Back to 'Poems by Peter Brooke'   Things that Speak   On a photograph of R.S.Thomas Stout Cortes The entertainer The Council of Ephesus Reflections after reading Boris Gunjevic's 'Mystagogy of Revolution' late at night On his (or her) blindness Loss Things that speak A poet's blood Prayer A defence of the Soviet system of 'public meetings' Them Apichatpong's tiger September 2013 The West Gallery   ON A PHOTOGRAPH OF R.S.THOMAS The Saints may look ferocious but their anger is always not directed against contemptible man. They know there is no such thing as a contemptible man. There is only, as enemy, the Demon, our common property, the mark of our common humanity, who was a liar from the start, and we, like children gathered round, like little birds with our mouths open, listening. Oh how innocent and foolish we are, with our awesome weaponry, and the Saints recognise the liar still in themselves, still whispering, still ready to call down wrath from on high, the judgement of God, on their neighbour, on contemptible man. The Saints may look ferocious but they are not desperate. They are not eaten up by childhood rights and wrongs, the past is dead to them, except as a bottomless well of regret. They do not keep albums of photographs that would be albums of infinite pain - the Saints have built a wall, and they sit up in the watchtower, sternly and ferociously surveying the world of their thoughts, which is the world where we all live. Standing apart from all that, they know that that is the sea. It isn't us. That is the difference. They know, we don't, and so They intercede for us.   STOUT CORTES Standing before Your icon, Lord, I do better than stout Cortes, the thief, the murderer, filled with awe as he might have been, or Simon de Montfort, gazing at the beautiful land, or Cecil Rhodes or the Children of Israel crossed over from Sinai, all of whom saw an opportunity for work, so, allegorically speaking, maybe I do worse, gazing into the Eyes that see everything, everywhere and feeling a twinge of momentary awe but not the opportunity to slay my enemies and steal - unworthy as I am of it - the Land You promised me.   THE ENTERTAINER I want to please you, but alas, I don't succeed, probably because I don't really want you to be pleased exactly, rather I want to put one over on you, to force you to take serious account of me. And maybe I succeed, but it really doesn't matter because if I haven't wished your joy, even if you are indeed pleased, nothing has been achieved, while on the contrary, if I have indeed wished your joy, even if you aren't pleased, God is pleased.   THE COUNCIL OF EPHESUS We like, nowadays, the idea of Christ as a man united to God. It flatters our humanity, our notion of our possibilities. We like less the idea of Christ as God united to man - that the generosity and the doing are not on our side - that Christ is not the development of what we are - and yet were we to think it out we would see that if Christ is not us, His mother is - flesh of our flesh - and Christ is flesh of her flesh - and she who is the very embodiment of history is the door, or, better, the gap in the wall, and though we do not pass through her to Heaven, Heaven has passed through her to us. Hence, if we are to discover the real meaning of the divine nature of our Lord and God and Saviour, then we must, as a matter or urgency, reconvene the Council of Ephesus.   REFLECTIONS AFTER READING BORIS GUNJEVIC'S MYSTAGOGY OF REVOLUTION LATE AT NIGHT All day, these days, I find myself looking forward to the end of the day, and sleep which I have described elsewhere as an awakening of it, which is and isn't me - all day awaiting impatiently the awakening of this thing that isn't me. I have described sleep as a security, snug in a cocoon of my own reality - the reality for which I nonetheless accept no responsibility. And that is my reality - I run to it impatiently - something other than me looking at something other than me. Sleep, then, is a looking, like the cinema Trotsky said was better than the pub, or the Church - more variety, more intellectual stimulation - but it isn't us - the pub is us, and we become the Church, as we become a dance, as anything we do can become a becoming, and as we don't become a dream. So sleep, the cinema and the pub are a not-becoming, unlike the Church, which, even if we 'do' nothing, is an act. Here we are person to Person, cheek to Cheek. IT is not looking at IT. I am looking at Him, and He is looking at me.   ON HIS (OR HER) BLINDNESS No, there is no consolation, but that perhaps is (or could) BE the consolation, that there is no possibility ever of forgetfulness - that there is, always, this accompaniment, this not seeing, this reminder that I am. It is no consolation but the flaw, in time, seems to become the stick, holding me up. So through the evil itself I could be stolen from the Evil One As Christ, for Whom the evil was everything He wasn't, assumed everything, held everything up, when that everything banged nails into His hands to hold Him up on a stick, and a hold-up there was when Jesus stole, from the Prince of the World, the little ones, the treasures of the world.   LOSS Will a moment come when I am so impressed, so stamped upon by You I won't stop crying, crying out because everything at last has disappeared and all that is left is all Isaiah saw - not You but all that isn't You, the unformed self- feeding mass of what we are, left to our own devices. That vast hidden sea of the cruelty that sustains us, suddenly wrenched away, what will we be, sold into exile, will we then see simply our own cruelty facing us? or that all that isn't Your Kingdom? I don't want to pray short of that realisation when there is nothing else left to do and no-one else but only You, for after all, what did Los, the great builder of the senses signify in Blake's cosmology but "Loss"?   THINGS THAT SPEAK My poetry is not me speaking but poetry speaking to me, and yet (as we know) only a person can speak, and so, if poetry is other than you and me, a person can be other too, and we are maybe a variety - or in a variety - of persons, and why shouldn't they include, as well as the Muses, God, and His mother and the angels and the demons and mountains and trees and animals and scrap metal. And so we conclude that personhood other than us becomes the origin of all that we call 'us' - personhood being (not dust) the first reality, reality understood as a concatenation of things that speak.   A POET'S BLOOD The Saints do not want to sleep. They do not want to see that bad infinity, that corridor, with doors on either side fashioned by the forces in and around us especially for us, the corridor that is what we are, the view that is entirely ours. To love God, to love the neighbour, is to look away from that mirror. The Saints do not like to sleep but we others need that nightly wandering through that otherness that is us. I think of Cocteau's film A Poet's Blood - the poet peeking through the keyholes one by one. Cocteau saw strangely clearly that sleep is not innocent, that sleep is an awakening. But what are we to make of that other striking image in the Poet's Blood - the drawn eyes pasted on real eyes? Eyes that maybe cannot see, yet we see them in a startling intensity. And what is behind the paste? Is it a dream? a real blindness, or (as I maintain) an attention, which is always an exclusion. Picasso (Serge Charchoune dixit) had the eyes of a hunter. What could he see other than his prey? The Saints do not like to sleep, do not like to dream, do not stare intensely. They, on the contrary, do not seem to look at anything very much, not from indifference, but a sort of discretion, a respect for the essential otherness of everything about them. Saint Silouan on Mount Athos occasionally raised his eyes and marvelled, then returned to his prayer. The appearance of the world wasn't his affair. Cocteau's poet made a statue that seemed so real it came alive. Why would anyone want to do that?     PRAYER Underneath our self justification, our complacency, lies something else. Something that has eyes. Oh, what, O my poor soul, are you looking at? What do you see that I don't see as I look at my walls covered with books. Something in us knows that something else is happening here, something something in us (like a mile-ometer, the wheels turning round, the numbers augmenting) measures. This is continuous and known, and more real than what is happening in front of us. It is us. And the soul stares at it as at something other than itself, stunned by it. I would like to pull those eyes away from that fascinated staring, so they, like me, could gaze out to the sea - limitless, serene and, in principle, not accumulating. Sometimes, though, I descend down to the basement, and sit beside my soul, and stare and that is what I mean by 'prayer'.   A DEFENCE OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM OF 'PUBLIC MEETINGS' Our people, projected, despite themselves, into the future, were not properly modern. They had not lived the Renaissance, Humanism, the Reformation. Industry had not done its work on them, and yet they had to take on the most industrial, the most modern of powers - they had to because by then we were the only choice. We had no choice - it was us or total collapse and the vultures swooping down on the carrion - we saw it all in 1941 - and so in ten, twenty, thirty years they had to learn the Renaissance, Humanism, the Reformation - oh not in the classroom but inscribed - burnt - into their souls and how many dead did that cost you, Europe of the superior smile. And so - yes, those public meetings - they were pretty grotesque, the denunciations, the hands raised in unanimity, the fear of stepping out of line (when you don't know what the line is). Everyone was implicated. Everyone had to think, critically, in a new way, everyone at once. Even as the potter moulds his clay, society had to be shaped, brought up to date. Oh how we envied Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt - their people were already moulded, baked to perfection, understood immediately what was required of them. Ours (the Russians anyway) would run after Nicholas or a man with a cross on the top of his head, but understand that the world they see is all that there is and has to be worked and reworked endlessly in an endlessly rational process of production? Our public meetings were a work of Reformation, turning our people into you - hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.   THEM The demons, the heresies, that gather in my heart, Oh! how I love them! I do not mean gluttony, lust, avarice etc. I would not admit my love for them, great as it is, into my poetry. No! It is the gathering of the poor lost souls, every morning at the hour of prayer, the hour when I don't pray, lying in between sleeping and waking, listening to them talking - since they have lived for ever, they have a lot to say and when they are not being merely malevolent, there is, sometimes, a certain grandiose air of tragedy about them. Oh I know I could get as much by watching television. Then they could come at me, all in a rush. But somehow the impression that this is really me, really of my substance, gives it a certain dignity, raises it - look! - to a level consonant with poetry. How dull the insistence on the one Principle, the only Name that brings salvation! Here I am in the morning, still half dreaming, dancing with the many. And what in the end, Yeats would ask, is there to be saved? What am I if I am not them?   APICHATPONG'S TIGER The reference is to the film 'Tropical Malady by the Thai film director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul As Adam and Eve, having made their choice between knowledge and life, could not not pass from good to evil, from evil to good so every one of our choices leads us deeper into the wood, the wood that has a strange and exotic name. It is called 'the economy'. It is a wood where the trees dance and we - as a wise man once remarked - have to keep dancing, dancing in rigourous time to the trees and so we lose the ability not to be taken in slowly and even lovingly to the shape changer, who could not not change his shape, the tiger Apichatpong imagined, the evil that is not always evil, the good that is not always good.   SEPTEMBER 2013 While we observe, of course, that time has a certain effect, we are not fooled by the notion that anything of any importance is better now that at any other time or any other place. Things change but the consequence of the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil remain much as they were. Eternity still masked by the horrors and delights of the here and now. And so we really do not know more than we ever did, even as Voyager slowly drifts out of the solar system, even as Great Alexander was once the marvel of the world. And so it goes on, much as it always has, the real battle being not one thing after the other but upwards and downwards.   THE WEST GALLERY Looking at you on a stage - me here, you there - you the spectacle, or me on the stage, the spectacle, I would prefer to be - prefer you to be - out of sight, in the west gallery so that the music or the spectacle exists in its own right. That is why the player wears a mask, and the priest vestments - a discretion that declares that at that moment the person that you are disappears. But this is no contempt of you. When it works, the work is a work of God. You and I too are works of God. Why should we wish to see two of the works of the Master, running simultaneously?