Bryan Islip's Blog, page 22

Shakespeare and Burns 1-4

For my regular readers, don't say I didn't warn you!  Here it is - the first four edited parts of my ... whatever ...





Two Gentlemen in a Far Away Land.

A Play or a Novel - whichever you prefer

This all takes
place in a land flowing with milk and honey, a place where some folk go when
they get tired of planet earth, or vice versa. Two men meet up, greet each
other warmly, sit down for a chat on a grassy bank alongside the slow
moving Milk river. The sun shines warm but not too warm.

Don’t ask what
these two look like or what they’re wearing. They look as you want them to look
and they wear or do not wear what you are happy to see them wearing or not
wearing.

Most of the
language is here translated into modern English, or indeed any other language
known to or preferred by the listener.  Note also that in a land of milk
and honey neither time nor space (as we know such things) exists. So let us
begin …

Robert Burns: “Now
then, Will, how’s she hangin’?”

William Shakespeare: “That’s horrible,
Robert.”

RB: It’s Irish. Mr Joyce
always greets you with that.

WS: Indeed he does. Still
awful. And I’ve told you before my friend, I’m William, not Will and you are
Robert, not Rabbie. But yes as a matter of fact she’s hangin’ pretty well.
Having said that, I’ve just been watching As
You Like It being played on that television thing with the men dressed up
as 20th century German nasties and the girls as ladies of the night. Not at all
as I like it. Oh, what they do to us once they perceive us dead and gone!

RB: Right. (Chuckles.)
 As
You Like It indeed! You know how much I used to like it. A big-eared hare has come
lolloping over the lea, now sits up on hind legs close by, regarding the pair
with shining, jet-bright eye.

WS: Hello Mister. Good here, isn’t it?

Hare: Yes. None of your kind shooting me. No
killing me. None of you lind or any kind eating me.

RB: We called you ‘Maukin’, Mister Hare. Having seen you
dragging your gunshot self along I once wrote you a poem, did I not? Hare drops to all fours then leaps high, twists in mid air,
comes down shadow boxing his front paws.

WS: That verse - lovely
stuff! Often as by winding Nith I, musing,
wait / The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, / I'll miss thee sporting o'er
the dewy lawn, / And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate. But
sex? Yes, we all liked it, Robert. Ever since that lovely Garden of Eden the
pursuit of such gratification was so compulsive, yet such a gross waste of your
energies and your years on earth. 

RB: I think I had more
regard for animals than for male humankind, William. But all that sexual
predilection! It was even more for most of us than the pursuit of power or that
mystic mythic going by the name of 
‘money’. Sex! In later years they had a saying: ‘it’ll pull ya more than
dynamite’ll blow ya’.

WS: Not too elegantly put but … yes indeed. (Ruminaters
for a moment then) For me there was this dark lady …

RB: The one secreted so carefully within some of your sonnets,
William. Not at all like me and my lassies. No sooner I bedded them than there
they were, in my verse.

WS: Clarinda? Or Nancy
Macelhose as others knew her?

RB: Oh no, not my lady
Clarinda. Never could I bring her to bed. The more she resisted the more I was
tempted. (Wry grin) I tried everything, came so
close, but always with eventual lack of success.

WS: Giving rise to one
of your finest works, Robert. If I may quote: I'll never blame my partial fancy, / Nothing could resist my Nancy: / But to see her was to love her; / Love
but her, and love for ever. / Had we never loved so kindly, / Had we never loved
so blindly, / Never met - or never parted, / We
had never been broken - hearted.

RB: Thank you kindly,
sir. But people and the pursuit of sex whether through its bed-mate love or
otherwise. We were all at it right to the end. (Laughs) Just now and then I look in on one of the Hogmanays -

WS (interrupting): New Years Eves.
No colloquialisms, remember? Goodbye, hare!

Mister Maukin is
shambling off, now and then leaping high, dashing in joyful circles before reverting
to the walk. Calls back; ‘Goodbye gentlemen
both.’

RB: OK, sorry - I mean yes, New Years Eve. But there were
millions of them at it with their crossing of arms and holding hands and
running out of my words after verse one. Of course we don’t do vainglory here,
William, but if we did I’d have to say there was more at the auld acquaintance
not being forgot, when all the rest of it has been than, well, than anything
else written or sung.

WS: You must be right about that.

William holds out his hand, palm uppermost.
Bees zoom in on it from all quarters, alight to deliver their succulent loads.
A small pyramid of honey at once begins to grow.

WS: I often wonder why
I myself didn’t do more poetry in the form of song. Big, big impact. Oh yes
indeed: Greensleeves; Bring On The
Clowns; My Heart Is Like A Red, Red Rose; Ain’t Gonna Work No More On Maggie’s
Farm, The Hallelulia Chorus. He nods ‘enough’ and the bees fly away. He raises hand to mouth, licks up
their sweet libation. Continues … Yes, strong stuff, that songbook of yours. By the way, I
meant to ask you, when did all the seas gang dry?

RB: Honey, honey. Think I’ll join you with some of that.
Robert holds out his own hand. Bees come back, get to work. ‘Go dry, not gang’, I think, Mister Shakespeare! Tut tut.
When? The seas dried up six hundred and three thousand, three hundred and
twelve earth years after the final disappearance of all life. That was two
point eight eight nine million years before the final evaporation caused by The
Contact.

WS: Sad. But not sad for us. Strange how it has never seemed
overcrowded here, Robbie. You would think - with human population escalating so
much after our times surely there would have been ever more acceptances, more
arrivals join us here …

RB: Doubt it, William. I’m told by Mary Magdalene that there
were fewer and fewer deserving of entry, the more and more people and their greater
and greedier consumption. But oh, look here, my friend! A beautiful young lady, floating apparently
on a raft of wild flowers, her long blonde hair splayed out, is drifting slowly
by with the flow of the river. 

WS: Ophelia! (Breaks into song) ‘Isn’t she lovely,
made for love.’

RB: Stevie Wonder. Brilliant! Springs to his feet, flings his arms wide, (forgetting the accumulation
of honey which runs all down his arm), declaims … Ophelia, thy charms my bosom fire, / And
waste my soul with care; / But ah! how bootless to admire, / When fated to
despair! /// Yet in thy presence, lovely Fair, / To hope may be forgiven; / For
sure 'twere impious to despair / So much in sight of heaven.

WS: Heaven! That’s a nice one. He’s looking down at his
hand in the grass. A fieldmouse has hopped on to it, is nibbling away the last
trace of honey. Hey, just look at this little chap. Is
he not enjoying himself! Oh, gone: gone in a flash.

RB: That would be my
wee timorous beastie, you ken? Oh, Timmy, little Timmy. I'm truly sorry man's dominion / Has broken nature's social union, /
And justifies that poor opinion / Which makes you startle / At me, your poor
earth-born companion, / And fellow mortal.

WS: Your little friend is not
mortal, Robert, any more than are you or I, thanks be to Him. William
rises to join his standing friend. Ophelia is seen swimming ashore, climbing
out of the river, smoothing back her golden tresses. We
are all immortal; all of life on Earth such as has been here admitted, whether animal
or vegetable.

RB: She isn’t - wasn’t - I mean your Ophelia. I often wondered
… she was, perhaps, someone you knew, William?

WS: Of course. Every character I created was a person a
compendium of persons I knew or knew of. Ophelia was actually Beatrice
Forsythe, a farm girl in the village in which I spent my youth.

(At this point, gentlefolk, I should explain
that human emotions are all here in this place provided they are the positive
ones - joy, satisfaction, love (non-carnal of course) sense of beauty etc,
etcetera. No negative waves. No fear or hatred or jealousy or anything
downbeat. Anyway, in the meantime the young lady Ophelia has climbed out of the
milk, taken off her filmy dress and now stands there naked, wringing it out
whilst our two in conversation take no notice.

RB: Laughs. You know we were so much alike, William. You had a fancy for
this Beatrice / Ophelia? Of course you did. So alike. We both of us impregnated
young girls when not far out of our minority. What was it you had your Othello
say? ‘One that loved not wisely but too
well’? And we both worked on farms before gravitating to our big cities,
both earned a measure of fame in our own lifetimes, both learned so much from
books without having had overmuch in the way of schooling.  

WS: Oh yes indeed! If I may quote some more from your verse,
Robert … A set of dull, conceited fools /
Confuse their brains on college stools / They go in stallions, come out asses /
Plain truth to speak; / And so they think to climb Parnassus / By dint of
Greek! ///  Give me a spark of nature’s
fire / That’s all the learning I desire / Then though I drudge through soil and
mire / At plough or cart / My muse, though homely in attire / May touch the
heart.

RB: Epistle to J Lapraik. Never
knew the man on earth. Just read his stuff. He’s with us now, so he is.

WS: I know. But you and I
both used things of long ago on which to weave what they called our tapestries
of words. You used your native Scottish songs, I used the Roman, Ovid, as well
as others ancient and modern.

RB: And you ended up moneyed and comfortable whilst I died
poor and most uncomfortable. It’s very hard, even here, to think
charitably about the doctor who prescribed for me a swim in the sea to cure
myself of whatever ailed me, thereby killing me!

WS: Undestandable.

RB: You were the
better businessman, William. I seldom had much money. Oftentimes I had none. Laughs.
But even though it so often worried me I never felt
like a poor man, ever. Hungry yes, harassed yes. But poor? Never. A man’s a man for all that.

WS: Is there for honest
Poverty / That hangs his head, and all that; / The coward slave - we pass him
by,  / We dare be poor for all that! /
For all that, and all that. / Our toils obscure and all that, /  The rank is but society’s stamp, / The Man's
the gold for all that.

RB: That’s it. Pity
about my last verse, though. Then let us
pray that come it may, / As come it will for all that, / That Sense and Worth,
o'er a' the earth,  / Shall take the
prize, and all that. / For all that, and all that, / It's coming yet for all
that, / That Man to Man, the world o'er, / Shall brothers be for all that. Shakes
his head, sighs. Never, never did that come to be.

WS: Perhaps I knewmore
about humankind than you, Rob, and you hoped more for humankind than me. But we
both came to unhappy ends. Me, I spent my life in pursuit of money and position
but I died of exposure after a night out in an alehouse with Ben Johnson, my
old compatriot of the theatre. It was he who wrote my epitaph: Not for our time but for all time. Found
in a ditch, was I! What an inglorious ending. Not exactly any flights of angels
taking me to my rest. I just arrived here, knowing not anything of the how or
the why.

RB: William Shakespeare, man of mystery! But all’s well that
ends well.

WS: One of these days we’ll have to write something together.
Play, poem and song all in one. By Robert Shakespeare and William Burns. Just
for the two of us and anyone else or any other creature who may enjoy it. Come,
let’s go find some of the others. (Calls out) Why don’t you come with us, Ophelia. No need to bother with
the dress.

The three of them wander off across the meadow
and into the trees, singing together, Should old acquaintance be forgot, And
never …but there are no crossed arms. The sun has not moved in the sky, nor
will it move in this land where the trees never shed their leaves and the birds
never cease to sing and where there aren’t any noxious people nor any of the
trials and tribulations that come with noxious people. So it follows that there
are none of the human problems that William Shakespeare and Robert Burns had
spent their earthly lives trying their very best to explain, to justify or simply
to cover up with words of everlasting beauty.




…. Scene two or
Chapter two, just as you like it  ….

Sunlight filters down through a latticework of
boughs and leaves, lies upon the forest floor as flakes and little lakes of
gold. There is the ripe scent of growth although here nothing grows, whether
vegetable or animal. It is just as it is, as for our pair of poets it shall
always be whilst this is how they like it. There are all the sounds of woodland
life: the calls of birds, the scuffling of small mammals in the undergrowth, a
background of multi insectorial droning or buzzing.

RB: Sings melodically without breaking step; Ophelia, Ophelia, how sweet you have been … Pauses, grins What a lovely
girl. So, William, finally we know all things yet …

WS: Yes, all things
that are, yet neither the how nor the why. But tell the honest truth -

RB: - there is only
honest truth here my friend, remember?.

WS: I was going to say the
things we know not - cannot know - they are irrelevant. Curiosity is
irrelevant.

RB: All right. He
stops, looks up through the branches. A pair of tropical exotics are strutting,
fluttering and preening in perfect happiness. He smiles. The birds look down,
smile back. The female drops and  alights, weightless, on to his shoulder. We are as knowledgable as are these lovely birds, Will. Puts
up his hand to smoothe her multicoloured feathers.
They cannot know of Johnson’s First Edition of your plays or John Wilson’s Kilmarnock
Edition of my own works. 

WS: I agree. But who is
this, your friend, Robert? The bird squawks: ‘I am called The Grand Duchess Bollox of Borneo, Mister Shakespeare. Hello.’ Her mate swoops down, alights on to Shakespeare’s
left shoulder. ‘And this splendid partner of mine,
he is the King of Birds.’ Very pleased to meet you,
Duchess, and you also, your majesty. Reverts to their topic: But of course its irrelevant, Robert. He knows and we cannot.
And even if He should deign to tell us, what then? Besides, we both know that
curiosity is impossible as well as being irrelevant because curiosity is
unhappiness because unhappiness is impossible.

RB: ‘Was there ever any man thus beaten out of
season, / When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?’
Your early work, The Comedy Of Errors Act 2, scene 2, lines 39–48, as I recall.

WS: Correct, although neither the phrase nor its
sentiment was in any way original.  

They ramble on through dappled sunlight and
shade, the birds nibbling playfully on their carriers’ ear lobes. Their bare
feet tread noiseless. Warm is the earth beneath soft grasses. The naked Ophelia
still walks behind, silent up to now. Her voice comes to them like the song of
the stars, as the trickle of a summer stream: ‘I
shall th’ effect of this good lesson keep / As watchman to my heart. But good
my brother / Do not as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and
thorny way to heaven.’ Her surprising
giggle is as the tinkling of small bells. ‘Your
words in me are yours; with whatever naughty suggestion you impose. ‘O, what a noble mind is here overthrown! / The courtier’s, soldier’s,
scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword / The expectancy and rose of the fair state, /
The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / The observed of all observors,
quite, quite down! / And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, / That sucked
the honey of his music vows, / Now see that noble and most sovereign reason /
Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh, / That unmatched form and feature
of blown youth, / Blasted with ecstacy. O woe is me / To have seen what I have
seen, see what I see.’  Just as I am yours, William. Just as you are mine by
whatsoever name you give to me. And now I leave you, gentlemen both.’ They watch
her, shimmering, fade from sight.

RB: Oh yes. Ophelia
was and is your lady, Will. She was and is your Muse.

WS: And perhaps for yours,
Rob? ‘And wear thou this’ - She solemn said, / And bound the holly
round my head, / The polished leaves and berries red / Did rustling play; /
And, like a passing thought, she fled. / In light away’ Your words and your
Vision I think, my friend. Each of them is now crowned with his own
holly wreath. The shoulder-borne birds peck idly at the red, red berries.

RB: Yes. But what
then?

WS: Douglas Adams said
that the meaning is forty two. Pure guesswork of course. Fantasy. But the
meaning of life is as likely to be forty two as anything else so the man must
have been correct.

RB: Fantasy!! We know
now that the only meaning to earthly life is earthly death. As well known also
to all our ghosts and fairie queens and witches, not to mention your floaty
little Ariel.

WS: Chuckles. And the witch that pulled off the tail of  your drunken Tam’s grey mare! There’s
the drumming of hooves on turf. A great horse comes galloping, pale mane
a-flying, a ragged figure crouched over her withers, her quarters pumping
beneath a mere stump of a tail. The apparition appears from and disappears into
the tree trunks. Poor old Meg. Good old Tam. Tom, I
mean. He raises a hand to stroke his bird’s red, silver and violet head feathers.
Muses … Yes, as I said, one of these days we shall create
something. Something entirely new, something that asks all the questions that
were ever asked by any of us or any of any. Something that promotes no answers
because there are none understandable by the likes of us.

RB: So we shall. We’ll
get some of the others involved. Your man Ovid for one, and the Persian, Omar
Khayyan, and my fellow Scot Robert Fergusson and the painters Da Vinci and
Vincent Jones and Braque and perhaps Raphael; for the music the piper
MacLoughlin and Wagner and Jerome and John Lennon and, oh yes, the great Thelonius
Monk.

WS: Smiles at
his friend. So you don’t think your own or my own music
could do, then, for this masterwork of everyone’s?  He reaches into the heart of a bramble bush,
his hand uninjured by its many thorns, extracts one of its plumpest, firmest,
most glistening black fruits. Tasty, these. Would you
care for one? 

RB: Thanks. He
accepts the ripe fruit, bites on it with eyes closed, tastes the sweet, sweet
taste of a late and wet British Summertime. Seasons of Mist and mellow fruitfulness. I’m wonder if young Keats is with us. If so he can help
with our creation, can he not?

WS: Yes. Quotes:
Where are the
songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music
too, -  / While barred clouds bloom the
soft-dying day / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; / Then in a
wailful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft / Or
sinking as the light wind lives or dies; / And full-grown lambs loud bleat from
hilly bourn; / Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft / The redbreast
whistles from a garden-croft; / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The figure of Keats appears, walking beside them, his hands tucked behind
his back beneath the tails of a frock coat. He turns and bows. Indeed I am: I am with you, gentlemen. And
shall be proud … to await your call. And then he is gone.

RB: Very good. You
know when you sat your questioning, William? Of course you, reader /
listener, will understand that nobody ex-planet Earth exists in our latterday
dimension without undergoing and passing the interview to which many are called
and so relatively few then chosen. This is ‘The questioning’, as it is known,
where you are in a not unfriendly void and must by power of thought alone
answer one thousand thousand questions about the conduct of your life and times
on Earth; must answer them without hesitation and with utter honesty - knowing
that the answers must be already known.  Were you
worried , Will? Afraid of rejection?

WS: Not at all. I mean,
not about rejection. Whatever will be will be.

RB: No, of course you
weren’t worried. Worry is an earthly condition; 
something we all leave to decay with your famous mortal coil. But what a
wondrous relief when the truth lies bare and the knowledge of what one was - indeed
the use that one was - is there for you to confront. Even though that
which was revealed about the life of Mister Robert Burns under The Questioning
was not so glorious, its outcome must have contained a sufficiency of glory or
something to justify the award of this immortality.

WS:   The light
and the word you either have or you have not, so to speak. Shall we sit and
have a listen, my friend? At his unspoken behest night falls cloudless,
moonlit. ‘Away,
away,’ shrieks His Majesty, springing into
the air, the beat of wings disturbing Shakespeare’s hair. ‘Come Duchess, we must away to find our roost.’ The pair of them
are soon lost in the canopy of a giant chestnut tree. The scent of many
woodland flowers hangs heavy in the summer night. You can feel the soft flapping
of the wings of a deaths head hawk moth and sense the zip-zoom fluttering of
bats.

RB: Sit here? By all
means. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! / Here will we sit,
and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears - soft stillness and the night
/ Become the touches of sweet harmony: /  Sit here and look how the floor
of heaven  / Is thick inlaid with pattens of bright gold. / There’s not
the smallest orb which thou beholdest / But in his motion like an angel sings.’
You know Will, when you wrote your Merchant
of Venice did you not wonder why the music of the spheres became inaudible
to us so soon after our species ventured forth from the Vale of Africa?

WS: Most of our
city-born kind on Earth did not notice the stars, did not look to them, could
not in fact even see them behind the city lights, let alone hear their music. Tiny
insects of all descriptions scurry, jump and fly out of the way and a grass
snake slithers off as the two men sit down. Small flowers close their petals,
bend horizontal to avoid being crushed. The Book says In the beginning is the Word, / The Word is God
by whatsoever name, / And you are born of woman, weakly heard, / At first a
babe all innocent of blame. / But you grow up and from Him turn away / For what
is in your mind is yours alone - /  You
hope: from His protective love you stray, 
/ immersed in guilt, by winds of sin far blown; / Perhaps grow old will
you, (but not too old), / Then learn how not to cheat, to show concern, / Learn
why there’s little worth in glitter gold / And leave when you no longer earn or
learn: / Your pain on Earth is after all your test / For what comes next,
unblessed or by Him blessed

RB: One of your sonnets, William. Nice. I like
it.

WS: Not mine. Someone
in the early twenty first century.

RB: Mmmm … Now let me
have it in your Latin … no, don’t. Listen to my song. I’m going to match it to
the stars as I go along … as I make it up … You recall the tune to Ae Fond Kiss, William?

WS: Of course.

RB: Here goes then … ‘Nothing’s crude and nothing’s cruel / Nothing
here emotions fuel  / Perfect peace and
joy we share it / Brother love, no need to spare it. / Dark despair we’ve left
behind us / Though love for the world reminds us / To the stars such love can
take me / And false love no longer break me.’

WS: That’s good,
Robert; more of the verses?

RB: Later. But pray look
up. We can go anywhere up there now. Anywhere we want to go. There is no
distance, is no time, all things sing and all things rhyme.

WS: But here we are and
here it is without fault. Sits up. How about
some cloud and some rain, lovely old rain?

The brothers in verse, in song and in human
creativity look at each other in the moonlight, nod their agreement. Earthworms
pop their heads from the soil in eager anticipation, the pipistrelles flit
around their heads, needing in this place to catch no insects winged or otherwise,
for nothing here has need to kill to live, unlike the testing place they once
called planet Earth; Earth, where all things animal must consume life, animal
or vegetable, in order to continue to live. The sky darkens. The first warm
raindrops pitter-splatter down. All their world is singing to the music of the
stars.




Act 3 or chapter 3 …

RB: It falleth as the
gentle rain from heaven - but now enough. What say you, my friend?

WS: All right.  The rain lessens, trickles to a stop.
Scents of wet grasses and foliage. Drip-drip-plop. Out of the trees comes an
upright shape on two legs carrying a light coloured bundle. The sky clears,
slowly lightens as slow grows the new music, the music of the dawn, of organic
happiness: Beethoven’s Fifth. All the chirping, cheeping, trilling of birdsong
mingles and blends into a single perfection. From deep in the forest comes the
growling, coughing hiccup of a contented lion. The dark shape is resolving
itself into a large black man carrying a small white woman. He is crying; silent
tears. She is dead.

Othello addresses his
burden, having recently discovered his awful
mistake … Now: how dost thou look now? O ill-starred wench / Pale as thy
smock, when we shall meet at count,   (day of
judgement) / This look of mine will hurl my soul
from heaven, / And fiends will snatch at it: cold, cold, my girl, / Even like
thy chastity; O cursed slave! / Whip me, you devils, / From the possession of
this heavenly sight, / Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur, / Wash me
in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! / Oh Desdemona, Desdemona dead

RB: Sighs,
shakes his head, his hair untouched by rain. So much
error, so much love, pain and suffering. All a single trial for this. On your
stage as always in your life, William. And mine. And all.

WS: Oh yes. Nods,
shrugs his shoulders, lays back against the bank.

RB: And that is what
you did better than any of us. You held up your mirror, daring all to take a
look. Plucks and chews on a blade of sweetest, raindropped grass.

WS: Chuckles. After I jumped ship and reached London I got myself in with the so-called
literati and soon realised that my new friend Pip Marlowe had hit on a money
making formula. He told me it was all in just one of his lines. Sits up,
strikes theatrical pose:“Come live with me and be my
love and we shall all the pleasures prove,” That is it. Prose as poetry.
All human emotion especially sex mixed in with all the other pleasures and all
the many pains. I expanded on that in my plays and some of my sonnets and lived
a lot longer than Pip in order to do so. I was quite handy with the cold blade
you know, but not like him, Marlowe. So quick to offend and take offence. He
was never going to live long. I looked for him here, Robert but … (sighs)
nothing.

RB:
Reborn to try again, perhaps? Great shame. Sits
up, the better to regard Othello and his burden. This
is how I would have had it, William … For I confess I was as greatly concerned
with love and the act of love as with the equality of all, whether the loved, the
lovely or those unloved. See here … Desdemona
stirs, raises herself in her husband’s arms, slips to the ground and sings … Behold, my love, how green the groves,/ The primrose
banks how fair; / The balmy gales awake the flowers, / Curl more thy wavy hair.
She
dances lightly around Othello, smiling, her loose dress flowing like that slow
moving river of milk, stooping now and again to pluck a flower from the forest
floor … I have wished only for us to be together, she murmurs, living
the simple life away from the burden of State. You know, husband mine, we are
all the children of Nature, are we not? A black bird emerges from the
trees, swoops around her garlanded head. She sings on … The blackbird shuns the palace gay, / And o'er the
cottage sings: / For Nature smiles as sweet, I say, / To Shepherds as to Kings.
// Let minstrels sweep their skilful string, / In lordly lighted hall: / I hear
you play the simple reed, / Blythe where the cuckoos call. Flotal music: King Harry’s Greensleeves. Othello
reaches out. The light of love is in his eyes. He takes her hand. They step
soft and lightly turn. The pair are a golden misted mirage, then are gone.

RB: You see, William? Her
hair was like the curling mist, / That climbs the mountain-side and sighs,
/  When flower-reviving rains are past; / And she had two sparkling
roguish eyes.

WS: Oh yes, you were so
much more than I the poet as well as the romantic. But my Othello was a
tragedy, not a romance. You said it; I tried to mirror life and life must
always be a tragedy. Because it always ends in death. Of course you and I know
now that death is no tragedy but we didn’t know that there and then, did we?
Only the most blameless, most at peace, most benevolent and most pious welcomed
what our friend, the Welshman Dylan Thomas called the dying of the light.
The vast majority of good health and sound mind dreaded the onrush of their
dying day. However pain-filled their lives were, had been, they wanted more.
Very odd indeed. Chuckles. Most in my day were
as convinced of this afterlife as they were afraid of it - and with good reason.


RB: Atheism was still
a crime in my age, tantamount almost to witchcraft. But then look. How soon did
our so called science demand its own atheism! By the twenty first century how
few believed in anything other than that which they could see, smell, hear,
touch, or read about in so-called newspapers.

WS: The understanding
that alone lifted our kind above others cast aside as of no importance,
replaced by mere mechanics.

RB: How soon all gone.


WS: Right. Where most
of that most are now we know not. Reborn to try again? Perhaps. It is of no
importance. But romance! Yes, romance was the saving grace. That and our
exposure on Earth to the uplift of the so-called arts. His hands behind
his head, he’s watching through slitted eyes the play of sunlight through wispy
cloud, listening idly to the drone of insect life.

RB: Oh yes, romance … You
id not say who she was, Will, the dark lady of your sonnets? She whose identity
has driven so vast an academia to drink and argument over the succeeding
centuries?

WS: I met her in Florence and later when she came to London. Her name was Bint Na’ir. She was the
second wife of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, ambassador for the King of Morocco
to the Court of Queen Elizabeth.  Messaoud was the inspiration for my
Othello. Ah yes what a fine though very wanton woman was our Bint. She
certainly cut a wide swathe through the ranks of the Globe. I detested having
to share her favours with my friends, even Johnson. But we all needed to keep such
liaisons a secret. Disclosure would likely have been fatal, not only to the
lady.

RB: You had many such
diversions in your life on Earth?

WS: By no means as many
as you, my friend. Forget not that I was so much away from house and home.
However I could never fully expose my adventures in verse or in song as did
you. It is through no fault of mine that generations of so-called thinkers
doubted my authorship. Grins at his friend. You
know, as if we semi-educated country boys without that Cambridge label must be bereft of the finer
thoughts, the dancing words? Pauses to think back, his thoughts as
always apparent to his good companion, then gets to his feet. Shall we move on?

RB: Now also on his
feet. But a man’s a man for all that. Yes, where shall we go, what do we find
there? Your choice this time.

WS: Anywhere and
anything we wish … if I am now to choose … oh, I think the sea that lies past
yonder stand of oaks. Come.

RB: The billows on the
ocean, / The breezes idly roaming, / The cloud's uncertain motion, / They are but types of
Woman. They set off as a black-maned
lion stalks out into the glade, coughs once, swinging his great head side to
side. He pads along behind them and beside him now gambols a snow white lamb,
skipping sometimes, and a troupe of Thompson’s Gazelle spring as if in slow
motion, stiff-legged, high into the air, avoiding on their descent by narrow
margins a flock of waddling geese, an army of soldier ants, the Prince of Denmark
and a lady.

WS: Who’s the lady,
Robert?

RB: I told you. You
know of her as Clarinda. She was the Love that’s like the red, red rose, as
unrequited as it was, physically at least, at least to all appearances. The
entourage proceeds through a grove of massive oaks and out on to a scimitar
stretch of eye-achingly pale sand, then an ocean seeming infinite.




Act four or Scene four, as you will.

The good companions lie side by side on the
sand within the shade of the last of their enchanted forest. Down-stretches the
beach, losing itself to a white edged, gently pulsing turquoise, far away a sky
blue-tinted pale. Alongside Burns lies the king of lions, panting, huge pink
tongue lolling wet between great fangs. He speaks (or rather, rumbles) to his
little woolly friend; ‘Good here, Larry, is it not?’ ‘Yes,’ bleats Larry,
‘Though I would prefer the green green grass of home. Better for my gambolling,
you know.’ ‘There’s a buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees,’ growls the
lion king, ‘And a soda water fountain, and a lemonade spring where the bluebird
sings in that old rock candy mountain.’ His laugh is as a fall of glacial ice
into the Arctic Ocean, the breathy expellation
of it disturbing sand and flies alike.

RB: Will, what on
Earth or anywhere else afforded you and I our entries into this place?

WS: No idea. None. Ideas?
Ideas are of no importance. We feel all things through these, our senses five.  We see, touch, hear, smell and taste of all
things bright and beautiful - and all without a contagion of those three
earthly agonies, the underlying themes of all our scribblings.  An
especially vibrant antelope is running in tight circles, now lands hump-backed,
set for her next spring, four hooves close together spraying fine sand over the
two of them.

RB: Unnoticing, thoughtful as ever. Yes indeed. We are without
hunger, therefore without the need to kill to eat. And without sexual urges for
there is no need here either for procreation or for senseless sensuality. And
without curiosity for there is no need to know. We are forever at the age and
stage at which we left your famous mortal coil, Will. We lie on this beach with
others such as we have chosen at random for here and for now. We can contemplate
all things within an eternity of timelessness, a continuum of space, a
pluperfect tranquillity. We are at peace with and within our selves, unburdened
by the negatives we carried around with us on our journeys through the days of
earthly life both light and dark. We have laughter but no longer any of the fears,
any of the jealousies, hatreds, remorse and sorrow, and without pain or well-hid
bewilderment. In short without any of the emotional ugliness that overlaid our
prior existence like some kind of poisonous shell. Here, we summon our environs
at will so as to live within its never ending beauty and we call up
companionship whenever we desire from such other life on Earth as has gained
entry. You summon me and me you, William, and here we are lying side by side
beside the paradisal seaside with Ryoka the king of Africa nuzzling Larry the
lamb of South Island; with the multitudinous microbia that swarms but harms not
we nor itself nor anything else; ah yes, and here’s your well-imagined Hamlet
and my real, lovely, loving young Highland Mary. So very pretty a lassie, is
she not? And these gaggling geese and gyrating gazelles and anyone or anything
else we wish to make apparent. A distant flying object is coming closer,
leathery wings flapping with the sound of footballs slapping a brick wall. It
is Robbie’s friend, the two hundred and twenty million year old Prince
Pterosaur, the first of the airborne reptiles and ancestor of all the birds. Welcome, your royal highness. Why don’t you rest here with
us awhile?  The giant bird-beast
glides in to land clumsily, bearing with him the acrid scent of all of his kind.
He settles down on the sand, great eyes taking in the assembled multitude.
  

WS: Ours not to
reason why, wrote Alfred Tennison. With all our sciences how hard mankind
has tried to find the ‘HOW?’ whilst so vainly evading that supreme of  all
questions: WHY? Sighs. My venerable Prospero had
it correctly, had he not? A small, white-bearded old man is standing,
looking down on the pair on them. Arms spread wide he now declaims, his voice a
rumble of thunder over distant hills …  Our
revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits,
and / Are melted into air, into thin air: / And like the baseless fabric of
this vision, / The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall
dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack
behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is
rounded with a sleep. The old man, a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination,
bows, fades, is gone. But the other one, the ridiculously handsome Prince of
Denmark is still there, his whisper just a movement of the shifting air that
stirs a trillion leaves of oak … O that this too sullied flesh would melt, /
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, / Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His
canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God! God! / How weary, stale, flat and
unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world! The great bird-beast
stirs, lifts his scaly head, his metre long beak. His small eyes blink. A single
tear exudes from each of his two eyes, roll down and fall into the sand. From
far away within the forest comes the quavering, heart-wrenching howl of a wolf.
Ryoka’s furry cup ears twitch. He listens, unfeared and unfearing.

RB: Oh, William,
William; your poor young Hamlet! You asked through him such questions in public
as all fleshly men and women sometime ask themselves in private. And inspired
such a great questioning in those who had the wit to hear or to read your works.
And all the while you, yourself, invisible. And me? My songs and verse tried in
some small way to set forth, to suggest some answers. My own answers of course,
for right or wrong. So often wrong. I was never enough afraid of being wrong.

WS: But forceful, give
or take the dialect! Such power there was and is in your works. But when we
summon all the others to write that thing of which we spoke we will have no
need any more for questions. No need for stories with endings whether sad or
happy. Just for language as ethereal, as perfect as Hebrew John foretold: In
the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God, And the Word was God … Speaking
of that, we must include Mister James Joyce in our creation. Finnegan’s Wake
is a fair pedestal on which to raise our tribute statue to The Arts of Man.
Now: shall we resume our perambulations? The mighty sea calls loud to me. As
much once more as once it did before … Oh, how well it was, how much loved I the
spread of tightly creaking sail before a fair wind, the salty spray, the
leaning port or starboard; all that straining overseas to find some other
place, to live another day.

RB: I often have
wondered about that great academic mystery in my day and throughout all the
remaining centuries. Where was this man Shakespeare? What was he up to with his
life between the years fifteen eightyfive and fifteen ninetytwo? Of course I
know now that you left your conniving, overbearing Anne and her squally newborn
twins -

WS: - not willingly. I
fled before both the law of the land and the wrath of my father, as well as
that of my wife. I loved those babes, whether or not they happened to be of my
own seed, whether or not I was the as yet unmarried cuckold! I loved not my
enforced taking of those marriage vows. Come here please. I need you here on
which to rest my head. A particularly plump young goose gets up, waddles
over, lies down with feathers fluffing and shuffling beneath his balding head. That is good, young goose. You are all right there, too? Yes,
squawks the feathery pillow. Better here than there, Shakespeare, my wings
plucked bare to make your wretched quills.

RB: You took ship from
Bristol. After
two years of coasting around the Isles of Britain and the near shores of Europe
you arrived in Venice
and liked that city so much as to jump ship and stay on.

WS: Venice was in my day the capital of the
world. How much I loved it there! The warmth, the wines, the romance. Ah, the
romance, Robert! And the more adventures, Enough to satisfy even the mortal
Robert Burns, Esquire! How much there did I learn. What did you
learn, squeaks one of the ganders. Yes please tell us what you learned
in Venice, echoed
another. In one word, LIFE. I learned in Italy from men
and women of great understanding the innermost workings of human existence.

RB: How could people
read your plays and verse or see the plays performed and not understood that
your knowledge of Italy, of
the whole Mediterranean and even of the East coast of my native Scotland had to
be in large part gained at first hand?

WS: I know not, nor
would I have cared. But the sea I knew, the sea and my journeys far and wide on
it - those things I did care for.

RB: Yes, yes. As I
have said, even though it was my good Doctor Maxwell’s prescription to bathe in
the cold Irish sea that led to my death, I too
loved the sea. And, William, you know that I too came close to running away to
sea before my very own sea of troubles.

WS: Jamaica and the
planter’s life. Perhaps -

RB: No regrets. But
before we go I have a question for you, Will. Have you ever been tempted to
re-visit the Globe?

WS: My theatre in London town or the great
globe itself?

RB: Either or both or
even that bawdy old Globe Inn that opened its steamy door not a quarter mile
from my final residence! But ‘great’, Will. you say? That little orb of
spinning rock, our earthly globe? Far indeed from being great within this
mighty vast of no beginning nor any end beyond time or substance.

WS: I have ventured to
re-visit Earth, where on earth? you ask. Venice of course, and that little
village close by Aberdeen where I spent my twentyfirst year in idleness and the
writing of verse, some small part of it good verse,  and making love in
the woods with one not unlike your Highland Mary over there. He sits up,
waves to her across the tawny back of the lion. She waves back, smiling her shy
smile, eyes alight with happiness. And you, Robert; you
have re-visited?

RB: Not very often. We
cannot here be sad but if we could my visits would have made me so.

WS: I was there in the
twenty first century soon after the beginning of  the madness that so gripped and suffocated our
species and so many others, Rob. The unbearable weight of demand from our wild,
wild over-burgeonment. Too many and too much. Much, much, much too much. I went
forward past the apocalypse and backwards to the time of the Great War. I saw
that pain etched deep in skulls which live men could not see.

RB: Thus resigned
and quiet, creep / To the bed of lasting sleep, - / Sleep, whence thou shall  never awake, Night, where dawn shall never
break, / Til future life, future no more.

WS: Yes, your Nithside
poem. But on the lighter side of my visitations, it seemed that one lady
actually could see me! I never in real life terrified a lady in like manner.
She shrieked and called me ghost! I aver I was real enough to she of the second
sight. Pauses to think, then Not a single trace
there now. Everything degraded and degraded until that final sigh of Life and the
evaporation  

RB: ‘Til all the
seas gang dry, my love, And the rocks melt in the sun.

WS: Aye, Yes indeed!
Well foretold. It would be distressing were we subject to such a knave of all
our erstwhile hearts as the thing we termed distress. So glad I am that we are
not. Come, my friend, let us proceed.

The two men arise, dismiss their current
entourage, proceed down the beach alone. They walk into the water until it
closes over their heads. They are in an element so different yet one in which
they feel as much at home as on land. They are embraced by the sea from which
came all of life on planet Earth, its inheritance the exact wet mix of chemical
salts that lived on within the blood of man. Burns stoops to pick up a golden
starfish, her tentacles slowly curling in the cup of his two hands. Both men
reagard it carefully, then…

RB:  We thought
our species so perfect, yet there were none so perfect as is this small beauty,
so much without impediment of disease, unlike ourselves. Three hundred and
sixty seven millions of years older than mankind and there until the end. So
falsely scorned by us in our short reign. Ah, so falsely scorned.

WS: The end is our
beginning. Behold our world.



















 

Wakey Wakey!!!

I'm taking my blood pressure each morning and evening for a week. Far as I know nothing wrong with me. Just doctor's orders. The reason I mention it , I'm supposed to sit quietly before en-wrapping my upper arm, not get esxcited. In that case I really must stop watching Breakfast TV news. This morning's collection of trivia included two items that probably added a good few points to my readings.


Our Chancellor waxing all defensive against media questions regarding his new eleven billion £ 'cuts'- but of course to be effective at some distant time in the future when his party will probably be looking at the government from the other side of the Chamber. Eleven billion? Peanuts! BP Oil alone makes this in profit yearly (even after forking out some twenty billions in damages following their Carribean deep sea  fiasco). Barclays Bank is not far behind. Eleven billion is less than the nation's interest on borrowings each month. So: all the usual smoke and mirrors calculated to hoodwink a financially naive electorate. To repair the damage of the awful years of borrowing excess George should be talking two hundred billions in cuts right now. As well he and The City knows..
The revelation that two million miserable UK households are taking out weekly 'payday loans' - at rates onf interest that would make Barclays or Shylock green with envy. Poor devils. But that's all right. The City continues to ride high, insulating its many key figures against the inevitable bursting of their lovely bubble.

I remember something on radio called The Billy Cotton Bandshow. Mister Cotton opened proceedings with his stentorian yell down the airwaves. WAKEY WAKEY!!!!

More Burns and Shakespeare (part 4)

If you've been reading the three preceding playlets plese read on ... if you'd like to catch up, read the whole thing to date then wait until tomorrow or tomorrow when I piece it together for you and publish the results right here.








Two gentlemen in a far off land - Act 1 Scene 4




The good companions are lying
side by side on the sand in the shade afforded by the last of the oaks in their
enchanted forest. Before them is the down-stretch of beach, then the gently
moving white edged turquoise merging into a sky blue-tinted pale. Alongside
Burns lies the king of lions, panting, huge pink tongue lolling wetly between great
white fangs. He’s talking (or rather, rumbling) with his little woolly friend;
‘Good here, Larry, is it not?’ ‘Yes,’ bleated Larry, ‘Though I would prefer the
green green grass of home. Better for gambolling, you know.’

‘There’s a
buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees,’ growls the lion king, ‘And a soda
water fountain, and a lemonade spring where the bluebird sings in that old rock
candy mountain.’ His laugh is like some massive fall of glacial ice into the Arctic Ocean, the breathy expellation of it disturbing
sand and flies alike.




RB: Will,
what on Earth or anywhere else afforded you and I our entries into this place?




WS: No
idea. None. We know only that ideas are of no importance. We feel all things
through these, our senses five; we see, touch, hear, smell and taste of all
things bright and beautiful - and all minus the shadow of those three great earthly
agonies, the underlying themes of all our mortal scribblings.  An especially vibrant antelope is
running in tight circles, now lands hump-backed, set for her next spring, four
hooves close together spraying fine sand over the two of them.




WS: Steady
on there, have a care young one.




RB: Unnoticing,
thoughtful as always. Yes indeed. Here we are without
hunger, therefore without the need to kill to eat. And without a sexual urge for
there is no need here either for procreation or for senseless, home-made sensuality.
And without curiosity for there is no need to know. We are forever at the age
and stage at which we left your famous mortal coil, Will. We lie on this beach
with others such as we have chosen at random just for now. We contemplate all
things within an eternity of timelessness, a continuum of space, a pluperfectness
of  tranquillity. We are at peace with and
within our selves, unburdened by the negatives we carried around with us on our
journeys through the days both light and dark of earthly life. We have laughter
but no longer any of the fears, any of the jealousies, hatreds, remorses and sorrows,
without the pain and our all too well-hid bewilderment. In short without any of
the emotional ugliness that contaminated and overlaid our prior existence like some
kind of poisonous shell. Here, we summon our environs at will so as to live and
love its never ending beauty and we call up companionship whenever we desire from
such other life on Earth as has gained entry. You summon me and me you, William,
and here we are lying side by side beside the paradisal seaside with Ryoka the king
of Africa nuzzling Larry the lamb of South Island; with the multitudinous microbia
that swarms but harms not we nor itself nor anything else; ah yes, and here’s your
well-imagined Hamlet and my real, lovely, loving young Highland Mary. So very
pretty a lassie, is she not? And these gaggling geese and gloriously gambolling
gazelles and anyone or anything else we wish to make apparent. A distant
flying object is coming closer, leathery wings flapping with the sound of
footballs slapping a brick wall. It is Robbie’s friend, the two hundred and
twenty million year old Prince Pterosaur,
the first of the airborne reptiles and ancestor of all the birds. Welcome, your royal highness. Why don’t you rest here with
us awhile?  The giant bird-beast
glides in, lands, settles down on the sand, bearing with him the acrid scent of
all things living.   




WS: Ours not to reason why, wrote Alfred
Tennison. With all our sciences how hard mankind has tried to find the ‘HOW?’
whilst so vainly evading that supreme of 
all questions: WHY? Sighs. My venerable
Prospero had it correctly, had he not? A small, white-bearded old man is
standing, looking down on the pair on them. Arms spread wide he now declaims, his
voice a rumble of thunder over distant hills …

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

The old man, a figment of
Shakespeare’s imagination, bows, fades, is gone. But the other one, the ridiculously
handsome Prince of Denmark is still there, his whisper just a movement of the
shifting air that stirs one million leaves of oak …

O that this too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God!
God!

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

The great bird-beast stirs, lifts
his scaly head, his metre long beak. His small eyes blink, as single tear from
each exuding, rolling, dropping to the sand. From far away within the forest
the quavering, heart-wrenching howl of a wolf in loneliness. Ryoka’s furry cup
ears twitch, listening, hearing, unfeared and unfearing.




RB: Oh,
William, William; your poor young Hamlet! You asked through him such questions in
public as all fleshly men and women sometime asked themselves in private. Yes asked
great questions and inspired such a great questioning in those who had the wit
to hear or to read you. And all the while you were invisible. And me? My songs
and verse tried in some small way to set forth answers. My own answers of
course, for right or wrong - and so often wrong. I was never enough afeared of
being wrong.




WS: But
beautifully expressed, Robert. And forceful, give or take the dialect! Such
power there was and is in your works. When we summon all the others to write
that thing of which we spoke we will have no need any more for questions. No
need for stories with endings whether sad or happy. Just for language as ethereal,
as perfect as Hebrew John foretold: In
the beginning was the Word, And the
Word was with God, And the Word was God … Speaking of that, we must include Mister James Joyce in our creation. Finnegan’s
Wake is a fair pedestal on which to raise our tribute statue to The Arts of
Man. Now: shall we resume our perambulations? The mighty sea calls loud to me.
As much once more as once it did before … Oh, how well it was, the spread of tightly
creaking sail before a fair wind, the salty spray, the leaning port or
starboard, that straining overseas to find some other place, to live another
day.




RB: I often have wondered about that great academic
mystery in my day and throughout all the remaining centuries. Where was this
man Shakespeare? What was he up to with his life between the years fifteen
eightyfive and fifteen ninetytwo? Of course I know now that you left your
conniving, overbearing Anne and her squally newborn twins -




WS: - not willingly. I fled before both the law of
the land and the wrath of my father, as well as that of my wife. I loved those babes,
whether or not they happened to be of my own seed. I loved not my enforced
taking of those marriage vows. Come here please. I need you here on which to
rest my head. A particularly
plump young goose gets up, waddles over to lay beneath his balding head. That is good, young goose. You are all right there, too? Yes,
squawks the feathery pillow. Better here than there, Shakespeare, my wings
plucked bare to make your wretched quills.




RB: I know you took ship from Bristol. I know that after two years of coasting
around the Isles of Britain and the near shores of Europe you arrived in Venice and liked that
city so much as to jump ship and stay on.




WS: Venice
was in my day the commercial, intellectual and cultural capital of the world. How
much I loved it there! The warmth, the wines, the romance. Ah, the romance,
Robert! And the sexual; adventures, Enough to satisfy even the mortal Robert
Burns, Esquire! How much there did I learn.




What did you learn, squeaked one of the ganders. Yes please
tell us what you learned in Venice,
echoed another.




WS: In one word, LIFE. I learned in Italy from men
and women of great understanding the innermost secrets of human existence.




RB: How could people read your plays and verse or
see the plays performed and not understood that your knowledge of Italy, the
Mediterranean and even of the East coast of my native Scotland - not to mention
your familiarity with all the facets of human behaviour - had to be in large
part gained at first hand?




WS: I know not, nor would I have cared. But the sea
I knew, the sea I cared for.




RB: Yes, the sea. Even though at Doctor Maxwell’s
prescription it was my daily bathing in the cold Irish sea
that led to my death, I too loved the sea. You know that I too came close to
running away before my very own sea of troubles.




WS: Jamaica
and the planter’s life. Perhaps …




RB: No regrets. But before we go I have a question for
you, Will. Have you ever been tempted to re-visit the Globe?




WS: You mean my theatre in London town or the great globe itself?




RB: Either or both or even that bawdy old Globe Inn
not a quarter mile from my final residence! But ‘great’, Will? That little orb
of spinning rock, our earthly globe? Far indeed from being great within this mighty
vast of no beginning nor any end beyond time, beyond substance.




WS: I have ventured to re-visit Earth, where on
earth? you ask. Venice of course, and that little village close by Aberdeen
where I spent my twentyfirst year in idleness and the writing of verse, some small
part of it good verse,  and making love
in the woods to a lady not unlike your Highland Mary over there. He sits up, waves to her across the tawny back
of the lion. She waves back, smiling her shy smile, eyes alight with happiness.
And you, Robert; you have re-visited?




RB: I have not.




WS: Perhaps that is just as well. I was there in
the twenty first century soon after the beginning of The Fall. Ah, the madness
that so gripped and suffocated the species, Rob. The unbearable weight of
demand from our wild, wild over-burgeonment. Too many and too much. I went
forward past the apocalypse and backwards to the time of the Great War. I saw
that which live men could not see, I saw the Mark of Pain etched deep from
skulls to skulls on to the brains of our Mankind.




RB: Thus resign'd and quiet, creep / To the bed of lasting
sleep, - / Sleep, whence thou shalt ne'er awake, Night, where dawn shall never
break, Till
future life, future no more.




WS: T’would never be the same as was before. Oh
yes. Your Nithside poem. But on the lighter side of my visitations do you know
that one lady actually could see me? I never in life terrified a lady in that
manner. She shrieked and called me ghost! Like the ghosts in my plays but real
enough to her of the second sight. Pauses to think, then Not a single trace there
now. Everything degraded and degraded until that final sigh a thousand million of
those turning years ago. Only the melted rock there now of that which we called
planet Earth. No longer any water so no longer any material life.




RB: ‘Til all the seas gang dry, my love, And the
rocks melt in the sun.




WS: Aye, Yes indeed! Well foretold. T’would be
distressing were we subject to such a knave of all our erstwhile hearts as the
thing we termed ‘distress’. So glad I am that we are not. Come, let us proceed.




The two men arise, dismiss their current entourage, proceed down the
beach alone, barefooted, walk into the water until it closes over their heads.
They are in an echoing element so different, although one in which they feel as
much at home as they did on land. The sea from which came all of life on planet
Earth, its inheritance the exact wet mix of chemical salts that so lived on within
the blood of man. Burns stoops to pick up a golden starfish, her tentacles
slowly curling in the cup of his two hands.




RB:  We
thought our species so perfect, yet there were none so perfect as is this.
Three hundred and sixty seven millions of years older than mankind and there
until the end. So falsely scorned by us in our short reign, Will. So falsely
scorned.

True love true story

The following is as told to us by the owner of a nearby restaurant ...



It seems that every year a man and his wife had been coming in for a meal whilst on holiday . They had all become good friends. Then a couple of years went by without the usual annual visit before the man returned with a new lady wife. This is his (true) story ...



On the anniversary of his first wife's passing away the man's telephone rang and rang with female strangers referring to his 'advertisement' in the local press. He went to the newspaper office demanding to know what sort of joke they were running at his expense. The editor showed him the advert and its paid up submission, It had been signed by the man's wife and dated more than a year previous. It included a year ahead insertion requirement and read something like ..."Good man, mature sixty years old, single since wife died a year ago seeks female companionship. Not good at being alone. Telephone xxxxxx"



The new lady was the man's new wife, one of those who had responded to the ad.

The play's the thing - Act 3

Shakespeare andBurns ...  Two gentlemen in a far off land ... continued




 CHAPTER THREE OR ACT THREE; whichever way you want it …




RB: It falleth as the gentle - but enough
I think …




WS: OK. The rain lessens, trickles
to a stop. Scents of wet grasses and foliage. Drip-drip-drip. Out of the trees
comes an upright shape on two legs carrying a light coloured bundle. The sky
clears of cloud, lightens slowly. Slow grows the music of the dawn, of organic happiness:
all the chirping, cheeping, trilling, all of it blending into the single song of
this, a far off land. From deep in the forest comes the growling, coughing
hiccup of a contented lion. Now the shape resolves itself into a large black
man carrying a small white woman. He is crying silent tears. She is dead.




Othello:   Addressing
his burden having discovered his awful mistake …

Now: how dost thou look now? O ill-starred
wench

Pale as thy smock, when we shall meet at
count,   (day of judgement)

This look of mine will hurl my soul from
heaven,

And fiends will snatch at it: cold, cold,
my girl,

Even like thy chastity; O cursed slave!

Whip me, you devils,

From the possession of this heavenly sight,

Blow me about in winds, roast me in
sulphur,

Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!

Oh Desdemona, Desdemona dead




RB: Sighs, shakes his head,
his hair untouched by rain. So much error, so much
love, pain and suffering. On your stage as always in your life, William. And
mine. And all.




WS: Nods, shrugs his
shoulders, lays back against the bank. Oh yes.




RB: And that is what you did better
than anyone else; held your mirror up, daring all to take a look. Plucks
and chews on a blade of sweetest raindropped grass.




WS: Chuckles. Perhaps. But it wasn’t any uniqueness. After I jumped ship
and reached London
and had got myself in with the so-called literati I realised that my new friend
Pip Marlowe had hit on a money making formula. He said it was all in just one
of his lines. Sits up, strikes theatrical pose:“Come live with me and be my love and we
shall all the pleasures prove,” That’s it. Prose as poetry. All human
emotion especially sex mixed in with all the other pleasures and all the many pains.
I expanded on that in my plays and some of my poor verse and lived a lot longer
than Pip in order to do so. I was quite handy with the old cold blade you know,
but not like him, Marlowe. So quick to offend, to take offence. He was never
going to live long. I looked for him here, Robert but … (sighs) nothing.

RB: Reborn to try again, perhaps? Anyway I reckon it a great shame that your
perfect union should have ended like that. Sits up, the better to regard the
tragic pair. This is how I would have had it, William …
For I confess I was as greatly concerned with love and the act of love as with
the equality of all, whether loved, lovely or those unloved. See here … Desdemona
stirs, raises herself in her husband’s arms, slips to the ground and sings …

Behold, my love, how green the groves,

The primrose banks how fair;

The balmy gales awake the flowers,

Curl more thy wavy hair.




She dances lightly around Othello, smiling, gossamer dress
flowing like that slow moving river of milk, stooping now and again to pluck a
flower from the forest floor … I have
wished only for us to be together, she murmurs, living the simple life away from the burden of State. You know, husband
mine, we are all the children of Nature, are we not? A black bird emerges
from the trees, swoops around her garlanded head. She sings on …



The blackbird shuns the palace gay,

And o'er the cottage sings:

For Nature smiles as sweet, I say,

To Shepherds as to Kings.



Let minstrels sweep their skilful string,

In lordly lighted hall:

I hear you play the simple reed,

Blythe where the cuckoos call.




Flotal music: King Harry’s Greensleeves. Othello reaches out, the
light of love in his eyes. He takes her hand. They step soft and lightly turn
as, shimmering, they fade away. The pair are a golden misted mirage, then are gone.





RB: You see, William? Her hair was like the curling mist, / That
climbs the mountain-side and sighs, / 
When flow'r-reviving rains are past; / And she had two sparkling roguish
eyes.




WS: Oh yes, you were so much more than
I the poet as well as the romantic. But my Othello was a tragedy, not a
romance. You said it; I tried to mirror life and life must always be a tragedy simply
because it always ends in death. Of course you and I know now that death is no
tragedy but we didn’t know that there and then, did we? Only the most
blameless, most at peace, most benevolent and most pious welcomed what our
friend Dylan called the dying of the
light - and failed to rage against it. Most of those - indeed the vast
majority of good health and sound mind dreaded their dying day. However
pain-filled their lives had been they wanted more of it. Very odd indeed. Chuckles. Most in my day were as convinced of this afterlife as they
were afraid of it - and afraid with good reason, most of them.




RB: Atheism was still a crime in my
age, tantamount almost to witchcraft. But then look. How soon did our so called
science demand its own atheism! By the twenty first century how few believed in
anything other than that which they could see, smell, hear, touch, or read about
in their so-called newspapers.




WS: The understanding that alone
lifted our kind above all others cast aside as of no importance, replaced by
mere mechanics.




RB: How soon all gone. Man no more,
no more machines




WS: Right. And mostly with good
reason. Where most of that ‘most’ are now we know not. Reborn to try again? Perhaps.
It is of no importance. But romance! I agree with you that romance was the
saving grace. That and our exposure on Earth to the uplift of the so-called
arts. His hands behind his head, he’s watching through slitted eyes the
play of sunlight through wispy cloud, listening idly to the drone of insect
life.




RB: Oh yes, romance … Tell me, who
was she anyway Will, the dark lady of your lovely sonnets? She whose identity has
driven so vast an academia to drink and argument over the succeeding centuries?





WS: The dark lady? I met her in Florence and later when she came to London. Her name was Bint Na’ir. She was the second
wife of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, ambassador for the King of Morocco to the
Court of Queen Elizabeth.  Messaoud was the
inspiration for my Othello, you know. Ah yes what a fine though very wanton
woman was our Bint. She certainly cut a wide swathe through the male ranks of
the Globe, as much as I detested having to share her favours, even with my friends,
even that Johnson. But we all needed to keep our liaisons very quiet.
Disclosure would likely have been fatal and not only to the lady herself.




RB: You had many such diversions in
your life on Earth?




WS: By no means as many as you, my
friend. Forget not that I was so much away from house and home. However I was never
tempted to try to expose my adventures in verse or in song as did you. I liked
to remain as invisible as possible behind my various creations. It is through
no fault of mine that generations of so-called thinkers often doubted my
authorship. Grins at his friend. You know, as if
we semi-educated country boys without that Cambridge label must be bereft of the finer
thoughts, the dancing words? Pauses to think back, his thoughts as
always apparent to his good companion, then gets to his feet. Shall we move on?




RB: Now also on his feet. But a man’s a man for all that. Yes, where shall we go,
what do we find there? Your choice this time.




WS: Anywhere and anything we wish …
if I am now to choose … oh, I think the sea that lies past yonder stand of oaks.
Come.




RB: The billows on the ocean, / The breezes idly roaming, / The cloud's
uncertain motion, / They are but
types of Woman. Laughs. They set off
as a black-maned lion stalks from the forest into the glade, coughs once, swinging
his great head side to side, padding along behind. Beside him trots a snow
white lamb, skipping sometimes, and a troupe of Thompson’s Gazelle springing in
slow motion stiff-legged high into the air, avoiding on their descent by narrow
margins a flock of waddling geese, an army of soldier ants, the Prince of
Denmark and a lady.




WS: Who’s the lady, Robert?



RB: I called her Clarinda. She was the Love that’s
like the red, red rose, as unrequited as it was, at least to all appearances. Touch of your Moorish lady,
right? The entourage proceeds through a grove of massive old oak trees
and out on to a scimitar stretch of achingly pale sand and an ocean turquoise, infinite.

The magic is still there

Why do I read the written word? 



If it is a fact - like a sign, a label or a report designed to impart knowledge - clearly it's because we feel a need to be informed. (Whether or not we really do need to know is immaterial. Do I really need to know about the sexual adventures of a Michael Douglas or the behaviour of a colony of wood ants or the cost in human lives of a mudslide in South China? Those things as opposed to, say, the price of a pint down the local? I don't think so.)



But what if the written word is non-factual; a fiction, a story, the product of a single human imagination? Why read that? As a writer and publisher of fiction I, I suppose like all other writers over the ages have been pondering the Big Question: why would a person unknown decide to give my fiction a little of their money and, of far greater import, many hours of their precious time?   



I can only relate to my own motivation. Reading a work of fiction is for me a journey into places unknown inside the minds, the hearts and the souls of its characters. I want to inhabit another human being or beings. I want to feel as that other person feels, to be and to live as that other person actually is and lives. Furthermore I can dip into that other life, that other world, and exit it at will. In so doing, if the writing is good and true enough I can feel the hurt, the joy, the sorrow, the adventure, the sex, etcetera - etcetera without the personal danger of reality. Without any personal danger in fact other than the danger, should it be a danger, of a change in personal outlook, even behaviour. 



Most of us will recognise 'the book that changed our lives'. Apart from religious tracts, almost certainly the book will be fiction. For me it was Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. I first read it at the age of twenty. How well I recall sitting up in our bed-sitter alongside my new wife reading this, the latest of our library borrowings. The tone and tenor of the story and the powerful way in which it was written, and principal character Robert Jordan and especially the final pages - all this has stayed with me throughout my life. I cannot exaggerate its importance to me or its influence on me. As a boy I had lived through World War Two in London but I can say from this distance that Hemingway's novel - and the others of his that I subequently read - had by far the greater personal impact. 



I am re-reading it now on my Kindle. The magic is still there.

A time and a space

A couple of night ago a very large yacht arrived off Aultbea to take up one of the Hotel's mooring buoys. Not unusual. These boats are chartered somewhere south of here to folk wealthy enough to have a holiday sailing around the many Hebridean islands. Wonderful.



I took this phograph, at exactly 10.10 p.m., from our living room window. We had been watching the ten o clock news with its account of how you are more likely to die if you get operated on on a Friday than on a Monday, its constant regurgitation of the awfulness that happened a week since in South London, its other major regurgitation, that of the death and destruction a couple of weeks back in the State of Oklahoma - and of course the latest obscenity in Syria with that bloody constant political hand-wringing political commentary from those well clear of the firing line. (Incidentally, I'm presently re-reading Hemingway's magnificent facto-novel, 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', set in the 1930's.Spanish Civil War. Nothing changes.).



Why, I wonder, do we waste our lives in watching this kind of  thing? Being brutally honest there's nothing we can or should do about it. If people have to suffer - whether by accident or by act of God or by simple self mutilation does it help them to know we are watching? Does it help us? A large No to both, I'm afraid.



Anyway back to my photo ... in case you ever wondered about what could possess anyone to go live in such a place as this, Scottland's Wester-Ross, look at the picture and now you know. Or should know. Time and space to think. Time and space to live. No place for the morbid spectator.

Burns and Shakespeare - chapter 2

A couple of years ago I wrote a kind of spoof playlet featuring Robert Burns and William Shakespeare, conversing in another world. This was originally for our Wester-Ross Burns Club meeting. I then blogged it. At the last count 'Two Gentlemen' has been viewed around nine hundred times - presumably by nine hundred different people. Here's that first chapter and a brand new chapter two. If you've read the first, just scroll down until you reach the CHAPTER TWO heading, then read on ...











Two Gentlemen in a FarOff Land.




A Short Play for The Wester-Ross Burns Club







This all takes place in a land flowing with milk and honey,
a land where all the good folk go when they get tired of planet earth - or
planet earth tires of them. Two men meet up, greet each other warmly, sit down for
a chat  on a grassy bank alongside the
slow moving Milk river. The sun shines just warm upon them and down  this sylvan glen.




Don’t ask what these two look like or what they’re wearing.
They look as you want them to look and they wear what you feel they should be
wearing.




Most of the language is here translated into modern
English, or indeed any other language known to or preferred by the listener.  Note also that in a land of milk and honey
neither time nor distance exists. Let us begin …




RB: Now then, Will, how’s she
hangin’?




WS: That’s horrible. And I’ve
told you before, my friend, I’m William, not Will and you are Robert, not
Rabbie. But yes, as a matter of fact she’s hangin’ pretty well. Having said
that, I’ve just been watching my ‘As You Like It’ being played on that
television thing with the men dressed up as those nasty old nazis and the girls
as ladies of the night. Not at all as I like it. Robert. Oh, what they do to us,
once they think we’re dead and gone!




RB: Right. (Chuckles) As You Like It indeed! You know how much I used to like it. (Sighs)





WS: Strange, wasn’t it,
Robert, how, ever since that lovely old Garden of Eden, sex seemed to be
everything for so much of the time. Seems such a waste of your adult years there
on earth, doesn’t it?




RB: Well - it’s just the
way of it. The way He put is all together, yes? Pal of mine once told me;
‘it’ll pull you more than dynamite’ll blow you’.




WS: Not too too elegantly
put but yes … There was this dark lady …




RB: I read all about her
in your sonnets, William. Very discreet. Not like my lassies at all. No sooner
I bedded them than there they were - still are - in my verse. But I don’t spend
much time looking down there these days. Maybe
just now and then I’ll look in on some of their Hogmanays -




WS (interrupting): Their
new years eves, don’t you mean? No colloquialisms, remember?




RB: OK - sorry - I mean
yes. But there’s millions of them at it with the crossing arms and holding
hands and running out of words after verse one. Of course we don’t do vainglory
here, William, but if we did I’d have to say there’s more at the auld acquaintance
not being forgot, when all the rest of it has been, than well, than anything
else written or sung by the live ones, poor things.




William holds out his
hand, palm uppermost. Bees zoom in on it from all quarters, alight to deliver
their succulent loads. A small pyramid of honey at once begins to grow.




WS: You must be right
about that. I often wonder why I myself didn’t do more poetry in the form of
song. Big, big impact. Oh yes indeed: Greensleeves; Bring On The Clowns; My
Heart Is Like A Red, Red Rose; Ain’t Gonna Work No More On Maggie’s Farm.




William nods ‘enough’ and the bees disappear. He raises hand to mouth, licks
up their sweet libation. Continues …




WS: Yes, strong stuff, that songbook of yours. By the way, I
meant to ask you, when are all the seas due to gang dry?




RB: When? Honey, honey. Think
I’ll join you with some of that.




Robert holds out his own hand. Bees arrive, get to work. He
continues…




RB: The seas are going
to gang dry any time now, says the boss. When they’ve warmed up their old
planet enough there’s a critical point when all the oceans suddenly evaporate. Too
bad.




WS: Going to get a wee bit
overcrowded for us here then?




RB: Doubt it, Will -
William. He tells me there’s not all that many down there will qualify when the
time comes. Oh, look here, my friend!




A beautiful young
lady, floating apparently on a raft of wild flowers and splayed out long blonde
hair is drifting slowly by, carried by the flow of the Milk river current. 




WS: Ophelia! That’s my
Ophelia, Robert. (Breaks into song) Isn’t
she lovely, made for love.




Robert springs to his
feet, flings his arms wide (forgetting the accumulation of honey which runs all
down his arm) declaims …RB:




Ophelia, thy charms my bosom fire,

And waste my soul with care;

But ah! how bootless to admire,

When fated to despair!



Yet in thy presence, lovely Fair,

To hope may be forgiven;

For sure 'twere impious to despair

So much in sight of heaven.




WS: Heaven! That’s a nice
one.




He’s looking down at his hand in the grass. A tiny
fieldmouse has hopped on and is nibbling away at the last trace of honey.




WS: Hey, just look at this
little chap. Is he not enjoying himself! Oh, but he’s gone in a flash!




RB: That was my wee timorous
beastie, you ken? Oh, Timmy, little Timmy.




I'm truly sorry man's dominion

Has broken nature's social union,

And justifies that ill ‘ opinion

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor earth-born
companion,

And fellow mortal.




William rises to join his standing friend. Ophelia is seen swimming
ashore, climbing out of the river, smoothing back her long golden tresses.




WS: But your tiny friend is not mortal, Robert, any more than are
you or I. We are here all immortal, remember?




RB: She isn’t - wasn’t;
your Ophelia, no? But I often wondered … she was, like, someone you knew,
William? Down there?




WS: Of course. Every
character one created was like someone you knew. Ophelia was actually Beatrice,
a farm girl in the village where I grew up.




RB: Laughs.




By the by, gentlefolk. I should have told you: ‘human’
emotions are all here in this place - provided they’re the positive ones - joy,
satisfaction, love (non-carnal of course) etc. No negative waves. No fear or
hatred or anything downbeat, right?




Meantime the young lady Ophelia has taken off her filmy
dress and now stands there naked, wringing out the milk. The two in
conversation take little notice.




RB continues: You know
we were so much alike, William. You had a fancy for this Beatrice / Ophelia? Of
course you did. So alike. We both of us impregnated young girls when still not
far out of our minority. What was it you had your Othello say? “One that loved
not wisely but too well”? And we both worked on farms before gravitating to the
big city, both earned a measure of fame in our own lifetimes, both learned so
much from books without doing overmuch in the way of schooling, etcetera.




WS: Yes, and we both used things
of long ago on which to weave what they called our tapestries of words. You
used Scottish traditional songs. Me, I used Ovid and those other good old
storytellers.




RB: But you ended up
moneyed and comfortable and I died poor and most uncomfortable. It’s very hard, even here, to think charitably about
that doctor who told me to swim in the sea every freezing day. Yes, you ended
up better than me. You were the better businessman, William. But it’s a funny
thing, I seldom had any money but never felt like a poor man, ever. Hungry yes,
but poor? Never. A man’s a man for all that and all that.




WS: We are such stuff as
dreams are made on. But comfortable in death? No, sir. I died of exposure after
a night out in an alehouse near Stratford
with my old compatriot, Mister Ben Johnson. You know, the one who wrote my
epitaph: “Not for our time but for all time”? Found in a ditch! What an
inglorious ending. Not exactly any flights of angels taking me to my rest. I
just arrived here all by myself. Don’t quite know how.




RB: Ah, William Shakespeare
- Man of mystery! But all’s well that ends well.




WS: One of these days we’ll
have to write something together. Play, poem and song all in one. By Robert
Shakespeare and William Burns. Come on, let’s go find some of the others. (Calls out) Come with us, Ophelia. No, no
need to bother with the dress.




The three of them wander off across the meadow and into the
trees, singing together, Should old
acquaintance be forgot, And never …but no crossed arms.




The sun has not moved in the sky, nor will it move in this
land where the trees never shed their leaves and the birds never cease to sing
and where there are no noxious people nor any of the trials and tribulations
that come with noxious people. So it follows there are none of the human
problems that William Shakespeare and Robert Burns had spent their earthly lives
trying their very best to explain, justify or cover up with words of everlasting
beauty.




…. CHAPTER TWO ….




RB: Sings melodically; Ophelia, Ophelia. Pauses,
What a lovely girl. So, William, finally we know all
things but one.




WS: Yes, but tell the honest truth -




RB interrupts - there is only honest truth here, Will,
remember?




WS: Yes of course. I was only going
to say I think that it’s really irrelevant, that one thing we cannot know.




RB: What, the meaning of life
and all things? Irrelevant?  Stops,
looks up through the branches. A pair of tropical exotics are strutting,
fluttering and preening. Perfect. Perfect happiness. Burns smiles. The birds
look down, smile back. The female drops, alights, weightless, to his shoulder.




WS: Who’s your friend, Robert?




The bird squawks: ‘I am called The
Grand Duchess Bollox of Borneo, Shakespeare.
Hello.’ Her mate now flaps down on to Shakespeare’s left shoulder. ‘And this splendid creature - he is my good friend the King
of all Birds.’




WS: Very pleased to meet you, Duchess,
and you, your majesty. Reverts to their topic: But
of course its irrelevant, Robert. He knows and we cannot. And even if He should
deign to tell us, what then? Besides, we both know that curiosity is impossible
because curiosity is unhappiness because unhappiness is impossible.




Burns nods his agreement. The three of them ramble on through
dappled sunlight and shade, the birds nibbling playfully on Robert’s and Williams’s
ear lobes. Their bare feet are noiseless. Warm is the earth beneath soft grasses.
The naked Ophelia still walks behind. Her voice comes like the music of the
stars, as the trickling of a summer stream: ‘I shall th’ effect of this good lesson keep / As watchman
to my heart. But good my brother / Do not as some ungracious pastors do, / Show
me the steep and thorny way to heaven.’ Her
laugh is as the tinkling of tiny bells. ‘Your words
in me for Polonius are yours as I am yours, William. With whatever naughty suggestion.
Just as you are mine by whatsoever name. And now I leave you, gentlemen both.’ As
they turn to look, shimmering, the lady fades away.




RB: Oh yes indeed, such stuff as
dreams are made on!




WS: ‘And wear thou this’ - She solemn
said, / And bound the holly round my head, / The polished leaves and berries
red / Did rustling play; / And, like a passing thought, she fled. / In light
away’ Your words and your Vision I think, my friend.




Each of them is now crowned with his own holly wreath. The shoulder-borne
birds peck idly at the red, red berries.




RB: Yes. But what then? After that?
After this? All things are known to us now except this, so knowledge is
imperfect whilst all else is perfect. You and I would abhor imperfection if
such an earthly sentiment were here a feasibility.




WS: Mister Douglas Adams said that
the meaning of life is forty two: Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy. Pure guesswork of course. Fantasy. But the meaning is as
likely to be forty two as anything else so the man must have got it right.




RB: Fantasy!! As with all your
ghosts and fairie queens and witches, not to mention your lovely floaty little Ariel.




WS: Chuckles. And your witch pulling off the tail of Tam’s grey mare. There’s
the drumming of hooves on turf and a great white horse, mane a-flying, a ragged
figure crouched over her withers, her quarters pumping beneath a mere stump of
a tail, appears and disappears between the tree trunks. Poor old Meg. Good old Tam. Tom, I mean: no colloquialisms. He raises
a hand to stroke his bird’s red, silver and violet head feathers. Yes, as I said, one of these days we will create something.
Something entirely new to Mankind, something of such a glorious and heavenly
abstraction as to provide all the answers ever needed by any of us or any of
any.




RB: So we shall. We’ll get some of
the others involved. Your pal, Ovid for one, and the Persian, Omar Khayyan, and
that fellow Scot of mine, Robert Fergusson. And the painters Da Vinci and Vincent
Jones and perhaps Raphael; for the music Wagner and Jerome Kerr and Lennon and,
oh yes, Thelonius Monk.




WS: Laughs. So you don’t think your own
or my own music could be right, then, for this masterwork of ours and
everyone’s?  He reaches into the heart of a bramble
bush, his hand uninjured by its many thorns, extracts some of its plumpest,
firmest, most glistening red / black fruits. Tasty,
these. Want some? 




RB: Thanks. You know when you sat
your questioning, William? Of course you, reader / listener, will
understand that nobody ex-planet Earth exists in our latterday dimension
without undergoing and passing the interview to which many are called and so relatively
few then chosen. This is ‘The questioning’, as it is known, where you sit alone
in a not unfriendly void and must by power of thought alone answer one million questions
about your life and times on Earth; must answer them for yourself without
hesitation and with utter honesty, knowing that the answers are already known.  Were you worried ,
Will? Afraid of rejection?




WS: Not at all. I mean, not about
rejection. Whatever will be will be.




RB: No, of course you weren’t
worried. Worry is an earthly condition, is it not, Will; something we all leave
to decay alongside that famous mortal coil of yours. But what a wondrous relief
when the truth lies bare and the knowledge of what one was - the use that one was - is there for you to confront.
Even though that which was revealed about the life of Mister Robert Burns under
The Questioning was not so glorious, its outcome must have contained a sufficiency
of glory or something to justify His immortal entry ticket.




WS:  Yes. The light and the word you either have or
have not, so to speak. Shall we sit and have a listen? At his unspoken
behest night falls cloudless, moonlit. ‘Away, away,’
shrieks His Majesty, springing into the air, the beat of wings disturbing
Shakespeare’s shoulder length hair. ‘Come Duchess, we must away to find our
roost.’ The pair of them are soon lost in the canopy of a giant chestnut tree.
The scent of many woodland flowers hangs heavy in the summer night.




RB: By all means. Should I may be
so bold as to quote your lovestruck Lorenzo … How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! / Here will we sit, and
let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears - soft stillness and the night /
Become the touches of sweet harmony: /  Sit
here and look how the floor of heaven  /
Is thick inlaid with pattens of bright gold. / There’s not the smallest orb
which thou beholdest / But in his motion like an angel sings.’ You know
Will, when you wrote The Merchant of Venice did you not wonder why the music of
the spheres became inaudible to us so soon after our species ventured forth
from Africa? After all, we know it now to be a
reality - all truth.




WS: Most of our city-born kind on
Earth don’t notice the stars, cannot even see them, never mind hear the music that
pre-dating all of which we know. But that doesn’t signify it is any the less. Tiny
insects of all descriptions scurry, jump and fly out of the way and a grass
snake slithers off as the two men sit down. Small flowers close their petals,
bend horizontal to avoid being crushed. Listen …




The Book
says In the beginning is the Word,

The Word
is God by whatsoever name,

And you are
born of woman, weakly heard

At first
a babe all innocent of blame.

But you
grow up and from Him turn away

For what
is in your mind is yours alone -

You
hope: from His protective love you stray

immersed
in guilt, by winds of sin far blown

Perhaps grow
old will you, (but not too old),

Then
learn how not to cheat, to show concern,

Learn
why there’s little worth in glitter gold

And leave
when you no longer earn or learn:

Your pain
on Earth is after all your test

For what
comes next, unblessed or by Him blessed




RB: One of your sonnets, William.
Nice. I like it.




WS: I just made it up.




RB: Clever fellow.  Now let me have it in your Latin … no, don’t.
Listen to my song. I’m going to match it to the stars as I go along … as I make
it up … You recall the tune to my Ae Fond
Kiss, William?




WS: Yes of course.




RB: Here goes then …




Naethin’s
crude and naethin’s cruel

Naethin
here emotions fuel

Perfect
peace and joy we share it

Brother
love, no need to spare it.

Dark
despair we’ve left behind us

Though
love for the world reminds us

To the
stars such love can take me

And no
more can false love break me.




WS: That’s great, Robert; more
verses?




RB: Later. But hey, just look up.
We can go anywhere up there now. Anywhere we want to go. There is no distance,
is no time, all things sing and all things rhyme.




WS: Yes, but we like it here too
much, so we do. Sits up. How about some cloud
and rain, lovely old rain?




The brothers in verse, song and human creativity look at
each other in the moonlight, nod their smiling agreement.Earthworms pop their
heads from the soil in eager anticipation, pipistrelle bats zip, zoom and flit
around their heads, needing in this place to catch no insects winged or
otherwise, for no life needs to kill to live. The sky darkens. The first warm raindrops
pitter-splatter down. All the world is singing to the music of the stars.










 

YES!

Recently I blogged about the venture by UKIP into darkest Scotland, confronting the independence issue. I  expressed in fairly strong terms a YES viewpoint. 

 

My friend e-mailed me his rejoinder, agreeing with the YES and saying... And I think if England were offered a
referendum to withdraw from this miserable marriage, I think the result would be
an overwhelming Yes. Ah, but what about custody of the children? Those
two fine Scottish banks which have bankrupted the UK ? 

 

My response:



 

That's an easy one for Salmon. Scotland takes over
'ownership' of RBS and BoS at current share price, so nationalising each of
them*. Then declaring them bankrupt, firing their entire management echelons
and closing all 'divisions' other than Retail High Street, at the same time
forbidding any kind of unauthorised use of depositor's money other than holding
it safely, charging a fee for so doing. In other words, be a bloody BANK once
again, as opposed to the kind of awfulness that Jesus once threw out of the
temple - and you yourself commented on and warned about back in
2008.

And yes, I do agree that England would vote for
divorce. And should. Successive Scottish Prime Ministers of the UK,
(current incumbent  of course being very much one of them by ancestry), and
Chancellors have done quite enough damage to convince me it's some kind of fifth
column implanted by Salmond, Merkel and the European Chorus much evident in last
nights farcical extravaganza, which I'm delighted to report we missed in favour
of a great Swedish drama. 

 

* Liquidating all borrowings and closing out all debtors as is the usual  thing with nationalisation.


 

So I thought to share the discourse with you. 

 

Hey, I've just thought of a p.s. Each of the High Street retail banks could be separately (individually) privatised. 




 

 

Bryan

 

----- Original Message -----

From: profitpie@aol.com


To: Bryan Islip

Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2013 7:21 AM

Subject: Re: Bryan Islip



Hear hear

And I think if England were offered a
referendum to withdraw from this miserable marriage, I think the result would be
an overwhelming Yes.

Ah, but what about custody of the children? Those
two fine Scottish banks which have bankrupted the UK ?



BlackBerry® for the Insecure on the move !

All things bright and beautiful

If you're sitting on the main setteee in our living room you can look out of a window directly on to the saltwaters of Loch Ewe. Some weeks ago, one flat calm early morning, we saw first one then a pair of rare great northern (or were they the equally rare black-throated?) divers busily submerging and re-emerging, sometimes with small fish in their beaks. After an hour or two they were gone only to reappear the next day in the same way. But eventually only one of them arrived, and we deduced that the other was incubating eggs on one of the remote inland lochs where such birds invariably breed. Breed on the freshwater, feed on the salt seems to be the order of their day. It reminded us of the time we sat eating our sandwiches by the inland water known locally as Goose Loch, watching a pair of divers instructing their three youngsters on flight and the fine arts of taking off on water. Comical. Time after time the babes would flap across the surface in a great splashing and spraying, only to sink back to exhausted floatation, parents calling out their strident admonishments or encouragements.  Eventually of course the first babe got itself airborne. What a triumph! We put down our sandwiches and spontaneously clapped our hands.



Two mornings ago we looked out of our bedroom window, transfixed by the wondrous sight of an adult otter teaching two of its cubs about shallow water swimming / fishing. Or were they all just playing?  I'd like to think so. Wildlife is not all, nor is it always about the serious business of survival. Bit like you and me really.



And then, two late evenings ago, in the half light, I looked out of the kitchen window on to our little bit of back lawn. Each morning we scatter seeds and peanuts and other kitchen scraps for a great miscellany of birds, large and small. (I'm sorry to say that grassy patch has become a dining table for sparrow and other hawks. But you can't please all the birds all the time and they all have to live - or try to live.) Anyway there, helping himself to the remains of the largesse was a bushy tailed pine marten. I reckon it had to be a male because of its size. Last night Dee put out peanut butter and jam sandwiches but we saw no return visit, although this morning all that had gone. Probably the greedy gulls. But maybe, just maybe, we'll have made a new friend. One who won't stand for any nonsense, even from the gulls, even from the hawks.If so I'll be trying to take photos for posting here.