in the strong room

"Now you see me", painting by Markus Åkesson (2018)

[Image source: http://markusakesson.com/paintings/]






There's times Andrea Brady's The Strong Room (2016) seems like a determined effort to incinerate any last possibility of describing her as Cambridge School in a limiting way. "The Underworld", for example, is an extended, funny and thought-provoking transcript of Andrea and her daughter making up a utopia-poem. "The Leavings" is as shameless a declaration of committed love as you could easily find. The #Direngezi poem is frankly adapted to a mixed audience united by solidarity not poetry.


With such poems before me, it no longer seems very appropriate to stress the difficulty of  Andrea's poetry (as I did when writing about her previous collection Cut From the Rushes).


Nevertheless, there are still plenty of poems in the more recent book that evade being pinned down so easily. One of my favourites is "40 Days and 40 Nights". It alternates between Day stanzas and Night stanzas (despite the title, only six of each). Here are the opening stanzas:


Day


Wind covers ears in cornmeal, sky overlord
of original pink waves the placards for 'liberation'
but these fringed miniscules make an ache,
a winter knot, dropped in a speculative apartment,
attention it takes practice to pay
to the vegetable soul breaking up
volumes of private air. Practice
being curative, as wintering
geese evoke the media plea: who wants
this life. Not me, the television
shows incurable sadness, nights drift
with residue.




Night


The narrow human attitude is a landing
strip of forested karst, it ripples
outward from the spinal border /
birds light / long yellow lines
mark out causeways in sensation.
The strips between scratches
between licks
are Crimean fields quivering like
sound. Moving plates, marks
of a parochial encounter. The rest
all too vast for governance gets
broody and a little pissed off.
When the tongue skips over them
leaving thirty clicks of unspent
twitches bickering in its wake
the stomach ditched, grassland
unmowed, it scalps a moon-warmed
vast peasanted terrirtory,
your punky nails the pickets
of paranoid garrison towns.




A note subjoined to the title says: A response to George Bataille's 'The Mouth'


This is the quotably brief meditation La Bouche, published in 1930 in Documents, a Surrealist art magazine edited by Bataille.


“The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighbouring animals. But man does not have a simple architecture like the beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. In a strict sense, he starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of attracting attention and it is the eyes or the forehead the play the significatory role of an animal’s jaws.”

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“Among civilized men, the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has among primitive men. However, the violent meaning of the mouth is conserved in a latent state: it suddenly regains the upper hand with a literally cannibalistic expression such as mouth of fire, applied to the cannons men employ to kill each other. And on important occasions human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: fury makes men grind their teeth, terror and atrocious suffering transform the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck so that the mouth becomes, as far as possible, a prolongation of the spinal column, in other words, it assumes the position in normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams. This fact simultaneously highlights the importance of the mouth in animal physiology or even psychology, and the general importance of the superior or anterior extremity of the body, the orifice of profound physical impulses: equally one sees that a man is able to liberate these impulses in at least two different ways, in the brain or in the mouth, but that as soon as these impulses become violent, he is obliged to resort to the bestial method of liberation. Whence the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.”




*


So the "narrow human attitude" in the second stanza above,  is here in Bataille's piece.




Which I think is brilliantly suggestive, by the way, yet also inadequate.  Why would the livingness of an organ be defined by its terrifying aspect in the eyes of a different species? (Presumably, a prey species.) I stop thinking about what the words might tell me about life, instead I'm  thinking what they tell me about Bataille.


But yes, I'm fascinated by the mouth. I'm fascinated by baby's fascination, her intent focus on the mouth of the adult, as if it's indeed the seat of life, everything comes from there. But even before that, it's the eyes. The first thing she learnt to know is the eyes. The first message that passed was the smile, and that was learned from the eyes.  But even before that, the baby and the mother knew each other. Life precedes the face.


Is it even really true that, as Bataille blithely implies, the mouth is the prow in most animals? Not really. It's the nose that is the prow, in a wolf or dog, for example. First because the nose is the most important sense, for these animals. Second, because the nose, or specifically its bridge, is bony.  When you design a moving abject like an animal, you make sure its projections are bony so they don't get injured.  Mouths are soft and need protection. So I'd dispute Bataille's animal physiology, and even his observation.


 But nevertheless, I like what he wrote. For example about the closed mouth of the magister. That was true. It was a power-play, though not such a timeless or universal one as Bataille supposed.


On the other hand, capitalism knows that models must be photographed with the mouth open. The iconography of an open mouth is participation, that is, economic consumption. No-one wants to see a closed safe in an advert.




*










The poem-title "40 Days and 40 Nights" opens out other vistas. It could allude to Jesus' temptation in the wilderness; it's also the title of a 2007 book about the test case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which ruled that teaching creationism ("Intelligent Design") in biology classes violates the First Amendment; the title of a  2002 sex comedy movie in which the male lead takes a bet to give up sex for Lent, and is "raped" by his ex-girlfriend to make him lose the bet (responses to the movie have been mixed); and a really fantastic Muddy Waters song.


All of these vistas seem relevant, but the poem stands without them, a record of days and nights traversed by pain, blurry insomnia and sexual frustration, an interrogation of the body's depths and surfaces.




*
Day


Rain falls in ears, rabbits fizzle on
workbenches where they are stripped crying
and alive for angora.  .....


That's the start of another stanza. This refers to revelations in the media (e.g. in 2013 and 2016) about cruelty at angora farms, especially during the plucking process.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2529849/Zara-Gap-finally-ban-angora-shoppers-horrified-plight-rabbits-plucked-alive-threaten-boycott-shops.html


The stretched, screaming rabbits might be an illustration of Bataille's text, kind of.