8 Winderby's Last Case - Duncan McGibbon (read book txt) 📗

Headquarters,
yet the ciphers are busy
this afternoon in Brindisi.
I am a trusted passenger,
eighty years on and still in cloth.
I still do Attwater the odd turn
and the Ministry of Secret Threatenings
(and the children will they be throwing
pebbles to shatter the night tide,
which might only have one bank,
carbonised against the setting sun
which prints Ensor's 'I' onto the swim.)
Thus it is possible that everything said
is being cracked open, or that the
monitors back in the friendly country
have packed up for the day, or for ever.
Yes I admit ghosts have little motive
for physical lovemaking.

What is needed for this narrative
is a term without any relevant cause,
a parentage to refer to, but only to stress its isolation.
The events of the journey and the women
who are still bricked up in my memory.
(The predestined for example,
could only have been so raised
at only the third month of conception
as a soul without a heart
is indeed an abstract thing.)
Earlier this very day I have looked for
tin openers, (their constant undermining is
raising questions about the hotel kitchen utensils
whose closed grasp of analysis needs be kept sharp)
where I read the tomato tin's label
'Prodotto in Italia a norma di legge'
Which gave me time to look at the
label, its image, a painted code, concealed
my intentional object, only the lissom
cutting edge could cipher the message which
my tongue could taste.
why does an imagined tin
still need to be opened?
Why do old ghosts lust?

The painted images, red and lustrous,
have coded signified and signifier,
the thing itself needs an opener,
burning behind De Saussure’s pate.

Thus even to raise a character
a travelling companion,
could produce the taste for uncertainty
which, the openers not being available,
could more the less frustrate the listeners
into a sullen attention.
The woman lying by my bed,
wearing Nineteenth Century costume.
Bunkered though, to the west of the city,
I want to tell my loved ones of promotion,
which may have been mine long ago,
but jammed in a previous transmission.
They do not read Troeltsch, or Weber
in these climes, the I Ching
is in everyone's hands;
the material providence is passed on here
in Materialistic Puglia.
I have been reunited to my sinning church.

Across the tight sky
the jets of a Clipper,
travelling to Potamos,
cut the misty sun above the Piazza Mercato,
no longer ascending,
but levelled for Cythera.
I am there in the real daring
of fancy, by their side.
in the seat next to me
sits Leconte de Lisle
sucking Villier’s candy again, this
time with no displaced imagination.
He has it blocked with my lost
British Museum reading card
which is why I write to you
for clearance and space
to be accompanied by my lover,
an open stranger.
 


5.Movement: The Birth of Flight


35 On Authority and Sameness

Reply to Attwater.
I am alerted by your message,
but its bareness has brought about
a break in my cover.
Sub specie aeternitatis,
the streets are alive with
troops, some, with assignats to spend
are from the directory, looking for the
Chastel de Beaureguard Sisters
and the Pomponazzi woman,
whom I think to be the woman in my room.
They have warrants for their arrest,
but ask constantly about sculpture,
regretting Blondel and Pigalle’s invasion
of Strasbourg, or sidle up to the issue by
remarks about the Critique of Teleological Judgment
or Schelling's doctrine of the Absolute.

In the rotting vegetable markets
and just round the corner in the port
the ambassador was considering the effects
of the constant erotic passage to the island.
In the Hotel, the ladies were preparing
to leave for the midsummer retreat
Word had it that a large, disused residence
has a superb colonnade that would
feature them in their rendering of Guarini.
Rome left with them, downing their masks
as the sumptuous coaches took the sea
for the Island.
Hours later, they returned,
the Directory's troops having invaded
and fled to their own hills
the fate of les demoiselles
not being the concern
of any particular noble

Others, merely Napoleonic, are content
to hang around, roaming about
not looking for Madame de Stael, Constant and
Chateaubriand, though they have
De Maistre in their pockets,
but for American dissemblers
and the English who shelter Pleyels.
The Nazis are the best behaved.
They talk about Kunst
and Bernstein, which I take to be amber.
As they seem to know what I am talking about
and have my records, they leave me alone.
They have no instruments
for measuring the distance
between death and obedience.
What worries me is what they will do
when they realise they are not getting anywhere.
The whole request is a thought –experiment.
It bears no relation to reality.
Because the last thing, Cythera wants
is only to be found this way.
Each day the tension mounts
on the breaking of the poet's code,
on agents of rationality trying to reduce to
sense what is a though –experiment,
rationalising and fossilizing what
should have had no relationship to reality.
Feudal, Renaissance, Napoleonic, Fascist
scenes borrow each others’ props
like Darwin’s organs.
They mutter the name of a
heterodox Renaissance humanist,
as if it cure them of doubt.
What can you say when they want
to arrest someone called Amaryllis?
This is no time to make news
of one’s travelling.
Yours sincerely etc Winderby


36. The Further Wanderings 2
A Railway Chronicle
Oxford to Paddington,
or A Mediaeval Jig Revived.
(Camera immobile
horizontal to tracks
revealed as train
departs. Train slow fade,
extreme longshot.
Sound added, a train
travelling from before to after)

(Voice over )

At Oxford General station,
I imagine for company,
a woman who wears
the three ravens badge of
of the Association for the Education
of Women at Oxford.
(Shot through train window)
She gets on the train.
She cannot see me.
The girl is no more than twenty
has a small, oval face
and a long, slender body.
Her hair is light brown
curled quite closely
around her head,
allowing the sunlight
to whiten the brown a little,
but tinged with auburn.
Her hands are thin,
and long, but graceful and deft.
Her eyes are a faint, piercing blue.
She wears a long dress with a crinoline,
and has a mantle.

(Studio set up)

Followed by a man imagined knows her
and seems to be her drama tutor.
She’s to be ‘Moll’ to his ‘Filch’
in the Jig of ‘Blind Harry Hunker
and the Cheaters Cheated’
for a revival at the New Masonic Hall.
They traipse up and down
the corridors,
practicing slapstick scholarship.
with theft and countertheft.
They talk of the old bear
(Archive)
who lies now in some
Elizabethan rubbish pit,
her scapulars pocked
with the claws of mastiffs
while her skull ears heard
the Shoreditch crowd bellow
for the cut of the whip,
a bloodied Lear with a paper crown,
a goaded Hamlet , cursed Faustus…
the sole female performer
on the wooden O.

The man begins to sing
in a strange counter-tenor.
(Sound added)
The girl is mesmerised.
‘Dark one, a pelt grows in
your supple flanks.
Its texture glazes
your breasts
and brings a bright
gleam of light
on your calves.
Its whirlpools
gather by your dimples
to run off to your legs.
Each shoulder
is turning to shadow.
Every finger flows
in curling locks
from your wrist.
Your waist is
rushing to the earth
and your loins
have plashed
with the
torrent of your hair.
I cannot touch
you more, Callisto.’

(Through train window)
and the man leaves
in a black cloak
and a cloud of steam
as the train draws
into Paddington.
I see her body
turn to fine bloodied fur
shade by shade
mimicking the contours
of her clothing.
I try to call out
but no-one can hear me.
I have no dialogue
with my own inventions.

(Fade to lips)(Is this the same woman
I saw growl at my spectre,
in an Attic bridal peplus,
shriek of fate, in khaki reliefs,
make vows of vengeance,
in mediaeval lappets and sleeves,
accept God’s will, in corseted waists,
deep décolletage and Renaissance taffeta?
She taunts my patriarchal shade.
I must write again to Attwater
My diary fans its pages, helped by the sea wind
'What then? I rasped out loud.
How can we get through all this?
Was I in Oxford? Am I now in Brindisi?
and the whole journey nothing more
than an awareness of a woman
and the accidents of a planet.


37. Second Appeal

You think I'm fooling you,
Then who do you think I am?
I can’t stay in Horace’s stinking canal.
An engineer to one end,
to fulfill the theory of value Marx's, or Ricardo’,
that the reader should waste as much time
as I have writing, which is
a domestic chore uncelebrated
by the praisers of the little way,
the dish-mop and hoover
and me, the scribbler?
I don't care if you started
on I.T.A. You must have got through
Quintilian, Colet, Comenius,
Burt-Schonell or someone lost
to be here at all
en face, left, right, black left, right,
sad left right, island,
So it’s a sad, black island,
fit for the dead, then get on with it,
my honest heart.

38.On Futility and Omnipotence

Dear Cedric,
This is what I have put together
with that sly man, Panizzi’s, assistance.
Word of the four walled room
no matter by whom it was first put about,
was recorded by Boissard in his
Topographica Romanae Urbis,
by which time its triad graces
with clasping hands had been imitated
by Germaine Pilon, to guard the heart of Louis
The crowning virtue too, was hinted at
in Biard's athletic 'La Renommé'
Thus Bologna could be looked to for the original
(He was known to the family)
but Vasari speaks vaguely of
a candelabra base, claimed for Cellini
separately by Francesco D'Ollonda.
Pilon clothed Mesdemoiselles,
but Boissard has them
traditionally nude,
perhaps a fountain.
Other sources, such as Heemsherck's drawing
in the Hague, point to an earlier date still,
but a fondness for counterfeit antiquities
among the humanists confounds the critics,
leaving only Focillon to point out the detour.
Its shape, too, has for long been disputed.
Some favouring the view of Wickhoff,
that the design of the figure of the muse
followed that of the right hand figure
of victory in Bertholdo's battaglia in the Bargello,
her feet therefore resting on the crouched
shoulders of three graces, while the fawn
silence, balances the other two
with a slight variation on the interlinked motif
and a finger held mysteriously to its mouth.

The candle, according to D'Ollando, being
placed in a horn of plenty which virtue
holds aloft in her right hand
as in the angel of Francesco di Giorgio.
Her left hand in this case
descending to touch the horn of plenty.
A more distinct authority is Winckelmann
whose writings, whilst making no mention of the group
are bathed in its non-existence. From them, it can