protect

THE ART OF POETRY


 The art of poetry? Look at the trees,
an old discovery. The wood
is what you cannot see. Your work
is finished when the words
protect something!


Gösta Ågren, from Hid ("Hither"), translation by David McDuff.


In art something is always concealed, even if it's only the occasion of making, or sometimes not even that, but only the acquired skillset that produces the making, or the thought behind it.

But "protect" implies more than "conceal". The hidden substance in the poem has life of its own.

Or rather.... (thinking of Ågren's tree image) it's the poem as a whole that is the living entity.

You can imagine the poem protecting its vital organs... or its cambium... but it's the act of protecting that reveals life.

I'm not getting metaphysical here. A poem doesn't live in the same way as a living creature. It can't wander around on its own, it needed writing and it goes into suspension until it's read.

But all life depends on others to a large extent. I even believe that a poem has some rights. As an artefact it deserves my reverence, I think.

Ågren's trees, we must suppose, are the tall straight timber trees of the north... pine or birch, spruce or aspen. But this reminds me that readers, like country folk who depend on wood stoves to get through winter, always have their own motives for coming close to the forest of poetry. Readers are practical in that respect.

And indeed without some motive the reading is apt to be anodyne. In the same way that though we don't much like a friend who wants to change us, we soon grow frustrated with a friend who doesn't have an interest in what we do and plainly doesn't want to do anything with us apart from completing a thin social ritual. Who just wants us on their list.

When I was younger I read vast numbers of poems in that spirit, and it didn't do either them or me much service.

*

But on this matter of the poem protecting, concealing, or at any rate containing something. It raises a question about honesty in poetry (I am talking about poetry though I think it applies to all the arts).

Ordinary, open, transparent language is the language used by dishonest people. I am one of those. Most often, the dishonest people believe that they are honest.

*

But Gösta Ågren's poem doesn't I think refer to the inevitable inscrutability that all artefacts possess. He talks about a quality that comes into existence only eventually, signalling work as complete. It must mean that the poem protects something other than its own circumstances.

The something is valuable but cannot be seen directly. We can provisionally call it content,  not inscrutable content but specifically unparaphraseable content.

This is quite a good description of Ågren's kind of poetry. As is usual with such prescriptions, it doesn't fit other poetry so easily.

A Journal

Laura and Sasha were talking about writing LOVE on the base of their plastic water bottles, using an indelible marker. The idea was to arouse positive feelings while you drank.

"On Mike's you'd have to write DRYDEN," Laura laughed.

It was true... After two weeks in the wild, the mere mention of the forgotten name sent a shock of joy through my body.

As I confessed to them, this time I had come away rather short of reading matter. Not in terms of quantity. I had reached Jacques Derrida in Mark Lilla's Reckless Thinkers (translated into Spanish), and the defence of Dresden in Scott's Life of Buonaparte. I had whizzed through Drew Milne's Go Figure a couple of times. And I still had my backstop, Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece.  But still, I felt something was missing.

"I might have a book for you," said Sasha. "Anna and Charlie left some with us."

She went to hunt in her van. "What about Defoe? A Journal of the Plague Year?"

I was stunned. Trying to articulate what was missing in all these generals and philosophers, I couldn't put it any better than that I wanted a book where men acted like men and not like chessmen. Defoe, of course, fitted the bill perfectly.

*

The great plague of 1665 turned out to be the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in the UK. Defoe couldn't know this. His 1722 book had, indeed, partly an eye to fears aroused by contemporary outbreaks in Europe.

Overall, such epidemics are in decline, especially in the west. But still, AIDS (or "sida" as they call it in Spain) is a recent and deadly plague. Among communities of gay men the scale of loss in the 1980s was at least comparable to what Defoe described in his docufaction.

Tom Crewe: "Here was a plague"...


*

By September, though, with the plague at its most ferocious, Defoe's imperturbable narrative recalls... Well, the only modern analogy I can think of is population-processors of the Einsatzgruppen type... (Though Death and his scythe would have been the natural image then.)

The confusion among the people, especially within the city, at that time, was inexpressible. The terror was so great at last that the courage of the people appointed to carry away the dead began to fail them; nay, several of them died, although they had the distemper before and were recovered, and some of them dropped down when they have been carrying the bodies even at the pit side, and just ready to throw them in; and this confusion was greater in the city because they had flattered themselves with hopes of escaping, and thought the bitterness of death was past. One cart, they told us, going up Shoreditch was forsaken of the drivers, or being left to one man to drive, he died in the street; and the horses going on overthrew the cart, and left the bodies, some thrown out here, some there, in a dismal manner. Another cart was, it seems, found in the great pit in Finsbury Fields, the driver being dead, or having been gone and abandoned it, and the horses running too near it, the cart fell in and drew the horses in also. It was suggested that the driver was thrown in with it and that the cart fell upon him, by reason his whip was seen to be in the pit among the bodies; but that, I suppose, could not be certain.

In our parish of Aldgate the dead-carts were several times, as I have heard, found standing at the churchyard gate full of dead bodies, but neither bellman or driver or any one else with it; neither in these or many other cases did they know what bodies they had in their cart, for sometimes they were let down with ropes out of balconies and out of windows, and sometimes the bearers brought them to the cart, sometimes other people; nor, as the men themselves said, did they trouble themselves to keep any account of the numbers.

*

By this stage Defoe has so accustomed us to inhabiting his plague city that we feel only a slight crescendo of horror. The numbers numb. We are ready to assent to universal destruction, and can only wonder that any are left to witness it.

But new waves of the destitute keep stepping up to man the deathcarts , though no longer to quarantine the infected houses; what was the point, when the whole street had died?

*

And yet, as even this extract shows, there is a certain resistance to apocalypse in its sturdy placenames. Defoe's book is about a living city, though pictured in its extremity.

We know from the start that the book's narrator survives his close brush with Death. So he curiously recalls Robinson Crusoe, but relocated from a desert island to a world that is simultaneously peopled and empty. So do the three heroes of the inset narrative, who set up their tents and shelters in Epping forest, and parley with initially hostile natives. 

*


Every reading of the book ends up talking about the plague. For Defoe's age this "visitation" had been a malign wonder, but a wonder nonetheless: just the sort of thing that had preoccupied Aubrey.

Discussing wonders was an early way of starting to write about normality: Defoe's book is one of the first to convey an idea of the normal life of a great city. Defoe began from a very different though equally religious basis, compared to Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. Different too from Shakespeare's timeless London in the Henry IV plays. In Shakespeare's time, too, the plague was not a wonder. Shutting up the infected in their houses began in 1603, but it's Defoe who discusses this at length. You might say, he chats about it; sometimes on one side of the question, sometimes the other. Like the voice of a crowd, he can never rest easy on the formula, "private evil but public good". Walter Allen points out that Defoe's "novels" are all unconfessed fictions, they genuinely attempted to pass themselves off as true autobiographies. New fields fell open to this fraudulent perspective.

After thunder

Half an hour of rain; by morning the land had imbibed it. But the smell of rain entered the caravan: the new green blades grew another centimeter.

This was all, but it was like the first lengths of a jigsaw puzzle.

Layering

We apply words
From the urban Code Napoleon:
We say Arbutus, outcrop and pit,
Swale and berm, clay Cistus and mantis.
But the changing land resists our labels;
A slope slips like a slow treacle,
Frost passes unhindered to the next hollow,
A shadow lengthens without a jump but
It never straightens,
And in summer the skeleton
Of itself, prepares green rosettes
From the earth's hidden roots.

Mimosa

.. is not its real name.
The ants. So we suspended the rule about cups on the ground.
A solitary black beetle crosses the ants' path. I saw this many times.
The future is fearful, but it hurts less than the past.
Cork-oaks, stripped to maroon tights.

*

Night sky: Venus, Mars red and bright,
The familiar constellations mothed with other stars,
The Milky Way a daze
Like a fossil layer.

The place

So bright that my eye sees the broom as white fire.

But later, so dark we can't find our way back.

Valladolid

The river Pisuerga.

We noticed there is a Hotel Olid here, but that may be a back-formation, the origin of the name Valladolid is disputed.

Fountains in the Campo Grande, beside the statue of José Zorilla.

.

Quevedo lived here for a while, so did Cervantes (the house still survives). Christopher Columbus died here, in 1506. Philip II and Philip IV were both born here... It was a royal seat of Castile at the time.

The monument to Cristofer Colón at the other end of the Campo Grande. It was intended to be sited in Havana, but the plan changed because Cuba declared independence. (I think.) 

Cepsa Itziar

I'm in Basque country, with an extremely sweet lemon tea and a very large pan chocolate. I think that's Txokolate in Basque.

Reading about Alexandre Kojève. He said both history and philosophy ended with the Napoleonic wars. The Code Napoleon had introduced the Universal State. (This is all to do with Hegel seeing Napoleon on horseback at Jena in 1806, and describing him as the Weltseele.) Now it was just a case of when we get there.


More when I get a moment!