An Anniversary Gift

The Abbey is one year old today

Dear Readers,

It’s exactly one year since I wrote my first essay here at the Abbey of Misrule. In that year a lot has changed - doesn’t it always - but the wider picture has remained the same, and so has what I’m trying to do here.

From that first essay:

Modernity is a permanent revolution. We were all really born for an age of walnut trees and shaded pools, but instead we find ourselves in the Machine’s maw with the jaws closing, and it is hard to know whether to fight or run, or whether either is possible, or whether all of this is just words, of the kind I should have stayed away from. But these are our times, and those of us cursed to think too much must work out how to live in them. We must work out, if only for our own peace of mind, what we think about the breakdown of forms, the widening gyre, the solidity melting ever faster into air. We have to work it out so that we know where we stand, and what we will not stand for. Where the lines are, and whether to cross them and what we will do if one day the times come for us as we sit beneath the walnut tree, armed with a vaccine passport and the latest official upending of reality, and demand a public pledge of loyalty.

Well, I’m still at it, and I’m enormously grateful for the input and support of all of you. I don’t just mean that you’re helping me feed my children, though you are. One thing I didn’t anticipate when I started was the depth and breadth of the commentary I would get in response to the essays I write. The thoughts, challenges and recommendations of the community that has developed around these essays has helped sharpen and sometimes change what passes for my thinking. Also, I’ve met new and interesting people, albeit virtually. That’s been a blessing.

To mark the first birthday, I’m offering you two little presents.

Firstly, I’m going full Machine and making a special offer to all my readers. From this morning until I go to bed tonight - for one day only, ladies and gentlemen! - I’m reducing the prices of subscriptions to the Abbey.

Annual subs, if you take one out today, will cost €40 rather than €50. And the rate for Founder Members, which entitles you to discount rates on my writing courses and several Zoom calls each year with me and other Abbey founders, will cost €130 rather than €150.

The second little gift is an unpublished poem of mine. I wrote it a few years back after reading Ezra Pound’s translation of a 3000-year old Chinese poem, Song of the Bowmen of Shu. That poem is about the misery of a soldier conscripted to guard the Great Wall of China, far from home. I was struck by the timelessness of it. It could have been written yesterday, or in another 3000 years. For what it’s worth, I offer it here.

Blessings to you all and gratitude for your support.
Paul

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The Grief of Bunno
After Pound, 'Song of the Bowmen of Shu'

Bunno, you sigh
As you pick the first fern shoots.
Over the valleys your sorrow moves,
And along the rivers, between the high crags
Where the enemy waits.
And you may not return home, no
You may not return.

The General's horses are tired,
Even the horses.
The willow leaves fall and winter comes.
Still the ivory arrows fly,
Still you grub the fern shoots,
And you may not return home, no
You may not return.

Bunno, it has been thirty centuries.
Does grief flow like rivers
To a green ocean, or lie
Stagnant in dark water,
Breeding mosquitoes in brackish pools,
Spreading the fever that consumes continents?

And he who called you, Bunno,
Who brought your shade into the circle,
Who knew of your grief -
What did he learn from his own?
Grubbing the fern shoots inside his cage,
Firing fishskin arrows at his foes,
Setting out into the snow.
What did he know of the power that transmutes?
White love become black sorrow
Become red rage.

Bunno, it has been thirty centuries.
Now here we are, picking the first fern shoots.
The continent trembles,
Our sorrow is bitter, we have no ease.
And what flower is this coming into bloom?
There is no snow now in our lands.
The rivers are channelled, the oceans empty.
The generals face off along the ridges,
And we may not return home, no
We may not return.