In defence of Dylan Thomas

Today the free world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And Poet-in-Residence, having once been to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (which is well worth a visit) joins with the spirit of the celebrations. It cannot be right that a wall divides communities, families and friends. But as Hillary Clinton reminds us, we should not forget that today there are other walls in the world, walls for people to hide behind.

Another thought that is in the public mind here in Austria, and over the River Inn in Germany, is that today is the 51st anniversary of the The Night of Broken Glass.
Kristallnacht as it was then called, was the signal for the long-prepared Nazi terror to begin; a terror that depended upon propaganda, false promises of better times to come, and re-education. The signs were: the children forced to spy on their parents, the replacement of schoolteachers with educators, the burning of the books, the terror in the universities, the banned authors, the idea of more living space (Lebensraum) for the chosen - the Herrenvolk, the spreading of fear (the spy next-door or in the place of work), all of which things and ideas led to the enslavement and eventual deaths of millions, mostly Russians, Slavs and Eastern Europeans, and of course to Hitler's Final Solution as far as the Jews were concerned. And so, Poet-in-Residence, as a member of the wider community of writers and poets, and a seeker after the truth, remembers all that too.

And now to the Swansea poet Dylan Thomas who died in New York on this day 56 years ago. He was on his fourth lecture tour of the USA.

In defence of Dylan Thomas

You should have waved goodbye
when they checked you
out of the Chelsea Hotel.

But no,
you strolled into a bar

and a coma.

Too many straight whiskies
they told me.

I think it's a record
they said
you had said -

your famous last words
poured
into the mouth of a tumbler.

And death shall have no dominion.

And so dear Dylan,
you now have your stars
at elbow and foot
and will live in the sun
till the sun breaks down
and with the man in the wind
and the west moon.

Go then! Do as you like.
See if I don't care!
I said.

And you did
like I knew you would.

And now
here you are
dead as nails
and too soon gone.

And soon you will rest in peace
upon your soddin' hill
in Wales
behind the heron-priested bay
and the house-on-stilts
where the gulls will cry and wail
on the westerly wind
that makes the waves break loud
ever loud.

The waves from afar.

The waves
from the mad Manhattan
crowd.

The waves


______
gw2009

The strange world of synchronicity

Regular visitors to Poet-in-Residence may see this blog post chopped and changed as events unfold, for synchronicity is a riddle the answer to which could be hidden just about anywhere.

If synchronicity takes you by the hand you ought sometimes to follow, if only to see where it leads you. Often it leads you to somewhere or something absurd. A silly coincidence. It has no meaning that you can deduce. But now and then the end of the trail will surprise and inform, for it will have led you to somewhere illuminating.

I begin with a definition of synchronicity:

synchronicity: the temporal coincidence of two or more events linked together by meaning, but without any causal connection; meaningful cross-connection between separate causal chains (Trans. of G synchronizität; used by C G Jung (Webster))

The story begins when I was leaving the Thomas Bernhard exhibition. There's a post below about all that. Before long I found myself rummaging in a banana box of bargain books. I chanced upon a paperback book called Those Feet, which I thought might make a suitable present for a football crazy friend of mine. And so I bought it.


[image courtesy of findagrave.com]

The original post began here:

David Winner, in the introduction to his book Those Feet - an intimate history of English football (Bloomsbury) tells a strange story. Here's an extract:

'Those Feet' are the third and fourth words of William Blake's sublime, exalting poem 'Jerusalem' [...] The book's original title had been 'By God They Frighten Me', from the Duke of Wellington [...] Mike Jones and I met to thrash out the question, and it didn't take us long to agree that Blake's line had more going for it than the acid wit of the Iron Duke.
The following day [...] exploring a part of London I didn't know [...] on a whim, I got off the bus [...] the only interesting thing in sight was a small park [...] I became aware of birdsong and greenery and trees covered with blossom, but I paid little attention to anything else [...] After a couple of hundred yards [...] I stopped. I looked down, and found that I was standing beside the grave° of William Blake.


William Blake was the first poet to speak for children in their own right, in their condition of innocence. For Blake, love was innocence; spirituality released from materialism. Churches and chapels belonged to The Beast, the State. His attitude to death was captured in this comment on the death of his friend Flaxman: I cannot think of death as more than going out of one room into another.

Blake said of the following poem: I may praise it since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in Eternity.

Blake's poem relates to the persistent legend in parts of Britain, including Wales, that Joseph of Arimathea, the wealthy Israelite who provided the tomb for Christ, departed Judea and sailed for Britain with a small fleet of ships containing some 500 followers (including Jesus himself). It is said that a group of these followers eventually settled in the Glastonbury area.

The Welsh prefix Glas (remember that Cymraeg or Welsh was spoken widely, in fact it was spoken in 2/3rds of Britain in those days) means heaven, sky, blue. According to the legend, Joseph of Arimathea thrust his staff into the earth and it miraculously sprouted white flowers, perhaps it was hawthorn, and so he came to choose Glastonbury as the place to be.

Maybe Blake was right? He certainly believed that he was. And he could be, for when I look at the boundary of the Roman Empire there was practically nowhere else that Joseph of Arimathea and his followers could travel to.

In the east there was desert and the client state of Arabia-Petraea. In the south the Romans controlled the provinces of Egypt (including Alexandria), Cyrenaica, Africa (including Carthage) and the client state of Mauretania. In the west Roman rule extended from Judea over the breadth of Europe to Lusitania in present day Portugal. And in the north, Roman power extended as far as the Rhine, Belgica and Gallia Lugdunensis (present day Northern France) and included the client state of Thrace on the Black Sea. The strategic and important cities of Antioch, Pergamum, Ephesus, Corinth, Actium, Rome, Lugdunum and Gades were in Roman hands.

Clearly with the Romans in control of almost all of Europe's roads and cities a land route was out of the question. A group of 500 travellers would immediately arouse suspicion. The roads were already lined with thousands of wooden crosses. The way out of Judea would have to be by sea and Brittania, which would not fall to the Romans until 43 AD, was at the time immediately following the crucifixion the safest destination for Joseph and his followers.

The Holy Grail, it has often been argued is only a code name for Jesus. This was probably an idea that Blake had mulled over time and time again. After all, as a ten-year old he had already seen one hundred sparkling angels sitting in a tree.

According to diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, the poet William Wordsworth thought Blake was a madman, but a madman whose work he preferred to the likes of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. That aside, Blake likely believed that the King Arthur and the Holy Grail legend was rooted in the much older Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail legend. He would then have deduced that the two legends were in essence two parts of one legend and then it followed that he could produce the following:

from Introduction to Milton

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

But what has all this to do with synchronicity. This is mildly interesting but in the end pure coincidence surely?

Please be patient dear reader, we are far from finished yet ....

And so, when I first drafted this post and had just finished typing the above poem from Blake's Introduction to Milton, I discovered much to my surprise that today, of all days, in the year 1674 was the poet John Milton's supposed death day. Milton had made his peace with himself and the world, declined to attend church, refused to allow any religious services to be held in his house and then quietly passed away in his bed, aged 66. It was so peacefully done that his expiring was not perceived by those in the room. He was buried in St. Giles' Church at Cripplegate in London.

[to be continued]
[continued]

A few words about John Milton at this point:
By 1651, at the age of 43 or so, Milton was blind. He believed that he had lost his sight by writing treatises in defence of freedom of the press and the English people. He wrote in his sonnet xxii that he had lost his eyes over-plied in liberty's defence. A true martyr to the cause.

And now back to synchronicity. We have followed the links in the chain from the Thomas Bernhard Exhibition in Vienna to a nearby shop and a book about football, and then from there to a graveyard in London and the poet William Blake. Synchronicity then took us from the world of Blake to the world of John Milton and his death on this day exactly 335 years ago.
But there's one more step, and that is via Nicholas Albery's Poem for the Day book where I found the text of the William Blake poem. This book is nothing less than Poet in Residence's bardic bible. And so, looking at today's entry, which is of course a poem by John Milton, I am forced to the conclusion that this was the whole purpose and point of the strange synchronous chain we have followed in this blogpost. It was intended, was it not, to bring me, and you, to this page dated 8th November and to this poem, this message, which I now share with you the reader:

Sonnet xix

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account lest He returning chide;
'Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?'
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post over land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.'

Of course, the bold text is mine. And that is done so that I must now ask myself: Where am I in the end, the end of the chain, the end of the journey and what is the message? Where have I arrived as the result of synchronicity? What is the information I must take on board? Is it that Zen Buddhism is just as valid as anything else? That there is no need for us to bomb our way to the tabernacle or to the black meteorite. In fact, as the poem hints, such fanatical behaviour is pointless. The blind man sees best. That's it. That's the information. End.

___________
John Milton (9th December 1608 - 8th November 1674)
William Blake (28th November 1757 - 12th August 1827)

°The location of William Blake's final resting place (see photo) is Bunhill Field Cemetery in the East of London. But, like Mozart in Vienna, the exact location of the great man's bones is unknown. The approximate spot was only rediscovered in 1965.

Thomas Bernhard at Vienna's KHM Theater Museum.

[image courtesy of Wikipedia]


The exhibition to mark the 20th year of the death of the writer Thomas Bernhard begins in the courtyard of the KHM's Lobkowitz Palace museum where a loudspeaker blares out the recording of the scandal; the opening night of Bernhard's strongest and most controversial anti-Nazi play Heldenplatz. The audience consists of a dozen black crows who sit on rose bushes wrapped in sacking. The sacks are stamped with 5 and 6 digit numbers, reminding the visitor of the Nazi penchant for numerical tattoos.

Heldenplatz, the large square in front of the Hofburg, is best known to modern historians and viewers of old newsreels as the place where Adolf Hitler addressed the jubilant citizenry of Vienna following his unopposed march into Austria. These days the Hofburg Palace houses, not a royal family or a 3rd Reich bureau, but the office of Dr. Heinz Fischer the President of the 2nd Republic, the National Library Archives and various historical museums.

It is November and it is foggy in Vienna, as it often is. And so in the courtyard of Palais Lobkowitz, on this 20th anniversary of Bernhard's passing, I begin to peer through the slowly dispersing fog into the life and works of the author who was regarded by many Austrians as the nest spoiler, the world famous writer from Austria who was never awarded his nation's highest literary prize, a writer who will always remain an enigma and a thorn in the side to most Austrians.

Ex-Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim, the Hofburg's incumbent at the time of the scandal, would soon have to deal with his own scandal: allegations of dubious activities during World War II. Nevertheless, he promulgated the following: Heldenplatz is an insult to the Austrian people.

President Waldheim's remarks were blazoned across the front page of organs like the Kurier newspaper. Austria's most popular tabloid the Kronen Zeitung printed a full page of carefully chosen out-of-context text from the play, as if to prove the point. Waldheim's reaction was the official line which Austria's press dutifully followed.

I come next to a weather-beaten park bench in the museum foyer. The bench is similar to the one on which Bernhard is sitting in the mist in the Volksgarten, a stone's throw from Heldenplatz, for one of his last photographs. It's theatrical. He sits alone quietly like someone meditating. He wears a scarf covering neck and chest, his weak points. It's the onset of winter. The picture was taken by Sepp Dreisinger in 1988 the year before Bernhard died. The bench may or may not be the actual Bernhard bench. We are not told. But more than likely it's not.

There are two rooms containing the main exhibition. A white room and a black room. The white room is titled Einerseits (On the one hand) and the black room is titled Andererseits (on the other hand).

On the one hand there is a glass box which you can enter to be bombarded with endless shouts of Hitler! Hitler Hitler! from the Heldenplatz crowd of 1938 and on the other hand there is a place where you can read Bernhard's sarcastic opinion on the idea of promoting Salzburg as the German Rome: Rome, Church, German, Nazi. A wonderful mixture.

There are many video-clips of scenes from various plays. I particularly enjoyed watching the 3-minute snippet of conversation between Bruno Ganz as a mad psychiatrist dressed in black (Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige) and Ulrich Wildgruber as the blind man in the fawn mackintosh. Ganz, a superb actor, reminded me of Peter Sellers.

Later I sat at a long dining table set for three and watched two video clips of Ritter, Dene, Voss. On the tablecloth there was some food for thought embroidered along one side: We hate all embroidery, even if grandmother embroidered it and on the other side: The one embroiders and the other philosophises all through life.

There was no problem with accessing the various headphones, videos and using the several chairs in the two rooms since the exhibition, on this its first day following its official opening, was not exactly crowded. During the time I was there (mid-afternoon) there were perhaps just a dozen visitors.

A special treat for me was to view a short extract, featuring Martin Schwab and Kirsten Dene, from the first Thomas Bernhard play it was my pleasure to see (in 1988): Claus Peymann buys trousers and goes with me to eat. Many letters and photographs were on display. It will require another visit to take it all in.

On leaving, I found I was pondering a niggling question: Was it meant to be a tribute or an apology? And I really couldn't answer that. Perhaps it was a curious mixture of both; Einerseits a tribute and Andererseits and apology (of sorts). Whatever it is, or was, at least it is something, and something is probably better than nothing.

Österreichisches Theater Museum
Thomas Bernhard und das Theater
5 November 2009 - 4 July 2010
"Austria is nothing but a stage"
Thomas Bernhard and the Theatre
Exhibition only suitable for German-speaking visitors. No English information.

Eye of God or Ring Nebula Deep Field

Image courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day (LINK at Bard on the Run)




Eye of God or Ring Nebula Deep Field

Fireworks and music
implosions and explosions
in Lyra's constellation

and the night drawn down
at the speed of light
the quick kiss and then
the complete shut-down

and soon the waves upon the shore
and are all gone
and one more star and all her children
are no more

2,000 light years distant
and gone
to the ultra violet
gone
to the infra red
gone
to our sensitive instruments
detecting atomic symphony of hydrogen
and gas flung
to the far flung
distance

but Lyra's star is seriously gone,

gone,
gone,
gone

like a vanished bell
in a war
shot from a cannon
and finally
gone
forever.


But Lyra's star repeats
there is no forever
only the moment
of the first word
repeated

fiat-lux

for then
gravity reassembles
from the atomic

and then there is the will
to shine out again
to sing an old familiar song
which comes from the round
molecular tones
of the new star
and the water music
in the the music
of hydrogen
and so there will roar forth
another blast of heavenly
dragon's breath

and the miraculous music
of life!
will be renewed
and will continue
to be forever
reborn

in the lyric
and the music
of Lyra's exploded sun.

______
gw2009

GENESIS

GENESIS

In the beginning was the ROCK

a place to stand

And God saw that the ROCK was good.

And God said: Let there be Algae.
And there was Algae. And the Algae
ruled over the ROCK for three thousand million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Trilobites.
And there were Trilobites. And the Trilobites
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae for fifty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Fish.
And there were Fish. And the Fish
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites for seventy million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Scorpions.
And there were Scorpions. And the Scorpions
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish for twenty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Snails.
And there were Snails. And the Snails
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions for fifty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Ammonites.
And there were Ammonites. And the Ammonites
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails for thirty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Amphibians.
And there were Amphibians. And the Amphibians
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites for thirty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Reptiles and Insects.
And there were Reptiles and Insects. And the Reptiles and the Insects
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians for forty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Dinosaurs.
And there were Dinosaurs. And the Dinosaurs
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects for forty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Birds.
And there were Birds. And the Birds
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs for forty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Flowers.
And there were Flowers. And the Flowers
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs for thirty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there Primitive Mammals.
And there were Primitive Mammals. And the Primitive Mammals
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs and the Flowers for forty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Modern Animals and Plants.
And there were Modern Animals and Plants. And the Modern Animals and Plants ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs and the Flowers and the Primitive Mammals for sixty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Man.
And there was Man. And Man
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs and the Flowers and the Primitive Mammals and the Modern Animals and Plants for one million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And then a voice
whispered in God's ear:
Why stop now?

_______
gw2009

Felicia Dorothea Hemans' Pilgrim Fathers

Poet-in-Residence discovered Felicia Dorothea Hemans' poem The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England in Bill Bryson's entertaining and informative book Made in America with which he is currently engrossed. Only the first two verses of the poem appear in Bryson's book. There's a lot to cram into 470-odd pages of Made in America and therefore Bryson is quite right merely to point the reader in a direction from where he can undertake his own research should he wish to do so.

Hemans, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, wrote her poem, or as Bryson says: 'dashed it off', in 1826 after reading of the Founders' Day celebrations on a piece of newspaper from Massachusetts which had found its way to North Wales and in which her groceries were wrapped. The style of the poem written by the 'mediocre poet' ,as Bryson labels Hemans, is in his words, 'vigorously grandiloquent'. Mediocre or not, the poet counted William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott amongst her friends and sponsors, it fired the American public's imagination and became: 'an instant classic and formed the image of the Mayflower landing that most Americans carry with them to this day,'

The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England

The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed;

And the heavy night hung dark,
The hills and waters o'er,
When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild New England shore.

Not as the conqueror comes
They, true-hearted, came;
Not with the roll of stirring drums,
And the trumpet that sings of fame;

Not as the flying come,
In silence and in fear;
They shook the depths of the desert gloom
With their hymns of lofty cheer.

Amidst the storm they sang,
And the stars heard and the sea:
And the sounding aisles of the dim wood rang
To the anthem of the free!

The ocean eagle soar'd
From his nest by the white wave's foam
And the rocking pines of the forest roared -
This was their welcome home!

There were men with hoary hair
Amidst that pilgrim band: -
Why had they come to wither there,
Away from their childhood's land?

There was woman's fearless eye,
Lit by her deep love's truth;
There was manhood's brow serenly high,
And the fiery heart of youth.

What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine?
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war? -
They sought a faith's pure shrine!

Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where they first trod.
They have left unstained, what there they found -
Freedom to worship God.

_______________
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835)

The Bard Anonymus's Egyptian Poem

The bard Anonymous is a bard who cannot be silenced by the Copyright Police. His uncensored, and in the following instance illuminating words will continue to be heard or be seen wherever poetry has not died.
The poem which follows, on the theme of death, was a favourite of the writer Aldous Huxley. In 1932 the poem appeared in Huxley's anthology Texts and Pretexts. Huxley's books were always controversial and subject to censorship and contention. His novel Antic Hay was burned in Cairo.

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) died at his home in Hollywood on the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

Egyptian Poem

Death is before me to-day,
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness;

Death is before me today,
Like the odour of myrrh,
Like sitting under the sail on a windy day;

Death is before me to-day,
Like the odour of lotus flowers,
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness;

Death is before me to-day,
Like the course of the freshet,
Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house,
When he has spent years in captivity.

______
anon.

Sven De Swerts at Cafe´ Kafka

Gothic bard Sven de Swerts (http://spinyopaat.blogspot.com) will be at the Vienna International Film Festival, the Viennale, with his short film Beijing Story scheduled to be screened tomorrow 4th November.

On Friday evening, the 6th, Sven de Swerts is scheduled to take centre stage, as special guest, at the Labyrinth Poets poetry mic(see A-Z LINKS). Labyrinth poets always meet on the first Friday monthly at Cafe´ Kafka commencing shortly after 8pm. According to his blog he's due at Kafka on the 7th. Sven you've got it wrong.

Poet-in-Residence, who unfortunately can't make it to Kafka, has flagged-up the error at spinyopaat and also e-mailed Labyrinth organizer Peter Waugh.

Hope that sorts it out.

Sven de Swerts' other advertised appearance for November is at the Bru Slam, VUB, Brussels, on the 21st.

Letts' August: Osage County at Vienna's Akademie

Tracy Letts' August: Osage County performed under its German title Eine Familie (a family) is now to be seen at Vienna's Akademietheater.

August: Osage County, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama award-winning play, is something not to be missed; especially recommended for Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee aficionados.

T S Eliot's poem The Hollow Men is the hook from which the more than 4-hour long play, directed by Alvis Hermanis, and three generations of the Weston family will have to hang until death us do part.

Beverly Weston, the family patriarch, opens the first scene ensconced in his favourite chair, a battered and worn leather chair with the filling bursting out of the splits, and recites and repeats the famous Eliot line: Life is very long. He bemoans the fact that his wife is a pill-popper and reflects that he is a worn-out alcoholic and a poet with nothing more to say.

Unfortunately actor Michael König was a shade too quiet in his musings and reflections. At times I struggled to hear him. And this is an important monologue and should be clearly heard for the play, as the audience will anticipate, must come full circle and end with another character sitting in the battered and torn old chair.

The life of the drunken poet is soon at an end. Other characters invade the stage on which a complete little house on the prairie with 7 claustrophobic rooms has been constructed.

The strongest and best performance, in fact it's a truly amazing performance, is that of Dörte Lyssewski who plays Barbara Fordham, one of the poet's 3 daughters. Another strong piece of acting, as always, from Kirsten Dene who plays the chain-smoking drugged-to-the-eyeballs family matriarch Violet Weston. It was lovely to see Dorothee Hartinger back on the stage after her period of maternity leave. She's a fine actress with a refreshingly clear and audible articulation.

Lines from The Hollow Men serve to describe role of the long-suffering and ineffective males caught-up in the Weston family tragedy:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

The family maid Johnna Monevata (Anna Starzinger) is the only one who keeps her head when all around, as the saying goes, are losing theirs. Insults and crockery fly through the air at the poet's wake and from then on everything runs quickly downhill. The family skeletons, the bloodline secrets, all is dragged from the closets. Will the family fall to pieces like the poet's old chair and will it all end as Eliot's poem ends?

Not with a bang but a whimper.

As one might expect, it was all too much for some of the audience who wandered away during the two intervals, perhaps to deal with family dramas of their own. For those of us who remained to witness the play's bitter-sweet ending it was a theatrical moment to savour.

With this play Letts joins the icons Albee and Williams in the fine tradition of an American theatre that scrutinizes closely the American dream and investigates exactly where it's going and where it's going wrong.

The Monkey Emperor

The Monkey Emperor
Every attempt to make us uniform, biologically, emotionally or intellectually, is a betrayal of the evolutionary thrust that has made man its apex. J Bronowski - The Ascent of Man

The Monkey Emperor
Closed his eyes
And ears
And from his mouth
Came ignorance
And dogma.

In awe
The other monkeys
Opened their minds
To propaganda
Became regiments
Of robot monkeys.

They had programmed themselves
To march and sing
To the Monkey Emperor's
Dogma
And that is the tragedy
Of Monkey Emperor arrogance.

But then one day
on the edge of error
one small monkey
stopped
and tried to think

and then he lightly touched
a fellow
gently on the arm.

It was an almost human act.

_______
gw 2009