Woodvale Cemetery

There are still some secrets about Brighton I'm only just being let into. After ten years since my arrival into this strange and eccentric city by the sea, this greatly excites me.

     
Today, I learned about Count Eric Von Stenbock, "Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men," as WB Yeats called him. He was also remembered with affection by Aubrey Beardsley, Symons and Lionel Johnson (although they thought his poetry was drivel). Many of his verses concerned his doomed love for a Berkshire youth, Charles Bertram Fowler, who died of consumption at the age of 16.

     
He was alcoholic, Catholic, Buddhist, homosexual and overall degenerate, and most interestingly of all, he lived in Withdean. Mental illness dogged him throughout his Thirties, but, since he was a Count, when escorted (as he was at all times) by a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll, everybody had to greet them with according courtesy.

In Eric's mind, the doll was his son, and he referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it was brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health.

On April 26th 1895, on the same day that Oscar Wilde faced the first day of his trial, Eric died. Drunk and furious, he'd tried to strike someone with a poker and toppled into the grate. He was buried in Woodvale Cemetery in Brighton on May 1st (the day Wilde's jury disagreed and was discharged), his heart removed and sent to Estonia, where it resides in a church at Kusal.

     
At the time of his death, his uncle and heir, far away in Esbia, saw an apparition of his tear-stained face at his study window.

     
Oh Eric, I applaud you. There's nothing quite like being a rotten poet with a taste for life-size dolls and the Divine.

     
I love Brighton cemetery. It's been far too long since I was last amongst the tangled ivy, my trainers squishing in the mud. Angels rear up at every turn, the lettering on headstones turning to rust in the dew.

Today, I peered into the small, simple plot where the Sisters of Mercy (nuns, not goth band) lay crammed in, heads to tiny feet. I also saw (thanks again to my knowledgeable friend) the resting place of the first man ever to spot Antarctica.

      
Tonight, I am very happy in my polka dot dressing gown and leopard skin slippers, listening to Debussy and generally avoiding starting my new story about a man who is perpetually late for everything. Mmm.

     
There's nothing like the dead to raise the spirits!

A Fierce Beauty

Last night I went and spent money that I didn't have on an evening dedicated to the great Spanish poet and dramatist, Garcia Lorca. I commited this rash act (being, as I am, savagely broke), because Lorca happens to be among a handful of artists who have changed my life, and for whom I would, as they say, lay down on the tracks. So parting with my money to go and see it seemed like a relatively small act of devotion.

Unfortunately, the evening was utter rubbish. It took the most razor sharp of passions, some of the most mortally wounding poetry of the 20th century, and put an old, comfy, pair of slippers on it. Though it makes me sad to say it, it was tragically British.

Lorca lived a relatively short life. He was beautiful and he was homosexual, and in the Thirties, Lorca was Spain's greatest living poet, describing and epitomising a spirit of Spain, a spirit that also manifested in flamenco and in the bullfight. In 1936 he was shot dead by the Fascists both for being a poet and for being a homosexual. He died face down in the mud. He wrote these words:

..there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation and makes Goya (master of the grays, silvers, and pinks of the best English painting) work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumens..

I think anyone who creates - who writes, plays music, performs, longs for this state that Lorca describes and that runs through all his poetry, because it contains magic and genius. Or perhaps we don't even need to be an 'artist' to have this longing, in life itself we can yearn for it. But most of the time we are so terrified of it that we want to stick to all the safe roads instead; we seek out the poultice of burning glass, but we don't want it to burn our hands.

As I struggle with my own existence, trying to write, trying to make music that might just have some integrity to it; through the loneliness and insecurity of trying to stay with the process and the wildernesses I often finds myself in, it feels a precious thing to try and keep remembering Lorca.

It's horrid seeing the fear of mistakes and failure embodied in another person's performance, as I did last night; to see all the imperfections rubbed out, and with it, all the lifeforce. It reflects what I myself might become if I begin to let those things rule my own poetry and songs, my performance. And it's sad that those musicians' efforts killed even the possibility of anyone in that audience getting the chance to experience the beauty that Lorca lived, and died for. Better perhaps to stay silent, than to kill the thing you love.

Here is some footage of one of the greatest ever Flamenco dancers, Carmen Amaya, who had left Spain by the time of the Civil War and Lorca's death, becoming a world-wide star. Often dancing in men's breeches and a jacket, she danced steps traditionally reserved for male dancers, and she embodies what Lorca describes as that "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.. a power, not a work.. a struggle, not a thought."

He continues "I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet. Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation."

By the way, the woman in the first video is Eva La Yerbabuena, who is also incredible.

tuesday

Though I'm pretty sure she doesn't know it, it is Mum's birthday today. She is 72. This is a picture of her with my sister and Aunty before her last stroke, looking happy in the sunshine.


by e.e. cummings

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)


x x x

News

I finally have a Myspace! In fact, I now have two, one for my songs and my band, which I have in fact named after this very weblog, and one for my poetry. So do check them out!

www.myspace.com/thisbeautifulhunger
www.myspace.com/clarefdavies

A history of my Religion

A couple of Saturdays ago, I went with a friend to Catholic Mass at a local Brighton church. The yearning to go there had started before Christmas, when feelings of grief over my Mum's condition peaked, and I couldn't see any real point in existence, if where it was to lead ultimately was simply dissolution, pain and death. The need for something big enough to hold this experience came to a crisis point.

What actually moved things on for me was listening to a talk by a Buddhist Order Member, Danavira, on death and dying. I sat, lights out, in my front room for two hours listening to the recording. The impact of it went directly into my veins and bones. It took on the horror, the devastation, the messiness and complexity of death, and ultimately, its utter profundity. Danavira's words were big enough to meet the immensity of my insights and emotions over what it means to live and to die, to be born and to decay.

Months earlier, in October, I walked up Snowdon with Bob, the first time I have ever hiked up a significantly large mountain. I found, in the climbing, that, having seen my Mum in hospital just days before, this was a mountain huge enough and powerful enough to take my grief, big enough even to hold Mum herself in her dying state. So tiny, I was, climbing the vast expanse of its stomach, I knew that the mountain understood and held me fast. Now, I am not speaking symbolically or poetically here when I speak of the mountain holding me, I mean it absolutely literally. I tangibly felt that presence and character of the mountain surrounding me. Because of that, all my grief and sorrow turned to amazement. That one primal, unanswerable question that I ask myself in every moment of grieving, "How come?" returned to me in the single voice of the mountain, not through words, but through a sound. It was a resonating hum, that the peaks and the valleys and the woodlands and birds and the small climbing bodies of hikers were all making. This is it. This is my answer. Everything I need is here.

I was surprised, then, when it was talking about Saints and Catholic Mass with some Catholic friends of mine that aroused such a strong feeling of yearning in me, rather than Buddhism. After over eight years of Buddhism being almost my whole world, in terms of way of life, friends, commitment and philosophy, I have drifted from it over the last few years, in order, I think, to go more deeply into my own experience of how things are and who I am, through writing, poetry and making music. Language, specifically poetry, and music, unlock realms of reality and experience I've never known before, and I can only seem to experience them through creating in this way.

And when I had what might be called mystical experiences some years ago, which totally tore down and rearranged my life, it wasn't Buddhist teaching that I felt was being revealed to me directly, but a direct and non-rational experience of healing, grace, and the presence of angels. This disturbed me greatly at the time, as it didn't fit with what I believed of reality, and not many people around me seemed to know what I was on about; only the the reiki healers, the lost shamans, the acid casualties, the people who had found God on the roadside.

I have always been attracted to the imagery of Christianity, to the blood and redemption, the wounds of Christ, the choirs of angels and the Saintly lineage. But there is more to it than that. I am drawn to the lineage of Christian mystics in the same way that I am drawn to the lineage of Nyingma cave-dwellers, or the seekers of Divine union in Sufism. The practice of direct communion with God, if you call it that, or with Reality or The Divine, if you call it that instead, feels like the truest form of practising any religion for me personally. It is helpful at times for someone to tell me about God or The Buddha or the holiness of existence, but ultimately, I have to plug into that directly myself. And that is never easy. But I relate to the convulsions and stripped back wonder of certain Saints, the fighting of demons in the mountains, the visions, revelations, hallucinations, the manifestation of stigmata, the terrible angels of beauty descending. And I relate because it feels like a world that I already live in.

Going to Mass that day blew my mind. The ritual blew my mind. No wonder the Spanish go to the bullfight on the Saturday and then take Communion on Sunday. The two seem inextricably entwined, to me, bullfighting and Catholicism. And the Mass spoke to parts of me that even Buddhism has not reached. It is poetry to me, amazing, cataclysmic poetry. And, if I look at it it as anything but poetry, in the biggest sense of the word, my fear is that it is also quite possibly a form of madness. In this way, I am still scared of Catholicism, rightly or wrongly, in, as one overseas friend described it, its strange rites of supernatural cannibalism. But then I have always been attracted to things that dwell in equal shares of darkness and light, and poetry did always tread those pathways between the sane and the crazily lost.

I was scared at the thought of returning to the Convent. I was scared that I would be disappointed by what I found there. I was scared that I would not be disappointed and that it would show me all I hoped for and suspected was there.

When I rang the Convent bell, an old nun came to the door and invited me in. I said to her "I used to live in the house next door, for over twenty years. But we moved out years ago." I had no idea if she was even at the Convent during that period, as I know that most of the nuns from then have either moved on or died. She smiled at me and said " Are you Clare?"

Darkness When The First Light Was Born

Homage to the world. Homage to the raging fires that eat it alive. Homage to tomorrow. Homage to the day when none of us will wake up. Homage to ships and planes. Homage to speeding clouds. Homage to the stripe on the zebra's back. Homage to all fallen prey. Homage to the predatory. Homage to light. Homage to the baby's skull. Homage to machinery. Homage to apparatus. Homage to buildings and to streetlights. Homage to my sisters. Homage to bad friends. Homage to mistakes. Homage to silent birds. Homage to snow.

Homage to stereos. Homage to the yellow stain on my mother's nightdress. Homage to kissing. Homage to fingers. Homage to harrowed eyes. Homage to brilliance. Homage to stupidity. Homage to sex. Homage to abstinence. Homage to a blue sky. Homage to apples, unripened fruit. Homage to leprosy of the soul. Homage to worshippers. Homage to the uncontrollably vain. Homage to TV. Homage to the hermitage on a hill. Homage to the ringtones of teenage children. Homage to their fathers.

Homage to the dying. Homage to every tear wept at their bedside. Homage to my mother. Homage to my father and his ebbing mind. Homage to animals and to beasties. Homage to the night. Homage to the frail, the ugly. Homage to superstars. Homage to the brave. Homage to power stations. Homage to sadists. Homage to euthanasia. Homage to the suicidal. Homage to insects. Homage to bats, eaten alive by beetles. Homage to caverns. Homage to church steeples.

Homage to the beatific. Homage to the horrific. Homage to the damaged and needy. Homage to air. Homage to sunlight. Homage to wrinkles. Homage to breath. Homage to limbs. Homage to eyesight. Homage to decay. Homage to the Atlantic Ocean. Homage to gravestones. Homage to small Northern towns. Homage to nonsense. Homage to the written word. Homage to mystics. Homage to tenderness. Homage to the cry of the wind. Homage to bad smells. Homage to the face in the mirror. Homage to you. Homage to me. Homage to waving goodbye. Homage to the end.

Hope To God I'm No Greeting Card

I've not done any substantial writing for a long time now, it feels. I've spent most of today and yesterday either at, or at least hovering around my piano keyboard in some tense, exploding state of consciousness. Creating makes me feel like the bird that has just broken out of an egg. Exhilarated, breathing, insane.

I pace the flat for something to distract me from the inevitable truth of those black and white keys. And still I haven't written anything of note for a long time now. The novel, or at least the drive towards a novel, on the 'back burner', that is, crept back into the recesses of my mind. A book of short stories, is reduced to two ideas only: birds' nests and windy places.

The post sinks into the ground. I am more preoccupied with things that make no sense than those that do. I walk to the shop. I walk back.

This thing I call creativity makes me happier than any sex, is as great as the greatest love. And sadder than all sorrows put together. I like myself a lot when I write, because I am not hindered by my own 'thereness', I am free to wander into whichever room of experience I please, untroubled by my own preferences and predelictions. And I sometimes hate all that I am too, saddled by my insecurities and cracking bravados, on nights like these.

Tonight, experience is painful and the rain dances.

But creating is giving birth, it is about something being birthed, born. And as I feel like the chick out of the egg, I also feel like the bloody mother, I can feel my body torn in labour. So this is a necessary pain, a necessary tension. Like new teeth pushing through gums. Skin ripping open.

And for what? For what reason do we give birth in this way? For sure, there is no fulfllment for me without it, to let the words or the song come into fruition without the tension of struggle, without working for it. Those slippy slidy works of supposed art, that trip so easily and so correctly off the smoothest tongue, they leave me unmoved by their composure, by their lack of a crime scene. No dying bull to trace in the sand, no ideal to stretch to the limit. Art can never be hidden behind, but exposes it all, all the workings. Ah, we are all so clever at this, still we try and tame the animal, lassoo it all so it belongs to us, not the other way round. Idiots, we are.

Can we make poetry with the head? Some people seem to think so. We can stare out to space with special instruments, we can calculate the mass of the world. We can float in space suits far above this bluest planet and watch the gases and the atmosphere, imbibe the greens and the corals and the turquoise patches, sail the infinite seas above, notating the wonders with a biro pen. And what does that make us? If we don't see it, it is all just another TV show, just an interesting experiment.

Poetry is not an interesting experiment. It is living, life itself. It is the often agonising process of opening up to what this universe is made of, and looking around, taking it in.

It is a space ship that travels to places otherwise unreachable, no other vehicle has the engine power, the correct design. It brings this human back, with the wonders and horrors of the world, of space, to write shakily some 'feeble approximation of starlight'.

It also travels underwater, to where the plants and the jellied fish grow. To where light cuts out under the ice, where sound is an ancient song from far above tides.

Descends, descends, past trees and caves and earth and matter and stone, into the stone it goes, the greyest, smoothest stone. Then the peat, and the ashes, the burnt out coal, the embers, the black chalk in the fire, soil and worms. Feel it in your hand, cool dark and sodden.

To the people, the stares, the unrelenting dreams. We say we are a million miles from the sky and the wood and the ground, from under the water.

No, we are the same life. In the human, there is always the valley and the rock, the repetitive seasons and the swimming fish. Discovered lakes, so much unchartered territory. The horrors of the flesh, the sinking stone, buried under ivy, human sleeps with fur and paw, eats its brother, dazzles with the sunlight and becomes dawn itself.

We are the night and the day, the afternoon, Northern Lights. We are neutron stars, gas and pollution. Moving in a haze of cloud. Whiskers. Dead creatures. Our own faeces. The blazing cottage. The never born girl child, left in a dream. A window, this book you hold, spent, spent, always spent.

This is all poetry to me. And to sit with that, is to sit with life itself. And the bravest poets are the Captains of the Boats at roughest sea. They bring the words home, they inspire, touch the fabric, rub the thread between their old warm fingers.

If I ever doubt poetry has a purpose, I think of this. I think of the bold. The death defyers. On a night like tonight, that I can be so bold, take these controls and launch again, is all I ask.

Make Me an Acorn Bed

and I find it kind of funny,
I find it kind of sad,
the dreams in which I'm dying
are the best I've ever had...

It has just rained, spray over pavements and flowers and on the beach. I am hiding behind my spotted curtains, peeping out into this blustery evening, enclosing myself in their shadow. It's only seven o' clock. But tonight I want to shut out the street and the damp air, and the wind blowing over the sea that churns at the foot of my road.
     I'm dissatisfied with the evening, and myself in it. I'm an unmoored boat, adrift in its tides. I've been looking up writing courses today; I've had more ideas for a book, the music making is still in process, tomorrow I sculpt - in short, I am not bereft of creative juice. But tonight I am scrabbling for an excuse just to turn off my light and obliterate the day. How lovely that would be, in one sense. And how tragic, in another, to ever want a day to end, to ever want to dull the senses to it so that one cannot feel so much. I can understand that desire, need even, when life bites hard on your shoulders, but today it's almost the mildness of it that's doing me in. Mildness can be deadly.
     I wish to be an animal in the woods tonight; I don't want to be human. I want to be feral, sniffing out hedgerows and following tracks to my burrow. I want the moon to guide my whiskers; I want undergrowth to be my bed sheets, my paws to do the talking. I want my nose to be my ally, and my belly to rub on the fur of another, roll amongst the fir cones. I will jump away from strangers and shun all that's human in this kingdom. Only a catkin and the most tender of branches will do. Only the soil will keep me happy.
     Else let me be a penguin, high on the ridge of the whitest world.

Sail Me to The Pole Star...

walk into blue rivers



the unspelt word



on a line of emptiness broken...