David Betteridge

David Betteridge

David Betteridge is the author of a collection of poems celebrating Glasgow and its radical traditions, 'Granny Albyn's Complaint', published by Smokestack Books in 2008. He is also the editor of a compilation of poems, songs, prose memoirs, photographs and cartoons celebrating the 1971-2 UCS work-in on Clydeside. This book, called 'A Rose Loupt Oot', was published by Smokestack Books in 2011.

The Day and The Hour
Wednesday, 07 September 2022 09:06

The Day and The Hour

Published in Poetry

The Day and The Hour

by David Betteridge

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One:

What distinguishes the worst of architects from the best
of bees is this: that the architects raise their structures
in imagination before they build them in reality...
- Karl Marx

Where there is no vision,
the psalmist sang,
the people perish.

Has our vision retrospective scope, we ask,
with eyes in the back of its memory's mind?
No? Then it falls short, vulnerable from behind.

Has our vision close scrutiny of things
that may not seem at first significant -
things that are routine, or in the dark,
maybe at the head of leadership,
or in our ranks, or in the corners
of our unexamined hearts:
things that can turn to danger, quick as a wink?

Experience instructs us:
before we act, think!

Has our vision a future tense, keen
to look across to tomorrow's further shore,
to envisage what might be different from today,
and how, in our journey there, we might follow
the best-considered way?

As a sculptor sees the contours of a statue
already shaping in an uncut block of stone,
or as an athlete first conceives a lift, or jump, or throw,
or run, and holds it within the grasp of mind,
cherishing it even before the act begins,
so, as a wise saw says, each last one of us must think
and feel, even in the welter of our present woes,
as if we were already citizens of a better land,
in its early days.

Two:

What if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying,
"We say no, and we are the state"?
Well we say yes – and we are the people.
- Canon Kenyon Wright

Purblind, some of us let a clown run rings
around us, unaware his circus act had allies
massed in his defence, brigade upon brigade
of adepts in the wars of both position
and manoeuvre, weaponised.

Not seeing straight, or thinking straight,
we set our sights on wrong goals,
and, forsaking loyalties
and purposes and roots, got bewildernessed
in ruinous wrong ways.

As the clown banged his tin drum,
even if we did not see the peril in its signs,
how did we not hear the horror
in its beat, its dead-march that betokened
the breaking of laws and lives,
as again and again has happened
in carnivals of evil down the years?
How did we not smell the reek
that our enemies' cruel arrogance exudes?
Why did we not sense earlier the creeping-up
and worsening of our fears?

Never as now have our enemies
so carelessly self-revealed
their empty souls and ravening greed,
their two-facedness,
their lethal recklessness in word and deed.

These hellish handcart drivers,
untroubled by any fear or shame,
these crass demolishers of culture,
these sociopaths in smart suits,
these devotees of global smash and grab,
ignorant or contemptuous of history and its gains,
these strangers to sanity and to truth,
these bringers of death,
see how they stand now: exposed as guilty,
red-handed, few options left, run out of breath.

Now's the day, and now's the hour,
Burns wrote, and sang.
Given our enemies are in disarray,
disuniting into faction fights, imperilling the safety
of the state, then we have one clear choice,
in fact it is imperative:
as one to make a stand, contesting the continuance
of their misrule, asserting our claim of right
to governance, at last, of this beleaguered land.

Three:

The most beautiful of all doubts is when the downtrodden
and despondent raise their heads
and stop believing in the strength of their oppressors...
- Bertolt Brecht

In a flash, in a flood, from memory's store,
from a remembered Bible story book,
a picture comes to mind:
Pharaoh's troops in turmoil, tossed
with their weapons and their useless chariots
by the Red Sea's power.

Like matchstick men they meet their end
as walls of water - that had parted long enough
to let Moses and his people through -
now thunder on their hostile heads.

Now's the day, and now's the hour,
for both the victorious living
and the disarmed dead.

Was this a scene that Brecht envisaged
when he wrote his poem praising doubt,
noting how "invincible armies" can be put to flight,
"headlong", while "impregnable strongholds" fall,
and ancient errors, valorised as truth,
are in the end put right.

In praising the doubt that tests decisions
"like a bad penny", Brecht dispraised the doubt
that is despair, that even under danger
asks too many questions, fearful to act,
opting out.

Divers exploring the Red Sea's bed found
shell-encrusted chariot wheels down there,
relics of an era's end and a bold new chapter's start,
when a page was turned, from foul to fair.

What relics from today's divisions
and impending shift of power will future history retrieve,
to put in picture books or heritage museums:
keys to safe deposits, maybe, and yachts,
and limousines, and other trappings
of a wasteful Few, juxtaposed with the sad remains
of a Many cast aside, like shards, in early graves
or battlefields, to be rendered back to view,
emblems of a time when a people
almost perished?

Best evidence of all will be,
growing from its early days to a mature peace,
a new-made land, negating what we now see,
living proof that where there's vision,
we, the people, flourish.

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Disaster's coming
Wednesday, 24 August 2022 11:41

Disaster's coming

Published in Poetry

Disaster's coming

A found poem

I truly, truly believe the foundations
of this country have cracked.

Who is this country actually looking after,
because it doesn't feel as if it's us?

People are desperate in England in 2022.
There's no care.

Where's the care gone from this country?

The words of Ursula Sutcliffe, Bradford shop and café proprietor forced to close because of rising costs and falling revenues, Sky News 30 July, 2022, accompanied an image from Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom.

What Bloody Man Is That?
Tuesday, 19 July 2022 12:10

What Bloody Man Is That?

Published in Theatre

I received a letter the other day from a friend of many years, that still active volcano of political cartooning, Bob Starrett. As always, his letter was neatly lettered in italicised block capitals, a throw-back to his time in the painting and decorating trade. Sign-writing was one of the craft skills that he had to learn, and even now, in his eighties, Bob does not want to let that skill fall into disuse.

Included in his letter was a cartoon of Boris Johnson (above), in the wake of his being levered from his position as leader of the Conservative Party, while still hanging on as this suffering nation's Prime Minister. Down but not out, yet! Bob's cartoon shows Johnson in his self-appointed role as a Shakespeare scholar, combined with being both hero, in his own eyes, and fool, in ours.

The cartoon prompted me to have a look at a selection of Shakespeare's playscripts, and perhaps readers of Culture Matters might like to do the same, to see if we can find bits of The Bard that might help Johnson's project along, for him to weave into the text of the book he has a mind to write.

I began my search with Shakespeare's Scottish play. At the time of its writing, with King James VI of Scotland having newly assumed the English crown too, the matter of Scotland was seen as troublesome, as it is again now, for good reason. So choosing to write a play set in Scotland's Dark Ages gave Shakespeare the opportunity to be topical, at a diplomatic and historic distance, while also giving him a context for exploring such favourite themes as political ambition, treachery, scheming, extreme behaviour of various kinds, and regime change.

Choosing to extract quotations from The Tragedy of Macbeth gives us a parallel opportunity to be topical, as we live through the latest shenanigans that characterise England's sad slipping back into its own second Dark Ages:

What bloody man is that?
(Act 1 Scene 1)

I am such a fool, should I stay longer
It would be my disgrace and your discomfort…
(Act 4, Scene 2)

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls on th'other. . . .
(Act1 Scene 7)

Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
(Act 5 Scene 2)

Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill…
(Act 3 Scene 2)

There’s daggers in men’s smiles…
(Act 2 Scene 3)

Crossing Troubled Waters: A review of Jim Aitken’s 'Declarations of Love'   
Monday, 04 July 2022 11:25

Crossing Troubled Waters: A review of Jim Aitken’s 'Declarations of Love'  

Published in Poetry

What I like about Jim Aitken’s poems is the way they can surprise us by travelling at speed from A to B, and sometimes a lot further. The starting point may be a person, a place, an image, an event, or an idea, typically taken from a real-life here-and-now, while the destinations of the poems can be anywhere and anytime. A prime example of this fast-travelling is a lyrical three-parter called “Beachcombing”, a poem that comes early in Jim’s latest collection, Declarations of Love.

It starts with “a boot / of salty leather” that George Mackay Brown once found on his Orcadian shore, and wrote about in a poem of his own, “Beachcomber” – a poem, that, in his school-teaching days in Edinburgh secondary schools, Jim read and got his pupils to appreciate. That boot leads by association to other sea-tossed findings, including a seaman’s skull, and then, because our poet sees the world whole, and holds it in his mind as if in a net, we “dance the waves” back to the Mare Nostrum of the Ancient Greeks. Why, we may wonder? What is the relevance of such a dancing back? As the poem draws us to its conclusion, we find out:

The universal brotherhood
of brine understands no borders…

For fragile is what we all are,
vulnerable our condition…

 We are all at sea, all at sea...

The source of energy for this “Beachcombing” poem, as for all Jim’s writing, is a combination of a powerful imagination and what Fran Lock, in her insightful Introduction to Declarations of Love, identifies as a “radical empathy”. This empathy springs from a deep-dyed structure of thinking and feeling for the “mutually vulnerable community” of which we are part, as humans in the company of the rest of Nature. This empathy entails large measures of both anger and love. It is the second of these, the greater, that informs the book’s title, and inspires its contents. In Fran Lock’s words:

For Aitken, love appears not merely a matter of individual emotion, but also of perception – a way of encountering the world and its myriad “others”...

We can see how well these observations are borne out in a second poem from near the start of Declarations of Love, the beautifully cadenced “On Raglan Road Remembered”. It is in part a homage to Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road”, one of the world’s great love poems, especially when sung, as by Luke Kelly, to a tune that seemed destined to partner it, namely "The Dawning of the Day" (Fáinne Geal an Lae).

Jim’s poem starts with “one of Autumn’s golden leaves /somehow landed on my shoulder”. This reminded our poet of a line from Kavanagh’s ur-poem, “And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.” From this starting point, Jim goes on to reflect on “the enormity of grief that there is”, citing those “who have died of Covid or drowned / Trying to cross troubled waters, leaving behind them war…” But he refuses to “leave it all at that”, thinking as he does of next year and new life and Kavanagh’s “clouds over fields of May”.

Jim’s choice of starting points and destinations is more than eclectic – it is extensive – and at the same time it is integrative. If Declarations of Love was a bale of cloth, all the poems in it are made of that same cloth. Following Hugh MacDiarmid, we might say of them that they are of the closest weave, “owre close for the point o’ a pin / onywhere to win in”.  Let us have a look at some more examples:

A dog sniffing scent, Pacman and Super Mario, Calgacus, drones, knowing the dancer from the dance, scumbag millionaires, being fair scunnered, a black padding cat all wrapped up in itself, a blackbird singing and needing no permission, ancestors, voices of the dispossessed, going on as a mode of being,

faces hard like rock and faith rock-sold too, grouse-shooters and Famous Grouse, Abbot Bernard’s vision and the Declaration of Arbroath, riverruns and all things merging in a global sea, am bradan fiadhaich, a spectre haunting Europe, putting clowns in power, cramped ships with chains, the naming of storms, standing beside a silent loch sensing ghosts,

wisps of grass peering out from the bottom of a shop door, new words with a Scots accent of voice and thought, a sixty something granny remembered as a twenty someone else, spying twa stars high in the heivens, chasing the deer, lighting a candle for a Big Issue seller,

smoke from your pipe, a childhood robbed early, geese scenting a cold turn to the air, a cannula renewing a precious life, an Arab in Scotland (one of our ain folk) extending us, writing our own version of the Beatitudes without the meekness, seeking the light, auld lang syne,

bees having their fill of fuchsias, Little Sparta on a cold hillside near Dunsyre, millions of words lighting up the darkness, a piece of broken glass among sea shells, Ukraine as the latest slaughter bench of history, guided missiles and misguided men, all things passing, if only...

If this list of content-matter appeals to you, the whole of the collection will appeal to you. I netted the list in a single quick trawl of the sixty poems in the book. How Karl Marx would have approved, given his favourite maxim, that Nothing human is alien to me! Here we see the deep philosophy that underpins the socialism that Jim embraces. It is a socialism of the heart and will, as well as of the intellect. It is humanist and internationalist and republican and green and local and personal, finding expression not only through political action of the party political kind, but also through cultural events and through education, trade unionism, PEN and family. So when I say that Jim is one of the best of our socialist poets, it is in the context of this expanded notion of socialism.

Declarations of Love speaks in the voices of the many, and speaks also for the things of Nature. Its sixty poems eloquently show up the monstrous injustice of the world, while indicating that this need not be the case. Capitalist exploitation, division, war, hate, etc. – no!  There is a better world possible, eloquently indicated by these beautifully varied poems.

Complementing this verbal beauty, the talented Edinburgh artist Martin Gollan, whose book illustrations will be known to readers of other poetry collections published by Culture Matters, has provided a striking visual commentary to Jim’s words, in a series of fourteen coloured pictures and two in black and white.

The last lyric in Declarations of Love makes a perfect ending, both in its looking back and in its looking forward. It is an invocation of the three bridges that Jim sees from his new home in South Queensferry, that span the Firth of Forth, “happed in mist / as if suspended in the cold mid-air”:

Three centuries of bridges and three centuries
of workers who aided their construction
with St. Margaret now a distant memory
to the ferry she created for pilgrims to St. Andrews…

These iconic feats of engineering that are already there, however, are not enough for the poem. Jim goes on to envisage a future in which other bridges of another kind can be built – those that link “all people over all the world”, from A, B and C to beyond Z.

Declarations of Love by Jim Aitken, with drawings by Martin Gollan, is available here. 

Have a Joycesome Bloomsday!
Thursday, 16 June 2022 09:30

Have a Joycesome Bloomsday!

Published in Poetry

Bloomsday 2022

by David Betteridge, with image by William Murphy

Dear language-king,
you crafted sovereign treasures
that we glutton readers crave.
Dire digger in the rib of too-too-solid, sullied flesh,
thanks for the blessings and the bliss
your mintings gave.
Unflaggingly, your Yes-wells
spring.

Wharnow are alle your brainbairns, say?
Not gone to Kingdoom come, thank Gud!
think Gutenberg! but no,
few fadoms down, where een-one goes,
there, in Joycesome mined, full-lexiconed,
they gab and grow.

Ex-centric and rebellious son,
you split the etyms of our Umpire's tongue,
and loosed on us

                  your lovely Merrydance and Meaningsong:

They gyre their gear's gimble
through funs fair and nimble,
crying factions and fictions,
believe, be live, O!
crying rusings and raising,
be kind, be care, O!

Joyce, your words, sonorous
in Space-Time, sing and ring.

Kind cosmos-maker, earth-quaker,
you put a blessing and a Bloom
on everything.

In Dire Parenthesis
Wednesday, 27 April 2022 09:28

In Dire Parenthesis

Published in Poetry

In Dire Parenthesis

by David Betteridge, with cartoon by Bob Starrett

When it comes to marching, many do not know
That their enemy is marching at their head...
- Bertolt Brecht

Whichever way your missiles fly,
reducing lives and hopes to debris, ash,
or dust; whichever way your anger
and your loathing lie, leaving space
for little else, and least of all for peace;
whichever flag you raise, or language speak,
whichever loyalty events have forced you,
cruelly, by their logic to embrace -
ask this:

Who can speak of "Victory"
or celebrate some smaller gain
that might be deemed success,
when every half a league or verst
that nations may advance
is paid for dear, in blood,
and our world is less?

Who can speak of "Glory"
when the cause of building for
and building by the people
for our common good
has been so widely lost?

After the great sacrifice of the battlefield
and the siege, the blitzkrieg
and the enormities of hate and rape,
what next?

Our class war for justice
and the peace that it may bring
is set aside once more,
put in dire parenthesis,
as our leaders make us ready,
all too ready, for no end of slaughtering
in their next -
and their next one after -
war.

Echoing the Arch: In Memory of Desmond Tutu
Monday, 17 January 2022 10:49

Echoing the Arch: In Memory of Desmond Tutu

Published in Poetry

Echoing the Arch
In memory of Desmond Tutu
(1931 – 2021)

by David Betteridge

He was portrayed as a dancing man,
and one given to laughter,
but he marched as often as he danced,
and he wept.

He marched at risk of his life
for justice and for peace.
He wept at their denial,
and their breach.

How long, he cried, echoing the Psalmist,
how long shall I take counsel in my soul,
having sorrow in my heart daily?

He is remembered for his consoling
and for his reconciling;
but he as often challenged and confronted,
saying to his allies, when he thought
them wrong, as to his foes,
Stop and No and How long?

A poor boy, be became rich in talent;
he out-scholared his teachers;
a servant of his God, he led peoples
and nations; not proud,
he boldly assumed the role of Moses
facing down Pharaohs;
he made his words a sword,
and the course of his life
a long battleground.

Look to the rock from which
you were hewn, he exhorted,
echoing Isaiah.
He became that rock,
hard, resistant, a sure place
on which to build.

His arch spanned great divides;
he embraced spectrums of folk,
seeing them as one;
he was a rainbow of hope,
even when others saw none.

Lighten mine eyes, he prayed,
lest I sleep the sleep of death.

Dead now, sleeping now,
he lives on, lightening our eyes,
still dancing and marching,
and laughing and weeping
as we remember him,
still consoling and reconciling,
and challenging and confronting.

It falls to us and others now
to look to our own rock
and become it,
and to echo the arch
that was this great warrior.

Tidings
Friday, 17 December 2021 20:12

Tidings

Published in Poetry

Tidings

by David Betteridge

For Ken Robson, shepherd, of Stanhope Farm
in Tweeddale, with whom the author worked
two lambing seasons, in 1964 and 1965.
In his practice, Ken Robson brought
the term “good shepherd” to active life.

On the first day of Christmas,                                                                                                                                                                                                                        a bent trader said to me:
Blessed are they which do hunger
and thirst: for they shall make
my till ring.
He spoke merrily.

On the second day of Christmas,
the trader’s accountant said to me:
Cursed are the poor:
for they have too little cash to bring.
He spoke disdainfully.

On the third day of Christmas,
a banker-felon said to me:
Blessed are the meek:
for they shall shrink from saying Boo,
challenging my fat goose.
He spoke dismissively.

On the fourth day of Christmas,
the banker’s offshore banker said to me:
Cursed are they that mourn:
for they shall stir up others’ sympathy,
and let kindness loose.
He spoke maliciously.

On the fifth day of Christmas,
a cabinet minister said to me:
Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall acquit me always
of my every tort.
He spoke assuredly.

On the sixth day of Christmas,
the minister’s lawyer said to me:
Cursed are the pure in heart:
for they cannot be coerced
or fooled or bought.
He spoke frustratedly.

On the remaining days of Christmas,
others spoke in no better terms to me -
the world’s Herods, Judases, and the like -
venting evil against the world’s poor,
for whom they held a killing spite.
They spoke bitterly...

Wheesht, my troubled soul!
Ignore these stridencies of power;
instead attune, and listen hard,
and hear a gentler voice,
one that is kind and clear,
that goes against the louder strain,
and calls and calls for justice
and for peace, holding
them dear.

As down the ages,
so this bleak Christmas, once again,
steadfastly, this quiet urging
makes its never-granted claim.

Wheesht, attune and listen,
as a parent searching for a child listens,
or as a shepherd, cocking his ear,
concentrates to catch the sound
of his lost lamb’s bleat,
until he finds the place at last
where a burn has carried the poor mite
down, from a windy hill
to a wet peat!

 

 

The Sword and the Sickle: William Blake and class struggle
Friday, 04 December 2020 19:29

The Sword and the Sickle: William Blake and class struggle

Published in Poetry

To celebrate his 79th birthday, David Betteridge writes about swords, sickles and class struggle

I

Have a slow look at the drawing shown above. Is it not an image that captures our eye, engages our intelligence, and feeds our imagination, springing as it does from the artist’s own eye and intelligence and imagination? By means of his long-practised craft, the artist transports us into a Tale of Two Fields, of Two Bladed Implements, of Two Adversaries representing Two Classes, and of Two Ways of Life and Death. We see more than an illustrative drawing. We see an emblem, transcending the historic past in which it is set, and speaking of and to all times. This emblem is, I would claim, a gift to be treasured, likely to stick in our memories. It is beautifully stark in its overall impact, and subtle in its detail. Look, for example, at which blade overlaps which; and look at the two hands holding them. One is gauntleted, implying rank. The other is bare, implying the opposite.

The artist who drew our “Sword & Sickle” emblem above is Bob Starrett, best known as a political cartoonist. He is a latter-day “Eccles” or “Gabriel” of Clydeside and beyond, as readers of his Rattling the Cage know, and readers of the Culture Matters site, as also the many activists who have gone to him asking for campaign designs for leaflets or posters, and invariably got them, sometimes within a turnaround time of a day or a night.

II

Does it affect your appreciation of Bob’s drawing when I tell you that it accompanies, or might accompany, a poem? It was drawn at my request to accompany a four- line fragment that was written by William Blake in the early 1790s, probably in 1793. This was a time when war with France was looming. England was an armed camp, with troops being recruited and drilled in many places, sometimes disrupting farm-work. There were shortages of grain, occasioning protest and social unrest. Blake’s loyalties in this turmoil of international and class war are clear from this little poem:

The sword sung on the barren heath,
The sickle in the fruitful field:
The sword he sung a song of death,
But could not make the sickle yield.

Compared with associates who were active at the time - Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, et al - Blake was surely the most root-and-branch radical of them all, if that is not a contradiction in terms. To borrow a term from David Erdman’s book about Blake, he was a “Prophet Against Empire”, and the Empire that he stood against had many aspects, all abhorrent to him, all grist to his poetic and artistic mill, and all inter-related. So the Sword represents more than War, as the Sickle represents more than Peace.

Behind the Sword there is a nexus and a history of class rule, that Blake often signified in his poetry and his art by reference to the Crown, legitimised by the Church, and maintained by armies of soldiers, teachers, false prophets, and other agents of the Repressive State Apparatus, as modern parlance has it.

Behind the Sickle there is a nexus and a history of resistance to class rule, of which Blake was a part, both in his support for political action and in his production of literary and artistic works of opposition. These speak with greater reach and resonance today than in his own day. They draw on the earlier tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers (defeated) from the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, and feed into the rising Socialist Movement of the Nineteenth, Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (still not defeated).

Blake’s “Sword & Sickle” little poem was never published in his lifetime. It was hidden away in a crammed-full notebook, along with screeds of other writings and some drawings, from which Blake excavated the raw material for several of his finest books.

Picture4

Out of this notebook came, for example, the highly wrought combination of text and design, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. One of the songs in it is the often quoted “London”. Here Blake showed a growing recognition of the growing centrality of Capital, industrial and commercial, in people’s lives. It provides a helpful context for the interpretation of the “Sword & Sickle” poem.

III

In its first draft, in the scribbled notebook, “London” starts as follows:

I wander thro each dirty street
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
And see in every face I meet
Marks of weakness marks of woe...

When it was printed and published, soon afterwards, the too-obvious adjective “dirty” had been amended to the much more telling “charter’d”, thereby pointing to the growing convergence of Law and the cash nexus that Blake observed all around him, at close hand, and suffered from himself. At the same time, as E.P. Thompson and others have detailed, the English working class was in the process of “making”, or self-making, as more and more folk were thrown on history’s scrap heap or herded into “dark satanic mills”. Blake was firmly in and of and for that class.

Picture5

In the penultimate verse of “London”, Blake powerfully compressed his chosen images into telling rhymes. In doing so, he demonstrated how inter-related the different forces in his “Empire” were, in an evil hegemony:

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

E.P. Thompson, following David Erdman, notes that, in the 1790s, it was common among radicals to “stress the identity of interests of soldiers and the people”; and the chimney sweeps can be taken as representatives of all enforced Labour, and also of stolen childhoods, and hence of ruined, shortened lives.

There is a companion piece of verse that underlines the “cash nexus” idea that is part of the web of meanings implicit in both “London” and “Sword & Sickle”. It is the following quatrain, also to be found in Blake’s notebook:

There souls of men are bought & sold
And milk fed infancy for gold
And youth to slaughter houses led
And beauty for a bit of bread.

So, in interpreting both Bob Starrett’s emblem and William Blake’s poem that inspired it, we see more than a pacifist plea, or an anti-war protest. We see a root-and-branch opposition to class society, expressed elliptically in the languages of image and word respectively, and hinting, through reference to the Sickle, at its future undoing.

If Blake can be called a Prophet Against Empire, is it too fanciful also to call him a Prophet for Communism, or at least for those early defining decrees that Lenin wrote for the young Soviet Union, namely the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land. These were passed on 26 October, 1917 by the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. A fortnight later they were followed by a Decree on Abolishing Classes and Civil Ranks.

To echo and adapt Wordsworth remark on Milton, we might wish that Blake, thou shouldst have been living at that time!

What is Present: History, by John Berger
Tuesday, 17 November 2020 10:29

What is Present: History, by John Berger

Published in Poetry

David Betteridge writes about the poem 'History'

What interests me about the existence of archives is that you enter the past which is as it were in the present tense. And so it’s another way of people who lived in the past who perhaps are still living or perhaps are dead; a way of them being present....
- JOHN BERGER

“History” is a poem which packs a lot of meaning into its eight lines: 

History

by John Berger

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

The poem is included in a 90th birthday tribute published in Culture Matters.

Let us start with Berger’s cunningly chosen title, which points, or seems to point, to the poem’s content, or maybe to the way by which we might approach reading it. “History”, he announces. Why History, we wonder, and what aspect of History? So we read on, to find out what references there are to the Past, because History is about the Past, isn’t it?

Oddly, only Berger’s “the dead”, in both verses, seems to belong to the Past, until we consider that “the silence” is similarly devoid of life, and that “the earth” is a place where graves are dug. And, again oddly, all the verbs in the poem are in the Present tense, not the expected Past, namely “pockets” (twice) and “walk” (once). The poem seems to imply that the dead are alive, making their presence felt in the here-and-now. They are described as having a “pulse” that is “interminably constant”, and as having eyes that are “inscribed on our palms / as we walk on this earth”. (How like a painting by Dali this surreal image is!)

What of the living in this poem? Where are they? Who are they? As well as us, who walk about, looking and seeing and listening and thinking, Berger cites the thrush. He is thinking, perhaps, of the songthrush, that sings its song twice over, as is well known; or, if he is not, we, his readers, are free to conjure up that response if we wish, sharing as we do the wealth of the English language with the poet. Layers and webs and wisps of inter-textualities are all about, ready to pop into our minds as we read, bestowing an aura of extra meaning to a given text, while not contradicting it.

What presence does our thrush, full of song, have in the poem? The second half of each of the two verses tells us: first the thrush is “pocketed” by “silence”, and then it is pocketed by “this earth”, that is to say it is seized by death, or snaffled, or taken into possession, just like that. So the poem demonstrates both life-in-death and death-in-life. That is Berger’s History; or maybe it is Natural History, more like, to use an old-fashioned term. That is the constant dual reality in which we all have our being. That is the “mystery” of Berger’s little gem of a poem.

There is an alternative way of appreciating the poem, it occurs to me, looking at it again, starting not with the title and with times Past and Present, but starting with the poem’s references to Life and Death. Let us see how these twins relate, using italics and bold to distinguish them.

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

The poem makes these images of life and death work together – indeed walk together – very well. Line by line, we are made to see how Life and Death co-exist and interpenetrate, and do so “interminably”, being “constant” in their togethering. Significantly, the term “earth” belongs equally in both categories, as my bold italics is intended to show, earth being both the habitat of the living, and, jointly with silence, their “pocketer”.

So, as before in our first reading, we come to the same realisation of the poem’s “both-and” wisdom. Let us now explore the context – other times and places – in which Berger considered the poem’s themes. Here we can draw on the inspired scholarship of Tom Overton, Berger’s archivist; and what a voluminous archive it is that Tom has worked on, a whole vanload of boxes of decades of work driven from Berger’s house in the Haute-Savoie by Jamie Andrews of the British Library to its place of safe keeping and public access, in London.

Dear David

Thanks for writing... It looks like the section you quote comes from p16 of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. But as so often with JB, he’s revisiting and rephrasing an older thought in a newer context: in this case a section of a longer poem collected in Andy Croft’s edition of JB’s Collected Poems on p 43, and annotated “Jura, 1973”. JB was often hazy on remembering the dates of his writings in general, but here I think the voice and thought sounds very much of that place and period...

Happy writing — please do send me what you make of it!

V best
Tom

Straightaway, following Tom’s advice, I went to Berger’s marvellously mixed reflection on Time and Space, and Death and Life, and, cross-cutting all, the power of Poetry, namely And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, published by Writers and Readers in 1984. I say “mixed”, because, like many of Berger’s books, it is a many-genred work, shifting rapidly and repeatedly between prose and poem, essay and memoir, fact and fiction, narrative and description.

Here is what I found on p 16: a passage in prose, prefacing the poem that we have been gnawing like a bone. In it, Berger notes the death of one of his friends, and then comments on it, and on all deaths. Key to that passage is the following thought:

Tony is no longer within the nexus of time as lived by those who, until recently, were his contemporaries. He is on the circumference of that nexus.... Yet he is also within that nexus as are all the dead...

I have to confess that I find the passage hard to understand. It appears to be self-contradictory; but then comes the poem, and in its eight lovely lines the contradiction is resolved, clearly and elegantly. A remark of David Constantine’s is proved correct, that:

Berger’s whole oeuvre – poetry, fiction, political and literary essays – is of a piece. Some poems... appear there not as lyrical interludes but as further condensations of accounts, events, characters, in the prose...
- Preface to The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger, Smokestack Books, 2016)

Chasing up Tom’s second reference, I turned to p 43 of Berger’s Collected Poems (Smokestack Books, 2014), and had a look at the poem printed there, also called “History”. Here, through the poet’s eyes, we gaze on a blue sky (not, as before, on the earth), and on buzzards (not on a thrush); but we have the same collapsing of Past and Present into a sort of Present Habitual, “regular as the sun / millennia powdered into blue /sky of all moments lived...” and we have the same sense of the presence of Death, co-habiting with Life: “the intent head / the yellow beak / the gut demanding food / talons that grip...”

These two poems by Berger both called “History” show him in a characteristic role, that of Death’s Secretary, to borrow one of his self-descriptions. “You see,” he said to an interviewer not long before his own death:

I think that the dead are with us…they are a presence. What you think you’re looking at on that long road
to the past is actually beside you where you stand...
- The New Statesman, June, 2015

Reading around, as we have been doing, looking for leads in and out of other texts, and seeking confirmations from other contexts, is akin, is it not, to Berger’s own practice as a writer, and his own practice as an artist and art-critic, too? Consider this observation from his Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972):

We are never just looking at one thing, we are always looking at the relationship between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.

Having done all this looking – looking at, and behind, and beyond, and between the eight lines of Berger’s “History” – how do we regard the poem when we return to it, as we are bound to be drawn to do, there being so much meat on its bone? There is still a “mystery” here, but one in which we can feel entirely at home.

History

by John Berger

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

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