Lipstick Sunsets

 Sundown on the Riviera

Camogli:  Giuseppe Pesa (1928 - 1992)

Not much has changed.......

Camogli:  Richard Gibbs (1951 - )

It is summer's end, and the Italian Riviera, or the Riviera ligure, or Levante Riviera, calls me down.  I want to bathe in both the water and the light, to wash off the dust of a certain sense of hopelessness that seems to affect both my life and that of my native land.  

There is something about places by the sea, where, day by day, life is influenced by the tridental vagaries of Neptune, and the diurnal passage of Helios in his chariot, rather than the whims of self-serving privileged individuals whose one aim is to preserve their own well-being......

In Camogli there are fishers and makers of focaccia and those who rely on passers-by like me to rent an umbrella.  And there are young lovers, who have a future, and have hope....

The locks on the chains may be universally a bit naff these days (I've seen more in Cologne and Paris, and it does seem to be a passing fancy....) but as the sun goes down on another day of my hurried holiday away from my duties as carer, a little ear worm stirs and I think of John Hiatt's memorable 1987 album Bring the Family, recorded in just four days in a flurry of post-alcoholic dependence:

There's a lipstick sunset
Smeared across the August sky
There's a bitter sweet perfume
Hanging in the fields
The creek is running high

And I left my lover waiting
In the dawn somewhere to wonder why
By the end of the day
All her sweet dreams would fade
To a lipstick sunset

Yes, I wish I could bring the family.  John Hiatt isn't a Nobel Prize winner and maybe neither his words and voice nor Ry Cooder's slide guitar will be to everyone's taste, but we all have our weaknesses.....

Well, a radio was playing
And that ol' summer heat was on the rise
I just had to get away
Before some sad old song
Brought more tears to my eyes

And Lord I couldn't tell her
That her love was only killing me
By the dawning of the day
All her sweet dreams would fade
To a lipstick sunset

Oh, yes, it is heartbreakingly beautiful here.  No wonder W B Yeats enjoyed some peace here, dropping slow.  Though quite what the irascible Pound found in nearby Rapallo I am not so sure.  But I can relate to Shelley and his funeral pyre on the nearby beach at Lerici.  Is that his spirit out there in his 'Don Juan?'

Camogli is a very pretty little place, with a stony beach and a cluster of houses backing the fishing port and the church and castle.  In the Castel Dragone, Giuseppe Pesa's pictures hang on the bare walls in an exhibition entitled Memoria di una bellezza inifinta (Memory of infinite beauty)....

It is indeed very beautiful, and as the sky darkens and the world turns I slip into romantic nostalgia, a glass of wine no doubt partly responsible, wishing my love was with me.....

Well it's pretty as a picture
Red and blushing just before the night
Maybe love's like that for me
Maybe I can only see
Take away the light

Hold me in the darkness
We can dream about the cool twilight
'Til the dawning of the day
When I make my getaway
To a lipstick sunset

Giuseppe Pesa became enchanted with Camogli some seventy years ago, about the time I was emerging into this confusing world, and he recorded the blues and greens of the sea, the multicoloured houses that rise from the shore, and the chiaroscuro of the sunset luminescence.  His canvases still show the energy and vitality that reflect his passionate and emotional engagement with the world.  For this I am grateful..... thought I also hope that

There will come another day
And I'll make my getaway
To a lipstick sunset

 

John Hiatt

https://youtu.be/ASRP9fc-_o4?si=84LyRyJ_MVkCf-E9

Across the Borderline

But hope remains when pride is gone 

There's a place where I've been told 

Every street is paved with gold 

And it's just across the borderline 

I cruise west, the concrete and steel towering over me as I pass through the shiny gateway to heaven.

And when it's time to take your turn

Here's a lesson that you must learn

You could lose more than you'll ever hope to find

The price is £6.70 to enter these Elysian fields these days, but wtf? With the way the world is spinning we need to treat ourselves. All we really need is the band from the Titanic to play us out, and we can sink happily.

When you reach the broken promised land

And every dream slips through your hands

Then you'll know that it's too late to change your mind

But then it is always too late to change your mind….. There is never a going back. I still believe in the England of Yore (whoever he/she was) where Postman Pat (and his black and white cat) delivers simnel cake and Private Godfrey’s sister Dolly makes the sandwiches. Come to that I even sometimes live in a world where Betsy Trotwood chases donkeys out of her front garden, Justices Shallow and Silence preside over the magistrature, and The Pardoner’s Tale passes the time in the traffic between Sittingbourne and Faversham.

But that is fantasy.  There is no going back,

'Cause you've paid the price to come so far

Just to wind up where you are

And you're still just across the borderline

So I pursue my first intent, to be a pilgrim for the day on Offa’s Dyke, up the hills near Abergavenny, in Monmouthshire. This is border territory, sometimes known as the Anglo-Welsh Border. The England-Wales border runs for 160 miles, from the Dee to the Severn estuary. It has followed much the same line since the 8th century, and for part of the way it is marked by Offa's Dyke. Offa was Trump of Mercia from 757 to 796, and his walled ditch was constructed (at his own expense?) to keep the immigrants from Powys out. The modern boundary was fixed in 1536, when Henry VIII melted the lead off the roof of Tintern Abbey and simultaneously created both the Romantic Poets and Secular Tourism.

Now the only signs of Welsh independence are signs on the road instructing you to go ARAF and a charge of £6.70 to cross the Severn in a westerly direction, where:

A thousand footprints in the sand

Reveal a secret no one can define

The river flows on like a breath

In between our life and death

Tell me who's the next to cross the borderline

En la triste oscuridad (In the sad darkness)

Hoy tenemos que cruzar (today we have to cross)

Este rio que nos llama mas alla (this river which calls us further away)

But hope remains when pride is gone

And it keeps you moving on

Calling you across the borderline

Up on these beautiful hills, with views across England’s green and pleasant (?) land to the East, the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons to the west,

and the flatiron top of Ysgyryd Fawr (Skirrid) between me and the Mouth of the Severn to the south,

it feels good. I am away, temporarily, from it all – or so it seems. The corrugated end of a farm building carries verses from Edward Thomas’s The Lofty Sky:

Today I want the sky,

The tops of the high hills,

Above the last man’s house…

…where naught deters

The desire of the eye

For sky, nothing but sky.

The skylarks agree.

The ponies agree.

I am alone with my thoughts, where once border patrols might have shot me on sight.

And other borders, other boundaries, come to mind. What is this United Kingdom if full of care? Will Gretna be Greener when Scotland detaches itself? What about Ireland? In Sunday’s Observer Sean O’Hagan asks Will Brexit reopen old wounds with a new hard border? 

A recent Irish government survey noted that there are now around 200 border crossing points and an estimated 177,000 lorries, 208,000 vans and 1.85m cars travel to and from Northern Ireland every month. In spite of this progress, the prevailing question now occupying people either side of the Irish border, particularly those that live in its hinterland, is: does Brexit mean that checkpoints of some kind could reappear, to prevent the movement of goods and people from European Ireland into British Northern Ireland?

The border is 310 miles long, and, as we soon find out, can be difficult to follow even with the help of an Ordnance Survey map. It skirts five of the six counties of Northern Ireland – Down, Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Derry – as well as five Irish border counties – Louth, Monaghan, Cavan, Leitrim and Donegal. Along the way, it bisects mountains, towns, townlands, fields, rivers, bridges, farms and even a few houses wherein the occupants sit down to supper in Ireland before going to sleep across the hall in Britain. [Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd]

And O’Hagan reminds us of Seamus Heaney’s chilling poem From the Frontier of Writing:

and everything is pure interrogation

until a rifle motions you to move

with guarded unconcerned acceleration – 

a little emptier, little spent

as always by that quiver in the self,

subjugated, yes, and obedient. 

Do we need these borderlines? Will the ponies be safer? Will the larks fly higher? As Robert Frost, in Mending Wall, said:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall…

…Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 

What I was walling in or walling out, 

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Though he recognises, and challenges, the opposition from his neighbour, but:

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

The received wisdom of ages: the black, the white, the binary choice. What are we doing with these enclosures, these barriers? In due course they will all be reduced to dust and ashes as the world warms, and meteorites gather speed in the vacuum, teeming towards our fragile planet, mindlessly careering through our futures. Why make things worse?

However, despite this life of care I enjoy a beautifully unfettered walk over Hatterall Hill in Crucorney, with a steep descent in to the Vale of Ewyas, with a stop at the wonky Cymyoy church,

which was built on slippage from the cracked old red sandstone of the surrounding hills (cf Matthew chapter 16, verses 18 & 19, And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it…. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven…. I feel reassured?)

and end up in the Queen’s Head, which isn’t really a very Welsh name for a pub, is it? In fact neither the lady of the house, nor any of the clientele switch to Welsh when I enter….

In fact, none of them are Welsh…. A sandwich and a pint, and a few clues in the communally shared giant crossword (The Ghost of Thomas... five letters beginning in K?), and then it’s back across the borderline to Bristol….

Though, as Ry Cooder, Jim Dickinson and John Hiatt wrote:

When you reach the broken promised land

Every dream slips through your hands

And you'll know it's too late to change your mind

'Cause you pay the price to come so far

Just to wind up where you are

And you're still just across the borderline

Now you're still just across the borderline

And you're still just across the borderline

There is no going back…… There is only hope!


Please sponsor my 100 mile hike in support of research into Dementia through Alzheimer's Society by donating online at http://www.justgiving.com/Richard-GIBBS5

For Bob Dylan's Farm Aid rendition of the song, please see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0iTXU8bSpk


For one throb of the artery,
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate
Mankind inanimate fantasy.

W B Yeats
A Meditation in Time of War