by Wendy MacIntyre

The Happy Prince in Reading Gaol

by Wendy MacIntyre

Sentenced to two years’ hard labour for so-called “gross indecency, Oscar Wilde spent his first month in prison bound to a treadmill. Six hours day, he laboured up the same short, steep incline, with five minutes’ rest every twenty-five minutes − activity lacking all purpose other than degradation. His next punishment, carried out all day alone in his cell, was picking apart tarred rope to extract the fibre known as oakum. This work split open the flesh of his hands.

He suffered regular bouts of dysentery and diarrhoea as a result of the wretched prison diet and unsanitary living conditions. An ear infection, which prison authorities refused to treat, left him partially deaf. The glittering, self-created dandy who delighted in outraging convention was no more. Gaunt, with shaven head and coarse prison garb, he had come to resemble the statue in his children’s story, The Happy Prince, rendered repulsively drab once his jewels and gold leaf covering were stripped away. read more

Jennifer and the Flower Fairies

by Wendy MacIntyre

One of my most treasured childhood books, Jennifer and the Flower Fairies, is all in pieces. The pages have come away from the buckram spine. Pages 41/42 have fled altogether. In an historic raid, one of my younger siblings tore page 49 in half and defaced many of the delicate line illustrations with crayoned scrawls. Fortunately untouched is the flyleaf inscription in my mother’s small, neat hand: “To Wendy on her fifth birthday, with love and best wishes.”

The book’s cover is also still exactly as I keep it in memory, a deep blue border embellished with buttercup yellow drawings of the characters one will meet inside: Alfie the gnome with his teasel duster, the handsome Bluebell Prince in his billowing cape, the silly, arrogant high-hatted Lords and Ladies who fancies himself a fairy knight, and of course Jennifer herself, soaring on her newly acquired wings. Inset in this blue border is a photo portrait of the teenage Jennifer Gay, the host of BBC’s Television Children’s Hour. She has a lovely open face and smile, and a smooth pageboy hairdo secured by a red Alice band. She wears a flocked print dress of yellow-green with an immaculate white collar. read more

A Japanese Tree in Scandinavia

by Wendy MacIntyre

In this time of pandemic and primeval fear, it is bracing to revisit Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, where one man’s potent prayers reverse the world’s destruction.

We first meet the aging actor Alexander on his birthday. He and his young son, Little Man, are planting a leafless Japanese tree on the shore of the remote Scandinavian island. “It looks dead,” Alexander says half-ruefully, then tells his son the tale of an Orthodox monk who planted a dead tree on a mountainside and instructed his apprentice to water it every day. The novice did so dutifully, until one morning he found the mountainside covered with blossoms. read more

Postcards from Rhona

by Wendy MacIntyre

In my copy of Simone Weil’s Waiting for God I keep an art postcard given me by my friend Rhona. It is a colour photograph of a group of sculpted figures atop an interior column of a Spanish Romanesque church. The church is St. Martin of Fromista, a traditional pilgrimage stop on the Camino de Santiago.

Rhona and I visited there together, spending a lavishly quiet hour looking up at the hundreds of human and animal figures the eleventh-century artisans carved into the stone capitals. Some of these stone-beings tell us stories we immediately recognize, like that of the naked Eve and soberly attired Adam beneath the tree with its enticing, and one fatal, fruit. But there are other figures, joined together in either torment or ecstasy, whose stories are long lost, gone with the medieval artists and worshippers who knew their plots intimately. read more

by Wendy MacIntyre

Anne Carson and the Charcoal Burners

For nine years now, I have been haunted by images from a poem by Anne Carson as enigmatic as they are unforgettable. Called Burners Go Raw, it opens with Carson’s nightmare vision of medieval charcoal burners’ forlorn, accursed existence.

Burners medieval dark mud on a road a dark morning/ falling back through memories a faint pain, dark uphill/ way the usual alone and gavel picking my step out where/ nothing, out hoping, hope sinking, slope rising, that dark/ colour, almost rain, a thing impending… read more

http://wendymacintyreauthor.ca/2019/04/09/1071/

Of Basilisks — Both Kings and Lizards

by Wendy MacIntyre

I must confess it took me several months to read the 42 pages of King James VI and I’s treatise on the ideal monarch, Basilikon Doron (The King’s Gift). James composed this gift for his eldest son and heir, Prince Henry, as a practical guide on how a king should govern wisely and judiciously. My stumbling blocks were not so much the sixteenth-century Scots spellings where u’s are written as v’s and vice-versa (enuie, neuer, vundestand), as my deep unease with James’s unshakeable conviction that anointed kings are tantamount to gods:
God giues not kings the stile of Gods in vain
For on his Throne his Scepter doe they swey

My reading was slowed as well, by the flagrant inconsistency between James’s stated principles and his own historical record. Given what we know of his craving for effusive flattery in the later years of his reign, his condemnation of this vice comes across as nakedly hypocritical: “Choose for servants men of known wisdom, honestie and good conscience, but especially free of that filthie vice of flatterie, the pest of all princes…” And of course I bridled at Basilikon Doron’s description of how the perfect relationship between a king and his consort ought to unfold. Even allowing for historical relativism, James’s opinion of women’s capabilities is here damningly restrictive: “command her as her Lord, cherish her as your helper, rule her as your pupil, and please her in all things reasonable; but teach not to be curious in things that belong her not: Ye are the head, she is the body; it is your office to command and hers to obey…suffer her never to meddle with the Politic government of the Commonwealth, but hold her at the Economic rule of the house, and yet all be subject to your direction.”

As an antidote to the rigid, often troubling views James advances in Basilikon Doron, I turned to Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Plumet Basilisk”, dedicated to a most remarkable lizard found in Costa Rica, southern Mexico and Panama. Also known as the plumed basilisk, this “living firework”, as she describes him, can run on top of the water, as agile there as on land. “He leaps and meets his/likeness in the stream. and king with king/helped by his three-part plume along the back, runs on his two legs.”

“One of the quickest lizards in the world,” Moore calls the basilisk. “If beset, he lets go, smites the water, and runs on it…” In his firework quickness on land and water, “the basilisk portrays/mythology’s wish/to be interchangeably man and fish.” Had James VI and I been more open to such supple interchangeability, conceiving of himself as both man and king rather than god and king, England might have been spared the bloodiest internecine conflict in its history, and the regicide that brought down the House of Stuart.

Prince Henry, for whom James wrote Basilikon Doron, died at age 16, a brave, soldierly, graceful young man adored by the people. Had he lived to become king, Henry might well have moderated his father’s unyielding doctrines on a king’s equivalence with god. His younger brother Charles, who succeeded James as Charles I, was to carry the divine right of kings espoused in his father’s treatise to such lengths England was plunged into civil war and Charles himself beheaded by Oliver Cromwell’s executioners.

Is it fanciful to wonder if Charles I’s obdurate resistance and refusal to compromise with Parliament was rooted in a failure of the imagination? Convinced of his own divine right to rule absolutely, in accordance with his father’s indoctrination, he was unable to envision another legitimate form of governance.

“As near a thing as we have to a king,” Marianne Moore calls the mind’s crucible of human imagination where all transformative thought is born. It is an insight that might well have helped James leaven his own unyielding vision of what kingship means and averted the years of horrific suffering that were its direct consequence.