Some Music And A Little War

Peter Finch (right) with members of Cabaret 246 outside the London Musicians Collective, May 1985

[Image source: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/photopf2.htm]




 

One of the pleasing things about Peter Finch's Some Music and a Little War (1984) is that you can’t pick out a poem that typifies it. Your way of reading is subject to review; it’s one of Peter Finch’s instruments. Here's one of the central pages of Instantaneous Magnetism:

 

enemi	magnetism
	magnetism	turn
	magnetism	charm
tude	magnetism
Way.	Magnetism
electri	magnetism
	magnetism	brain
	magnetism
	magnetism	s
	magnetism	t        lps
	magnetism,	nd      re
	magnetism,
generate	magnetism
without	magnetism
endowed	magnetism
diffuse	magnetism
collect	magnetism
anima	magnetism
		Thus many
from the
atomic
		is the union
		in
		we do not
developing
	tism,	they
nal	net
nat	tis
king	mag       m,
		as a study
sup  stucture

 

This doesn’t look as good as the book by a long way, and it really isn’t supposed to be in a table, but I couldn’t get it to line up around the crucial central column of “magnetism” otherwise.

That central column is in part unseen but no less felt, just like the real thing. The palimpsest of academic, perhaps scientific, writing is also discernible, but comically disrupted by a vein of demotic and perhaps accusatory comments

(“...(fuc)king mag(netis)m..”?). “tude” is part of “student”, I think, but it might also be part of “attitude”. “nal” and “nat” suggest – by a sort of rhyme with “animal magnetism” – “natural”, and (just as potently for a Welsh author) “national”. But there are no right answers, only good questions. It is curious how a poem that you can’t precisely read aloud nevertheless has a distinctive voice. Or you might call it music, like the title of the book; but if so, it’s music with a lot of space through it, like Cage or (an acknowledged influence) Trout Mask Replica.The whole page shimmers. One has a palpable sense that even in the original book Instantaneous Magnetism doesn’t really fit on the pages. The visible part is a section of a trailing knot of energy, that is eventually likened to the pattern on a tie-dye shirt.

 

Bright Wind, the companion-piece to Instantaneous Magnetism, is concerned with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, another invisible play of forces. The “and” in the following passage comes from the sixteenth-century doubling of epithets beloved by the translators who made the prayer-book and the bible. But Peter Finch keeps one mundane eye on the incongruous break-up (or break-down) of a charismatic service into modern, urban men and women.

 

motives and desires

gas and electric

rushing and struggling

faith and godly

distinct and convincing

strenuous and occasional

week and many

bed and found

uneasy and disturbed

methods and results

city and people

frowned upon and imitated

fingers and bade

life and opportunity

god and they

 

sinners in the hands

 

The poem allows fingers to be pointed.

 

The “little war” of the book’s title is (of course at one level only) the Falklands war of 1982. Sometimes foregrounded, it is more pervasively there in the background and in fact it’s no part of Peter Finch’s purpose to spell it out. He is dismissive of attempts to do that: “The full story is bent like soft plastic. It fits the contours of the newscaster’s head.” So what seeps onto the page is in various ways oblique. Thus we find a nineteenth-century empire-builder subduing an empty part of the dominion (and pinning down its creatures as lists of names) in An Idea of Empire. Or a piece with this title: I wanted this piece to have a title which mentioned Warsaw and the Ghetto and perhaps connotated the press, the illegal press. But all these terms mean something else now. I won’t bother. It starts like this: -  (I’ll quote some of it in a minute).

 

We carry a lot of questions around with us:

 

            is plastic alive

            is blood forgotten

            is air emulsified

            is an ant a giant to a microbe

            is an atom a star

            is chess a product of bicycles

            is seawater evil

            is rubber hollow

            is double vision the result of rainwater

            is fishfood not really food

 

                                                            (Some Blats)

 

They’re funny, and more intelligent than they might seem at first, but we have no answers. We need advice, but in this book advice leads in unwelcome directions:

 

            Grasp the grenade in the throwing hand

            no gloves, no rings,

            with the fingers holding the lever tight

            against the body

            tremble, let the blood flush under your nails,

            pull out the arming pin,

            do not relax grip on the lever before throwing.

            Throw.

            Throw.

            Throw.

            Throw. 

 

                                                            (Strategic Targets)

 

That’s exciting, but it’s obviously not right. Or perhaps this good advice appeals:

 

            Keep quiet, you can betray –

            but not everyone can.

            Don’t talk in the street.

            You must not make notes,

            code it, destroy it,

            the less said, keep quiet.

 

You listen:

 

            all the time the water running,

            rolling together, confluencing,

            swelling out from the thickness of your arm

            to the size of your thigh. Large it’s large.

            It makes more noise. It goes

            splartsch splartsch splartsch

 

Quiet comes to this:

 

            They entered the Umschlagplatz, scrubbed,

            hair flat, clean clothed, four by four, four by four.

 

                                                            (I wanted this piece to have a title which...)

 

 

Advice is one thing, and then there’s testing.

 

                  tevt tevt

            tawfully tsss

            ting what

            tevery it

            ting ting

            ten tag tag

            tsst ting

            tevt tint

 

When this eventually streams into a less clotted sound it becomes like this:

 

            then you know

            it is awfully hard for anyone to

            go on doing anything because

            everyone is troubled by everything.

            Having done anything

            you naturally want to do it again

            and if you do it again

            then you know you are doing it again

            and its not interesting.

 

                                                            (Gertrude Stein, Doing It Again)

 

If the line about blood flushing under the fingernails caught your eye you might also appreciate this:

 

They wanted the salt, the water to cleanze them. To take all the flames from out of their souls. They had died in their hundreds. Half sunk in sand, their flappy mouths filled with sea. He looked across them, saw the remains of an ambulance – its red lettering still showing faintly as it rusted back into the coastline....

 

The dusk was coming. He wanted all his energy for the sea. He touched his forehead, felt the bone flex sponge-like under his finger...

 

                                                (Strategic Targets)

 

It’s with the sense of touch that the book ends, an artist’s account but no more purely “autobiographical” than any of these other poems:

 

You know what I’m doing. I’ve told you.

Smoothing, planing, rubbing, rolling.

Each time I look at it its less,

smaller, rounder,

like a pebble you’ve had in your mouth and kept in your pocket and taken out and sucked and rolled under your tongue and spat out and dried on your shirt and put back in your pocket and thought about and then tried sucking without it and felt what its absence might mean and touched it, the actual pebble, with your fingers at the same time, niggled it a bit, down near where the rip in the material at the bottom of the pocket is, so the pebble touched your skin, not too sharp because you’ve softened it, not cold, and you take it out, palming it, suck it again.

It’s like that.

 

                                                            (If Marcel Duchamp had been writing this...)

 

*

The Peter Finch Archive, an essential resource for his poetry and a lot more: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/sitemap.htm


Claire Powell's informative essay "The Art Of Noise: Peter Finch Sounds Off": http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/noise.htm


Peter Finch's blog (almost dormant but very good): http://peterfinchpoet.blogspot.co.uk/

From Peter Finch's Antarktika (1973)

[Image source: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/newvis~1.htm]

Pocket Litter

Extracts from this month's Pocket Litter (a Writers Forum magazine, published irregularly since 2011) :




LAWRENCE UPTON




Been hope of old.
Been led of pooh.


Beep.
Beep fond.
Beep fond loo.
Beep fool nod.
Beep eon fold.
Beep flood
Beep hold of one.
Beep hole nod of.  Beep.


Bop. Won dring. Bop flee.
Debone fool nob.
Deep lob.
Deepen hoof.
Oboe.


Do flee. Hope?
Dole eel end.
Feeble.
Feed noble pooh.
Fen hope lob ode.
Fled oboe.
Fondle hobo pee.


(from Phone: That Buzzing Noise)




XAVIER VELASTIN

(from Score - 1B)


This piece is connected to Xavier's Me & My Whale project -- see
https://meandmywhale.wordpress.com/








MATTHEW ROBERTSON




he has been kicking the ball well tonight


he's been good


looking for two


measures a kick to the top of the square


not a good fifty to give away


so too thomas


switches through the middle


well taken care of in the end


well the conversation goes on




(from Transcript 04/04)




*


Re Pocket Litter :








For futher information contact infoATwfuk.org.uk

in the city

I was in London for a 2-day training course (Citrix Provisioning Server). As usual on my rare visits to central London, I tried to get about on foot - in this case between the training center (near Finsbury Sq in the City) and my overnight gaff, which was in King's Cross. It fascinates me to begin to make a sense (placed, though commonplace enough) of the capital. To stand at Farringdon Rd and see the course of the old Fleet river, which is still running under your feet.

Yesterday morning, on my way back to the training centre, I realized it was right by Bunhill Fields, which I remembered exploring a few years ago during some other course with some other training company - MS Exchange, I think it was. Since I was still making a terrible mess of Pret's famous All-Day Breakfast sandwich, I wandered back in to take another look.

     Now he hath left his quarters,
        In Bunhill Fields to lie...

I forgot to look for Bunyan's tomb, but I did see the monument to Daniel De-Foe, Author of 'Robinson Crusoe', which was erected in 1870 and paid for by 1,700 of the boys and girls of England, following an appeal in the Christian World. And right beside it is the standing slab that passes for the grave of William Blake and his wife Catherine Boucher. It was decorated with a few votive offerings, not very exciting ones this time. No Rimbaud-magenta ostrich plumes or stained manuscripts, just some November-proof objects lined up along the top - one of them a silver bullet, the rest mainly pennies and pebbles.

Woolett's and Strange's works are like those of Titian and Correggio, the life's labour of ignorant journeymen, suited to the purposes of commerce, no doubt, for commerce cannot endure individual merit; its insatiable maw must be fed by what all can do equally well; at least it is so in England, as I have found to my cost these forty years. Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts or to empires that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

So which empires would those be, then? - the ones that were destroyed, not by invasion or disease or climate change or opium, but commerce? Anyway, why would Blake care a rap about empires anyway? Did he not write

Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field
and let his wife and children return from the oppressor's scourge
look behind at every step and believe it is a dream
singing The sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning
and the fair moon rejoiced in the clear and cloudless night
for Empire is no more and now the lion and wolf shall cease

(America, a prophecy)

Why would Blake care about empires? In his ideal politics, not at all: his moroseness merely enjoying the thought of empires being destroyed while blaming commerce for their destruction. But as an anxious artisan, the attachment is there all right. He relied on patronage and he sometimes got it (not always accompanied by recognition of individual merit, however - sometimes it was charitable); he was more connected to the spirit of empire than he knew. But, what he compains of here, he also found in intaglio engraving a "missing link with commerce".

As for his strictures on commercial art, the neighbouring monument to the surveyor De-Foe seemed to make a sufficiently pointed response.

And yet few people afford to be as uncompromised as Blake.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

I was reading Allen Fisher's Brixton Fractals (1985), twelve of whose poems are distantly conducted by the opening pages in Blake's notebook: "Boogaloo" quotes from this same address on engraving. Often, it is Blake as an economic entity who is uppermost, or rather, inseparable from the poem's realization of geography. Blake's poet-painter shuffle, then odd enough to be mad, has become paradigmatic.

     William Blake makes a tracery of a figure
     binds it to his headache.
     Leaves follow footsteps.   through snow
     perhaps a traveller
     runs away from noise something tearing
     his ankle.   A trembling
     image rises out of darkness:   Blake holds
     his head between fingers
     dry from acid
     Bright work diffuses
     through forms of thrilled consciousness
     becomes apprehensive only to another.
     Gradually the workforce of
     a marginal elite
     burn down hill
     to read latticed recurrences
     in the ice.
     "Oh, constructores, Oh, formadores!"

Blake holding his head in fingers dry from acid is as thorough-going an economic entity as this later visionary: "Then I took my head tenderly between both hands, to make certain it was not coming off or turning round" ("The Finest Story In The World").

It was 08:54, so I left that field of stone and went back to join the noise of the workforce, forming its Moebius strip.

My walk had also taken me past the Betsey Trotwood on Farringdon Rd, hallowed ground in the eyes of one too rural or too lazy to have ever yet made it to Writers Forum.

Resources:

All Blake quotes from a free pamphlet in "The Romantic Poets" series, The Guardian, spring 2010.

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