waves broke calmly and indifferently

No more Powys, Powys ended, none after this, even though there are still books by him that I haven't brought up, no mention of Ducdame, because I can't find it, no Homer and the Aether for the same reason (the enervating knowledge that the thing would not be on the shelf if I looked there for it; the stubborn resistance to the idea of buying it on Ebay – no --), no mention of Wood and Stone, or, wait, I'm wrong, I must have mentioned that it was dedicated to Hardy, in one of the posts in which I was saying that Powys indebted himself to Hardy. “All of Powys' fiction began with the description of a hill in Wood and Stone,” is probably what I said, and everything afterwards takes place in the shadow this embarkation, hills recurring in his work, hills in Porius, hills in Owen Glendower, countryside often looming, hills and then the sea, the hint of infinity in the vertical direction and the hint of infinity in the horizontal, Adrian, about to die in Rodmoor, shouting across the sea that separates him from his son.

The long dark line of waves broke calmly and indifferently at his feet, and away — away into the eternal night — stretched the vast expanse of the sea, dim, vague, full of inexpressible, infinite reassurance.

Troubled things happening on beaches, Weymouth Sands opening with trouble on a beach; Powys himself in his Autobiography sneaking often away to a beach to visit the women's legs. I might have posted his description of the hill.

Were it not for the neighbourhood of the more massive promontory this conical protuberance would itself have stood out as an emphatic landmark; but Leo's Hill detracts from its emphasis, as it detracts from the emphasis of all other deviations from the sea-level, between Yeoborough and the foot of the Quantocks.

Probably I compared it to the opening of Titus Groan, seeing that Peake has come up several times in this long series of posts. “John Cowper Powys is difficult to categorize,” reads the blurb for a book named Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex, by Jeremy Mark Robinson. “We place him (usually) in amongst D.H. Lawrence, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, William Blake and Thomas Hardy.” How much do I have in common with “we”? Wessex opens with a quote from Hardy as remembered by the critic William Archer (1856 - 1924): “What are my books but one long plea against “man's inhumanity to man” – to woman – and to the lower animals?” Powys empathises even with the worms, empathising with things that can't use his empathy, like fictional characters and mythological demons, which might be the smallest and lowest kind of animal for if they wriggle away from the grasp of a human then they die, and even a worm can wriggle away from a human and live.

and a counter-tendency of resistance

Why does Powys refer to free will as an illusion ("by the true illusions of life, above all by the ultimate illusion of free will"), why do I look at the paragraph and think that it can't reach the place it wants to go, and not only because Powys is unwilling to push his ideas to their conclusion but because he in fact cannot push that far, and can't, in other words, declare that pure untethered spontaneity is desireable or possible?

Wondering like that, I go back to Death of the Posthuman and Claire Colebrook arguing that "a living being is never 'pure life,' for a living being closes itself off, to some extent, from the world's energies; a being is in part its open engagement with the world, but also a certain refusal of the dynamic life of the world, a selfsameness that remains unto itself and limits relations and stimuli." Life is characterised by a "certain intertia."

Life can be considered a double tendency, an explosive power of creative difference, and a counter-tendency of resistance.

(Anthony of the Time's Flow Stemmed blog linked to Colebrook's book on Twitter.)

Meanwhile pre-life (theoretically imagined, as it it has to be) was a time (or a not-time) of supreme undifferentiation, it was nothing graspable whatsoever and might as well not have existed (and may not have existed anyway, since this entirely fictional description is like a mermaid deduced from a manatee), and this (declaration!) is why Powys can't write it.

Isn't it wonderful, I marvel, the way my points of view come to meet me when I go looking for them. For I am going to suppose for a moment that this (the above) is an explanation of the feeling my gut was giving me, which is that the state of absolute freedom would be, from a human point of view, nothing at all, or anyway not human, and that if Powys started advocating a non-illusionary freedom then he would have to throw all of his characters away and write, somehow, a nonhuman book, which is not within the scope of his longings. He wants to write people, he centres everything on people, his "queerest side-way impressions" go through a human consciousness, the problems are human problems; the insects themselves have human perceptions.

The violent movement of the stickleback disturbed a water-beetle from its afternoon sleep by shaking off a little group of vegetation-parasites which still clung to its primrose stalk. These unarmed miniscules of the land now drifted, clinging to each other in shivering apprehension, into the watery gulf of unknown regions, regions which to their simple minds must have been full of all the hungry monarchs and all the torture-loving archbishops of the aquatic world.

(Owen Glendower)

Objects at a house in Weymouth Sands do not remain in their un-named states -- their owner gives them names -- these are garden spades and so on -- meanwhile the character-owner Powys locates his people in specific places, he involves the unhuman earth and treeline with the bodies of humans, acknowledging Thomas Hardy as his teacher, dedicating his first book to Hardy, writing admirations of Hardy and even meeting Hardy in the flesh one day.

Whoever tries to visualize any scene out of the Wessex Novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons concerned "silhouetted" against a formidable skyline. One sees them, these poor impassioned ones, moving in tragic procession along the edge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darkness re-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy's manner such a refuge from the levities and gravities of the "reforming writers" is a quality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of "proportion" like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath, and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribes of men have felt it since the beginning.

(Visions and Revisions)

standing forth in low relief from the rock

So Peter Matthiessen likes integrations and primal systems. Freya Stark does not like them, or does not dislike them but they do not occur to her or they occur but do not make an impact, she cannot include them in her style, her style is a romantic not a mystic, she sees the lone person standing clear, she takes joy in things that are eccentric, and she will pick them out then assign a clear adjective or pair of them to an object to make it quickly distinct; she will set the objects apart in the sentence with the help of an "and," like this -- "the village itself, with flat roofs and arched mud gateway on a rise, and vines and fruit trees and a grassy glade of old mulberry trees where the crows cawed like English rooks in a park, were all hidden from us by poplar trees and willows."

Matthiessen is pleased when things are same and the Native American is also the Tibetan, but if Stark mentions a similarity between an item in the Middle East and one anywhere else then it is only to give the British reader (she is imagining British readers) a clear picture of this solitary event. "Like English rooks in a park."

When she wakes one Iraq morning in a thick "Scotch mist," she does not invite the reader to extend those two words, "Scotch mist," into a theory about the fundamental natures of mists, the mists in Scotland connected instinctively to the mists in Persia, this word "Scotch" uttered in a foreign setting suggesting understandings flowing secretly through the currents of the world's liquids, speaking and haunting one another as they sit suspended in the chilly air ("It often covers," she writes, "the Shah Rud Valley for days like a ceiling"), but this is Matthiessen's plan when he compares a Tibetan custom with one from Africa or the Arctic Circle; he is inviting speculation on a mystic-anthropological level, he is serious, but she is delighted, and she is not serious merely sane, and when she is knocked unconscious by near-fatal malaria she records her symptoms and spends time observing the character of the doctor, but Matthiessen appears to find his troubles more troublesome, they are a serious matter to him, and he will cure them if he can by reflecting on Zen Buddhism.

Meanwhile Stark's prose habits will not let her take the troubles solemnly; this style is too easily romantic and entertained, it repels the Matthiessen philosophy; it cannot save itself through a unity of everything but looks for a strong individuality of one, whose duty is to remain level-headed no matter what.

And this style must have been influenced by the styles of books she had read, and so those other books helped her to a legacy of this level-headedness, this faith in observation, which was recommended to the world by Lawrence Durrell and others. He edited an anthology of her writing, The Journey's Echo: selections from Freya Stark. I do not know for sure what she read but I think of the habits of the Victorian British -- she was born Victorian in 1893 -- and their observations of fossils, rocks, and rockpools, the trilobite in Thomas Hardy,* the family of the boy Gerard Manly Hopkins pacing along the shoreline, searching for specimens, and the adult poet Hopkins describing leaves or pigeons in his journal: "They look like little grey jugs by shape when they walk, strutting and jod-jodding with their heads. The two young ones are all white and the pins of the folded wings, quill pleated over quill, are like crisp and shapely cuttleshells found on the shore." (June 16th, 1873) though a mention of Barron Field's poetry at Whispering Gums reminded me how profoundly their descriptive language tripped over under the people of this same race when they tried to see Australia; for decades they could not see it and the English language in this area was purblind.

Jenny Uglow, in her biography of Gaskell, believes that Ruskin helped to make this habit of observationliterary as well as scientific; an author such as Eliot, she says, owed him a debt in this respect -- look, he said, like Hopkins in that poem -- look! look! -- you can see him in Modern Painters telling the landscape painters of the United Kingdom to look at a tree and not just jot down whatever shorthand for trees they seem to have learnt.

It was not until I had finished the previous sentence that I remembered my selected Hopkins has a painting by Ruskin on the front.




*The trilobite appears in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873): "By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites." Assume that if Hardy had been writing one hundred years earlier, before the Victorian fossil craze, then the character would have been blind to the fossil.