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Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 33
 
 [Two Poems]
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RUSSELL GREEN
 
THE LOVE-SONG OF A PESSIMIST: 1920

I SHALL not meet you on the painted pavement
As I go lonely through the crowded city.
You will be dining with a nameless lover,
You will be listening to his dull avowals,
You will be listening to the unconvincing
Romanticisms unfired by mental ardour
Of some anonymous and vague suburban.
And in my consciousness shall I be wandering,
Asking myself a sad eternal question,
Why I pursue you with a tale of love,
A tale to which you listen courteously,
With wistful silence, with affectionate deference —
Then turn again to your versatilities.
For when I speak of loving concentration
And when I speak of mutual servitude,
My sombre words go drifting, drifting by you
Like sombre seaweed drifting by a mermaid
Playing in the froth and foam of a sunlit sea.
On stony ground the seeds of my evangel
For ever fruitless fall — you know the parable —;
The stony ground is your void scepticism,
Silent and void as interstellar spaces,
Wherein may fall the very stars of beauty
And fall beyond the borders of the starland.
My burning words like meteoric flashes
Against the purple of a night in August
Torn suddenly by the momentary Pleiads,
Gleam and and are gone in the clear cold void abysses
Of your ingenuous cunning philistinism,
Sunk without sound in your sweet and treacherous
Dark chosen deliberate girlish shallowness.

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Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 34
 
 [Two Poems]
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Love is an arc of light upon the darkness,
A phosphorescence curving like a rainbow
Of flame between conspired imaginations,
The living art of two creative artists,
The silent symphony of unheard music,
The rhythm concealed in the uncarven marble,
The only earthly transubstantiation,
Whereby the human body is commuted
Into a perfect and eternal symbol
Of incarnated beauties, permanences,
Hopes, ecstasies, abandonments, ambitions.
Here is the road that anchorites and mystics,
Philosophers and devotees and dreamers,
Have sought, foretold, imagined, lost …

* * *


All this I tell you. You prefer your dances,
Your tinsel erethisms, your carousals,
Your dull, mechanical routine engagements,
Your drunken midnight revels whence you fling
Back to your suburb in a cushioned motor.
You find it so much easier to follow
Your customary stale routine engagements
Prescribed by cavaliers who rather like you.
You cannot pierce the fallacy of pleasures
That are pursued, mechanical, external.
I wish that you could see yourself as I do,
A victim bound upon the ribboned treadmill,
Whose feet will soon be wearied with recurrence,
Creaking recurrence of an endless sequence —
The serpent pleasure that devours itself
In pitiless infinities of ennui.

* * *


I can but think your nerves are of a fibre
Too coarse to feel these delicate vibrations
Enough to reach your central ganglion
Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 35
 
 [Two Poems]
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To light the flame of an ideal reaction.
I can but think your blood is far too viscous
To tremble with the shaking flame of love,
To quiver with the old ideal ardours.
I fear that you will feel no more the lovely,
Swift sweet reactions of the blood eternal
From all the fragrance of a summer morning
Washed with warm dew and south-west rain and sunshine.
You have transmuted blood into an idol
To which you offer bloated sacrifices
Of baked dead flesh and nauseous synthetic
Loud scents and artificial wines and cognac.

* * *


Blood is a god of infinite intelligence
Mute in deliberate creative cunning,
Building the slow red coral of humanity
Into the ultimate reef that shall bar out
The ancient sullen surges of death and darkness
Beating for ages on the organic foreshore.
But in your blood, unfired by love, receding —
Receding goes my hope to be immortal.
Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 36
 
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RUSSELL GREEN
 
APHORISMS

ART is memory attempting immortality.

Time is like a poor relation: it stays too long and when it goes takes something away with it.

How great the insight of the patrons of immoral novels! — they can read between the sheets.
Let us live with a will and die without one.

Freedom of choice is useless without the instinct of selection.

The polygamy of the body challenges the monogamy of the heart.

Romance to the imagination is distance; to the emotions, abandonment

Humanity hates change and loves variety. It compromises in optimism.

Life is a melodrama in the evening, a farce on the morning after. Only the apotheosis of retrospect raises it to the sublimity of tragedy and comedy.

W hen argument comes up the stairs of the past, love flies out of the window of the future.
Marriage is a form of emotional insurance; divorce a realisation of your surrender value.
Knowledge may be power, but imagination is omniscience.

Each year one rises from the dead past to find a humorous satisfaction in dancing on one’s own tombstone.

Altruism is the disguise which desire steals from honour.

Woman is the sea of barbaric flesh beating in desire for destruction against the base of the lighthouse of the brain.

It is because the strong eat each other that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Life is an experiment in the art of living.
Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 5  Autumn 1920  Page: 37
 
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Do not reason with the cynic; retaliate.

How curious to imagine that one cannot be a man unless one is a devil!

The atheist is one who cannot see wood for trees.

Indiscretion is the name that cowards give to truth.

The only criterion of love is the degree of impatience with which you wait for the postman. Cynicism is an anticipation of the historical perspective.

One cannot be a law unto oneself without being a lawbreaker to others.

Free will is the refinement of anthropomorphism; both are attempts to put God in his place.

Mind, a device to facilitate self-deception.

A cynic is one who tells you the truth about your own motives.

Imagination is the separate memory of the senses.

A man wants first sympathy, then sin. A wife is a woman who gives him both.

Emotion is the fourth dimension of the mind.

The god of the rationalist is himself.

The illusion of immortality is the mirage of the memory of the race.

Repression is the refuge of the weak.

Sentimentality is a name given to the emotions of others.

Call, no man genius till he is dead; it might be true.

The divine myopia of desire is spared the vision of the ultimate horizon of despair.

Brevity is the soul of passion.

Religion is more popular than art because prevention is better than cure. Imagination is the disease.

Fatalism is the tribute that indolence pays to enterprise.

Conservatism is fear masquerading as wisdom.