Incarnadine (August)

Reading Alexievich, a relentless record of voices. It’s like Dostoyevsky, blood on the pages. We want the tsar, then it’s kill the tsar. Men go into battle prodded by bayonets. Horrible deaths, superhuman survivals. Anything could happen, anything does. It’s like Mandelstam. Fear drives memory, fear threatens hope. Blood covers the floor, colours the rivers. Stalin was strong, Stalin was a bastard. Lives seem stable, they break apart. It’s gangsters and thieves from top to bottom. Gorbachev was visionary, Gorbachev was gutless. August 1991, October Revolution not. Freedom is a Gucci bag. Once read samizdat, now read glossies. What happened?

Incarnadine (January)

A Shakespearean hapax legomenon, drawn presumably from the Lancastrian ‘catholic university’ of his ‘lost years’. It bodies forth from my January reading on the pointless authorship dispute, colour word for flesh made flesh by blood. If you prick us, do we not bleed? Hark it heralds the intimacy of incarnation, being derived from Latin incarnato. Shakespeare even turns his original colour into an active verb: ‘…this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.’ Can we imagine Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe coining ‘incarnadine’? With deadly irony? With profound distaste? With artful shading? With individual negative capability?