WORKING NOTES: October 2018


Working on verse letters to my children leaving home, started some four years ago, one to my daughter on a visit to an art college in Linz. Made the obvious (for me) connections, including the very speculative theory that Hitler and Wittgenstein were in the same class at school there and the latter the ‘cause’ of the former’s own jealous ‘philosophy’. Wittgenstein, of course, a Jew by background not religion. Then wondered if my showbiz parents, who were with ENSA (entertaining occupation troops) in Lili Marlene years just after the war, had ever played at Linz, me then in my first term at prepschool (horror) and learning to play Lili Marlene in a way that, I’d discovered to the ruin of any faint hopes I might make a reasonable pianist, that you don’t really need to read all those notes. For a pop song just the top line and the chord symbols at the bottom. I don’t think I had the industry or ear to learn enough chords, however, beyond the usual ‘hymn book harmonies’. Lili Marlene is one of the most popular songs ever, disliked by Goebbels but not Rommel and his Afrika Korps, and all the German troops, and then it began to be sung by the allied soldiers, in German, so a lyric was quickly translated, which over sentimentalised the lyrics which were originally, “The Song of a Young Sentry,” by a German soldier, Hans Leip, composed in World War I. It was a poem before being taken over by the song industry, as comes out in such images as
Unsere beide Schatten sah’n wie einer aus - Our two shadows appeared as one
C                                   F                       G7
together with the ‘metaphysical’ ideas suggested about death, afterlife of reunion, and so on, which have no equivalent in the English version. Goebbels, apparently wish to but couldn’t get the song banned. Marlene Dietrich’s recording done later, is now perhaps the best known recording, but by a beautiful irony, the original singer of the song in German, the Danish cabaret artist, Ladle Andersen, was in fact in love with a Jew.
I often think of a line from Private Lives: ‘Strange how potent cheap music is’. And then, suddenly, of me, ASM (Theatre Royal Portsmouth) behind a screen at an upright, waiting for a light to come on for me to play “Someday I’ll find you” (with a few chords fudged) for the actor the other side of the flat, to play it on silent notes. 
Silent notes. Poetry as silence, the cracks between the words, and down the cracks, like my naïve (my heads when I was a primary teacher used to think) idea that education come into a child like that, out of wild, up through the cracks in the ground, ‘or not at all’, like a gift this year of about twenty evening primroses from where I’d not trowelled between the paving stones in the back garden. I’m now leaving more long grass in the garden for the bees. A poem of mine’s coming out in Magma about climate change, this set in the present season in Nigeria. . . . harmattan, anniversary (10th October) of my first stepping off the plane at Kano Airport, feeling the heat from the ground lifting through the insides of my trouser legs, a breeze like coconut, about to learn and learn most of all from ordinary Muslim people without prejudices at all (neither a priest nor a politician be), whom I made laugh (as we drank beer which is ‘haram’) by saying I was a ‘kafiri’ (heathen). Another naïve faith in the people with dust between their toes and broken toenails, who when you asked them the time looked at the sun. A pound coin, a swastika, the id of the Gilgamesh in us, or a voice shouting ‘holy, holy, holy’ with the silence of poetry, or of a repertory stage piano with me behind the arras, or the air and ground where Hitler has left minute forensic traces somewhere, connecting him in the collage of things to me, my Mum on stage singing, my daughter sketching, collage in which there are no boundaries, each bit of picture made of other bits of pictures, historical, geographical, the only limits ‘the limits of my language’, wrote the ‘Jew of Linz’ who also thought philosophy was between done as a kind of poetry, because he was always questioning boundaries, which in Linz my daughter was studying through the study of sound. In one of the verse letters I remind my son of that bee in my study here, almost visibly effing and blinding each time she went towards the sky and the garden and the effing blinding air suddenly turned into solid very pain, the ‘transparency’ not in her language as it never is in a poet, even one as plain, as me. Metre, you see, is an image, in language, with language, of language itself. ”Show the fly the way out of the bottle.” Watch the bat fly between the spokes of a bike in the dark. My daughter’s interested in sound in art, and the interesting relation sound has to boundaries and spaces. 
Felt drawn to two poems not quite sure how, or how I feel a kinship, Clive James’ way of drawing the world around himself by bringing history in close and everyday, and in a different way John Greening doing the same with his ‘Codices’ in Poetry Review this number. I too, Clive, loved Keith Miller. Cricket’s not tension, he said. Tension is a Messerschmitt up your arse. And John ending up as Prospero on Desert Island Disks! (Orders came for sailing, somewhere over there! Where?). Caliban, the ‘monster’ – in common with J’s intermergings of opposites - has the best poetry, though. It’s never us, is it? (and it’s not that the centre cannot hold: there is no centre). 
Then to my dear good once fellow-student-flatmate Jeremy Hooker, who writes in on metaphysics in current Scintilla but still with his nose right up nature’s warm arse as it should be, about David Jones on our own sense of the ‘hairy ass and the furry wolf,’ how, we ‘ presume to other and more radiant affinities’ and ‘are finding it difficulty, as yet, to recognise these creatures of chemicals as true extensions of ourselves, that we may feel for them a native affection, which alone can make them magical for us.’ Hitler doesn’t feel like a hairy monster of that kind because he doesn’t seem to have had any blood.
Whether my parents or another ENSA show ever went to Linz, I haven’t discovered yet. Doesn’t look like it. But in an infuriatingly brief diary entry of his visit to Berlin in 1945/6, when he must have played Lili Marlene for Mum to sing, he mentions seeing the place where Adolf and Eva were burnt. If Dad hadn’t lost the tile he picked up in the wreck of the Fuhrer’s Chancellery I’d have a tangible bit of the collage of myself, our joint, mixed, selves. Like the Lili Marlene in his fingertips, in mine, on the keys of his piano here, my own fingertips on the keys of the computer writing ‘Linz’ from its innards, fingertips – fingerprints – which I learned in the RAF to type with so that if I stop to think which finger which letter I can’t. Muscle memory. Memory as forgetting. But not a muted piano. Poetry as resistance. As silence. Daughter of memory. My daughter missed but not in my memory, but as here, part of the house, these words (all words, even in the past tense, are present), Or like Lili’s lamplight which can forget - Alle Abend brennt sie, doch mich vergass sie lang. (Every evening it is burning, but it forgot about me long ago.) Or this lampshade, this windowpane, this desk, desktop. And now, ah, if we starting talking about screens. . .