Missing Dates

Binning Wood, East Lothian, Scotland

In memoriam Rab Shiell

(Cape Town, January 8, 1940–Edinburgh, May 12, 2024)

Shattered our story now—there’s little left that works,

but though the dates have all gone completely missing

in the bright shards the pattern of some meaning lurks.

On Lykavittos in the Sixties, you lent me

your typewriter. At Odos Xoida No. 2,

I was writing my first novel then and you knew.

Traversing Aegina in your red MG,

Fix beer we declared "slipped down awful grateful"—

demotic folderol repeated with glee.

I picked up such expressions, chameleon-like,

from you, and they've stuck in my mind for ages now

—over half a century. I don't know where you

got them. Not likely, one would think, at New College!

Perhaps from some colleague at the British Council?

"Mo-o-o-o-st unpleasant!" we said as well when

we reckoned something to be not good. I confess

I thought that, too, watching your brave coffin descend

into the ground amid the trees in Binning Wood.

Born within a few miles and months of each other,

our ways split wide apart when we were just small boys.

You were schooled at Wet Pups,* Bishops, and Oxford,

while I unfailing took a quite different path.

Yet we became fast friends—how to explain that then?

Of the totem texts in your scholar-gypsy's stash,

T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

and the complete works of your idol Robert Graves

combined might perhaps confect an explanation:

You danced a Scottish reel in Anatolia,

your cat’s called Percy Buttons, as I well recall,

Loch Fynne kippers you insisted are best of all.

These Sherlock Holmesian clues I can’t resist!

What was it we wished for? Should we have wanted more?

Yelling Empson’s shattering poem “Missing Dates”

at each other bathing on some Cycladic shore

—Kea? Sifnos? Milos? I've forgotten the isle—

we chanted by the sea, with grave frivolity:

“It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills

Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.”

“It is the poems you have lost, the ills

From missing dates, at which the heart expires."

Barbara and Rab Shiell in the 1970s

*Western Province Preparatory School, Claremont, Cape Town, South Africa

A Game of Marbles

“It is the game that is ingenious, ingenious Kircher, not the marbles.”—Quirinus Kühlmann,* letter to Athanasius Kircher SJ (aka “The Last Man Who Knew Everything”)

However our free will may be

conceived of, it can't properly

perform the role that Destiny

assigns us—thus, I imagine,

Père Kircher must have reasoned

contemplating Kühlmann's cruel fate:

burned as a heretic spy in Moscow,

where God must have made him go.

The wised-up Jesuit knew everything—but there's some stuff too fierce to know!

"It’s not about the marbles but the game,"

Kühlmann insisted. A pity, he

didn't see that our wills are only optionally free.

You yourself must somehow nab that frame.

Who knows how you do it, since it's all the same,

the Catch-22 of our hominid ontology.

Upright apes on Earth are born to fetter.

On other planets—as people used to say of France in the nineteenth century—they manage things much better!

*On the German poet, mystic, and (possibly) imperial secret agent Quirinus Kühlmann (1651–89), seen by some as a precursor of surrealism, see https://htext.stanford.edu/content/kircher/texts/biographies/515.html.

Kühlmann's assertion that it is the game that is ingenious, not the players, echoes the Niederdeutsch adage “It’s about the game, not the marbles” (in modern Dutch, “Het gaat niet om de knikkers, maar om het spel”).

Before language there was music, and poetry came before prose—something ancient Greeks called πεζός λόγος (pezos logos): “pedestrian logic [or words].”

Hard Words: Everything Will Be All Right

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, Scythians at Ovid's Tomb (ca. 1640). Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

“Tempus edax rerum.”—Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.234

Edacious air, esurient sea!

What do those hard words mean to me?

What Ovid said millennia ago:

Time eats everything. Don't you know?

Being there or not to be,

Air and sea are agency,

Exit strategy, kitchen door.

It's a patient omnivore.

The subcortex may at first resist

For the reptilian level of the brain

Has one great purpose: to persist.

Invidious age devouring all,

A pain in the butt might well befall;

Sciatica bites there to appall.

Doggedly, do not to complain.

As they say, no pain, no gain.

Puzzled still which way to bet?

The old recall, the young forget.

Too drunk to fret, sober as most,

Follow suit all through the night.

Keep your doggerel in sight

Albeit its bark outdoes its bite;

Sully not the sacred lamppost.

Pascal's wager's* out there yet,

No rush in giving up the ghost.

Everything will be all right!

In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Irish public broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann ended its evening news broadcast with Derek Mahon (d. October 1, 2020) reading his poem “Everything Is Going to Be All Right.”

The lines flow from the hand unbidden

and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything

and the far cities are beautiful and bright.†

*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

†Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1999), 113.