"Not even not wrong" Email to: michaelpeverett@live.co.uk
Monday, March 20, 2023
Things I wrote in Intercapillary Space, part 2
OK, here's a second tranche of things that I published on Intercapillary Space, or sometimes Stride. Covering approximately April 2007 to August 2009. Part 2 of 4.
Pentti Saarikoski's chaotic personal life and alcohol dependency was nothing to emulate, so why is it that when I read his poems -- I mean, especially, the poems in his trilogy of late collections -- I feel at once that I'm listening to someone enormously wise, someone who tells me things?
I sit on the liars' bench
the cow in heat smelled of pine
today the sheep came to the meadow
to eat the grass
that is their work, their task
So many flowers summer so soon
appletrees in bloom, and the cherry
the blackthorn too is in bloom
Power over fellow humans
is costly
history is not true
only propaganda is I repeat
this, praise
him whose face already is stone
his eyes are such
one doesn't listen to him
The price is loneliness
payable in cash
Pull your boat up on the rock, turn it over
sit out the afternoon
on the steps of the boathouse, how the islands
move at right angles, how
all
moves
I praise him
who had himself tied to the mast
plugged up the ears of his oarsmen with wax
a man of many turns
who came home, killed the suitors
buried buried
His face already stone
the sheep are bounding about
on the first day
He saved his country
but from what
and for what
do means sanctify the end?
I must go see him, ask him
he has killed the suitors, he's lonely
I repeat and praise
his face already stone
Birds appear in the air
this fine evening
Pentti Saarikoski, from The Dance Floor on the Mountain (1977), translation by Anselm Hollo from Pentti Saarikoski:Trilogy (1988).
By the end of the poem we can put it together: the man with power over people isn't, as we might have expected, Lenin, but Odysseus, admired for his lies. One of Saarikoski's constant conversations is with power. Outside the establishment by dint of wild bohemianism, yet somehow a neighbour to power by dint of his herculean grasp of literatures and cultures, he's unremittingly occupied with the big questions. He accepts nearly everything without complaint, but not those.
Pentti, sitting on his liars' bench, falls to musing how history isn't true and propaganda is true. Propaganda and praise are the same thing in this poem. Praise has given us the Odysseus we read about, the one that matters. Useless to ask if Odysseus was really a good guy, or whether he brought healing or harm. History isn't true because (in the decade of John Berger's Ways of Seeing) there can never be a single history. But praise eventually becomes a fact. Odysseus is a presence in our civilisation; a stone one, but a presence all the same.
This dubious but deep meditation is only a part of the poem. The gleam of water from the steps of the boathouse; looking up at the end of the thought and seeing birds in the sky... these are just as important to it.
And the face already stone isn't just Lenin and Odysseus. The whole trilogy is haunted -- perhaps we might say, fuelled -- by awareness of the author's own approaching death. It's a fine evening, and the poet isn't lonely, not like those dead men of power and blood. Not yet.
*
The translator elsewhere tells us that in the lines
him whose face already is stone
his eyes are such
one doesn't listen to him
a more literal translation would be "his way of looking is such ... ".
*
My earlier (and much longer) post on Pentti Saarikoski:
For the last eight years of his life Pentti and his wife Mia Berner lived in a cottage on the large island of Tjörn, off the coast of Bohuslän in western Sweden (it's joined to the mainland by bridges). I couldn't find any images of the actual cottage.
How could I forget about Claes Andersson? But so it is. I haven't read his poems for ten or fifteen years, and yesterday the forgotten book (translations by Lennart and Sonia Bruce) comes off my bookshelf, falls open, and I begin reading, and I remember how strongly and passionately I love this poetry that I had nevertheless forgotten all about. Wasn't there, though, a perceptible if undiagnosed emptiness in the years between? Or am I misremembering it all, and the truth is I love Andersson's poems much more today than I ever did before? Has love opened up in me that I express it so, or is there something histrionic about all this, has love in fact narrowed -- whereas, back then, I inhabited a whole world of love, I didn't need to make such a noise about it?
Have sat at meetings, ticked off items on the agenda, recommended,
turned down
Approved the minutes (change "should" in §123 to "ought")
Gone to movies, museums, bars, libraries, homes, deserts, caves
Shoveled snow, played with the children, screamed at the children
been bitten by dogs
Traveled in Europe, the States, Africa, met people
Bought and sold junk and cars, waited for buses, trains, have biked
Given speeches, lectures, been dumbstruck, signed petitions, demonstrated
Read (tons of) books, papers, brochures, hares' and crows' tracks
in the snow
Stared at TV, drunk beer, wine, schnapps, kefir, tasted sperm
Awakened in my own bed, in another's, up to now have always awakened
Dozed off over books, steering wheels, bottles, women, in buses,
closets, on guard duty
Put on pounds, lost them, exercised, lifted weights, brides over
thresholds, odds and ends
Been disappointed, happy, angry, indifferent, enraged, in love,
indifferent, empty
Been to funerals, weddings, soccer games, visiting, to crayfish
dinners, outhouses
Witnessed deliveries, death throes, christenings, autopsies, orgies
Written plays, traced hearts in the snow, poems, demand notes,
prescriptions, crib sheets
Shot rifles, pistols, water guns, mortars, slingshots, blowpipes
Had the mumps, the shakes, anxiety, depression, paranoia, inflamed urethra
Fought with conservatives, radicals, myself, Finns, windmills, my wife
Rented rooms, laundry rooms, apartments, tuxedos, cars, bought
houses, potted plants
Been plagued by guilt, small children, nightmares, red-headed lovers
Have asked the meaning of it all
Brooded, deliberated, pondered, constructed, conceived, stopped
thinking
Found the questions irrelevant and answered with the answer of
the senses
Brussels is famous for its sunny weather and
its waste disposal.
My potency and my teeth have never
been better.
Every moment I have free I listen to Wagner and
read Proust without stopping.
It is not tragic to be smothered and consumed
by small animals.
As far as I'm concerned, the panic attacks are
a stage that has passed.
Politics is about respect for those who think
differently and about being honorable.
I never feel like smacking my wife.
Autumn is my time of year, a time of clarification, of self-control.
What I enjoy most is the solitude of an early morning
in the churchyard.
I am a happy person.
*
The problem with our war was that they could
not defend themselves.
Nonetheless, we carried out the war entirely
according to plan.
We did it for our credibility and so that
we could restock the depots.
Man is not a commodity in short supply.
Land mines were not a problem for us who
conducted operations from the air.
War is always a tragedy but even a tragedy
can be beautiful.
The pictures you saw were slightly out of focus.
Any sharp boundary between the military and civilians
is hard to draw.
*
I was inside when the department store collapsed.
I was aboard the passenger ferry when it vanished
in the deep.
I lay on the operating table when rockets hit the hospital
in the city under siege.
I was riding the subway when nerve gas seeped into
the cars.
I had hidden myself in the cellar when soldiers set fire
to our house.
I saw the tidal wave that would drown us as it approached.
I was one of the children put to death because a friend
needed my heart.
I remained in the sand after the desert storm.
What you are I was, what I am you will become.
*
Our childhood photographs lie where we left them,
in an attic in a cellar.
With their features half dissolved, those closest to us,
our demons, oxidized to silver nitrite.
In the attic in the cellar, in the dark ice-cold goddamn
cellar in the attic.
Brothers, cousins, sisters, moms, dads... oxidized,
disarmed, destroyed.
Of mother's wondelful shining kitchen only the hearth remains.
The cat drowned in the well along with the rag doll,
the kids' bicycles, the rats.
Maybe someone ought to remain, withstand the oxidization when
the others flee, drown, dissolve.
Why do cars and houses with people in them explode every day
everywhere.
One fine summer day the children found a dead soldier
in the cellar in the attic.
Andersson is a Finland-Swedish author (i.e. a Finn who speaks and writes in Swedish).
Förtvivlan är ett alltför stort ord, men jag vet inte.... Ty sorgen är obotlig, den går aldrig över Därav dess styrka, dess bördighet för det som ännu inte förstörts inne i oss Den som inte har sorgen har intet Den som inte har sorgen kan ta sig till med vad som helst! Med vem som helst! Den som inte har sorgen har aldrig förlorat någonting, aldrig ägt någonting Smärtan och försoningen finns inte hos den som aldrig haft sorgen Och dikten växer bara ur sorgen, ur den sorg som beretts ett rum i glädjens hjuls nav och där klarnat till blick och förståelse. (Ur "Under"- 1984)
[The second of three parts. The first one was here.]
The Literature of the Highlands, by Magnus Maclean (new and extended edn, 1925). "After receiving a fair classical education, and while yet a student, this wayward fondling of the Muse fell in love with a Glen Etive damsel, Jane Macdonald of Dalness, or Sine bheag nam brogan buidhe (Little Jean with the yellow shoes), as she was locally called, and this winsome maid he married..." (this is about Alexander Macdonald). Not much of whatever may be interesting in the subject (Scots Gaelic poetry, 18th-19th century) is still interesting when it's been translated into sweet Victorian parlour-lyric. Besides, there's a filtering process at work so we hear nothing of what would shock us in Alexander Macdonald's "Praise of Morag" ("His amorous language, indeed, needs frequent asterisks at the hands of publishers and translators"), nor of his 1735 pamphlet with the promising title "An Essay upon Improving and Adding to the Strength of Great Britain and Ireland by Fornication". The terms of critical language create their own story, in this case entirely distinct from the story I think I want to hear. "'William Ross,' says Pattison, 'is a graceful poet, perhaps the most polished of any of the Highland minstrels; although he is certainly inferior to more than one of them in point of strength and energy. He is tender and easy and plaintive.' He delighted in pastoral poetry, of which he seized the true and genuine spirit, and in his descriptions of nature is very sweet and pretty. His 'Praise of the Highland Maid' is a masterpiece of its kind..."
Tres pasos en falso, by E. Jarnés Bergua (1970) - detective novel for students of Basic Spanish; very fascinating. I spent about half my time speculating about the intended audience, apparently good enough at Spanish to negotiate the astoundingly ingenious reasoning of the investigator, yet sufficiently unacquainted with Spanish life to benefit from laborious explanations of eg. cigarettes, nerves, facts, saying goodbye, and even smiling (to laugh without noise). It was only just now that the penny dropped, that the book being designed for readers from any country cannot translate any of its unknown words but only indicate the meaning by using Basic Spanish itself. The other half of my time was spent admiring the darkly intricate story and the bizarre perspectives of the illustrations - e.g. of falling masonry as seen from overhead. Reading a story in another language massively intensifies its effect; what would be beneath notice in English disturbed my dreams for several nights with an impression of desolate sadness.
The Works of Sir George Etherege, vol. 1 - containing a lively account of the author's scandalous life (most of it comes after his brief dalliance with the theatre), and also The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub (1664), - the first real Restoration Comedy, though still partly intermixed with heroick love in couplets. It's difficult to read it without thinking of the brilliant new genre that would solidify immediately afterwards and as a direct result of this play (but from which such transitional vestiges as e.g. a dejected lover falling on his sword would be utterly sloughed off).
Land in Bloom, by V. Safonov. This won the Stalin Prize in 1949. Pentti Saarikoski (I am still reading Saarikoski in the midst of all this), struggling with Le breton sans peine, reflected: "Lenin's method of language study was brutal: he read his way through a dictionary and a grammar book, then proceeded to construct sentences. He was equally impatient in his construction of the Soviet state. Never would he have put up with this idea of proceeding in daily twenty-minute increments. Everything had to be done now, not on the fifteenth." Safonov's Lysenko is also like this. "Perhaps it was only his perseverance, his extraordinary thirst for knowledge and his undeviating pursuit of the road he had chosen that distinguished him from the rest. And one other very characteristic feature: for him, knowledge was something that was immediately put into practice... The fact that, having arrived in Ganja in the autumn, he did not wait until the spring to commence work on his legumes, already revealed the 'Lysenko style'." The result was a demolition of the fallacious "laws" of the spluttering Morganist Mendelists, representatives of the science of the West in its terminal decline. For, as Michurin said: "We cannot wait for favours from Nature: we must wrest them from her." Johann Eichfeld, interviewed by Safonov, explained: "One must not mark time in science. Not on anything, not on any theory - like the theory of intraspecific struggle. Ossification means death for the researcher." He held a book in his hand, "one that he, evidently, was constantly consulting, for its margins were heavily annotated and numerous passages were underscored... He put on his spectacles and read the following: 'Content is impossible without form, but the point is that a given form, since it lags behind its content, never fully corresponds to this content; and so the new content is obliged to clothe itself for a time in the old form, and this causes a conflict between them.' These words, the utterance of a genius, sum up the dialectics of the development of the science that casts aside the old, that seeks the new, and pushes ever forward. They are the words of Stalin..." (Robert M. Young shared my fascination .... )
Soil Biotechnology, by J. M. Lynch (1983). This does not, for the most part, mean genetic engineering (then a technology in its infancy) - it means, more generally, "manipulation of soil micro-organisms and their metabolic processes to optimize plant productivity". In that sense cultivation, straw mulching and burning, fertilizers and pesticides are also biotechnology. The two irritants of the proponents of a "sound scientific basis" are snake-oil salesmen selling miracle preparations and emotive, inaccurate, environmentalists. But the author is reasonably fair: "it is interesting that organic farmers using composts as a basis for their system seldom encounter major pathogen problems... Organic systems include the composting of plants and animal wastes, the science of which is generally poorly understood." More generally an adequate grasp of the entire ecology of what one is manipulating seems not to have been attained: the science has tended to be funded where significant money is at stake, i.e. to treat specific problems of current conventional methods, a kind of patching-up. Facts thus drift in a void, but some of the facts in the book catch my eye, e.g.: "Most plants form non-pathogenic associations between their roots and fungi (mycorrhiza): the sedges, crucifers, some chenopodiaceae (e.g. sugar-beet) and certain aquatics are the exceptions".
Rubens, by Kristin Lohse Belkin (Phaidon, 1998), who writes persuasively of the linked themes of peace and women in his later allegories. But basically, this is the kind of art book you get for the illustrations; a large and excellent selection, though of course there's no shortage of material - it doesn't show e.g. the National Gallery Judgement of Paris. When I want to read about Rubens - or Van Eyck, Rembrandt, or Cuyp, - I'll always drift back to Eugène Fromentin, but it's even better to read him with this book open at e.g. the Antwerp altarpieces. The only time I ever wept in an art gallery was in front of the Chateau de Steen landscape, much to my own surprise. Hysteria, I thought as I hid my face. Must be a bit over-wrought. Nothing to do with the stupid painting. Which to a large extent was true, but somehow Rubens has happened to punctuate my life at important moments. His paintings, therefore, become portals to an inrush of memory. What do these private associations have to do with the character of an art? Nothing worth public discussion - ?
Diplomat, by Gunnar Hagglof. Memoirs of distinguished service as a Swedish Envoy, including during the second World War. This golden era of diplomacy depended on an upper-class cultivation of non-specialist hunches, in turn on the conception of national types - "I have never found it rewarding to try to define the 'character' of a nation," Hagglof remarks, but his zeitgeist was too strong for him, so he spent the next couple of pages doing exactly that about Germany. The book slips down easily - Hagglof, of course, knew "everyone" - the usual anecdotes of Goering, Roosevelt, Gide, Eliot... the raison d'être of memoirs is to lay bare what was confidential at the time, but something makes this less than arresting - a feeling that the author's temperament remains innately diplomatic...
Our Lady of the Sewers: And other Adventures in Deep Spain, by Paul Richardson, 1998. Of all the books in my pile of treasures, this was the one that, before opening it, afflicted me with a feeling that it didn't fit; it looked like the kind of book that sells to casual passers-by and keeps the book trade alive. The author, columnist for Harpers, the Sunday Times, etc seems to meet in Spain a sort of analogue of his own media conceptions; searching for "Deep Spain", the disappearing Spain that still resists homogenization, he keeps finding media events. For authenticity is itself an imaginative projection of media culture (this is Baudrillard's hyperrealism in one of the senses I've learnt to give it) - inexplicable search for a lost paradise. (This reminds me that Richardson speaks of "shiny happy po-mo Barcelona" - in contrast to Vigo, "rough-edged Atlantic port city,... rusty, musty, sad...") - This is bookmaking, rich with facts, not because anyone will ever seek them here, but because facts go into the mix. Richardson uses words like "unfazed", "downside" and probably "into the mix" - perhaps I have a snobbish problem with finding these chatty contemporary Islington Barcelona words in my books? - Still, I learnt a few things. "The downside of whitewashing is that it leaves your hands feeling like dried-up bits of leather, But for this, too, deep Spain has a solution. A leaf of the aloe cactus, which grows wild all over the south, is broken and the jelly inside is smeared on the skin, for near-instant healing.... The dog barked and bared its teeth at her... she reached inside her dress and discreetly rubbed her right hand under her left arm, holding out this hand for the dog to sniff. Instant recognition, instant respect..." To be honest the more I quarrel with the book the more I begin to discover a friendly feeling towards it. Isn't this, too, a diverting concoction of facts?
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