richer than the humblest real one

I was picking up a bottle of oil and listening to one of Geoffrey Hill's lectures on a borrowed set of headphones when Hill said, "Thank you," and as I began unscrewing my oil I heard a screwing noise in the headphones and so Geoffrey Hill opened my bottle of oil for me at the same time as he opened a bottle of water someone had given him last year at the podium in Oxford while he was talking about perjury in poetry. The word poem came out of him sounding hyphenated, like this, po-im, or po-em, which reminded me irresistibly of the man with the purple shopping trolley, probably homeless, who shouted at me down the street two days ago, "Are you a po-lice officer, have you come to arrest me?" It's impossible to describe this hyphenated style of pronunciation if you haven't heard it but it's not only Americans with trolleys in the street who do it, it's American sports commentators too, who will hyphenate defense and say DEE-fens, or offense and say OH-fens, with the whole word banging its skull forward into dee and oh, and where the source of this frontloading lies I do not know but the sports broadcasters announce words like this with satisfied confidence; they will even shout when there is no need to shout, which is what the man with the trolley was doing too, and it is as though these television journalists do not believe that the microphones are really there in front of them, or as if they think the microphones do not have the power of increasing the volume of their speech, as if maybe they're dummy microphones, maybe they're mock-ups, maybe the universe is conspiring, maybe nothing in this television studio is real -- they show a massive mistrust in physicality, these sports commentators, which is almost definitely the reason why they're so excited whenever they see sportspeople, whose whole job is to test out every physical thing that they come across, starting with themselves and moving on to balls, sticks, sand, holes, etc.

Poetic utterance perjures the poet said Hill, and in a later lecture from the same series he talked about poets being forced, by the strictures of poetry, to make revelations. A dedication to form will wring things out of you, he suggested. I thought: so a writer is someone who always has to live with the guilty party. Well, and the same for anyone, we all have to do that, if to act is to self-betray, as Proust suggests, and who is there in the world who doesn't act? And how not to, when we reach out to everything through acting, like bony big amoebae, and the self-betrayal (as Swann betrayed himself by knocking at the lit window) is a side-effect? "The Worthiness of Suffering like / The Worthiness of Death / Is ascertained by tasting --" (Emily Dickinson).

This perjurous exposure is the only genuine kind of danger I can imagine Francesca Rendle-Short's Glory-character talking about in the quote over at Whispering Gums, "Glory decides writing is a way of thinking: to think, to write, is dangerous." Who does it endanger if she writes? No one as much as her. She'll mention someone, who? A dangerous writer. D.H. Lawrence, says Rendle-Short "attests that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a beautiful book, that it was tender like a naked body" -- but wait, I thought, self was the word Lawrence used -- "To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is," he wrote in a letter to Nancy Pearn, April 12th, 1928 -- self, not body, not meat, which is a different thing, as Lawrence would have known, this man who loved the "fine, unquenchable flame" of the will. "What then was its will?" wonders Ursula in his Rainbow, as she examines a plant under a microscope. "If it was a conjunction of forces, physical and chemical, what held those forces unified, and for what purpose were they unified?" A "knowledge" occurs to her. "Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge." The cells of the plant are visible but the plant itself must be more than whatever is visible. "Self was a oneness with the infinite." Which makes each of us like a book constantly being read, if you think of the book's self and assume that the reader is filling in for "the infinite."

(A book is "a small, hermetically sealed universe," says José Ortega y Gasset, as translated by Helene Wyl, and "what novelistic horizon could be wider and richer than the humblest real one?" The reader must be imprisoned by the author inside the smaller horizon-line of the book, a process that Ortega says is like putting a citified person in a village and convincing them to become so provincial that they "find [themselves] vehemently taking sides in the local gossip." So the limited book stares up at this sky above it called a reader, which seems as infinite from its concentrated perspective as the real sky does to the same reader, and, oh look, the book must say to itself: infinity!)

But leave Rendle-Short alone, I lecture myself: she was taking for herself the same freedom that Montaigne took for himself, which was the freedom to quote from memory; and Francis Bacon, who was inspired by Montaigne's essays, adopted the same freedom, and sometimes got his quotes slightly wrong, but the sense of the essay remained steady, as Rendle-Short's book remains steady too (so I'm guessing, anyway, reading the post at Whispering Gums). Sometimes when the original quote doesn't fit the material of the essay you see that Bacon's mind has whittled it so that it's in a neater shape, and yet "whittle" is too preemptive, I think, it suggests that the activity was all on one side, the mind whittling, and then the essay coming along quietly to borrow the byproduct; all right, change that; say that the essay, the mind, and the quote worked in tandem simultaneously until everything had been forged together: big fire and melt. Whatever the quote is, whether it has the name Plutarch attached to it or Plato or Marcus Aurelius, it's also Bacon himself, smuggling himself out under a disguise, the way that Australians do when they borrow from Donald Horne and refer to their nation as "The Lucky Country." Use that phrase online and someone else will jump in sooner or later to remind you that Horne meant it as a critique not a compliment. But Australian society has taken it and worked on it like the pressure of the planet on the trunks of drowned trees, turning them into diamonds. Horne designed "the lucky country" as a dead tree, now it is used for a diamond and he complained before he died in 2005, "I have had to sit through the most appalling rubbish as successive generations misapplied this phrase," but he couldn't turn the lucky country back into wood. The American author Greer Gilman, too, in Moonwise takes Old and Middle English and changes it -- keeping some archaic vocabulary, keeping the short cadences and the habit of alliteration, "Not ruing now but ranting," she writes, or, "They are meddled, neither breath nor blood, but flawed things, frail and bonefast" -- she changes it into the language of her book, having this old language speak through a mind that is not like any mind the ancient authors ever used. The enthusiasm for battles is nowhere any more and the characters tease and giggle, all soft with unfanged modern whimsy. "Sylvie giggled; and he began softly, hoarsely, to sing." "A wild storm of giggles, but the wind's eye was eery." "Ariane giggled in her sleeve ..." "Ariane bit her lip. She felt ticklishly close to laughter ..."

When Sir Gawain meets wild men in the wilderness the anonymous Middle English poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight takes it for granted that his audience will expect him to fight them immediately and violently and never say hello or otherwise treat them like people; in fact he puts them briskly in a shopping list of Things The Knight Fought along with dragons and wolves. "Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez and with wolues als / sumwhyle wyth wodwos þat woned in þe knarrez." (Somewhile with wyrms he warred and wolves also, / somewhile with wildmen who dwelt in the crags.) Gilman's Ariane meets a lonely man living wild in the woods too, but the language immediately assumes that he is harmless, he is going to be a ragged, kind companion in a "wraprascal" coat. It doesn't occur to Moonwise that Ariene will do anything else but make a friend out of him. Moonwise is a hateless book. Meanwhile there was my man with his trolley up the street, also in old clothes, also behaving wildly, neither dangerous wodwo nor kind companion, literature helpless here. I told him that I was not a police officer, I had not come to arrest him, and as far as I was concerned he could do whatever he liked in any street in Las Vegas, but he shouted the same phrase again, and went on shouting it while I said no, no, sir (as Americans do I said sir, which might have sounded like a parody of respect if you had seen it, me shouting back down the street at this homeless man, sir!, but it was impossible not to actually and truly respect someone who was so determined not to be lied to, and who was like an unconquerable Sherlock Holmes trying to penetrate a mystery with only one instrument, he was a man using a fork on soup because fork was all he had), sir, I said, there's no police around here, but he went on and I saw that the phrase had got hold of him, language would not let go, and whatever else he might want to say, he couldn't say it. There must have been about thirty years between him and Geoffrey Hill, with Geoffrey Hill older, but there is no podium at Oxford for the trolley man, not now or ever; he was a soul enspooked.







José Ortega y Gasset was writing in The Dehumanization of Art. Donald Horne's book was The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, published by Penguin in 1964. Dickinson's poem doesn't have a title unless you know it by its first line, and then it's Despair's Advantage is Achieved. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. Thomas H. Johnson) makes it poem no. 799. Podcasts of Geoffrey Hill's Oxford lectures are available at the website of Keble College, Oxford. The physical part of Keble College was designed by a man who believed that he "had a mission to give dignity to brick."

one thing for another

M. made Lamb's Wool again and this time there was white froth on top -- tasted better -- delicious -- how did he do it? -- he put it in a blender. The downside was that later I had to clean the blender. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and the two things were linked, are linked, and if I had known that I would take the blender apart and clean it later would I have had the same uncomplicated reaction to the froth? Paul in Dune is given powers of prescience and Frank Herbert makes him see that the future is not one path but several paths between which he has to choose; the difference between his prescient and non-prescient selves is that the choice is now conscious, and he never lives happily after that. To live, writes José Ortega y Gasset, is to act in spite of the forces that surround you, and these forces are, for instance, your country, your culture, your family, your soul, and your bad stomach. Reading Carlyle's French Revolution I wanted Marie Antoinette to escape somehow, to veer off from history and flee, in short I was afraid that she would die, and this fear was born not from the simple facts of the story (which I already knew, I knew that she was doomed) but from Carlyle's way of writing about them, which was so exciting that at one point I was actually clenching my fists and leaning forward over the book and all the muscles in my shoulders were bunching up to make knots that spelt out these words: Run, French Royal Family, run! If they weren't going to start running away with some conviction then the muscles in my arms were ready to do it for them. You can't carry out someone else's destiny but I was tense with willingness to try.

They were so bad at escaping that the temptation is to say, "They were asking to get caught," and then, "They must have wanted to get caught," because all of their actions seem so absolutely aimed at that one goal. If an activity is the sum of the actions that constitute itself then their escape would have failed in its objective if they hadn't been caught. Getting away would have been a failure. Everything was calibrated for capture. And yet they wouldn't have said that if you'd asked them -- if you'd said to the adults, "Do you want to be captured and have your heads lopped off in the Place de la Révolution?" then they would have said No, and if you'd asked the children if they wanted to be shuttled around and die of diseases then they would have told you no as well but they didn't have much say in the escape or in any of it. The starving poor women of Paris felt helpless as well (a common human problem, writes Ortega: to be kept away from paths that would realise your destiny), and finally they acted, they demanded bread, a demand that wasn't inventive or new but the persistence was novel and new, they would not be told to go away, they wanted bread they said, they wanted food they said, marching into the room, although if you judge their desires by the results they got then they wanted revolution and not bread -- not bread but the head of Marie Antoinette dropping into the basket, not bread but the crowd running forward with handkerchieves to collect the king's blood, and not bread but modern France itself, so that what they were shouting was not, "Bread!" but "Modern France!" not "Give us such and such," but "Allow the future so and so," not hands reaching forward to take, but hands reaching forward to pass us all Agnès Varda, the Eiffel Tower, and existentialism, and the mouths saying not, "We want, we want," but "You're welcome."

They died, of course, Marie died, everybody dies, the future is always unhappy, but people still want to predict it, although predicting it is absolutely easy: you will die. I know at least one person who puts his trust in a godly apocalypse, preferably sooner rather than later, and when an earth tremor hit the countryside around his aunt's house he believed that it was a sign, or so he said to us, observing, also, that there had been an earthquake in Turkey just the week before, and that other countries had suffered from other disasters. Think of the quake that knocked down the cathedral in Christchurch. He had already predicted the future, now he was looking for evidence that would connect it more tightly to the present. His earthquakes are all metaphorical; they represent the apocalypse as roses represent romance. "A strange thing in man," remarks Ortega, talking about metaphors, "this mental activity that substitutes one thing for another -- from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second." These associations depend on memory (we learn that roses mean romance and then we remember it and act on it) and what if (I thought) we did things the other way around, and formed our metaphors presciently, associating one thing closely with another before we learnt that they should be connected? Then the world would be different, for one thing, Yu Muroga would never have had that trouble with his car.

Muroga was a delivery driver in Sendai when the tsunami hit earlier this year, and I thought of him because I'd been watching footage from his dashboard camera on youtube. First the camera sees the earthquake. The arm of the street light pats an invisible ball. The trees along the sides of the road wave their hands. Muroga stops and waits for it to pass. Everything slows, the light loses interest in the ball, he resumes driving. The video fades out and fades in. This quick fade represents about an hour in which nothing unusual happened. Now he's stopping in a traffic jam. Why is there a traffic jam? Cars begin to run across the road ahead of him as cars do at intersections but they're all going backwards and a grey cushion of liquid is lifting them off the asphalt; they are on a river and none of them are under the control of their drivers, not even the semi-trailer truck that shoots past directly and meaningfully, like a ship going to shore, also backwards. The sky is cloudy, everything is grey, the cars are grey, the water is grey, and a heavy drop runs down the windshield glass. Now water is coming under Muroga's car from behind, the water is running to join the new river ahead of him, now his car is being picked up, now it's wobbling on the surface, now another car has gone nose-down, now there's a ruffle over a current, now the car is caught in this current, now it's flying strongly backwards, now the camera is looking at the sky from the inside of a cave, the cave mouth is framing the camera's point of view, now the car tilts, the water is rolling over the window, the video ends, the car is drowned.

Muroga escaped but the camera never saw him do it. "Yoshi," he said to himself -- all right then, ok, here I go -- and out of the window into the water before the car encaved, this cave being either a warehouse full of debris or just a mass of debris on its own. (Some reports mention the warehouse, some don't.) Next time I see a twig being dragged along a stream I will remember this video and I will believe that the twig's poor life is one paralysing horror of disorientation and vertigo; I will probably want to rescue it.

If Muroga had had the power of prescient metaphor then the sight of the swaying traffic light would have meant, "My car sucked underwater an hour from now" as surely as roses mean romance, and he could have done -- what he could have done I don't know, but he could have done it.







Ortega wrote about metaphors in his essay The Dehumanization of Art, which was translated into English by Helene Wyl. He wrote about life for In Search of Goethe from Within, translated by Willard R. Trask.