"Five Sentence Fiction"

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This is how the creator of the Five Sentence Fiction idea, Lillie McFerrin, describes the idea:

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What it’s all about: Five Sentence Fiction is about packing a powerful punch in a tiny fist. Each week I will post a one word inspiration, then anyone wishing to participate will write a five sentence story based on the prompt word. The word does not have to appear in your five sentences, just use it for direction.

This week: AWKWARD

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So, I thought I'd give it a go. I took a cue from one of my own blog stories and constructed it based very loosely on a theme from there.

Here's my first (and maybe my last!) try at Five Sentence Fiction.

I sat beside her on the park bench, she in a neat grey dress, her laced shoes barely touching the grass. Age could not rob her face of its beauty, all the more charming because of its puzzling lack of inhibition.

Her eyes sparkled as she took from her handbag a creased black and white photograph of a youth in full military regalia.

"We're getting married on Saturday before he leaves, but he's a stranger here," she said, scanning my face intently.

"Will you be his Best Man?"

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The sneak thief of space (and time)

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You're probably one of those people whose eyes glaze over when you hear geek-speak, but hang in with me on this one.

   I was having a problem. A really big one.

   My big computer, Fat Boy, has a startup hard drive plus three other internal drives; vast disk space required for the old days when I was editing video. I bought it five years ago, very expensively, but it is still competitive with what's now standard, so it has served me well.

   The startup drive came with the basic system. That's all I wanted. Over the five years, as you can imagine, the amount of space available on it gradually went down.

   It's a bit like when you move into a new house, or office. It starts empty and you add to it and customise it. Some people have the enviable ability to plan that space ruthlessly and it never becomes cluttered. If that's you, I'm jealous as hell, because it's a trait I admire deeply, but this story may still be relevant to you, so keep reading. This could still save you a fortune.

   Yes, I'm one of the hoarder types, but not like the ones you see on those scary TV programmes. Call me messy. There's method known only to me in my madness, or so I keep telling myself.

   The point is, over five years, the drive space on the startup disk slowly but inexorably went down, like the space in my study at the university for the thirty years I occupied it. There seemed nothing unusual in that. It's a variation on Parkinson's Law and has widespread application outside computing. Have a look in the third drawer of the kitchen cabinet. See?

   For practically all that time, the drive-space thing didn't matter. There was enough left, though installing a few big programs did eat up big chunks of space. I was constantly offloading whatever I could to the other drives.

   Then came the time, only very recently, when I noticed something alarming. Each day, the hard-won disk space available was vanishing at an exponential rate.

   OK, I thought, I have a couple of heavy-user programs I can shift to other drives, and I can prune what's on the startup drive in other ways, just like you can take stuff you don't use too much and store it in the garage. (No! You can't possibly throw it away. Who  knows, you might need a belt with a broken buckle – that's good leather, that is.)

   Because of the zooming rate of disk space lost on the vitally important startup drive, I got ruthless, and did some serious disk housekeeping. At last, a few days ago, there was a safe margin of space on it. Not a lot, but safe for operation.

   The next morning I was stunned. Almost all that space had disappeared, and my computer's kernel was having a right old panic, telling me to get my act together and find some space or it would self-destruct, creating a black hole that would consume the entire universe and Mitt Romney, and finally disappear up its own arsenal of misbegotten source code.

   So it was seriously seriously serious. Substitute a googleplex of seriousnesses there if you like. The fact was that the overnight loss was vastly bigger than I could possibly be responsible for. I had done all I could to make space. Was it some virus?

   I did what any sensible person would. I turned to the oracle. Google.

   Predictably, most of its suggestions were useless. But as I was about to give up, right near the bottom of the last page on the last relevant site I found, the author explained that he had had exactly my problem, and had solved it.

   This guy was using the same free anti-virus program I was, the one I had been relying on for all these years. It turns out that it constantly writes small files for just about every separate one on your drive, which in most cases approaches a million. It should have been deleting those when no longer useful, but it wasn't.

   When he uninstalled the program, his world changed. It released massive amounts of space occupied by the combined size of small, hidden, individual packets of data that it had been saving and storing for years.

   The scales fell off my eyes – I, who had been using all sorts of computers for thirty+ years and thought I knew a bit about them. It never occurred to me that in the background, my free, tried-and-true antivirus program, busily protecting my main computer from the enemy, could be guilty of a grievous offence.

   So, with hope in my heart, I backed up the vital files on my drive, and did the same as my advisor. The anti-virus program took a long while to uninstall, and I was happy about that, because it meant that it was deleting many, many files. I had an open window and watched in amazement as the drive space mounted in gigabytes:

   10...25...75...140...250...400...finally, 574.99 gigabytes – out of a 750 gigabyte hard drive. Three quarters of the entire disk was now released. It was a glorious sight – a thing of beauty to behold.

   Hello... are you still there? No, I see several of you are snoring peacefully. That's OK. Still, you must be wondering, how could I possibly not notice all this happening long before?

   I'll tell you. It's a bit like life. You don't know for a very long time that your body is accumulating sludge and unwanted particles and dangerous things, because it works OK and you are used to how it feels. 

   Then may come a crisis and if you're lucky, you find out what's wrong.

   In this case, I got lucky, turning up the one scrap of vital information I needed to rescue my whole system. My startup drive is at peace.

The offending program was Symantec iAntivirus for Mac. It's a free program and does its job, but the version I had was not deleting hundreds of thousands of little undetectable files that were past their use-by date. Maybe Symantic has solved this. It should have, surely.
 
   If you are on a PC, don't think that a similar thing can't happen with your anti-virus program (or some others). An easy way to find out is to check the drive space, uninstall the program, recheck the drive space, download the latest version of the program and reinstall.

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The Secret Pleasures of Reginald

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As I begin to write this, it's just after 9.30 am. I've been in another morning wake-sleep pattern for some time.

   It all flows from one decision – to drink more water through the evening than I've been doing. I think this is good for my stomach and kidneys apart from anything else, like skin. With the concoctions I am subjected to, I figure the more diluted they are, within reason, the easier it all is on my internal organs.

   Inevitably, it means that I wake earlier, because it's not good for the bladder to retain a cocktail of chemical residue for any longer than I can help. It's like what's brewing in the witches' pot in MacBeth. Besides, my stomach has a dull persistent pain when I waken in the morning, and activity eases that, so it's a 6 am trip to the bathroom for me.

   I have to be careful, because I may not be fully alert, and my legs may not function well. On the right side, there's not much synchronicity between joints – hip, knee and ankle. This is danger time. Concentrate.

   It's cold, so my right arm in various positions has a bad tremor. All I have to do to stop it is to change that position, or hold the arm with the other hand, and it ceases immediately, but the tremor soon comes back. 

   I bathe my hands and face, left-handed, because the right won't cooperate. Trying to make a two-handed cup for water fails, because I can never get it to my face without losing it. It's hayfever season, and washing face and eyes thoroughly does much to keep sneezing at bay.

   Now, with this activity, I'm fully awake. I could go straight back to bed, but I don't. I do the exercises that I practise every morning for balance, muscle tone and strength. I always do them in lots of twenty.

   But each morning I am noticing one sad thing. All these exercises are getting harder and harder to complete. Doing them regularly should make them easier, and for a while there it was, but something vital is being lost each day.

   This morning on the most difficult exercise, I made it to nineteen, but it was impossible to do the final one. The brain was giving the order, but the biceps and triceps weren't listening. If it all stops dead, there's nothing you can do about it.

   I completed the rest of my routine, but felt sad. I've never not made it to twenty before.

   My body after exercise is always very weak, and I can only just crawl back into bed. I get out the Kindle, and start to read. It's wi-fi, so I can read the ABC News headlines and see what miseries humanity has managed to inflict upon itself in the past few hours. There's plenty to choose from.

   If I felt like it, I could read the New York Times or practically any other newspaper, but this morning I didn't. I read what's static on the Kindle – what I've chosen to put on there. A long article I've had for a day or two by an absconder from that dreadful cult in the USA. You know the one. It litigates the pants off anyone who criticises it. Evil, evil. I finished reading the script for Meet Joe Black and now I want to see the movie. I read some very funny stories from P G Wodehouse – A Wodehouse Miscellany. It's free – you should get it – or just dip into it online. But not till you've finished this, OK?

Kindle Reader

THE SECRET PLEASURES OF REGINALD

I found Reggie in the club one Saturday afternoon. He was reclining in a long chair, motionless, his eyes fixed glassily on the ceiling. He frowned a little when I spoke. "You don't seem to be doing anything," I said.

"It's not what I'm doing, it's what I am not doing that matters."

It sounded like an epigram, but epigrams are so little associated with Reggie that I ventured to ask what he meant.

He sighed. "Ah well," he said. "I suppose the sooner I tell you, the sooner you'll go. Do you know Bodfish?"

And so the charming story goes on. 

   Then I was tired again, although it was 8 AM. My body was relaxed after the morning's ablutions and exercise, and I felt cheered after the exercise failure by the ingenuity of what Wodehouse's mate Reggie was not doing. I turned on my side, glad my head and stomach felt fine, and drifted off....

   It was after 9 am. I felt deliciously warm and relaxed, and for this brief time it was as I had felt nearly every day that I woke up in more than twenty-two thousand mornings of my life.

   Normal.

   Oh God, if you haven't felt normal for nigh on a thousand days, you don't know how good a sensation it is.

   I didn't want to get up, but it was important for me to pop pills, and that meant eating breakfast. I had no choice. But I did lie there for another ten minutes of perfect, perfect luxury. The enchanting illusion of blissful normalcy.

   11:07 AM. That's not bad going. By the time I correct this and post it, another hour at least will have disappeared from my life.

   But there's one thing I'm going to do in a few minutes. I'm going to do that one last freakin exercise – no. 20 out of 20. No, not just by itself; that's cheating. The whole bang lot. Twenty.

   You reckon I'm joking? You don't know me all that well, do you?

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Why printed books will never disappear

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You'll get this or you won't, with no explanation. It was appended to a volume dated 1907, downloaded from Gutenberg, and now I find to my annoyance that I can't tell you exactly which one.

GENERAL EDITOR:

PROFESSOR I. GOLLANCZ, Litt.D.

ALTHOUGH The King's Classics are to be purchased for 1/6 net per volume, the series is unique in that

 (1) the letterpress, paper, and binding are unapproached by any similar series.

 (2) "Competent scholars in every case have supervised this series, which can therefore be received with confidence." – Athenaeum

The "King's Classics" are printed on antique laid paper, 16mo. (6 X 4-1/2inches), gilt tops, and are issued in the following styles and prices. Each volume has a frontispiece, usually in photogravure.

Quarter bound, antique grey boards, 1/6 net.

Red Cloth, 1/6 net.

Quarter Vellum, grey cloth sides, 2/6 net.

Special three-quarter Vellum, Oxford side-papers, gilt tops, silkmarker, 5/- net.

***Nos. 2, 20 and 24 are double volumes. Price, Boards or Cloth, 3/-net; Quarter Vellum, 5/- net; special three-quarter Vellum, 7/6 net.

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"A fragment of her soul" 3

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This completes my little triptych on Sappho, whose poetry I can only describe as an unbounded joy.

   In the first part, I said that there was one unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire her Hundred Lyrics created in me. It's been a fortnight since I wrote that, so I realise that anyone who was curious about the wish at the time has wandered off, and I don't blame you in the slightest. There's only so long you can keep such things dangling. The bait falls off the hook.

   But here it is anyway, just after Sappho's Lyric Fifty-two.

   I need only one poem. This one. Just amble through it lazily. It's Sunday right here and now, or if it's not where you are, pretend it is. Take your time.

LII

Lo, on the distance a dark blue ravine,
A fold in the mountainous forests of fir,
Cleft from the sky-line sheer down to the shore!

Above are the clouds and the white, pealing gulls,
At its foot is the rough broken foam of the sea,
With ever anon the long deep muffled roar, –
A sigh from the fitful great heart of the world.

Then inland just where the small meadow begins,
Well bulwarked with boulders that jut in the tide,
Lies safe beyond storm-beat the harbour in sun.

See where the black fishing-boats, each at its buoy,
Ride up on the swell with their dare-danger prows,
To sight o'er the sea-rim what venture may come!

And look, where the narrow white streets of the town
Leap up from the blue water's edge to the wood,
Scant room for man's range between mountain and sea,
And the market where woodsmen from over the hill
May traffic, and sailors from far foreign ports
With treasure brought in from the ends of the earth.

And see the third house on the left, with that gleam
Of red burnished copper – the hinge of the door
Whereat I shall enter, expected so oft
(Let love be your sea-star!), to voyage no more.

What's my desire? It makes me want to paint a picture for each little stanza. Six paintings. Very traditional they would be, taking us from the broad vista in the first one to the house where she is about to open the door. Acrylic, maybe, as I never was keen on working with oils – but more likely and more pleasing to me, watercolours, unmistakeably Mediterranean brilliant blues and whites.

   I can't do that now.

   But you know what? It's a good thing in a way, because the six watercolours I've created in my mind are the best ever done, almost, and it would be a shame to expose them to public view, or mine for that matter. The reality wouldn't live up to what's there in my head. Let them stay where they are.

   And one last thing. Maybe it would be a pity to impose my ideal version of all these six on you or anyone else. Remember how a fine novel converted to even the best movie forces upon us a new model of our characters; one that often robs us of our own?

  I wouldn't want to do that to you. It's just not right.

   So you see, it's all worked out well. Perhaps we all get what we want out of it. My perfect painting, secure in that corner of my brain, and your perfect image in yours.

   Now read through the little poem again, chillen, and fall in love with your own double-triptych created by Sappho's lyric. (No, nothing like what's below; it's just my scrambled egg six-for-the-price-of-one-version, and surely looks that way.)
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Neapolitan Sappho Lyric LII

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The bus to the past

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I am not old, except perhaps to someone under thirty, but because of my condition, I now have to put up with many of the frustrations of the ageing. 

   I know I've said this before, but there's new depth to this understanding as the months I was expected to live have now extended into years, and there's no clear end point. Please put up with a little repetition if you remember I've said something like this before. Your memory is probably a good deal better than mine for things that happened recently.

   When I got this disease, I thought, if there were any benefits, one was that I'd escape the trials and rigours of old age. What I discovered, to my surprise, was that I haven't evaded them at all. They've just been compacted in time. In addition, I've been destined to experience them earlier than most in our fortunate society. The combination makes resistance to this change set in all the more deeply.

   This makes it possible for me to understand all too well what was never on my radar until I got a taste of it.

   Let me give you an example. It's a bit scrambled between separate things that should be sorted out, but here you have it.

   We've all seen the movie trope where someone sits down by an old lady or gent at the bus stop, waiting patiently for the bus to turn up. They get to talking, and it turns out they're waiting for a spouse who's been dead for twenty years.

   The dear old thing has wandered down the street, 'running away'.

   'They're just seeking a bit of attention.'

   They're not. What they're seeking is the exact opposite. They're craving not to be noticed, helped, or, as they may feel, 'spied' on, even though it's for their own good. In good nursing homes, people are monitored constantly for the best of reasons, but it may be hard for the oldie to see it that way. Even if they do, it exasperates. These people just won't leave me alone.

   They're running away from attention. It's not being alone that matters. They want to have power back over their lives, even though that's impossible. They want that spouse to be on the bus, and to go back together to a place where they had the control they were used to for their entire adult lives, until somehow it just disappeared. They want to sit in their own kitchen over a cup of tea made exactly as they used to, or, even better, or a glass of wine and some good cheese, and talk about nothing in particular with the ones their lives revolved around. The way life used to be.

   If in the real world they live in a place with care professionals, they don't want to return to share that little room with some stranger whose name they keep forgetting and, you never know, might steal their teabags or tissues. They don't want to be talked to like a child by the cheery young nurse.

   They want a return to a world that's gone forever, but there's always hope at this bus-stop.

   All the care and attention showered on them by their loved ones cannot compensate for that loss of who they were, especially if that loss includes the death of a partner, or the need to be separated from them to go somewhere else for heavy-duty care. So they tell their tale about who they're waiting for to the person at the bus stop, and the Good Samaritan realises he or she needs a loved one to come and pick them up. By one means or another, it happens, and the anxious daughter or son or carer rescues them and takes them back to safety; that comfortable prison where others make all the decisions. Mealtimes, food, medications... the relentless drivel on TV. Clothes, even.

   They don't protest when the rellie arrives; not much, anyway. They know that bus to the past they've been waiting for is too late again to beat the intrusion by the present. Resistance is futile. They go off meekly. It's been an adventure, and they chose it every step of the way. Till this point anyway.

   Attention is the last thing they want. I'm not at a similar stage yet, though I feel cramped by restrictions that I know simply can't be avoided. They're necessary, self-imposed or imposed by sheer circumstances. Without them things would descend quickly into chaos. All of us are locked in to this inevitability. Each has an inescapable but different burden, till that end point that defines itself.

   I know what the oldies want. I want it too, but it's impossible. This bus-stop world is locked in fluid, strangely static time.

   Ah, the Time Lords. Dr Who can do it, but Dr Wright can't. There's no Tardis at the bus stop. Nor, of course, should there be.

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"Life is like a river"

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Apparently this is a very old Jewish joke. I must confess that until a friend sent it to me some months ago [Thank you Aaron, via Marsha] I don’t believe I've ever heard it before. But then my memory plays such tricks on me these days that any joke is likely to look new. I guess that has some advantages.

   At least I think it's a joke. I'm not quite sure....

   Maybe I should have checked thoroughly in the delightful book by Leo Ronsten, the new joys of yiddish, which our friend Carl Merten gave me some time ago.

A rabbi is lying on his death bed, and his students are lined up at his side. The wisest student is beside the old rabbi, the second-wisest behind him, the third-wisest behind, and so on, down the length of the bed, into the hall, down the stairs, and out into the street where the simplest student is at the back of the line.

The wisest student leans over and in a soft, reverent voice asks, "Great Rabbi, before you go to be with God, please tell us: What is the meaning of life?"

The rabbi raises his head a little, slowly opens his eyes, draws a rattling breath, and with great effort says, "Life... Life is... is like... a river." He shuts his eyes, dropping his head back onto the pillow with exhaustion.

The wisest student turns to the student behind him and says, "The Rabbi says life is like a river!" That student turns to the one behind him and repeats this wisdom, and so on and so forth, out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, and outside to the end of the line, until the second-simplest student turns to the simplest and says "The Rabbi says life is like a river!"

The simplest student, realizing he has no one to who to repeat this wisdom, contemplates it. After a moment, he taps the student ahead of him on the shoulder and says "Excuse me, but... why is life like a river?"

This message gets passed up to the front of the line, until the second-wisest whispers in the wisest student's ear "Moishe wants to know why life is like a river." The wisest student leans over the Rabbi and again, soft and reverently, he said, "Great Rabbi, your students have brought forth a question! Please, oh wise one, tell us... why is life like a river?"

The old rabbi raises his head again, slowly opens his eyes, draws another rattling breath, and says... "Okay, so it's *not* like a river..."
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"A fragment of her soul" 2

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Bring me those sweets from Africa.
I give to you a fleeting taste of each.
You crave their dark gold centres –
One tiny bite, no more.

India has its ragas; its music of the dawn and dusk and other special times, played by sitar and tabla, and many other instruments besides. You could not mistake the time of day from the sound of the first few notes.

Wright's vision of Sappho in Mitylene

   So it is with Sappho. In her poetry imbued with the scent of Lesbos in the Aegean, Sappho appeals to every human sense in a profusion of colour, of delight in natural form. The lyrics exude sensuality with a deftness that seems spontaneous, but is crafted with the skill of the finest jeweller. 

   Allow me that paragraph of rather florid prose, but I couldn't help it.

   There's a hundred poems on offer, which are random in their original form. I chose these these snippets from amongst them, and put them in a vague order which I like.

   See for yourself. Read slowly. Don't be greedy, as I was first time round. Stop if you've run out of time, and come back later. It'll still be here.

   It's like that CD you bought because it has one or two special songs on it, but after a while, you come to appreciate many others on the album as well. You enjoy it no matter how often you hear it.

   In the same way, you'll get more and more from Sappho every time. Although it looks a generous sample, it's really just one fleeting taste. No more.

And there, as darkness gathers
In the rose-scented garden,
The god who prospers music
Shall give me skill to play.

And thou shalt hear, all startled,
A flute blown in the twilight,
With the soft pleading magic
The green wood heard of old.

Then, lamp in hand, thy beauty
In the rose-marble entry!
And unreluctant Hermes
Shall give me words to say.

Add to that the exotic – chimes from Nepal or Tibet:

And a tinkling Eastern wind-bell,
With its fluttering inscription,
From the rafters with bronze music
Should retard the quiet fleeting
Of uncounted hours.

So many references to the sea, the ships, their sailors, especially the beach and the waves in spectacular images that resonate strongly with me:

Lo, where the white-maned horses of the surge,
Plunging in thunderous onset to the shore,
Trample and break and charge along the sand!

The day passes; its rhythms threaded through the lyrics:

All day long now is the green earth renewed
With the bright sea-wind and the yellow blossoms.
From the cool shade I hear the silver plash
Of the blown fountain at the garden's end.

Now the moon-white butterflies
Float across the liquid air,
Glad as in a dream;

As dusk approaches:

Noises are hushed in the courtyard,
The busy day is departing,
Children are called from their games,
Herds from their grazing.

Softly the first step of twilight
Falls on the darkening dial,
One by one kindle the lights
In Mitylene.

What should so detain thee,
Now the wind comes walking
Through the leafy twilight?

Over the roofs the honey-coloured moon,
With purple shadows on the silver grass,

And there is nothing more in this great world
Than thou and I, and the blue dome of dusk.

Night falls:

Sleep thou in the bosom
Of the tender comrade,
While the living water
Whispers in the well-run,
And the oleanders
Glimmer in the moonlight.

Seasons come and go.


Spring:

All day long now is the green earth renewed
With the bright sea-wind and the yellow blossoms.

When to the meadows the young green comes back,
And swelling buds put forth on every bough,
With wild-wood odours on the delicate air;

Autumn:

Cold are the chattering oak-leaves;
And the ponds frost-bitten.
The sun on the tide, the peach on the bough,
The blue smoke over the hill,
And the shadows trailing the valley-side,
Make up the autumn day.

Natural forms create personal images:

Thou, the hyacinth that grows
By a quiet-running river;
I, the watery reflection
And the broken gleam -

And so we come to love; its ambiguity and passion:

XLI

Phaon, O my lover,
What should so detain thee,

Now the wind comes walking
Through the leafy twilight?

All the plum-leaves quiver
With the coolth and darkness,

After their long patience
In consuming ardour.

And the moving grasses
Have relief; the dew-drench

Comes to quell the parching
Ache of noon they suffered.

I alone of all things
Fret with unsluiced fire.

And there is no quenching
In the night for Sappho,

Since her lover Phaon
Leaves her unrequited.


This very hour
In Mitylene,
Will not a young girl
Say to her lover,
Lifting her moon-white
Arms to enlace him,
Ere the glad sigh comes,
"Lo, it is lovetime!"


Ah, how comes it my frail heart
Is so fond of all things fair,
I can never choose between Gorgo and Andromeda?


Touch with thy lips and enkindle
This moon-white delicate body,
Drench with the dew of enchantment
This mortal one, that I also
Grow to the measure of beauty
Fleet yet eternal.


Once you lay upon my bosom,
While the long blue-silver moonlight
Walked the plain, with that pure passion
All your own.


And then her mouth, more delicate
Than the frail wood-anemone,
Brushes my cheek, and deeper grow
The purple shadows.


O but my delicate lover,
Is she not fair as the moonlight?
Is she not supple and strong
For hurried passion?


Surely somehow, in some measure,
There will be joy and fulfilment,
– Cease from this throb of desire, –
Even for Sappho!


I loved thee, Atthis, in the long ago,
When the great oleanders were in flower
In the broad herded meadows full of sun.
And we would often at the fall of dusk
Wander together by the silver stream,
When the soft grass-heads were all wet with dew,
And purple-misted in the fading light. 

And three longer, complete poems for you:

XLV

Softer than the hill-fog to the forest
Are the loving hands of my dear lover,
When she sleeps beside me in the starlight
And her beauty drenches me with rest.
As the quiet mist enfolds the beech-trees,
Even as she dreams her arms enfold me,
Half awaking with a hundred kisses
On the scarlet lily of her mouth.

Ah, what am I but a torrent,
Headstrong, impetuous, broken,
Like the spent clamour of waters
In the blue canyon?
Ah, what art thou but a fern-frond,
Wet with blown spray from the river,
Diffident, lovely, sequestered,
Frail on the rock-ledge?


XXXVII

Well I found you in the twilit garden,
Laid a lover's hand upon your shoulder,
And we both were made aware of loving
Past the reach of reason to unravel,
Or the much desiring heart to follow.

There we heard the breath among the grasses
And the gurgle of soft-running water,
Well contented with the spacious starlight,
The cool wind's touch and the deep blue distance,
Till the dawn came in with golden sandals.


XXIV

I shall be ever maiden,
If thou be not my lover,
And no man shall possess me
Henceforth and forever.

But thou alone shalt gather
This fragile flower of beauty, –
To crush and keep the fragrance
Like a holy incense.

Thou only shalt remember
This love of mine, or hallow
The coming years with gladness,
Calm and pride and passion.

Most of what's above are just fragments of the fragments we have. There is one more poem, which reveals my newly-acquired desire, and that one completes my Sappho story.

You have had but a nibble at the chocolates in the box!

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Under the blanket with three queens

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I suppose that title looks a bit odd. I'll explain.

   I woke this morning with no energy at all. It happens sometimes. I can think, in a vague and haphazard sort of way, but not move without great effort. So here goes with the Hemingway stream of consciousness thoughts, only not so lofty as his.

   In short, I felt like Shakespeare's "shotten herring." [It comes from Henry IV Part 1, which we studied Senior year at high school, so that's how I know about the herring. That play really intrigued me, as I had no idea that kings and their mates could behave with so little decorum.]

   A shotten herring, by the way, isn't a herring that's been shot with a gun or anything; it's a herring that's 'shot' or pumped out all her eggs, after which she looks and acts as shagged I felt this morning, and she dies. I wasn't that far gone, but I was on a Shakespearean roll. The reference brought to mind Falstaff, and good King Harry's ripping into him; something about…fat-guts-Jack and "When didst thou last see thy knees?'

Sir John Falstaff

Oh all right then, I just checked, and it seems my bed-ridden brain did a conflation of separate bits. The lines are:

Here comes lean Jack, here comes bare-bone.
How now, my sweet creature of bombast!
How long is't ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?

To which Falstaff replies:

My own knee! when I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! it blows a man up like a bladder.

It's not a line to contemplate when you're about to get up and skip to the loo my darling, especially when your knees are fading dangerously out from sight.

   Anyway, the gluttonous old Falstaff led me to muse further on the Tudors and those who followed, and it occurred to me that ever since that time, England has been much better at producing queens of the realm than kings. Think about Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II.

   Now they were stayers. Between them, they've so far governed the empire, or what's left of it, for round 170 years, and still counting. That's more than one-third of the time of all rulers since Good Queen Bess, through the whole period when women's rights were not even on the agenda. None of them seems to have put a foot too far wrong, and have kept their heads [literally, in the case of the first Elizabeth – she would have lost hers had she not been a genuine Tudor] when things were at their bleakest.

   Take the current Queen. She dutifully produced an heir, bang on cue, though that hasn't turned out ideal, and a princess in second place to keep the papers occupied. That didn't turn out too well either, but I doubt the Queen's to blame. As Monty Python's grotty peasants in the Holy Grail insist, with gleeful and wanton anachronism, "it's the corruption inherent in the system".

   Royalty surely pays its way now. It's the greatest drawcard for tourism Britain has, and therefore pours millions of yankee dollars, yuan and yen into the country's coffers every day. 

   These days the Royals don't go around blowing it all, with armies and swords, fighting or eviscerating each other and torching houses; they just do it by mobile phone, which is a lot cheaper on the whole, and marginally less messy. They've turned out a better investment than they looked like being, thanks to a world of people with enough money and nothing more useful to do with it than to turn up on the Mall and stare through black steel bars at ugly buildings and real-life toy soldiers with incredibly tall, black, furry heads.

Oh, my only sainted aunt. For fifty years I've been reading Shakespeare, and only now has it clicked that there's a double entendre in the name "Falstaff".

   That's was it. I had to move. It was way past my knee-observing and morning pill-popping time. And yes, I could still see my knees, not that it's any of your business.

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"A fragment of her soul" 1

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"Sappho, who broke off a fragment of her soul for us to guess at." 

[Elizabeth Barrett Browning]

I have managed to get to this point in my life with remarkably few unfulfilled ambitions, which is fortunate under the circumstances. It comes as both a vague annoyance and a pleasure that I've acquired an unexpected new one – one that won't be fulfilled.

   The villain of the piece is someone I met not long ago. "Met" is a bit misleading, because we've never seen each other face to face and never will. Had we met, we couldn't have communicated in words, because I can't speak Greek and she no doubt would never have bothered to learn a primitive language like English.

   I've mentioned her before and this is all about the pleasure she's brought me. Her name is Sappho.

   For one terrible moment there, I thought that Ab Fab's Edina might have named her long-suffering daughter Saffy after her, but of course, as a product of her fabulous times, Saffy's full name is Saffron. Saffron Monsoon.

   Whew. That was a narrow escape. Not that I dislike Saffy – she's far and away the most likeable character in Ab Fab. I'm just happy she was named after a spice, not in honour of the most wonderful lyric poet I've ever read.

   At the online font of all wisdom (you know what), you can read what's known of Sappho, but she's an enigmatic character.

Image source

   Not all that much can be told about her life, but three highly significant life events appear to have happened. She seems to have married, produced a daughter and for some unknown reason was exiled from Lesbos. 

   Let me not muddy the waters further. Maybe, if this Roman copy of the lost Hellenic original is a guide, take something from it. I like to think it's just as she was, because the Roman sculptor has been more faithful to the Greek style than other Roman examples, but draw your own conclusions about her from the translation of her poems. They're practically all we've got, and it's only by great good fortune that we have them at all.

   Our other piece of luck, if it can be called that, is that we have a freely downloadable version of Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. An even greater good fortune is that this 1907 translation, by Bliss Carman, is beautifully empathetic. Tender, even, I feel; although to compare with the fragments in the Hundred Lyrics, I'd have to know the language of the era and life about 2700 years ago on the Aegean island of Lesbos.

   Sappho's poetry is sensuous and rich in imagery. She writes about women, men, children, nature and the seasons, the sea and the ships that come into port, the Lesbos capital Mytilene, gardens – her entire world. She writes passionately about love, the duality or ambivalence about sexuality in her poems captured so perfectly by Carman. I think in this regard her classical references to lovers contain clues, apart from the poetic themes themselves.

   I'd better give you a sample and not rabbit on too much.

LXXXIII

In the quiet garden world,
Gold sunlight and shadow leaves
Flicker on the wall.

And the wind, a moment since,
With rose-petals strewed the path
And the open door.

Now the moon-white butterflies
Float across the liquid air,
Glad as in a dream;

And, across thy lover's heart,
Visions of one scarlet mouth
With its maddening smile.

You want one more? OK. Not all the poems mention rose petals as both of these do, but I thought one describing garments might appeal. It reminds me strongly of the Pillow Book, or the Tale of Genji, the Japanese classics of a millennium ago.

XXVI

I recall thy white gown, cinctured
With a linen belt, whereon
Violets were wrought, and scented
With strange perfumes out of Egypt.

And I know thy foot was covered
With fair Lydian broidered straps;
And the petals from a rose-tree
Fell within the marble basin.

My unfulfillable ambition? I'll get back to it later. I do promise many more tastes of her poems, but here I'll concentrate on the slightly longer ones, not restricted to 140 characters. Some of you will know why. I can't stay out of it altogether though. This is about her and me!

[continued] 

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