From Kubla Khan
Dear Myles,
I am taking the liberty of replying without a reference to a specific post.
Thanks for your reply a few weeks ago. I am touched, truly.
I have stopped reading books as I am going through a condition called ‘Montano’s Malady’, though that afflicts writers generally. I switched to movies and watched what there was to.
Then I came across a poem by Mallarme, which I am sending to you, rather copying. It is called Brise Marine.
It goes:
The flesh is sad, Alas! and I\’ve read all the books.
Let\’s go! Far off. Let\’s go! I sense
That the birds, intoxicated, fly
Deep into unknown spume and sky!
Nothing – not even old gardens mirrored by eyes –
Can restrain this heart that drenches itself in the sea
O nights, or the abandoned light of my lamp,
On the void of paper, that whiteness defends,
No, not even the young woman feeding her child.
I shall go! Steamer, straining at your ropes
Lift your anchor towards an exotic rawness!
A Boredom, made desolate by cruel hope
Still believes in the last goodbye of handkerchiefs!
And perhaps the masts, inviting lightning,
Are those the gale bends over shipwrecks,
Lost, without masts, without masts, no fertile islands…
But, oh my heart, listen to the sailors\’ chant!
The same kind of affliction grabs me when I think now of Arsenal, a melancholy, a sadness.
This was most acute after the ‘running fan’ after the Arsenal bus video which most fans found thrilling.
The minds numbs at such travesty. The players must have felt the acme of their stardom but this voyeurism of ‘looking’ at the fans ( this was unsolicited, nobody forced him to run after the stupid bus) suggests the crassness of this late capitalistic society which we live in.
As Mallarme said, it makes you ‘fly
Deep into unknown spume and sky!’.
I lost my connection with Arsenal a few years ago but now, it is past any remedy, alas.
I wanted to see a family fan-oriented club run by earnest men and women who would compete on the pitch fairly and truly and respect the actual purpose of sport. Too much football, too much sport, too little reading and writing.
I consider this like the great Austrian writer Bernhard would say: a cretinous destruction of our souls, of our spirit.
‘Lift your anchor towards an exotic rawness!
A Boredom, made desolate by cruel hope’
I am not trying to intellectualize a sport, a business. I am not approaching it from a poet’s perspective.
I am thinking of the surfeit of lies that Arsenal has fed us since 2006. That makes me sick and nauseous. That alone.
People don’t admit it but your blog is the reference point.
Myles says:
I don’t know what this blog is any more, Kubla.
But your tender musings suggest that it’s different things to different people.
So I would like to keep ANR going…. but I find I’m now reviewing my options daily
