So another trip to London

The growth of the capital, a view from Leman Street, Aldgate.

So I had with me, for the train and tube, two small-format books: a selection of Francisco de Quevedo's love poems (Poesía amorosa), and a Gale Nelson pamphlet from 2000 called in it.  

I began to read Quevedo's Endechas (unrhymed lines of six or seven syllables) beginning "Estaba Amarilis...". 

  Estaba Amarilis, 

pastora discreta,

guardando ganado 

de su hermana Aleja, 

  sentada a la sombra 

de una parda peña, 

haciendo guirnaldas 

para su cabeza.

  Cortaba las flores 

que topaba cerca, 

veníanse a sus manos 

las que estaban lejas. 

  Las que se ceñía 

siempre estaban frescas, 

mas las que dejaba, 

de envidiosas, secas.

There was Amaryllis,

discreet shepherdess,

guarding the flock

of her sister Aleja,

   sitting in the shade

of a brown rock,

making garlands

for her head.

  She cut the flowers

that grew close by,

while those more distant

came themselves into her hands.

  And those she wore

stayed ever fresh,

but those she left aside

withered from envy. ...

"Aleja" is the Spanish equivalent of "Alexa".

Amarilis falls asleep, and a number of bees descend on her, mistaking her cheeks for roses and lilies, her lips for carnations, her breath for jasmine and violets, etc. The poet intervenes, telling the bees that they're fools trying to make beeswax out of marble, and it's a bad idea to make honey from flowers that produce poison. Amarilis wakes up and the bees, blinded by her two suns (eyes), flee murmuring away. I think the poem ends with the poet saying that the honey they hoped to gather from her garments was obtained just by looking at her. Some of this is beyond my Spanish (and Google Translate's, too), but I'm guessing there's a joke in there about premature excitement. 

My eye caught on the name Pisuerga: it is the river that runs through Valladolid, I have swum in it. That is near the bottom end, just before it joins the Duero. Quevedo's poem must be set up-river, on the plains of Castilla y Leon or even in the mountains of Cantabria, not so very far from his birthplace. 

But in the course of looking this up I also read about Quevedo's (1580 - 1645) lifelong antisemitism; not the passing insults that you can expect in e.g. every dramatist of Shakespeare's time, but the chillingly programmatic antisemitism that dreams up Jewish conspiracies and solutions for dealing with them.

I found I could no longer focus on Amarilis, despite the rousing beauty of the verses, so I took a look at Gale Nelson's in it instead. Here's the beginning:

for the that in it

from our of than in

free for the that then

then the it then

then that then in

then that in then that

that then then then in

in it it in it it then

then the it

then the then

then the then then

then the then for

for the that it it

from our of in

from of in our than

then our of it then

our of it

then that of

If you're curious to read more of it, well, you can. The entire text is printed on the jacket of the booklet as well as within it, so you can see the second half in the photo at the bottom of this post. (But the jacket version doesn't show that the poem is in five numbered sections.)

 I wanted to quote as far as the fourth stanza so you could see the argument of the poem starting to develop. For there certainly is an argument: most obviously it's about form and freedom, both in art and in life. But there's more to it, because this necessarily leads into why we do art, in fact why and how humans do things at all. So it becomes a very broad topic. And  it's quite funny and quite impressive that it's conducted using a vocabulary of just fifteen words.

Much of Nelson's writing employs the idea of a limited pool of vocabulary; a "source-text", in Jackson Mac Low's terms. 

Eleven of those words make their appearance in the first three lines. The remaining four words, when they show up, have the force of detonations, or perhaps water-drops on a parched tongue.

The words aren't used with anything like equal frequency. Perhaps the engine-room of the poem is then and that, words with such a powerful range of uses. The words strain into each other (for-form-from-free, the-then-than-that, it-in-is-this) and they talk about each other, turning each other into nouns ("from our of then / this then our then / that then is our that / then is in our then"). Reaching the end, I knew that I had read not just an argument but a poem as fresh and lively as the Cantabrian rivers, in its own way.  

The White Tower, built by William the Conqueror in the 1080s

"To all intents and purposes, the Tower of London may be said to be the beginning of our London..." (E.V. Lucas, London Afresh (1936)). 

Heading home

By the return journey I felt I had enough phone battery left to drop into Kindle and indulge in a few pages of Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (Richard Howard's translation). I won't say anything more about that yet, but here's a sample of what I read:

and then she blew the lamp out, turned away and went out into the bluish dawn that was like a cataract on a blind eye, her figure silhouetted a moment while she was still in the darkness of the barn, then, once across the doorstep, seeming to vanish, although they continued to stare after her, not walking away but apparently dissolving, melting into what was really more grey than blue and was undoubtedly the day, since after all it had to come, but apparently without any of the powers, the virtues inherent in the day, although a little wall was discernible now on the other side of the road, the trunk of a big walnut tree and behind that the trees of the orchard, but everything flat, without colours or values, as if wall, walnut tree and apple trees (the girl had disappeared now) were somehow fossilized, had left only their imprint on this spongy and uniformly grey matter that now gradually crept into the barn, Blum’s face like a grey mask when Georges turned round, like a sheet of paper with two holes torn for the eyes, the mouth grey too, Georges still saying the words he had started to speak or rather hearing his own voice saying them (probably something like: Say did you see that girl, she…), then his voice stopping, his lips still moving perhaps in the silence, then they stopping too while he looked at that paper face, and Blum (he had taken off his helmet and now his narrow girl’s face seemed still narrower between the unstuck ears, not much bigger than a fist, above the girl’s neck coming out of the stiff wet coat collar as though from a carapace, miserable, mournful, feminine, stubborn), saying: “What girl?” and Georges: “What…What’s the matter with you?” Blum’s horse still saddled, not even tethered and Blum simply leaning against the wall as if he were afraid of falling, with his rifle still over his shoulder, without even the strength to take off his pack, and Georges saying for the second time: “What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?” and Blum shrugging, moving away from the wall, beginning to unbuckle the saddle girth, and Georges: “For God’s sake leave the horse alone. Go lie down. If I pushed you you’d fall over…” he himself almost asleep on his feet, but Blum did not offer any resistance when he pushed him away: the hair on the horses’ coppery rumps was pasted down by the rain, dark, flat and wet under the saddle blanket, giving off a harsh acrid odour, and while he set their two bundles of harness along the wall he still seemed to be seeing her, there where she had been standing a moment before, or rather still seemed to feel her, perceive her like a kind of persistent unreal imprint, stamped not so much on his retina (he had seen her so briefly, so little) as, somehow, on himself: a warm white thing like the milk she had come for at the moment they had arrived ...