I first came across Xavier le Maistre's faux travelogue 'A journey around my room' when I was researching material that might be useful for my M.A. dissertation. It was cited as a pre-cursor of psychogeographical literature. Though I noted it, time pressures were such that I never got around to reading it. Published in 1795, it records Le Maistre's two months under house arrest in Turin, imposed by the civic authorities after he wounded a rival in a duel. The journal is written in a mock heroic style. It alternates between a parody of a travel journal which treats the indoors as unknown territory, interspersed with personal ramblings on more metaphysical matters. As 'lockdown' was imposed I thought, what better moment to immerse myself in Le Maistre's interior expedition.
In the event, though Le Maistre's book was entertaining, and divided into forty two short chapters perfectly suited to the dive in concentration which seems to accompany being marooned indoors, its tone was irritating, 'foppish' almost. It's difficult to empathise with some entitled eighteenth century aristocrat grounded by an ASBO bemoaning the fact he is missing out on costume balls and the carnival when you are similarly afflicted through no fault of your own, and fated to watch a global pandemic cut down, country by country, the world's oldest, poorest and most vulnerable people.
However, it did occur to me, what would a journey through my room entail taking Le Maistre as the starting point? Occasionally I have thought about writing a 'crown of sonnets' but have always managed to find a good excuse not to. Sometimes the sequence is called a 'sonnet corona'. With days to fill and only weeding, decorating and iPlayer to stave-off mental meltdown, if this was not the moment to attempt a 'sonnet corona', when would be? As a 'newbie' I thought I would start with the simpler, seven sonnet sequence. The 15 sonnet cycle - the heroic crown or sonnet redoublé looks mightily tricky, but May seems set to be as locked-down as April, so perhaps I might continue this....
1/4/2020
From bed to bureau - a trip of forty days,
under house arrest time slows, or rather
attenuates the way a sun-shaft greys
when thin clouds drift across. Always farther,
always beyond the ever receding
horizon, somewhere between now and then,
time became the ground we were conceding,
but no one knows to whom or why or when.
Le Maistre proved no help, his musings trite,
self-aggrandizing, sentimental tosh.
Instead, embrace routine! The pure delight
of chopping vegetables and pots to wash.
For us there is no carnival outside,
an emptied world awaits the rising tide.
7/4/2020
An emptied world awaits the rising tide.
Where once we looked to God we watch the screen,
appreciate the numbers game - next slide!
Death's five day rolling average, the mean
or median seem matter-less if you're
that scattergram's black dot! Come 5pm
it's briefing time, the PM.'s at death's door,
robotic men in suits step-in, condemned
to echo their Adviser's puerile patter:
"Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives.."
- propaganda in perfect pentameter!
Do as we say, or people here will die;
we comply, hostages to the Hobbesian lie.
10/4/2020
We comply, hostages to the Hobbsian lie -
democracy's a sham, a puppet show
that hides elites' protection racket. They die
in droves, the old and weak; the 'foe'
invisible as our unspoken fears.
Enmeshed in myth, the only thing we know -
the world is not the same as it appears
twittering on screen. Out of the window,
unstoppable, spring unfolds anyway,
a green contagion; birds tweet our relief.
There is only grief in human hearsay,
but solace in the wild, faith in disbelief.
Bright days, white blossom flecking woodland streams,
then restless nights edged by sinister dreams.
11/4/2020
A restless night edged by sinister dreams:
A voice repeating, "No-one tells the truth."
A twilit street, is nothing what it seems?
Each shadow hides a faceless, trilbied sleuth,
(a noirish mise-en-scene). Out of the gloom
the spooks close in, I break out in a sweat.
Jump cut. Stark naked in my living room,
I face a firing squad - last cigarette
before they shoot, it morphs by magic
into a digital thermometer -
37 degrees. I wake.. hardly tragic!
"You are ridiculous," I mutter.
MacNeice was right, 'we cannot beg for pardon'.
Dawn's dull light spreads plague-like through the garden.,
11/4/2020
Dawn's dull light spreads plague-like through the garden.
Blackbirds sing, the hunting owls go quiet.
In 'solitary' our hearts must surely harden,
'Dying Egypt, dying' as we deny it.
Finally I fall asleep, wake-up late
to glorious sunshine, summer in spring,
so beautiful I feel disconsolate.
Earth always will prevail, knowing nothing
of our grand designs or for what we yearn.
A widget in the system, a slight force,
this cocky primate's smart linguistic turn
unsignified in Nature's wordless course.
Unseen, there is no beauty in the wild,
only the regarded can be defiled.
24/4/2020
'Only the regarded can be defiled'.
Perhaps we never see beyond the sign;
eschewing fact, we choose to be beguiled,
mistaking unintelligent design
for Providence; our vivid here and now,
mere accidents narrated into sense.
Our 'hunting fathers' tried to beat the odds
to stave off hunger, drought or pestilence
by bowing down before capricious gods,
believing bison painted deep in caves
controlled the hairy ones outside. For us,
though freed from deities who strike or save
at will, we're doomed, alas, to trust in Boris!
As memory fades our long todays seems endless;
the future looms before us, bleak and friendless.
30/4/2020
The future looms before us bleak and friendless -
NB. to my miserable friend T. S.
'April - not cruel, more horrendous',
but as he said, 'stirring dull roots' nonetheless.
I click through last spring's photographs. Stevns Klint -
white cliffs in scintillating light, a line
less than a hand-span wide through chalk and flint
delineates the dinosaurs' decline -
their sudden mass extinction. Is ours next?
Well yes, but no-one knows how long before
it's our turn to be utterly 'T-Rexed' -
a plastic sliver on some silent shore.
Bright days exclude us, diminished inside
an emptied world, an ever ebbing tide.
