a frozen smile

Himalayan Birch (Betula utilis var. jacquemontii 'Doorenbos') - East Sussex

Today's post is a makeshift helpless sort of thing, and it begins with a joyous notice seen outside a church and passed on by Lawrence Upton in his latest newsletter.

YOU ARE WELCOME TO OUR SERVICES

A straw poll in the workplace revealed that most people didn't see the joke, which in turn meant that my mirth died in mid-chuckle, overtaken by a sense of isolated and reprehensible old age.  Most likely the person who wrote the notice is a second-language English-speaker. Whether or not, they don't deserve my pointing fingers.


I don't really want this post to be about this, I want it to transmit the other things that were in my mind before I began to write, the hundred vivid and particular realities I think of each day, the enormous things they might mean, the joyful connexions they could make in our lives,  if only I could open up my language and composition to bring them through.


That theme, the theme of writing inadequacy, has directed my reading of both the books that I've spent time with this morning.


In Denise Riley's Say Something Back (2016), the lyricist is driven by the desperate need for a response, not from her audience of living people, but from those who don't respond: somebody we love who has died, God when you don't have faith, the flat blue sky...


Yes, the scenario for most lyrics is talking to the wall.  You're addressing or apostrophizing someone who can't hear you and who doesn't answer back.  Maybe they're an animal or a cloud or star, or a nation,  or society in general, or Toussaint L'Ouverture, or someone dead, someone in your past, or maybe they are an icy unattainable Petrarchan object of desire, or maybe they're an old flame that you once had something with, or a child too young to understand, or even someone you do talk to every day yet can't talk to about the things you say in your poem.


The engine of the lyric has always been this frozen need.  "Things I'd like to say but don't know how, except in a poem". But it isn't just a need to express ourselves, who wants that for its own sake? It's a need for a response that most likely we'll never get. 


The poem can enclose the lyrical engine in half a dozen wrappers and frames, ironic or complicating or allusive not - it can be the fictional Old Minstrel who sings of his native land, not the poet - and some level of fictiveness is nearly always there, isn't it? - but still, you read the poem and it's like peeling off all those wrappers and sitting transfixed looking into the frame not at it. And there it is: the frozen need.




                            I couldn't spot
the obvious - obviam, in the way; plain
sight goes blind through chasing clarity.
I looked for you, so couldn't see you gone.


I sensed your not-there in its burning life.
I listened out to feel its silence beat.
It does not speak with any human mouth.




(Denise Riley, end of "Hiding in Plain Sight")




[Latin obviam can be translated as "on the way, in the way towards" or "against"]


*


The other book is Richard Makin's Mourning (2015), the final part of his trilogy. I don't know this book particularly well. Despite its name, the book is rich (if that's the word) in Makin's peculiar kind of humour.

More rainfall, exhaustive and noisome. His quest to join the guild of mastersingers was frustrated by petty rules and technocracy; it's a terrible time to be on the earth if you've no wish to know anything.

---

Answers are raised here, more than I could ever question. His concept of history is a struggle between two opposing forces: thesis and antithesis. (Look, an arctic!) That noise must be the building swaying in the solar wind he once spoke of.

I too was unsought. That's quite funny; I meant to say this is macrofiction.

(extracts from Richard Makin, Mourning, p. 57, p. 58)


Makin's books are more like sculptures than books you read from cover to cover.  You visit them and look. They are determinedly non-narrative: there is no place out there, real or even imaginary, that the text describes. Its extraordinary ingenuity goes with an unbending resolve not to open the shutters. Or should I say an unbending incapacity to open them?


Makin's deadpan version of the Fichte triad (synthesis is conspicuously absent) is one way, perhaps, of expressing the frozenness in his astonishing sculpture. A frozen need I suppose.


As with a lyric, what happens is obscure. The triumph, if ever a triumph is conceded, arises from the inadequacy. Something is beautiful, and that's an obscure says-nothing sort of word too.

I asked for decapitated so I wouldn't have trouble sleeping.

(Mourning, p. 61)