Time plays tricks. Sometimes it seems endlessly spacious – like on today’s radiant dog-walk on a high ridge through mushroom-filled beech woods or at last night’s wonderful concert by Lunasa at the Canterbury Festival’s Speigel tent, followed by dancing in this romantic, mysterious mirrored space..
In other ways, time is over-full, stressful, congested. The back-to-back complementary festivals of Hallowe’en, All Saints and and All Souls evoke all kinds of ghosts and, this year, yesterday, being Saturday, brought bonfire parties in addition in advance of Guy Fawkes next week. And today, a rare solar eclipse (apparently a hybrid of a total eclipse and an annular eclipse) took place over the Atlantic. And my own life too, is especially full at the moment. This year all harvests seem to have been abundant. The interplay of inner and outer is a constant theme in poetry therapy.
Here’s a poem by Angela France that I heard her read at an event expertly compered by Patrick Gale at the Penzance LitFest this July, that seems appropriate for Hallowe’en. It’s reproduced below with her permission.
The Real Bedtime Story
I’m the thing that’s under your bed
to bite at tender night-time toes.
I’m not in any Disney films;
no little girlies’ noxious squeaks
and nauseous frills disturb my rest.
You won’t find me on nursery walls
nor caught in plush and gummed to death,
dissolved in slime from puking whelps.
I’m the worm that gripes old women
to yearn for young flesh and the itch
that sends the wolf to speak in tongues.
I’m the knife that hacks at heels,
the bloody smear on crystal slippers,
the hex in the apple. You need me.
from Occupation Ragged Raven Press
Hallowe’en, or so I heard on Radio 4, is now, in commerical terms, the UK’s third biggest festival. Certainly, the streets of Canterbury on Thursday were thronged with people in fancy dress, from pre-school tots to the rather ‘mature’, a mixture of Disneyfied and truly ghoulish costumes. Angela France concludes her poem with ‘You need me’ and it seems that in 2013, for whatever reason, our culture needs whatever it is Hallowe’en symbolises.
Back in August I saw a film that impressed me – Blancanieves – a black and white, silent-movie take on the Brothers Grimm’s version of Snow White, by Spanish director, Pablo Berger. It is visually breath-taking with great music and quirkily, the dwarves were a troupe of bull-fighters and Blancanieves becomes a toreador herself, as her father was. I found it terrifying and thought the cruelty of the step-mother, the sorrow of the motherless child and the horror of the bull-fighting were brilliantly handled. My friend, Derek Sellen who came with me, knows Spain much better than I and was less impressed, thinking it full of stereotypes and a giving a false representation of what bull-fighting is – ‘Lorca it wasn’t’ was his comment.
How can we give voice – or pictures, or costumes – to the ‘dark side’, be accurate but not gratuitous, transform and uplift whilst not denying cruelty, shame and horror? Answers on a postcard – or below please.
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“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but Death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste to cover our bones.
For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings,
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered. For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable.”
Difficult to write anything in the face of the master! Coincidentally, have just been reading about Wales, where Richard declaimed the above – I don’t know where though.
I love this poem the Real Bedtime Story. This past three weeks we have been surrounded by beautiful art works at Open Houses, including our own, and attending some amazing music during the Canterbury Festival but last night we watched the documentary No Fire Zone on Channel 4 which showed some of the most horrific film imaginable of war crimes committed in Sri Lanka. It was reported that well over 40,000 men, women and children were mindlessly slaughtered and the film ended with a visit to Sri Lanka by David Cameron. We didn’t intend to watch this but happened upon it and sometimes, despite having to cover my eyes for some of it, it feels important to bear witness to what goes on in the world and allow yourself to know what it is to be truly human, both ends of the continuum from creativity to destructiveness. The first thing it made me think as I woke this morning was that I had to write a poem about what lies behind such attrocities. One of the things that I believe allows such violation of human beings to exist is the denial that it is happening at all and the question we asked ourselves was who makes money from such horror… not the people of Sri Lanka!
Fairy tales are not so removed from the truth after all…
Maggie
Thank you Maggie – yes, the actual horrors of the world are worse than those in fairy tales – perhaps the latter are a kind of vaccination we need to bear reality.