Unkept Good Fridays

Unkept Good Fridays - Thomas Hardy

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Unkept Good Fridays - Thomas Hardy 〰️

There are many more Good Fridays
Than this, if we but knew
The names, and could relate them,
Of men whom rulers slew
For their goodwill, and date them
As runs the twelvemonth through.

These nameless Christs' Good Fridays,
Whose virtues wrought their end,
Bore days of bonds and burning,
With no man to their friend,
Of mockeries, and spurning;
Yet they are all unpenned.

I hadn’t read this poem by Thomas Hardy until today. Written the year before he died in 1928, it discusses the unsung fates of ‘nameless Christs’ who likewise suffered throughout history but are unremembered, whose stories remain unpenned.

In one way, its rationalism is entirely correct; we are all God’s children and each of us are worthy of celebration and equality before history. We all navigate the same path, face the same doubts and share the same ultimate fate.

But the poem is not especially concerned with universal equality; in my reading it is a poem of courage. Like Christ, certain people have displayed this foundational quality; the courage to stand up and speak your truth. The consequences for doing so - like Christ - can be appalling. There is no end, or change, to human nature and it can be, as well as kind and compassionate, also cruel and uncaring. To stand against received opinion, in any age, is a dangerous pastime.

Christ died for our sins. He was an individual but, like many biblical stories, I think the truth is more instructive than literal. He was abandoned, put on trial, humiliated, tortured and killed but rose again from the dead to point the way of redemption. It is both personal but universal.

The correct path (one hesitates to write righteous) isn’t easy. We all know that and struggle daily to be better versions of ourselves. This takes courage. Courage takes many forms but the courage to seek out the better parts of human nature and avoid the easy, destructive path, is a strength all us ‘Christs of unwrit names’ must battle each day. There is no redemption without struggle and that struggle is personal, unremitting and, often as not, forgotten by history but, perhaps, perhaps, remembered in eternity.

And that is my Easter message through poetry and scripture.

The full Hardy poem can be read here.

From Bulgakov to Hardy via Romans

It’s crowded. It’s dusty. It is my overstocked bedside table. What lurks there?

Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

A Russian novel recommended by a Russian lady. Though she’s departed the scene, the novel remains; a 439 page aide memoire to one of life’s tiny footnotes.

SPQR - Mary Beard

It’s like the law - or something - that there shall be a Roman History book on my bedside table. Mary Beard traverses familiar ground as she meanders around from Romulus to Septimius Severus. Not my favourite author or person but I’ll try and look past that and let the subject speak for itself.

Life’s Little Ironies - Thomas Hardy

Hardy was an all rounder - novels, poems and short stories. Study the art from a master.

The Folio Book of the English Christmas

It’s an annual tradition, I get this book out 1st December, it gathers dust and I put back on the shelf in February as the crocuses emerge and the thought of Christmases past appal.

Caligula - The Corruption of Power, Anthony A Barrett

Not one, but two Roman histories. As a keen student of Suetonius and Robert Graves, this feels a bit obvious to my tastes. I crave the third and fourth century, the fury of Aurelian, the prescience of Constantine, the oddness of Julian. But one still returns to the Julio-Claudians like a Hollywood film-maker.

The Bible - King James Version

The only constant presence on my bedside table. I like to look in occasionally. Ah, wisdom and Western Culture. Mmm. As you were. And today’s reading is: Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; But afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel. (Proverbs 20: 17)

And my mobile phone and a coaster with my name on it. Possibly my Boss watch.

All Must Have Prizes

I was long-listed in a recent writing competition (TSS Quarterly short story competition)**.

What on earth does long-listed mean? Is it some hideous all must have prizes* bollocks where, even in a competitive medium, organisers must assuage the egos and feelings of the entrants? Possibly. Personally I would prefer a straight forward hierarchy, like this:-

1st Place, 2nd Place, 3rd Place. Losers (you're shit and you know it).

I suppose I am becoming a dreadful curmudgeon.  So I shall take my long-listing positively in a - 'I didn't win but I wasn't totally crap' type way. Which is awfully big of me. Mature even.

So what was 'The Winter Train' (for that is what my entry was called) about, I hear you ask. Okay you didn't ask and don't care but this is my blog, on my website, so I will bloody-well talk about it.  

Well, since you ask, it's about old lovers meeting by chance after twenty years, both observing the passing of time on the faces and personality of the other, both assessing how the equilibrium of power in their relationship might have changed so many years later. Yes, serious themes from a serious writer at the top of his (long-listed) game. A real page-turner.

As a literary joke - i.e. not a funny one - I incorporated many lines and themes from the poetry of Thomas Hardy into the story. Particularly poignant were his later poems where he recalled in verse the courtship of his recently deceased wife, Emma. I even called the main characters Tom and Emma FFS!

I've been rereading Hardy's poems recently. Let me end this blog with At Castle Boterel one of his most evocative, and as I get older, most moving poems. I may have borrowed - as Hardy did himself in his prose - themes and words from this and other poems. We are all referential; I take mine, de haut en bas - so here is the high.

At Castle Boterel (1913)

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,                       

And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,

I look behind at the fading byway,

And see on its slope, now glistening wet,

Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted

In dry March weather. We climb the road

Beside a chaise. We had just alighted

To ease the sturdy pony’s load

When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of

Matters not much, nor to what it led,—

Something that life will not be balked of

Without rude reason till hope is dead,

And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever

A time of such quality, since or before,

In that hill’s story? To one mind never,

Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,

By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,

And much have they faced there, first and last,

Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;

But what they record in colour and cast

Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,

In mindless rote, has ruled from sight

The substance now, one phantom figure

Remains on the slope, as when that night

Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,

I look back at it amid the rain

For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,

And I shall traverse old love’s domain

Never again.

NOTES (yes I realise that notes on a blog post is intellectual masturbation. Don't knock my hobbies. But sometimes extra info, credits or explanations are in order. Deal with it.)

* All Must Have Prizes - A quote from Alice in Wonderland (which I've never read to be honest). My adaptation of it is from the great Melanie Phillips' book of the same name which details the corrosive effect of decades of progressive thought in education. Dumbing down teaching so that, literally, for our super-special snowflakes, 'all must have prizes'.

** I always know when I'm up for a prize because I start to get some interest in one of the most unvisited parts of my website - Other Writing. The judges of competitions always check here to see if I've already published my short story entry - in contravention to the rules - on this august public forum. Me being me, I decided to change the content of the page to an open 'Dear Judges' letter which ends with a plea for them to give me the prize and offering them a kick-back if they do so. Realising that this might be counter-productive to my chances of winning contests, I've amended the text recently. Sometimes my urge to joke is not funny.