Sunday, June 7, 2015
you'll see what I say you'll see
Having, now, The Glass Canoe next to Little, Big in my mind I wonder about the different ways in which the two authors find a character or structure for the Unknown in their books, Crowley building a kind of horizontal (rather than hierarchical) maze in which a revelation in one story will lead you sideways to another story – not a clarity through the unknown but a passageway into another room of it. Mrs Underhill says "Wear this," as she sticks a magic leaf on Lilac's forehead but the enlargement is only in a certain direction, "and you'll see what I say you'll see." By implication, what I don't say you won't see, and who knows what size that is. The dream that seems to be taking Grandfather Trout into a memory of his original human self turns, instead, towards the story of (maybe) the Frog Prince, disenchanted, leaping from the water, "legs flailing and royal robes drenched," then to the Fish-Footman from the first Alice, a "bewigged fish in a high-collared coat, a huge letter under his arm" – till the trout wakes, in shock, back to his own edition of the tale. *
Irrevocable revelation in the Glass Canoe, however, is not only achievable, it is horribly forced on you, and you will be catapaulted into the misery of knowledge against your will when you point out the anthropomorphic mystery of the record player to your girlfriend and she easily shows you the knob that explains the technology.
The Meatman, who loved not knowing, is troubled by the new absence of his pet ignorance, and the information is not an addition to his mental landscape, it is a loss forever. He laments.
Binarily he shifts over into that knowledge as if through a door that shuts behind him. And there are other such doors in the book, but he avoids them: he won't look in the sealed barrel, and he won't draw the obvious conclusion when he sees his girlfriend in the window with several men. The knowledge is being offered so starkly; Crowley's people should envy him. But it would mean sadness if he took it (we know that from the record player episode), and sadness with no compensation that the reader is ever allowed to see. He is wiser than Victor Frankenstein; instinctively he has resisted (or shied away from, take your pick) temptation, he is aligned with those books and authors who have worried about the effect that technical knowingness, ie science, will have on the state of knowledge-less anticipation that is described with words like wonderment. Lord Dunsany wrote with a feather pen in the age of biros.
When I think that we, as a species, have only just become aware of the lymph vessels that run up into our brains, and that this discovery is not the end of anything (as the discovery of the lymph system itself was not the end of anything, and the mapping of it, falsely wholly, over a century ago, was not the end of mapping it or knowing it), I want to believe that, out of the two of them, Crowley's formulation of the Unknown as story beyond story is closer to what is …
*After I posted this I went over and read, for the first time, the post from June 4th at Wuthering Expectations, which also mentions the Alice Footman. Coincidence.
Alice never knows whether she is looking at a fish or a man: "she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish." Carroll's illustrators are always sure that he is a fish-headed person but this is more than you can say for the author, who only ever refers to a resemblance in the face. And the way he has packed man into footman is very strange: if the person had been naked, without the livery, but still running up to a door with a letter under his arm, then what would Alice call him?
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i dunno... seems kind of like a tennis ball bounding around inside my skull. does this have to do with anything? i suppose games are fun if not taken too seriously; but i can't help but think(there's that word again)that language is not a very good handle for reality. quien sabe... on the other hand, what else is there? and isn't it the point of books anyhow?
ReplyDeleteMaybe not a good handle -- but as I write this I wonder how I think I'm defining the word "good" in this instance: what does my "good" mean? Adequate? The only really adequate representation of reality, is reality, but I suppose language can have the function of a map: it clarifies the eccentricities and raises the possibility of a direction that could be moved in, if you chose it. So my brain can grab hold of the article about the lymph vessels and decide that Mary Shelley's vision was too simple (because it doesn't accord with this one piece of evidence), and then I can tie that to the ideas that I think I see in Crowley (which seem to suit the piece of evidence better), and then I wander on with that idea in my hand and what comes next, comes next. As for the point of books, I don't know.
Deletethat makes some sense; i look at things from a geological, zen, quantum mechanical perspective and i tend to forget there are an infinite number(or seven billion) of ways of seeing any phenomenon/idea/reality/book. tx
DeleteDo you read Gary Snyder? He's the first name I think of when I think of Zen poets.
Deletepoetry seems different somehow. it presses on other senses, so an indescribable sensation is achieved by means unrelated to understanding or prior knowledge; i've heard some poems described as a weight inside ones head; definitely a physical presence there, possibly...
ReplyDeleteI agree, it's different: a poem has the possibility of becoming a more holistic series of catalysts, packing its language very tight (thinking of Geoffrey Hill, in Speech! Speech!, writing "grand malpractice," so that he can put the implications of "grand mal" inside the idea of a large, careless malignancy) -- but prior knowledge can come into it as well, I think, as a tool among other tools -- Scott at Six words for a hat was reading T.S. Eliot's Prufrock a short while ago, and there's a poem that gets stronger if you come to it with an awareness of Hamlet.
DeleteHa! I am still reading Prufrock. I think a lot of poetry that comes out of the Western classical tradition is pretty thick with allusions, a thickness atop or within the other thickness of the poetic language. One of the great powers of poetry is all this other energy inside the poem, all the energy drawn together from other sources, as if a poem is a magnet or a net that radiates a new energy of its own. Good art of all kinds does that, or can do that. There are plenty of ways for art to be good, of course.
DeleteThe poem as a radiant object. And then you have the intractable things itself, constructed out of those phenomena that can't be reduced any further; enjambment, for example, which is its own summary. (I've got Donne in front of me at the moment, "Love's Infiniteness," with the following line break and language: "Or if thou then gave me all, | All was but all which thou hadst then" -- English compressed with such economic violence that there's nowhere further it can go.)
DeleteEnjambment is such a simple idea ("I'll just ignore the metrical line length here, why not") with such amazing consequences. Expansion and compression, and new ways of contrast. I remember, almost, the moment I was shown what enjambment was and how it breaks poetry free of the lines. All of verse became a new and greater thing for me. Well, a lot of verse anyway.
Deletei see by the above i've tied myself in knots again as is oft my wont.
ReplyDeleteWell at least you're not the one who's comparing an American metafictional novel to a Miles Franklin award winner that nobody outside Australia has ever read. Look on the bright side.
Deletei was thinking about language and words last nite while trying to sleep. words are pointers. they don't describe the whole object; hence "true" knowledge about external "reality" is never achieved. but people act as if that were not so. this accounts for the madness we see around us, at least in some part. yes, i've read gary snyder and others, mostly chinese, wu wei, li po, and the haiku masters. i wrote a lot of haiku until i came to a sort of realization: mainly that there wasn't such a thing as "consciousness" and that the evidence for it was faulty. the brain makes up its own world as it grows. zen ideas of mu also try to reflect this, i think, although it seems to be just another coping mechanism for the continuing search for meaning. geology really explains the world best-what you see is what you get. boy, don't get me started, he said, belatedly. many thanks for your informative reviews and your considered thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI want to write something like, "Language is a system that leads back to language," but then I remember a piece of reportage I read this morning, in the New Yorker I think, about the abduction and murder of the Forty-Three in Mexico, and I wonder how I can say that a sentence like, "None of that evidence was found while the independent experts were there; it was discovered only after they left," (which, in context, was absolutely startling) leads back to language. I don't know if I can. There's something else as well ...
ReplyDelete(Sudden thought: if the brain makes up its own world as it grows then is the coping mechanism also the meaning? Geology as a language: there's a thing.)
yes! what is needed is a geological grammar! the quote re mexican expertise takes me back to my year of living there. and my instinct is to spread some salt grains on it. lots of things happen down there that are pretty inexplicable.
Delete