Bryan Islip's Blog, page 17

British Internationalists, Mr Barroso.

So Mr Osbourn's tripartite seizure of the UK pound sterling has backfired. Surprise, surprise. Only the supremely arrogant would not have seen that one coming. Who the hell do they think the people are going to be cheering for, Goliath or David?
And now Mr Cameron is going to hold a meeting of his Westminster Cabinet in bonnie Scotland? Wonder why he's suddenly decided on that one. So unclever, too little and far too late, David..
As for the ploy involving your mate, Barroso!!! Forget it. Scotland will be as European as it always has been. It is because it is. Have they never heard of the Auld Alliance? (Scotland - France).
Best now to leave the politicking out of it. The whole UK is sick to death of Westminster / City of London politics. Don't they get it even now?
Let the people of Scotland decide whether they wish to be a Nation once again. Or not. After the vote the English will still be English, the Scottish Scottish and the people of these islands British Internationalists.

Some independent thinking

The prime minister of this United Kingdom will today stand where the medallists of last summer's London Olympics once stood. Using this as a political springboard of doubtful taste he will urge English, Welsh and Northern Irish to raise their voices in supplication against Scottish Independence. He will cite the heroic deeds of Scots / British such as Chris Hoy and Andy Murray. He will say that a United Kingdom without Scotland will be greatly diminished in the conference chambers of the world at large. He will say that people in the wider UK will be the poorer should the Scottish National Parliament's 'Yes' campaign prevail. He will not say ...

Why they will be poorer, exactly., and whether he has bothered to read the SNP's White Paper on the whole subject, including all the many economic ramifications concerned, many of them a big plus for indpendence. *Why the people of Scotland, who have never in recent times or any times voted for a Tory party to represent them should now vote for it and him.What pressures on him and Westminster in general are being applied from his own family's links with the City of London, not just on this Independence issue but on all things recently governmental. (Labour as well as his own Tory)Why the UK's economic so-called 'recovery'  applies much more to London and 'down south' and much less the farther from London you happen to be.Conversely, why the so-called recession recessed far more deeply 'up north', whilst much less in London and the south east of England - and for those responsible for the problem in The City hardly at all - if at all..Why he, with his generational family linkages, should believe that his native Scotland cannot be a nation unto itself - once again.Why it is important for this nation or nations to be represented abroad, never mind held in high esteem. Oh, David, the days of the British Raj are long since dead and gone.         Why he is refusing to debate the issue man to man (or woman) in front of the whole United Kingdom instead of this incessant sniping from the rear. most often via redundant politicians paid by Westminster and the captains of some industries and the Bank of England Governor (an ex Investment Banker who has a whole year's experience of living in these islands! - sorry. in the City of London.).
* I would be first to admit that medium or long term economic forecasting - of whatever colour - is little more than a political gimmick. All I know is that only factories and the invention of product creates wealth, all else including government and so-called service industries do nothing but spend it, with finance feeding itself like a parasite on the whole shebang.

My American industrialist boss, a first generation multi millionaire, once toured our factory (his factory - I was only its marketing director,) and he turned to me and said; "Everything you see here is cost. The only reason for it is the sales you generate out there." Well, ditto UK.

A Valentine's Day message

We all know how it is when we come across that box of old photos whilst searching for something else. Three hours later you look up, having forgotten for what it was you were searching. Memories, memories.

I guess, in these digital days boxes of old photos are becoming rarer, which is a pity. Memories are not the same, they're not so powerful on-screen.

Anyway, in amongst Dee's box of photos and personal memorabilia I found a bundle of my own letters and cards, written to her mostly from hotels when abroad on business trips. Many are too personal and of no interest here but I found a couple of my long forgotten poems, hand written and faxed to our home near Winchester, one of which I thought I might 'publish'  ... The single sheet of lined paper is date marked 'Feb 14 (YES, St Valentine's Day!) - 2001, 09.31 Dharan International Hotel (Saudi Arabia) ...

A sonnet for Delia

My mind's eye sees her as I saw her first
And still she thrills me as those years ago
When Nature's breathless clamour did its worst
And best when deathless love began to grow.

So easily she found my heart, my mind,
And soothed them with no over-tenderness;
She uncomplaining led me from behind,
Shared failure'sd pain, shared joy in our success.

This day pf Valentine, I feel her still,
Yes, even closer is my Dee to me;
My crowded mind knows that I ever will
And from my beating heart I reach for she.

Mysterious love shall be my saving grace
Through time beyond this living, loving place.

Bryan

 International business and love poetry - strange bedfellows in a single life. But if I had to give up one or the other I know which one I'd choose. Yes, the one I did (choose). And how prescient now, after she has gone, that closing couplet!

A 'tidal wave of cancer'

My comments are in red ...
Headline today ..."TIDAL WAVE OF CANCER  ... A global drive to tackle the causes of cancer linked to lifestyle has been urged by the World Health Organisation as it predicted the number of new cases could soar 70% to nearly 25 million a year over the next 20 years... Anybody who has spent time in cancer wards talking to patients and nursing staff knew that; they didn't need to be told by the World Health Organisation. The incidence of cancer globally has increased from 12.7m new cases in 2008 to 14.1m in 2012, when there were 8.2m deaths. By 2032, it is expected to hit almost 25m a year – a 70% increase. If as stated it went up by 15% in the last 2 years why only by 70% in the next 18 years? Don't these scientists know an exponential curve when they see one? (Or don't they want to know? Or don't they want us to know?)
... Dr Christopher Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and joint author of the report, said when people know his job, they asked whether a cure for cancer had been found, yet few think about preventing the disease in the first place. Oh yes? Why doesn't the good doctor mention any concern with the One and Only Primary Problem - i.e. what the hell is causing it? Lifestyle, he says. Bollocks. What a cop-out. Try natural forces working to cull our heredically cancerous, wildly destructive over-population, doctor! "Despite exciting advances, the report shows that we cannot treat our way out of the cancer problem. More commitment to prevention and early detection is desperately needed in order to complement improved treatments and address the alarming rise in the cancer burden globally." Too late and with far too much official head in the sand. I rest my case.
His co-author, Dr Bernard Stewart from the University of New South Wales, talked of "the crucial role of prevention in combating the tidal wave of cancer" 

Read my novel, Going with Gabriel. Sometimes fiction is truer than the truth. Sometimes it's also more palatable.

The killing and the watching

There are many kinds of cancer, not all of them physical. Take the pantomime in progress in Montreux right now. Seemingly intellegent men, recaltricant at the so-called Syrian peace talks busily insulting each other whilst adding even more concrete to their own, already entrenched positions. And while they talk to the media and do not talk to each other their countrymen, women, children and babies starve, living in misery, and die whether by force of arms or force of (baffled) nature.

This is a cancer of the human mind, a cancer fed and watered by our unlovely media. Left unchecked it infects and will in time kill us all.

Who supplies such merciless combatants the world over with the weaponry to make more efficient the killing and maiming process? (Call it 'war', call it 'terror', call it what you will, it is that awful word: cancer.) For sure these often backward, often indolent people do not make the guns themselves. When was the last time you can think of anything Syria or Egypt or The Peoples Democratic Republic Of Central Africa invented anything, never mind manufactured it? For that they rely almost entirely on the equally malign greed of the so-called businessmen of Europe, Russia, America.That means us, people, us! Aided and encouraged of course by 'democratic' governments hungry for more dollars, more growth on the back of their industrries' cancerous exports..

I composed this in a Dharan hotel bedroom after TV viewing the news from the Congo. The world's most advanced fighter planes flashed by my window, planes sold to Saudi Arabia by gigantic western corporations up to their ears in blind-eyed bribery and corruption.



Brazzaville 1997
How happy the boy soldier seemsDowntown in good old BrazzavilleIn television’s nightmare dreamAs he searches  for more to killBlack face split white in one wide beamWhilst from the rubble bodies spill:
There is this frightful innocenceAnd you can smell the pestilence.
They must have told him that they’d wonWho gave themselves that Cobra name,And flies that fatten in the bloody sunOf Africa know more of shameThan we for such as this destruction -Each of us knows he’s not to blame:
But cobras have their grace and know Their place and in what space to grow.
Attend the screen’s sick imagesSee this Swiss reporter boy; he's made The chance to make the moment his; Red Cross or something who have paid So much so uselessly - just show bizFor us the prying cameras stayed:
Behind him there the kiddie standsWide crazy eyed, gun in his hands. 
The media’s the message, true?This would not be thisbut for it.There’s really nothing we can doBut watch them sport in their own shit?Now in my mind these questions queueWhat thrills me when the fuse is lit?
Do answers lie in schaddenfreud? Is this our true selves, unalloyed?
Bryan IslipDharan 20 October 97
Why the devil worry about it? I think I'll take a walk along the shore of Loch Ewe; a walk I used to do with Dee, escaped now to a better place than this. No doubt I'll pick up a particularly pretty little stone and marvel, for this was here billions of our years before first foot of something resembling you and me, and will be here long, long after we have done our worst and duly gone away.

My ragged odyssey

I've just sent off to a favourite literary agent the first seven chapters (or acts, if preferred) of my novel (or compendium of one act plays ). This is the stuff of dreams, therefore fantasy but not without humour, and I have no idea right now how best it would be published as a book or whether best to have it played on television or radio or stage or screen - or each or all of these. 

What's it about? It is called Two Gentlemen in a Far Away Land and is an account of William Shakespeareand Robert Burns' afterlife, their perambulations through the Earthly elements and space and the timespan on planet Earth of Humankind. Therefore it is about us; from whence we came, to where we go. Not the why or the how, just the imagined reality, for despite the petty pretences of our scientists and our philosophers the why and the how belong to a power as infinitely greater than ours as are ours from those of an un-namable microbe. Neither Burms nor Shakespeare would, I think, have found such a statement surprising.

Five years ago I wrote an autobiographical poem and this it was that gave rise to Two Gentlemen ...



A Ragged Odyssey
Unbound from classrooms sinceMy fourteenth hormonic year,(Hormonic as opposed to harmonic),And then my first half centuryFocussed on the unpoetic now,Finally I’m here with DeeIn this dark place in Picardy, Where once the roses bloomed,In a rather morbid souvenir shop. And here we look in silence Through sickly memorabiliaAt all the glorious stupidity: The wasteland war that we call GreatThe war to end, but did not endSuch pantheons of heartfelt hate.
It’s here I buy a little book Its title: Violets from OverseaThat speaks of how from chaosFlowered once so much great poesy In wounded fields where poppies blew; It’s writer does not use the word hero,In respect to and of those khaki poets - Like Owen, Sassoon, Ledwidge,Sorley, Leighton, McRae and Co,And all the rest who lie below:Of them it speaks without hypocracy -And starts me on my ragged odyssey.
Over the tumult of the years aheadI make my journey down a trackThat ever leads me, in time, back, Here pausing for long moments With such as Joyce, so very hard, So easy, soldier Kipling, RudyardThen find and read the worksOf those two midnight walkers,That pair of wild Socratic talkers,S T Coleridge and his friend The ascetic mister Wordsworth, Latterday Lakeland postmaster,And after, I skirmish all around  That other wondrous set: Keats,Dreaming misty mellow fruitfulness, And Shelley, wanly loitering - Oh yes, and I must not forget Byron, that bad yet mighty baronet.
Backwards still I go in time Find Robert Burns’ lilt and rhymeAnd learn, and understand of how A man’s a man for a’ that and a’ thatFive hundred and fifty nine times, (The total number of his works)And here I come to know how verse To mean some real thing of worthMust make you want to sing the songs of life, the life of mother earth -Must catch her heartbeat rhythmin barest, simplest, truest words Just as the Scottish farmer poet’s Poems do - for everyone, and moreFor now, for those ahead, for all before
And through the centuries I go, if slowthrough Swift and Alexander PopeAnd Dryden, and old Milton, blinded by his metronomically Agonistic anti-Paradise,To find my parson friend John Donne,(A love-struck island to himself),And all along this distant road The whiff of something fine, some Thing of strength and meaning thus Becoming ever, ever obvious; As incense moves the hardest heartsWhen pendulemic swinging starts.
Breathless from the chase by now,I circle the one I call the other bard, Mysterious Mister Shakespeare, But warily, and for a long whileKeeping from him a nervous distanceUnsure about this special EverestOr perhaps in truth of my ability To climb it or to find the light In words, like those of Burns,Sometimes unknown but always right.
So I march backwards further stillLost now and with longer stride, To fall, entranced, on TamburlaineFrom reckless, feckless Marlow Come live with me and be my loveAnd we will all the pleasures prove, he writesAnd Spencer's lovely Faerie Queen -A love-struck poet’s waking dream,
And that’s as far as I can goBecause my path has now becomeA river of sweet scented mistsThat coil and deeply, darkly flow,That swells and heaves itself in rhymesFrom far away, from distant times
But they are all, those poets, still aliveFor me as in the woodland shade I lie and read and come to understandHow two great brothers of the penTwo centuries apart are still the heartFor me for every consolation;Men born of soil, of toil and tribulation Each with not too special educationBut each with such appreciationOf this, our world, not just of nation;These two who knew enough To move me, it seems without effort,To recognise my hopes and fears,To make me smile, touch me with tears.
For Burns and Shakespeare lifeWas not of ease but constant strife, So high these bardic poets flew,So near the sun whilst in our view, And then again, of what is pain,But counterpoint to all life’s gain?I think of how the wildest flowersIn brightest glory, beauty blazeWhere ordure thickest underlays
And what of my little book of poets,Youths should not have known so much,Writing ‘midst the muddy gore of war'?Well, rust away as may the swordsI shall recall those poets’ wordsAnd yes, we shall remember themDespite what human bedlam yields,
Long after time has healed our Many, sadly, badly wounded fields.

Bryan Islip22 June 2009
Should you be interested, you can read some of the Chapters (or Acts) of Two Gentlemen in a Far Away Land on this blog. Or if you like I'll be happy e-mail you all seven of  the story thus far.
How many Chapters or Acts in the finished work? A number as finite as I want to make it or as infinite as that great delusion, time itself. I would like to spend the rest of my own life in the writing of them

Taking Christmas down

For me this Christmas past has been anything but Merrie. Picture me sitting, almost all the time by myself but  sometimes with glass in hand. Dreaming.

Hogmanay ditto, except in the aftermath when things brightened up for me considerably. Two lovely parties amongst folk I feel so comfortable with - and vice versa, I hope. When I was able temporarily to   forget the shadow beside me of she who has gone.

Anyway I looked in my files for something to blog and her it is.... 1991 would you believe! 



Taking Christmas down
We put it up with no problem at allBright green leaves fixed to old oak beams,And the wreath we gladly hung in the hallOut of wind, out of rain that outside teems,Warmed by the fire we had our own ball
We drank to the health of every known one -And to peace on earth, goodwill to all menBut, oh, when the feast and drinking is done,We can feel the press of the world again,And this taking it down is not so much fun.
They stared: “What a beautiful tree” they said,And we looked with pride on our tinselled towerA star-burst of baubles and lights - overheadA fine fairie queen dispensing her powerNow all to be boxed, our tree dumped and dead.
What pleasure it was when each post arrivedEach envelope opened, pictures admiredReading from whom with the card spread out wideThen hanging our trophies, strings multi-tieredThey’re all in the bin and something has died.
Some echo of good from the distant past?Some simple utopian wish we feel?Beneath the tumultuous hard sales blast:We hear that voice, it’s so clear and so realThat’s why we want to make Christmas last.
Perhaps next yearWe’ll just leave it here.

Bryan Islip12th night: 1991

To be

Since Delia embarked upon her solo voyage into the well believed or the unknown or the void (depending on your own predilections) I have talked with several similarly bereaved men and women about my own, unaccompanied new journey. Almost all have wondered, as have I, whether the journeying on could be worth the bother. But suicide is such an ugly word, ranking as it does alongside all other breaches of man-made Christian Law, that it is never a word to be used in personal conversation. Besides, there are, after all, a number of euphemisms.
Suicide Is Painlessis the song that opened all 251 episodes of the smash-hit TV series M*A*S*H*. It was composed by Johnny Mandel with lyrics (purportedly) by 14 year old Mike Altman. It begins…Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see
That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

… and ends with …
A brave man once requested me
To answer questions that are key
Is it to be or not to be
And I replied 'Oh, why ask me?' …'Cause suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please
And you can do the same thing if you please
Now suicide may or may not be painless (other than to that necessary band of lawyers, officials and undertakers for whom there can be no pain, only profit, in the death of a stranger), but it is certainly not painless to those who cared and are then left behind by he or she by their own hand gone.   
Anyway, I like the Shakespearean reference in the M*A*S*H* song. The following is an exchange between the spirits of Burns and Shakespeare taken from my unpublished novel / play Two Gentlemen in a Far Away Land …
Robert Burns: But this ‘perchance to dream’ - your Hamlet’s far famed soliloquy? To be, or not to be: that is the question:  / Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, /Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; And so forth.
William Shakespeare: Was there ever a man or a woman since the dawn of humanity who did not sometime have such a private conversation with him or herself as did my Prince? Physical life: the single thing allotted to each of us at our worldly birth. At certain times it seemed more a curse than a gift. Who did not sometimes wonder: is not my life my very own to maintain or to reject, either way of my own free will?
RB: That Vale of Tears could and did at times seem so very desolate. For myself there were times … however there were also heights on either flank topped with supreme joy and pleasure. To surrender one’s own life may have been the obvious choice but there was always the possibility of things improving. Hope does spring eternal, as was truly said. And besides, how could anyone alive know that what comes after death is not worse, perhaps far worse, than ‘soldiering on’, as they say. Those mythical flames, Will! All that church talk of hell and damnation!
WS: Of course, even though we could not know and still cannot, even here. But you yourself had little public sympathy for the taking of one’s own life, witness your little verse, the one entitled ‘On a Suicide’ Earthed up, here lies an imp of hell, / Planted by Satan's dibble;  /  Poor silly wretch, he's damned himself, /  To save the Lord the trouble. By the way, talking of hell I wonder whether Signor Dante is here with us?
RB: Dante? I hope so. Should he not have been directed into his own Inferno. We must call to him, Will. Hemingway definitely is here although he took his own life as did his father before him and his father before him and of course that aged fount of human wisdom, fine old Socrates. And there’s many a soldier or non-soldier or icon of religion here who ‘sacrificed’ his or her life for one thing or another. Francis Feeble, Henry IV part two: By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death.... He that dies this year is quit for the next. Suicide by any other name, William! But enough.
*****
Suicide is still taboo; I believe that taboos are or should or will in time be recognised as worthless relics of our past. Far from stepping carefully around these ‘horrors’, or pretending their non-existence, much better for the human spirit / soul and comfort to confront them. And thus to carry on doing one’s best in truth and goodly humour. As I shall surely try to do, myself.

Burns and Shakespeare chapter or act seven

Chapter Seven or Act Seven
In which Burns and Shakespeare take to the skies, space and pre-history.

In dreams we dream of wingless flight; flying solo, escaping earth’s surly bonds, that kind of thing. We leap from some high place, begin the headlong fall then spread our arms and - oh the relief, the joy, the freedom of it! Without effort we climb, we soar and swoop far atop this petty world. Above the rooftops go we, Mary Poppins-style; high and sometimes low over the treetops and roadways and fields and all the earthbound peoples and over all kinds of water. We are so happy. And then of course we have to wake.
William Shakespeare and Robert Burns, as with all who have been admitted to this place are similarly unrestricted. Of course not in sleep for they only sleep when they decide they’d like to sleep rather than when they have to. As we have seen, they can progress under water as well as on land and, by the same token they can wing without wings through the air and even through space. They do so whenever the desire occurs. They can go as far back as the dawn of humankind and as far forwards as the final setting of its sun. They are free to go wherever they wish within those bounds on or above or outside of the Earth. Two spirits together, the bards of England and Scotland now and forever; (‘forever’ of course being the finite span of Man).
RB: Come Will, let’s fly; let's watch the good old bad old world go by. He spreads wide his arms and leaves the ground, skims smoothly through a gap in the overhead canopy, William following. They emerge into a gentle sunlight. The dense, stone age coverlet of great, multi-green, broadleaf trees and giant ferns rolls away into the distance, rising and falling with the contours of the land on all sides except that of the beach and the sea, the mighty sea.
WS:. Yes, but we are to visit Socrates in his earthly time, yes? Perhaps we should ask him first to join us here.
RB: Why not? Instantaneously an old man is airborne alongside them. His blunt, well-lined face is suntanned, rimmed with full-waved snow white hair and beard, not in looks at all the classical Greek male. Good morrow, sir.
Socrates: Good morrow you bid me? Tut, tut, Mister Robert. All our morrows here are good, are they not?  But you wish to visit me during my life on Earth, I think. Therefore might I suggest we meet first in my Athenian jail rather than here in the spirit? I shall then be able to introduce you to those who some will call my pupils or by some my acolytes, or even my biographers albeit of an accidental kind: Plato and Xenophon, you know. All around jolly good fellows.  Oh and that scurrilous Aristophanes as well, writer of well-imagined plays like you, Will. Perhaps we can converse even with Aristotle should he deign to descend from Olympus!
WS: As you wish, sir. Thank you.
Socrates: Call me anything but sir. And be sure to have your questions ready, for from your questions and our opinionated answers might just emerge some new understanding or better yet, some ineradicable truth beyond our understanding even here.
He’s gone, leaving our two gentlemen hove to high up above these forest lands of the Rift Valley.
RB: What a man was that - is that!
The two of them begin slowly to move ahead, deep in thought.
WS: Robert, I feel a sonnet for the old man coming on. Should we compose one together?
RB: Why not? Alternate quatrains, then. But your contributions shall be more facile than my own for you composed so many more than I, Will. One hundred and fifty four sonnets that stand outside your plays. Less than half a dozen of my own! Right, so you first.
WS: Less than half a dozen, yes, but how I admire that one, those seventeen ninety three birthday reflections of yours! Composed on your morning walk you say ... Sing on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough, / Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain,  / See aged Winter, 'mid his surly reign,  / At thy blythe carol, clears his furrowed brow. // So in lone Poverty's dominion drear,  / Sits meek Content with light, unanxious heart;  / Welcomes the rapid moments, bids them part,  / Nor asks if they bring ought to hope or fear.  //  I thank thee, Author of this opening day!  / Thou whose bright sun now gilds yonorient skies!  / Riches denied, thy boon was purer joys -  / What wealth could never give nor take away! He pauses, then; I especially liked your finishing couplet, addressed still to that thrush  - Yet come, thou child of poverty and care,  /  The mite high heav'n bestow'd, that mite with thee I'll share.
RB: I thank you. Consistent was I if nothing else. Always in praise of the virtuously or unvirtuously impecunious!
WS:furrows his brow in thought,  conjures up some of Aristophanes’s allegorical clouds to help the flow of his creative juices. Then … here’s one, then, for dear old Socrates …
He said he had the wisdom so to know -What? Nothing!  But in truth it was most wiseFor thoughtful man is always on his own And scorns the need for obfuscation, lies.
RB: Though nothing is the sum of what he wroteAnd nothing was the wealth he left behind When welcomed hemlock trickled down his throat   What majesty of mind he left his kind!
WS: that’s excellent … so …Master of unassumed philosophyEx mason, warrior, leader of the StateThe star of Clouds by AristophenesIs, of all classic Grecians most great
RB:Propounding truth to his last dying breathas, centuries on, would Jesus Nazareth
WS: That’s not too bad, but I say - Jesus Christ? … I have wondered where he is if not with us. If any man on Earth should be here, it is surely he.
RB: I know not. Perhaps he was not of his time but of all time, as your friend Johnson wrote of you yourself, Will, if that not be to trivialise the Messiah. Perhaps we should visit Jesus at the time he came down to Earth from Heaven.
WS: Well, why not. As is said, the cat can after all look at the king. But now that I’m in the poetical mood here’s a sonnet for you ...
I praise the works of Burns, my Scottish friend,I’ll sing with him the songs of his old race  As auld acquaintance truly has no endWe’re going hand in hand by God’s good grace.
‘For all that’, he wrote, ‘A man is a man’And one life is his for him to use wellSo he lives and loves as right as he can And writes as true as the toll of the bell.
The good folk came out in old Dumphries townTo bury the Bard that all the world ownedThey have not forgotten who wears the crown -Rabbie - now here to eternity loaned.
I read him again, I hear the pipes’ skirl‘Awake’ they say; ‘See your saltire unfurl’.
Far below a great flock of small birds is assembling from the treetops like the issue of steam from the surface of a volcanic pool. The two men come again to a stop, watching with interest as the flock twists and turns, forming and reforming into its own uniquely beautiful abstractions.
RB:  Two thousand three hundred and thirty one fine feathered birds of one species, of one mind, moving as a single entity. Now we know the truth of what mother Shap told us: He who made this world allowed all creatures to talk without sound to those of their own kind. One leader down there, two thousand three hundred and thirty instantaneous responders to her instruction. How very odd that we of later years had lost the ability to comprehend the simply obvious.
WS: Deliberate, Robert. What Man could not understand he tended to discount. There was and is a rhyme and a reason to all things. The good mother also said, ‘But He made only Humankind able to understand other creatures’ talking without sound between each other. Nothing else can do so.’ said she. Shakes his head sadly. So we must have lost that gift long before our times.  
RB: Indeed we became as if struck deaf to the thoughts of others and even to the thoughts of our own kind, responding only to the imprecations of those who would exloit us for their own pointless gain and our own selfishness. Come, let us rise to watch the world go by. They soar upwards and ever upwards. But in response to yours, William, here’s my sonnet to you …
Sing on, sweet Prince, high on the leafy bough,
Sing on, our Will, I read once more your words  
The words that put to joyful flight the birds
With love and tears to spite the furrowed brow.

The words that touch so many human hearts,
‘Though scholars always failed to find you out
‘Twas never you that it was all about;
It was your words touched every human heart.

We thank you, author of transporting plays,
Whose sun reigns high to gild our heavenly skies,
Whose mirrored soul to all of Man still cries
There is the chance of glory all your days!

Self-hidden fount of meaning deep and fair,
Our thanks for that great gift with you we share.
Up they rise; higher and higher and higher yet until in no time (for here there is no time) the Earth is a slowly turning globe, beyond it the spangled blue-black darkness of their universe. Beyond that, invisible, other universes far, far beyond number. This latter, Burns and Shakespeare understand, even if they knpw that human understanding and human imagination, even here in the spirit, are as limited as it is in the power of a thermometer to understand things beyond its surrounding temperature.
WS: Wistful. But how beautiful it truly is, this globe.
RB: And see the colours of it, our earthly home!
WS: Oh, yes! And how proud we were in my time about that first circumnavigation by the Englishman, Drake. Proof positive that we lived not on a dish but on a sphere. That’s why we named our new theatre The Globe of course. Everything up to date in London Town, you know!
RB: And by my own time so many of the public houses in that, by then United Kingdom had also adopted the idea. There was even a Globe Tavern in my last home town.
WS: chuckles. Meg Hyslop’s The Globe in Dumphries, staffed in part by her niece, the barmaid Anna Park, mother to yet another of your offspring!
RB: I was not proud of that, especially as it was Jeannie who needed to take in my daughter and bring her up. Ruminates. However on the plus side, I suppose, I did address my finest love song to that lovely, fair-haired Anna. I never bedded any one of the fair sex without loving her you know, Will. That’s my only defence for the promiscuity as I knew it then and even more so now.
WS: Oh yes, the barmaid Anna Park; she for whom you wrote; Twas not her golden ringlets bright, /  Her lips like roses wet with dew, / Her heaving bosom, lily-white-  / It was her eyes so bonny blue. This lady of yours, she is here. Robert?
RB: Sighs. No. I loved the forty three women I conjoined in sexual union and thirty eight loved me in return - for however short or long a time - but of these only three are with us here: They are my Jeannie - Jean Armour who I married and the mother of my children - the very young Jane Cowan and my very own Clarinda, Nancy McLehose.
WS: Any regrets?
RB: Not here of course, but there? Many indeed.  Not lovely Anna, though, she for whom I wrote. The Kirk an' State may join and tell, / To do such things I mustna: / The Kirk an' State may go to hell, / And I'll go to my Anna. / She is the sunshine of my eye, / To live without her I canna; / Had I on earth but wishes three, / The first should be my Anna. He does a little skip-jig in the air. But what of you and your loves, Will?
WS: I cannot say - as have you - that most of the ladies I bedded were loved by me, nor me by more than a few of them - although many loved enough my money. Chuckles.That last certainly included Mrs Anne Shakespeare. However there was oftentimes a true fondness all right. But here? Only Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Oxford, beautiful and blighted love of my life. Love! All those questions we asked ourselves and each other: Recites: What purpose has that urge that blots all other things, / And drains the mind of all except a certain she? / That has you risk your life to find that old glory, / Grows, some fresh pink rose in thorny secrecy / To prick you, have you bleed no matter what you give? / This agony, it moves from just a thing of glands? / ‘Forsaking all others:’ But a rose that’s not your own, / Is a fire by which the cold and lost may warm their hands? / Questions like your shadow leap ahead across your way. /And answers swirl around in chaotic shades of grey.
RB: The way we were ...
WS: The way we were, indeed! But enough of that. Shall we spin the globe, Robert? From here at the Neolithic back to the beginning of the Pleistocene perhaps, or on to its ending?
RB: Back to the beginning, I think; the beginning of our selves life as we know ourselves on that wondrous planet.  
They watch as the slow turning of the globe below stops, reverses, begins to pick up speed then accelerates until all its colours blur and the land shapes merge into a single, fast spinning ball of flash alternating blue-green and white. It’s rotation slows and comes to a stop, reverses direction once again before re-commencing its slow turn. But now the shape of the land masses are slightly different. The globe is of a visibly smaller size, more of its surface is green and white, less of it oceanic blue. 
WS: So you just know this earth is living, too. / She breathes; each breath a turning season long; / Although in ways unknown to me and you / She hears and shares the rhythm of life's song. Our Earth was already old when the first of animated movement occurred.
RB: And animated movement itself very old - at least by Man’s measure - before first consciousness arrived.
WS: And much more time before the consciously intelligent, bipedal life called by us Mankind arrived. He is pointing to the globe. We! Mankind! The golden species yet in large part this golden planet’s nemesis.
RB: Gestures all around. Everything in this universe has, embedded within it, its very own nemesis, therefore its own time to be. There is no immortality. Only this other place is immortal, William, indestructible - this heaven as it is or was called by Man on Earth wherein we can observe without participation, be interested but without other emotional sensibility.  
WS: Come, let us visit our first ancestor proper down there. Mister Socrates and company will not mind the wait. Laughs out aloud. There is no wait when there is no time.
The two men are standing by the shore of what appears to be a large lake or loch (depending upon whether you are Shakespeare or Burns), behind them the giant forest ferns. A group of brown and black creatures, ape-like, some on two legs and others on four, are tearing at the flesh and bones of a substantial fish, apparently not long since washed up dead. A second group of similar animals, about the same in number, is watching from under the last of the fern/trees, apparently awaiting its turn. But all of a sudden one of their number darts forward, roaring, stops short of the feeding group, raises himself to his full height of about a metre and a quarter to scream out a challenge. A male of the first group stops eating, comes shambling on knuckled arms half sideways on towards his adversary. The rest is a blur of black, brown and red, red blood as the two males and then all of both groups engage in battle.  Very soon it is over. Some of the dead and dying lie where they have fallen, their incapacities wide open to the skies. The vanquished, many of them wounded, disappear unpursued into the trees. Those victorious and still relatively able turn, (or return, for we have no idea which side lost and which won), red in tooth and claw to their fishy prize, chasing off a pair of curiously rat-like animals that had been taking advantage at the carcase of their temporary absence. However, centimetre by centimetre, unobserved by the combatants, out of the water has crawled a scaly, eight metre long leviathan.
RB: What, Will? After all that? The crocodile seizes one of the larger surviving humanoids in its jaws before backing off into whence it has come, lashing into white the waters before slowly submerging, last sight a pair of yellow, blank, unblinking eyes amidst the spreading of the red.  
WS: So here! The violent ancestors of Mhod and Shap, so of all of us. Nobility? No, not here. Conflict, pain and early death from the very start. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. The love that became so important to us is notable for its absence here. On the contrary for the dead lie unburied, no doubt to be consumed by the denizens of the forest and of these waters when night-time falls. Already a blood-orange sun is falling low across the mirrored lake or loch. You know the meaning of it all - of life itself - such a question was at the centre of my plays and some of my verse. 
RB: You often concluded that life on earth had no meaning.
WS: Well, some of my people did: you know, my ‘characters’ as they are called, though they are real enough to me.
RB: Instance my countryman, Macbeth, …
Macbeth appears, clothed in rough splendour, striding along the beach, crowned head bent down, bloody hands clenched tight behind his back. They hear his mumbled thoughts:  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing. He disappears, leaving in the primeval air but a lingering whiff of iron blood, sweat and sulphur.
WS: Of all of mine, the passage most meaningful to our friend.
Mandela appears, that look of gleaming friendliness upon his customarily smiling face.
Mandela: Gentlemen I am sorry to intrude, for you have not summoned me other than by reference. It is true that when I was taken to imprisonment with my fellow insurgents - you, know, we who were labelled as terrorists by the Prime Minister of your United Kingdom - I was allowed to take with me one single book, and that my choice was your complete Works, William. It is also true that I marked the reflection of Macbeth as my favourite.
RB: Nihilism, some might say, Nelson. Might I ask why that particular passage?
Mandela: It is a question to which you already have the answer, gentlemen. Look around you at this ‘first as last syllable of recorded time’. Look to we who are here and the end and look to the stars, my friends. Vanishes, chuckling.
Night has fallen. There are the cries of the hunters and the hunted near and far, the suck of wavelets on sandy shore, the scuttling of creatures … forty six creatures small and less small beginning with their grisly work. Then fifty … sixty one … sixty four … more and more of them …
WS: Whispers. To Athens? Or to the end?
RB: To Athens. But first, I suggest, back to the land of milk and honey. To your sweet deluded Ophelia and my wee timorous beastie perchance.

Memories of a girl in orange

Happy New Year!

I do really hope so, but more than looking ahead with proper determination and hope for things, however undefinable in the misty future, I urge you to treasure this moment with friends and family and all of that precious thing called love. It, like we, ourselves, of course is transient. But in taking to yourself the present, I beg you not to forget your treasures of the past. This little verse is one of my own ...
  The girl in orange
Often, Dee, I see the photo Glass-less, old in battered frame,See I our faces, smiling soAt something…someone without nameWho‘d held my camera on that mornWhen you and I to Cornwall came,Yes, you and I not long re-born:We’re leaning on a harbour wallBehind you sits a solo gullAnd I can smell the sea and allThe world and you are beautiful.With more than twenty* summers goneYou’re still my one, my orange sun.

Bryan IslipAl-KhobarJune 99
* for twenty read forty: 2013/14
Today, the last day of 2013, I have searched without success for that photograph, the one I always took with me on my business journeys. I would prop it up on my hotel bedside table so the girl in orange was with me always. I remember it so well. It is gone now but the words remain, as does the meaning behind the words.
Happy 2014.