Monday, November 30, 2015

chimneys smoke in the cross light



When I heard that an author I hadn’t read had won the Patrick White Award then I went to the Guardian website where there was an excerpt from her recent book, The Golden Age, 2014, but the excerpt was so boring that I couldn’t reconcile it with the idea of this author, whose name is Joan London, winning a prize named after Patrick White, who believed, 1) that the independence of a serious human person would be understood as a kind of offensive violence, and 2) that this offensiveness should exist in fictional expression as well as in fictional character: putting White on a wavelength with Rabelais.

If I want to believe that the London who should win the Patrick White Award exists then I have to trust the reviewers and critics who say that she is exceptional and unfairly neglected, that she deserves all of the awards that she has won (this is Kerryn Goldworthy in the Australian Book Review) and that she should win more of them (this is Elizabeth Webby in The Conversation).

I need to believe two things, 1) that in its place, in the book, the excerpt is evidence that London is a singular writer, and 2) in isolation it misrepresents her. I have read her and not read her, and she vanishes in the excerpt; the excerpt has concealed the writer instead of revealing her, and she is eerily going and present and incomplete without the absence being structured, polite, poetic, or tempting. There are lines in Pound’s Cantos about the action of recession.

Sail passed here in April; may return in October
Boat fades in silver; slowly;
Sun blaze alone on the river

Where wine flag catches the sunset
Sparse chimneys smoke in the cross light (Canto XLIX)

He describes things disappearing but he has made something that is there and so you must describe disappearance in order to have the present thing that is not absence but something like a calm memorial in its favour, not it, itself, as war memorials are not like death. You can dwell on a war memorial but not on death as it is happening, you can’t stand there dwelling as the muddy soldier is straining to tolerate a bullet, but you can look at a stone. The fading boat was invented so that it could stand like a still part in Pound's machinery while the sad vivacity of things in transition appealed to him … (at that moment in my draft I wrote, “but the form of disappearingness itself was not tempting, the poem does not vanish”, then I rethought it and I am wrong because the strange words “wine flag” have established an unbridged gap between the English language that they were written in and the Chinese scenery that he hints at in another way three lines afterwards: “a world is covered with jade.” London is withdrawn from me when I read the excerpt, yet at no moment is she curtailed completely below the shape of a suggestion, which is also the shape of things within the Cantos, these existences that the poet gives to you before questioning them, first “Comes the snow scur on the river,” but three lines later, “The flowing water clots as with cold.” My italics).


9 comments:

  1. toying with vanishing, as Pound does, is inherent in chinese verse as well, the long wine red shadow of twilight painting the slowly flapping flag(or the tile in the courtyard); the jade world holding in it's grasp the essence of being and/or godliness, forever gliding out of comprehension but there in intuition. don't know joan london either. visions of fading always take me back to matthew arnold and the long receding roar of the surf at dusk(in memory). pointing to the moment in dreams, as it were... nice progression there...

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    1. I like that connection to Arnold. Are you thinking of Dover Beach: "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"? Prefaced by solid dissolving: " ... the light | Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, | Glimmering ..."

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  2. forgot: homer and the ever present but endless "wine dark sea"...

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    1. Is there anybody who uses the sea to represent the idea of solidness, or is it always about movement, travel, departure, adventure, death, and other ideas like that?

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    2. Dickenson refers to the sea as a house in that "started early" poem, with a basement and upper floors and all. But most of the time, yeah, the sea is a metaphor for change or chaos. I have a nagging thought about the sea in Homer, that is was more like a road, and the storms were separate things, encounters with the gods. The sea not a stranger to the sailors, etc. But it's been some time since I read Homer and I wasn't looking at that angle.

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    3. "Mermaids in the Basement ..." jarring and unpeaceful woman: she not only concreted the sea, she gave it stairs.

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  3. there's the solidity of it being the ultimate, the mother of us all, for one... but using it as an allegory for a compact mass of atoms, i can't think of anything off hand-unless some more or less modern writer has referred to it in that way. in prose it's used a lot of course, but subliminally, as i said above, as the foundation, the fount of being(in which the first basic amino acids arose), the common basis of our existence; i suppose it's the counterpart of earth, the duality of which was expressed in the ancient mythologies: gaia/poseidon and others. interesting question; what do you think? the activities that occur upon the sea assume it's importance inherently: so it could represent the id, the reptilian brain, one of the fundamentals of what we think we are as an animal... i looked through some of my poetry volumes but only found references along the lines that i've suggested, nothing more concrete... hmmmm

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    1. Now that I've brought the subject up I wish I could think of some good examples. The stillness in the first line of Dover Beach is the way I've usually seen the sea made solid: "The sea is calm tonight," but you know that if this is noteworthy "tonight" then the sea is not always calm. If the sea in Arnold is a counterpart to the land, then what is the land? After that feint at earthly solidarity in the first few lines he spends the rest of the poem trying to dissolve the cliffs and the sand into the "ebb and flow" and unstable "gleams" of the water and the light. What is the earth's reaction? It doesn't fight for its concreteness. It is infected with light and water and it does nothing.

      (I am late for work: I go.)

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