Within the hollow crown

‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,’ Shakespeare has Henry IV say. It’s one of many meditations on the frailty of human authority. Another comes earlier, from the king Henry dethroned: Richard II. These well-known lines are a rare moment of vulnerability for a king convinced of his divine right to rule, but they ring more true than his more brave state. For some reason they came to mind today. 

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king? 

And so the light runs laughing

I’m not a big TS Eliot fan, so I was glad to find this Ash Wednesday poem by Louis Untermeyer, 1961's poet laureate, but better known to Americans as an anthologist. As Lent begins, I love the joy in this pair of sonnets, light escaping through holes in Larkin’s “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade.”

I (Vienna)

Shut out the light or let it filter through
These frowning aisles as penitentially
As though it walked in sackcloth. Let it be
Laid at the feet of all that ever grew
Twisted and false, like this rococo shrine
Where cupids smirk from candy clouds and where
The Lord, with polished nails and perfumed hair,
Performs a parody of the divine.

The candles hiss; the organ-pedals storm;
Writhing and dark, the columns leave the earth
To find a lonelier and darker height.
The church grows dingy while the human swarm
Struggles against the impenitent body’s mirth.
Ashes to ashes. . . . Go. . . . Shut out the light.

II (Hinterbrühl)

And so the light runs laughing from the town,
Pulling the sun with him along the roads
That shed their muddy rivers as he goads
Each blade of grass the ice had flattened down.
At every empty bush he stops to fling
Handfuls of birds with green and yellow throats;
While even the hens, uncertain of their notes,
Stir rusty vowels in attempts to sing.

He daubs the chestnut-tips with sudden reds
And throws an olive blush on naked hills
That hoped, somehow, to keep themselves in white.
Who calls for sackcloth now? He leaps and spreads
A carnival of color, gladly spills
His blood: the resurrection—and the light.

Blessed ones, whole ones

Two poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian turn-of-the-century spiritualist poet, came to me in answer to my sense that being is more than breath. In the first, one's breath joins a larger breathing, and we find by losing. In the second, the senses are not the most blessed; rather it's the mystery at their crossroads.  

Part One, Sonnet IV

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Part Two, Sonnet XXIX

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Matins

“If we don’t breathe, we die,” she said. “So we want to keep that breathing going.”

I'm all for breathing. Breathing is swell. But what I find in these situations - whether it's Saturday morning Pilates, or “mindfulness” training at work - is that concentrating on the workings of my respiratory system or musculature does not relax me; it makes me nauseous. Even thinking too acutely about my toes makes them curl. I think the idea of all this is to be in the moment, to exclude the abstract, to return to something primal, as though breathing were the elementary mode of being. To me this is like trying to squeeze the consciousness of a higher being into the mere sentience of a lower being, and it freaks me out.

I'd rather think of breath as spirit, and spirit as the very thing that allows me not to be 'in' my body at every moment. As Leon Wieseltier says, “the pure present is for infants.” Bobby McFerrin says for him breath is not enough. Breath joined to spirit and made into song - ahh, that's another matter.

So instead of watching my breath while lying on my mat, maybe I'll lift my voice in a joyous morning hymn. I wonder if my fellow Pilatists would mind? 

Raising the brow bar

Sometimes when you check back in after a break, things have moved, often at a swifter pace than you thought possible. Like when you don’t own a tv, and then you catch some and think ‘was tv always this loud, crass and fatuous?’

Today it was eyebrows. I’ve always had a casual approach to eyebrow maintenance, and haven’t put them in for a service in quite a while. Feeling a tad unkempt about the brows, I had a look online to find a neighbouring brow shop. There are plenty, and since I last looked, they’ve experienced what can only be described as profession creep.

With a few clicks of the mouse, I stumbled unawares into a world of brow shapers, sugarers, designers, stylists and – I kid you not – brow whisperers. At a brow bar that looks more like a Byzantine kasbah, your ‘Arch Angel’ will perform a ‘face reading’ to gain an understanding of your personality and idiosyncracies. (I wonder, does one’s face have to be straight for this to work?) ‘Using the brow whispering technique they can then determine a perfect brow shape to suit each individual.’ Once you’ve had your brows whispered, you move on to your consultation with a brow artist, who’ll (eventually) give you a ‘wax, tweeze and alignment’ for just $70. If you prefer something more radically intrusive, you can pay considerably more for a browlift, which surgically removes excess fat and skin in your brow area, and tightens the muscles to give you the perfect arch of the permanently surprised.

It’s not really the money that troubles me, nor the possibility that if I were so inclined I could have my face surgically rearranged. Tempora mutantur, after all. It’s the spin: the psuedo-spiritual quasi-psychological lily-gilding that blurs a service industry with the helping professions and the arts.  Such spinning elevates beyond reason both the nature of the transaction and – it must be said – the participants. Removing hair with hot wax is not an art; the person who does it, however well, is not an artist. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I, as the buyer of these services, was not drawn into the pretence. Because that’s the worst part.  Going along with the elaborate charade that my eyebrows somehow deserve this much attention, this much gilt. That I care about them this much.

Maybe I should ask my brow artist to give me the ‘dead pan.’  I think I’m going to need it.