From Bad Shaman Blues
Three Lost Films
1
The cube-shaped theatre building in the temple grounds at Penglai: a small building where we’d crowded into a ground floor room to watch this continuously-rotating video of the mirage phenomenon seen out at sea from this spot for thousands of years. The video is from three or four years ago, not very good quality, and it shows excited crowds on the seaward ramparts. The temple complex is quite high above the sea on cliffs it follows with a restraining rampart but otherwise crowds up to at all angles, so when the camera pans there are constant profiles of curving roofs with their green tiles and rows of mythical beasts on the eaves, each following a combination first seen in the Forbidden City: eagles and dragons and a triceratops-like creature, and lastly a figure on a horse the locals call ‘No Hope’. All the heads of all the witnesses (and apparently the dragon-beasts, who must have seen all this before) are looking out to sea and whooping with a genuine surprise.
The camera keeps turning to what looks like ink or sand pouring from an invisible tray into the sea in horizontally-distended hourglass shapes you gradually grasp are huge. Whoops continue as these separate out and form three colossal shapes and you remember the conversation with Lian on the night bus to Wansongpu: the three floating mountains of the gods of Taoist legend. Supposedly a voyage in search of these islands ended up discovering Japan. Then the camera cuts uselessly back to the faces by the Puzhao light tower. They’re still attempting to control their sense of the random luck of this happening now and their surprise, because they do seem to be wondering how this thing works – it must be some mirage, but now it’s changed: the camera flicks back and there are cities out there. It focuses on what appear to be rectangular, dull-windowed buildings and almost minaret-ish towers or possibly lighthouses. Everything looks sandy but there’s an edge before the water as though it could be St Mark’s Square, the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile – can we almost see contradictory cars, some people? No, it seems deserted, the camera behaves as though it doesn’t understand and wobbles back to a long shot of the pouring sky, then, for reassurance, to the faces on the walls as though comparing realities. Then back again to one of the gods’ islands. It’s dry, there’s shimmers to it like tarmac at a distance when you know it’s dry, it’s floating on the same water we will go to soon and look out at and see nothing at all.
But before I get there, I look back at the sugar cube of theatre because above, in an open curtained area I can’t quite analyse spatially, I hear the sliding twangs and long slow notes, the sudden shill of woodwind; and I’m told ‘the orchestra is warming up’ – and it’s that I film on my phone for forty seconds or so: no figures, just the sliding notes emerging from a building I still don’t understand.
2
We were still somewhere in the temple complex and I’m not sure whether it was a Buddhist or a Daoist temple. The layout of all the temples is so similar: you enter through a porch passing between scary purple or green giants; then you’re in a courtyard flanked with buildings – from the one on the left people buy massive bushels of incense, light them with some difficulty, then place them to burn in a central ash-filled stand. The inner temple building is straight ahead up a few steps where you approach the main deity past two lined-up crews of immortals or intermediaries, all life-sized at least and containing winsome women, smiling ancients and stern warriors. The God or Buddha is always flanked by two attendants and all this happens in a building with roof-timbers, columns and assorted beams painted in blue castellated patterns in shades that create recessive 3-D patterns that confuse any eye that isn’t drawn to the God of the Sea or Avatar of Maternity – the one with a massive painting behind him, half-storm, half-grisaille dragon; the other attended by maidens, one of which holds a giant eyeball; all with money strewn at their feet in abundance.
Wherever we’d reached at this point in the tour, we were within box after box of temple, holiness inside holiness but somehow without growing holier – neither ourselves nor our surroundings. An equality of spirituality had been achieved, an ecumenical democracy was shared between tourist and believer, guide and temple official, priest and, in this particular courtyard, poet. Because here there was a large stand hung with every level of souvenir from pencils to costumes, from postcards to huge rubbings of the calligraphy committed to stone at this site, some of which dated back to distant dynasties. And it was a sheet of this calligraphy hanging like a peeled blackboard pelt in the shadows of the awning that had attracted Lian and Xiaodu: an inscription by Su Shi, who had stayed at the temple for a matter of days more than a thousand years before, scarcely long enough to commit these ‘Notes on Reading Wu Daozi’s Painting’ to paper. They were remarking on how proper and perfect the hand was, almost a platonic example, until almost at the left hand edge when, suddenly, after the date, something more occurs to the poet, and he begins to write again.
They’re reciting it now, almost in harmony, though Lian breaks off to explain Su Shi had almost certainly been drinking, but it’s hardly necessary: the shift in their voices as they pass from the ideal to a wildness, a wilderness appended to the rational city of what was written first, is perfectly evident. I know now that what Su Shi was drinking was not the ‘wine’ of my translations but the báijiŭ of our own drinking sessions, too potent to describe as merely alcohol; and I know too that this liquor has no more changed than the characters these two poets are able to read after the night of centuries, the static frenzy of script obliterating time. But it’s not this I film, but their subsequent discussion – I miss their two faces chanting: Yang Lian’s long black hair whisping around his Genghis cheekbones; Tang Xiaodu’s rounder features and hesitantly-blinking eyes: one voice stronger and the other more melodious, its slight stammer gone, both of them lost in the text.
3
The third film was in Beijing when Antony and I decided to hit the hutongs one last time on the morning of our departure for the airport. We were staying in a swish low-built hotel, itself a hutong on a grand scale with rooms around two squares: the first a space where taxis could pull in, but the other a miniature garden complete with opium-boothed bar and a little massage hut where I’d been dressed in pyjamas, methodically pummelled and given medicinal tea to drink. (At lunch the day before a waiter had wielded a kettle with a spout an ell in length, always getting the tea in our tiny cups from a distance of several yards.) We turned left and left again into lanes full of bicycle repair shops, usually advertised by a single stirrup pump, and what seemed like spontaneous markets formed on wiggles in the road by two or three minivans and their sparse, fresh contents. Tight corridors between grey concrete houses were hung with washing, walls repaired with plastic, doors decorated with posters. We passed men in singlets, a boy who sat on a doorstep covering his eyes, mothers slopping out buckets. We crossed a sudden busy road, a man whose T-shirt said ‘Hello Boby/yesterday you are...’ – and some third line we forgot immediately on plunging back into the grey labyrinth, then emerged into what seemed to be a play park by a lake.
The green area of swings, climbing frames, and standing stones decorated with incised characters, gave way to a walk around the lake taking in trendy new bars, boating areas (little gunboats in green with red stars on them were peddled past), a peculiar crannog of miniature houses apparently built for ducks, and another playpark where small children were pushed back and forth in swings moulded into the forms of giant goldfish. But where we first happened upon the park there was a man sleeping on the grass on a spread- out newspaper; children watching (very disparately-sized) dogs copulate; and a gathering of men gambling in tight little units around cards and mah jong sets. And in the play area, using the bars to stretch themselves, were some trim older people, perhaps in their sixties.
As we leaned on the railings by the water, we saw one of them set up a tape recorder on a picnic table, and the group resolved itself into couples, a few of them woman and woman as the old unselfconsciously, silently do, in the absence of sufficient surviving males. A switch was flipped and everyone began to dance. It was a sedate, swing-based form of music, vaguely pop, vaguely oriental, and so was their dancing, full of elegant little twirls. It wasn’t clear from their expressions whether they were learning or rehearsing. The music would get switched off abruptly, and – while a debate went on as to what to play next, and the tape was jammed on fast-forward or rewound in search of the start of something – the dancers would languidly practice some more, discussing and repeating their steps before embarking on another jazzy waltz about the play park. And this is what I recorded, not the moments before or after, in which we went for a bottle of cold beer on the decking of the boat club, or jumped in a rickshaw in order to dash to the hotel, catch the taxi to the airport, then lose my phone with all these films on it – none of that peace or panic, just the short whirling slow distracted moment of their dance.
Sri Ganesh Tyres
As the taxi is shouldering its way between mustard-coloured motorised rickshaws, mopeds and other sleek bulbous white Ambassadors, I see a man rolling a huge tyre down the main street. It’s as tall as him, and he’s rolling it past a wall covered in faded scripture in blue and red writing, one section in English, one in Tamil. We pass too quickly for me to recognise the text, but something sufficiently religious sufficiently deep inside me acknowledges it. Later I work out it’s the Thousand Lights Mosque.
The man looks as though he’s leisurely pursuing a large vehicle which is somehow continuing with only three wheels; he looks as though the truck he was once driving has been eroded over thousands of miles, leaving him only this remnant to complete his journey with. I keep seeing this man and this tyre, or this man with a different tyre, or this tyre with a different man, or some other combination, till in my sleep I imagine one man rolling another man down the street, or large tyres strolling around in pairs, like the bases of giant phantom motorcycles. Their tread is made up of dark acknowledged scripture.
Later I am driven round the corner, and pass Sri Ganesh Tyres, a little frontage piled high with circular rubber ziggurats like the sloughed skins of bathing elephants.
Kapalishvara
The splay-wheeled juggernaut
is parked down a sidestreet,
its turquoise pillars supporting
a thirty foot pyramid of gods,
though its wood-slat tiers
are dwarfed by the gopura
over the temple entrance –
that mound of holy termites,
that technicolour hive of deities.
Shoeless in the courtyard,
I hardly notice
the lingam in its gate
till a family come through,
the women’s ankles chinking
with little chains,
and proceed to worship
what I’d just gaped at,
my feet in a warm puddle.
An old man takes me round
the low bepostered shrines –
we stand, considering
the old tree where
Shiva turned Parvati into
a mayil or peahen because
she’d been distracted by a
peacock from her lord –
except of course, he explains,
this isn’t the original site
so that can’t exactly be
the original tree.
The wooden animals from
the annual procession are stacked
like carnival creatures
in a shed-full of shadows
their painter comes out from
hot-chested and chatty
about me scribbling as
my guide extracts rupees
and sterling for
narrating how santhome
cathedral had claimed
this temple’s prime location
on the ocean front
but how easily it has
rerooted itself here.
I retrieve my shoes but am
reluctant to put them on:
something more has been displaced.
An Informationist is Shown Around the Government Museum
‘Hand of a Roman, heart of a Dravidian’
At the start he runs off to get his laser
instead of touching the darkened stone
between the feet of the female statues
is the shape of the temple gate
his wife and daughter hover in
the first room as he indicates
the hand and the joints of the fingers
dictate the proportions of body and face
I don’t need to copy this down
I can use his website later
the eyes are the last to be carved
so God doesn’t see the carver
forty years old, a Ph.D. student in
Archaeology who gets by as a guide
sixteen knots protect the secrecy
of the wealth of the family
his son appears between the sati stones
and the slab depicting the Buddha’s stupa
everything in fives or sevens
indicating deeds or virtues
outside, between the crumbling red-bricks
cotton is blown through scaffolding
the mnemonics of
the encyclopaedic eye
before the Chola bronzes
in 101 degrees he flags
subduing evil by dancing on a dwarf
Nataraja bestows grace on the world
and drinks from my water without
letting the bottle touch his lips.
General Epistle of Thomas
‘He had a garland on his chest,
a strong bow in his grip,
arrow already chosen,
and he asked which way
the elephant went
with an arrow buried in its side.’
Kapilar, trans. A.K. Ramanujan
Thomas Didymus, apostle of doubt, to the strangers
who may be living peaceably or at war throughout
the hills and forests, plains and wastes and seashores
in Mylapore, Mamallapuram and in Gingee,
in Kanchipuram, Tiruvannamallai and Pondicherry,
those unelected through any foreknowledge
of the Lord, nevertheless, Grace unto you.
You have your faith as I lack mine;
you have searched out the Spirit diligently
as you have searched out the honey and the mango
and the jackfruit, as you search out those clouds that
like the lips of angels suck rain from the sea
to succour you, and you have waited
with the patience I could not muster when my Lord
was reported found, green in the desert as the palai tree.
I, who have arrived among you like the fish
caught up in the cheeks of the angels and spat forth;
like the weed which springs up between the toes
of the fishermen waiting for their tide, patient as
the neytal, blue lily of the shoreline; I am like
a living stone which cries out to the pilgrim
in the desert’s rage; I am like the grooves
worked in that stone by the thirsty at prayer;
I am like the cross cut in that stone by one
who would mark his desolation with a scar: here it is.
Let me ask you, Poet of the Fingers Round a Bow,
how can I come close to Him whom I have doubted,
his side-wound like a lotus in the water
that I drowned with one bloody hand? Let me ask you,
Poet of the Ploughman With a Single Plough,
how long must my heart wait, frantic for him?
My followers say the rock gave birth to water
and drink from its dirty spring, but I have heard
that in the hills where hunters go there is a flower
red as my Lord’s blood and rich in honey. I will go
where the kurinci blossoms and hide my hand.
And therefore I leave you to love one another
without faith in the life or lives to come,
love one another in the only moment in which
we know our failings make us loveable to God.
In the AC carriage
A boy, the size of two rupees,
clutching a packet of chocolate biscuits
and wearing sandals with a squeak in each heel,
is snatched by parents from the path
of chai and paper chanters.
Lemon Tea Kabitika
small plastic cup and not
the clay ones shattered in
their orange hundreds in between the rails
like brittle fingernail goodbyes
lemon sweet but salty too
as thick as tears
the tongue-imagined flakes as big as teeth
dissolving in a dragged-on urn
cha lemoo cha
Santiniketan
Dark on the concrete porch with Debanjan’s professor
in a deckchair chatting quietly beneath
the increasing silence of the trees, but not so dark
I couldn’t see the high branches and the bats’
darker blue blades against the welling blue milk
of the silent starless sky, the space between
each word and its neighbour growing longer
like a town becoming countryside until
we were walking home along the avenue
of huge trees and I saw someone
smoking in the field, so dark now it was just
the cold tip of their cigarette just beyond
where the tailor had stood with his table below
the branches to repair the passers-bys’ clothing
but there was another, dancing perhaps
or waving lazily becoming my first
fireflies and then there were
uncertain constellations of them, fireflies all the way
back beside the broad canal until
we came upon a crowd with ropes
taut by the bend where the truck had slipped
and fallen on one shoulder spilling all
its earthy rubble on the lawn and
it seemed as though we too should haul on
the wrist-thick ropes in pitcher darkness now
until we couldn’t tell but felt the poise
of the almost-decided, half-right truck
and then it thudded back with such
determination that it threw us all
back in our separate directions and
Debanjan and I went on to Prantik
never knowing that the broken-necked poor driver’s
ghost came blowing back with us and drank
molasses whisky and listened to us chat
and lay upon the spare bed in my room
and watched the ceiling fan’s brown blades
spin slowly to cessation.
Santhal Shop
‘A little juice collecting in my pen-nib this free morning
Like a slit made in the bole of a date-palm.’
Rabindranath Tagore
Spun on that slow wheel of generations’
knack and nous and never glazed:
the blue-striped cool round interlocking
houses and courtyards of mud
that one clan fills precisely;
ovens rising like lava bubbles, cut
to admit the copper skillet, cook
and architect arranging
heat and shade in demilunes;
set by the proper palms up which
a son offered to collect the sap
brewed into the drink we were
too busy finding to wait for fresh,
so drove past scattered easy huts
in the growing dusk;
past tattered straw goddesses
they’d fished out from the rivers after
Bolpur’s Tushu Porob
and set up under trees to view the sunset.
And in one courtyard found
an amused grandma whose sleepy child
fetched the cloudy white taari
much diluted for the city boys
who sat beneath the palms and trees
conjoining in the glowing dark;
and I thought of the cave of shop
where we’d stopped to ask
for our elixir: how it seemed
a tilting wall of jars, two insect wings
of glass with the shopkeeper’s head
shaking between them; how
there seemed to be no contents in them,
the more I tried to remember
their dusty little globes
grew emptier and emptier
as though containing air
from further and further north,
higher juggings with cold stars,
small mountain peaks of ‘Breathe Me’
I found myself exhaling
in the dark courtyard with
the grandma and the child and my friends,
all of us drinking in and breathing out
the distances between tribe and town,
city and continent and star.
Air Sibir as Shamanic Flight
Direction doesn’t matter – taiga’s
relentless ringworm forests; lakes
we cross for hours, beside which tigers
with phosphor coats await their Blakes;
east, west, up, down – are each negated
by this old plane’s decor: belated
ill-fitting tan wallpaper fills
it to and from its windowsills;
families perch their weekend shopping
on knees amid the flopping seats,
the frequent vodka and boiled sweets –
and if you take to Ural-hopping
or not, this flight’s a long strange trip
that takes us all from blip to blip.
In which I see the way I travel
is equal to the way I live:
inept, withdrawn, and half-unravelled,
too full of neediness to give;
barely witnessed seeing fiercely,
never heard or very nearly.
To such a shaman still belongs
all partial and irrational songs.
The purview that the travel purist
obtains through months of rooting down –
all well-earned insights – I renounce.
I am content to be the tourist
who finds home in that other place
with cyphers crawling on its face.
That we approach our destination
is clear from shudderings and groans
as though the plane gets premonitions
now that we near the spirit zones.
Instead of donning psychic armour,
I’m thinking I’d once claimed the glamour
of unknown cities hits your brain
with first love’s force. ‘So you’d regain
your youth by travel?’ asked that devil’s advocate AKA a friend –
not what I’d thought of as my end;
but neither is this far from level
half-swoop, half-swooning down through air –
as threatened hearts applaud, we’re here.
In retrospect the shack for baggage,
the cage and then the carousel,
should each have served as grinding presage that all indeed might not be well.
But such relief at such a landing
had addled keener understanding.
The runway filled with evening light:
that orange chill, the fading flight,
the brief belief we’d reached Siberia –
conspiring to dismiss those fears
the time zones crossed were deeper: years
of jumping to a jammed interior
of thought, not just a continent.
So this was what Siberia meant.
The Grumbling Box Problem
A television shows me its most intimate cartoons, the ones in which the ages and the genders of the somersaulting participants mutate constantly, pinning me to the bracken carcass of the hotel’s best shoddy furniture. It’s very late somewhere in the world my inner ear can’t place; even how high up the building this is is unsettled by the jetlag. I appear to be in a narrow pod being shown rage doilies, Rorschach upholstery, wallpaper lingerie. I gaze at them for a long transgressive moment not following not only a single word but a single note of the accompanying plastic balalaikan timpani-eats-piano soundtrack. After a while I realise I am in bed and all the lights are out apart from the dirty snow light at the centre of the continental night and I also realise I am being muttered to. From some point in the room the dancing dots of vitamin-deficient vision prevent me from making out, someone is muttering to me in a voice so indistinct I can’t even establish whether or not it is Russian or an aboriginal language: Chuvash, Khant, Tuvan, Yakut. I lie there for another of your Earth minutes. The voice drones on, apparently exterior to my fizzing cranium. I check I have not left the television on. I pull the plug from the wall like a rotten tooth on string just in case. The muttering is replaced by an indistinct snatch of music: one of those frozen blocks exported to Phil Spector to construct the Wall of Sound. No single instrument is distinguishable, but the noise draws me to a sort of cabinet by the head of the bed. I don’t remember seeing this before but it looks like a giant radio. It has clacky controls apparently for stations and frequencies, a dial possibly for volume, and a number of switches, bulgy lights (off), and grilles of indefinite function. The voice has resumed, but when I clack, twist and flick, nothing appears to happen. I put my ear to one of the grilles, but cannot confirm that the grumbling is actually coming from this machine. I speak into another one of the grilles, ‘Please stop this incessant noise.’ I stare at it as though it’s the TV and some message will be displayed on it. The lights continue not to flash. I try to move it to find the power source but either it’s too heavy or it’s attached to the wall. After a while I lie down again, whereupon there is another short outburst of music, possibly the same as before. The voice continues to grumble into my wax-encumbered ear, apparently telling me all its problems, or perhaps telling me all my problems, or possibly all the problems that have afflicted this floating city since it was founded in the middle of absolutely nothing a little over a hundred years ago. No, it is not like Middlesbrough. Perhaps I am listening to the groaning complaint of the countless exiles and prisoners whose camps’ remains remain around us in the vast coldness of the night. Perhaps if I concentrate I will be able to distinguish Dostoevsky muttering from Omsk, or Mandelshtam on his way to Kamchatka, or someone whose name I do not know, whose crime even they did not know, whose next thought is completely unknown, whose only recourse is this word and this word and this next word I still cannot make out. Perhaps I am listening to the ground itself, grudgingly defrosting for the spring that begins tomorrow morning wherever that is. Perhaps this will go on all night. It does.
Tissue Remains
Too many hands were pressing on
my breastbone and my brow in
the great marble sandwich of the state museum.
We slid like sliced meat about the Thracian room filled with so much gold as though
Midas had beaten up a rose garden
into this dinner service full of slurring rhyta.
The bas-relief horsemen insisted
on cornering their boars with always
one hand flung out behind them
not clutching a spear but letting the reins stream
through their casually tugging long fingers
which would only take a millennium
to rearrange themselves into
the next door icons’ serpentine blessing machines
of still more hands. But for now
all the faces were Alexander clones
so that was never where my eyes could rest
till the skull-bulb helmets drew us,
their tight-lipped spaces that hold
exact absences, to the case in which
earth-coloured armour propped on perspex shoulders
and shinbones. And the greaves,
that word that’s almost a wound,
had their own card that told us
what survives the centuries’ ceaseless fingers
is less than the step I couldn’t take away:
‘Bronze, traces of leather straps, tissue remains.’
rhyta—drinking cups
These poems are from Bad Shaman Blues (Bloodaxe Books, 2006)
W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his Ph.D. thesis on the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He has published seven volumes of poetry and four pamphlets, and he is widely anthologised.
His last five collections, all with the northern publisher Bloodaxe, have won numerous accolades. Forked Tongue (1994) was selected for the New Generation promotion, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot and Saltire prizes. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Northern Arts Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward and McVities prizes; and The Laurelude (1998), written whilst he was the Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, was a PBS Recommendation. All three books won Scottish Arts Council book awards. The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) was longlisted for Scottish Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. His most recent Bloodaxe collection, Bad Shaman Blues (2006), was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award and the T.S.Eliot Prize.
He taught in the Department of Creative Writing at Lancaster University (1996-2002), and is now Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in the School of English at the University of Newcastle.