Bob Geldof documentary shows power of poetry in travel
Bob Geldof’s documentary on the cultural legacy of Irish poet WB Yeats has the quality of a travelogue.
I’ve just caught up with A Fanatic Heart, the excellent 2016 movie-length doco made and presented by Bob Geldof on the times and legacy of WB Yeats. The overarching focus is on the Dublin-born, Nobel Prize-winning poet’s powerful impact on the complex, and still-evolving, cultural identity of Ireland. It’s an intellectual bio-pic, to be sure, but Yeats, both statesman and writer, is indivisible from the landscapes he loved so passionately. So, in a roundabout way, while watching, for example, Geldof looking up to the mystical flat-topped hulk of County Sligo’s Ben Bulben and showing us Yeats’s gravestone in its shadow, the film takes on the quality of a travelogue.
More broadly, it makes me recall how my earlier travels were typically with a book of verse to hand (or back pocket, to be exact). Such (usually) slim volumes could be relied upon for sustenance and inspiration in an age when filling time did not mean staring at electronic devices. Thanks to the influence of my high-school English teacher Miss Webster (Joan, as I was allowed to call her after my HSC), poetry had a fierce hold on me.
So, in its grip, journeying during my 20s often meant seeing places through the eyes of the greats. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England’s Lake District, for example; Lord Byron in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and then, unexpectedly, in Sintra, Portugal. Decades on, it was Pablo Neruda as my spirit guide in Santiago and Valparaiso; Silvina Ocampo in Argentina.
And later still, immersed in the mirrored labyrinth and “inexhaustible stairways” of the fantastical world of Jorges Luis Borges, I wandered the streets of Buenos Aires in search of his swaggering compadritos and tango cabarets and “poker talk” in the backrooms of cafes. At the city zoo, which Borges described as smelling of “candy and tigers”, I reread his 1949 poem The Writing of the God, in which the feline beast acquires a divine presence when a prisoner believes a message from God is written in the stripes of a tiger he glimpses each day in the next cell.
I trust Joan Webster approved of my industriousness that day as she looked down from the eternal paradise that Borges hoped would be “a kind of library”.
Less successfully, in an act of sheer folly during my university days in Japan, I attempted to walk the Basho Trail, which honours 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho. It covers about 160km, up hills and temple steps, down dales and forested valleys. I was not the fittest in my group. On day two, I broke my right foot. Medical assistance was summoned. You could call it poetic justice. But at least I could continue travelling in a metaphysical sense while laid up in a tiny village hospital, thanks to the dog-eared copy of Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North lurking in my backpack.
A Fanatic Heart: Geldof On Yeats is streaming on Foxtel.