Monday 29 August 2011

Where the streets have no name

A whole bunch of people answered the challenge about one-word poems. The list of poems (re-ordered to make it slightly more interesting) is:

Motherless
Moist
Horsefeathers
Humbug!!!
Conundrum
Lighght

And the winner is... James Joyce, and the word "Yes".

There's a story that James Joyce was invited to dinner and spent most of the time very quiet and looking pensive. Eventually, he said:
'I'm sorry I've been so quiet, I was looking for the right word for something I'm writing, and I've finally found it.'
'Oh, please tell us, what's the word?' said the host, expecting to hear some wonderful new invented word. (Remember, this is the man that wrote Finnegan's Wake, a novel stuffed with so many invented words that it has been often described as being written in its own invented language.)
'The word is "yes".'
And if you turn to the last page of Ulysses, Joyce's masterpiece, there it is. Of all the real and invented words, that's the one he chose to finish it off.

"Yes" is also the love poem that sparkled one of the most famous and least likely marriages of the history of rock&roll: John Lennon and Yoko Ono. John first met Yoko when she was doing an art exhibition in London. Because John was a superstar at the time, he got to see it before the official opening. One of the exhibits was a ladder, and at the top of it, a spyglass he was supposed to look through to see something. He went up, looked through the spyglass, and he saw this tiny placard saying "Yes". Afterwards, John would always say that if it had said something rebellious or negative, he wouldn't have been interested, but "yes" was something he could connect with.

After single words, let's talk a little about names. Hurricane Irene has just passed over New York, and I was reminded of the lyrics of Where the streets have no name by U2:

The city's aflood
And our love turns to rust
We're beaten and blown by the wind
Trampled in dust
I'll show you a place
High on a desert plain
Where the streets have no name

Many streets in Manhattan have no name, but a number. But U2 say the song is actually about Belfast, about people not daring to say their street name because it could identify them as Catholic or Protestant. And some people note that Northern Ireland isn't known for their deserts or dust, and suspect the song was written in Ethiopia, a place they visited after Live Aid, where a lot of streets actually don't have a name.

It doesn't really matter which place U2 really meant. One of the things that make this song work is that "where the streets have no name" sounds like a magical place that doesn't really exist. We are so attached to the names we put on things that the idea of taking the name off immediately transports us to another plane. I wrote once a poem about this, and if you are really good, I may even post it later.

What are your favourite place names?

Sunday 21 August 2011

Holiday


You might be forgiven for thinking that I missed last week's post because I was on holiday. In actual fact, I was so behind on a deadline that the weekly post had to be abandoned. I have noticed that I'm the only one that seems to be crazily busy, and that everybody else is on holiday or taking things as easy as if they were.

In that spirit, I'll be minimal today. Today's picture is....




And today's poem is a one-word poem. I just haven't decided which word yet. What do you think is the best one-word poem? As an inspiration, here's a Spanish one by Miguel Hernandez:

Relampagueaste.

Which means: "You made lightning."

Do you have any better ideas? Please avoid the obvious, such as 'love', 'God', etc.

Monday 8 August 2011

Death is before me today

There seems to be plenty of darkness in the news today, with riots in various places and the financial world panicking with the possibility of starting a new credit crunch... but bigger this time round.

My personal life is providing the perfect counterpoint: I just came back from a funeral, and I recently got the news that another relative that spent most of his life in a mental hospital has died. A starkly clear reminder that once things start to go wrong, they may well go wrong all the way.

But I can't say I'm in a dark mood. The funeral was in the same chapel as my husband's funeral, a little more than a year ago. The man that died was sitting two seats away from me on that occasion. It reminded me vividly of that time, but it wasn't a sad memory. It was beautiful. And the man that died had done his damnedest to cheer people up on his own funeral. His selections of poetry and music ranged from inspiring to enthusiastic to downright funny. That was very much like him, wanting people to be happy above all.

The best way to describe the feeling of the day was that this man clearly understood the ebb and flow of life, and was happy to go along with it. We're born and grow, the same way we breathe in, we get to whatever is our personal high point, then contract again and die, the same way we breathe out.

It reminded me of one of the oldest poems that have been recorded, from ancient Egypt:

Death is before me today:
like the recovery of a sick man,
like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Death is before me today:
like the odor of myrrh,
like sitting under a sail in a good wind.
Death is before me today:
like the course of a stream;
like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.
Death is before me today:
like the home that a man longs to see,
after years spent as a captive.

The first time I read this, it was in a comic that has Death as one of the main characters (The Sandman). And here you can see what's probably the best remembered page of the comic, perfectly suited for a day like today:

If everything goes to hell in a basket tomorrow... you still got a lifetime.