Have a Poem

When I first went to Balliol, all fresh and robust from my steel town and my saturday job at Texas homecare, I was, frankly, terrified. Trying not to show it, I looked for ways to stay calm. In my room above the JCR, I clove books to myself. Despite the confidence I tried to show outside--and if you can sell a Texas kitchen to Corby people you have it made--I desperately needed some home comforts.

I found it in the most strange place. It wasn't just the cold bacon and sausage rolls in the Junior Common Room--too many of those, eventually!--or in the odd glass of wine here and there. Nor was it in the eyes and laughter of the women who became my closest friends, because I hadn't met them in my first term. It wasn't in the histories of America, or the letters I sent to friends, or the memory of my Grandad's smoky old terrace. Nor was it in the paintings and line drawings I've done at those times in my life when I've been stressed or pressured, though I did do a good few.

As you may have guessed during the course of this blog, should you be my one regular reader, I basically don't care what anyone thinks. So I'll tell you what I got up to. I found a little comfort sitting at a cold desk translating Baudelaire for myself.

I'm sure that the consequences were the equivalent of Mark Twain's Jumping Frog story, only less funny. I liked it though. The activity, along with writing my essays, kept me calm, of whiles.

Though the following wasn't my favourite--given my taste for the gaudier side of Yeats I preferred this, and this,-- I remember the following poem.

The reason I write about it this morning is that a commenter on the excellent Watts Up With That site, writing about the Sun's lack of sunspots, brought up the poem because of its penultimate stanza. Hope you enjoy it, don't care if you don't. Cool title too, obviously linked to Psalm 130.

De profundis clamavi

J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime,
Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé.
C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé,
Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème;


Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois,
Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre;
C'est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire
— Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois!


Or il n'est pas d'horreur au monde qui surpasse
La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace
Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos;


Je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux
Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide,
Tant l'écheveau du temps lentement se dévide!

Here is a video from a French film of the 1960s, showing a disastrous sleazy evening. I think it stars Jane Birkin who is performing some sort of strip show for a couple of chancers. Their companion, who is in herself beautiful but deeply threatened, is appropriately not pleased. They also appear to be surrounded by a mixture of the Benny Hill show cast and the inhabitants of an old Dublin bar. Meanwhile, mad French transvestites start quoting Baudelaire...Ah, Paris.

I got poisoned there after saying goodbye to a very beautiful woman who left for Venice on a train long ago. The fitting guilty reflection on my catholicism will follow in, oh, two or three days. DO NOT WATCH the video if the sight of a beautiful stripper offends you. Haven't we all, when young and foolish, had dates like this though?