bhikku

2008-10-05T14:15:57Z

It's Flann O'Brien's birthday.

I was seven years old when I was sent to school. I was tough, small and thin, wearing grey-wool breeches but otherwise unclothed above and below. Many other children besides me were going to school that morning with the stain of the ashes still on the breeches of many of them. Some of them were crawling along the road, unable to walk. Many were from Dingle, some from Gweedore, another group floated in from Aran. All of us were strong and hearty on our first school day. A sod of turf was under the armpit of each one of us. Hearty and strong were we!

The master was named Osborne O'Loonassa. He was dark, spare and tall and unhealthy with a sharp, sour look on his face where the bones were protruding through the yellow skin. A ferocity of anger stood on his forehead as permanent as his hair and he cared not a whit for anyone.

We all gathered into the schoolhouse, a small unlovely hut where the rain ran down the walls and everything was soft and damp. We all sat on benches, without a word or sound for fear of the master. He cast his venomous eyes over the room and they alighted on me, where they stopped. By jove! I did not find his look pleasant while these two eyes were sifting me. After a while he directed a long yellow finger at me and said:

- Phwat is yer nam?

I did not understand what he said nor any other type of speech which is practised in foreign parts because I had only Gaelic as a mode of expression and as a protection against the difficulties of life. I could only stare at him, dumb with fear. I then saw a great fit of rage come over him and gradually increase just like a raincloud. I looked around timidly at the other boys. I heard a whisper at my back:

- Your name he wants!

My heart leaped with joy at this assistance and I was grateful to him who prompted me. I looked politely at the master and replied to him:

- Bonaparte, son of Michelangelo, son of Peter, son of Owen, son of Thomas's Sarah, grand-daughter of John's Mary, grand-daughter of James, son of Dermot . . .

Before I had uttered or half-uttered my name, a rabid bark issued from the master and he beckoned to me with his finger. By the time I had reached him, he had an oar in his grasp. Anger had come over him in a flood-tide at this stage and he had a businesslike grip of the oar in his two hands. He drew it over his shoulder and brought it down hard upon me with a swish of air, dealing me a destructive blow to the skull. I fainted from that blow but before I became totally unconscious I heard him scream:

Yer nam, said he, is Jams O'Donnell!

Jams O'Donnell? These two words were singing in my ears when feeling returned to me. I found that I was lying on my side on the floor, my breeches, hair and all my person saturated with the streams of blood which flowed from the split caused by the oar in my skull. When my eyes were in operation again, there was another youngster on his feet being asked his name. It was apparent that this child lacked shrewdness completely and had not drawn good beneficial lessons for himself from the beating which I had received because he replied to the master, giving his common name as I had. The master again brandished the oar which was in his grasp and did not cease until he was shedding blood plentifully, the youngster being left unconscious and stretched out on the floor, a bloodied bundle. And during the beating the master screamed once more:

Yer nam is Jams O'Donnell!

He continued in this manner until every creature in the school had been struck down by him and all had been named Jams O'Donnell. No young skull in the countryside that day remained unsplit. Of course, there were many unable to walk by the afternoon and were transported home by relatives. It was a pitiable thing for those who had to swim back to Aran that evening and were without a bite of food or sup of milk since morning.

from The Poor Mouth

2008-10-02T05:13:49Z

The beggar's palace is the cloud's shadow

- Hafiz

khidr

2008-10-01T17:24:50Z

. . . if the Green Man often looks deathly at the same time as overflowing with life, that is because paradox is his very nature. Since he is life itself, the thing he utters, or 'outers', is the living green of woods in spring. He carries the spirit of Dionysus himself, whose haunts are woods and wild places, and who is never seen except as a mask hanging in a tree. - Roger Deakin, Wildwood

2008-09-14T15:46:31Z

I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
- General Sternwood in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

(image: nest of Lycosa tarantula, Spain)

2008-09-13T14:34:28Z

First morning in Spain: we drove up into the mountains from the coast and stopped to look back the way we'd come. I couldn't find the handbrake on the rental car (it turned out to be a footbrake, that was why) so we put it in gear and a rock behind the wheel to prevent it from rolling into the valley. The smells were of hot rock and hot pine. There were a few cicadas layering into distance. A good place for lunch. The central smudge on the horizon is the Rock of Gibraltar: behind it across the Strait are the hills of Africa.

2008-09-11T17:39:38Z

A kind and attentive reader (thanks Arthur!) sends in a cartoon to which previously I've only known the caption. Triffic.

2008-09-10T17:23:36Z

There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp than a house because that's the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through.

Roger Deakin, from Wildwood

in Ronda

2008-09-09T17:03:59Z

"Whoever has no license now, will never have one."

2008-09-08T10:39:49Z

In Cordoba

Cordoban, step into a new pair of shoes.
Look, your footprints in the blue
stretch over Andalus!
Go softly through the lanes.
The city melts in the mouth
like candyfloss.
What remains is relict. The Guadalquivir divides here less from force of water - the Berber riverbank rituals not forgotten - than from the leathersmell flowing from one end to the beginning; man-smell, skin-smell, the smell of conquest and vanquishing; the almond blossoms on trees nodding to the south wind. History abuts here again to its own explanations; the Alcazar's Roman bridge, the river meandering across the fields of cotton, corn and barley to the Atlantic; new electrical fittings, of course, and chapters of endless olives. Outside the lichened Arabic walls Averroes waits, while the local angels take new language courses and operate the official grapevine. But you haven't walked out of it yet - a white handkerchief across the city's face. In La Mezquita let heaven's music fill in for light - turn the shadows in the nave back to rows of people. So you will not avert the breezes from the Yemen or your silent prayer through this watchful arch of time (to a God who will bless without design, not convert).

Alamgir Hashmi

2008-08-14T05:57:10Z

* * * bhikku is off to Al-Andalus; Herr Doktor Professor Freidegg is all agog to walk the streets of the home town of Maimonides and Averroes; the History Dept are keen to visit the place Hadrian grew up in; the rest of us would like to see wild vultures and eat tapas among moorish, morisco and mudéjar architectures. Back later on * * *

this

2008-08-13T05:32:12Z

This is how I like my scientists: exuberant, euphoric, bearded, unconcerned with Old World considerations or restraints. This is what I'll be showing my students in the years to come: what science does; what humans do. Because this is the space age, and we're here to GO.

2008-08-12T20:50:52Z

Thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.

Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

She was everywhere at once! Streaking along high monster towers in instants, sizzling between high poles where small glass knobs sat like crystal-green birds holding the wires in their non-conductive beaks, branching in four directions, eight secondary directions, finding towns, hamlets, cities, racing on to farms, ranches, haciendas, she descended gently like a widely filamented spider web upon a thousand square miles of desert . . . . . . She spilled out swiftly into rooms where life was rising from a slap on a naked child's back, into rooms where life was leaving bodies like the light fading from an electric bulb . . . she was in every town, every room, making light-patterns over hundreds of miles of land; seeing, hearing, everything . . .

Ray Bradbury, Powerhouse

2008-08-11T12:37:21Z

Don't forget to read the sizzling new edition of Peter Parasol. It's just out.

2008-08-09T08:44:56Z

It's been a while since I last looked at him.

2008-08-06T15:29:49Z

If my discoveries are other people's commonplaces I cannot help it - for me they retain a momentous freshness. - Elizabeth Bowen