Malcolm Arnold, Composer of the Week

Are you of a sensitive disposition?

Affected by the issues 

In today’s episode?

Drinking heavily, throwing up your guts? 

Are you a wife beater, ill tempered, bad? 

Or a distressed and anxious, alcoholic?

Well cheer up, it could be worse,

I won’t suggest that you write verse,

But dry your eyes, you don’t need tissues,

Try your hand at composition,

Musicians often are quite mad.

Why not write a dance, bucolic,

Or something in Jamaican mode?

Leave the bar at closing time,

Create a symphony sublime.

Write a hundred film scores then

A fine concerto, maybe ten,

Who knows how much sheer brilliance,

And genius at orchestration

Comes in part from deep resilience

From hard work and concentration

And how much just from being nuts?

Let Us Revitalise The North

Let us ‘revitalise’ The North, tomorrow,

Remove the misery we caused it yesterday,

Let’s cheer the poor sods up, who live there, 

Let’s patronise them now and spend, spend spend,

Let’s put an end to misery and sorrow

And most of all, let us pretend

The good we do today will quite repair

The harm we caused before and the despair,

We’re trillions in debt, but we can borrow,

It wasn’t us who stole vitality away

Scientism (based on a quote from Roger Scruton)

When you take away philosophy, religion,

The higher aims of art

Then you also take away 

The way we know ourselves apart. 

And knowing our apartness

Is the basis of our sanity.

We can’t reduce our kind

To basic biology.

For when we try, it seems,

We offer an apology

For all that is abhorrent,

In our vile inhumanity.

”The one who forgives, sacrifices vengeance, and renounces thereby a part of himself for the sake of another.” Roger Scruton

What are the causes of our happiness?

Some say they’re many, varied, manifold,

Some cite freedom, some pursuit of pleasure,

But these with sacrifice must be compared

For in living as if living’s to forgive

(Thus to the Christian message paying heed)

One sacrifices vengeance, and gives up

A portion of oneself, a valued treasure,

Not for the sake of doing some good deed,

But in order that another might live.

And strengthened thus, as pillars we uphold

The value of our citizenship

And find the path to social membership

All human beings seem to need. 

'It is Only a Very Shallow Person Who Does Not Judge By Appearances' Oscar Wilde

Although the title of the poem is a quote from Oscar Wilde, the content is based on a chapter in ‘The Soul of the World’ by Roger Scruton

Your eyes, which are your soul,

Made manifest, unfathomable,

Defying scientific explanation;

Express in pools of blue or brown,

Round, moist with brilliance,

And fragments of reflected light,

Your very essence:  your whole.

To find a gaze impenetrable

Is merely to avoid confrontation,

There is no fleeting thought so quickly flown,

That leaves no evidence

Of its flight,

No trace residual in the coal

Black depths of pupils. For each inimitable,

Unique and transient manifestation

Of thought is known,

Finding its mirror in the onlooker, whose excellence,

Whose skill in guessing right

Your emotion, is illimitable.

And thus your eyes are by definition

The second person singular, a pronoun

Made physical in the face, speaking in silence

The language of consciousness: insight.

‘It is not falsehood that causes the greatest offence but truth’. Roger Scruton

Free speech is being everywhere shut down,

so we will never know now who is right

 – the heretics or those who’d keep them mute

By force of law and brutal strength of will.

Today a thinking person of renown

Will not be murdered for his thought, 

But might be subject to assassination yet

Of character and of his good repute.

We can’t discuss, converse, we can’t refute,

Much better our old habits to forget,

We must self censor, let our tongues be still. 

For some beliefs are safe, beyond dispute,

Protected from debate. For it is known

That certain kinds of men may wish to kill

And others may take up the noble fight,

If questions are allowed of their ideas.

And so it is that now we must disown

Our old traditions honed throughout the years.

Yet why restrict a contest free and fair?

Why give in to bullies and relent?

For ‘tis not falsehood makes men violent,

Or makes them take offence, or claim despair.

The thing that makes these men too much protest,

The thing these people really do detest,

Is truth, spelled out by reasoned argument.

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.” Roger Scruton

If only we could plan and organise

The way that other people live, we’d show

That following our rules, sans compromise

Improves society no end. We know

So much. The poor man in the street cannot

Much more than hope he makes the wisest choice

In such a way that helps to stop the rot

That’s at the heart of western life. His voice,

His thoughts, are for himself.  But ours are based

On calculations which can take account

Of every consequence.  We would not act in haste,

We’d weigh and measure, calculate amount,

Ascribe a figure to the impact each

And every action had and in this way

We’d help Joe Bloggs, the ignorant, to reach

The best all round decision, that’s to say

To put himself and all his needs aside.

For thinking of oneself, we always find

Does not in every case quite coincide

With doing what is best for all mankind.

Oikophobia

‘Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind all but inevitably passes. But it is also a stage in which we can become arrested.’ Roger Scruton

It seems, as if in answer to the adolescent need

To turn one’s back on all that one loved best

And walk into the world and then to test

Each old idea which lately had been seed

From which the current self had grown,
One had despaired.

For on finding there were blooms more dazzling bright,

More gaudy; hybrids bred for trumpeting their right

To dominate the public parks, be shown,

The latest, greatest, must have, modern craze

One had offered up one’s soul

For hybridising treatment, so the whole,

Native flower were wiped out.  To erase

The subtle beauty of the wild thing

So fitted for the soil, the cold, damp air,

Had been one’s mission and one’s only care

To emulate the fashionable, bring

Something of that showy, new florescence

In the juvenile belief that it would thrive,

Take over.  Full of joy, and still alive,

One believed one could acquire a new quintessence.

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.” ― Roger Scruton

 “The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.” 

We’re truly moved when music stirs the soul.

 It matters not that we are subject to manipulation:

Melody and harmony console.

And tension and release are real, for seeming real,

There is no proof, no basic, solvable equation:

Music has its human place, fulfils its role.

”The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.” 

And yet it bears some scrutiny, investigation,

Within the Lebenswelt, and left intact and whole,

Not beneath some lens or analysed in fragmentation, 

We’re truly moved when music stirs the soul.

Those minor thirds, descending scales may both control

The floods and tides of sadness and emotion

Such music is the moon, the guiding star, the pole,

It matters not that we are subject to manipulation

Or that others name our claims 'exaggeration'.

Music might encourage and cajole

But we respond with glad capitulation:

Melody and harmony console

There’s deeper truth in chansons sans parole

Than in the truth of scientific explanation
We are complex, much too strange to pigeonhole

There is beauty in the world and in creation

of imaginary things.

Property of a Gentleman

An 18th century oak cupboard,

Nice thing, anyone going to bid?

Come on, it belonged to such a good fellow,

A gentleman, played the cello,

A man with a title,

He once gave a recital

In the village hall,
He raised quite a bit for charity,
Over the years,
Good chap, full of bright ideas,
But he didn’t need money,
So nothing ever came to much.

He used this as a cabinet by his bed,

But his family wanted rid,

Once he was dead,
Well, not dead as such,
Dying

Second marriage, you know how it is,

The wife can’t stand the sight

Of aught that’s his,

And now he’s on his way out

She’s taken a new broom

Come on now, that’s right,
Anyone buying?

Anyone going to give it house room?

It’s quite small,

You could stash your porn in it,

As he did,

And there’s only one shrinkage split.
His first wife was a nice lass,
Pretty, clever, upper class,
Went off,
With some other toff.
I’ll tell you what,
I’ll throw in this regency bedroom chair,

Come on, do I hear two quid?
Two quid anywhere?
Alright, I’ll let it pass.

Are My Emotions Real?

Are My Emotions Real?

Is it true, as I self report, 

that I am repelled

In that moment,

Bending near the ground,

When I discover that the turd in the poo bag,

Reducing the heat of my hand,

Is not the one freshly expelled

By my faithful hound,

But the shit some other dog has left lying around? 

Why do I start to gag?

Either I am revolted by faeces or I’m not,

Cool or hot,

I would have thought.

Is this a subject for a thesis or dissertation?

Would I still feel queasy

If the ‘wrong dog’s’ excrement 

Was warm?  Am I simply disgusted

By taking hold of something cold?

Or is this conclusion too easy?

Should I conduct an experiment,

Launch an investigation?

Is my response adaptive or encoded,

Do I feel this way, because of my DNA?

Is it an instinct protecting me from harm?

Which questions might be loaded?

“What kind of bond

Makes one respond

To the motions passed by one’s own Alsatian

With equanimity and calm?”

For example.

Could one set out to deceive

By pretending all the mess 

Dog owners were asked to collect

Was from their own animal,

Or would it be better to forget the lies

And see if owners could detect

Or recognise

The particular qualities of their own pet’s faecal matter?

I think I prefer the latter.

Would other physiological responses

Reveal the truth, serve as validation?

Or is all this emotion just imagination?

Can Mud Abate?

How strange a thing to contemplate,

And yet a subject for debate,

And childish poetry and rhyme,

Since mud only becomes less mud

When water doth evaporate:

When mud is dry, of mud there’s none.

Yet one could argue  (as one should,

Since arguing does people good)

Or make a gambit or a start,

By saying that the water’s gone, 

but that the water’s not the mud,

Since no one ever understood

The nuisance of the dirt and grime

To be the clear, liquid part.

Lutoslawski, Concerto for Orchestra

Out of the suffering came forth sound,

A tortured song of the soul.

A music the purpose of which was profound,

Containing a prayer, not meant to console,

A prayer sufficient of itself, a hope complete and whole,

Which hung in the air, above the despair, which also hung around.

And yet there was no praise, no glorified God to extol.

Out of the suffering came forth sound,

Out of the music appeared a wound,

Which could not be healed and still had control

Of the man who conveyed it as pain as he found:

A tortured song of the soul,

A music whose only role

Was to spell out exactly, not trick or confound,

To say what was true and let truth take its toll,

A music the purpose of which was profound,

A music of death and of blood soaked ground

And yet intelligent. A glimpse through a keyhole,

Into a mind which did not flinch, but sought to expound,

Containing a prayer, not meant to console,

Or offer false glimpses of future parole.

A music relentless and seeming to hound

The listener, wear him down, yet condole,

Truth and beauty wrought, where yet they almost drowned:

Out of the suffering came forth sound.