By Mourning

 

Beams of light pierced the thunderheads, stratocumulus. (p. 19)

Strange things that happen when reading Richard Makin's Mourning. I'd already chosen this image, and the book duly coughed up the caption. 

Your life, little girl, is an empty page

that men will want to write on . . .

I sometimes think of that Oscar Hammerstein lyric while I'm reading Richard Makin's prose. I'm conscious of the temptation to decorate these pristine pages with my own apophthegms. This, of course, is one of them.

*

I'm always striving to retain as few books as possible, so the continuing presence on my shelves of the bulky Dwelling (2011) and the somewhat less bulky Mourning (2015) means something. 

I'm now quite resigned to the fact that I will probably never read these books all through, there'll be pages I never open. But the days come, now and then, when they are exactly the books I reach for. 

It happens like this. As ever, I'm in the middle of reading a couple of dozen substantial books (some of them, I've been supposedly reading for five or ten years); one is uppermost (it's currently Victoria Glendinning's Trollope), the others lie beneath it, or back on the shelves, or on Kindle, but I haven't forgotten them, they're still ongoing projects. However, on this day I feel I want a break from Trollope and from all the rest too, I feel a bit bored by them.

Well, some poems perhaps? No, I'm not quite in the mood for short poems either. I want to immerse in a writing that has the space and grandeur, the world, the being-there, the three-dimensionality of a big book. It would suit me to dive into a novel by an author I've never read before. But that would mean, God forbid, adding yet another entry to the long list of books I'm currently supposedly reading. The solution, then, is to dive instead into a book I can't pretend I'll ever read. I'll never get to the bottom of Mourning. I'll visit it. It's a landscape.

I can't remember. We're just below the hospitality hoax at the riverend. By then I was sold: low ebb of gravity hence had already the vision. The things that hatched out of the eggs resembled lizards. 

(Mourning, p. 1)

The opening words. Mid scene: memory is patchy, context is patchy. There's an urgency to it ("We're just below") yet this is qualified by the word "hoax". Riverend ... rivers end at the coast. Is the sea itself the "hospitality hoax", an empty place, a place with nothing to drink? (The way land drifters always end up down at the coast, and then lodge there.)

There's an urgency, yet the action is always misplaced. Something that already happened (like the vision), or seems to have happened but was forgotten, or belongs to a different order of reality (like those eggs).

Further down the first page, the text confides:

It was a sense of grey I desired -- the neutral -- as if all spark of animus had bleached from the world, leaving it fallow, at peace. She pronounced the word to rhyme.

That word "animus" -- evidently used to mean spirit or animation, but evidently also aware of meaning enmity or animosity -- .... That's the kind of artistry that grips me in Makin's books. (To be frank, I struggle to feel excited about most experimental prose. But this is quite a different kettle of fish.)

Flick to the final page, and the confidence is taken up again. 

Grey equals the neutral, counter-spirit -- the ocean in mourning -- chain-mail, the landing-craft, caterpillar tracks in oily sand: an invasion. From beneath the ridge she hurls stones at his sex.

    Set above the tympanum of the temple is a sculpted ornament: bucranium.

    Ejaculation under u.v. light.

(Mourning, p. 254)

The grey, the bleached counter-spirit, remains evidently vivid with animus. That's both a spiritual apprehension about the inseparableness of seemingly opposing principles, and a source of the text's endless deflating comedy, its sarcasms and despairs:

On the second page, Icarus plummets to earth at 9.8 meters per second per second. Later, he asks his partner, Did you see me when I passed the house?

Also on the second page, a biographical note begins: I began my philosophical career under the influence.

And the whole story is overhung with romantic, maritime scenery. 

Unfallow. A sack of salt sea birds. The day's work is never quite over -- wings are plucked by the light of a tilly lamp, well past midnight. 

(Mourning, p. 2)

Perfect for the reader who, this evening, doesn't want to make a start on Conrad or Hugo or Copperfield . . . 

But this reminds me, Richard Makin's texts are noticeably parsimonious with names. It's like a landscape, there's a silence about it. The visitor, like a rambler, can dig deeper, but meaning isn't laid out on a plate. And when I come back from the trip, as I'm doing here, the shells may no longer retain the significance they seemed to have when I stuffed them into my pockets. Here they are anyway:

*

Fylfot. One turned counter-clockwise, probably from a misunderstanding. (p. 14)

Term for a left-facing swastika, commonly used in Anglo-Saxon and medieval art. (But sometimes also used of right-facing swastikas, or more generally to refer to non-Nazi swastikas.)

Ones upon a time there was a statue of  a prince and he had emeralds for eyes and a rubie on his sword   . . . (p. 15)

A variant on Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" (.... both reverent and malicious?)

Sursum corda, get up off the floor  (p. 17)

From the third-century Anaphora or Eucharistic prayer in the Mass: Lift up your hearts.

I do everything by numbers: there are four ember-days, one in each quarter, hour upon hour of fasting and absinthe -- a circuit, from around. (p. 23)

In the western liturgical calendar, each season has three nearly successive ember days (a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday), set aside for fasting and prayer.