Living in the moment: Bashō and mindfulness, via Tony Conran

This by Tony Conran from September 2005, Blithe Spirit vol 15 no.3, at www.poetry magazines.org uk:

"In Bashō, as far as one can understand him through translation and commentary, what he sees is totally transparent to his humility. It becomes a vehicle for a kind of saintliness, a 'helpless' trust in the world as it blows him along his path, so that what he sees and writes about is in no real way to be distinguished from what he is. He feels love and compassion, for example, for the prostitutes who try to join him on his journey; but ultimately he knows that this love (caritas, or agape, as a Christian might call it) is not his business. If the gods or the great Buddhas wish to 'absent them from felicity awhile' to interfere and with compassion to help others on the way to enlightenment, that's their choice, but neither on them nor on us is it a mandatory demand.

The haiku is a sociable but not a social form. It is almost totally unrhetorical, having nothing to say to the will....Loneliness is the gift the haiku poet prizes above all, because it is the loneliness of detachment, not the bitter isolation of frustrated desire...haiku poets call it tenderness - fellow-feeling, a gentle acknowledgment that things exist outside yourself, which suffer and have their being in the Tao of enlightenment just as you do....

And a haiku must be slender because it makes no claim upon us other than an invitation to share its moment."


May I gently, in the spirit of tender loneliness Tony so eloquently describes, suggest you take a gander, if you don't already know it, at "The Narrow Road To The Deep North," Bashō, Penguin. *

*other editions are available - but there's only one Bashō, and there was only one Tony Conran.

A poet (Tony Conran) at a painter's funeral (Victor Neep)

When I was a student, I knew Vic Neep a little; liked him a lot, greatly admired his directness and clarity, and his guitar playing (40s-style jazz on a Spanish guitar, gentle, melodic and swinging) - oh, and of course - his strong, sometimes enigmatic paintings. 

Vic died far too soon, in 1979.

Tony Conran died in January, and I've already posted in his honour:

http://mortality-branchlinesblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/rip-tony-conran-poet.html

Looking through some things written by Tony recently, I found this, about Vic's funeral, in a magazine, "Blithe Spirit," volume 15 no. 3 

"Haibun - The Funeral

Victor Neep (d.1979), painter of derelict industrial Gwynedd, lit by the moon; of abstract still life, portraits of jagged sculpture-like forms; shaper of terror and wit; sculptor of savage birds and warriors from the detritus of machinery and slate.

All the riffraff of Caernarfon and Waunfawr, painters and jazz-guitarists, poets, spongers for a drink, an eisteddfod bard, even a solicitor who'd bought some paintings once - we were all at his funeral that cold January day. I threw my clod of cold earth and heard it rattle on the coffin. There was reassurance in the ordinariness of the sound - minimal, but enough to make me almost cry out loud, "O my man, my man." We wandered around the graveyard trying to be near to each other, but at the last minute avoiding contact. Many of us were old acquaintances because we'd loved him, but now we'd probably never see each other again, or be awkward and unsure if we did.

    Under the silver sky
         Ghost of a half-moon - 
              A hall-mark."

I think - I hope - I realised at the time how fortunate I was to know these men.

Here's Vic quoted in a reference in "Zones of Contention," by Carol Becker:


"If pressed on the subject of the political significance of certain types of art, philosopher Herbert Marcuse often recounted an anecdote that pleased him a great deal. It was about the painter Victor Neep, who, when challenged to explain the alleged element of protest in Cézanne's "A Still Life With Apples," responded, "It is a protest against sloppy thinking."

O my man, my men. Such integrity, such dedication. 

R.I.P Tony Conran, poet

Tony Conran died recently and was buried yesterday. The meaning of his life and the poetry and other writings he gave us ripple on, touching so many lives.

What I write here is personal and inexpert. For a beautifully-written, expert view, go to:

http://www.literaturewales.org/news/i/142467/


Tony was a poet, and a - in my view, the - translator of Welsh poetry into English, and therefore the translator of a culture and a history. He was a critic and a teacher. He was a party-giver, and a generous host; he brought together a fascinating variety of people, who may not otherwise have met.

He had a powerful and fierce intellect, wide-ranging too. The poem below has in it a more-or-less technical term. Just like Tony to find, know and use the accurate geological term. He brought together the imaginative power that people sometimes call "romantic" with the clarity and accuracy of a natural scientist. He was an expert on those mysterious and ancient plants, the ferns. He had a fernery, which he was always very pleased to show you. He knew a hell of a lot about music, and provided a hub for the burgeoning traditional music scene in his part of the world.

In person, he could be forthright, never sentimental, sometimes deliberately contrary in order to stimulate discussion. 

He published a lot of his own poetry, often in small booklet form, though volumes of his poetry were also gathered. He published his book of translations, The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, in the mid-sixties; it was revelation to me then and still is. It's titled "Welsh Verse" now; it is, disgracefully, not that easy to find outside Wales, although there is plenty of his stuff on Amazon.

I hadn't seen a lot of him in recent years; I saw a lot of him and his circle when I was a student; he gave me more than he could ever know.

He was not, despite his huge talents and dedication to poetry, an arrogant, over-inflated sort of man. He was courteous and sensitive.

I'm proud of this anecdote: at the height of the late sixties perturbations cultural and political, one witless McLuhanite of our mutual acquaintance told Tony that the days of poetry, and  indeed of books, were over, writing poetry was looking at the future through a rear-view mirror, the new thing was... whatever the hell he thought it was I can't remember.

Tony asked me - callow youth as I was - if I thought this was so. Tony was disturbed. 

What Tony had, which people like the McLuhanite couldn't grasp, was a traditionally-based but entirely up-to-date view of his work as a social poet. He would write beautiful little poems for an engagement, a wedding, a death; the recipients were awed, grateful, delighted. He wrote poetry to and for people, the community of people he built around him. (He also wrote much more widely-aimed poems, of course.)

Anyway, I asked Tony on no account to be thrown off-balance by such views, and said that in my humble opinion the bloke was a tosser. He didn't understand what a community poet was for, and that Tony's poems would be read and loved when the McLuhanite..etc etc. Tony smiled and cheered up.

In some ways, the least important thing about Tony was that he had cerebral palsy, except to say that the doctors told his parents he wouldn't make forty. Tony knew what he was here for, and he was a determined man. He wrote, taught, married, raised a family, and fulfilled his destiny as a poet. He died at the age of 81, honoured, loved and admired.

Pebble, by Tony Conran (1931 - 2013)

World pebble in my hand - 

Millimetre escarpments,

Cliffs, potholes,

Flat places.

It remembers 

A red mist of

Liquid stone

Slopping into the air.

Pressure was the heartbeat of living rock,

Millions of tons of it,

The pouring of world

To its centre.

Now this little lost stone

Must travel the trivial

Rivers of death.

Rub into dissolution.

Sharp gravel. Sand. Mud.

And then, deep down

Fragments

Like a froth of rock.

Settle into the seabed.

Relax under the tons of deep sea.

Harden again 

To strata.

It could be my fingers

That the sediments

Mould

Into chert.

My thumbprints could be fossil next.

The pebble on its way to death

Might laugh last.

It would remember me.

This poem was read yesterday at his funeral.

Thank you, Tony, for so much.