balance, poise, and relative gravitation

A word in Hill is always volatile, excluding those nuts and nails like "the" or "of" and could you write a poem that would make no other word volatile except those words? -- so you always knew that cordial meant polite and not drink, even though you never knew if the meant for instead? The word "vivisector" in John Cowper Powys, however, is unwaveringly evil. It is like an "and" for Powys. It always means the same thing. "[W]e soon got an entrance to all the cruellest and wickedest vivisection laboratories in New York City." (Up and Out.) "For the wickedest and most abominable practise made use of in these modern days is vivisection." (Two and Two.) "From the point of view of our mysterious System-of-Things, to be a vivisector at all is to put yourself on the side of evil against good." (Morwyn. The ghost of the Marquis de Sade is speaking.)

Then he couples it with the word "scientist," and if I had the library's copy of The Inmates still with me I could quote one of those paragraphs about the scientific institutions of Britain giving the vivisectionist asylum owner its top awards and honours.

But Powys himself likes to take scientific language and scientific discoveries for his own use, inventing personal “currents” and “rays” and “fields,” and sending one of his people to “electricity school” where she learns to build “a neat little ball of electrified feathers” so that she can fly. Plundering the enemy he is inspired by the enemy; he perverts the hard world of science that he sees, he rewrites it fantastically, he is a parasite upon it, he will resist his parasite status, he whimsies it, he allows the word “astronomy” into Up and Out but immediately he diverts it away from itself.

“You mean,” murmured Rhitha, with just the faintest tinge of mischief in her smile, ”those books about galaxies and nebulae; things of which I never hear mention without wondering why one of them ends with a Latin plural and the other with an English plural! Is that because a Latin plural means they can't ever stop going on, while an English plural means that we just don't know whether they stop or don't stop?”

So he plays. The characters in Morwyn survive the trip to Hell through a vague invocation of mythic-scientific principles. The seriousness here is similar to the seriousness of Carnacki the Ghost Finder  when he discusses his famous electric pentacle, though it is more elaborate in Powys. I am telling you a fantasy as if it is not lies.

The blow carried down the whole block of stone, carried it down to the centre of the earth with ourselves on it, but it was so large that it must have carried with it, if not some of its own atmosphere, at least something of its own balance, poise, and relative gravitation, so that it was really like sinking down with our feet securely planted on a solid segment of our planet and all the while being protected from the whole spatial sensation of "up and down" by some of the deepest laws of the cosmos.

The problem he has with real scientists is that they're not mystic enough. Carnacki would be closer to his ideal. “I came to make the Electric Pentacle, which is a most marvellous 'Defense' against certain manifestations. I used the shape of the defensive star for this protection, because I have, personally no doubt at all but that there is some extraordinary virtue in the old magic figure.” (The Gateway of the Monster.) Every scientist, in Powys' perfect world, would have the Carnackian instinct for magic.

capturing the incomparable life

Bob Rochester, diswived by the freedoms that have made this country great, decides that he is going to resurrect his personal morale with the help of a good deed: he will save the Devil's Hole pupfish. He puts it in a bucket and the pupfish is saved. "What else can I do for Nevada?" he wonders. He attends a Preserve Nevada symposium where a man insists that Las Vegas does have a history though nobody thinks so. "And you don't have to dig deep either to find it. It's sitting in the old part of town, in all the old casinos there. The bones are there. You just have to look under the shell to see what you can find," he says, and his speech is noted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Las Vegas loves its old historical bones so much that it puts them behind walls where nobody can damage them. Lucretius tells us that sight is possible because all visible objects spew little balls, which we take in with the assistance of the wonderful dark pupils that have punched two holes into our faces with unnoticed efficient modesty. The concealed sections of Las Vegas have been saved from the wastage of atomic spewing. They can keep all their molecules. No one looks at them. Preservation! But the catwalks in the Imperial Palace ceiling are still visible from the blackjack tables. Security used to dawdle there and stare at the customers through darkened glass. The owners have decided to destroy the ceiling and rename the casino. History is everywhere! One of the metal accoutrements outside Planet Hollywood has rust.

Rochester decides to make up numbers at a cultural evening. He takes a forty-minute walk from Planet Hollywood down Harmon to UNLV where a biographer is giving a talk in a room attached to the museum. I know that he was there because I attended the same lecture. On the screen above the biographer someone has projected a picture of her book with this line printed above the blurb: "A biography capturing the incomparable life and times of one of America's finest writers."

He is chilled by the thought of this incomparable life, which would not be able to be described or measured, because, without comparisons, you would lose your place in the world: you would not be able to say, "My life is tempestuous," because you would not be able to compare it to a tempest, and you would not even be able to say that your life was good or evil, deprived of the ability to compare it to other lives. It can't be an impressive life, or a boring life, or any kind of life; if it is incomparable then you can't even describe it to yourself, and you never know how well or badly you're doing and can't guess, because every time your brain tries to make a comparison your estimations are blanks. Even the Elder Gods can be descr -- I want to stop mentioning H.P. Lovecraft, this is ridiculous, back to William Hope Hodgson: even the demon in Hodgson's short story The Hog can be compared to something, namely a hog, and a giant pig coming through the floor, and Carnacki, although he has found this comparison, is still desperate and keeps asking his friends if they see, if they understand? And Bob Rochester tries to imagine Katherine Anne Porter, who was the subject of this biography, desperately asking her friends what they thought of her, but she would not have any friends because they would not know what to think, and she would have to go through life like a black holes asking like Carnacki, "Do you see, do you understand?" but she would not be able to help or prompt them with even such a sketchy definition as, "My life is like a giant demon pig."

so much refin'd

The agony of thinking that you would like to be one with everyone and the difficulty when you discover you can't become that: this was a quality of David Foster Wallace said one commentator I read a few weeks or months ago, and this attitude was juvenile in him, the commentator added, if I remember rightly, but I never bookmarked the article and articles about David Foster Wallace proliferate like stars or freckles. If you have moved into a state of separation through the medium of shame like the people in the William Matthews poem then unification is possible and even desirable since you could reach it by eradicating that shame. Shame is in the action of hiding or wanting to hide; without that hiding impulse there is no shame and by describing the motivation he classified the shame; it is the shame of certain people who understand the words "pink slip" in one way and not another way; in that other way they would not understand them without further explanation, and so the work of comprehension can take different paths even when it starts from the same place, in this case, "pink slip," two words, but what small items are misunderstandings made of, as in comedies of manners and Victorian tragedy novels, which are in this sense identical.

... None here thinks a pink slip
("You're fired," with boilerplate apologies)
is underwear.

So the two phenomena are connected and intimately indicate one another, or have done so since 1998 at least, when his posthumous book was published and the poem inside.

Love can eliminate the alienated separations between people, hints John Donne, "we shall | Be one, and one another's all" (Love's Infiniteness),

But we by a love so much refin'd,
   That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.


Our two souls therefore, which are one ...


(A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning)

So the poems chat, Matthews' explains a problem, shame, separation, and Donne's work proposes a solution, unity, love, romantic love, suggesting that if the men in Matthews' bar could all manage to fall in romantic love with one another then their situation would be cured, they might lose their habit of speaking Demotic, the words "pink slip" would open for them like a blossom: one man might see himself sliding on strawberry gelati, another man might salute his wife's unmentionables.

But that's too simple, argues Matthews. Listen to you, Mr Donne, there's a problem you say, we apply a solution, romantic love, boom, the problem is fixed, no, listen, it wouldn't work, not with the people in my After All poems, whose lives are muted and complicated, something like Raymond Carver people: life or the situation has gone too far, and who knows how to get back -- not me or them. Your way is the Aelian way of dealing with things, and he, the Ancient Roman, would say that there is a natural method that could be used, he would make me this proposal as if we're all a stork in De Natura Animalium having troubles with a bat. Pick this leaf at midnight, he would say: find the right herb at the bottom of a lake, administer it to the source of your problem, and the bat will disappear. Romantic love is not a herb, announces Donne, and there is more to it than that. Not material but spirit. Telepathy too I suppose, says Matthews, like that couple in Voss, having communication over distances because they're in love, no, I still don't swallow it. I haven't read Voss, says Donne, but I know that the narrator in The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson likes to communicate telepathically with his beloved across a landscape full of monsters. Really, says Matthews, but that's the second time in two weeks this blog has connected Hodgson with Patrick White, seeing as Hodgson was an inspiration to Lovecraft and there was that post about Riders in the Chariot and the Lovecraft goat, which I admit I only got halfway through. I think they must be almost identical then, says Donne, this White person and this Hodgson. I look forward to the monsters in Voss.

Writing "herb" I realise that Foster Wallace, being American, might have pronounced that word urb, like Uriah Heep, and I think of the numbers of people on this continent turning Cockney when they meet those four letters.

So that's Charles Dickens who's been brought in, and Aelian, who else, David Foster Wallace, the poet William Matthews, and John Donne. I could save myself the trouble of thinking out another post just by writing, now, "What other names? Who isn't here yet? I'll tackle that in a few days," and then spend my time writing five hundred names: there's my next post: done. Robert Burton sticks his head in. All you need to do is quote something, he says. Something rude in Latin.

the horror of the fixed

The air conditioning for this building is powered by a machine in the room next to this room, and when it starts up, and for as long as it runs, I can hear a long mushy detonation of rushing air, always the same speed and constancy and flatness, on and on and on.

Outside, the wind hisses through the cactus spines, and (listening to one and thinking of the other) I believe that the air conditioning machine is more aggressive than the wind, which sometimes meanders and sometimes takes a deep breath and blows and then dies again; the machine shoves the air constantly, it doesn't let it rest, but in spite of this pushing and force it doesn't sound energetic; it seems monotonous, dutiful, and bored. It needs Macbeth's porter, coming in to change the mood (which is his role, and he has been waiting for his chance since the witches), "But this place is too cold for hell," says the porter, "I'll devil-porter it no further," and at this point "Mind knocks," writes Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, "and breaks into the play, with the first and only comedy allowed in this drama. Shakespeare employs his company's leading clown (probably Robert Armin) to introduce a healing touch of nature."

A "touch of nature," with its variations and changes and its sense of three-dimensional space (the birds making their noises outside provide you with an aural map, one noise high, one noise low, one noise close, one far away, as if they're marking out the corners of a geometric shape with thousands of sides; the name of this geometric shape is probably Robert Armin) is the thing that gets smothered out of the atmosphere by this machine.

Its appearance doesn't change, no matter whether it's on or off. In the desert the stiff spines of the cactus vibrate a little as the air passes through, and the dangling leaves of the mesquite tree stream up from vertical to horizontal. But there is no sign that the machine is making the noise. "Oh," I think, "The noise might as well not be part of the machine," and then I start to believe that I would find this situation inspirational if I became a composer of musique concrète, if I could be Francisco López, who samples the noises of cities and makes albums out of the samples. In 2001 he released Buildings [New York], in 2008 he released TDDM, "based on sound materials recorded in factories in Asia," and recently he masterminded a series of projects named Sound Matter Cities. I've been listening to his Untitled #244, which is a single track, almost an hour long, put together from the sampled sounds of the Paraná and Paraguay rivers. "The air conditioner is an ingredient," I would think, if you turned me into Francisco López.

Untitled #244 has been left as one long track, not broken up, because envelopment and immersion are important, says Francisco López, the album envelops and immerses; he wants his music to fill the ear and head as fully and envelopingly as Dunsany's Elfland in the King of Elfland's Daughter fills the valley where the parliament of Erl sits, wishing for more magic in the world, and this air conditioning machine is like Elfland too in its monotonous endurance. "[N]othing stirs or fades or dies, nothing seeks its happiness in movement or change or a new thing" in Elfland, and this changeless mood is created by a sound, by elvish "incantation and song."

I would be more interested in this machine's blank white noise if I could think of it as an incantation preparing to create an Elfland, or as a partner to Gormenghast's timelessness, or even as the weird suspended atmosphere that William Hope Hodgson writes about, although he has to make the world end first, either supernaturally, or by removing the reader to another planet.

If I were Hodgson I could find a story in this air conditioning machine. The noise would begin, time would be distorted, my dog Pepper would turn into a heap of dust, "there came a faint and distant, whirring buzz … [it] reminded me, in a queer, gigantic way, of the noise that a clock makes, when the catch is released, and it is allowed to run down," the sun would rise and set at an insane speed, a hundred lightning flashes would flood downwards, "the world-noise was drowned in the roar of the wind," I would totter to a window, the sky would change, an enormous stream of luminous spheres would pass me at an unvarying rate, then a jade sun, then two suns, then no sun, then a terrifying Arena, then a Beast-God, then an Eyeless-Thing, and finally I would realise that the house had gone green. "All at once, there came a bewildering, screaming noise, that deafened me," and I am sitting in my chair again, the room has been restored, but the dog is still dead.

(This happens in The House on the Borderland, chapters XV to XXIII, right after the attack by the Swine-Things.)

Or if I were Dickens I would be vivified by the monotony, I would be roused and provoked, and Chesterton would state after I had died (stating because Chesterton liked to state), that I couldn't abide boredom, and I couldn't create it when I wrote. "The one thing [Dickens] did not describe in any of the abuses he denounced was the soul-destroying potency of routine. He made out the bad school, the bad parochial system, the bad debtor's prison as very much jollier and more exciting than they may really have been."

I read this and wish that I could be like Dickens, who did not abide boredom but rang a stranger's doorbell and lay down in the doorway, or else raced away to France. Why do I sit here bored? I wonder. Why can't I rush away to France? I spend too much time wishing that I had the good qualities of famous people, M tells me when I let him know that I want to be Hayao Miyazaki. If I became Dickens then the machine would excite me, I would write a book with it as the villain and have the rest of the people in this building picking up their pitchforks to exterminate that whooshing devil.

Chesterton writes:

As long as low Yorkshire schools were entirely colourless and dreary, they continued quietly tolerated by the public and quietly intolerable to the victims. So long as Squeers was dull as well as cruel he was permitted; the moment he became amusing as well as cruel he was destroyed. [ie, in real life the schools were closed] As long as Bumble was merely inhuman he was allowed. When he became human, humanity wiped him right out. For in order to do these great acts of justice we must always realise not only the humanity of the oppressed, but even the humanity of the oppressor.

I would realise the humanity of my oppressor, I would give it the energy that Dickens gives even to a building of Furnished Apartments in Calais, a "dead sort of house with a dead wall over the way and a dead gateway at the side, where a pendant bell-handle produced two dead tinkles, and a knocker produced a dead, flat, surface-tapping, that seemed not to have depth enough in it to penetrate even the cracked door. However, the door jarred open on a dead sort of spring; and he closed it behind him as he entered a dull yard, soon brought to a close by another dead wall, where an attempt had been made to train some creeping shrubs, which were dead; and to make a little fountain in a grotto, which was dry; and to decorate that with a little statue, which was gone."

This house, which is a list of the same word, or similar words, is not like Mr Pickwick's bright street, which is a list of different words, and dissimilar words.

'The principal productions of these towns,' says Mr. Pickwick, 'appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters.'

Pickwick, states Chesterton, is light itself, it is vitality, it is primeval. "It is the splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars were ultimately made. You might split up Pickwick into innumerable novels as you could split up that primeval light into innumerable solar systems." Chesterton is thrilled by Dickens as Annie Dillard was thrilled by creeks, "an active mystery, fresh every minute." She wrote: "Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection."

Meanwhile this machine churns on in the next room, unvarying, perfect, and outside a ground squirrel crossing the road tosses up a plume of dust, and I see that the fecundity of the natural dusty road, its numberless mass of dots and specks, has given the ground squirrel a chance to make its mark in a way that an impenetrable and constant surface would not: the dust spreads and hangs, the surface of the earth is impressed with footprints, and another ground squirrel on the other side of the road, startled, manifests its personality by deciding to vanish down a burrow with a cheep.

his deficiency serves

It would be easy to enumerate many important and splendid gifts in which Butler as a novelist was deficient; but his deficiency serves to lay bare one gift in which he excelled, which is his point of view. To have by nature a point of view, to stick to it, to follow it where it leads, is the rarest of possessions, and lends value even to trifles.

This is Virginia Woolf, writing about Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh in 1919, and she's articulating an idea that comes to me whenever I try to explain to myself my liking for a writer like ER Eddison, someone "deficient" in "many important and splendid gifts" but hedgehoglike able to do one thing very well, to produce a piece of work that is particular to themselves, and is remarkable not for its intelligence, or its insight into character, or any of the other things that people commonly draw on when they want to praise a book, but for its apparent fidelity to the writer's - I don't know what to call it. Perspective, perhaps, with 'perspective' encompassing voice as well as subject matter. These writers seem to embody themselves in their mistakes as well as their successes; in some cases the two are indistinguishable. Here I'm thinking of someone like William Hope Hodgson, whose characters are so thin they're almost nonexistent, whose settings are rudimentary pulp, whose plots are often borrowed and shaky (The Night Land excepted), but whose point of view, which, in Hodgson's case, is one of raw fear, is so strong and apparently genuine that it heats the reader through this weak façade like fire behind a sheet of cloth, like UV through a cloud. The flimsiness of the façade helps to remind the reader that it is a façade, and the storyteller who keeps interrupting himself throughout Hodgson's short story The Hog to ask his friends, "Do you understand?" "I wonder whether you can understand" "Can you understand?" "I wonder if I make it clear to you?" seems to be the author himself, struggling to smash a hole through the feebleness of words. The writer is wrestling with language; language is getting away from him, and at any moment he might give up the struggle and collapse into a gibberish of which the only comprehensible words will be "Outer Monstrosities," "Black void," and, "It was yellow."

If Hodgson seemed to be doing this on purpose you could call his writing Brechtian, the work of a man who never lets you forget that the actors are acting, but no, there's nothing to suggest that he's anything but an author whose passions outstripped his ability to articulate them. He died of a bullet in World War I, a simpler fate than anything he imagined for his characters, but maybe not less horrifying.