Re-walking Buncrana & Season's Greetings

 Reviewing photos of Buncrana Heritage Trail...... Here's a dark shot and a light one. Seaon's Greetings to All !

Leaf shadows II

 Leaf shadows II - for autumnal enjoyment !

#JacobsRoom100

It's well known by now that  2022 marks the centenary celebration of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. 

The celebration continues of course and there is now a Twitter hashtag with information about a free online seminar of talks and readings in regard to Jacob’s Room on 26 and 27 October.

So the tag is above and I highly recommend Jacob’s Room to anyone who hasn't read it and has an interest in poetry in the wide sense of the word. I should add perhaps that I don't yet know the names of the people who will be speaking at the October gathering. I'll try to find out and post.

Pyrenees photos revisited

 Two photos from the Vall Fosca region of the Pallars Jussà comarca

The trail from Gento Lake and Erica growing on the mountainside

Buncrana Shore Path Revisited

 A photo from our 2019 visit. I've posted other pictures of this area here, easily searchable happily enough. Hoping to make another visit this autumn!

 

 

Virginia Woolf's poetic fiction

 

Virginia Woolf’s poetic fiction (2)

 “That there is a poetic element in Virginia Woolf’s writing,” I wrote in June, to celebrate Dalloway Day 2022, “is hardly a new thought.” And I went on to speak of Woolf’s short fiction, citing different stories in Monday or Tuesday.

However I might more correctly have said poetic elements, given the fact that poetry employs different strategies. My citation, in the June post, of one story in Monday or Tuesday, “Kew Gardens,” brought out an ekphrastic description:

 From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

But of course description may be more or less ekphrastic and is only one sort of writing element, present in some, not perhaps all poetry. Others include rhythm, rhyme, metaphor, assonance. Metaphor is a constant in language use, so common that it’s difficult sometimes to say whether it is present or not.

 However 2022 also marks the centenary celebration of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Obviously these three works utilize metaphor in various ways. But for the sake of space, and staying with Woolf for the time being, perhaps a look at the way Jacob’s Room makes a metaphor of the British Museum as if it were a mind or brain will be useful in celebration of the centenary. Woolf says, in section IX of the novel:

 Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, “Let me in! Let me in!”

 However we wish to classify writing like this, calling it poetry, calling it prose, or prose poetry, I think it calls for reading. For re-reading!

Nuria Valley

 Seeking cooler weather and a change of scene .... The photos show a growth of foxglove along one of the streams near the hotel and (2) spring water coming out of the mountain area.

Haiku

 

wanderer’s breakfast

 

standing in line

outside the bakery

in the lightest of drizzles

Virginia Woolf's poetic fiction

 

Virginia Woolf’s poetic fiction

 I’m late with this in terms of Dalloway Day 2022 but it’s on a rather constant theme in writing, that of expression and form. It’s from a longer piece in preparation.

 That there is a poetic element in Woolf’s prose writing is hardly a new thought. But I think some of her short fiction contains some particularly interesting examples of this literary feature.

Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short fiction Woolf published in her lifetime. Her experimental fiction in that book is generally seen as avant-texte for the novels. One story in the collection, “Kew Gardens” (begun 1917, published 12 May1919), contains sustained sections of poetic writing about Nature. The beginning:

 From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

Thus we find a space in which natural things grow, an organic space touched it seems by a miniature spectrum of three primary colors. As the passage continues, the colors are spoken of as “lights” and we are told “the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.” […]

 And thus my beginning. More information later. Happy Dalloway Day to all !

Barcelona Poetry Week 2022

 Lots of poetic activities scheduled for Barcelona's 2022 event. Below is a link that sets out schedules and other information in Catalan and Spanish. Exploration is the word, however, and the website is very well set up.

https://www.barcelona.cat/barcelonapoesia/

April 12, 2022

 The Mediterranean Sea, from Vilanova i la Geltrú ....

Spring

 

Early Spring

 

In celebration of World Poetry Day 2022

 I first posted the poem below, a translation, to celebrate Barcelona's Poetry Week 2018. The original is Joan Timoneda's "Só qui só, from the version sung by Raimon. As will be obvious it's a love poem/song. It can be found on YouTube among other places. Wikipedia has information about Timoneda (~1518-1583) but as far as I can see only in Catalan and Spanish, although it should be easy enough to get that translated. So Happy Poetry Day---taking poetry in the ample sense of creative activity! The poem and translation:

Só qui só

Só qui só, que no só io,

Puix mudat d’amor me só.

Io crec cert que res no sia,

o, si só, só fantasia,

o algun home que somia

que ve alcançar algun do,

puix mudat d’amor me só.

Só del tot transfigurat;

só aquell que era llibertat,

i ara d’amors cativat

me veig molt fora raó,

puix mudat d’amor me só.

Sí só, puix que en lo món vixc

i a mi mateix avorrixc,

i segons que discernixc

veig la qui em dóna passió

puix d’amor mudat me só.

                                                                                          Joan Timoneda, 1556

My translation (version 1):

I am who I am

I am who I am, I am not I,

for by love changed am I.

I well believe that nothing is,

and, if I am, I’m fantasy,

or some man who dreams

he may attain some gift,

for by love I’m changed.

I am fully transfigured;

I am who was freedom,

and now by loves made captive

I see myself gone mad,

for by love am I changed.

Yet I am, for in the world I do live

And do weary even myself,

and by my discerning

do see her who fires my passion

for by love changed am I.

in the interests of peace....

 .... and with respect for the hard work of diplomacy !

Virginia Woolf and war – an homage to Virginia Woolf and to #BreakTheBias

 

Virginia Woolf and war – an homage to Virginia Woolf and to #breakthebias

The writing of Virginia Woolf was bound to touch on the effects of war. She lived through both the first and second world war as well as the Boer war. As a pacifist, Woolf wrote against war and other violent situations, including, obviously, gender violence. In Mrs Dalloway, as I have written before, there is a basic duality established between Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway that reminds us of the suffering we’re currently seeing in world conflicts, not only in Ukraine. In the novel one protagonist is privileged, a person of means; the other, an ex-soldier who survives World War I, is unemployed, of penurious means. Poet and society matron. Male and female. Simplifying in this way is one way of coming to understandings of the ideas running through the book. And as always in Woolf there is highly careful planning behind the writing. But two other binary opposites, sane/insane, are of use here, especially as Woolf herself made use of them as she planned the book.

 Repetition of some of these words sets the novel to navigate around truth versus insane truth… At the same time the writing establishes doubt—the region of beauty, as Woolf terms it in the essay ‘Reading’—about the acuteness of Septimus Smith’s psychological trauma. Smith, the character, representative of so many people trapped in wars, may or may not be insane. But obviously the insanity of war makes up a great part of the writer’s societal indictment. But underlying the text is a fascinating use of suggestion woven in through the aforementioned series of key words or ideas as the personal perspectives of the book’s characters become clear through their thoughts and conversations. 

Given the world situation today, let us hope we can grow less violent and definitely break the bias!

Conflicts (2)

 

Conflicts (2)

 No, obviously it is far from easy to create in the harsh times we’re living through. The seeming impossibility of diplomatic solutions to the current conflicts in Ukraine, and for that matter of course in other parts of the world are part of the context in which we live and work. As noted in my previous post, I have gone to the work of John Dewey in search of ideas that may provide ways of finding peaceful solutions. So again I quote Dewey in regard to the use of diplomacy:

We have to analyze conditions by observations, which are as discriminating as they are extensive, until we discover specific interactions that are taking place, and learn to think in terms of interactions instead of force. We are led to search even for the conditions which have given the interacting factors the power they possess.

 Additionally, I think we must look at today’s ongoing protests against “Putin’s war” as an “interacting factor” rejecting the misuse of power and force of arms.*

 *The citation is from Dewey’s Freedom and Culture, 1939 (1963).

Conflicts

 

Conflicts

The current headlining focus on Ukraine and Russia is perhaps the biggest link in what amounts to a chain of conflicts—turmoils in various situations in the Middle East, in Africa, and elsewhere. Some of these situations involve full scale wars, others are perhaps less dire but may still involve disastrous living conditions for the people caught up in them.

The situations that lead to violent conflicts vary. Causes include territory, natural resources, water. Very often colonialist or neo-colonialist interests are at the heart of the problem.

Both globally and locally the concept of freedom or liberty is involved in such struggles, and this relates to power. For freedom is not only an abstraction but “effective power to do specific things,” in the words of John Dewey.*

In “The problem of freedom” the philosopher encourages us to look at the matter in the context of culture, “a state of interaction of many factors.”

It was important to Dewey not to isolate any one notion in the conversation, and I bring this up here because in spite of the vast number of texts being published on the current crisis I believe his words still resonate: “The fundamental postulate of the discussion is that isolation of any one factor, no matter how strong its workings at a given time, is fatal to understanding and to intelligent action.” 

I offer this short comment in the belief that violent conflict is not the answer to the problem.

* Cited in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 435 (paperback).

Repetition

 

Repetition and its importance, physically, mentally. From birth onward. The importance of the calendar in human activities makes it impossible not to reconsider repetition. But I’ve returned to it, in this case, with thoughts about the celebration of world days, centennials, and the like. Specifically, the literary side of 2022 as the centenary of  book publications, certainly a high point of Anglophone Modernism. Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, in reverse alphabetical order, published Jacob’s Room, Ulysses, The Waste Land in 1922, three years after the peace accord to the First World War was signed. But these are only three of the events that happened 100 years ago. And, as indicated, I’ve mentioned only a specific temporal and linguistic category. Specific dates: JR: 26 October 1922. TWL: October 1922. U: 2 February 1922 (previously serialized in The Little Review, March 1918-December 1920.

New shoes

 

Planning rural trips again. The weather is still cold but for the most part the days are sunny. And the pandemic seems to be diminishing just now. So maybe it’s time to go out and hike to keep warm. In any case I’ve bought a new pair of hiking shoes in hopes of doing some trail walking soon. Meanwhile preparing a text on Virginia Woolf for publication.

Notes

 Not every journey is downhill........  A view of one of the entrances to Antoni Gaudí's beautiful Parc Güell. Not a bad place for inspiration, like many parks. And then, it occurs, sometimes going downhill is more strenuous than going up.

De Luge Journal

 Much thanks to De Luge Journal for publishing one of my recent poems in the Winter 2021/22 Issue.

I admire DLJ's project and feel sure others will as well. So please look in and consider contributing to future numbers. The url:

https://www.delugejournal.com/index.html

The harsh times we live in these days make imaginative dreaming a big plus, it seems to me. The way to better times in more ways than one.......