Once again, a request for ID. This is a case of neither the buyer nor the seller having the faintest idea what the merchandise was. I thought a bit of quick mouse-work would reveal all in no time, but I thought wrong. This is so extremely distinctive that I’m sure identification will be a doddle. but the wierd thing is, with no word to input, the web is powerless to help.

I had an idea that this was Hungarian, Bulgarian or similar - but I’ve drawn a blank. Could the men of rugs (’men’ as a unisex pronoun) ride to the rescue?

[text e-mailed to Steve Price at Turkotek, 16/05/08]  

Those who are familiar with my haiku output may well have noticed that it tends to be very largely visual. I’ve decided to remedy this by branching out a little. This post will be for ear haiku

Bus’s heavy purr;

two horn blasts like hunt; engine

vibration rumble.

_______________________

low hum: computer;

still gey skies - dispirited

twitter from garden.

 size 85 x 145cms

My heart bleeds for retailers - well, let’s not exaggerate: it does sometimes! In retail, there seem to be lots of ways to get it wrong, and few ways to get it right. This is the story of a shop that should have been a success, or to be more precise, of a shop that was a success, so far as I can judge. The  Moroccan who ran it and sold me this rug - flushed perhaps with his success - moved down and across the road to a much larger unit that had just failed as the locale for another ethnic artefacts outfit - and sure enough, it destroyed him also.

For a time, however, he established a delightful little corner of Morocco on the English south coast in his (smaller) emporium - selling iron lamps of many kinds, including the hanging ones with stained glass windows, various tables, ceramics, divan seats, cushions, rugs… He never did do much in the way of rugs, and the ones he had were modern-horrible to a fairly advanced degree - ideal in a low-class brothel, but not in a refined English home. But there was one, the one pictured above. Now I never for a moment thought it to be a fine example of the weaver / embroiderer’s art, but I had nothing at all from North Africa, never seemed to have any opportunity here to acquire anything, and… I guess I must have had the readies (cash, dosh, geld, lucre..) so I bought it.

The only thing I knew and know about it, apart from the fact that it was older than new, was that it was dyed using saffron, and a beautiful warm colour that produces, I must say. I like this rug, not because it is a piece of fine craftsmanship, in fact I have the impression that it’s a bit commonplace, but because it’s the only one I have from this area, and it’s quite distinctive, relative to the other rugs I have from elsewhere. In fact, I do have one other embroidered rug, considerably bigger and in a very different style, whose origin I intend to chase up, and about which I will try to post one of these days.

So, it remains for me to apologise for not being able to supply any more detailed information about this piece, and to wag my finger at retailers and say to them: ‘be warned, big is NOT always beautiful!’    

I’ve decided to refresh the haiku series by transfering it to a new post. Here’s the starter, already posted on red ravine http://redravine.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/haiku-one-a-day/

English Channel in

mist; soft rain on Florida

miniature golf course. 

_____________________________________

21/4/08

overcast sky; sultry

grey sea behind young black girl

in white bobble hat

__________________________________

This is from QuoinMonkey’s intro to haiku on redravine:

Near the end of Seeds from a Birch Tree, (Clark) Strand speaks of Basho’s greatest work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North:

‘Haiku, in many ways the most outward, most concrete, and most perpetually grounded form of poetry, is also the most inward. It requires a lot of inner work.

Basho titled his greatest work Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Basho traveled a long way north on a journey with his student and fellow poet Sora and kept a diary of his travels. The diary contains some of his most famous haiku.

The way north is the way within. This kind of understanding comes when we realize that in looking out, we are also looking in. We learn it by looking carefully at the world.’

 

This insight which links north to within definitely resonates with me. In my Rainring cards, north is the place of the Unconscious.

Basho travelled north;

a stray dog crossed his path: south-

west is something else.

__________________________________

At Marseilles, the stray

dog joined the wise fool and they

walked the tarot way. 

_____________________________________

_____________________________________

23/04/08

mysterious fog

shrouds the sea; only the pier

palely emerges.

—————————

25/04/08

SOAKING THE LENTIL PAN PRIOR TO WASHING UP

 ridges as left in

 sand by retreating sea, but

 in pan of lentils

___________________________
30/04/08
cloud piles all up the

sky; prowling sea; wind annoys

beds of pink tulips

_____________________________
01/05/08

towers of white cloud

over frisky, sunlit sea;

cars glitter along

___________________________

sparkling sea has changed

from grey to palest turquoise;

white sails fill with wind

______________________________

the men of rugs have

spoken: from Kurdish Bijar

comes my woven flame

(http://www.turkotek.com/)

 

 

This post is going to be different to all the previous art-object ones, because the ‘value’ of the object in question does not reside either in the sense of its beauty that I had when purchasing it, or in some kind of rarity value, or in the interesting emporium from which I obtained it… in short, it is a real one-off, and I should now without further ado explain what all this is about.

Well, actually… let me set the scene first. The location is a large ramshackle building on several floors which I shall call the warehouse. When it was first taken over by Jack the Lad, the whole vast space was given over to every sort of antique furniture, paintings, objets d’art – Jack has never been afraid to have a go, and he certainly had plenty of scope. Much of the original shop area has now been converted to other uses, and the actual antiques patch is a shadow of its former self. In addition, various fringe bits are leased out to others, and it was in one of these patches, belonging not to Jack, but to another local dabbler in bric-a-brac and so on, that a couple of years ago I had a strange experience. There on the wall - during one of the frequent visits that I have been making for several years now – was a picture. What was singular about this picture was that I knew it very well, but I had totally forgotten it. And this was because this same picture used to hang on the wall of our house when I was a child, and I had looked at it many, many times, but not seen it for perhaps forty years

For my father, I suppose, it was a picture of religious devotion, of men at prayer. As for me, I am not sure that I ever realised that the men in the image were praying. After all, one prayed in a church, and these men were not in a church, or indeed in any other building. O.K., so one also prayed at home - kneeling by the bed side with hands together. No-one in this picture had his hands together.

It was certainly not prayer, that is,which held my youthful attention. Of course, there were  two men in strange costumes in the picture and, even more interestingly, perhaps, a camel. But what I believe truly fired my imagination as a small boy was the only other constituent of the image apart from the two men and the camel – a rolling panorama of sand dunes, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. And the only obvious feature in all that wide landscape was the trail of footprints which one could see leading far out over the dunes until it was lost in the vastness.

I do not know any longer what exactly was the impression made upon me by this image. But I very strongly suspect that it told me that, beyond the confines of the suburban England of the fifties, the rows of pebble-dashed semi-detached houses in which the anonymous drones of lower-middle England went about their grey affairs, there was, somewhere over the horizon, another, an elemental world, where the writ of the petit bourgeois did not run. This image never seized me of a desire to rush off to Arabia or the Sahara. But it did, I believe, help me unconsciously to sense that one day I too could walk out of those suburbs into a wider landscape. (To this day, I cannot stand suburbs.)

All this happened between one and two years ago. I did not buy the picture. It cost peanuts and this was not the issue. Whilst I could not deny the singularity of this strange reappearance, this in no way meant that I therefore felt that I should buy the picture, take it home and put it on our wall – even with my partner having been brought up as a Muslim.

 [I am aware that at the mention of mediums and contact with a dead relative, many readers of this will immediately freeze. Unfortunately, there are still many, many people who do not find it in themselves to have an open mind about such things, but feel a need to violently oppose any claim of the possible reality of such phenomena.]    

I have more questions than answers about what exactly goes on after death. The father who communicated with me on this occasion seemed quite needy, wanting to invade my hour with the medium, for example by recounting incidents from his early life. This rather juvenile need for approbation / affection, certainly characteristic of him in life, did not seem to have been diminished by his sojourn ‘on the other side’. At one point my mum also appeared, and was apparently playing cards with some women friends. I am left rather puzzled as to what purpose exactly this other realm is intended to fulfil – if it does not enable those who inhabit it to progress psychologically, and if they ‘pass the time’ there rather as one might do on Earth.

Anyhow, my father also said that he was proud of me, which certainly represented a major shift from his attitude down here, and my partner Hacina had a similar experience in which her father behaved and spoke in a way which represented a very marked shift from his previous manner. Apparently the future was also accessible from the other side, and my father made two specific predictions involving me. (Neither have yet come true, or seem likely to. I have an inherent tendency to believe predictions which on the face of available evidence seem to make no sense.)    

This ‘encounter’ (the first time I had visited a medium or experienced anything of this kind) has I feel, over the intervening fifteen months, contributed to a slow re-appraisal now going on in me of certain aspects of my relationship with my father. In particular, I feel that I am more aware than previously of him as a person in his own right – belonging to a different time and circumstances, facing different challenges and decisions, attempting to make the best he could of the hand of cards dealt to him. And I am certain that, during his lifetime, I must have been a bitter disappointment to him. He had hopes of me as an engineer and pillar of the church, and neither of those hopes was ever to be realised.

Fate played the same trick with me concerning ‘Prayer in the Desert’ as it did with the landscape painting of art objects 41. One day I passed through Jack’s, and it had gone. I mentioned this to Carla, the seller, when I bumped into her in Roger’s one day soon afterwards. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I just took it down and shoved it in a corner. In fact, I’ve reduced it to half price. I can’t believe no-one wanted to buy it. I really like it.’ I told her of my connection to it. ‘Look, Carla’, I said, ‘I’m going to go round to the warehouse and get it – I guess you didn’t sell it because it had my name on.’

It’s a good feeling to have it here. Don’t get me wrong, I still have issues with my dad. But this picture represents, perhaps, the things on which I can feel in a sense close to him. Part of my inheritance from him is to have been exposed to his qualities, just as I was to his faults – and both have become part of who I am. My father was not a bigot. This image reminds me of a poem that he once read to me and that I remembered enough of to be able to find it again on the web, decades later.

Abou ben Adem

Abou ben Adem (may his tribe increase!)

awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight of his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

an angel, writing in a book of gold.

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adem bold,

And to the Presence in the room he said:

“What writest thou?” The vision raised its head,

And, with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”

“And is mine one?” said Abou, “Nay, not so,”

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerily still, and said, “I pray thee, then,

Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again, with a great awakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adem’s name led all the rest.

- Leigh Hunt

I produced this for another blog, and liked it so much I decided to do a separate post for the (doubtless very occasional) philosophical haiku I might happen to come up with.

God said: ‘let there be

light!’ Elephant wept. God said

quickly: ‘And heavy!’

____________________________________

GARDEN PATHS (1)

What do woodlice do?

don’t know - can’t judge; better be

woodlouse than person. 

__________________________________

GARDEN PATHS (2)

‘WE BECOME WHAT WE THINK’

we think what we be-
come: so imagine the long
pink thoughts of earthworms

I was fooling around typing various words into google image search, and under ‘unicorn carthorse’ was annoyed to see a picture of my avatar in the top slot, but no sign of the Rainbearer himself. So I decided to try and remedy this by uploading the image itself, rather than a link to it, and having done so I guess I should write something about it.

The figure perched on top of the horse is Rain, who represents harmony, or better sympathy (in the old sense) in the Unconscious. The device on his shield is the reversable loop - as I call it - because you can, without stopping, begin in either direction, pass to the opposite direction and then back again. With a single figure-of-eight, this doesn’t work.

The unicorn carthorse, aka Rainbearer, is standing on a cricket pitch, and is in fact in the process of trampling the stumps - those pieces of wood - which must be correctly in place for the game to be played. The unicorn carthorse is, in short, a spoil-sport. This means that he refuses to play by the rules of the establishment: in this case the cricketing establishment.

This attitude sits well with that of his rider, who seems intent on attacking, with his cricket bat, the person riding the not-bull. This person, with the air of an English farmer, is in fact John Bull, which according to Merriam-Webster online refers to ‘the English nation personified’ or ‘a typical Englishman’ - the English everyman, if you like. No Bull ought to mean the absence of bull, baloney, fakery etc, but it is complicated by having another meaning. This second one refers to the whole Zen culture and all spin offs, where the goal of human existence appears to be to disappear up one’s own rear end - otherwise known as ‘enlightenment’ - a devious little male-side manoeuvre of which I have written elsewhere. So, the unicorn carthorse is apparently carrying his rider into battle against all that - whatever exactly that is…

There are other things in this image too. I wanted to set a puzzle here involving old cartoon images, but half an hour’s search on the web by me knowing what I’m looking for has proved fruitless, so what chance do you have? Instead, I’ll do further research and hopefully let you have the results.

This is a very simple piece, done I assume by country people, I imagine in Peru or Bolivia, depicting their way of life and executed in a naive and rustic style. (Of course, I suppose it’s equally possible that such pieces are turned out in their thousands by child slave labour in the sweat-shops of Lima to designs produced by ruthless capitalists intending to milk ignorant westerners of their last nuevo sol [kudos please for googling the peruvian currency] - but for obvious reasons, I prefer my first supposition.)

I bought this from a local emporium that defies all the rules of commerce by a) never seeming to have anything to sell, b) opening only very erratically, c) having no clearly discernable line of merchandise. As I can’t for the life of me imagine how they can possibly make any money, or even pay the rent, if indeed the shop is not theirs, I can only suppose that for the two ladies, one or other of whom can always be found on the premises, it must be a hobby - though they hardly look the part. At any event, there are items in this shop that have been stuck in exactly the same place for years, and short of an earthquake or tidal wave, seem set to continue to do so.

Which just goes to show, I suppose, that in retail, just about anything is possible. I have never seen anything like this on offer in this shop either before or since, so all I can say is that perhaps this too was waiting for me. I hope you enjoy it.

I would like to give a link here to a recent post by Kalliope Amorphous, and the poems I wrote in response.

This is not the first, or even the second time that Kalliope has moved me to poetry. So I asked myself why, and the only answer I could come up with was the word authenticity. But enough - judge for yourself

http://musecatcher.com/2008/05/06/compulsive-creativity-disorder/#comment-680

KALLIOPE: TWO WAYS TO SPIN

God created light, then

watched Kalli spin: ‘close your eyes;

rest in my darkness.’

———————————————-

She is the spider spinning
fibres of light;
weaving a coat of colours,
keeping away the night.
Carry her off
to an enchanted island
where there is no more scheming;
only the marks of dreaming
in the sand.

Those of you who have followed the gradual unveiling of my collection of art objects will, I suspect, be at least half-surprised that, amid the assemblage of ethnic paraphernalia with which my walls are festooned, there is somehow room for an English landscape painting. Only one (so far), but one nevertheless. I am a bit surprised myself. Let me say that originally this painting was bought for someone else, but eventually ended up in my possession. This perhaps explains how I came to do something as uncharacteristic as to dabble in an area of which I know and understand nothing whatever. 

The origin of this peerless example of English fine art (if such it is, which I very greatly doubt!) was none other than Roger’s ‘Old curiosity shop’ as I always used to call it. Roger’s is zoned by height, with essentially four layers, counting from the bottom: under the tables, on the tables, on the walls and suspended from the roof beams. Paintings at Roger’s can be found in zones 1,3 and 4, viz: anywhere except on the tables. For anyone with an elastic neck, this is quite convenient, as the majority are suspended from above. For the non-bionic among us, it can be a bit of a struggle. Those on the walls, on the other hand, suffer from another complication: they are not infrequently one on top of the other. Given the density of objects in all areas of Roger’s, moving anything is a heart-in-mouth proposition at the best of times, so anyone attempting to view ALL the paintings on show at any one time has to have nerves of steel.

There was one painting which, to my untutored eye, seemed really attractive - a watercolour of (I presume) English fields in summer. I can’t remember any longer why I dithered about getting it - possibly because there was such a profusion of framed items of many kinds at Roger’s that I may have been nervous about taking this for fear of passing up something better - which is ridiculous: if you like something, then you like it.

Inevitably, one day I walked in and it wasn’t there any more. That was the moment when I realised how much I had liked it. Is it not ever thus? I pass on the scenes of ringing of hands, self-flagellation and worse. Anyhow, after slinking away and licking my wounds, I eventually returned to the fray with renewed determination - the time spent not (yet) buying this promised picture was getting ridiculous, even for me I had to find something, so that I could keep my promise. So in my new, aggressive mood, I scoured the entire shop from top to bottom. At the back, hidden on the wall behind a couple of other large canvases, I found the very same vanished pastoral scene - it had not been sold but victimised by a reshuffle occasioned by another tide of incoming merchandise. This time, I didn’t dither.

Here it is: