This piece looks back to when John Skelton wrote his poem “Speak, Parrot” in the sixteenth century. All these rhyme royal stanzas about Brexit I’m writing, refer to that poem, in one way or another. It is supposed that Skelton wrote it in the precincts of Westminster, where the medieval laws of sanctuary were still operating.
In other words, he was living under the jurisdiction and hence protection of the church. The powers and laws of the state did not hold sway there. He could therefore consider himself safe, even as he attacked the head of state, Cardinal Wolsey, from within his parrot’s cage.
Is Westminster still a place where truth is safely spoken ?
This piece was written a few days after Mr Johnson became Prime Minister. Mr Toad seemed quite puffed up by now, that jolly mop on top sticking out in all directions. He was centre stage and the cameras were following him everywhere. And again we kept hearing that “Labour Must…” And “Now’s the Time…” but no one seemed to know where old Jez had got to…
Since his accession, Mr Johnson had been upping the ante with regard to a “No Deal Brexit” and spraying money here, there and everywhere, as if Austerity had never existed.
But where was all that Tory money coming from, with our economy tanking ? What about these many years of austerity cuts we’d been suffering from ? Those savings that had to be made by “strong and stable” Tory government, at whatever the social cost ? Those disapproving words about the money tree ? Those lectures about the leaking roof ? Suddenly the roof had disappeared. It was all leak, unlimited sky and rude-boy fantasies.
This piece was written immediately after we heard that Boris Johnson had won the Tory leadership contest. The image of Mr Toad, a rather puffed up character in the children’s book “The Wind in the Willows” had already occurred to me.
The Tories seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of plagues with which to assail the UK. Here was their latest.
This stanza was written just minutes before it was announced that Mr B. Johnson, sacked twice in the past for being a liar, had just become Prime Minister of the UK. He had been elected to that position, not by the country, but by members of the Tory Party, some of whom had only just joined the membership, adamant they wanted a No Deal Brexit and confident that Mr Johnson would be able and willing to provide it.
It appeared that his assertions and approach conjured up some sort of comfort zone for many of them, despite the fact that, by any normal standard, this magician has shown himself serially untrustworthy, even perhaps a fraud.
Furthermore, we all surely know that lies, fantasy and bluster do not provide a comfort that lasts. At some point, you are obliged to wake up and return to reality.
The “segments twain” in the stanza’s third line refer to a book by Iain McGilchrist called “The Master and his Emissary.” It is about the human brain and its two hemispheres.
The “master” is the right brain hemisphere, the “emissary” the left.
McGilchrist describes how the two hemispheres are neither equal nor simply complementary. And they are actually at odds, in tension, their partnership in question. The emissary doesn’t believe the master is necessary. The emissary counts and measures and fears. That’s all we are, or need to be, it “thinks”.
The emissary’s attempts to take over from the master threaten to destroy all of us, both sides.
On the day this piece was written the nation was waiting to find out which of the two rival (Tory) candidates was about to take control of our nation, Hunt or Johnson. Both were hollow men, diddy men. Johnson was widely expected to get it, so no great surprise was expressed when he did. In the meantime, one was vividly aware that another (Labour) hollow diddy man was still leading Her Majesty’s Opposition, our alternative government in waiting. We were thus surrounded by disaster and the hollow bringers and products of disaster. Hollow men. Diddie men.
And the parrot’s question stands. To what extent are our political parties, and the system that supports them, effective vehicles for a swift and accountable response to present national and human need ; or, on the contrary, mere outdated refuges for those who inhabit them, dim slogans where there should be living speech, mirages and fixed repetitions and ideologies of familar thought and incantation, where there has to be the urgent addressing of reality by people fully fit and fully present to it, undefended ? The implication is that the second option is the true one. In the UK, both the Tory and Labour parties, and the individuals on their walls and in their halls, are mere self-serving inadequates and throw-backs, insufficient to present storms. And here comes Flotsam Johnson, to complete the nightmare.
I don’t think there was any immediate catalyst for this stanza, as far as date or event were concerned. In the UK, as elsewhere, there just seemed to be so few redeeming features, no 5th cavalry rescue , no clearing of the mist, no light of sanity breaking through. The thought that we make a world that reflects the chaos of our own natures is neither new nor original.
Yet whatever dreadful things we do and make, the plain and simple bliss of being still waits in ambush.
This piece returns to a preoccupation of my own, concerning language. What is the point of writing, the point of taking a position and then articulating it ?
And of course that leads to the question, why keep writing these stanzas, these mere words amid all the bizarre and frantic and disastrous political action going on all round us, mere words among so many words, but so many false words. Will anyone stop for long enough to read these words of comment and protest, in rhyme? Why would they ? Might the poems even play a part, in the public forum, on behalf of sanity ? Why will they not ?
Again : if words in our time have become truth-free, just tools and weapons for self-interest and self-worship, if – in other words – words can be empty or mean anything, a worthless currency, just another way for sinners to prosper, what’s the point of turning to them ?
In writing the stanza, I found myself remembering the appalling public death of Muath Safi Yousef al-Kasasbeh, the young Jordanian air-force pilot first captured and then publically burned to death by Isil or Isis, in January 2015, for propaganda effect, providing us with one of the more appalling images of our era. What words are sufficient for that act, that purpose, that caged human dolor ?
Yousef is an Arabic form, in Latin script, of the English name Joseph. Joseph is the name of my eldest son. All my sons are half-Greek. That young man, burnt to death in a cage, could have been anyone’s son, of whatever race.
