The Philosopher and the Wolf

Been a bit busy since last I posted, principally producing the New Voices showcase for Madrid Players. I dropped by Pasajes, the international bookshop in Alonso Martínez, on Friday to leave some publicity for the upcoming production of Macbeth, and of course, came away with a book : " The Philosopher and the Wolf ", by Mark Rowlands ( Pegasus Books ). It is what it says on the cover : a university philosophy teacher who bought a wolf cub and lived with his wolf for 11 years. So far, it's very interesting : natural history written by a philosopher.

( From Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Philosopher-Wolf-Lessons-Happiness/dp/1847081029/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330885888&sr=8-1 )

Here he is reflecting on the different forms of memory : he distinguishes episodic, day-to-day memory, the type that fades with time, and a deeper form of memory that he's describing here, " a past that has written itself on you, in your character and in the life on which you bring that character to bear. "

"It is in our lives and not, fundamentally, in our conscious experiences that we find the memories of those who are gone. Our consciousness is fickle and not worthy of the task of remembering. The most important way of remembering someone is by being the person they made us - at least in part - and living the life they have helped shape.... being someone they have helped fashion and living a life they have helped forge are not only how we remember them; they are how we honour them."

That second sentence is fascinating : at first it seems ridiculous - can my consciousness, the part I usually think of as "me", really be so unimportant ? But it chimes with lots of otherwise unconnected stuff I'm thinking about at the moment, including persuading some of my teachers that they are the least important people in their classroom ( might be a stretch ). And it does fit in with one of life's deeper experiences : certainly, whatever good qualities I think I possess ( and I'm no self-hater here ), I'm fairly sure that the people in my life who've loved me deeply have done so in spite of who I think I am, and not because of it - because that's what love is, I suspect.

The Sailors' Arms

"Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The ship's clock in the bar says half past eleven. Half past eleven is opening time. The hands of the clock have stayed still at half past eleven for fifty years. It is always opening time in the Sailors Arms."

It's probably possible to write your life story across the great pubs you've drunk in, but writing about the legendary Kinmel Arms made me think of my favourite fictional watering-hole, from Under Milk Wood. I've always suspected that Dylan, who was great-nephew of a famous preacher and never missed a chance to write about the Welsh landscape in sacramental terms, was equating the welcome at his favourite pub with Heaven here ( in a way that enriches both.) Either way, I think it's a beautiful image which I stole for my Dad's eulogy.

On the Kinmel Arms website, Tim is apparently preparing "The Kinmel Arms Trail." I thought that ran from my front door at 1, Church Street to the bar ( about 70 metres ). And sometimes back.

Home

I think "home" is probably my favourite word in English - sounds like something you should be able to wrap yourself up in to keep warm through the winter.

Apparently, Rudyard Kipling wrote in the Honorable Visitors  (no, I haven't read it either ) that "All things considred, there are only two kinds of men - those who stay at home, and those who do not. The second are the more interesting." Not so sure about this : I don't think it's quite that simple.

Home for me is two streets, a handful of farms, the pub, the church, the war memorial, the whole thing perched on a north-facing hill looking out over the Irish Sea. The gales come in off the sea in winter and rattle the windows ; autumn nights you hear the owls in the churchyard across the road, the gentle twit-twoo that everyone recognises and  the unsettling screech of the banshee. The colours are green, grey and the white of the cottages; summer evenings after rain sunlight washes gently over the village like the love of God.

And yet home is also Madrid, my dirty, polluted, overcrowded, busy city of four million immigrants, kind of a city that never sleeps and often won't let you sleep much either. There's nothing quite like a stroll after work up the Gran Via, surrounded by people who have no idea who you are, anonymous : for a brief while you can hang your identity up, you could be anyone, go anywhere, do anything, at least in your imagination.

And so of course you finish up making shadow puppets, going hillwalking, watching doomed football teams, drinking too much beer, playing Gaelic football, getting into unlikely theatre groups with like-minded idiots from places as improbable as New York, Waterford, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and even England.

I'd like to think that Kipling got it wrong; I'd like to think that home can be both a physical place, and the energy and emotion you invest in wherever you are, that you can stand still and move at the same time.

But then again,  I'm a homeboy who didn't stay at home; I'll always need to find out what's around the next corner, over the next hill, while a part of me stays sitting in the churchyard, looking down to where the Clwyd meets the sea, waiting for the Kinmel Arms to open.

Llyr, by Gillian Clarke

A posting for Reyes ( Epiphany ), just back from North Wales.

Llyr.

Ten years old, at my first Stratford play :
The river and the king with their Welsh names
Bore in the darkness of a summer night
Through interval and act and interval.
Swans move double through glossy water
Gleaming with imponderable meanings.
Was it Gielgud on that occasion ?
Or ample Laughton, crazily white-gowned,
Pillowed in wheatsheaves on a wooden cart,
Who taught the significance of little words ?
All. Nothing. Fond. Ingratitude. Words
To keep me scared, awake at night. That old
Man's vanity and a daughter's "Nothing",
Ran like a nursery rhythm in my head.

Thirty years later on the cliffs of Llyn
I watch how Edgar's crows and choughs still measure
How high cliffs are, how thrown stones fall
Into history, how deeply the bruise
Spreads in the sea where the wave has broken.
The turf is stitched with tormentil and thrift,
Blue squill and bird bones, tiny shells, heartsease.
Yellowhammers sing like sparks in the gorse.
The landscape's marked with figures of old men;
The bearded sea; thin-boned, wind-bent trees;
Shepherd and labourer and night-fisherman.
Here and there among the crumbling farms
Are lit kitchen windows on distant hills,
And guilty daughters longing to be gone.

Night falls on Llyn, on forefathers,
Old Celtic kings and the more recent dead,
Those we are still guilty about, flowers
Fade in jam jars on their graves; renewed
Refusals are heavy on our minds.
My head is full of sound, remembered speech,
Syllables, ideas just out of reach;
The close, looped sound of curlew, and the far
Subsidiary roar, cadences shaped
By the long coast of the peninsula,
The continuous pentameter of the sea.
When I was ten a fool and a king sang
Rhymes about sorrow, and there I heard
That nothing is until it has a word.

Copyright Gillian Clarke, reproduced here with permission ( yes, Gillian Clarke wished me a Happy New Year - for Anglo-Welsh poetry geeks, this is a bit like meeting Justin Bieber ). Gillian Clarke's poetry is published by Carcanet.

For non-specialists, the poem plays off the first scene of Shakespeare's play King Lear, in which Lear announces he will divide his kingdom between his three daughters, only first they must declare how much they each love him. Cordelia, the youngest, is unable to put her feeling into words, and so is disinherited.

The Welsh for river is Afon - so Stratford, that centre of Englishness, carries through it's centre a memory of those "old Celtic kings". The whole poem washed through with water magic, the river and the sea.

Happy New Year !

Since we're now in the month of Janus, the two-faced god who looks back at the old year and forward to the new, I thought I'd share this story, borrowed from Thomas More, but it's not his either - he ripped it off from a haiku, methinks. If you read the story, you have to go to the link as well : )

A traveller was walking through an unfamiliar country, when he came across a group of what looked like monks, surrounded by many large stones, wheelbarrows, and lots of building equipment. So he went across to the monk who seemed to be in charge.

"Building a new temple ?" he asked. "When do you start ?"

"Actually, we've just finished pulling it down," was the answer.

"Now we can see the sun rise."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSIrHyMJVlQ

And may 2012 bring you all good things.