We are gathered
a crowd of unknowing
some all night, they say,
some since bird-yellow dawn
tautened strings

a broad blank shop window
empty, paused, waiting
There, cries the boy,
There: a shade of violet,
bending, shimmering

we strain and peer –
was there a movement
ripple in the glass
fault, parallax, water
between the sheets

an impossible change in the air
a defunct TV screen
emitting its last rays
blue as paradise,
faint as the last bird

we saw nothing, we say
even to the police, moving us
along, an unseemly crowd
nothing, except perhaps
the ghost’s violet shimmer.

I suppose, as somebody who has spent 45 years in universities, much of it in the UK, I should have something to say on the vexed topic of British Vice-Chancellors’ pay. I am conflicted. VCs these days run large organisations, and they have precious little training for the responsibility. You could compare them with other CEOs, but universities are strange beasts, neither private nor public, funded by the taxpayer but at arms’-length. I want the university, as a concept and as an institution, to be valued, and that includes financially; but of course there is the problem of The Gap – or rather, of The Gaps, between highly-paid managers and poorly-paid junior staff, and between all of the above and the students paying a fortune for the privilege of higher education. For the moment – and I shall return to this topic – I have only one thing to say to VCs, and it is: for God’s sake have some dignity and know when you are damaging your own institutions – and, more importantly, the very intellectual (dare I say that word?) concept of the university. If in doubt, read Heidegger.

It was a creature of darkling fires and flashes of silver. It had no outline that we could see, but worse if didn’t have a clear tense: sometimes it was present, at others past, at others again future. He were bewildered, re-wilded. It hung, or sat, or strode over what was perhaps a chasm, or possibly a fault in the universal fabric. ‘Past imperfect’, Bruna joked, but it was true, and the creature was all imperfection. ‘Counterpoint to the narcissistic ego-ideal’, suggested Fabor, but when I looked at him he seemed engulfed in flame, or perhaps he was standing on a pool of clear silver water, over which the night-hawks flapped and crowed. In the depths were flashes of ruby; striations of red …

Ball fall crawl too far to fall the ball is in your court caught hard-fought to wrest the ball rest the ball at the end of the fall we crawl Saul becomes Paul bawl we bawl at the outset at the remaking standing tall answering the call; a trawl of what survives from the brawl and fall we sprawl brought bought in sport as we were taught to crawl as we ought to make it back from the fall wrought as we are from the haul brought in from the wall wall ‘I am Wall’ we call from nought from the fraught demon ‘blank Naught-at-all’ what sort of port will succour us at all exhort us back to the ball for out here in the glare and gall of the Red Death in the gleaming hall of the mall it is FUCKING COLD.

I have never seen a ghost. It’s a shame; I have spent a large part of my working life reading and writing about ghosts, phantoms, spectres, spirits, ghouls, revenants. But they elude me; I know they are down there, in the crypt, perhaps fully armoured like Hamlet’s father (if it really was Hamlet’s father), perhaps sheeted as in M.R. James, the strange hopping creature pursuing us over beach and breakwater and rearing up in the spare hotel-room bed. Or perhaps they are here with us all the time and we don’t recognise them. Think, for example, of a huge, opulent chamber; in it there are a few scattered forms – some are reclining, some clearly asleep, but some are all too full of a spirited, malign life. Many of them remind us of people we once knew to be alive; they bear their form, they sometimes seem to speak in their tongues. Although they are not habitually wearing the scarlet robes of destruction, we know they have them ready to hand for when the ghastly celebrations occur. Yet it seems to me I know this place, where the already dead, the half-dead and those so laden with earthly honours that they can never surface from their somnolence gather and speak only to each other in strange, discredited tongues. Ah, I have it. It’s the House of Lords.

I was told last night of a recent demonstration by a far-right party in Athens. It was the most sinister thing my friend had ever seen. It wasn’t large, perhaps a hundred or so men, all dressed in black, and it wasn’t noisy: indeed, it was silent, except for the clanging of the noisy equipment carried by the police escort – rather larger than the demonstration itself. And then we heard of this idea: what if, for every few yards these men advance, you donate, say, £5 to a good cause? So that their progress disseminates a little good – to the homeless, say, or to ill-treated donkeys – so that they are unwittingly contributing to the good of things, doing something to negate the evil prejudice of their intentions? Perhaps (I think to myself, as so often these days), this is no time for liberalism: fight venomous fire with a different kind of conflagration. “make sweet the bitter …’.

… across the darkling plain, before the gates of the city, we took surroundings with dontoscope and claviscope, the ear-bones of a mare, all the paraphernalia we had amassed on our journeyings, we sounded the hissings of the hidden cauldrons, we traced lines and thin patterns in the sediment, we tried by all means possible to establish where we were, but the shapes refused to fit, the maps giggled at us and sometimes we burned our feet as rare earths throbbed and moved. Is that what it comes down to, Fabor mused by the light of recent stars; that we should be lost before we are born? Is that Bethlehem? Is that the fabled city of Ur? Or are these the half-glimpsed tracings of distant constellations, reverberant with life, starved of all direction? And then we glimpsed the beast …

I used to love seeing
the lights of the boats coming in
green and red, steering
(I could tell) a little too far
to starboard for comfort

the risk of those seamen
rounding the harbour mole
their kinship with the night
knowledge of the dark things
I knew only by repute

but then I was coming in to harbour
myself and I saw the lights of land
colours too big to count
a ceaseless drone of life
and began to understand

homecoming joy, wringing
out the turtlenecks, fishermen’s
friends, ‘the many men
so beautiful’ on coastal shelf
and resounding in the deep waters.

… but we press on. Fabor appears well, except for the increasing encrustation around his right eye, which he had replaced years ago. He said it was necessary; I thought it vanity, especially with the ochre and turquoise striped orb, but who are we to judge others, under these circumstances? Last night, as we observed the subplanetary susurrations beneath the surface, Bruna told me one of her interminable stories about a lost lover; so prime he was, she said, although whether that meant that he was loaded to discharge I was unsure; her face, so carefully reconstructed yet held together, I suspect, only with chicken wire and fragments of marble, flickered in and out of the cold firelight, and I wondered again about whether the keys had finally been lost, or whether we could recover them once we encountered the others … as surely, soon, we were bound to do.

Back to Writing the Passions (nobody can justly say that I am not trying to sell the last few remaining copies of this excellent and challenging book, which has never been an STBS:

Ceremonial
On Deception, Sleep and the Heart
(Inter)Leaving
Kenosis
Rituals of Guilt and Innocence
The Innumerable Community
The Violence of the Automaton
Dreams of Forgiveness
Fright
Evading the Spoils
A Hidden Cacophony
Nostalgia, Regret, Evaporation

Oh, I knew a thing or two then (or thought I did). Some time soon I shall post my ‘Ballad of Disreputable Old Age’, a homage to George Barker. As they say, I knew George before he died; who properly gets to know somebody after they’ve died? Well, actually, all of us, I suppose: perhaps that’s one kind of true knowledge (if such a thing exists, and unless everything is indeed like Heraclitus’ river).