The Christmas Party

A broadcast on behalf of the Christmas Party! An accidentally profound film about human aspiration, longing, suffering, the expression of these in literature, art and music the possibility (but by no means the certainty) of God and what that means as discussed amicably by four old and slightly tipsy friends. The sax episode “I can’t play for laughing!” steals the show - funny and musical (not always at the same time!) and I think we all come together more during that than on anything else, though we are definitely 'together' as a group throughout. Carols and Nativity poems (by U.A Fanthorpe and T.S. Eliot) and songs (Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”) offer their mixture of divine longing and wry realism, holy and broken hallelujahs, true and bum notes. And no Christmas story would be complete without a compelling modern tale of an Inn too busy cashing in to offer warm rooms of welcome. John’s emotion at the end of the Muggeridge is a revelation, a powerful ending that one doesn't expect but which resolves all the rest in a way one feels was always coming.

T S Eliot's Journey of the Magi

T.S. Eliot's proof in a single poem that the experiments of modernism - adopting a personae rather than the personal voice of the poet, free verse "composed in the rhythm of the musical phase (or of speech and thought patterns) rather than the metronome", concreteness, imagism, detachment, feeling delivered through object correlative rather than sentimentality and bombast - could produce a masterpiece as good as any. The symbolist details arranged in the narrative like a painting (a triptych), foreshadowing Christ's future at his birth and which produce in the middle section the 'temperate valley' in which the wonderful Nativity unsentimentally and realistically yet heartwarmingly occurs flanked by the two colder pictures of the journey and then the living death of the old world they no longer belong to. Performed over our version of the Nativity carol "In The Bleak Midwinter" which seemed to fit beautifully at every point and lit by a serendipitous burst of winter sunshine through the window during filming. If I remember my 'O' Level correctly, I think this was around the time that T.S. Eliot the great modernist iconoclast of the Castle Land and Prufrock threw a curve ball towards a crypto-Christian conversion in his Ariel poems. The Journey of the Magi (1927) "A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter." And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. T.S. Eliot

Goodbye Cruel World

Hear it realised as a sound poem here.

Film to follow:

An autumn leaf detaches itself from a tree and Falls. On it is some writing - a suicide note. The performer catches it in his hand.

The performer holds an antique magazine issue of Dante's inferno (vol 1 of 36, publ. 1903) with a burnt-brown cover. He is wearing shades and removes them during the Dis-tinted spectacles verse, only to restore them before the end. He indicates his heart on "This Not (knot) only love dares to tease undone." A modern take on Dante at the mouth of hell.

Now was the day departing, and the air
Embrown’d with shadows…  (Inferno)      

As fall off the light autumnal leaves 
One still another following, till the bough
Strews all its honours on the earth beneath
E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood
Cast themselves, one by one, down from the shore
Each at a beck as falcon at his call. (Inferno)

The night train West voids a soiled brown note and leaves the downfall station; 
Goodbye Cruel World - I trust you receive THIS communication.

The Zoo-break heart-freeze sin-beasts of Dante shadow the Circle Line,
Paddle up shit creeks out in the Styx to Dis-on-Vacation.

Spine-chilling out dark half glasses of Daily Hell, Bank Holiday
Messiahs Dis-May my heart; Dis Troy, dim Dante’s Vision. 

God save me from my Dis-tinted spectacles’ bewitching
Bewildering shadows of Dis-appointment Dis-guised as Eden. 

God save me from Dis-consolation Discourse, Fifty Shades
Of Grave; the pinched shrill of Avant-God; this don't know 'Who' we are from Adam.

The name is Bond. Adam in a Bond. The Actor Who Can't Go On.
Wash off this Who-do, not dis, not dis, this suicide mission.

Hell isn’t other people…….It’s ourselves, our self-fulfilling 
Cock-up conspiracy clouds; our I-land’s alien nation.

Marx says to do is to be; Sartre to be is to do, Sinatra
Do be do be do this ‘Not’ only Love dares to tease undone.

Who to do or not to do? to be or not to be? Who’s that 
At the tunnel’s end? Death. I embrace your oblivion.