I have been "invalided for three months". They did not invalid me for long twenty years ago, but now, thirty years after, yes-- now again. No, it is different now. Now, one can take one's time being ill. Today, I am sitting on a porch near Harrow-on-the Hill, staring at a man in a white rocking chair across from me. I do not like rocking chairs, so I am sitting in an iron chair designed by William Kent. Few people know that Kent designed outside furniture. I know because I, too, am an artist.
The man in the white rocking chair is named Timothy. He has a good mind and we can talk about things, anything but the war, of course. No one here talks about the war. I have forgotten some things already. But, then, I have shell-shock, only thirty years late.
Timothy has no face. Where his jaw is there is nothing but white bandages. One of his eyes is gone and half of his nose is gone. But, Timothy is not sad. He is amazingly positive. Why, I do not know yet. Timothy is from another war. He is not from my war. His war was on a ship, which was blown up. He survived the Hood. Ventis Secundis. He has been here for five years. I cannot imagine sitting in a rocker for five years. Timothy is a forgetter, but I am a rememberer. Artists must remember. We are the keepers of the stories.
his mess-mates sleeping like long-barrow sleepers, their
dark arms at reach.
Spell-sleepers, thrown about anyhow under the night.
And this one’s bright brow turned against your boot leather,
tranquil as a fer sidhe sleeper, under fairy tumuli, fair as
Mac Og sleeping.
Timothy remembers nothing, not even the name of the Mighty Hood. He does not remember the cold waters of his baptismal sufferings or the sound of the torpedoes.
I remember sounds, mostly those of the nights in the trenches, the screeching sounds of the shells. The screams of my mates.
Some were never buried. We do not know where some disappeared in the smoke and chaos.
Is the tump by Honddu
his lifted bolster?
does a gritstone outcrop
incommode him?
does a deep syncline
sag beneath him?
or does his dinted thorax rest
where the contorted heights
themselves rest
on a lateral pressured anticline?
Does his russet-hued mattress
does his rug of shaly grey
ease at all for his royal dorsals
for faulted under-bedding
Maybe I shall know someday where my friend Tom was buried. Somewhere in Wales... Right now, I wish I lived in the times of King Arthur and his lady. I would be dead, not living in this half-life of death and terror. Tom claimed he came from royal blood. He claimed his ancestors scoured the valleys where I lived for awhile. Those green hills above St. Llanthony, the fog coming in so quickly I got lost once or twice, hearing the soft neighing of the horses in order to get back "home".
Home, where is that now? The mess is still growing damp over my painting of the dying Christ.
Do the small black horses
grass on the hunch of his shoulders?
are the hills his couch
or is he the couchant hills?
Are the slumbering valleys
him in slumber
are the still undulations
the still limbs of him sleeping?
Is the configuration of the land
the furrowed body of the lord
are the scarred ridges
his dented greaves
do the trickling gullies
yet drain his hog-wounds?
Does the land wait the sleeping lord
or is the wasted land
that very lord who sleeps?
My doctor is the best there is. And, I am to meet a new type of doctor tomorrow. His name is Crichton-Miller, Hugh Crichton-Miller. I do not want to speak with this man. I do not want to speak to anyone.
Nor, do I want to paint. I am sick of painting as no one cares, why should I care? But, deep down, I want to preserve, transfigure, guide. I am not just a painter, but a teacher, a bard, reminding the younger ones of what is to come, what has been and what will be. But pens bore me and brushed freeze to my hand. I could not finish the poem I was writing.
I was in hell again. But, now, it is different.
It is just the present I cannot face.
to be continued....
poetry by David Jones