Kevan Manwaring's Blog: The Bardic Academic, page 31
October 20, 2017
Breaking Light: part five
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It is late. It is early.
And the world is turning beneath us,
so let us hold onto one another,
for where we go to sleep
is not the same place we wake up.
Everything shifts – the Earth
tilts
we have only our the axis of our love
to stop us from spinning off into space.
You anchor me
with your eyes,
a touch, a word,
breathed in the night,
a smile at break of day.
We contain each other with such
lightness,
allowing our spaces to dance
against one another.
To make a third shape between.
I inhale you. You exhale me.
I slip into bed, blindly, seeing by heat,
and let the warmth you have left
envelop me.
Our souls fit together,
like our bodies do.
As though,
way back when
before the beginning,
we had been wrought as one,
then, broken apart –
to be finally,
blissfully –
joined once more.
The same light
shining through us both.
Love,
the home where we belong –
the door with our names on –
waiting for us to arrive.
FINIS
Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring 2010
First published in Soul of the Earth (Awen 2010) and soon to be featured in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring (Awen 2017).
https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/
October 19, 2017
Breaking Light: part four
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iv
It is late. It is early.
We finally met
at Lammas –
when summer first seems to sense
its own mortality.
Ours is a late summer love.
Not the foolishness of Spring,
swept along by giddy lusts,
the chancy intoxication of the May,
nor the apparent glory of June,
when midsummer dazzles us
with its gaudy enchantment,
but a love of long shadows,
of languid contentment.
Ripening to prime –
we are ready for love’s press.
It insists we offer all.
What can be gained from
withholding the tiniest drop?
Pulp and pith and pip,
let the cloth of truth,
contain our allness.
Gladly we bring our bounty to share
to the harvest supper of the heart.
Arriving in splendour,
wearing our autumn like a crown,
we greet each other
at the end of a long road,
our harlequin robes
stretching behind us.
Stopping to let the sunset slip
like a mug of copper hops
down a thirsty throat
over the blue tapestry of hills
pegged to the sky by trees,
we give thanks for the abundance,
the riches of the year,
strewn before us
with such wild abandon.
Yet the thrift of Mother Earth
means nothing
is wasted.
All the ungathered,
unreachable treasure
that falls on the ground,
unpicked, to rot,
becomes the mulch
from which the future grows.
Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring 2010
Continued tomorrow
First published in Soul of the Earth (Awen 2010) and soon to be featured in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring (Awen 2017).
https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on October 16
October 18, 2017
Breaking Light: part three
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iii
It is late. It is early.
Lady Autumn
teaches us
the art of letting go,
as she performs her annual yard sale,
de-cluttering with a tut, a smile,
a shake of the head,
tidying away the toys of summer.
She sings as she sweeps –
her long skirts
layered with a patchwork of leaves,
gathering up all that we don’t need
in her wake.
Busily she insists
we put our house in order
before the harsher times ahead.
Her winter sister is not so sentimental
when she brings her black bag,
as bottomless as a December night.
Despite all we have done,
the gifts we have squandered,
her treasures plundered,
still the Earth
is beautiful.
Still the Earth
will forgive us.
Her compassion is endless,
and we will weep at her feet
before this is played out.
But first, a favourite vinyl crackles
to the centre.
The needle gathers dust.
With a melancholy pang
Lady Autumn revisits her old haunts,
her maiden places,
savouring the memory one last time
before letting it fade.
She presses the best
into the palimpsest of the past,
a bonfire for the rest.
Smoke curlews from the piles of leaves,
gathered into golden dragon hoards,
to be kicked –
and, for a moment,
we are as rich as bank robbers,
the folding gold falling around us.
Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring 2010
Continued tomorrow
First published in Soul of the Earth (Awen 2010) and soon to be featured in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring (Awen 2017).
https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/
October 17, 2017
Play It Again: Blade Runner 2049
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Eco-SF or Sucking it Dry? Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve, 2017
A Review
I went to see this film with great anticipation, and a little anxiety, for the original (Blade Runner, Scott, 1982) has a kind of ‘sacred’ status to me, having been such a massively influential experience when I snuck in to see it at the cinema aged 12. Having watched in many times since (and listened to the Vangelis soundtrack on a kind of loop throughout my teenage years) it has grafted itself onto my consciousness until it has become almost part of my identity – a constructed memory, imported into my mind. Take it away, and would I still be the same person? I was hoping the long-time-coming sequel by the Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve, (who had impressed me and the critics with Arrival) wasn’t going to steal my dreams, as so often happens when films are remade or rebooted. Hollywood, intellectually bankrupt these days, it seems, has turned to remaking its own successes –safe bets in hard times, feeding on people’s craving for the comfort drug of the past, nostalgia. The present is dysfunctional, the future unbearable, so only the past remains in which to seek shelter – even when that past is a hauntingly bleak vision of a dystopian future. Rewatching Scott’s masterpiece it strikes me how much of it is about the past – people living in the ghosts of cities amid the wreckage of their lives, clinging onto precious shards of memory; the Marlowe-esque presence of Deckard (even sans voice-over Bogie’s spectre informs his performance); the retro hairstyled ‘ice-maiden’ (Rachael the replicant); the multi-cultural melange that could be out of Casablanca, Edward James Olmos’ Gaff with his city-speak a kind of one-man version of that city; the haunted city of shadows like an echo of post-war Vienna from The Third Man; the double-coding of the Tyrell Corporation’s pyramid-like HQ and the classical grandeur of the executive level; the art-deco/neo-Fascist Union Station police station; and of course the crumbling elegance of The Bradbury.
Blade Runner 2049 takes this idea and runs with it. Set 30 years after the events of the original, Ryan Gosling’s replicant blade runner ‘K’ spends a lot of the time wandering around vast old ruins, working out which memories are real, which are fabricated, echoing what it feels like to return to the cinema 35 years after seeing the first film (that Ur-cinema itself an art-deco ghost). As soon as the opening shots appeared – an extreme close-up of an eye cutting to a vast iris-shaped solar farm extending to a field of them extending into the haze – underpinned by the pulsating electronic Wallfisch/Zimmer soundtrack I knew I was in safe hands. Rather than try to replicate (excuse the pun) the classic ‘apocalyptic sublime’ of the original – the Hades landscape of an environmental disaster zone Los Angeles 2019, which had such a deep impact on an impressionable 12 year old, Villeneuve drew upon a scene cut from the original screenplay for Hampton Fancher (then called ‘Dangerous Days’). With Fancher back on board as the writer, the scene (which was going to be the opening of Blade Runner) consolidates the sense of a movie haunting itself. This time it is K in the role of ‘Rick’ (Gosling a chip off the old block, like a younger Harrison Ford). The twist is that K is ‘outed’ pretty much straight away, dispensing with the existential question of the original – in which it is implied Deckard himself is a replicant (as the unicorn dream/unicorm origami implies); and the fact of Deckard’s continued existence evaporates any doubts about his flesh-and-blood credentials. According to recent interviews, Ford said he always played Deckard as a human; it was Scott who wanted him to be a replicant. So, in a way, both possibilities exist in the original – giving it the Buddhist koan resonance. Here, the paradox is retired. And yet the film is still a masterful meditation on the nature of reality (trademark Philip K Dick territory); on metaphysical concerns (which have often haunted Scott’s work) around origins, around creators and their creations. It is a poem of light and dark. Set after ‘the Blackout’, an event that crashed and wiped the world’s computers, this Los Angeles is less ‘neon’ than the original – in the original light intersected every scene, moved about it, was an active presence. 2049, masterfully lit by Roger Deakin, is darker – despite it having several day scenes (Blade Runner was largely filmed at night because of the restriction of a filming on a Hollywood backlot – it was one of Scott’s tricks to make up for a lack of budget). The sky is a perpetual sepia haze. America has become a denuded wasteland, has become Mars (and The Martian Chronicles goes full circle). Shadows, rather than night, dominate each scene, threatening to engulf it entire. Deakin lights each set piece like Caravaggio, deploying that master’s trademark chiaroscuro. And in the visual illusions he plays upon our eyes, he homages another master, De Chirico. ‘The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street’ is a frequent visual reference; in the giant figures through which K walks, ‘Melancholia’; and in the Piranesian architecture, a homage to the original. Villeneuve , to his credit, eschews CGI for model and matte shots – giving the whole thing a suitably old school ‘analogue’ feel. The magisterial pace of the film some may find ‘slow’ but I found it a refreshing contrast to the attention-deficit teenage-screen-tested biff-bang-pow of most mainstream movies these days. This is an elegant spinner of a movie – gliding along in a dream-like fashion. It lacks the adrenalin-pumping edge of the original, which simultaneously managed to achieve a metaphysical register in a fraction of the time. Scott’s visions was the blueprint, and this works to that, extending it but not necessarily adding to it. Nothing is taken away – it is a towering tribute to the original – but nothing is really added either. In many ways, we didn’t ‘need’ this film – but that’s where we’re at. As PKD would say, ‘we can remember it for you, wholesale’. Nevertheless, it a well-acted, well-scripted, well-made film. This is a journeyman work of a director who I suspect is going to keep astounding us for, hopefully, years to come.
Kevan Manwaring 17 Oct. 17
Breaking Light: part two
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ii
It is late. It is early.
Lady Autumn is walking
with sloe-eyed grace
through our lives once again;
rose-hipped, withy-limbed,
bejewelled with blackberries like
tiny bunches of grapes,
ready to burst on your tongue,
lips, fingertips,
stained with juice;
rowan berries, hard as nipples;
elder berries glisten like spider eyes,
from boughs of yellow flames,
watching.
The forest floor
where we made love
sanctified by
your blood, my seed,
mingling with the soil.
Its rich earth of
fertile death
scattered with ash keys, acorns,
fur-flowered beechmast,
horse chestnuts, hard and smooth
in their spiky jackets
(like antiques packed in a sea mine),
the milky bullets of cobs,
walnuts ransacked by Ratatosk
buried in forgotten cists,
fungi erupting from another world,
like fish gasping for breath,
gills gaping.
I graze lazily through your edible forest –
pore my hot breath into your jew’s ear,
rifle your King Alfred’s cakes
and penny buns,
devour your chicken-in-the-woods.
I trace the lace of your mycelia –
the wood’s lingerie. I yield
to your moreish morel,
drink champagne from your chanterelle.
You lick my slippery jack,
make my puff balls
explode.
Feral cry in the thicket,
the grunt of wild boar
snuffling out truffles,
the sow’s ear of his mate.
A roe deer freezes, wet nostrils twitch,
a flank shivers,
and it leaps into the wood’s legend.
The sunlight snags
on the canopy’s lattice,
the chlorophyll circuit-board
of a crimson leaf,
the abacus of dew
on a cobweb.
Nature’s astonishing
attention to detail
insisting
we notice
like an act of love.
I stroke your face
with a tuft of old man’s beard,
circumnavigate you with a feather,
all your inlets and promontories.
We cast a limpet shell
on the river
laden with our dreams
and laugh as it sinks.
Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring 2010
Continued tomorrow
First published in Soul of the Earth (Awen 2010) and soon to be featured in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring (Awen 2017).
https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/
October 16, 2017
Breaking Light: part one
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i
It is late. It is early.
3 a.m. Too tired to sleep,
awake-dreaming.
Feeling the house breathe around me,
its unfamiliar night sounds, a
strange landing.
The pores of my skin
are a million unblinking eyes.
You have set me off
like a spinning top.
Made my head explode with light.
As you lie next to me,
I listen to the white noise
of rain on your attic windows,
whispers in the static.
Even in the city I feel Her near.
Lady Autumn,
I can hear you
washing your long russet hair,
a weeping willow sifting the wind.
The rivulets reveal its lustre,
like a wave-wet pebble on the beach –
your colours unveiled, a whole paintbox.
Everything becomes more beautiful
the more it lets go –
the more it releases its inner life.
The promise of frost brings
the spectrum to the surface –
the colours the light let go of.
We see what isn’t absorbed.
A leaf, in Spring, not-green, becomes
in Autumn, not-red.
What the world sees is
what we cannot contain inside us; it
spills out –
breaking light,
the way love splits us open.
Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring 2010
Continued tomorrow
First published in Soul of the Earth (Awen 2010) and soon to be featured in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring (Awen 2017).
https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/
October 15, 2017
The Taliesin Soliloquies: Black Hen
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There is no hiding from me.
I am the destroyer of worlds, I am Carrion’s Queen,
Valkyrie, Kali, Cailleach, the Morrigan,
the Washer at the Ford.
I will strip away all that is non-essential –
I will find your weakest point
and tear you apart.
And yet,
I only have your best intentions at heart,
I want you to show your truth.
I will only snatch you
if you stray from your path,
If you lose your centre.
If you lie to yourself.
I am the black mirror –
your soul’s dark night.
The blind maw, your worst fear,
the smothering mother
who on her young feeds.
Never fulfilled,
a raw hole of need.
Black Annis, Baba Yaga,
there’s no escaping my hunger.
Let me eat you, obliterate you,
taste your strength.
If you are strong, you will endure.
Denial is another dying.
Death only takes from you
what you refuse to give.
Release into
the serenity
of oblivion.
Copyright © Kevan Manwaring 2017
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From ‘The Taliesin Soliloquies’, originally published in The Way of Awen: journey of a bard, O Books 2010; to be included in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring, Awen, 2017 https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/
