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"Old Woodley! Welcome Home to School!”
Thursday, 26 May 2022 at 21:47
"Old Woodley! Welcome Home to School!”
Following my last blog to quote an extract from Roy Campbell's great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War, Flowering Rifle, I now add a few of my notes and thoughts to support a reading of the text, which will be found below.
My “Southern Gestures Modify” their dream—
“Southern Gestures Modify” refers to the effect of Campbell’s own prophesies upon the thinking of the 1930s literati of leftist Bloomsbury. He turns the table on those he would critique by quoting from W. H. Auden’s own poem Hunting Fathers.
And well may they beware: for from her chain
A “Southern Gesture” liberated Spain.
This refers to Franco’s African Army built and disciplined in Spain’s African colonies, which beat back the early gains of the Republicans, eventually to win the war.
For where they doze in faint Utopian steam
Among their vicious languors and their lilies
My Hand will pepper them with Southern chillies
They’ll feel the heat - but only the heat of chillies is needed to defeat the gutless brigaders
... this dance of wowsers
Would still be hiking in their sawn-off trousers
Or climbing grapenut-trees in some green lane—
This bunch of hikers in shorts climbing grapenut-trees is a reference to the faddist outdoorism and eating habits of the faddist left (grapenut breakfast cereal eaten as a health food).
But that I gave the rendezvous in Spain,
And came to greet them, shouting from my mule,
“Woodley! Old Woodley! Welcome Home to School!”
Campbell quotes from his own poetry collection, Mithraic Emblems (1936) lines that in the Spanish Civil War context emphasise the public school immaturity of the Bloomsbury set and the brigaders more generally. (Majuba was a resounding victory for the Boers.)
They just can’t keep from hanging round their school.
It holds the sum of all their earthly joys
And they’ll be Masters if they can’t be boys;
And here to prove it running to the minute
Shunts in the train with all the ‘Old Boys’ in it.
The chaps all shouted like a single fool
‘Woodley! Old Woodley! Welcome home to School!’
Then the new Master from his study burst
Not quite so much a Coward as the first
He cracked a joke, made everybody laugh —
John Bull, Jock Stot, and little Jacky Calf.
Back to the fields where Waterloo was won,
Majuba lost (they blame it on the sun!)
(From Mithraic Emblems 1936)
One votive goat, had they but spared my kraal
This must be a reference to the farm burning atrocities of the Republican side in the early stages of the war.
The brigaders had:
…not even the guts to run away
When their red paradise behind them lay
And not a single man to bar their way—
Inviting them with all its charms untold,
The New Jerusalem, the Age of Gold,
Where loving comrades howl for gory tripes
And pay their services with shots and swipes.
The emphasis on leftist cowardice is clear.
Back in the “New Jerusalem” is the contrasting and hyper-hypocritical call for blood and guts
“Shots and swipes”? I am not sure what Campbell means by this, except perhaps that “swipe” suggests a wild swing rather than an accurate hit, which might also imply that the shots were of the same amateurish nature.
John Dunn ©
They’ve backed no cause from Greenland to Australia
But petered out for fear of worse mischance.
For still the “Southern Stranger “ of their theme,
My “Southern Gestures Modify” their dream—
And well may they beware: for from her chain
A “Southern Gesture” liberated Spain.
For where they doze in faint Utopian steam
Among their vicious languors and their lilies
My Hand will pepper them with Southern chillies
Whenever I can spare it from my team,
As these found out, these gutless weary-willies
Who but that I had called this dance of wowsers
Would still be hiking in their sawn-off trousers
Or climbing grapenut-trees in some green lane—
But that I gave the rendezvous in Spain,
And came to greet them, shouting from my mule,
“Woodley! Old Woodley! Welcome Home to School!”
One votive goat, had they but spared my kraal
Would have been worth this batch, their kit, and all,
Who had not even the guts to run away
When their red paradise behind them lay
And not a single man to bar their way—
Inviting them with all its charms untold,
The New Jerusalem, the Age of Gold,
Where loving comrades howl for gory tripes
And pay their services with shots and swipes.
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Two fords, long since bridges
Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 22:07
Great Barford Bridge
Two fords, long since bridges
Dr John Dunn 2022.
What follows is my first drafting of the supporting text and commentary for my next YouTube video, which will relate a motorcycle ride to two bridges, one ancient, the other just very old, especially in its context(more of this to come).
All commentary work has to start somewhere, inevitably being modified when the practicalities of matching word to image are eventually reached. What I mean to say is - sorry for these rough notes!
I pulled up in Great Barford on New Road, just near the east end of the church. Parking the bike, I wandered over to the old bridge to take a look. I was not surprised to find a few picnickers and patrons of the pub across the road, sitting next to bridge, enjoying the sunshine.
All the same, I chose not to stay long filming the bridge here; I'm much too self-conscious. The view from the other side is much better and quieter.It was from this vantage point that I did most of my videoing.
The bridge and causeway were built largely in the 15th century, with some rebuilding in the 19th century.
Remounting my Royal Enfield Classic 500, I set off along New Road, heading for the village of Roxton. This New Road was so named because it was new... back in the 18th century! It was built by a new turnpike trust to take coach traffic heading for the Great North Road off the High Street in Great Barford.
And it's towards the Great North Road that I'm heading now, to see another old bridge, the Tempsford Bridge, just north of Tempsford on the A1 near the Black Cat Roundabout.
I'm approaching the bridge via the village of Roxton, along the long and straight School Lane. A strange road this. Obviously name after the village school which is still a fully functioning Academy... The road clearly shows on Victorian Ordnance Survey maps, running from Roxton to the Great North Road, but the current OS map designates it as a track with footpath right of way. Google Maps offers a route from Roxton to Tempsford Bridge on the A1 via the Black Cat Roundabout. Crossing the busy A1 to view the bridge is a small challenge, and perhaps make the Google Map directions seem more reasonable. It's all about timing. Here's a gap in the traffic, let's go.
And into Kelpies Boat Yard, where my map research tells me there should be a good view of the Tempsford Bridge.
John Dunn ©
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The Worst Form of Slavery
Tuesday, 24 May 2022 at 22:03
As I'm travelling back home following a visit to Monet's garden at Giverny in Normandy, with little time to be creative, I thought that I would post an old archived piece on to the home page. These were my thoughts from ten years ago concerning Julius Evola and his critique of modern nationalism.
John Dunn 2022
The Worst Form of Slavery
First posted Wednesday, 25 April 2012 at 11:31
What is taken for the political right today? There are two common misconceptions. Firstly, that the right stands for proponents of free enterprise and the free market – as opposed to leftists who advocate state intervention in economic and other aspects of life. Secondly, that extreme nationalists are on the right, advocating white supremacism as opposed to multiculturalism.
Criticisms of these two positions from the left might be that:
1.The market cannot be left to its own devices. Spending by the state is required to avoid the worst of recessions. Proponents of the free market are devoid of ethical principles. State intervention is required to protect essential services such as healthcare for everyone. Social security is required for the losers in the system. State intervention is needed to ensure fairness and equity, for example, in the education system.
2. Extreme nationalism is equated with fascism. Proponents are intolerant of people with differences of nationality, race, creed and sexual orientation. (Criticism of religious intolerance is problematic to the left, given its tendency to wards atheism.) Intolerance and discrimination are considered by the left to be unethical.
Both the free market and nationalism are believed to be historically spent ideals.
But where might another critique of the nationalist right wing perspective come from? The Elovian right. The traditionalist right. The perennialist right.
A traditional society consists of individuals who each affirm their individual identities through adherence to superior principles and interests. Personality is not abolished, but is integrated through participation in a society in which ‘every individual, function, and caste acquire their right place and reason for being through acknowledgement of what is superior to them and their organic connection with it’. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p338)
The acknowledgement of a common spirituality and a common active propensity towards it is such that each and every action by an individual becomes a rite and the fulfilment of a role. Through this fulfilment, the individual gives a law and form to his own nature. He is sure and certain of his purpose – which is sacred.
The roots of tradition lie in the distant past, but emanate most typically in religions and systems of caste. Such is the depth of these roots of tradition that adherents refer to them as perennial, in the sense that they have always existed in one form or another and always will.
In the Middle Ages there was widespread adherence to the perennial tradition. As a result, whilst nationalities existed, nationalisms did not.
Whilst individuals conformed to this or that nature, language or exoteric religious emanation of the tradition, the social principles of caste were articulated across all nationalities. ‘Hence, the possibility for members of the same caste who came from different nations to understand each other better than the members of different castes within the same nation.’ (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.339)
With the loss of tradition, the need for a new type of unity was increasingly felt. Modern nationalism offers an artificial and centralising unity for individuals stripped of religious certainties, living out lives as commodities in a state of pure quantity, as one of the masses.
Nationalism acts upon these masses through myths and suggestions that are likely to galvanise them, flatter them with the perspectives and fancies of supremacy, exclusivism and power. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.339)
Nationalism emerged as a collectivising force. The nation, the homeland became primary as an entity that required from the individual belonging to it an unconditional declaration, as if it were a moral and not merely a natural and political entity. It led to a mentality of ‘my country, right or wrong’.
Even when nationalism parades its traditions up and down, it is living out a myth of fictitious continuity based on a minimum common denominator that consists in the mere belonging to a given group. Celebration of the nation really means the upholding of anti-tradition. The leaders of world subversion see in nationalism a way of disposing of the tradition.Turning this contingency into a science, Marx felt able to affirm ‘all that is sacred melts into air’.
Now for the nightmare vision of the kali yuga.
Today there is a trend towards universal brotherhood, reflected in ‘multiculturalism’, which is really ‘uniculturalism’. Far from abolishing the nationalist spirit and its pseudo-traditions and pride, its supreme form as the nation will be called mankind. The tradition, onthe other hand, manifested most typically as religion, especially in the Muslim world, will be regarded as the enemy.
The individual will barely attain the status of a cog in the all-consuming global enterprise and lose all self-differentiation from the masses. In losing all sense of law and form of his nature, the individual will lose all sense of personality. The individual will be crushed.
Since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary"slavery" should be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.109)
Once the global enterprise has been established, there will be no escape; no Guenon-like refuge in a traditional culture beyond its borders.
John Dunn ©
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On grapenut-trees
Monday, 23 May 2022 at 11:27
On grapenut-trees
Dr John Dunn 2022.
As I continue my break from the usual elements of the website whilst I travel in northern France, I have again found a little time to add another excerpt (see below) from Roy Campbell’s exceptional epic poem about the Spanish Civil War, Flowering Rifle.
When I have a little thinking time, I will add a few notes and thoughts to the extract, as I have done on previous occasions (see most recent blogs and Flowering Rifle in the ‘Thought Pieces’ section of my website).
John Dunn ©
They’ve backed no cause from Greenland to Australia
But petered out for fear of worse mischance.
For still the “Southern Stranger “ of their theme,
My “Southern Gestures Modify” their dream—
And well may they beware: for from her chain
A “Southern Gesture” liberated Spain.
For where they doze in faint Utopian steam
Among their vicious languors and their lilies
My Hand will pepper them with Southern chillies
Whenever I can spare it from my team,
As these found out, these gutless weary-willies
Who but that I had called this dance of wowsers
Would still be hiking in their sawn-off trousers
Or climbing grapenut-trees in some green lane—
But that I gave the rendezvous in Spain,
And came to greet them, shouting from my mule,
“Woodley! Old Woodley! Welcome Home to School!”
One votive goat, had they but spared my kraal
Would have been worth this batch, their kit, and all,
Who had not even the guts to run away
When their red paradise behind them lay
And not a single man to bar their way—
Inviting them with all its charms untold,
The New Jerusalem, the Age of Gold,
Where loving comrades howl for gory tripes
And pay their services with shots and swipes.
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Merry hummed the wheel
Saturday, 21 May 2022 at 22:18
Roy Campbell
Yesterday I posted another short extract (see below) from Roy Campbell’s great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War, Flowering Rifle.This evening I’ve had a few moments to add a few supporting notes to Campbell’s lines, though I must admit that the humming wheel and clashing shears perplexes me. Nevertheless, please find below my efforts. In time these recently read pieces will be added to my other thoughts on Flowering Rifle which can be found in the ‘Thought pieces’.
Dr John Dunn 2022.
Merry hummed the wheel
The Knight of La Mancha is Don Quixote, and honest heroism.
“Charlies" refers to the leftist products of the “Charlie-factories of Cam or Isis” mentioned earlier in the poem.
The Charlies are caught on the lance of true and honest heroism.
Skein of Atropos - that one of the three Fates who cuts the tangled web of life. So happy were the Fates to hear a prophesy that was not marked by the contemptible timidity of the Charlies.
At first “So merry hummed the wheel and clashed the shears” which I think means that life goes on? the wheel of fortune turns? the agricultural calendar turns over? (sheep shearing?). In short, at first, there was nothing to worry the “Materialists and wowsers”, when the republican cause they supported“in blood and arson towered alone”. The metaphor recalls the siege of the Toledo Alcázar in the early stages of the war, the towering fortress that witnessed atrocities committed by republican forces against the men, women and children trapped inside.
Yet even whilst the leftists had their way in the early stages of the war, Campbell stuck to his predictions in defiance of the pundits “those paladins of failure!”i.e. those heroic champions, defenders and advocates of noble causes! For noble causes read fashionable causes and faddist causes, typical in the Bloomsbury and political establishment circles of the 1930s.
John Dunn ©
For I foretold La Mancha’s Knight would prance
With Charlie like a cockroach on his lance
Which I was called Romantic to believe:
Around the Fates to play at pitch and toss
Like kittens with the skein of Atropos
My devil-daring prophesies had leave;
So happy were the Fates at last to weave
A prophesy that wasn’t pusillanimous,
And when they saw my program, were unanimous
I’d come a tedious chapter to relieve:
So merry hummed the wheel and clashed the shears
Was never such a miracle for years
Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve:
For when our cause was scarce a handsbreath grown
And theirs in blood and arson towered alone
And Absolute from Portugal to France,
With flawless certitude I flung defiance
At all our pundits, bards, and men of Science,
Who’ve always viewed my gasconades askance,
Since well they know, those paladins of failure!
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Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve
Friday, 20 May 2022 at 22:08
Roy Campbell by Augustus John
Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve
Dr John Dunn 2022.
I continue my break with the website as I do a little travelling in northern France. However, it is a time to catch up with my reading of Roy Campbell’s great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War and more, as I add a few more extracts from the gigantic work.
The following lines continue those just published on the blog of this website. Previous extracts can be found in ‘Thought pieces’. In the next few days or so, I will add notes and explanations.
John Dunn ©
For I foretold La Mancha’s Knight would prance
With Charlie like a cockroach on his lance
Which I was called Romantic to believe:
Around the Fates to play at pitch and toss
Like kittens with the skein of Atropos
My devil-daring prophesies had leave;
So happy were the Fates at last to weave
A prophesy that wasn’t pusillanimous,
And when they saw my program, were unanimous
I’d come a tedious chapter to relieve:
So merry hummed the wheel and clashed the shears
Was never such a miracle for years
Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve:
For when our cause was scarce a handsbreath grown
And theirs in blood and arson towered alone
And Absolute from Portugal to France,
With flawless certitude I flung defiance
At all our pundits, bards, and men of Science,
Who’ve always viewed my gasconades askance,
Since well they know, those paladins of failure!
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Oily sleeze
Thursday, 19 May 2022 at 20:27
Roy Campbell 1901-1957
I now add notes and commentary to the extract posted yesterday (see below) from Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle, his great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War and much much more.
Oily sleeze
Dr John Dunn 2022.
Robert Southey was the political radical turned poet laureate. He epitomised the unscrupulous Bolshevizing (Bolshevik and Yiddisher being as one to Campbell) i.e. courting of establishment favour by the leftist lackeys whom Campbell suffered in his own Bloomsbury years.
Henna-tressed is about being as radical as your hair-do; in other words, Campbell's critique of shallow, showy and fashionable establishment leftism.
To water down the vodka is to water down your apparent Bolshevism, i.e. install insipid and shallow politics.
Baksheesh,a form of bribery common to Asia, is symbolic of Britain’s culture of conformism in which lick-spittle cronyism is the way to win honour, as a film of oily sleeze covers everything.
One might act like the Bloomsbury Set “radicals” Campbell derides, but only if you could say noto life, wish you hadn't been born and renounce all that's worth believing in.
In contrast, Campbell argues that honour must be won with honour.
Tupper is a reference to Martin Farquhar Tupper, composer of moralising verse that passed for poetry. Given the context, there may be a secondary reference to sheep tupping.
But no defrocked scoutmaster (here standing for Bloomsbury perversion) would get away with moralising doggerel to win the honours he (Campbell) has upon his chest.
With some weary resignation, Campbell accepts frankly that he will never be recognised for his true worth as a poet, because it would take the impossible; i.e. British poets would have to reject the foredoomed causes espoused by the leftist political establishment.
John Dunn ©
And when I Bolshevize for Royal Favour
Among her modern Southeys, henna-tressed,
By watering down the Vodka like the rest,
May my right hand lose cunning, flinch, and waver,
Salaaming there for baksheesh with their best,
Who’ll call you honest, daring, fearless, bold,
For blacking boots and doing what you’re told,
If only you unclench that “no” to life
And wish your Father hadn’t took a wife,
If only you renounce all Faith and Vision
Foresentencing your manhood to derision.
For King’s Gold Medals when I strive to please
Their winning will require a sterner test,
No defrocked Scoutmaster could Tupper these
That jingle with the Cross upon my chest:
When Britain and her poets stand for causes
That aren’t foredoomed by foul subhuman crime
They’ll change their present sanctions to applauses
And own me for the prophet of my time,
Since the whole trouble with the other chaps is
Whatever cause they flunkey for collapses
However well it flourished at the time:
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