EMPEROR

For this

We fray.

When fact becomes fascination

When deed becomes destination

When destiny,

Divine

The holy spirit,

Spirits torn

By steel and grain and paper

And holiness defiled

Waded in

And blood

Stretched to fetch sensations

For this

Divide and rule

For this

The deformation of space

For this

Showers in a fire storm

For this the infidel, immutable ironies

For this

The trilogy, tragedy, soul and sex and England

The crystalline ruse

For this

The catalyst, reign, demise and return of Orion

For this

Cloth stained

To card

For the ark of a young horizon

And shepherds

Not knowing to warn or delight

For this

Loss, love, grace, pain

Repentance

Twenty thousand hail Mary’s,

A pat on the backside

And confiscated bottles of gin.

For this we fray.

For when I die these lapsing hours are infinite traces on the tramlines of Einstein’s universe.

For when I die, forever setting sail

Towards Tennyson’s sunset,

Forever

In the swoon of Chopin’s great

Ecstatic misery

Forever

Mozart’s dreaming clarinet, the uncertain vine, an Italian mirage

Forever, mothers dreaming reeds, soaking up immortal notes

Forever Beethoven’s single inspiration

For masterpieces,

Whilst glazing trills

Refining

Forever

The eternal, deflecting stars

To throw

Into the darkest fissure

Of the most brilliant.

And always

If he deflected

The great and the glorious deflecting

The great and the glorious

And wear my new clothes without having

To know

Where on earth

They would take me,

My ashes,

After all that burning.

The inferno did stop

Or perhaps I was mistaken

And again

Aither’s bright palms could not turn to face me,

Were simply for the transient stage,

Knowing all along that I would follow

And finally

Drop my shield, and droop my petals from setting Helios

To face chaos with none of the glory

Of a Greek myth.

Perhaps I was mistaken

For that was the tragedy

Dramatic and devastating and dubious

Where knowing more was enough

And knowing more of enough was enough

And knowing more of enough was enough was enough

Enough!

For that was the tragedy

The dropped shield cast aside

And the choice between two pedestals.

And while negations and deflections cultivated a famished intellect,

Blood boiled

And hands held

And feet stepped through silenced

Glory

Forgotten.

For the pedestal did not dock.

Perhaps by an act of God,

Lucifer himself,

Or some agnostic nemesis,

It rolls confused somewhere

On the bed of the English Channel

And I am to make do with my soapbox.

And my magnum opus is wasted on the shallow and faithless

Who do not know

Who can not know what is better for surely

They have not known these visions and testaments

And from here surely there is nothing but mediocrity

And where is my great cloak

My red carpet

My gilded throne

And where is my empire

And where are my servants

And why are these proclamations

Unheard

And unfelt.

(I am shiny and metallic

I hook and link with others that are shiny and metallic

What am I ?)

I am in amongst the trills

Just

Hyde Park serving procrastination’s

Just wear and tear and watching the number seven carry every ten minutes

Just fifteen and at war with reflections and identity scrawled across a record bag

Just

The five-year-old destined for Eton and his own private jet of companionship

Just

The weeping underground soothed

By a Rasta with dexterous fingers and strings

Just customers

Weeping and beaming

Beneath

Crushing teeth

Just the British soldier

Returning

To take communion with the other side

Just

The starving child turning his head from the camera

And the camera

Returning

And the child knowing the empire that destroyed

Will send its acolytes to spread circumstance and subject

Across the popular canvas and

Augment

H E A D L I N E.

For it is he

Without robe and ornament

Breathing, weeping, dying

That beats us

And it is they

That stir passions

And it is they that protest stirred passions

And it is they,

With shallow eyes,

That hold onto

Water and tears.

And also I, stirring passions

Inflecting and deflecting

Wax on, Wax off

Forever and always

The resounding echo

Of fallible

Glory.

And what now?

When gravity rows with motion we will head for the sun

All in one inevitable glory.

But for now

What is already written

Is written

And what is already thought

Is thought

And what is already photographed

Is photographed

And what was always mediocre will always

Be mediocre.

Where the gutter is paradise,

The meat and the marble,

Paradise

And discovered paradise

And titled paradise

And the hell of mediocrity,

Paradise.

I will lurk in the shadows of these glories

Becoming

And I reserve the right to tell

That yes!

I understand the terminology:

Postmodernism and post post modernism and self-awareness

And quasars and meteors and poststructuralism

The tragic flaws of poetic justice and poetic license

The phenomenology of the critic

The pathos of the father who never lifted up a single stone

The mimesis of human actions

Epic similes nearly metaphors

And the canon of literature shooting backwards

And the canon of glories gauged by the great and the glorious

And the great and the glorious gauged by the bomb of history

And still

So

I reserve the right to suggest

That mine

In all

That mine

Surrounding me

That mine

Forever glorious and resounding.

But the social scientists tackling straws for the ultimate utopia

Are lost

On the death of an author of a particularly ungratifying kind,

Snorting

His lines for the ultimate in deflection.

And the biscuit with its rich and unsavoury history

Is crumbled divine and glorious

In lectures and classes and

Poor metaphors.

I reject this canon

Because

She with the bag

Does not know of the biscuits history

Does not know of the post and the modern

Conjoined

Does not puncture mine with hers.

But surrounding me,

She battles

In disenchanted mimicry.

She frays

For hers.

For these

In all

In everything

Amor vincit omnia!

In everything,

Love.

In all

The tremendous brilliance

The trembling soul

Threatened by the laws that skulked and framed and adapted and Mesmerised

Celebrating the unremarkable

For fringes of red carpet.

For you who know

Glory evermore

For you who do not

Glory evermore

For life, luminosity,

The blush and thrill of the new born

The smouldering of frightened fires

Glory everymore

For the famed and the unknown

For myth and truth and divinity

Glory evermore

Birth

Blood

Breath

For the jaws of history

For the paradise of every patient soul

And the glory of possibility had and has and will

Arrive

And the glory of the shallow and faithless

Is becoming

And the masterpiece

Is becoming

And the autonomy of the soul

And the divided world

And every empire,

Becoming

Forever

The eternal fellowship

Of

Time.

25) ‘The catalyst, reign, demise and return of Orion’. Mr. Clayton once mentioned Orion. The rest is private business.

41) Einstein’s explanation of gravity. He suggested that if one were to shoot a gun around the earth with enough speed, that is, with motion and gravitational pull correctly in balance, it would circulate continuously, eternally, on the ‘tramlines’ in the sky. So there you have it – the earth circles the sun.

45) Alfred Lord Tennyson –

‘Come my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world

For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset.

And though we are not now that strength

Which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

48) Listen to some Chopin, in particular: Ballades in G Minor, F Major, A Flat Major and F Minor.

50) Mozart – Clarinet concerto in A major, second movement, Adagio. My mother, Anne-Marie, in quieter moments listens to this and imagines being in Italy, with white curtains blowing in the summer breeze and a balcony overlooking rows and rows of vines.

52) Ludwig Van Beethoven – Piano concerto no5 ‘Emperor’. With a very fine Adagio.

63) Newton wrote a piece called ‘Principia’. Subsequently, he was dethroned by Einstein who claimed 41). The metaphorical bullet became one of the first satellites (Sputnik1)

87) See Goethe’s ‘Faust’. In particular the film adaptation made in Prague. It has puppets.

‘Though rooted fast, towards the sun she turns; her shape is changed, but still her passion burns.’ (-Ovid Metamorphoses 4.210-275, Metamorphoses - Latin Epic C1st BC - C1st AD )

115) The Tragedy of Knowing

170) A reference to a soldier of the Falklands who, on returning to the battlefield after a particularly bloody scene, discovered a cassette tape belonging to an Argentinean on which was recorded none other than Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. Having listened to the piece he felt a kinship with the other side. It’s that good. Thank you Radio 4.

174) The starving child needn’t be a reference, but I shall expound upon it nonetheless. There is a photograph taken in Red Sea Hills, Sudan in 1984 during one of the most devastating famines. In the photograph one of the weakest children is placed before the cameras. Perhaps inadvertently the photographer (who, as far as I know, remains unnamed) photographed a cameraman and photographer either side of the child. My first response to the photograph was directed at the photographers – their pictures sought truth but at the cost of the dignity and integrity of the child in the centre of it. The fact is, I do not believe, as a photographer, that it is easy to accept monetary or social rewards for such truths. The child has become supplementary to the story, and this I find detestable. So there.

229) Wordsworth. In ‘Michael’ (1800, 11. 465-66), the grief of the old father for the loss of his son:

‘Many and many a day he thither went,

And never lifted up a single stone.’

247) ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes. He got hit by a laundry truck. I wish it had had something to do with me.

250) We have lectures on Biscuits. It ought to be interesting.