AndrewPaulWood

Scholars of the Matter of Britain tell us, that Astolat, or Shalott (as in Tennyson’s Lady of) like the onion, somewhere between Londinium and Camelot, (if Camelot is Roman Camulodunum, or Colchester) is ruddy Chelmsford ! I mean, don’t get me wrong, Chelmsford has its pebbledash charms, the cathedral’s nice, and my cousins lived in Writtle, but I baulk at the idea of Elaine as an Essex girl, orange and bleach ogling a chavvy Launcelot in his tricked-out Evo… The mirror cracked from side to side … Tennis, anyone?

De Sade just wanted to blow the paradigm apart by overloading the hive mind like Spock and Kirk every other time in Star Trek : that’s the philosophy of pain. Foucault liked tit clamps now and then. They helped him think, and near the end in Paris bathhouses his AIDS inspired Nietzsche emerged:  Après moi le deluge . The Raft of the Medusa ’s a commonweal of pain. Gericault lets you feel it deep: black and white, young and old, equal in wave-tossed enervated suffering. Though nothing is more democratic than pain, the difference is for the privileged it’s a luxury, like salt on their life’s meat; for the rest of us, it’s the thankless oxygen.

I, butterfly; I, little painted god, I flap my wing, dislodge a slight dusting of azure scales, and lo the typhoon sweeps over China. I am Shiva, the making and unmaking. I stamp my foot and the earth shakes with the passing of a dozen elephants. I see you, poet-scientist, regard my amaranthine silks with lecherous eye, cataloguing antenna and mandible as if searching for just the right word, and in the beginning was the word – logos , the name, the truth, and in my own way, am I not an artist?  

The British Empire owed much to the desire to find a more congenial climate, a better cup of tea, and someone to make it. Much bloodshed and horror over some rain and a cold wind. Shelley was obsessed with wind, Wordsworth fretted over clouds, and Keats had a thing for mist and damp, which didn’t do his fragile health much good at all. Samuel Palmer painted golden corn in a permanent summer twilight, while Turner was very much excited by violent storms as much as Constable was by a light drizzle and the sort of dappled light that used to set Gerard Manley Hopkins off; on the whole, English Romanticism has always been a conversation about the weather.                                    The year 1816, for example, the Year of No Summer when Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies ...

You may keep your princely peacock in his eye-brocaded finery, I prefer the turkey, the practical burger in sensible black and brown: he struts and fans his tail just as well.

I imagine her, Mary, when they come for her at the sunrise in the Spring. En ma fin est mon commencement. Dark circles of fatigue around her eyes, unslept since Fotheringhay. Dressed in embroidered satin, Catholic black and white lawn veil, betrothed to God and death, she paces out the Rosary, unattended to the block, save for her lapdog, a Skye terrier hiding beneath her skirts, a fierce storm of loyalty hot at her ankle. Before a noble audience of men two executioners roughly strip her: “Now truly, my lords, I never had two such grooms wait on me before!” And then the pale throat and décolleté laid bare, aflush: blood-red petticoat, blood-red sleeves, red for the blood of the martyrs, defiant to the end. Pale Elizabeth watches from a high window, her white silks, chaste and virginal buttoned up to the tall ruff. She withdraws for the dolorous blow: deniable culpability. " In manus tua...

I’ve climbed into the lap of the maternal hills and long only to be shattered and dispersed like indivisible atoms through the invisible, universal labyrinth of cause and effect, to serve the night as a ripple on a pool caught in moonlight, or a rustling willow. I’ve watched meteorites stream across the welkin until I ran out of things to wish for. Catullus! Now there was a poet. He could make the death of his mistress’ pet sparrow stand for the colossal entirety of death’s mystery within the body of the greater mystery of love. Is the language even capable of that anymore? The poor, half-starved words have begun to cannibalise each other with no transcendence to aspire to, nor even that absolute existence in the present moment within their aeon. Technology has even robbed us of that joy: the letter – not the kind you slide a silver blade through, but the kind you tear open – inside, nothing but FEELING; like a bullet to the heart. ...