What a charming picture

Burnham allies talk up Rayner return

  

Allies of Andy Burnham believe Angela Rayner could make a political comeback if he replaces Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader.

MPs think that the former deputy prime minister could provide the Mayor of Manchester with support from inside the Parliamentary Labour Party ahead of his comeback to the Commons.


Don’t we make our world? Isn’t that our blessed, our betrayed responsibility?

Walter de la Mare - The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)

The basest of all responses

It was the ebbing light of evening that recalled me out of my story to a consciousness of my whereabouts. I dropped the squat little red book to my knee and glanced out of the narrow and begrimed oblong window. We were skirting the eastern coast of cliffs, to the very edge of which a ploughman, stumbling along behind his two great horses, was driving the last of his dark furrows. In a cleft far down between the rocks a cold and idle sea was soundlessly laying its frigid garlands of foam. I stared over the flat stretch of waters, then turned my head, and looked with a kind of suddenness into the face of my one fellow-traveller.

He had entered the carriage, all but unheeded, yet not altogether unresented, at the last country station. His features were a little obscure in the fading daylight that hung between our four narrow walls, but apparently his eyes had been fixed on my face for some little time. He narrowed his lids at this unexpected confrontation, jerked back his head, and cast a glance out of his mirky glass at the slip of greenish-bright moon that was struggling into its full brilliance above the dun, swelling uplands.

“It’s a queer experience, railway-travelling,” he began abruptly, in a low, almost deprecating voice, drawing his hand across his eyes. “One is cast into a passing privacy with a fellow-stranger and then is gone.” It was as if he had been patiently awaiting the attention of a chosen listener.

I nodded, looking at him. “That privacy, too,” he ejaculated, “all that!” My eyes turned towards the window again: bare, thorned, black January hedge, inhospitable salt coast, flat waste of northern water. Our engine driver promptly shut off his steam, and we slid almost noiselessly out of sight of sky and sea into a cutting.

“It’s a desolate country,” I ventured to remark.

“Oh, yes, ‘desolate,’” he echoed a little wearily. “But what frets me is the way we have of arrogating to ourselves the offices of judge, jury, and counsel all in one. As if this earth.... I never forget it—the futility, the presumption. It leads nowhere. We drive in—into all this silence, this—this, ‘forsakenness,’ this dream of a world between her lights of day and night time. We desecrate. Consciousness! What restless monkeys men are.” He recovered himself, swallowed his indignation with an obvious gulp

“As if,” he continued, in more chastened tones—“as if that other gate were not for ever ajar, into God knows what of peace and mystery.” He stooped forward, lean, darkened, objurgatory. “Don’t we make our world? Isn’t that our blessed, our betrayed responsibility?”

I nodded, and ensconced myself, like a dog in straw, in the basest of all responses to a rare, even if eccentric, candour—caution.

Walter de la Mare - The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)

All gregarious functions

But then railway travelling – all gregarious functions – are rather dehumanising. They evoke enterprise and selfishness, even at the ‘festive season’.

Walter de la Mare - A Froward Child (1934)


I’ve used this quote before. A chilling one, because it is so easy to think of modern examples where de la Mare’s “enterprise” has expanded enormously to official, political and cultural functions.

An obvious example de la Mare would certainly have recognised is air travel which is certainly dehumanising. Regimented and prescriptive to the last degree, there is no freedom, no humanity in air travel. Except when flying first class perhaps, but this too is characteristic. First class is always less dehumanised than the rest, it’s what people pay for.

Shopping centres, supermarkets, the Olympics, the World Cup, Christmas, Halloween, Red Nose Day, music festivals, political rallies, a great variety of modern gregarious functions are rather dehumanising. Television too, that can be a weirdly gregarious activity even in the home when merely using up a long evening.

How about electorates as major elections loom large? A fixed political allegiance is not dissimilar to a gregarious function. Not always an enthusiastic one perhaps, but it’s a herding function. Guided to tick the right box with logos, slogans and emotive rhetoric. Political rallies, conferences, parades and stunts. All rather dehumanising.

Modern life, for all its wealth and variety is rather dehumanising in its intensity, its forced gregariousness, its endless pressure to be involved, to listen, pay attention, react and respond to the crowd, the consensus, the right side of history, the woke.

Maybe this is why we seem to end up with dehumanised institutions which do not appear to know what they are doing or why, including political parties and government departments. As for elites, they make their escape via first class as they always did.

The price of the wearer

source

Personally I detest diamonds. They are hard and showy. They give any young and lovely human creature an air of meretriciousness; and merely serve to disguise and conceal the old and ugly. They price their wearer, and only the evil come alive in their baleful company.

Walter de la Mare - The Lost Track (1926)

All Hallows

Stories well told - they remind me of listening to the wireless and what we miss in the ghastly visual clamour we have so busily created. To my mind de la Mare's strange tale should be enjoyed by the flicker of firelight and a glass of something chosen with care. Something to salute Dry January perhaps?

Things change

source

Timepieces

I presume I shall be better understood if I day that the month was October and the day October thirteenth; the exact hour I cannot tell you — it’s easier to get philosophers to agree than timepieces — but it was between noon and one o’clock.

Seneca - Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii (around 55AD)

Tanning

A terrific day when the doctor, with face tanned like a chauffeur’s, returned to Clerkenwell and resumed his work, calm, prim, impassible as ever!

Arnold Bennett - Elsie and the Child (1924)

Childhood nutrition

He listens; ay, his lips moving perhaps, and a smile on his old face like a child asking for a slice of bread and sugar.

Walter de la Mare - Music (1955)

As a child I remember bread and butter with sugar sprinkled on it. Slightly crunchy and not particularly pleasant

Distance

“How long does it take to go to Westcombe across this way?” she asked of him while they were bringing up the carriage.

“About two hours,” he said.

“Two hours — so long as that, does it? How far is it away?”

“Eight miles.”

“Two hours to drive eight miles — who ever heard of such a thing!” “I thought you meant walking”

“Ah, yes; but one hardly means walking without expressly stating it.”

“Well, it seems just the other way to me — that walking is meant unless you say driving.”

Thomas Hardy - An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress (1935)

Monday mornings

Monday morning is a strenuous but somehow a glad morning in respectable households of regular habits. The clean linen is brought out in lovely white piles from the linen cupboard and distributed over the house, and the dirty linen is collected and shamefully hurried away and catalogued in a place without honour and thrown pell-mell in baskets and despatched, and then everybody has a sweet sense of relief.

Arnold Bennett - Elsie and the Child (1924)

Transport

I have just returned from a ride in my litter; and I am as weary as if I had walked the distance, instead of being seated. Even to be carried for any length of time is hard work, perhaps all the more so because it is an unnatural exercise; for Nature gave us legs with which to do our own walking, and eyes with which to do our own seeing. Our luxuries have condemned us to weakness; we have ceased to be able to do that which we have long declined to do.

Seneca - Epistulae morales ad Lucilium c. 65 AD

Rather dehumanising

Seems appropriate these days
source

But then railway travelling – all gregarious functions – are rather dehumanising. They evoke enterprise and selfishness, even at the ‘festive season’.
Walter de la Mare - A Froward Child (1934)

A curiously sinister yet accurate observation. I'm reminded of Red Nose Day with its grim determination to twist our charitable instincts into another aspect of celebrity culture. Is this rather dehumanising too? Yes - I think it is.

This primitive weapon

The vibrant metal ceased to hum; and, as if reassured by this interruption, he drew out of his pocket a large stone – a flint such as his remote ancestors would have coveted – roughly dumb-bell in shape, and now waisted with a thick and knotted length of old blindcord. This primitive weapon, long treasured for any emergency, he gently deposited on the shelf behind him, and then followed it into the pew.

Walter de la Mare – The Trumpet (1942)

The owner of this primitive weapon is a boy so the weapon ought to be familiar. Easy enough to picture from its description, but how it was used I’m not so sure.

As a boy I made many things but a rock on a cord wasn't one of them. Was the cord used to swing the stone around like a kind of crude flail with no handle?

Now wails the Banshee

source

I am in the blues, boy, unfathomable. All is wrong: that I am old and full of wear, that Life, the sorceress, is wearying of me; soon she will play the jilt. And here I sit, cudgelling my jaded brains for to evade the one event. But even the Count is mortal, and his palace of youth evanished in a golden mist of memories. Now the worms’ banqueting hour is at hand, now wails the Banshee.

Walter de la Mare - The Moon's Miracle (1897)

What a gift eh? To draw the reader's mood out of a comfortable chair into the subtle shadows of mortality and uneasy ennui. Passages such as this lead me to stop reading, to stare into the fire and listen to the tick of the clock for a while.

The Listeners

I'm reading a collection of de la Mare's short stories at the moment. I've read him on and off for years and never tire of  his extraordinarily subtle and spooky imagination.

Mist

from photographymojo.com

Sometimes in moods of gloom-like mist
      Enswathing hill and wood-
A miracle of sunshine breaks
      Into my solitude.

In scattered splendour burns the dew;
      Still as in a dream, the trees
Their vaulted branches echo make
      To the bird's ecstasies.

What secret influence was this
      Made all dark brooding vain?
Has then the mind no inward sun?-
      The mists cloud down again:

Stealthily drape the distant heights,
      Blot out the songless tree:
Into cold silence flit the thoughts
      That sang to me.

Walter de la Mare (1873 - 1956)

Making a Fire

Following on from the last post - a fire-lover's poem from Walter de la Mare - suggested by Sam :-

Scatter a few cold cinders into the empty grate;
On these lay paper puffed into airy balloon,
Then wood - parched dry by the suns of Summer drowsy and sweet;
A flash, a flare, a flame; and a fire will be burning soon-

Fernlike, fleet, and impetuous. But unless you give heed,
It will faint, fade, fall, lose fervour, ash away out.
So is it with anger in heart and in brain; the insensate seed
Of dangerous fiery enkindling leaps in horror and rout;

But remaining untended, it dies. And the soul within
Is refreshed by the dews of sweet amity, pity's cool rain.
Not so with the flames Hell has kindled for unassoiled sin,
As soon as God's mercy would quench them, Love, weeping, lights them again.

Walter de la Mare (1873 - 1956)