Land Of The Angles
It’s a long time since I wrote any sort of poetry. This is some sort of poetry.
1.
I love the Baroque. I took my Protestant self off to Rome once
and the main reason we went there was to show it The Ecstasy Of St Teresa.
The Baroque –
misshapen, disheveled, swooping, gliding, flying, feeling, people-pleasing pearl –
started (like me) self-consciously, deliberately, politically.
They met, the Catholics did, and they decided the only way to sheepdog
the northern people back into the Pope’s pen was to appeal to their id,
to their love of raw, loud, swirling curves,
to the energetic, soap operatic flirtations
and consummations
of Him and Her.
‘Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.’
She said that, Teresa did, supposedly.
Before Bernini turned her into marble,
before he poured her into a live white death that is both profane and holy,
fucking and Godlike,
assuming there's a difference anyway.
I'm not sure if that means he understood her or not
or if I do.
2.
There are people in these islands who feel a northwards pull
and there are those who feel pulled towards the south.
You and me,
we’re one or the other:
our soul, our centre tastes those connections,
experiences that magnetism,
gets seduced into our chosen, specific world.
I saw one of Jonathan Meades’ strange, sweet, showoffy, Gothic, wordy hurly-burlies
on television once and he said
(at least this what I remember him saying, I've no idea if he actually did,
I only have six real, verifiable memories left in total, and maybe it doesn’t matter anyway?) and he said, Meades did, that the English,
wherever they are actually from geographically,
are uniquely both, or, rather, uniquely one or the other:
northern or southern.
He said (probably) that the northerners among us are Protestant:
dour, grey, self-isolating, sharp, acute, compact, filled with trade and linear histories
and herring and windswept coastlines
and common sense
and a rationality that greys everything we touch
when we risk touching anything at all.
The southerners among us, on the other hand,
Meades may well have said,
are freer, more open to the sunshine within and without,
Catholic, meat-eating, beach-loving, soft, obtuse, celebratory,
loud, quick, eager to connect, here, now.
The northerner’s poisons are, I think, spirits, vodka, beer and depression;
the southerner’s are wine and sherry and mania.
And they appear –
by they, I mean the southerners –
to have much lower suicide rates,
though that may be because of an unspoken agreement we have,
with God and each other,
not ever to confess publicly what we have done.
When we go away on holiday, we go to learn
and to enquire and to museum and to gallery
and to find ways in which we can better understand,
ways in which we can better reduce the world in which we live
to its constituent parts
and to find explanations that are cognitive and untroubling.
When the southerners go away on holiday,
they go to live more than at home,
to eat more, drink more, envision more, fuck more,
to embrace the whole, to consume everything.
.
Peter Ackroyd (another white man decades older than me
and 47.6 times cleverer than me and several times odder than me)
sort of once said, I think, that this southern soul was partially buried by the northern,
but its resonance remains, especially here,
in London,
where place, history and identity converge
and the Catholic ghosts
(and the Jewish ghosts)
pop their heads above ground
and show us they will always refuse to be silenced,
show us our histories are far more than little puritan myths of green cricket and willowed cider and stocky restraint.
3.
I think I want to know if I can ever change.
I want to know if I can enCatholic myself
and not be the one who wants to know anymore.
I want to be the Angel, not Teresa.
I’m a Southerner in a Northern body.
Today, at least.