Guinevere

the courage to do
wrong — all our very cheapest
stories recognise
— in some blind way — that nothing
makes sense like a paradox

My last night’s dream was really quite powerful and significant. It entailed my being seduced by Beryl Graves, the wife of the poet Robert Graves. Currently I am reading his historical novel Count Belisarius, and finding it a little bit tedious. Graves is an important figure for me. He captured my imagination in my mid-twenties, when I was struggling with so-called ‘psychotic’ experiences, and I made the journey to his house in Spain, in 1982, to try and gain enlightenment from the great man. I knocked on the door and was kindly entertained for an hour by his wife (then in her sixties) while Robert himself sat inert in a wheelchair. He was 87 and had retreated into dementia.

organic fact

ego — fiction — fact
— who can fathom the divine
interplay of these
co-ordinates? — blindly, we
embody all three at once

I dreamed last night of the poet Robert Graves. He was saying that nobody has ever properly analysed the statement: ‘Fiction has the power to alter fact’. The exact wording of the statement was actually rather vague, but that was the gist. Last Christmas I asked my mother to give me Clive James’ translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy as a xmas gift. I did read the first section — the Inferno — but it was a struggle and I have now officially given up the ambition to read the rest of it. I’m positive if I could read it in the original Italian I would adore it. This Christmas she is giving me Yuval Noah Harari’s SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND. Harari’s idea is that what distinguishes humans from animals is the ability to co-operate based on collective belief in a story. It’s astonishing how consistently and frequently this notion — this vision — of Harari’s keeps coming back to me in the process of blogging my dreams every morning. Hopefully the book won’t disappoint. Below is an extract from the Foreword to Robert Graves’ Poems 1970-72. When I first came across this paragraph in 1982, it was a revelation, and has stayed with me ever since:

Little need be added to my Foreword in the Green Sailed Vessel. I wrote there that, now well into my seventy-sixth year, I had been increasingly concerned with hidden powers of poetic thought, which raise and solve problems of advanced mathematics and physics. The word “poetry” meant in Greek the “act of making” — a sense that has survived in the old Scottish word for poet, namely “Maker”….The poetic power to make things happen, as understood for instance by the early mediaeval Irish master-poets, and by their Middle Eastern sufic contemporaries, raises simple love alliances to a point where physical absence supplies living presence. These experiences occur not only in the fourth dimension, where prison walls are easily cheated…..but in the fifth, where time proves as manipulable as is vertical or lateral space in the usual third dimension, and where seemingly impossible coincidences and so-called ‘Acts of God’ occur almost as a matter of course. In poetry, the fifth dimensional co-identification of lovers is truth rather than idealistic fancy….

postmodern hell

how shall I preserve
my soul? — damnation is a
consumer, grazing
the multiplicity of
competing philosophies

And yet there is no answer for me in single-minded devotion to any single religion or philosophy. Christianity is the religion of my childhood, which my inner child responds to like no other. Buddhism seduces me with the promise of a superior spirituality. Taoism accords most closely with the Jungian doctrine of opposites which I do go along with, heart and soul. But there is something so coldly intellectual in the idea of opposites as the basis of all psychic life. And if Jung was right about it, how come the world hasn’t embraced the idea? Or to put that another way — what use to me, to possess ‘the truth’, if I am in such a tiny minority of believers? And how can it be science (as it claims to be) if it requires me to believe? The fourth belief system I am tempted by is the belief in a mother goddess. This relates to last night’s dream where I was in the garden of Robert Graves’ house in Mallorca, getting along famously with Graves himself. In reality I met him when I turned up at his house unannounced in 1983, and his wife kindly entertained me for half an hour or so. Graves himself was in a wheelchair and by that time had retreated into dementia and silence. For a Wikipedia summary of the Graves-goddess connection see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Goddess

peek-a-boo

the question isn’t
whether our species will die
— it’s are we dying
young, imagining death won’t
see us if we hide our eyes?

Wish I could remember last night’s dream more clearly. Pervaded (as so often) by the figure of Robert Graves, I seemed to be at the very end of the world. There was no animal life at all except one particular species (not homo sapiens) which had found a way to survive, and which had produced a brood of babies. There did seem to be plenty of vegetation. I had the gift of time travel, so I was whizzing around in time trying to find the optimum conditions where these baby animals could survive.

holding

reality is
what? — a puzzle to be held
caringly — sucked, chewed,
spat out and re-examined –
but above all to be held

I’ve managed to cut down drastically the amount of time I spend watching TV. I did though, watch part of a programme online yesterday, about the love life of animals. The programme asks are animals capable of ‘love’ in the human sense. There is some wonderful footage of Bonobo ape babies, and quite clearly this morning’s poem reflects those images. The ape babies were orphans and had been assigned human foster mothers. Last night I dreamed of the poet Robert Graves, whose house I visited in 1983 by which time he was not speaking to anyone — because of what was presumably Alzheimer’s. While I chatted with his wife, she offered me tea and sponge cake. She also placed a plate with some cake for Robert, but he picked up a playing card instead and put that in his mouth. ‘Reality’ is not a thing. Science treats it as a thing. I’m inclined to treat it as a thing even when I’m thinking to myself how mysterious a thing it is. The image I’ve landed upon in the poem is useful, because it includes the ‘thingness’ of reality, but the idea of holding suggests the holding of babies and hence of people. I have great trouble with the idea of a personal God. But maybe the nature of this puzzle called reality could be more like a person than a thing.

psychopath

the poet who fails
to identify at least
in part, as madman
is no poet……… medical
science lacks that dimension

I’m beginning to feel I want to break out of the strict syllabic forms of 5-7-5 and 5-7-5-7-7. Brevity doesn’t make a poem. There’s a cruel irony with my poem here, as with so many of my haiku and tanka, that they’re much too rational to be true poems. All the same, I feel pleased, I think I’ve gleaned the correct ‘message’ from my dream of last night. It was incredibly intense. I seemed to be locked in a kiss with a man who was only interested in his own power over others. I had to try to outwit him, and one of the few reliable helps I had was the poet Robert Graves. Another thing that helped was the baby I was holding in my arms and trying to hide from the maniac. I believe this dream was a reflection upon the word psychopath which I came across in a book I’m reading called The Roots of War and Terror by the Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens. I found myself feeling sad at Stevens’ unreflective acceptance of the category psychopath. He writes as though there were objectively such a thing as a psychopath, whereas I would definitely question whether it might not in fact be a label we invent and then impose on people. Here is the passage in question: I would agree that Konrad Lorenz’s view of aggression as an instinctive urge which needs to be discharged is oversimplistic and difficult to apply to human behaviour. There are men who have a low flashpoint and who are more aggressive than others; that aggression — in psychopaths, for example — seems to be readily available and functions as an integral part of their character structure. But, by and large, human aggression is stimulus-dependent.

dimension

decision to fuck —
that moment when a woman
can bend time and space

Alternative titles I thought of were homing pigeon and radar and gravity — but finally settled on dimension, probably because it relates to Robert Graves’ claim that a poet works in the 4th and 5th dimensions, where his thinking forms a unity with that of his muse. I suppose my understanding of the word ‘magic’ (as in sciencegoodmagicbetter) derives directly from Graves. I could almost have called it sciencegoodpoetrybetter. While it’s true that in 2014, even to me, Graves does cut a very strange figure — nevertheless I do believe he was right that there is something almost supernatural about heterosexual desire, and that poetry is probably the purest expression of this. I have felt it viscerally at moments when I’ve been the lucky recipient of a woman’s amorous intention.