Tommy C's Blog

The silver hours. Behind the sky's blankets of grey, dawn's rose-red fingers hide, frail and ancient. In the stone court-yard, a man, dressed only in a battered old jacket, lies motionless on the ground. Then his torturer kicks him around a bit, muttering only that:

If I cut you like a pig,
Do you not bleed like a pig?
Are you not, therefore, a pig?

He will cut him again, he has cut him before. An Auschwitz Jew, a Guantanamo detainee, a Middle East kidnap victim, a Nazi junior, a psychopathic extremist, a secret service operative, a would-be-bomber, a Turk and Armenian, a Roman and Christian, a tribesman and caveman, or a pair of Hollywood stereotypes - who are these two figures that haunt my dreams this morning, that haunt from the birth of time the whole of the human world?

The man sat next to me - haphazardly dressed in a badly torn and badly patterned jumper, a Star Trek t-shirt partially visible beneath it, tucked into his ill-fitting tracksuit bottoms - is gesturing wildly. Applause, thumbs up, even a little bow - which vaguely resembles praying, too. It's the first round of the Portsmouth Chess Congress, and his position is getting torn apart by his sharp, composed opponent. A few moves ago, he was rubbing at his stubble, coughing these little, irritating coughs, clamping his balding head in his pudgy fingers. But now he's accepted his fate, as if a crude bull thankfully put out of his misery by the swift, sophisticated sword of a master matador.

This is why I quit chess tournaments, I remind myself. The ludicrous myths that circulate in and out of them, as if even at our mediocre level, a moment of magic was only a few moves away. Twinned with that, the strange shame, where fears of looking stupid make grown-men perform such rituals of understanding, and act complicitly in their own downfall. Still, I think, at least it's cold, at least it's February - so the big airy hall where we play contains nothing like the smell of the sweaty, summer events. Even if the guy two boards along sat opposite clearly has a passion for curry far greater than his passion for cleanliness.

Almost five hours later, and I've finally lost my game. It's 11.15, and it's Friday night, and the dark city has been circulating away crazily in pubs, clubs and parties, for all that it's worth, for hours and hours. I wait twenty minutes for a cab and the list of grim reasons for quitting tournament chess seems to grow. How did I forget? What I am doing here?

A few rounds later on and I face the same player - same jumper - I was sat next to on the Friday night. A change of t-shirt though. He passes me a note: "I'm deaf", it reads, and I feel like an idiot for not realising that before. It even says next to his name on the tournament pairings. Hence the coughing, hence the signalling. And by this time I've started winning, and telling myself that Of course, I love chess tournaments, I must do more of this! Why did I leave it so long?

Half-way through the game and I'm taking control of the position; my opponent's head looks like it'll be locked in his hands for quite a while, so I take a walk through the other sections. Down in the Minor section there are a few girls in their late-teens or perhaps early twenties; their new cleavages, nicely displayed in the latest high-street tops, must be torture for the fat, old, lop-sided men sat dribbling opposite them. Why weren't their girls like that around when I was a junior? I thought. But of course there were. Emelia, Shelly, Lynsey - I can even recall some names, and that I was always too red-faced when talking to them. And now - there in my shabby jumper, unshaven and putting on a belly, close to thirty - now I'm just another one of the weirdo's who they ignore in tournaments. Just another reason they'll have to quit the scene when an adult life of family and work takes their time over, and, in their new tiredness, they begin to look for excuses to grow-up and get-wise and get away.

So what am I doing here? Maybe I belong here, I think, as my deaf opponent resigns. We conduct a post-mortem on the game after in improvised sign-language, and I realise I like the guy.

When I find out my next opponent, though, I'm terrified. A positive mood is nowhere, nowhere at all, because, well, just how old is he? Maybe double figures, maybe eight, even six... No, no-one six years old could have won in such style as he did, in the previous round against such an experienced, strong opponent. I shake his tiny hand, and look across at those big ears, little round glasses, that fresh, pale face and pre-pubescent hair-cut - whatever age he is, it's the age where a calculated personal style doesn't matter, doesn't register. Everyone in the universe must like him, everyone, at least for another year, maybe two.

Terrified: lose, and I'm a laughing stock. Win, and I'm cruel. Offer an early draw, and I'm patronising and anti-competitive. What to play for? A win, I decide, and my method is cruel: I cut down any active, attacking possibilities for him, frustrate his youthful, optimistic impulses. Soon, he blunders away a pawn, soon his pieces are getting boxed in, another pawn is vulnerable, and my pieces are poised for a slow invasion. He grows despondant as I gradually poison him. He looks down onto his scorepad, there on his little lap, scribbles a black shape on the back of it. Is that water across his eyes? He fidgets glumly; maybe just tired. I am too, but this is no draw. It's mate, soon.

We shake hands after. He tells me he is ten. Ten. And at around the playing standard I was at 14 or 15, I estimate. A prodigy? A future Grandmaster? A future World Champion? Who knows, but probably not. He clearly loves to attack, push the pieces out into the board, as proud as an army, swoop them down the diaganols like hawks or missiles, and along the ranks like unstoppable tanks, to get at the cornered enemy king - but not much else.

So here he is amongst us strange men, at almost 11pm on a Saturday night, in an alien, cold unfriendly city. Here he is, an innocent and pleasant child, an optimistic and fluent attacker, and I ask myself a question that's yet, I imagine, to even remotely cross his mind: where will you be in another ten years? Or twenty? Still here, after the bored girls have all departed, and when - unlike the stomatch - the talent has stopped growing? Still vainly here searching for that one great game, telling himself how it might have been? And like me, unkindly competitive? Or gesturing as if in the company of genius - while watching, with a speechless sadness, the next generation file in?

is a book I've failed to review many times. There are over ten attempts sat about on various hard-drives - and a couple of draft postings wait, too, on my old abandonned blogs, for the push of a publish button that will never arrive. No doubt this post will be such a failure too, but at least I have not started it like William Logan did here:

Czeslaw Milosz wrote A Treatise on Poetry nearly half a century ago, in the backwash of the war that almost destroyed his country. In this complex meditation on Poland and Polish poetry, the poet grapples—at the climax, weirdly, wonderfully, in the backwoods of Pennsylvania—with his own compromised relation to his art. You can feel the influence of The Waste Land (there are objective correlatives scattered like candy), though Milosz, attempting to write the history of a sensibility, has his long eye on The Prelude.

A scatter-gun of facts to give some context is alright, but anchoring the review in Eng Lit referents is distinctly odd. True, Miłosz translated The Waste Land into Polish, whilst a member of the Warsaw resistance in fact. But despite some formal similarity between his Treatise and Eliot's Waste Land - they are both long poems, split into parts, and have notes at the back - it is not hard to notice that Miłosz wrote in distinctly ambivalent tones about Eliot. Even polemically and mockingly, in fact, at points in this poem I am once again failing to review.

Still, at least I am doing a better job than William Logan, because hinting that Miłosz aimed to stride with his work into the Western Canon alongside Wordsworth's epic wander in a wood, The Prelude, via this poem, is truly odd. A Nobel poet who here wrote in Polish, about Polish poetry, poems, poets and society - of course! he wants to be Wordsworth. It is as logical as saying that Shakespeare aimed to write like Paul McCartney. And Poles, in my experience, rate English novels but not poets. "Maybe Byron is good enough," a Polish literature PhD student told me once at a seminar in Cambridge, "to be talked about alongside our poetry." And if not Byron, he meant, then none of us at all.

Still, many contemporary English or American poets, recognising the absence of any public recognition - let alone role or adulation - fake for themselves in its place some self-esteem by saying they are like x from Wordsworth, y in whoever, and z as if such-and-such, and so this discourse of legitimation and narcissitic tick of denial is easily projected onto others via the reviews that fund them. Of course the public must be mildly chastized for their ignorance, and also x,y and z must be suitably dead and thus unthreatening, and contemporary poets are not to be discussed in their absence. For, after all, who could dare write directly and honestly nowadays, after all?

Which is why Logan fails to understand the various other parts of this poem that he takes half-hearted and misaimed shots at in his review. For instance, Logan writes that Miłosz "leaps into platitudes as into a warm pool — to write poetry, we’re told, you need a) a classical education, and b) forests and streams." Yet the passage Logan is ineptly summaring is in fact bitterly sarcastic, and does not fit with some implicit cozy dismissal of a European eccentric who dallied to the States.

I don't think Logan's just missed some detail of this poem, either, but pretty much the whole thing. The conclusion of his review: "In A Treatise on Poetry, Miłosz and [co-translator] Hass have made what is so difficult, a beautiful poem in English that wasn’t written in English." Yet the book's Preface makes clear that the ethos of the poem's translation places being literal above being pretty, and poets who retreat from the world into attempts at 'pure beauty' are accused of moral neglect in the poem itself. Also asserted in the poem are the need to be of use, and even that it is better to write with a metaphorical stammer, if it means poetry at least makes more sense - all this, please note, in the context of a country living under various murderous invasions. Anyway. Having casually snubbed or avoided the poem's content, all that is left for Logan is a patronising little pat, I suppose.

I have briefly reviewed a review and could go on, but not reviewed this poem which you by now may have twigged means quite something to me. Means what? And why? Because this poem from Poland is of the world's "salt and void", not Auden's rhetorical world of "eros and of dust", secretly already affirmed from word one? That it proves that whilst "Novels and essays serve but will not last./ One clear stanaza can take more weight/ Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose"? Its elegies for the lost world of European beautiful times, its elegies for the lost poets whose name pass away like a waiter, "without a name"? Its terrible evocation of world war two, unimaginable, its bitter truth within and love of nature? Its history, philosophy, its beautiful poetry? That it is the bridge from Milosz's earlier, angrier writings to his later, more philosophical and at-peace work?

But no-one wants to hear such things from a review, and maybe not even from a work of art any more either. As I flick over the book's rich pages, I think my unending interest has something to do with Miłosz's capacity for honest, deep, intelligence and love, his ability to recognize and directly talk to reality in a way no-one else I've known or read does or has done. Whatever, I read with something shamefully rare, that you would not guess I had from my negating comment's about Logan's void of a review. For I read with the feeling of gratitude, even if I cannot put that into a few more words, or into a review, or ten.

We play it each and every day, said the man centre stage at the end of the debate. "Climate Roulette," he repeated, with all the drama of a headline phrase, designed to stun.

So he pointed at his head with a finger for a gun. Having just relished a description of The Day After Tomorrow. Meet Andrew Simms, armed with doomsday prophecies and hyperbolic pronouncements. Run-of-the-mill stuff, except his anecdotes weren't.

Take a little look at one tiny island of ten thousand people, out in the South Pacific and three metres high: Tuvalu. And take a little look, do, while you still can: for under our rising waters, Tuvalu is amongst the first destined for drowning. So how many delegates and scientists and experts can they send to the UN's IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? A few, a couple, a handful, a drop in the ocean - and many, many less than they send to Hollywood. To Hollywood? You read right. In the hope that sales on their domain name will save them: .tv

Or, this. Of the estimated 150 million environmental refugees the world will face by 2050, 20 million will come from Bangladesh. From Bangladesh and its floods. From Bangladesh who, under the duress of poverty and population, resigned themselves just recently to the sale of 300 million tonnes of their coal. The burning of coal. They teach the global consequences of that now in school.

But these stories weren't the centre of the debate. On stage were three others: Tim Forsyth, Saleemul Huq, Peter Newell. Two academics and a campaigner, and not replete with the scandals that make neat examples.

Instead they analyzed how the international debate was full with the voices of the first world: Of the scientists, creeping toward consensus in their technocratic language, of the nations and their line-by-line vetoes of the IPCC's reports, of the politicians and their stalling tactics, of the business leaders saying what might or might not be practical. Voices that don't speak of their responsibilities to and the rights of those who suffer the consequences most of pollution. Those for whom land and liveable weather are passing luxuries. Those for whom all that is left is some kind of adaptation to such problems - like the Inuits, who are suing the United States for their losses - but who have no real say in attempting some kind of solution.

Analysing the structure and discourse of international decision-making is a dry pursuit, not the stuff that headlines are made of. But reading through my notes from the debate, even as the boundaries of our comfort start to shrink, and the height of our decadence starts to stoop, it does not seem like climate roulette points a gun at our heads. More like it points at the heads of poor and the misplaced, and that their mouths are gagged with a black cloth manufactured to a Western design.