Thin Ice: A Haibun
Some prefatory remarks on haiku and haibun
A haibun is a prose
narrative, long or short, interspersed with haiku[1]. The essence of the haiku is the ‘Zen moment,’
a flash of insight which must then be rendered into a strictly prescribed verse
form. The haibun itself has been
described as ‘a moment of epiphany’, a definition which is better confined to
the haiku, for haibun by their very length clearly record much more than mere
‘moments’ The editor of a distinguished
haibun journal, explaining why he has rejected certain haiku sent to him, has
rightly observed that the haiku must stand out distinctively from the prose of
the haibun. ‘If the three lines can be
folded up without so much as making a ripple in the prose then that’s where
they belong.’ [2]
This otherwise admirable
precept leaves unanswered, however, two important questions. Though our editor is rightly rejecting
certain haiku on aesthetic grounds, this prompts us to ask two questions: Firstly, what is art and how do we
distinguish between artistic and inartistic texts? Secondly, since haiku must stand out
distinctively from prose, how do we define the distinction between verse and
prose? Since small libraries could be
filled with books and articles written on these two subjects in every major
language, let me simply say that one of the most convincing answers to this
question was given by the Russian Formalists, one of whom, Victor Shklovskii,
defined art as ‘defamiliarization’ (ostranenie). This is so closely in accord with Zen
practice that its relevance to the haiku should be obvious. A psychological study of Zen monks showed
that no matter how often they were subjected to a certain stimulus, the sound
of a bell, for instance or a loud bang, their brains always responded to it in
the same way; there was no falling off in their response, no matter how often
the stimulus was repeated. This was not
true of the control group, composed of non-meditating laymen, whose brains
responded sharply at first and then with ever decreasing vigor. For the Zen monks, every stimulus was felt afresh;
for the others, familiarization increasingly dulled their responses.
Shklovskii argued that familiarization, our
habitual, automatic response to things and situations, dulled and devoured our
lives. The aim of poetry was to
defamiliarize, to make us see things anew, to ‘estrange’, slow down’, or
‘prolong’ our perception of the world, to make things appear, as Wordsworth
expressed it, ‘apparelled in celestial light.’
This heightening of the sensation of life is precisely the function of both
the haiku and the haibun.[3]
The only difference between the two is that the haiku, as poetry, compresses
into the space of a few lines what would normally take a page or so of
prose. So the difference of between
poetry and prose is essentially one of intensity. The efficacy of the haibun as an art form is
therefore that it alternates looseness and relaxation (prose) with compression
and tension (poetry), while never for a moment losing its defamiliarizing
magic.
Let us now consider the
formal characteristics of the haiku, which I regard as the heart of the
haibun. Japanese haiku are based solely
on syllable count, utilizing neither rhyme nor metre. The traditional haiku normally
consists of a mere seventeen syllables, set out as follows:[4]
First line: Five syllables.
Second line: Seven syllables.
Third line: Five syllables.
I believe that English
haiku must follow the basic principle that informs its Japanese progenitor,
namely, packing a moment of insight into a brief, epigrammatic verse. The ‘Zen moment’ has a poetic precursor in
English Romanticism, bearing a close resemblance to the Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’, that is, moments when ‘we see into the life of things’. But where Wordsworth is wordy, haiku are epigrammatically
brief. Indeed, the epigram, of all our
poetic genres, bears the closest resemblance to the haiku. Haiku, broadly speaking, achieve their
effects through comparison, contrast or association, while paradox, riddles,
puns and other tropes are widely employed. Humour, (karumi)
often admixed with sadness (mono no aware), is also an important feature
of haiku, as in this haiku by Bashô (1644-1694):
Hatsu-sigure First winter rains.
Saru mo komino wo Even the monkey seems to want
Saru mo komino wo Even the monkey seems to want
Hoshige nari. A small straw cloak.
Though Japanese haiku are
traditionally constrained by the seventeen syllable form described above, translators
from Japanese, as well as poets writing original English haiku, have preferred
to write a type of vers libre,
which, like the responses of the control group described above, is slipshod,
loose and prolix; in short, inartistic and hence unable to defamiliarize. English verse has, since the fourteenth
century, been based on a combination of syllable counting and metre, generally
allied to rhyme. To shun the above in
favour of vers libre
renders most English haiku absurdly facile and therefore devoid of art. Japanese poets have always been aware of the
importance of strict rules; it is not from mere inertia that they still confine
themselves largely to the traditional format. Since I believe that any art worthy of the
name can only achieve its defamiliarizing effects through a discipline which
counteracts our ordinary looseness of perception and thought, I have adopted a
stricter model for my haiku, as follows:
First line: Generally, either four or five
syllables
Second line: Generally, either six or eight syllables.
Third line: Almost always four syllables, but
occasionally five.
Furthermore, each line
should conform to the rules of metric, that is, one should be able to scan it
metrically in iambs, trochees, spondees, anapaests and so on. This differentiates such a line from prose,
which should never be metric.
Since English is close to
being an isolating language, one can generally pack more meaning into fewer
English syllables than is possible in Japanese.
The slight variations in syllable count are due to the demands of metre,
or more subtly, of rhythm. Other familiar
English poetic tropes, such as alliteration, antithesis, apostrophe, chiasmus,
hyperbole, irony, metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, paradox, paronomasia,
personification, simile and synecdoche, must also play their part. All of them, combined with metre and rhythm,
are devices which create what the Formalists called the ‘literariness’ of a
text, the ivory gateway to the transfiguration of the world through defamiliarization.
The haiku, properly
handled, is both insightful and incisive.
Its flavour is subtle, encapsulated in Japanese terms such as wabi, sabi and yugen, all
controversially difficult to translate.
Their importance lies in their affirmation that the world cannot be
contracted to a mere ‘recognizable image’, as in the poetry of William Carlos
Williams, but is always redolent of a spirituality that permeates
everything. As R.H. Blythe puts it: ‘In
haiku the intellectual element is absent, or is so completely fused with the
intuitive poetical that no analysis can separate them.’ [5]
Consider the following
haiku by Buson (1716-1783):
Na no hana ya Canola
flowers!
Kujira mo yorazu No whale approaches
Umi kurenu. The sea darkens.
Here we have three loosely
associated images – canola flowers, the absence of a whale (!) and a
darkening sea. The absence of a whale is
Mallarmean (cf. ‘…nul ptyx/Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore’) in its
riddling strangeness.[6] Try as one may to banish it, the non-whale
intrudes itself as a huge sea-beast into that darkening sea set off by the
brilliant yellow of the canola flowers.
Moreover, the logical mind complicates things further by attempting to
find a connection between these images, subconsciously associating the
darkening of the sea with the non-appearance of the whale and placing the
canola flowers on the shore, though there is no indication in the haiku of
their whereabouts. The poem is actually
an illusion, comparable to the pictures of Escher, where the eye insists on
trying to make sense of the senseless.
Yet the poem – a miracle of economy - is far from senseless, evoking as
it does a metaphysical continuum in which these archetypal images - flowers,
(non)-whale and sea -combine to form a riddling text reminiscent of a koan which,
by defamiliarizing these three signifiers through juxtaposing them, (like the
celebrated goose in a bottle), startles us into a realization that, as J.B.S.
Haldane observed, the universe is not only queerer than we imagine but queerer
than we can imagine. This is the
loftiest form of haiku, in which familiar binaries of concord and discord are
resolved, poetically, into a synthesis greater than either.
Unfortunately, most Western
practitioners and not a few Japanese not only fail to recognize these ‘fingers
pointing towards the moon’, but find the haiku’s apparent ease and looseness a
quicksand into which every vestige of poetic life disappears without trace, The
‘Zen moment’ in such hands has become a false Enlightenment (satori), which any Zen Master would
dismiss with the injunction to go back, keep sitting and try harder – much,
much harder. As Théophile Gautier says, in words which keep insistently
thrusting themselves upon me as I write my own haiku:
‘Oui,
l’oeuvre sort plus belle
D’une
forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers,
marbre, onyx, émail.’
Writing haiku should be at
least as demanding an art as sculpting marble, not merely, as so often, playing
with plasticine. And in the haibun, a
story interspersed with haiku, the prose must be worthy of the haiku which accompany
it, instead of merely plodding dully alongside them, as is all too often the
case. Moreover, haibun must be judged
not just by the quality of their haiku, but also by the intrinsic quality and
interest of their narrative prose, which should be quite capable, artistically,
of standing alone, without using the haiku as a crutch. Furthermore, the narrative should possess
significance in itself, not be simply a frame around the poetry or, worse
still, merely a prelude to the verse. Here
again, we invoke the concept of defamiliarization, for artistic prose must
accomplish, though at greater length, essentially what the haiku accomplishes –
make us see things, people and situations as fresh, new and startling,
possessing, to quote the Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality once again, ‘the glory
and the freshness of a dream.’
Finally, one may ask why
haiku occur so sparsely in English haibun?
Is it felt that they are so difficult to write that they must be spread
as thin as possible to eke them out? Or,
alternatively, do we find them so rich that one or two of them at a time are
all we can digest? Whatever the reason,
I can see no reason why a haibun should not be filled with as many haiku as the
artistic demands of the narrative require.
Moreover, the haiku may comment on, amplify or form a counterpoint to
the prose, as long as they continue to be true, phanopoaeic epiphanies..
Let me conclude by quoting
the whole of the opening passage from Wordsworth’s famous Ode, which I
have alluded to earlier.
There was a time when
meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common
sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial
light,
The glory and the
freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath
been of yore,
Turn wheresoe’er I may
By night or day,
The things I once did see
I now do see no more.
Images from that dream, a
‘temporary enlightenment’, an epiphany flashing upon ‘the inward eye which is the bliss of solitude’,
have prompted me to write this haibun in an attempt to recapture things, people
and feelings that I shall never see or experience again, seizing ‘those moments
of inexplicable depth’ in all their brevity and joyful profundity.
Thin Ice
‘This dewdrop world, Tsuyu
no yo wa
Is but a dewdrop world,, Tsuyu no yo nagara
And yet…’ Sari nagara
(Issa Kobayashi)
I
The harsh winter when Z turned seventeen, was the
coldest in the U.K.
Z was young and
healthy enough, however, to revel in the dramatic, novel adventure of this
almost Russian winter, where even the milk, when it arrived, came in solid blocks.
Gracing their porch
In carapace of glittering frost,
Three milk-white pillars.
To harden himself against the cold, like an ancient Spartan,
Z would fill the bath with water the night before, since unlagged pipes would invariably
freeze up overnight, then break the ice before dawn the next day as he plunged
into it. Once he went down to the sea-front
at dawn, when the tide was running high, and swam alone amid floating ice in
the Irish Sea seeking to prove his hardiness,
What was he trying to drown? Not himself
I believe, though he almost did. After
this, he confined himself to ice-skating, speedily becoming adept since every pond
and lake was frozen at least six inches deep, the ice growing thicker every
day.
That Arctic sea!
Did shivering fish, cold
crabs
Think him a polar bear?
Beyond the dunes,
Cowslips huddled asleep in
earth..
A shroud of snow.
No seagulls fly
Through swivelling snow at dawn.
The dark sea freezes.
II
Birds perished in myriads that winter, their corpses
strewn across gardens, fields and hedgerows.
Putting out bread crumbs for them one morning, he found a dead robin red-breast
clinging to the stiff, icy washing on the line, hard and cold as marble.
Vainly seeking warmth
In a shirt starched with hoar-frost,
It found a shroud.
Window ice flowers!
Glacial notes of a dead bird’s song
Scrawled upon glass.
He buried cock-robin in a snow-covered flower bed,
spade grating on the iron-hard soil, recalling some lines from The Wasteland
as he did so:
‘That corpse you buried last year in
your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?
Oh, keep far hence the dog
That’s friend to men,
For with his nails he’ll dig it up
again’.
Z was reading T.S. Eliot avidly at that time. These evocative lines from The Burial of
the Dead, with its persistent references to death and spiritual blight, as
well as to ‘winter… covering earth in
forgetful snow,’ along with the elegiac theme of irreparably lost love which
runs through The Waste Land like a
bass continuo, summed up for him not just 1947 but the years that followed. That was one winter he would never forget,
nor the resplendent spring and the dazzling ‘summer [that] surprised us’ that
followed it. In retrospect, it proved to
be one of the most memorable years of his life.
Let him now dig it up for us, not with his nails but with an old man’s
memory, which can exhume certain moments long past as freshly and clearly preserved
as though in amber.
Enshrined in amber,
Snap frozen seventy million years,
Spring buttercups.
III
One bitter Saturday towards the end of January, as his
bus passed a small, frozen lake, Z noticed a girl skating gracefully around it,
alone. A skater himself, he was so
struck both by the effortless skill of her skating and by her blonde, barelegged,
beauty, that he leapt impetuously off the bus as it was slowing, ran back up
the hill, and slid rather than clambered down the snowy slope that ringed the
lake to stand beneath the leafless branches of a lakeside willow, the better to
observe her. Lost in admiration, as
oblivious of the falling snow as she was, he watched her glide, swoop and
pirouette unfalteringly across the ice for the next hour. At length, she stopped disconcertingly close
to him, intentionally he hoped, to adjust her white-booted skates and floral green
headscarf. When she removed it, her shoulder-length
blonde hair, lightly wind-blown now and flecked with snowflakes, tumbled down
to frame the perfect oval of her face with an aureate nimbus. She was wearing a green cashmere sweater
against the cold, the clinging wool outlining the high swell of her
breasts. He longed to speak to her, but
dared not, paralyzed by an unaccustomed shyness.
Time had stopped.
There was an almost palpable silence, broken only by the soughing of the
wind through the bulrushes and bare trees around the lake. Then, still panting a little, snowy cheeks
flushed with hectic pink, she suddenly caught and held him with her cornflower
blue-eyes. Something passed between them
like an electric shock, though neither of them spoke or even smiled, as would
be normal in such an encounter between strangers in a lonely place. Suddenly, as he gazed at her, entranced, trembling
slightly though not from cold, he found himself in some northern country, skating
hand in hand with her along a frozen river as dusk fell. He could hear the hiss of skates on the
uneven ice, see their frosty breath swirled before them as they swept towards a
bend in the river, feel the warmth of her gloved hand clutching his own. As he turned his head to glance at her, he
could see she was wearing in that far-off time just such a peasant scarf. The image, faded as an old sepia daguerreotype,
seemed to hang between them for a moment. Even as it vanished, felt, confusingly, that they
had been lovers then and would once again unite. When she took to the ice again, with never a
backward glance, he rushed home to fetch his skates, eager to join her, and
cycled furiously back to the lake, only to find it deserted. Deeply disappointed, yet still under her
spell, he circled the glimmering ice for hours until night fell and he grew
chilled and weary, vainly hoping she might come back and join him. She never did.
Epiphany!
White-veiled with thickly falling
snow,
That long-lost face.
Glimpsed once then lost!
Must he wait for yet another life
By the ancient pond?
Skating at night,
Cavorting madly over
That hyaline moon!
Z later discovered that the girl was part Swedish,
through her mother, which not only accounted for her resplendent blondeness but
may also have lent some credence to his unexpected vision of her on a frozen
river winding among snow-covered hills.
This, however, did nothing to shake his skepticism about what he had
seen. Until that moment of recognition,
he had never had the slightest interest in the doctrine of reincarnation, though
aware that some believed in it. Religion
of any sort no longer made sense to him, for he had jettisoned his Christian
beliefs years before, during the Blitz, when, paradoxically he needed them
most, unable to believe in a Deity who would create a species capable of such
atrocities. Six years of total war, in
which he had lost two uncles and several friends of the family, had combined
with a careful study of twentieth
century history to make him both a nihilist and a materialist, stripping him of
all faith, all spiritual discernment.. His
glimpse of a presumed past life therefore gave him cognitive dissonance, defined
as result of a clash between a firmly held belief and evidence contradicting
it. In such cases, the prior belief
almost always reestablishes itself. So
he thrust his unsettling glimpse of another life out of his mind, telling himself
it was simply a foolish confabulation.
Summer grasses!
How green and strong they’re flourishing
On broken bricks.
A bombed-out church.
Its marred foundations re- entomb
The crucified.
Strutting like geese,
Young men cry, ‘The world is ours!’
Frogs croak in a well!
IV
Z went back to the lake day after day, until at last the
thaw came in mid-March, bringing with it gales and floods which added to the
general misery; but he never saw the Skater again. Perhaps she had only been a visitor? Dejectedly, he resigned himself to losing
her, though for months afterwards he was haunted by her memory. Then, in mid-April, after so many sunless months
of ice, snow, floods and gales, the weather suddenly turned intoxicatingly warm
and sunny, a prelude to the hottest summer for decades. Z reveled in the warmth of a spring of
extraordinary, intoxicating lushness, which covered fields and hedgerows with
such a profusion of brightly coloured flowers and blossoms that the
countryside, long buried beneath a pall of white, now looked like a festival.
A feast of flowers!!
Who is holding a wedding
For this virgin spring?
In this festive atmosphere, which all of us seemed to
share and enjoy, Z attended a party on April 25, (recalling the slaughter at Gallipoli,
as a historian would) to find, unbelievably, that he was once again meeting the
luminous, cornflower gaze of none other than the Skater; she was there partly to
escort her younger half-sister. Though
his heart was racing wildly, Z strolled over to her, introduced himself, and told
her, as nonchalantly as he could, that he had once watched her skating. Her name, he learnt, was Alethea, a word
familiar to him from his Greek studies, meaning ‘Truth’. To his delight, she not only remembered him
but told him that, intrigued by his watching her for so long in such inclement weather,
she had later learnt his name after seeing him with one of her friends and had
wanted to meet him. Infuriatingly, he
learnt that she lived only a kilometer or so from him, close to the lake. Had he made enquiries of friends who lived in
that neighbourhood they might well have led him to her much earlier. A year younger than Z, Alethea attended a
local convent school and had learnt to skate in spite of the protests of the
nuns, who had seen her photograph in a local paper and found her ultra-short
skating skirt an offence against modesty.
She laughed when he told her that the nuns should look upon her skirt as
affording us a divine revelation, for she had long, shapely legs. They spoke of last winter’s biting cold, a
delight to skaters, a misery for almost everyone else, especially for wild
animals and birds. She then told Z that
after he had left, she had gone home because she had found a frozen red-breast on
the ice. Instead of burying it, as he
had done, she had put it under her green sweater, tucked next to her breasts, hoping
to revive it. To her delight, it
recovered and flew away happily the next morning.
Even a dead bird,
Sheltered in such a nest
Should spring to life.
Touched by her
compassion, amused by her forthrightness, Z told her that the warmth from such
a source would revive a dead man, let alone a bird. Smiling, she promised to do the same for him
if he ever needed it. Z said he’d keep
her to her promise.
‘And now we’ve broken the ice…’ he quipped, and asked
her to dance.
In the spring twilight,
Her beauty, lambent as a torch,
Roused him to life.
Lazarus stumbled
From his tomb, blinded by sunlight,
Starting to waltz.
Z spent the whole evening dancing with her, never
leaving her side, then, finally, as she was about to leave, took a deep breath
and invited her out. She hesitated a
moment, then agreed; he went home feeling more exalted than Caesar in a Roman
triumph. ‘At last,’ he told himself,
‘I’ve
stumbled on the Truth.’
V
Z and Alethea met early the following afternoon and
walked along the deserted shores of the River Dee, gazing across the broad
estuary, ten kilometers wide, to the distant Welsh hills. She told him that her father, whom she had
loved deeply, had died after a long illness when she was only ten, leaving her
heartbroken. Her mother, a good-looking woman then in her early thirties, had
remarried later that year. Her
stepfather, a middle-aged engineer whose wife had committed suicide under the
stress of the Blitz, had brought two girls with him, one of whom Z had met at
the party. Z realized that Alethea was
perhaps subconsciously looking for a father in him and doubted whether he was
old enough to fill this role. And was he
perhaps subconsciously seeking a mother in her, young as she was?
They strolled hand in hand for a couple of hours,
talking as animatedly as if they had known each other for years and just met
again. Later, they swam in the incoming flood
tide, warmed by the sand, before the lapping waves drove them to climb half-way
up a sandstone cliff to a grassy ledge, sheltered by an overhang from prying
eyes. Here, emboldened by her casual
semi-nakedness, Z took her in his arms, for she was by then unresistingly bare-breasted,
in the sultry heat (had she not promised so to revive him?), and this at a time
when prudery held unchallenged sway and sex out of marriage, especially between
young people, was anathema. Though he
did not venture to make love to her, feeling it would be almost sacrilegious
after such short acquaintance, after an hour or so of kisses and caresses she suddenly shuddered,
moaned softly and then began to cry out loudly, gripping him tightly and sinking
her teeth into his neck. For both of
them unforgettably, such overwhelming sensuality was new, at least in this
life, though it felt like a renewal of a familiar erotic ritual with which they
were both well-acquainted.
The world hushed, breathless –
Sea, river, wind and rustling grass,
-- For a hundred years.
A curlew’s cry
Passing into the ancient rocks
Awakened them.
After such knowledge….
The west wind brushed her silken hair
And sang to the river.
VI
From then on, until he was called up for military
service some eighteen months later, Z and Alethea were inseparable. Any hour spent away from each other they
regarded as time wasted. ‘Oh, that I
could sleep out that great gap of time/My Anthony is away,’ she said to him,
half-playfully, half-tearfully, when her family went on holiday to the Welsh
coast that August. So Z cycled over one
hundred and thirty kilometers every day for a month to be with her, setting off
before dawn and not returning home until midnight. Later, during his basic military training, he
would half-kill himself in the compulsory Brigade seven mile cross-country
every Saturday morning, to ensure that out of several thousand runners he was
always placed in the first three, thus earning a thirty-six hour pass enabling
him to see her, albeit briefly, every weekend.
Exhausted runner!
Back from the battlefield
Thirty years late.
Stream-drifting boat.
Lovers entwined, both of them deaf
To Falls ahead.
In their small café,
Twin lobsters in the tank
Are feeding happily.
As Z caressed her that first day by the Dee , he had been startled by another imaged memory flashing
before his eyes. Wearing an old
fashioned, ankle-length dress and a broad-brimmed hat, she was clinging to him,
weeping, as he kissed her goodbye at Waterloo London for a death-dealing battle-front in France
At Waterloo
Parting, she knows the station’s name
Presages death.
He watches his men
Buoyantly digging a deep trench -
Their own mass grave.
Dying in the mud,
He still kept on calling, calling
Her name, her name.
The soil of France-
Defended to what purpose?
- Now fills his mouth.
The telegram
Arrived while she was happily reading
His latest letter.
Such gay, pink ribbon
Round his impassioned letters,
Stained with tears.
The Spanish Lady
Who strangled her that winter
Was a welcome guest.
VII
In the strangeness of their time together, one
incident unaccountably unsettled him.
They had ridden out late in July to a favourite spot of theirs, deep in
the tranquil, then unspoilt, countryside.
Petrol rationing had not yet been fully lifted, so there were few cars
about and they had the country roads and adjoining fields and hedgerows
exhilaratingly to themselves. Z had lifted
their bicycles over an ancient stile, into which, synchronistically enough,
some long-dead, scholarly hand had cut the date DMCCXL (1740), as though to
remind passers-by of the dreadful winter of that year, before riding bumpily down
a narrow footpath, turning aside at length into a small dell, where they lay
hidden from view beneath an oak tree, deep in long summer grass, and made
love. Afterwards, as Z lay contentedly
gazing up through the leaves to the cloudless summer sky, he became aware that a
strange, unnatural silence had descended upon them; the singing of birds, the
chatter of grasshoppers, even the lowing of distant cows had ceased.; only the
tranquil murmur of a nearby stream was audible.
It was then that she drew his attention to a circular object, about the
size of a halfpenny but of a pale, almost translucent appearance, like the moon
seen in daytime, moving rapidly across the sky.
Just above them it stopped, hanging there perfectly motionless. Since the sky was cloudless and he did not
know the size of the disc, he could not tell how high it was; but he was
intrigued by the way in which it hovered soundlessly above the trees, as well
as by its circular shape and pellucid, spectral appearance. They watched it for a few minutes before again
turning hungrily to each other. Then, as
the summer afternoon was hot and humid, exhausted, they slept.
When they awoke, they were startled to find the sun
was setting and the dell already plunged in shadow. Four hours had passed! Alethea was alarmed, for she had been given strict
instructions to be home before dinner; even more startlingly, their bicycles
were missing. Convinced that the
machines had been stolen while they so unaccountably slept, they made their way
despondently back up the track. Then, as
they approached the stile, they caught a sudden flash of metal from the
adjoining field. They found both
bicycles propped up next to each other against a blackberry hedge, undamaged
except for an inexplicable coating of grayish-white powder. Even the inside of his saddle-bag and her
basket were thick with this stuff, which had a pungent odour. They hastily made their way home without
further incident and promptly forget about the whole affair, which they
dismissed as a practical joke, though at a loss to explain how that same
powdery substance had found its way, as they later discovered, into his pockets
and her handbag. Yet for years
afterwards that disc troubled Z’s dreams, hovering like a ghostly moon over the
trenches on the nightmare Salient or above the ruins of shattered towns before
gliding swiftly across the sky.
That eerie moon!
Freed from the ice it soars above
Lovers entranced.
VIII
Three years after their first encounter, when Z kissed
Alethea goodbye at Waterloo on his way back to Oxford, after a weekend in
Surrey where she was then living with her family, those familiar images of
their final minutes together in that station in 1917 assailed him with a
hitherto unknown intensity. Though they
had never even had a moment’s disagreement, let alone a quarrel, in all the
years they were together, something subtly different in Alethea’s voice, her eyes
and her caresses that foggy evening of November 17 (that integer again!) filled him with deep
disquiet. Yet refusing to believe either
his intuition or the veracity of his far memory; Z was therefore unprepared for
the terse, pencilled note, two sentences scrawled on a page torn from a
notebook, - was he then not worth even the dignity of pen and her usual headed
paper ? - that arrived in his college
mailbox a week later. No longer able to
tolerate a long-distance relationship, she had decided – at the instigation of
her sensible mother and aunt – that they must part.
These loves of ours?
Just ‘the track of a boat
Rowed away at dawn’.
In flower-hung moonlight,
A girl tenderly sleeping
With somebody else.
Sudden shock can bring on a condition known as
Transient Global Amnesia. It occurs more
often in war than in love, though the two are closely akin. Z remembered little of what followed until
finding himself late that Monday afternoon in December deep in the Cotswolds, nearly
forty kilometres from Balliol, with no clear notion of how he had got
there. Regaining his senses only when a compassionate
motorist stopped to pick him up, he realized he must have been walking rapidly for
nearly eight hours, hatless and coatless, through driving winter hail and sleet,
like a latter-day Lear, oblivious to everything but the storm raging within him.
IX
Z did not reply to Alethea’s letter nor ask for an
explanation. Cold Lazarus had returned to his tomb. Something icy and implacable had come to
dwell within him, smiling malignly, and did not intend to leave. Though he was slow to realize it, he was a
changed man – and for the worse. He
became dangerous to himself and smilingly hostile to others. He never saw nor heard from Alethea again
while she lived, though some years after they had parted he learnt that she was
disgraced. She had given birth to a son
out of wedlock (on July 17!), fathered by the nonentity for whom she had left
him, a womanizer whose effrontery was matched only by his treachery, and had
been forced by her horrified family to give the baby up for adoption, without
even being allowed to see it. Later,
after she had recovered from her consequent nervous breakdown, she had bowed to
her respectable family’s insistence – flinty mother and steel-eyed aunt again!
- and married the child’s father, a reluctant, shifty bridegroom at best, only
to leave him a couple of years later, sickened by his drunken adulteries.
The marriage market
Is stacked with stolen goods.
Mummy’s own choice!
Too young to know
What love was really worth,
She pawned it cheap.
The booby prize!
A bundle of baby clothes
Clutched to dry breasts.
Tears she has shed
Would fill that lake twice over
Then turn to rime ice.
Within a month of hearing of the baby, Z had married
on the rebound, impulsively, stupidly, unhappily and without even understanding
why, a woman who bore a superficial physical resemblance to Alethea, cracked
glass to her diamond, though resembling her in nothing else. Shortly afterwards, he left England
Oedipus tempted
By those full, milky breasts
Should have fled Thebes
The beast with two backs
Brings crowds to the cages
Of
our human zoo.
Shakespeare’s Dark Lady
Was something like the sun-
She seared his art.
Mad Lear on the heath
‘What is there in Nature
Makes these hard hearts?’
Nobody answered.
They were too busy blinding
A credulous fool.
Black Hamlet learnt
Graves were like women-
Open to all comers.
What made him a killer?
Revenge for a father
A dubious ghost?
No!
He had learnt.
All mothers and sweethearts
Were the same girl.
Desdemona now,
Chaste as the driven snow?
Just give her time!
Hands hard on her throat?
Quite a wise precaution
Against lost kerchiefs.
That jealous king
Saw spiders in his cup
Like sprawl- thighed queens.
Young
midsummer dreams
Withering to winter’s tales
Beneath dead willows.
Z had repressed,
not just suppressed, his anger and grief, and with it all memories of Alethea,
so successfully that he not only never thought of her but could barely remember
her. Once, when his sister had casually mentioned
Alethea’s name, he had looked at her blankly, globally amnesiac, until she was
forced to remind him of her! It was as
though their three years together had been erased from his memory. The day after her casually vicious scrawl
reached him, he had walked across Christ Church Meadows in a buffeting gale and
thrown his ice-skates, along with all her letters and every gift she had given
him, into the chill waters of the Isis . When he realized much later that he had been
covering a deeply infected, almost fatal wound with keloid scar tissue, he wished
he had recalled those psychoanalytic warnings about the return of the
repressed. Unknowingly, he had lost,
catastrophically and bloodily, as in 1917, a battle he believed he had won.
Back in his tomb,
He found a friendly demon
Goat-legged adviser.
He learnt, like Yeats,
To study hate with diligence,
A brilliant First!
Devilishly easy.
Just a matter of changing
Bread into stones.
Their general’s banner?
A scented silk dress
On a golden screen.
Seductive prisoners?
Up against the marriage wall.
The coup de grace.
No prisoners taken!
Such an order now seemed
Militarily sound.
When the ice broke
He found their cries gave him
Cold satisfaction!
Watching them flounder,
He’d shrug and walk away.
Flowers for Ophelia.
Such winning ways!
‘Take a vampire to dinner?
Then dress to kill!’
Those lethal kisses!
Should her fangs distract you
Impale her - quick.’
Fast highways to hell,
Lined with glittering fruit
Eager for plucking.
X
Just when his sickness seemed incurable, miraculously,
Z was healed. After years of prolonged misery,
endured ‘for the sake of the children,’ with a middle-class Messalina, he divorced her and married a woman who was beautiful
clever, and chaste. The most precious gifts are those we do not
deserve.
Sloe-eyed, quick witted,
She hauled me from deep water,
More than half drowned.
The summer moon!
We listen to wind-chimes singing
Among white flowers.
Even sound asleep
She holds my hand in hers.
Spring rain falling.
Some years later, quite unexpectedly, Z was
transformed by what Chinese Buddhists term Dun Wu, or Sudden
Enlightenment, waking up one morning to find miraculously, as it were, his long-lost faith sitting
serenely on the bed. One of his attendant
demons had fled, snarling; once again, Lazarus was out of the tomb and in warm
sunlight.
Sitting in the sun,
He sees the hills
reflected in
His cat’s green eyes.
For many years Z’s life steered a relatively tranquil
course in a happy marriage with a new family.
Then, without warning, the past sprang out upon him; suddenly, Alethea,
forgotten for decades, returned to haunt his sleep almost nightly. He came to dread those intolerable dreams
where, knowing the misery in store for her, he tried in vain to persuade her shade
not to marry her betrayer.
The ice is cracking!
She does not hear him shouting,
As she falls through.
Orpheus pleaded,
But Eurydice refused
To stir from Hell.
Why does her mother
Still slam the door on him
Even in dreams?
XI
Alethea’s nocturnal visitations continued to trouble
him. In one of them, she showed him the
house where she had breathed her last, told him where it was and even gave him
its name, White Gables. When he eventually located it, the photograph he obtained of this gloomy
Edwardian mansion in the north of England, sixteen thousand kilometers away, corresponded
almost exactly to the rough drawing he had made of it on awakening from his
dream,. Six years later, still disturbed
by these nocturnal apparitions, Z managed to track down Alethea’s elder half-sister,
whom he later traveled to England
Warm breasts that gave
Life to a young, dying robin
Gave her slow death.
Those dancing poppies!
Did they set her free once more
To dance on skates?
Even in dreams
She spurns his proffered hand,
This helpless wraith!
The timeless dead!
Does she not ask herself why
She’s still eighteen?
When he convinced her
She’d been dead for twenty years
She sought rebirth.
XII
Z still dreams, though infrequently now, that he is skating
on that mist-wreathed lake, as the winter dusk falls and mist gathers thinly
around its banks, hearing only the hiss of his skates on the ice and the sibilant
rustle of wind through the dead, blackened bulrushes stiffly lining the banks. Sometimes, he thinks he catches her watching
him; but when he glides over, breathlessly, heart racing with wild hope, to see
if she is there, he finds only a withered tree, the once green and graceful
willow where he himself had stood as a boy, now bent and gnarled beneath the
glacial weight of time till it has assumed, in the growing dark, a faceless, human
form. As night deepens and the first
flakes of snow swirl faintly about him, he feels the ice cracking beneath him as
he surrenders himself unprotestingly to the dark waters beneath.
Alone in dreams,
Darkling, he skims across
That treacherous moon.
This world of ice,
Of frozen human hearts!
And yet, and yet…
A dying robin,
Warmed at her breasts,
Soared eagle-high.
That ancient willow,
Does it remember her
And also weep?
Following the Master,
To that willow he now yields
Hate, anger, desire.
Epilogue
As Proust observed, to have loved a woman is as
nothing besides the truth gained from the suffering that follows losing
her. One of Basho’s pupils, Sonojo
(1649-1723), put it even more strongly: ‘Going to Paradise
is good and falling into Hell too is a matter for congratulation.’
O the mind; mind has
mountains, cliffs of f all
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there…’[7]
Now almost sixty years have passed since Z first met
Alethea, he can look back over the long vista of his life, as from a high peak,
and understand that we who skate heedlessly on the frail ice of the world must inevitably
fall through and drown. Life is a long ascent to the heights, which, sooner or
later, all must take or remain bound to the ever-turning Wheel.
How pitiful
Those ever-changing clouds,
Aimlessly drifting!
We wake to Truth:
Black rain is falling on
The temple roof.
Leaving the lake,
This old man is trudging up
The Eightfold Path. Om mani padme hum
These mountain peaks
The Buddha’s radiant Body,
Their streams his Tongue.
Lord of the Wheel,
Pity us creatures still held fast
Within its toils!
[3] Shklovskii was forced to
renounce these views in 1930, with the advent of Stalinism and ‘socialist
realism.’
COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM
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