L'autre monde

My recent Camino continues to reverberate: my song 'A Bus Stop in Galicia' was one effort at making sense of it, trying to make sense of the 'spiritual' element. Though I was scoffing at superficial new-agery there, I was trying to also give a sense of the elusive positivity that seems to have flowed from it, but one shouldn't try to explain these things too much.

Then unexpectedly (the way the best things always happen) a contact who has an automatic quotation generator on his email sent me this. Which seems to sum it up perfectly:

Il y a un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci," says Paul Eluard. To speak of another world has, historically, been to commit to a mystical or religious agenda, and to a province of wishful thinking normally inhabited by children and the simpleminded, as opposed to the real, factual, less deceived world of grown-up rationalists. A good deal of argument has gone into defining terms such as "mystical," "religious," and "rational," but Eluard's remark points us in another direction altogether: the other world is here, now, but we miss it every day: we see what we expect to see and we think as we (are) expect(ed) to think. Eluard's secular program was to uncover the autremonde—the nonfactual truth of being: the missed world and, by extension, the missed self who sees and imagines outside the bounds of socially engineered expectations—not by a rational process, as the term is usually understood, but by a reattunement to the continuum of objects, weather, and the other lives that we inhabit.
— John Burnside
(from the Summer 2005 issue of Poetry Review and the May 2006 issue of Harper's)

I wouldn't describe my re-attunement to things in precisely those terms, but something of that nature is certainly happening.

Going deeper....

(Photo of Eluard and some of his surrealist pals by the incredible Lee Miller)

Party time

It was supposedly the company Christmas party. I don't know why I went. It was a 'corporate event' replete with self-regard and self-congratulation on the part of those in command and control. In fact it reminded me of a political party conference - the only difference (and the only consolation) was the free booze.

Everything of this nature aspires to the condition of showbiz and the attention span of the TV watcher. References were made to recent electoral changes in a foreign state and cheered by British citizens. Well I suppose what's on TV is more interesting than G.Brown and his gang.

Fighting to be heard against the voices of self-congratulation ringing in my ears were lines from some old songs. "I thought it was the UK, or just another country"; "Yes it's time for the Dr Goebbels show".

Oh I am still an old punkrocker and proud of it. So much so that I left before the dancing started. If it ever did.

Why 'underwater'??

It started as a poem title. And then it cropped up again in some song lyrics. The idea of plunging in, of leaping into a new element. The idea of depth. The metaphor is commonplace enough. It seems to be a useful one for a lot of ideas and experiences I've had lately, and things, hopefully, still to come.

But I still don't like getting wet that much, on the literal level. But, as the song lyrics say, "You can't avoid the heavy rain."

Or as Randall Jarrell said: "A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great."

I knew I shouldn't have...

Started this I mean. First post and I manage to offend somebody. Roci I adore your surveys, I just thought the idea about famous people was a little erm..silly. Ish. But I will always answer your questions. Soy aficionado, no?

And guten Abend David, nice to see you looked in. I must follow your blogging when I get a minute.

More tomorrow. Maybe....

In principio

Ha ha, I had to start this just so I could post a comment on somebody else's (Ingvill's, hi)

Never wanted to, I will only irritate people...

Today I am in conceited intellectual mood/mode. My Spanish colleague sent a silly survey around asking "Should we have someone famous working here?"

I answered:

No thanks! 'Fame’ is a construct used by late capitalism to distract the people from their true desires, keep them in their place and assuage the anxieties of the anomie of fractured modernity. It is more important to celebrate the autonomy of the "ordinary" individual. ( From my thesis "Hello! - Celebrity culture and the coming apocalypse" University of Old Holborn 1997)

But actually I mean it! The old situationist is as unreconstructed as ever...