wipers, and no wipers

[Image source: http://sawmengzhi.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/how-to-have-good-vision-while-driving.html]


Forty miles in light misty rain, round about midnight, when the windscreen wipers aren't working, isn't great. The cabin heating wasn't working either, but that was a minor consideration. I stopped regularly to wipe the windscreen. After each wipe the rain showed only as diamond pin-pricks, but soon this water reformed into the same veil of heavy drops as before.




Visibility wasn't so bad when I could put the headlights on full beam, except when road-signs reflected the light straight back.  Whenever there was on-coming traffic I had to slow to a crawl. When I joined the motorway I couldn't use full beam so instead I got close up behind a well-lit HGV doing a steady 55 and tailed it all the way to Swindon. The driver may have felt a bit haunted. At speed, the raindrops furled up the windscreen and on to the van roof.


[According to Meng Zhi (link above), in this scenario you can see better if you put on sunglasses.]




Windscreen wipers are one of those parts of a vehicle that are so clearly essential that they haven't changed much in a century. I started to wonder about the origin of windscreen wipers.


The original designs, such as Mary Anderson's in 1903, were manual; the driver operated a lever inside the cabin to clear the wind-shield. Automated wipers arrived in the 1920s. The associated windscreen washer was an idea of the 1930s. Wipers for headlights (remember those?) appeared in the 1970s.




 I didn't have much headspace for thinking as I drove along; most of the time I was peering in case a night walker or parked car suddenly loomed up ahead of me. But I did remember Louis MacNeice's poem "The Wiper". His film noir allegory seemed quite desirable.



The Wiper

Through purblind night the wiper
Reaps a swathe of water
On the screen; we shudder on
And hardly hold the road,
All we can see a segment
Of blackly shining asphalt
With the wiper moving across it
Clearing, blurring, clearing.

But what to say of the road?
The monotony of its hardly
Visible camber, the mystery
Of its invisible margins,
Will these be always with us,
The night being broken only
By lights that pass or meet us
From others in moving boxes?

Boxes of glass and water,
Upholstered, equipped with dials
Professing to tell the distance
We have gone, the speed we are going,
But never a gauge nor needle
To tell us where we are going
Or when day will come, supposing
This road exists in daytime.

For now we cannot remember
Where we were when it was not
Night, when it was not raining,
Before this car moved forward
And the wiper backward and forward
Lighting so little before us
Of a road that, crouching forward,
We watch move always towards us,

Which through the tiny segment
Cleared and blurred by the wiper
Is sucked in under the axle
To be spewed behind us and lost
While we, dazzled by darkness,
Haul the black future towards us
Peeling the skin from our hands;
And yet we hold the road.




(from his book Solstices, published in 1961).


That lulling rhythm, with its few masculine endings -- the word "road" three times, plus a couple of others near the end -- is a little narrative about doing some activity that is sort of automated, but with those stray reminders that there's a world beyond the automation, and an overview in which the road is not just something experienced but something that exists and has significance.


Interesting that the poem always speaks of "the wiper" in the singular. Most 1950s cars had twin windscreen wipers, just as they do today (unless you drive a Toyota Aygo).


On the other hand, the poem speaks of the driver in the plural, not "I" and "me", but "we" and "us".  So the poem speaks of us as a collective who all share the same experience, but it also emphasizes that the experience is a solitary one, each of us staring at his/her driver's-side wiper. We individuals are isolated from each other in our "boxes of glass and water".


But are "we", nevertheless, embarked on a communal enterprise, and buoyed, at least a little bit, by a sense of shared experience?  That's the nub of it, I think. Are we really moving forward together with a collective purpose, or is that just sentimentality, really we're on separate consumerist journeys, each trying to get our own best deal in terms of indulgence vs effort ?

acorn

Grocery shop in the Edgeware Road

[Image source: https://londonist.com/2015/08/the-culinary-tube-map-edgware-road. Photo by Adrian Scottow.]



Here's the beginning and end of Laurie Duggan's "Autumn Journal".



gulls caught in early light over rooftops


yellow sky


*


one red fox, several deer


the length of the King's Wood


*


mud and twigs


cracked acorns on a wet road


*

- - - -




smoke turns to fog


moonrise south of Gravesend


*


rough winds


wrong equinox



The characteristic generous, indifferent, allusion in the title:  LD's poem does have some quiet conversation with MacNeice's eve-of-war meditations. But the differences are marked. For example,  this autumn journal consists of 14 lines, instead of 24 cantos. Macneice's poem covered about 4 months in 1938. There's a hint of a smile in just how brief LD's Autumn Journal is. What's happening in our news media, then? The silence hums with that unvoiced commentary. Yet isn't this poem, too, in some accord with what Macneice says in his introductory note, "Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets -- a final verdict or a balanced judgment".


The poetic is one in which the integrity of the real world is specifically not "captured" in the words, it is not immanent in the words. Yet it feels very present For, example, the poem uses no verbs of  movement, yet looking past the text we're aware of  movement.  The gulls, for example, are flying and wheeling and gliding. How do I know? The poem doesn't say that. But I see them.




You can read the poem in a few seconds. The asterisks, however, are there to tell us that its seven annotations are spaced far apart, in place and probably in time.  Its horizons are large, it's a big page.


The length of the King's Wood is also quite a long way: it's one of the largest woodlands in E. Kent. Placed next to the deer, it suggests a chase, vistas opening, canopy thinning.


The second allusion is to Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May .  The springtime of that poem explains why now is the "wrong" equinox.  But then isn't the autumnal equinox always the wrong equinox. Yet the trans-seasonal "rough winds" are, in a way, reassuring of larger cycles.


It was in a park in Bexhill-on-Sea, last Saturday morning, that I encountered the cracked acorns. (Moving between the ash-dominant scarplands of the upper and lower Jurassic, well, I don't seem to spend a lot of time with oak trees and am always struck by them when I visit other parts of the country.)


Only some of the acorns were cracked. This was more about cycling and trampling than the pulverization of trucks.


Pedunculate Oak. Some of the acorns were really big. I picked up the fattest and juiciest and bunged it into the pocket of my hoodie. Then I forgot about it until, very late last night, after luminous dinner at a Lebanese restaurant on the Edgeware Road, and several hours of train and coach into provincial darkness,  I was settling down in the van, and I heard the sound of something rolling along the foot-well then plunking onto the step.


The Indo-European root for "acorn" is very ancient; it meant fruit of various sorts. Words from the same root turn up in Celtic languages, referring to sloes and plums. Preparing acorns for human food is not straightforward, but it's possible. The tannins must be leached off, boiling with five changes of water. But potentially it's worth it in survival terms, because this is an abundant source of starch and fat, things that most easily-foraged foods tend to be lacking in.




http://britishlocalfood.com/acorns/
https://honest-food.net/how-to-eat-acorns/


*


"moonrise south of Gravesend".




This could, I suppose, mean a moonrise witnessed while standing somewhere to the south of Gravesend;  and if so, that's not particularly interesting, except for confirming that the poem reports from a number of different locations. 


 The alternative and I think more natural interpretation is that, from where the observer is standing, the moon appears to rise to the southward of Gravesend. 


Let's think a bit about this.

Moonrise, we all know, takes place in the east -- approximately. In the UK moonrises vary between nearly NE (e.g. a full moon in midwinter) and nearly SE (e.g. a full moon in midsummer).


The observer would need to be seeing the lights of Gravesend on or near the eastern horizon. Not necessarily due east, but definitely easterly. It wouldn't make much sense to say the moonrise was "south" of Gravesend if Gravesend itself lay far to the north (or the south, for that matter).


Positioned thus, the observer might witness the moon come up to the south of  an eastward-lying Gravesend. The moonrise isn't, I suppose, very far to the south, or why would you mention Gravesend at all?


The observer would need to be quite a long way off, so that the lights of Gravesend appeared as a localized cluster (or smudge), something you could refer to in relation to the moon.


On the other hand, if you were a very long way to the west then Gravesend wouldn't be distinguishable from the lights of other nearby conurbations.


My imagination takes me to a viewpoint somewhere on the high ground south of Swanscombe. A motorist on the A2 eastbound -- yes, that might do it.


People usually notice moonrises when the moon is (more or less) a full moon, rising in the early evening. A full moon at the autumnal equinox would rise due east. If you were standing, let's say, on Castle Hill, then it would appear to come up just to the south of Gravesend. Though (to quote Ashbery) this is just one example.




The magical power of four words!


*


Since Ashbery' s "These Lacustrine Cities" has swept into view, I can't neglect the opportunity to recommend Norman Finkelstein's interesting reading of that poem (The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry (2nd edn 1993), p. 62ff.).