Island of Lightning

by Robert Minhinnick

Okay, maybe in reality he’s not so great. Those sad tattoos? But you have to have a model, see. A role model. And Nicolas Cage is mine. Because Cage built an observatory. And now he’s up there looking at all this; the fireflies, the UFOs, the shakedown of meteors over the desert. I can picture that glass he brandishes. Black lens with a rainwater meniscus set in a gold bezel.

  So I’m here too, sneaking round his villa, me and the other obsessives in the pinon pine and prickly pear, all of us an audience outside his theatre. Because where else should we be, tell me that, when rising from the rimrock is this midnight moss of mescal-coloured stars?

  3.

  The stone comes from Cog y Brain. What’s up there? A cool calcareous crater. A view of Gower and Cefn Bryn’s brown volcanic cone. X-rays of coral. Buzzard bones like 64 ounce Big Gulp drinking straws. And from my botanist’s roster, restharrow and bugloss, squill and squinancy. How did orchids, those stoics of limestone and loam, find their way? Why is centaury, the alchemists’ herb, common this year? Below, every branch in Cwm y Gaer is a cambrel for cuckoo and crow. Ash keys shiver in their sheaves. A cock pheasant does the Freddie through the buckthorn. Not a bad place. Yet it will take me until the next millennium to understand it.

  But scrape any rock on Cog y Brain. That’s brine, and it was. The summit was once an ocean. This was the seafloor and its saltwater blood-warm. Tsunamis spun their camshafts here. Yes, select a stone and carve a word. Antediluvian viruses will be released, sulphur foam in the nose. The stones on that crest are brittle and fragrant. They snap like capsules and their dust floats away.

  4.

  Talking of role models, here’s another. In the Guggenheim Museum’s helter-skelter, it’s the last day of the David Smith retrospective. Smith was a Brooklyn sculptor who taught, escaped teaching, worked like a foundryman to weld together his immense metal statements, drank too much and at 59 wrecked his car, cutting short a unique career.

  In his steelies and leather apron, there’s David Smith in the long grass of Bolton Landing. That’s where he found sanctuary and inspiration. But a model? Undoubtedly. A big fisted shambling loner, Smith got on with the job. Sipping Jack Daniel’s, brandishing his acetylene lance amongst a bushel of sparks, Smith dealt in wheels and axles and the dynamics of frozen motion.

  In photographs he looks a bashful frontiersman. But that’s what such people are. The USA is full of them. They make their art in the wilderness – in Gila Bend where it’s hot as a griddle; amongst the redwoods in Santa Cruz; on the iron-angled sidewalk between Burritoville and the Café Vivaldi.

  The caliphate that runs the Guggenheim has brought David Smith’s art together. Here’s the stuff that was weathering in the fields, all bloodrich iron, the portals and girders and gallows Smith set in his meadow.

  But here too are his drawings. If Smith was a bison he’s also a hummingbird. Every year he made four hundred large drawings. Let’s forget talent for a moment. Industry, dedication, resolution are his other lessons.

  But this might be his masterpiece. Here are David Smith’s Medals of Dishonor, his predictions of the Second World War and what it would bring. The artist took a dentist’s drill to incise bronze with some of the twentieth century’s greatest war-warning art. His images are an indictment and iconisation of war and what creates warfare. Smith used horror derived from Hieronymus Bosch and satire from Brueghel the Younger to forge terrifying tableaux.

  Looking at David Smith’s work, displayed on every floor of the Museum Mile ziggurat, a ray passed through me. A dark laser. Maybe it had nothing to do with the exhibition. It concerned a human being’s comprehension of how it must live, and then the struggle to fulfil that quest.

  Not everyone rates David Smith. And maybe his art never made him happy. But there he is in dungarees that oxy’s burned with its bulletholes. Dangerous stuff, oxy-acetylene. I worked with oxy once on the Cardiff foreshore when the scrappies from Bird Brothers were taking apart the hulk of The Flying Fox. The flame can droop loose and yellow. But at its hottest it’s invisible.

  5.

  We go through the scanning process and file into the United Nations. With the other writers I put my stone on the auditorium stage. This rubble drawn from all over the world will be used in a ‘poetry wall’. We were instructed to incise our language’s word for ‘poem’ on our stones. As I know that English is not required, I have scratched a shaky GAIR. Which in Welsh means word. Because a stone isn’t a poem. A stone is a word. So gair it is.

  Then I read the poem I have selected. What can destroy might better delight, so nerve gas or nougat, bomb or bergamot, here are one hundred and thirty-six words about Taliesin, war poet who celebrated and surely detested war, who in these new words is stating fundamental truths. Which we will ignore.

  When I cut the stone a prehistoric wind blew out of it. In Keats, I cupped its sulphur-smelling spore to my face. Like Monsieur Becquerel in his laboratory in Paris, Becquerel who had returned from holiday to discover radioactivity, I held the stone and let its demon enter where it would.

  Freddie and the Dreamers Greatest Hits,(EMI) 1998.

  ‘Taliesin’ by Emyr Lewis, from Chwarae Mig (Barddas) 1995. See www.davidsmiththeestate.org

  The Reef

  i.m. Joan Abse

  But, Lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake,

  That seemen rather a foul confusion

  Of werk than any fair creacion

  The Franklin’s Tale

  In his fifties my father described himself as a beachcomber. I was puzzled by that until I reached the same age. Now I understand. My own writing is a beachcomber’s diary whilst my editing work essentially beachcombing, with bottled messages of my own tossed into the electronic surf.

  But literally (littorally?) I have become a beachcomber, discovering that the intertidal zone is the most dynamic part of the physical world I know, a world where I am closest to the processes that have fashioned this planet and the life upon it.

  I’m in Southerndown on the coast of south Wales, where the sea snipes up the gwters to girn at the anglers on the bulwark and threaten night fishermen on Witch’s Point. Twenty years ago I was employed here on the Glamorgan Heritage Coast as part of a Community Project scheme. I’ll write that again – scheme – to bring back its unforgettable flavour. For scheme was a quintessential Thatcherite era word. And a bitter joke. (Heritage too is doublespeak. Heritage is the dirtiest deal we get).

  But on the Heritage Coast I was the project manager. My colleagues were ex-soldiers and ex-prisoners, the workshy the feckless, the didoreth, the damaged, the dangerous, the doomed, the weird, the sick, the unlucky, the salt of the earth. And I was one of them, paid the pittance that rescued the unemployed from moral corrosion and social uselessness.

  In the summer of 1984 I had gained my Post Graduate Certificate in Education, yet had learned enough of comprehensives to know I would not become a teacher. (What an irony: since that decision I have visited more schools than a sales rep for Dorling Kindersley.) Instead, I was coasting.

  Now at Southerndown I watch the sand migrate. It’s a restless beast. What was hidden is revealed. But the familiar is lost. There’s the barbarous ironwork of a buried deck, chain-link and hawser indistinguishable from the rim of a barnacled pool. And here, a two metre high honeycomb that marine worms have built over the rocks. Golden, oozing salt, it hisses electrically as the tide retreats. But out to sea a mile away is a white stave that becomes a black line. Something is emerging. Soon it is unignorable.

  And I stare although I know what it is and have known all my life. It’s an island, almost volcanic in the way it appears so abruptly, an island extruding into daylight and already clinkered with mussel shells, black with wrack. Rearing there is a reef like the roof of a submerged citadel. What’s appearing is a mezzanine for conger eels, its razored edges sharp as conger teeth.

  Once I stood here at a cave mouth. The waterfall that screens it was frozen into a glacier three yards wide, corrugated like a corkscrew. From within
, or so it seemed, peered the faces of drowning children, blind eyed and hair afloat in that strange aquarium. Above, the cliff was snow-thatched, finials smoking in the breeze.

  But this is a hot day in July. Around me lie boulders shifted from their prehistoric positions by the Bristol Channel tsunami of the seventeenth century. South and west are the emersable region and the splash zone where geology is speeded up and I might feel geomorphology happen between my toes. This is where avalanche and earthquake occur twice daily. Twice daily the littoral is constructed afresh.

  This Glamorgan hides a life all right, cold blooded, hermaphrodite, cannibalistic. Rather seek mercy in the seawater-coloured eye of a passing gull than a rock pool’s sumptuous mantling.

  Yet I love these pools, especially after a storm when a black and green thallus floats upon every surface. For each pool is different. One’s a dark jeroboam; one a saucer like a stoop in a church porch. One pool I know is a limestone cylinder, six feet deep, two feet in diameter, an immersion chamber wine-coloured with coralweed, its red becoming purple and its purple black, a cistern the sun will never irradiate yet which to me is a doorway to inestimable regions.

  In my Heritage Coast year, Poetry Wales Press was based at Green Hollows Cottage, the home of Dannie and Joan Abse in Ogmore by Sea, half a mile away. For this reader at least, the books the press was then issuing remain central to my experience of those times. (Mass unemployment, the Miners’ Strike, the core years of Mrs Thatcher). It was a wet summer in 1985. The schemies played cards in their hutch under the evergreen oaks. Heritage hung sodden around them.

  I was thinking about that period on June 13th this year when Dannie and Joan Abse visited the Grand Pavilion in Porthcawl. They had planned a joint reading. Dannie had resigned from the Seren editorial board, a quarter century being enough committee work for anyone. For the event he chose poems of Ogmore and the Heritage Coast, fruitful and inexhaustible subjects.

  As he and Joan read, I looked at the sea, visible through the Pavilion windows. It was the bluest it had been all year, the affirmative blue of a sea that is rarely blue. The tide was receding. And although it was concealed from view, something was thrusting from the waves.

  Dannie Abse knew what it was. He read:

  …here, this mellow evening,

  on these high cliffs I look down

  to read the unrolling

  holy scrolls of the sea.

  He read:

  Has the past always a future?

  He read:

  The tide is out.

  And from the reeled-

  in sea – not from

  the human mind’s vexed fathoms –

  the eternal, murderous,

  fanged Tusker Rock is revealed.

  And there lay that stark atoll. Which I observe now and to which I pledged particular regard when I worked on this beach for Mrs Thatcher’s shilling. It will always be with us. Because in every summer sea as on every summer evening the reef must reveal itself.

  Quotations from ‘New Selected Poems’ (Hutchinson, 2009) by Dannie Abse.

  The Way They See It At Buba’s

  My brother, you know, is one of the conductors at the Viennese opera.

  Wonderful, I say.

  Yes. For many years. We should toast him.

  The barman pours us all a glass. One for himself, one for me, and one for my new friend, the Slovene.

  It is made of grass, says my friend.

  I expect he means it’s flavoured with herbs. A kind of liquorice. Maybe aniseed. Because everywhere I go in this country, the bottles are produced and the spirits, aromatic and corrosive, are poured. Such rituals are vital. Local pride is at stake. Usually, if you are drinking together it means you are not fighting. So toasts are important.

  Yes, says my friend, his dog curled at his feet. I can speak English. And I can understand Croatian. But Croats have no chance with Slovenian. No-one else here will understand us. Now, what is it you are looking for?

  The best way to arrive in Zagreb is by train. From the west the railway follows the gorge of the Sava, the river running green between limestone walls. But emerging from the railway station I found that martial law prevailed. There were police and soldiers everywhere. Roads were blocked, entrance forbidden to state buildings, flights delayed. Of course, a European Union delegation had arrived. This is what always happens when such a delegation arrives in a European capital. The city freezes like a computer. Our leaders were in Zagreb to negotiate Croatian membership, now a distinct possibility.

  Obstacles to this are being overcome. Ante Gotovina’s arrest late in 2005 at a Malaga restaurant and his speedy transportation to The Hague, where he will answer War Crimes Commission charges of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, has done a great deal to smooth the way for speedy admission. Many Western politicians view Croatian membership as crucial. Usually, the reasons given for this are bland, such as welcoming Croatia to the European family. Heard less frequently is the fear that fascism remains a latent political force in Croatia and that only EU membership will keep it reined in.

  The Slovene stared at me hard. I could see he had decided to talk. And yes, he was correct. Of course I was looking for something. No-one visits Bistro Buba by mistake. Hidden away in its courtyard, Buba’s is deliberately unprepossessing. I had come across the bar two years previously. Now, whenever I visit Zagreb, I find myself duty-bound to discover whether it’s still there. But nothing seems to alter. The sink of unwashed crocks and the overflowing ashtrays are permanent fixtures. And in the gloom of the bistro, above the red and white check plastic tablecloths, the television will be on with a subtitled film.

  British war films are popular in Croatia. I’ve seen Jack Hawkins ride The Cruel Sea in Buba’s, the desert survivors wipe the froth from their lips in Ice Cold in Alex. Once there was a girl behind the counter, fineboned and palefaced, fragile in that proletarian twilight. She had opened my bottle of Karlovacko and smiled. But although I have looked, I have never glimpsed her again.

  The Slovene shrugged. Bistro Buba, he said, is the last bar of its kind in central Zagreb. Everything around us changes. Everything costs more. Except here. Only Buba stays the same. I hope it always will.

  For those who might wish to explore modern Croatian culture via the dangerous door marked pivo, this is a good place to start. Around the corner, The Old Pharmacy has opened, with its international lagers and perplexing English memorabilia. The Old Pharmacy is the new Europe, Buba and its Bubarians the unreconstructed continent. But my friend wanted to apologise.

  Slovenia is already in the EU, he laughed. These Croats can’t understand it. Maybe I can’t. But the EU will want this country in sooner than later. Considering the past.

  Then he told me what had occurred a few weeks previously. A crowd of thousands had gathered in Knin to mark the anniversary of the destruction of the breakaway Serb republic of Krajina in 1995. This had been set up in June 1991, the same time that Croatia and Slovenia formally declared independence from the Yugoslavian federation.

  Croatia’s ‘Operation Storm’, led by amongst others, General Ante Gotavina, had ‘cleansed’ Krajina, resulting in 300,000 refugees leaving the area. The tenth anniversary was marked by the Croatian Prime Minister, Ivo Sanadar, who described it as ‘magnificent’ and liberating. Many in the crowd had chanted anti-Roma slogans, for the gypsy situation in the new republics remains precarious. Then they had changed the cry to one of ‘Ante, Ante’, not only to mark General Gotavina’s contribution, but as a tribute to the Second World War dictator, Ante Pavelic.

  It is impossible to discuss Croatian fascism without reference to Ante Pavelic, premier of the ‘independent state of Croatia’ set up by the Nazis, 1941-45. Pavelic’s territory consisted of two constituent parts – Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with a total population of 6.3 million. Of these, 3.3 million were Croats, almost all Catholic. There were 1.9 million Serbs, about 700,000 Muslims, 40,000 Jews and 30,000 Roma.

  Although one of the g
reat mass murderers of the Second World War, Ante Pavelic’s name is hardly known in the UK. Yet he and his ‘Ustasa’ (Croatian Nazis) were responsible for the deaths of half a million Serbs and over one hundred thousand Jews and Gypsies. After the war, Pavelic was sheltered by the Vatican and employed by the Perons in Argentina. Indeed, Juan Peron issued over thirty thousand Argentine visas to Croats, not discriminating between profascists and anti-communists, all of whom were fleeing Tito’s post-1945 dictatorship. Eventually, Pavelic found a home in Franco’s Spain, where he died in 1959.

  Pavelic’s plan was to exterminate a third of the Serbian population in Croatia, expel another third, and convert the remainder to Catholicism. Modern Croatian fascists, who feel their country’s newly independent status is directly inspired by that wartime ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nazi puppet regime that it was) make a mystical relic of Pavelic’s remains. His body is thought to rest at a secret location in Madrid. The return of the corpse of the ‘Poglavnik’ (supreme leader or Fuhrer) to Zagreb, with the possibility that Pavelic might lie there in state, is one of the great fascist dreams of Croatia.

  Such mythification is in keeping with its powerfully dogmatic Catholicism that sets great stock on shrines and the bones of native saints. Indeed, the Croatian church, and especially the Franciscans, is inextricably linked with Croatian Nazidom. During the Ustasa reign of terror under Pavelic, many Serbs were forced to convert to Catholicism. These are deemed the lucky ones. If you know where to look, there are signs all over the country that Pavelik is still venerated by some Croats.

  Of course, not all Croats were Fascists. Thousands joined Tito’s partisans, while others were persecuted by Serbian Chetniks. It seemed that to oppose fascism, all non-fascists had to ally themselves with the communists, or in the south of Croatia, with the Serbian resistance.

  But the crimes of the Ustasa tainted the nation. Thus during the Yugoslavian warfare of the early 1990s, it was normal for many Serbs to deem Croatia as ‘fascist’. The Croatian leader and then President, Franjo Tudjman, was routinely blamed for rehabilitating the reputations and honouring the names of Ustasa members. He was also accused of trying to conceal evidence of the existence of the concentration camp at Jasenovac, set up by the Ustasa. This was in fact, a linkage of five individual camps located on the River Sava, sixty-five miles south of Zagreb. Estimates of numbers of Serbs, Jews, Roma, Muslims and non-Catholics murdered at Jasenovac range from 50,000 to nearly 100,000. Tudjman was also blamed by the Americans for airbrushing Croatia’s World War Two record. For example, he changed the name of the ‘Victims of Fascism Square’ to ‘the Square of the Great Croatian People’.