Perhaps this recent poem of mine has something to do with the monster:

Dragon

He has it on his back,
the cannibal serial killer,
‘The Great Red Dragon
and the Woman Clothed with the Sun’,
Blake’s apocalyptic masterpiece
which he can only see
in mirrors, in his terrified
nakedness, a shrunken dream of glory
like the uncertain visions
afflicting the suicide bomber
on the pathway to paradise,
or the shining, many-coloured
road to perdition.

What, in this bicentenary year of Frankenstein, are we to make of the creature, the monster, his sadness, his melancholy, his ceaseless call for a voice? The media have been hounding me all day (because I am an expert? because I am a monster?) for my views on sympathy for the devil. I say we are all entitled to a fair hearing, but the naive questions come thick and fast. Are we speaking of human rights? of animal rights? The creature is neither, but more importantly he blurs the distinction – as should we all: we are are all human (are we?) and we are all animal. Mary and Percy Shelley thought long and deeply about that; we seem to find it surprising, as though we have invented ecology. My answer could be that the creature has the rights that all created beings have, except that when I watch the TV news it seems to me as though we have no rights at all. The creature stands in for so many of us: slighted, cheated, fed lies, denied basic comforts, turned out into a hostile place. The creature is, of now, the refugee: what rights do we imagine we shall grant?

And then, as we view the transcender (our only amusement of an evening, while we wait), things float into focus. Here there seems to be a smooth venomous braggart, who claims to be ruling a powerful nation (on earth, he says, but it is not our earth), and we are to record that his name is Trump. Bruna is reminded of the Last Trump (for that is when she latterly died, having overdone, not for the first time, the diamorphine and pear juice). We are appalled. Yet, we discover (even worse) he has an accomplice (he is otherwise referred to as an adversary, but the transcender does not lie), and he is a tiny mannequin with a pumped-up chest (Fabor says it is in artificial ribcage, and he should know, after all these years under the knife). His name flickers on the screen – we think it might be Pouting, or Putain, or Pottin, but perhaps is is Putin – to us, out here, he is not dangerous, but we still feel the instinctive impulse to warn about this pair, this destructive coupling, this signifying rut in the bordello of desire.

It is becoming less decipherable. As we camp, it sometimes appears as though messages are being inscribed on our skin, or perhaps under the skin, where the epidermis meets the soft ooze of flesh. It isn’t painful; more as though we are itching from the inside, as though something is trying to speak from within. Our new companion – it seems we are being sent reinforcements at irregular intervals (or are they replacements, are we each being replaced before the fact?) – claims her name is Xenia, although this is a name we seem to have heard before, perhaps outside the blinded gates of Naples. She has, of course, no papers. Except her face. Except her face. Which is paper-thin, a slender coating of matchwood on a bone structure so fragile it reminds us of evanescent nights of childhood. Her limbs seem curiously disjointed, a kind of incarnated spiritual dysmorphia, and it makes us feel so tender, so terribly tender, to terribly tender as we observe her pale shift, her struggle to begin to speak, her strange articulation. What ragged army, we wonder, is this?

I have no idea why this might be Chapter One. It doesn’t seem like it, out here under the cold blasts. But then, all that has gone before might be preamble – isn’t that a wonderful word, ‘preamble’? Walking about before you’re prepared for it. Let us wonder for a moment about whether this might all be preamble – or prolegomena, as Kant among others famously put it. Yet I sense a certain beginning here, a beginning which will not be a drawing together of the threads – they are far too widely disparate for that, and to draw them together would imply a false cohesion of the soul. But ;et us start again. As I say endlessly to my soul mates, the cousins of my decay: let us start again.

I imagine it’s some kind of a door. It doesn’t look much like a door, but from behind it I hear wails. A cliche comes to mind: the wails of souls in distress. I tell the others, we must move beyond this: if language is to mean anything at all, it must at least retain the capacity to generate something new. Or relatively new. I am refining this thought when Jun-So approaches me on folded elbows. He cannot speak (of course), but he reminds me that all of this, including his own collapsed body, has been foretold. He carries his punishment with him like a rose. Yet how can we manage with this door which is not a door? We need, of course, a sacrifice – a liminal being who will enable us to tread lightly, to leave no lasting imprint, having absorbed the footfall into his (no, I think it may be her) own body. It is hard to tell: I can see what is about to occur, but I cannot remember what it is that will have occurred. Here the future is neither perfect nor imperfect; and the past is, for all I know, continuous. But what would be the consequences of that?

I have just read two articles in my newspaper of choice. One appears to suggest that Jacob Rees-Mogg may be the next leader of the Conservative Party, the other tells me that Mr Bean is the most widely recognised international emblem of Britishness. I suspect a fearful symmetry. They look alike; they display a similar concentration in the performance of acts of idiocy; and they show that Britain still clings to the old ways, whether that be in comedy or in parliamentary democracy.

A partnership made in heaven; but of course there is a further delicious scenario to be entertained. Suppose Mogg did make it to the high table? He might encounter there King Charles III. Imagine the conversation:

Monarch: God, I abhor modern buildings.
Mogg: God, I abhor anything modern at all.
Monarch: How are the kids?
Mogg: No idea – I leave all that to the wife. Never changed a nappy, you know.
Monarch: Good man, No idea whether my ex enjoyed doing all that for me. Bit of a handful.
Mogg: I’ve got more than a handful.
Monarch: Of course. Six at last count, eh what?
Mogg: I think the last Count was killed in some kind of middle European uprising.
Monarch: Ho ho! No danger of that here, eh?
Mogg: Certainly not, your Majesty, so long as we have a firm hand on the tiller.
Monarch: Firm hand, eh? Just so. Yours doesn’t seem so steady, if I might say so.
Mogg: Tough lot, these constituents in BANES – bane of my life (after a moment’s silence) That was a joke, Your Majesty.
Monarch: Oh yes, ha ha. Remember the old days at the Brighton Pavilion?
Mogg: Remember them? I’m still there every night.
Monarch looks momentarily perturbed, before he recalls that it’s his own slightly wayward ancestor they’re discussing.

Anyway, this could run and run; but let us not forget the crucial difference between Mr Bean and Rees-Mogg. Mr B has the high ground; unlike R-M, he doesn’t speak. We could learn a lot from that.

And of course, let us not forget that the election of R-M to high office is the greatest gift for which we socialists could hope: the sanctification of Jeremy as the only human alternative!

All these miracles. I did a good thing the other day. I’m not sure I often do good things. I was with an old friend; he is in his 80s, fit and spry as a bird, but inwardly he wasn’t doing well. Every day looked the same, the sure sign of depression, along with the inset of the monochromatic. I said to him, ‘Look, in every day there may be something entirely new; it’s all a question of perspective’. I’m not sure why I said it; in a sense, I’m not sure whether I said it – was something else speaking through me? At any event, it performed a magic trick. The sharp bird’s eye opened more fully. Will it last? I don’t know. It is also true that each day can also bring its own harvest of disappointment. I can only repeat to myself my mantra, a travesty of Buddhist sagacity: ‘The secret of being happy is being happy’. It may not do us much good, down there on the terminal beach, or outside the perpetually closed Western gate, or amid the ruin of favour and hope, but it is something to cling to, a raft on which to resist, for a short while, the inexorable, growing power of the swell …

And here is another set of section titles from Writing the Passions, which seem, as I recount them, to be melding more and more into the story of our adventures in unseen lands; perhaps they are guides through the labyrinth, perhaps they are statements of denial, of avoidance of what is there to be seen, if only one could look at it straight, if only for a moment, before the real shimmers and disappears:

Why Any Text At All?
Adoration
Worship and Be Punished
Abjection before the Cross
Despair/Passion
Shadow and Outcast/The Uncrowned Head
A Scornful Exhibition
Corruption’s Miracle

I am in the process of publishing my new book, Bristol: 21 Poems. I shall be reading poems from it at the regular poetry revue at the Square Club, Berkeley Square, Bristol, at 8.30 on Tuesday 30th January – there will be other poets and musicians on the programme. Do come along if you can!