taste, any taste, so long as it's strong

Reading the tweet by Robert Minto in which he tells me, us, that “increasingly I enjoy the aesthetic opinions of people with *a* taste, any taste, so long as it's strong and they're articulate. Those people are the ones who show you new ways to be" -- I thought, oh, advertising, we want advertising; we are unhappy when it manifests itself insufficiently, when the brand is not evident – this is bad for me -- I will never show anyone a way to be, my taste is very very little, I am less than a new car or a box of butterless butter – and if a person does not have a taste then they are not even flesh, they are cardboard. Even Frankenstein's monster had an opinion.

I should find a thought and espouse it ... I will be angry at texts that do not feature farts. There is a manifesto in that. "Farts are part of LIFE," I write, "why are they not ALSO part of literature?" Every piece of text must have at least one anal utterance unless it is an academic paper: those I will excuse. I write, "A fart is as intimate as we can be with the divine element, Air, and does not the position of the emittance indicate a relationship also with Earth? Throwing open the skylight we establish a deposition to the ground. Nearby there is Water." I’ll follow this up with water wisdom of some kind -- quote: Shelley, Percy B (do you pron. this Bish?): "A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight." A Defence of Poetry, writ. 1821, pub. 1840: posthumous. Everybody will be impressed but we want something more contemporary. Adrienne Rich, why not. "I have always wondered about the leftover | energy, water rushing down a hill | long after the rains have stopped," use that, from For the Dead, found in (as in, I opened the book and looked for the word "water" because the title sounded as if it would lead to water) Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971 - 1972, pub. 1973, "Co-winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1974." Water: done and sounds unassailable. Water is life and poetry. Fire, I don't know -- fire? I could fuzz something about the energy of life being essentially multiplicitous, composed of opposites and contrasts and everything in the middle, therefore firelike as well as waterlike (n.b., this connection to the convincing earlier extrapolations about water will be worth half the argument right here) and this energy runs through all of our bodies but especially through the anal-neighbourly presence of two clumps that do not pick anything up* or transport us anywhere and instead hang there with energy popping through the fat "as a flame leaps (leapeth sounds better? too pretentious?) between gum trees, therefore FIRE, the plump arse is a natural HOTBED, plural units cry out for transference and fire transfers itse" ... no, I dunno about Fire. I think I could get away with it though.


* there must be someone with good musculature who could do this.

an over-excited brain, kept in continual action

Enjoyment recently with Edward John Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, a gossipy, wayward, autobiographical book by a moustach'd Romantic who tracked down both poets in 1822 and stayed with them for a while by the Mediterranean. He was still there when Shelley died, and alert enough to rescue the poet's unburnt heart from his funeral pyre. The seaside cremation, though romantic on paper, was not a romantic gesture; the body had to be carried from the shoreline, where it was found, to Rome for burial, and the authorities, fearing infectious disease, weren't going to let them travel through the countryside with an intact corpse.

"In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace," Trelawny writes, "my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine." The heart was passed on to Mary Shelley, who wrapped it in a copy of her husband's Adonaïs and deposited it in a box on her desk.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.-- We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

It's Trelawny's biases and his breezy style that make the book interesting -- his willingness to exaggerate an anecdote -- to lie and invent -- his preference for Shelley over Byron, who disappoints him with flippancy and cynicism.

Byron's wit or humour might force a grim smile, or hollow laugh, from the standers by, but they savoured more of pain than playfulness, and made you dissatisfied with yourself and him. When I left his gloomy hall and the echoes of the heavy iron-plated door died away, I could hardly refrain from shouting with joy as I hurried along the broad-flagged terrace which overhangs the pleasant river, cheered on my course by the cloudless sky, soft air, and fading light, which close an Italian day.

Byron stays Byron, but Shelley is quickly transformed into The Poet.

Events not worth narrating in the lives of ordinary men are interesting as regards our Poet; they illustrate the character and the workings of an over-excited brain, kept in continual action by a fervid imagination and metaphysical studies.

Which tickled me massively.

The Poet, hearing his name -- for all his senses were marvellously acute -- glided into the room, with his boyish face and radiant expression. He seized some bread and grapes ...

The Poet vanished, and tea appeared.

The Poet in this book is often coupled with food. Either he is gliding in and seizing it, or else he is forgetting to eat it.

If food were near him he ate it, if not he fasted, and it was after long fasts that he suffered from spasms.

Dreamy genius, he sits in a glade.

"Hello, come in"

"Is this your study?" I asked.

"Yes," he answered, "and these trees are my books -- they tell no lies. In composing one's faculties must not be divided; in a house there is no solitude; a door shutting, a footstep heard, a bell ringing, a voice, causes an echo in your brain and dissolves your visions."

I said: "Here you have the river rushing by you, the birds chattering and the beasts bellowing."

He answered; "The river flows by like Time, and all the sounds of Nature harmonize; they soothe: it is only the human animal that is discordant with Nature and disturbs me."

I sympathise. In the background right now someone is running a television, and all I can hear is that television. I should go out into the desert and plant myself in a wash. So it's disappointing when Trelawny starts to insert the Poet's letters into his story and we discover that the dreamy one is rather polite and self-conscious in prose, and not nearly as interesting --

We see the Williams every day and my regard for them is every day increased; I hardly know which one I like best, but I know Jane is your favourite.

-- as slapdash Byron in his letters.

You will have heard of our journeys and escapes, and so forth,-- perhaps with some exaggeration; but it is all very well now, and I have been some time in Greece, which is in as good a state as could be expected considering circumstances. But I will not plague you with politics -- war -- or earthquakes, though we have had a rather smart one three nights ago …