Phoenix Ark's Blog

‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my back…’

‘Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered…’
HAMLET

You might say many things about Hamlet. That, in a way, he is the archetype of an alienated, even adolescent consciousness. That he is on the cusp of modern self-awareness, beyond religious absolutes, that haunting paradox of thought and action, the never ending ripple effect of consequences. Armed from the start with a knowledge that he cannot even speak about – ‘But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.’ One thing is clear, that while partly being a ‘sweet Prince’ and enormous idealist, he also becomes a figure of black tragedy, in the incestuous little court of Denmark. The paradox in turning the spotlight on him as the cause, is that real evil has already taken place, in the murder of a father, and in life’s great and cynical ‘move on’. ‘ Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table..‘ He is also a Master at castigating himself, as much as others. He both ‘beats himself up’ and sets enormously high standards. In that he sometimes becomes an enemy to normal life. There was a book I was given to read at school, studying Hamlet, called ‘Poison, Play and Dual’, a brilliant examination of a masterpiece’s many elements, I would recommend to anyone.

But Hamlet’s supreme sphere is the inner world of man and woman, even the awareness of how it is rotting his own soul, and turning everything to meaninglessness. Wilde might call it the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s why the play within the play becomes the ‘mousetrap’ to ‘catch the conscious of a king’, and so justify a real act of justice, that he has only intuited in his metaphysical dealings with a ghost – ‘oh my prophetic soul’– but does not want at all, perhaps knowing the fatal consequences of the revenger’s path, and all those blood soaked revengers tragedies too, that used to put bums on seats. Yet still Hamlet cannot act, except to trip up betraying and manipulating Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, prefering events to drive him towards the fatal conclusion. Perhaps that becomes Hamlet’s real ‘bad’, swept up in whirly-gig of things, and seeing ‘providence in the fall of a shadow’. Trying to touch some greater human meaning and justification too. It certainly makes him the companion of the most enormous metaphysical awareness, and the grinning skull of Yorick too. Death haunts the play, and only for the floundering individual is the rest ever ‘silence’ in life. Enter martial Fortinbras. Hamlet’s huge shadows always remind me of the Knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, playing chess with Death. In his supposedly heroic journey, the only winners are the loving gypsy couple, in their caravan, who simply duck and get on with being alive.

The role of the women in it all too is very sad. Devoted and innocent Ophelia, driven to madness by Hamlet’s viciousness, and slaying of her father. A figure who might have saved him, but who he can only embrace in death. His mother, touching incest and marrying his father’s brother. They are Oedipal themes also touched on in King Lear, with its many blindings, and its bad male love and enfolding tyranny. Ophelia is not as advanced as loyal Cordelia, who expresses all the true virtues of responsible and balanced love, both for Lear and herself – ‘What must Cordelia do, love and be silent?’ But cut off from positive relationships with women, deprived of the ideal of a father that is somewhat in question too, and aware of his own sins, Hamlet finds himself in a place he cannot cope with, where ‘the world is out of joint, oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!‘. But that is the consciousness and scope of a Prince too, that the whole world is somehow on his shoulders. Who would want his kind of tragedy, no one at all, but it is those great works of tragedy and consciousness that provide us with a ‘mirror up to nature’ and also those vital acts of catharsis, in touching pity and terror, that make written art truly important. Especially in such an enormously democratic age, that has seen so much world suffering, it no longer really believes in the validity of individual tragedy at all, or the fall. But inside the mind too that fall can happen to every one of us.

It’s an AOL headline today, but tell me about it! With our ‘scientific’ obsession, we also miss what we know intrinsically, or instinctively, and that is often held in common stories. Dad told me one as a boy, about a guest at our home in Wales who tripped and broke a leg badly, and went grey overnight. But so often the ‘insights’ of science are as absurd as those scientists in Britain who did a lot of work on a study to prove that stags suffer stress, if they are hunted to death! Sometimes we are completely nuts, but I guess it’s good for research grants. DCD

IF…

Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Ah good, they’re doing a new version of Jane Eyre, and we need active heroines in abundance nowadays! Watch those psychic Grace Pooles in the attic, Mr Rochester, and never go blind.

Jung said the greatest thing that affects children and their ambitions is ‘the unlived life of the parent’. Perhaps then it was Dad’s thwarted writing ambitions that led me to be a writer. Apart from Lord of The Rings, and the astounding excitement of that book and its narrative force as a boy, there was one writer in particular who rather obsessed my father, and whose stories of course thrilled me too. Robert Louis Stevenson. Tusitala, they called him, on the island of Samoa where he’s buried, cutting a swathe through the rainforests, to lead his body by torch light up the mountainside. It was the kind of honouring my father needed and longed for, and perhaps I did as a writer too. But then Stevenson, apart from his classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde and Catriona, filled with the subtle loss of idealisms, as we came out of a more heroic or even ‘childishly’ idealistic age, in its best sense, also fought for the rights of the indigineous Samoans, in a battle conducted in The Times. He hated the pettiness of power, and supposed priopriety too. It is indeed harder to fight for yourself than others, sometimes, but it’s a very important thing too, or how can you help anyone else at all? DCD

‘I have come to rely on the kindness of strangers!’

You don’t exactly expect to be turned into Blanche Dubois by people you loved, out of a Street Car Named Desire, but take the strain and never complain. Then you’ll be a man, my son! Not exactly what I’ve done, I know. When I was informed though, out of a deeply personal and supposedly private relationship, and by the CEO at my publisher I ‘burned my bridges’ I snapped back he had no right to say it. He didn’t, or to turn a personal ‘take’ into a company take, as bridges weren’t burnt, but simply removed completely, despite contracts and promises, and their unnecessary little conspiracy. With all the authors in the world, and all the people trying to survive, do I have a right to a living, or a readership? No, of course not. You are as good as what you write, or what you can sell the public. But I did have a right to support of the work Abrams contracted.

I wanted to heal everything once, family pasts too, always inclusive of people, I think, and I’ve ended up healing nothing at all. Stories are only echoes of how life might be better and people much bigger. Better fictions, perhaps, and better tears. I wondered why I couldn’t be more proud or confident though, when Fire Bringer came out, of wanting to buy back a lost family home, or to succeed for myself, at last. Because the contradictions inside my Dad were just too great, perhaps, the draw of his past, and I’d also been wounded personally. Because I also hated invasion. Then you can become ‘your own worst enemy’, another take from my own editor. Is it better not to compromise the heart and soul, and fail completely, knowing not one of them could have coped and peace in such tongues is outrageous?

I don’t know right now, but when the person you love and your ‘best friend’ become the enemies, at the heart of your working life and livelihood, watch those street cars. Well, dear Abrams, loving exes and decent friends, big companies and editors always ‘win’, unless you’re Prince, and you’re about to take Vanbrugh Court too now, home of fireworks once and birthday balloons, and little offices of Phoenix Ark Press. Quite a road, out of opening a heart and trusting. So ‘burn this’, and many congratulations on all you’ve done to a man, life and a writer, in brave New York City. I hope you’re all hugely proud of your loyalties and imaginations, professional standards, and the connected and truly seeing world we all seem such a vital and nimble part of nowadays!

Boy them writers know how to do it, sometimes! I thought I had, but I’ve never read Charlotte’s Web, and it’s enchanting. ‘Some Pig’ in fact, and ‘radiant‘ and ‘humble‘! Since the world is a strange miracle, books too can be miraculous and magic at weaving what’s bigger than us all. What’s you’re word, because especially with the good eyes of friendship, it should be far bigger than you might sometimes feel?!

The picture is a public domain photo of the original book on Wikepedia

I was asked today if I’d ever work with Publishers again! When you try something like Phoenix you are often faced with your own potential hypocrisy, or basic need to survive, and despite half wanting to attack the cynicism of the system, I’ve been trying hard to work with publishers, still, though the climate’s awful. I knew I had gone over the top in America though, and it came out of a battle with Macmillan here, and something so personal too, but it is all about working well with people, and many people mattering in that. About respecting what others do too, although there were deep personal reasons for my loss of respect in New York. There may be a hierarchy in that structure that I think is being abused, namely care of the artists you buy, even over the power of editors, and the need to always explain things, but if a work is succeeding, actually good publishers always want to follow it. They may follow the big sellers far too much, and at the expense of more valuable or even better work, but that is markets and probably life. What I do despise is either hypocrisy, or far too much politics in the frame, and it applies above all to agents who can be remarkable bottom feeders. But from the days of forcing too big an advance at Macmillan on a third novel, at a tough time, then leaving my agent and forgetting the work is what matters first, and the readers, I’ve learnt a great deal. At the moment, I would give my eye teeth to be supported, in a way I can’t do properly here , and to be ‘allowed’ to write well again and see that published well. DCD

FROM LHUNA

‘Onward and upward. Still looking eagerly forward to Scream of the White Bear. As long as you still write, we’ll still listen.’

Lhuna, onward and upward is what Michael Jacobs eventually said at Abrams, after such a pointless and bizarre battle, before I asked my ex and editor for peace again, or some respect, but then walked away, when it was refused yet again. In fact ‘heaven’ isn’t quite ‘upwards’, on a planet spinning round and around in Space-Time, as The Flaming Lips have it, and it can be with one another. Thank you Lhuna, I’m a grown man, who sometimes feels about twelve now! I’ll try with Scream, only to Kindle I’m afraid, but it is not exactly a book that fills me with joy, being connected to so much sorrow and darkness. So much human blindness too. This attempt at publishing too, and trying to do it alone, or turning to a stranger true story, has taken me away from what I’m really good at. But letters from readers like that, up in Scotland when I was trying to find a road last year, or later, have really kept me going, and always touch me. Nice to hear from you, and you’re right, I must turn to real work, not blogs.DCD

POLLIPIGGLEPUGGAR

Though PolliPigglepuggar is a nonsense kind of WORD
You CAN’T hunt down in any diction-reeeee,
‘THE Pollipigglepuggar’ is a most exotic bird,
Which sleeps within the Pollipiggle tree.
She isn’t quite a Parrot
Though her plumage is akin
And her ears are thin and furry, as a bear,
Her tail looks like a carrot,
While she has a sort of chin,
And wears a set of curlers in her hair.
Her beak is made of lemon peel,
Her eyes are black and blue,
Her call is like the bleating of a goat,
Her favourite meal’s spaghetti
It’s weird, but still it’s true,
She loves to wrap so loosely round her throat.
While, on her Pollipiggle branch,
She perches day and night –
A look that says – there’s nothing else to do.
Though in those scented piggle leaves,
She’s dreaming of the fright
I gave her when I stole out and went – ‘Boo’.
But just before I tell you
What a racket THAT inspired,
There’s something else to show you all, for free,
Not the colour of those feathers
Or the way her feet are wired,
But the nature of the Pollipiggle Tree.
The Pollipig’s a cousin of the Lollipopple plant,
In the genus of the Ligglepipple root,
Its leaves are made of herbal tea,
Although the branches aren’t,
While its flowers sprout out in rubber, like a boot.

It sways there in the piggle breeze,
Just waiting on some fun
Or that Puggar bird to use it for her bed,
And, since this tree can’t walk with ease,
(The thing can’t even run!)
It’s fond of simply growing up instead!
So there it waits to ponder,
As it blossoms once a year,
When the swooping puggar-puggar will appear,
Until from out of yonder
The thing loops through the air
And settles with a whooping, on its ear.
Behold the Pollipiggle Bird,
A fowl that isn’t deep,
A-landing on its side within the shrub
A bird, you see, that’s so absurd,
It promptly falls asleep
And dreams of bathing nightly in a tub.
So there they snooze together,
Like a perfect pair of chums
A-deep within the pollipiggle wood
And there the tree gets bigger
While the Pollipuggar hums
A tune I can’t remember, though I should.
You see, I’ve quite forgotton
That thing I had in mind,
Namely WHAT the creature cried when given fright;
It screeched out something rotten
When I woke it from behind,
Then called out like an ostrich taking flight:
“oh, polli, pig AND puggar,
oh piggle, puggle, pol
oh, rallop, lipig, gopple, gup and gol
oh luggup, paggle, leppug, paaaa
And glipple loppgup too.
Which really meant no more than;
‘Who are you?”
Oh, I love my Pollipiggle bird
A-sleeping in her tree
With her multicoloured feathers on her wings
And her strange, but polli, habits
Which NEVER seem absurd,
Like those ears that grow like rabbit’s,
Or the piggle way she sings,
And the puggar way she knows just how to be,
While she’s snoring up her Pollipiggle Tree.

Copyright David Clement-Davies June 20i1 All Rights Reserved.