Island of Lightning

by Robert Minhinnick

  Typical of you to say, said the French.

  To my aid I called Indian poet Manohar Shetty. But if Shetty writes in English, he remains multilingual. I quoted Nikolaj Stochholm, Danish poet now starting, slowly, to compose in English. But Stochholm is also, inevitably, a polyglot.

  Thus it continued under Lahti’s birchbark sky. It was the Russians who reminded us that if McDonald’s was a clever stupidity, then the communism most Russians had experienced exemplified the malign variety. Which after a while became simply stupid stupidity. The kind of stupidity that gives stupidity a bad name.

  A Russian joke was told to reveal what the Soviet system had done to personal initiative.

  A woman notices two men at a roadside. The first man is digging holes. The second man shovels the earth back in.

  Woman: What are you doing?

  1st Man: Planting trees.

  Woman: No you’re not. You’re digging holes and that second man is filling them in.

  2nd Man: I’m not the second man. I’m the third man. The second man didn’t turn up.

  Our definitions of stupidity heated up. A stupid society, said one delegate, was one founded on logic. Societies should be based on magic. But logic is the enemy of magic.

  Another said that a stupid society is a sated society. Because real stupidity is stupefaction of the soul. Personally, I was hungover from the recent General Election in the UK. No wonder people refused to vote. They recognised stupidity when they saw it. Not a word about the global commons, climate change, drugs, the arts, the life of the mind. Instead, aridities about how the wealthy might become wealthier. Endless media interest in…nothing very much at all. It had dissipated so quickly.

  I replayed the Russian joke. Or maybe it was an Albanian joke. It could have been a Welsh joke. But Welsh stupidity is of the abject variety. The new National Assembly – our infant parliament – has granted money for the destruction of the Dunlop factory domes at Brynmawr.

  These had once comprised the largest spanned concrete structure in the world. The factory was a structural forerunner of the Sydney Opera House. The building was unique in the UK.

  Now it is rubble. The demolition was financed by people who purport to have the vision to run a country. In truth, the Dunlop fiasco demonstrates failure of nerve and imagination at the highest political level. Stupidity and self-loathing demanded that the extraordinary be replaced with the anonymous. Abject indeed.

  But who is the second man? The artist, surely. The Dunlop architect. The campaigner to save the domes. In Wales, that ‘country of employees’ as a correspondent writes, the second man remains a rarity. So save the second man. We need the trees.

  As these things do, our theme expanded to include the role of the writer in a stupid society. How should writers, even stupid writers, live? The writer has one duty, a delegate said. To live the writer’s life. That is not a teacher’s life. Neither is it an academic’s life. And in case you are beginning to worry, he added, it is not an ascetic’s life. Skol, he added, cupping a Koff.

  A writer’s life should be a life of the imagination. A life of thought and idea and impression. Then of learning how to put these into words. Then developing structures for such words. As simple as that. And if a writer has to teach it is not to teach the mechanics of poetry.

  A poet who teaches poetry is a serpent swallowing its tail. The poet must convince the pupil that the imagination is a midnight sun. It never goes out. Then he must instruct the pupil how to read. Because reading dresses us. Reading feeds us. Reading warms us in a hostile climate. Without the life of the mind that reading provides we are naked and unnourished. Without the life of the mind we have no life at all. We are frail and impotent, at the mercy of fashion and politics and nationalism. Etcetera.

  Was it night? Was it day? That titanium light might have brought dawn or dusk. For once, outside, the voices were stilled. The only sounds were the liturgies of the birch, the primaeval birch and spruce that have always covered this country.

  Back in Helsinki, I roamed the city. It seemed deserted except for the poor and the very poor, the drunk and the very drunk. Everyone else had left for the lakes. For the trees. The nights were darker here, but stayed the colour of cigarette smoke. The only sounds were the wail of the Estonian ferry, the clinking of passing trams like a toast of vodka glasses.

  Holed up downtown on Bulevardi with an enormous television, I watched MTV and BBC World. Eminem was the star of the former. Bad as I am, he raged. Bad as I am. Caged in computer music, he incited phoney hysteria. Behind the din he spat the rhymes. Yet his words seethed with a racked, if remote, intelligence.

  Bad as it was, I’ve heard worse. BBC World, meanwhile, claimed it was volcanoes, not asteroids, that had done for the dinosaurs. And will do for us too, some day. Make no bones.

  Then came a programme about Tirana. I was transfixed. How it has changed. Even the inhabitants cannot recognise it now. At home, I have framed a photograph of the tomb of Enver Hoxha. The grave of that absolutist bears a jamjar of weeds. When I visited Albania the first time it seemed a country from a fairytale. The people despaired under the enchantment of evil. Everything was broken.

  And then, overnight, Ryan Giggs was ascending in a silver elevator. What was hot on the street were not samizdat poems or blackmarket loaves but Levi’s and Nike ball caps. In the end, nothing could keep capitalism at bay. Not ignorance, not paranoia, not a million air-raid shelters. The invasion of Albania happened all right, but it came down the wire straight into the pleading soul.

  From a great stupidity to a small stupidity. From stupid stupidity to clever stupidity. And hardly time between to look around and ask what kind of country Albania might have been. Or still might be.

  Exhausted by the screen, I tried the bars. Leningrad Cowboys was closed, an unsprung bottle of Finlandia in every booth. Next was Erottaja. Wash out.

  In U-Kaleva, spartan, local, I thought about where we had left the Lahti discussion on writers as teachers. There had been a woman standing behind me for some time. Now she stepped round, took the book I had balanced on my knee, kissed me.

  Tickets? Passport? I never leave the country without my New Directions copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Prose poems and letters that serve as a philosophy. Especially the letters of May 1871, written when Rimbaud was sixteen. And a half. Coming up to his A levels, I suppose.

  I cherish the book, disorientating, boundless, because it has often served as the antithesis to the world in which I grew up. “A prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses”, the poet demands. Of himself and other poets. A rational disordering? Of all the senses?

  No wonder we steer clear of the cracked kid these days. How easily he might offend the thin-skinned legions of the writing classes. Those letters are manifestos of scorn. But magnificent. The writer’s attempt at decoding poetry’s genome.

  One thing Rimbaud does not do is endstop the imagination. And one thing he does is identify stupidity as the poet’s enemy. So what would he make of my literalisms? Or of Lahti? And what would Rimbaud say to Eminem?

  What problem? asked the woman.

  I thought about it.

  No problem, I said.

  Her partner sneered at the next table. I noted his saurian eye. Unreconstructable pissheads. No question. The danger they radiated might have been my own unease.

  I am lesbo, said the woman. She kissed me again.

  I looked at the man. Days drunk. He sat slumped in a poisonous lethargy.

  So am I, I said. And took Rimbaud from her like a baton.

  Booze, I thought. Another thing that is really stupid. Really really stupid. The enemy of the writer. The enemy of the mind. Then I ordered another Koff medicine. Just to confuse myself.

  Babble

  I went to Babel once. There’s not much left. The tower’s gone, as you might have heard. Instead there’s a crater with mud bricks at the base.

  But there’s a mosque. And when I was there, a pyramid of shoes. A big
heap. It was prayer time and the men had taken off their shoes – sandals and trainers and some black Clark’s. And all the men were inside the mosque. The mosque with the blue minarets.

  But outside the mosque was a well. So I stood against a wall and looked at the boy, the waterboy, the servant of the well, and watched what he was doing. He seemed a happy child. Oh yes, he laughed a lot.

  This boy put a stone in a bucket and lowered the bucket into the well and filled it and raised the rope and poured the Babel water into plastic bottles and jerry cans.

  Then he did it again. And again. Women kept bringing him containers and he kept filling them up.

  Yes, all the time I was watching, he did that. This laughing child. This boy pouring out the silver water – because it looked silver in the sun – and the drops he spilled darkening the dust around the well. The dust of Babel.

  All that time I could hear the prayers from the mosque. Those voices like water, voices murmuring like the green Euphrates which was just over the hill, flowing there as it had always flowed.

  And I thought, yes. There has always been a waterboy. Ever since Babel was built, there has been a waterboy, lowering a bucket, raising a bucket, weighting that bucket with a dark river pebble. A pebble from the Euphrates. A river-riven stone.

  And I also thought, maybe God is in the well. Yes, maybe God is down there. Not in the mosque, not in our churches. But down there. In the well. Where the dark eye of water is the eye of God.

  I thought that. Maybe an idle thought. Maybe a foolish thought. But then I thought something else. Maybe God is the well itself. And then I thought God might be the pebble. That river-riven stone.

  Then I thought that God might be the bucket. The water? The well? The bucket? The pebble, that river-riven stone? Yes, leaning against a wall in Babel, those thoughts certainly crossed my mind.

  Antares

  (for Trevor)

  A few years after it happened I started going to Beachy Head. High cliffs, white cliffs looking south. And I’d go in summer, really late on, because those June nights don’t get properly dark until after midnight.

  I’d go to see Antares. You know what that is? Antares is a star. A red star. In the constellation of the scorpion. Most times, I can’t see it. Nobody can. It’s too southerly, even from Beachy. But sometimes – yes, if I’m lucky, if it’s a perfect night – Antares is there. So I just look. I sit on the grass, that bitten down grass on the chalk, and look out into the night. The night that’s like the ocean.

  Yes, as big as the ocean. And those June nights full of cockchafers. Big bugs, scary at first, but just clumsy. Flying around at the edge of things. Back and forth over the precipice and into thin air with the sea three hundred feet below. The sea milky with the chalk. So at night, it’s a white sea.

  Then low down, if I’m lucky, there’s Antares. There it is. A dusky red like a pheasant’s eye. Red as the dust of Morocco. A star red as chili oil. A glimpse of Berber gold.

  And I think, Christ, I’m alive. Alive! Alive in all this, with these bugs divebombing and the sea a white mist, and the Milky Way a net in the sky, and the June night hardly a night at all. And a star like a ruby. Yes, a ruby in the navel of the night. Because I was sure I was done for. I was gone. Finito, I’m telling you. Over and out. I couldn’t believe it.

  When it happened everything seemed in slow motion. I could look down and see myself in the water. On the black swell. And my boat disappearing, with no-one on board who knew what had happened. Yes I looked down at myself – a man overboard, a man waving, a man calling. In the black swell.

  And soon one red light on the stern was all I could see of that boat. That’s all there was. The boat chugging away and me left behind, shouting, waving. That one red light on the horizon, down low. Not even a star can get any lower than that, I thought. But Antares can. I’ve learned that now. Because there it is, tonight. Antares on the southern horizon.

  And then that red light vanished. Christ, I thought. I’m done for. This is it. Here I am on the shoulders of the swell. Thirty minutes is all I have. And the boat disappearing out of sight. Gone. Gone absolutely.

  But what I’m trying to say is, that light vanishing was a good thing. Because it meant the boat was turning. The red star had vanished because the boat was coming back for me. Me on that big swell. In the white line of the wake, out in that immense clean blackness. No wave breaking. A world of black glass.

  And I suddenly knew, yes, that they’d missed me. That the boat was turning. Because the star had vanished. Because the light was gone.

  And that’s why I come up here. To look out at the ocean and the sky, another ocean. And sometimes I see it and sometimes I don’t. Antares, that is, the red star. The star of the stern.

  I Know Another Way: Walking To The Rhondda

  “I know another way.”

  He would say that. Wouldn’t he? The thin man.

  I knew he was going to say that. The moment I’m sure of the route, north and north-west, past the Butcher’s Arms in Llandaff, or off the cathedral green, along by the BBC, or maybe across to Whitchurch and the house called Khasia, north and north-west anyway, he has to offer his own alternative.

  Which will involve roads not marked on any maps. Not that the thin man ever consulted a map, not in his own country. Those roads frost-heaved and rutted by the iron rims of hay-wagons and death-carts. Roads with burned-out Cavaliers on the corners but always an absence of traffic. Roads with pink armchairs abandoned under oak trees. Roads where buzzards wait like dismal pensioners for the bus that is a century too late. Roads that turn west when you’re seeking the north. Roads that pass farms with ragwort in the beilis. Roads that are building sites with sycamores seeded in the foundations. Roads that double-back so you’re surprised you don’t meet yourself coming the other way. Roads under hedges black with bryony where a green cockscomb grows up the middle. Roads so narrow you must walk sideways. Roads to places that are no longer places. Roads to places only he would know.

  Yes, he would say that, wouldn’t he, the thin man, who is already leading me out of the suburbs, or the villages that became suburbs, good places, expensive places, all gnocchi and nokias now of course, but in their time part of a vision, a creed that honoured life. I know another way, he says. But we can’t start here.

  Yet start we must. Under the Llandaff Cathedral yews. I’m glad they’re still here, alive and poisonous. Fifteen years ago I stood under these yews with a television journalist and local MP and talked about what acid rain was doing to the vitals of Wales. Frankly, I predicted doom. And was right. In a way.

  Yet doom proves itself a cell by cell process. There was no apocalypse. So it’s good to talk to the yews again, to acknowledge their reasonable health. Because the yew is a powerful tree. It comes out of the neolithic to us in an immemorial dynasty. Over its red dust we make our way, across to the Taff. We’ll look at the river a while, then follow it north. The Taff’s our compass needle. But the thin man needs no compass, he says. And we’re travelling without the assistance of the Director General of the Ordnance Survey. What does he know and where has he been? So, not for the last time, let’s stray a little.

  The Taff in its time was a quilt of iron dust. It was a coal vein broken open to the light. The Taff was once so thick with coal, people claimed its waters looked like funeral crepe. But now the final indignity. They have taken away its tides.

  Because the Taff drowns itself in the teaspoon of the Cardiff Barrage. Back there at Llandaff and now at Taff’s Well it flows beside me, coming out of the carboniferous. It pushes through the circlet of limestone that rings the coalfield of south Wales on the geological map. That coalfield is coloured grey as a tumour, though as a Cardiff poet has told us, tumours might ripen into mauve.

  So here it runs. Silver, suicidal. It has otters and trolleys and toilet paper, kingfishers and colliers on its conscience. And of children like poor Wiffin, there’s no counting.

  At the same time as in Taff’s Well it
is behind us at Llandaff. There in the cathedral, Epstein’s Christ is squeezing himself out of an enormous toothpaste tube. Simultaneously the river is flowing through Bute Park and into the city’s aboretum, and surely of the cities I know it’s only Rio has a richer rainforest in its midst. On to our glass parliament it runs, and the Millennium Centre. So let’s hear it for the Taff. Let’s drown its own aria with an oratorio of our own, then allow the First Minister to offer a valediction as the river slumps into the dock beside him, Guilty, your Honour, Guilty as Sin, and its name is dissolved in the Bay’s acid bath.

  I’m walking north. But in less than a mile the way is blocked. Here’s the motorway – a Serengeti for the age of speed. I stand on the M4 bridge below Radyr watching its metronome of life. And such life, a teeming ecology, the prey and the predatory mixed in together.

  Usually, where there’s no going over, I go under. Under at Kenfig to the sand-scoured castle. Under at Llewellyn Street where you might lean from the terrace windows and touch the concrete piles. Under at The Cymdda where the new Wales has been constructed overnight in the ultra violet of the Odeon and the sacristy of McArthur Glen. And when you stand under the motorway and read the writing on its pillars, when you hear the unrelenting wheels above your head, you know the motorway for what it is: a path of pilgrimage.

  Because we all commute. The sea twice a day, the call centre Kayleighs, the DIY warehouse Garins, the planets in rare affiliation in the north west tonight, which is the direction we’re taking. Commuters are the pilgrims today and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that we are pilgrims or we are nothing. There’s white van man in the fast lane, that pilot fish of commerce, because if ever there was a pilgrim it is white van man, gunning it to destiny, 90, 95, the orgasmic ton.

  And there stalled on the hard shoulder, the saleswoman’s Focus. And you and I in the hayrattle meadow that is now the Grenada forecourt at Cardiff West. Ten minutes later we can be above The Cymdda where one day the cottongrass and peatwater black as espresso will be restored. Because this is it: our Great Barrier Reef. And there’s no better place to observe it than this bridge. I suppose I could have dashed across, there are gaps in the traffic. Yet only the bridge permits this panorama. And what a place to stand. This is our balcony in the eye of the storm as the M4 disappears in its ribbon of platinum dust and the cherry blossom streams into the drains.