I am uploading with this post the first installment of  “Fables and Reflections,” a collection of short prose pieces which I wrote over a period of around three months in Greece.  Future uploads will consist of just one Fable each. But this first post has two attachments, first the collection’s Introduction and second Fable One. Click on the link words. Exclusive of the Introduction, there will be sixteen fables in all.

As a series, “Fables and Reflections” varies in approach. Some of the pieces are essentially metaphor, allegory, parable, fable ; others are written more directly as discussion papers. They explore, among other things, the place and meaning of social responsibility and social inclusion, and the  skills required to make  and keep healing human connection,   in a Society otherwise much engaged in transition-fever, aggressive fundamentalism, material acquisiton, denial.

I believe this collection of pieces is relevant,  especially to people working/struggling along frontiers within Society where the need to connect, and to have skill in doing so, are especially important.

For various reasons my “publication” strategy will be to put up the fables here one at a time  and later perhaps on the site of a small charity I run called “Hyphen-21”. They’ll go up fortnightly.  At the same time I shall send them out as email attachments to people who have said beforehand they’d be interested. If anyone would prefer to have them sent in hard copy by surface mail, I would be willing to do that too. Just contact me and give me your address.

The Fables vary in length, but I would say on average that each takes approximately ten minutes to read. If you have them in hard copy, you could read each one over a cup of tea, a half pint, a glass of wine, whatever you fancy.

Fable 1, “The Door which Strangely Opens,” offers some thoughts on endurance and right action.

If you think that “Fables and Reflections” has any merit or value, please pass  the collection on, or recommend this site,  to anyone else you think might be interested.

Best wishes

Rogan Wolf

Someone I knew well died this Spring. Her death (from breast cancer) came twenty years after she was first diagnosed. But almost until the end, she refused to accept that death was pending. In her bed at home, she acknowledged the truth only a few hours before she stopped breathing, thereby making honest communication with her loved ones only briefly possible.

Until those final hours, she had believed that acknowledging the fact that the disease was a mortal one might in itself kill her. She felt that anyone who talked to her about death was introducing negativity into her system,  threatening her life, weakening her hope. Words which acknowledged the disease seemed almost more dangerous to her than the disease itself. She felt that her survival depended on refusing to resign herself and, by extension, that she could actually keep herself alive through the sheer positive power of her denial. She insisted on more time. “I am not a statistic“, she would say. “I shall stand aside.“ Another ten years would do. That round figure in the mind would take from death any power it might have had to lean across her every day and skin cell, causing her heart to plunge to the depths whenever she returned to consciousness in the early mornings, or her fingers to search every few hours through the scarred surfaces of her body, for further signs of the spread of doom.

That resolution of hers made me think of Lazarus.

Jesus Christ, maybe under pressure from Mary and Martha, his good friends, brought their brother Lazarus back from the dead.

The heart lifts. Here’s a happy ending. A pale figure emerges from the tomb to screams of joy. He’s back. Life is cheated of its rules. Loss and pain are pushed back.

But who is this man who has returned to us ? How can he be the man we knew ?

Christ has probably fixed things so that the parts of Lazarus that had decomposed are more or less back in place and reasonably hygienic once again. But he can’t fix the fact that Lazarus now knows how it is to die. That is beyond even Christ to change or undo. Lazarus has crossed the frontier that separates the living from the dead. He got through, leaving everyone else behind. We don’t know how it was for him, but he knows, or half-knows. Perhaps he’ll tell us, or half tell us. Perhaps he won’t want to.

And the story hasn’t ended at all. In a while – and the Gospels don’t tell us when – Lazarus will have to die a second time. By now, Christ himself will be dead and will be sitting alongside His Father, the Creator. So this second time, there will be no return trip. Will Lazarus be sorry ? Or glad ?

Was he glad that first time, having made the exit which everyone dreads so utterly, to be forced back into the blinding light, for the temporary relief of his sisters, only to have to go through the whole business again, a short while later ?

Did he dance out of the tomb, wagging his fingers, saying Hi guys, I’m back, let’s
party ! – now I have a second chance to live awhile, (but also the obligation again to
die ?)

We aren’t told how Lazarus lived his second wind and second death – in that new time granted him – how much more joy he experienced, how much more pain, how much human value there was in that meagre period of extra time made possible millennia ago.

Nor are we told about those crowds who followed Christ around, saying, Save me Lord, Heal me Lord, Bid me Rise up and Walk. We have to assume that He was only able to “rescue”a few of them. How did the majority feel ? Did they blame Him for failing to put things right for them ? Or did they blame themselves ? Or their Carers for failing to push them forward hard enough, or in the right way? What sort of lives did they lead, devoid of that interlude, that stay of execution, which Christ might have delivered to them ? In what spirit did they die ?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Rogan Wolf

Here is a poem about the last Emperor of Byzantium. I sent it recently to a married couple I know, who both liked it. She said it’s about me. He said it’s about Gordon Brown.

The idea behind the poem is that we are all now inheritors of fallen cities, walls of security which have been broken. The fugitive fox has much to teach us.

We are also perhaps no less apt than ever our ancestors were to go after those who stand or speak out, people we can blame for our woes, confusions and pain. So we are fox-hunters as well, baying with the hounds.

The Travails of the Last Emperor

by Rogan Wolf

2010

dedicated here to the Right Honourable Gordon Brown, MP, with thanks.

For centuries, Constantinople, capital of  Byzantium, was the greatest city in the world. Historians maintain that when it fell in the fifteenth century, its last Emperor died on the walls.  But his body was never found and we are free to consider another  possibility : that he simply wandered away  –  on the one side to Thrace,  or on the other, Anatolia …

Part 1

The Emperor at Kerbside

i

Highness,

I saw you tonight,

creeping like a sickly fox

across our street.

The camera’s bound

to have caught you

in that glare

of white light

at the corner –

would it miss ?

I didn’t know

you were still going,

Highness,

with your City

a charnel yard

of stone

and bone

and shard

of fine crockery.

There you presided.

Can death

be worse than this ?

ii

Between our blurred and broken lines

the fox is worth picking out.

He guards the word on the tip of all tongues

the telling we are frantic to avoid.

He slips between the cars at kerbside

his home his own slinking

his homelessness our street.

iii

He has moved in !

I heard him last night

scuffling by the open window

emasculating my arrangements there.

This morning

as I put the garden

back together again,

I knew he was watching me

from my window !

iv

All my life since setting out

I have carried fragments and relics

mementoes of a time intact.

The city is fallen,

undone and irretrievable.

Bowed archaeologists scraping about

shall not ease my desolation.

The City is fallen.

I am the ruins.

v

He makes grin

his mask

and he spins in the air

his stink

and lightly

sleeps

and lightly

he shits.

He has no shame

in his matter.

His game

is defiance of death.

vi

There are real advantages

to being nowhere nowhen

no profile

on the radar screen.

I am the broken emperor

so when I materialise

surface breaks

queues scatter

and mouths gape in wild surmise.

vii

Fox feathery and starved tonight

emerges from a bank of ivy.

His back arches, he walks on tip-toe

and his tail is like the skeleton of a wing.

The cats take no notice of him.

They know that they’ll be alive tomorrow.

viii

The stillness of the Voice on Sinai

foxed Moses. He’d made that arduous ascent

in full expectation of Grandeur and Majesty.

Still, small and crucified day upon day

(until at last

one day of sorrow

He’ll  simply give up the ghost),

this was not the God he thought had promised

to show his people the Way.

ix

Cities in the desert

picked over by camera and crow –

history grows dim

the present points to sorrow.

June 2007

 

 

Part 2

The Emperor Unclothed

i

Who was that boy

who said the emperor

was merely naked ?

The boy died of course

almost at once

his flesh in gobbets

scattered across the hills.

Perhaps he was blind.

For the emperor wore that day

the sheen of his apartness

and a shadow so long

it girded the earth.

ii

Have at you, Highness –

clear of  the multitudes

free of the robes.

You’re just quarry now

shoulders bare and shining ahead –

fair game.

We’ll paddle in you,

your excellency,

you’ll do us good.

iii

A young fox

most of his fur missing

pads the ridge of the garden wall.

He knows he doesn’t belong here

and to survive the night

he must glide to perfection

between each holding

he must slide with precision

around each lit space.

iv

That wide-eyed small boy

who proclaimed the obvious to his neighbours

didn’t live long enough to see the truth –

that truth is unendurable

but learning you’ve bowed for years to a lie

can drive you to murder.

v

And the fox said to the boy emperor

“follow me.

Let me guide you

through my web of shadow

to where the truth lies hidden

precarious as an embryo.

Let us sidle

together.”

August 2007

 

 

Part 3

The Last Emperor in Chaotic Times

i

The last emperor stirs.

Chaos inspires him.

It brings back memories

of earlier convulsions

when he was the apex

uppermost in disaster.

Now citadels collapse again

and strange new progeny stagger

sleek and bewildered

across our blasted fields.

The last emperor hunches

into a ball, wheezy and crackling

and hurries to join them.

He is sure this time

he will be our chosen one.

But what is there left to say ?

It has all been used up.

All the great redemptive words

fizzed and burned out

almost the instant they entered time

and for millennia

they’ve hung in countless rooms

like lumps of raw clay

twisted and re-modelled

to ennoble and justify

the frets and furies that have always been.

But the last emperor

has no need of hope.

He lost it ages back

amongst the paraphernalia

of cities and face

and full diaries.

This is child’s play.

Yes indeed, oh yes indeed

there’s nothing left to say.

He sings to himself happily.

Against the odds another chance.

Against all the odds another chance.

Let’s try.

ii

The last emperor confided

resting his feet, reaching for the water jug –

“I had a cheering thought today.

I realised the past is just

another set of possibilities

as rich in guidance and new ideas

as anything present or still to come.

The dead may still belong in the dance.”

The last emperor was almost weeping now.

“And straightaway, the walls of my City

renewed themselves in my mind

and the dead rose from their mass graves

took back their faces, their noble eyes,

and became again my counsellors,

comforting me with their wit and high learning.”

iii

When the great City fell all those years ago

the emperor had to give up communicating

with crowds. Now he secretes words in code

under stones and between buses, whisperings

deep in caves by the shore, scribblings

borne in small balloons loosed to ride hurricanes.

It’s more intimate that way, he says,

more telling

more effective in getting his message across.

iv

He tends to avoid caves for his resting.

They are too obvious and accessible.

He goes for between-space

and between-time

on the edges of snug living.

Fly-tips do well, for instance,

or gaps between fences

in the more established parts of suburbia

where arguments over boundaries

can open things up a bit.

Allotment huts have proved satisfactory

shared with the odd fox or down-and-out,

or patches of spare paving beneath bridges

beyond where the cyclists pass.

And like the kestrel and the red kite

he is drawn to the motorway

and will often bed down within feet

of the juggernauts

blasting through

their sharp beams searching infinity

all night.

v

Since the last emperor lost his name

he’s been invisible.

He asks himself,

does it matter

where I place myself

if no one can find me there ?

He wanders from city to quiet fastness

and there’s no difference

except in the impact on him.

No one knows he has gone

and no one takes note of his arrival.

Yet on the mountain trail

he adds a small stone

to each cairn he passes.

There is no name on it

and no one will know

he placed it there.

But the stones will continue

to serve and guide

once the emperor is dead.

I’ve learned to be

an invisible servant

says the last emperor

to himself.

October 2008

Now that the new “One World…” poem-poster collection is up at last and as I begin to collect myself again and think about how to make sure that people know it is there, I want to record a good email conversation I had recently with Lakshmi Holmström, translator of the two Tamil poems selected for the new collection. The conversation is reproduced here with Lakshmi’s permission.
_______________________________________________________________________

Sent: 31 March 2010 11:17
From:  Lakshmi Holmström

Dear Rogan Wolf,

I am glad the new collection is nearly ready for uploading……I too, of course … would want to support and encourage any initiative which would make Tamil more visible, and the best of Tamil writing more accessible to people who are unaware of this rich literature. But the thrill is in seeing Tamil as part of a spectrum of languages, each making its own wonderful contribution.
_______________________________________________________________________

Sent : 31 March 2010 11:50
From : Rogan Wolf

…I also think – that there is something almost political about this project, in a healing sense, in that it affirms people in their self-belief and cultural identities, as part of the wider community.

_______________________________________________________________________

Sent: 31 March 2010 14:46
From: Lakshmi Holmström

Yes … I do agree that there’s a political aspect to your project, which I find truly admirable in that it encourages and celebrates different identities equally, within a world citizenship.

But I’m also aware that language chauvinism leads to the most bitter nationalism and violence.

There seems to be a fine line here (between a pride which shares a universality and a pride that turns into narrow chauvinism) which I think one ought to be vigilant about.

But I do wish you the best…

_____________________________________________________________________________
Sent: 16 April 2010 10:06
From: Rogan Wolf

I’ve been meaning to reply for a while. I want to thank you for…what you wrote to me in your message of March 31st and yes I know it’s a fine line, but it’s also a vital and precious one, to be worked at and worked on.

I actually “run” a small charity called “Hyphen-21.” The title is based on the image of human connection itself as a fine line, in fact a hyphen. The source of the image is a book by Martin Buber called I and Thou. The more successfully we nurture the skills of connection between I and Thou, along this fragile line between I and Other, the more chance our communities and our world have of surviving.

There is a beautful Arabic poem I chose for the first “One World” collection (see “Prison”) The poet Mourid Barghouti wanted to be identified as a Palestinian. I showed it to a friend of mine who is himself a Palestinian. He came to UK as an asylum seeker and now works for the NHS at quite a senior level. My friend read the poem and said it made him come out in goose-pimples – because it spoke to him and for him so vividly as a Palestinian – that he felt he had just discovered the power of speech. There are things at present the Palestinians cannot say, my friend said ; the experience of being Palestinian is not being given real credence or validation at this time, by the outside world. But the poem says it, and far from being prison offered him release. He said that, if he were an NHS patient and saw that poem on a waiting room wall, he would feel respected and recognised by this hosting country, even though it might treat him clumsily and suspiciously in other respects. He was even prepared to suggest that his health might benefit from this poem.

I lap up that sort of thing, of course. For similar reasons, though to a lesser extent, I do warm a bit to enthusiasm that verges on the nationalistic, which may come from someone whose culture is being reduced and weakened by another in some way, and the psychological and identity issues there must be among a people in that position. In doing that I am not warming to chauvinism, as such, I don’t think, but I might be a bit of a sucker for people who identify themselves as underdogs, and turn to chauvinism as a substitute for true identity. And that’s a real danger.

The translator of the Barghouti poem mentioned above has something to offer to this discussion. Her name is Radwa Ashour and she is actually the poet’s wife, and an Egyptian academic (they live in Cairo). It was she who suggested the Arabic text should be on the right of the poster. Her suggestion was less because the eyes of the Arabic reader travel right to left, than because, this way, the texts are open and broken to one another, whereas the other way they stand stiff back to stiff back.

That first bilingual collection of 45 poems is already on the site and can be downloaded. It contains several Arabic poems but no Hebrew. Quite deliberately seeking to balance that, this present new collection will be carrying two Hebrew poems.  But which poets to choose ? Rahel Bluwstein is seen as virtually the national poet for all Israelis ; Amichai was a soldier in his time but was to the left in politics and would not be seen as a Israeli “chauvinist”.

Similarly, for the new collection I’ve tried hard to identify and select poems in African languages. Should Afrikaans be included ? Yes, so long as it is one of a large enough group of poems by black Africans. Written by someone identified with an earlier oppressive regime ? No. The poet is Ingrid Jonker who was at odds with the Apartheid regime and committted suicide by drowning.

And again, I have been given permission to adopt and publish Michael Rosen’s commissioned poem celebrating the 60th birthday of the NHS last year. He was asked to write it during the time he was Children’s Poet Laureate. The poem will be in our new collection, alongside translations of it into Punjabi, Turkish, Greek, Somali and – soon afterwards – Arabic and Hebrew. And maybe Tamil and Sinhala ? The idea is obvious – the NHS waiting room is common ground ; people sit there from many cultures and nations, several of them warring or otherwise in conflict ‘back home.’ So let’s choose, for this poem of the waiting room, where people sit together to see the doctor, languages of peoples who elsewhere might be seeking to harm each other’s health.

Obviously there is a danger of getting a bit omnipotent in all this, delusions of influence, etc. Finally, though, I might record the following slightly paradoxical thought : if it were possible to avoid the charge of seeming to sympathise with oppressive behaviour, by singling out the poetry of nations or regimes guilty of aggressive actions against others, I think it is at least arguable that we should do precisely that – to show them and their neighbours the other side of themselves in their lives, to validate their higher nature and more human identity. It can’t really work in reality, but seems to follow a bit as a line of thought…
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Sent: 01 June 2010 16:12
From: Lakshmi Holmström

Dear Rogan

I wanted to answer your previous email,  ‘Thoughts on Chauvinism’, but have been very busy with deadlines, besides being away for a  part of  April/May.

Of course I agree: languages, literatures and above all poetry are among the most powerful ways in which we identify ourselves. Poetry can express for us – as nothing else –  the particularities of a landscape, specifics of memories, sensations to do with a particular way of being.

But poetry also seems to tap into what is universally felt too. When I do ‘readings’ of my translations of novels [in my language] , there is a lot of ethnographic and cultural detail which I need to gloss for ‘western’ audiences. This isn’t needed at all, in the case of poetry. The particular seems to get subsumed in the universal.

That first aspect of poetry, I think,  is one reason why a Palestinian or a Tamil (when in exile) reacts so intensely when she/he  sees a poem in her/his language, on the wall of a hospital waiting room in England, or the London Underground….

But most of us who are transnationals, or who are part of a diaspora, carry multi-identities, too. And poetry, signalling to the universal, the humane, should help us all to heal, to reconcile and build bridges within ourselves and between ourselves.

You are absolutely right in seeking out poems  in Hebrew or Sinhala which do just that. No language is chauvinistic of itself; it is our misuse of language that makes it so.

Best wishes

Lakshmi