a battle-cry reminding the hearers of the long story

I was reading the Giramondo reprint of Murnane’s first book, Tamarisk Row, when I entered into an impression, and “entered” is more or less what it was like, as if I had left one frame of mind completely and come into another.

(The book itself has an opinion about the nature of being placed and trying to identify the presence of a place but this is not an attempt to create that kind of link between Murnane’s ideas and mine.)

It was the kind of impression that I have had before, and the words that give it to me will only work that way once. I was part-way into this sentence on page one hundred and seventy-three. “For a few minutes he enjoys the revelation that this one name among sixteen, Hills of Idaho, which people have spoken aloud so often with no special sonority –“ & here I felt, rather than imagined, the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. I had an idea that the only purpose of this speech was to explain that people who had never bothered to think about St Crispin’s Day before were, from now on, going to put it at the forefront of their intelligences every time it appeared on the calendar. At that moment, swollen with the connection, I didn’t think of any reason why they were going to be impressed by the day, only that it was going to suddenly become instantly important.

But why … and now I trust that I had detected, out of the corner of my eye, without knowing it, some words that only appeared to my conscious reading mind after I had gone on further in the sentence, down one line to the words “battle-cry” and then the word on the line after that, the word that I believe was the crucial word, “band.”

-- may in future whenever it is spoken ring out like a battle-cry reminding the hearers of the long story of how a little band of men never stopped believing that their day would come.

Now I could see the silhouettes of soldiers on a beach. For a moment I couldn’t place it, though I knew it was a film or television show of some kind. It was the advertising for an American television serial, Band of Brothers, which I had never watched. I was actually conflating it with The Pacific, which is also about American soldiers, but in The Pacific they visited Melbourne, and so I recalled it more specifically, because this was the only thing in either series that was interesting. I haven’t seen The Pacific.

The connection between the soldiers on the beach, the sight of a man on a stage reciting the St Crispin’s Day speech, and my copy of Tamarisk Row seemed genuinely mystical to me for a time, and somehow unrelated to the acts of writing or to speech or to any act that would have created the words on the page in front of me.

ground where now we stand

If I had to choose a piece of Bathgate's scenery I would pick the contrast between the colours of the swans and the pelicans in The Sydney Exhibition, 1879, “The only fleet a flock of dusky swans, | Which, near some fearless white-plumed pelicans | Swam stately on the quiet water's breast” -- only I want the contrast jammed closer, eg: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 14, the line itself turning on the word “turn”), “fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace” (Tennyson, Idylls of the King), or in Hill's Funeral Music, “fastidious trumpets,” even “grim fatuous clown,” from First Dog On The Moon's cartoon about Joe Hockey, the closeness that is also part of jokes and jump cut edits, things close together seeming exciting by proximity, proximity being the arena in which events take place, change wrought, attacks carried out; the possibilities fly open; the poem should be shocked by the surprising contrast of white and black animals on the water.

Note that the colours haven't been mined any further by the author, who, in this narrative scene, is envisioning the First Fleet coming to Botany Bay, obvious, you'd think, obvious, the “poor native black” standing there a little way earlier in line six, looking at him, asking to be transposed into the swans, but does Bathgate think that way? Is that what “fearless” next to “white-plumed pelicans” is trying to do? The British have come and they are fearless, etc, to lead on from the earlier description of “the first daring English wand'rer” in line two?

A century complete has scarcely passed
Since the first daring English wand'rer stood
Upon this favoured ground where now we stand.

Bathgate is so gentle I can't tell. Question though: why does he give the pelicans credit for being fearless, on that quiet bay without the swans threatening them or the ships coming too close, or any other thing trying to attack? Does the act of water-riding seem terrifying in and of itself, to the mind of Alexander Bathgate, even if the water is quiet, and therefore is this act always performed either fearfully or fearlessly, in that same mind?

It is brave to be stately when your entire activity threatens you; and you are like an aristocrat getting into a tumbril.

Or else the absence of fear in these pelicans is so incredible to Bathgate that it doesn't need to be justified by any poem, even if he is the author of that poem. It is a royal majesty. Explanation is beyond the point. It should exist. It should have a lovely, pure existence. It should be possible to detect an incredible, impossible purity behind the word "fearless."

When John Donne discusses God in his Sermons he considers the rights of kings.

Donne was not a king any more than Bathgate was a pelican. So I see that the normal existences of alien beings can be a source, either of wonder or of speculation, since Bathgate is wonderstruck without speculating and Donne speculates without seeming wonderstruck.

There is no reason in the poem for the pelicans to be fearless and no reason either, for the wand'rers to be daring. Australia is not only "favoured," it is furthermore a “fairyland of flowers and bright-hued birds” where the “calistemon's flaming brush-like plume, | Meet and delight the adventurer's eye.” “Daring” becomes synonymous with “inexperienced.” When is it brave, entering fairyland? When you don't know that it's fairyland.

consuming good heavy food

Buddenbrooks moves along in set pieces or literary moments – I mean in scenes that I can think of in isolation -- either long or short, the briefest ones being those miniature performances that take place in solitary sentences, like Herr Kesselmeyer playing the piano on his shoulder.

That moment is inert, it comes and goes without an aftermath, which means that it is the easiest kind of scene to pick out, but there are other moments that act as triggers, making them less easy for me to bring them out quickly because they seep into their own repercussions. The beginning of Tony's hatred for the Hagenström family is signalled by the scene in which the son kisses her, the hatred goes on throughout the book, occasionally mentioned, then, almost at the end, the kiss re-enters the story.

Food is present almost as soon as the book opens. In chapter one they are waiting for the lunch bell to ring; by chapter two it has rung. “There they all sat, on heavy high-backed chairs, consuming good heavy food ...” (translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter). Food goes on vibrating throughout the book, the wealth of the family often expressing itself in food (and the black sheep Christian jumps up from his chair because he has a nightmare fear of choking on a peach), until my idea of their money was also a feeling for spongy substances decaying and vanishing. They could have been buying jewels in chapter one instead and showing off their jewels in chapter two. At the end of the book they might still have owned the jewels. They were never going to keep the food.

The value of food is effervescence. It starts with the gastric juices. So the family's loss, a soft haemorrhage, is a different species of loss to the losses of a character such as Shylock, who could have kept control over his money and his religion (identifying himself by both of those as soon as he appears onstage) if the Merchant of Venice hadn't taken place. But it does, and he is dispossessed. Other people are dictating to him. A state of loss exists at the end of both stories but the value of that loss is different in each case, even though you could sum up both of them with the same words: “Their wealth is gone.”

by reason knowledg is dividable, as well as composable

Cavendish praised John Evelyn's book Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664), “though it is large through number and variety, yet you have enclosed it with elegancy and eloquence,” which is also her praise of Shakespeare in the Sociable Letters, who could express multiplicity with intelligence. “Shakespear did not want Wit, to express to the Life all Sorts of Persons,” “for who could Describe Cleopatra better than he hath done, and many other Females of his own Creating, as Nan Page, Mrs Page, Mrs Ford, the Doctors Maid, Bettrice, Mrs Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, and others, too many to Relate?” though I would not say that she thought Evelyn was Shakespeare, only that she saw the enclosure of multiplicity as a virtue, and found it when she looked for virtues.

It is this belief in the value of variety that made her an insightful critic, says Fitzmaurice, “The point, again, seems to be variety,” and it seems, when I read her, that she is interested in the multifarious as an idea, and how insistently it appears everywhere in life; she sees it when she looks at herself; she sees the ways she might be and the way she is.

I am that the vulgar calls proud, not out of self-conceit, or to slight or condemn any, but scorning to do a base or mean act, and disdaining rude or unworthy persons; insomuch, that if I should find any that were rude, or too bold, I should be apt to be so passionate, as to affront them, if I can, unless discretion should get betwixt my passion and their boldness, which sometimes perchance it might, if discretion should crowd hard for place. For though I am naturally bashful, yet in such a cause my spirits would be all on fire.

(A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life)

She is “a coward” but also “valiant;” it depends on the circumstances, she says, and whether a gun has been fired, also, who is in danger, and whether her honour is involved; there are all these possibilities of change in her and why omit any; she is interested in everything that she could be, or else it erupts into her and she needs to make a record, or she allows it to erupt and follows a style that encourages eruption.

“The Empress confessed that she observed Nature was infinitely various in her works” in The Blazing World and her sentences often swell themselves with multitudes of words around one theme, “an Elephant seemed no bigger then a Flea; a Camel no bigger then a Lowse; and an Ostrich no bigger then a Mite,” “the Spider-men, which were her Mathematicians, the Lice-men which were her Geometricians, and the Magpie- Parrot- and Jackdaw-men, which were her Orators and Logicians,” “the Earth is a warm, fruitful, quiet, safe, and happy habitation,” “the Women, which generally had quick wits, subtile conceptions, clear understandings, and solid judgments;” the whole Blazing World being that way also, a series of discussions around the strange country the Lady-Empress has come into, which is an example of “female rhetoric” a blogger named Celeste argues, not meaning rhetoric performed by females but a style that mounts to a point by conglomeration instead of announcing its thesis directly. “Instead of building a world for the purpose of holding a particular narrative plot, she builds a world with the purpose of simply understanding the full range of its complexity and complications.”

Truly, said the Empress, I do believe that it is with Natural Philosophy, as it is with all other effects of Nature; for no particular knowledg can be perfect, by reason knowledg is dividable, as well as composable; nay, to speak properly, Nature her self cannot boast of any perfection, but God himself; because there are so many irregular motions in Nature, and 'tis but a folly to think that Art should be able to regulate them, since Art it self is, for the most part, irregular.

and so I am

The absence of adaptive flexibility here fascinates me: once the subject matter changes then the style has to change as well, into a different mode that must have felt right (felt Vidal) for the non-Austeny classes; that mode is high physical shouting drama, raving misery, characters going mad, and the "melancholy cry" of the curlew.

But she awoke, and had quite an access of delirium, screaming and talking, knowing no one, but always insisting that she was going on some weary journey, among trees, with nothing to eat, and a very high wind; and that Jack was free, and was expecting her. Then she looked at her stained arms and hands and shuddered, exclaiming at her horror of blood.

The lead characters among the convicts are ordinarily desperate and either frantic or cruel in ways that do not have any correlation among the Austen people, who, when they suffer, do it without madness or visions of blood. The Austens have probably read Shakespeare and the non-Austens haven't, but it is the dying non-Austen whose literary bodily self gets miscegenated with Ophelia, with Lady Macbeth, and with repetitive mad-person lines that have been written for spoken-acting voices. "Yes, yes; I'm ill, am I? Well, and so I am. That's odd," she says. (Repetitions in Shakespeare: "No more o' | that, my lord, no more o' that," "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul," "Now, now, now, now:" all tether-ended people gone frantic, closing in on death.)

And her Jack is driven into a cul de sac that seems doomed and fated, which is not a state that afflicts the Austens, but it does affect people in Shakespeare as well as the Ancient Greeks and Romans who were at the mercy of their spiteful gods who came down and shot your tootling sons with arrows because you had insulted them. In the same Ancient vein, one of the characters in a Vidal short story from Tales for the Bush discovers (when the author gives him the words to say so) that his wife has died from a lingering illness because he did not go to church. The convicts and workers in Bengala are closer to Vidal's early people than to these later Austenesques; they are closer to plays and poetry and the Austens are closer to prose.

So the characters, like two sets of alien species who have landed at the same time on an identical planet, live in at least two different behavioural worlds. Those worlds can touch one another: the people from the Austen world can put the young woman from the drama world to bed and try to cure her ("Miss Terry gave her some nourishing drink") but she is true to the world of poetry and she dies calling for Jack and her mother.

to be truly polar

In Hillgarth the early Catholics are destroying and disturbing existing structures, not to do away with structure but to introduce a new one; the mind could not love two structures at once said their verdict; the mind could not be a pagan and a Catholic although to be honest I think that in the privacy of the individual brain these do not have to be contradictory ideas, for who is there anywhere who cannot hold ideas that go against one another, who can't know and not know at the same time, the two states intermixed and cosy, or pressing against one another, so that a teenage passenger in a speeding car comes up with these words for her last text message, "I'm going to die lol," typing with her fingers, first the el, the oh, then another el, an action that comes to pause, later, in the sight of this same message printed later in a newspaper for the sake of horror, the doomed woman expressing a belief in death but also hitting an attitude with those words (almost undoubtedly in sweetly intimate correspondence with the behaviour she has shown in the past) as though she believed she was continuous and should remain consistent: here is faith in life's extension?

No thought goes unmixed, and there is no borderline between thoughts; the plural form of the word thought must be more arbitrary than it looks but I use it anyway, very helplessly.

Perhaps she was horrified when she sent the message out but probably not in the way that the reader of the newspaper is horrified. The word is the same but the experience is not. Hnh, the reader thinks, I might be in the same situation without knowing it, complacent and about to die -- entertaining themselves with this ghost story -- then the piano falls out of the window above them and smack -- no it doesn't -- they go on with life regardless, as Robert Louis Stevenson recommends in Aes Triplex, the writer in this essay sounding so gung-ho that I remember his criticism of Thoreau. "Thoreau was a skulker," says Stevenson, who likes his men to run around with "dash" and get a bit drunk. Shakespeare, he says. Who is there among us who does not believe that the Bard was game for a good shickering when the thought occurred? Drunk he was, and rolling around with the oranges. Thoreau, on the other hand.

"He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not enough of them to be truly polar with humanity."

But then the essay slides toward the favourable. Contradictory thoughts are easy: the patriot can call the country fine and right even though they've seen the account of the massacre; the parents of gangbangers are quoted in an article saying that their burglar son is a good boy, and when I consider those examples I realise that the woman in the place behind the tree would probably be volcanic with counter arguments if I called her a repressive mother, even though the words I hear her say to her children most often are "Shut the fuck up" and "Get the fuck in your room and don't come out," and yesterday she interrupted one of their arguments by screaming this sentence at her son, "Then let her play with the fucking game by her retarded self; you go outside." Afterwards she kept on screaming with nothing but vowels, and who was that aimed at?

The vikings in Henry Treece's novels manage to cope with all of their gods together, the Christian and the not-Christian, and they were happy until they were lectured and so, apparently, according to documents in Hillgarth, were thousands of other early-Catholic people, going to church at the appointed times, then burning their magical turfs in the barn afterwards and being kind to a tree until someone arrived sternly and said, no, you may not, if you are that then you cannot be this as well; your private accommodations between one jealous god and a group of other gods cannot be sustained, and the private justifications have to be eliminated or buried.

it is not necessary

Ann Radcliffe takes that one Nurse-trait, prolixity, and doles it out to more than one character, and yet her servants aren't actually unreasonably prolix (she doesn't carry it a long way, she hints at the prolixity they could achieve if they were allowed, "Well, Peter, it is not necessary to repeat what you said --" the other party reacts as if the servant is talking more than they do --), and the relationship between master and servant is always superior to inferior, and not, as in Romeo and Juliet, a to and fro between companions who have known one another for years. The masters in Radcliffe expect an instant answer -- they've inserted their money in this particular vending machine so where is the can? -- is their tone -- though if you note the words on the page you can see that they talk more than the servants. And this makes them seem cruel, which is not the dynamic in the Shakespeare.

Even the sweet heroes and heroines adopt that impatient master-mode when the relevant scene arrives, noble and sensitive creatures otherwise but changing like werewolves when this brand of conversation rises full-mooned into the plot. Vivaldi, hero of The Italian, tells his servant Paulo to be quiet, be quiet Paulo, be quiet, all right Paulo, keep it short Paulo, that's enough Paulo, Paulo, we're being held by the Inquisition Paulo will you stop antagonising them. Of course master, says Paulo, who adores his master with berzerk sincerity like all of these mistreated sods, it's just that they're idiots. Paulo, they're standing right there. I know master, and what idiots they look.

And this is a nexus of artificiality, the fact that a character can be called sensitive, thoughtful, kind, a hero, and also engage in behaviour that is unkind, patronising, abrupt, insensitive, going from one assigned role into the other without any reflection from the author, or any sign that there is supposed to be reflection from the reader either, we are expected to switch brains, forget the old and embrace the new, or decide that this new set of cruel tags fits naturally onto the same skeletal prose-framework as the old kind ones, take the master's side and roll our eyes, even when the master is La Motte, who, in most of the rest of the novel, we're expected to despise, weak man, unworthy man, but for the purposes of this convention he is suddenly ourselves.

Conclude that for the duration of the servant-scene we are supposed to forget that one human being snapping at another for trivial reasons is repulsive and not heroic or sympathetic; we want a blind spot here, Radcliffe had that blind spot, her readers might have had it too unless she misjudged them: the conversation is a black hole where assumption rules, the clouds part to reveal the pointing neon hand, and the mutual game of pretending that these scraps of deployed description are human beings, trembles.

words are a very fantastical banquet

Servants in Radcliffe aren't often allowed to answer a question without being interrupted -- that's true in Romance of the Forest and true in The Italian as well, the two books of hers I've recently read -- "I got a sound drubbing," says servant Peter in the Forest, as he's telling La Motte about a reconnoitering expedition to a nearby village, "but then it was in your business, and so I don't mind. But if I ever meet with that rascal again --" then the master steps in, "You seem to like your first drubbing so well, that you want another, and unless you speak more to the purpose you shall soon have one," and soon again, "Is it impossible for you to speak to the point?" snips La Motte, and "Do be less tedious if it is in thy nature," and this pattern recurs, not only with Peter and La Motte, but with other servants and other masters, in different combinations; Peter enters the role of the one who exasperates people; he can barely say a line without somebody having a go at him, and it's played for laughs, it seems brutal.

This is the Nurse and Juliet, I thought when I came across it the first time -- the servant who keeps talking about themselves ("Fie, how my bones ache! what a jaunt have I had!" says the Nurse, "Would thou hadst my bones, and I thy news," says Juliet) and the master trying to extract some specific piece of information -- "although," I said, "probably an everyday comedy trope at the time and borrowed from other literature without coming through Shakespeare" -- and I still believe, without knowing for sure, that it must have been a contemporary habit that she picked up -- believing this because she picked it up, when she's not a funny writer; easiest to take what's there -- but I noticed that the pattern was accompanied by bits of language that seemed to indicate an older presence inhabiting Radcliffe's brain, "thy" in La Motte's "thy nature" when the characters use a normal "you" in other conversations, and also his "speak more to the purpose," which appears in Much Ado About Nothing: "He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose," says Benedick in the garden, Act Two, Scene Three, "like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes." Benedick at this point has sent a servant Boy to bring him a book; the words "He was wont," etc, are not referring to this Boy, but Benedick began the speech by telling the Boy to stop faffing around and obey.

Benedick:
In my chamber-window lies a book: bring it hither
to me in the orchard.

Boy:
I am here already, sir.

Benedick:
I know that; but I would have thee hence, and here again.

Exit Boy

And I suspect (though I can only suspect) that the conjunction of actions, servants being told to hurry up, masters giving orders, and "his words are a very fantastical banquet," suggested that other phrase to Radcliffe's mind, namely, "to the purpose," and I suspect also that in The Italian she is thinking of Macbeth when one character urges an accomplice to stab a person to death, then, when the accomplice baulks, tells him to hand over the dagger, saying, "Arouse yourself, and be a man!" So too, Lady Macbeth tells her husband to hand her his daggers when he baulks: "Infirm of purpose! / Give me the dagger." Meanwhile the accomplice suffers bloody visions. Macbeth has bloody visions. In another part of the book the murderer who says, "Arouse yourself!" is in cahoots with a woman who is unnaturally firm and murderous (thinks the author) for a woman; and so Shakespeare seems to disintegrate and scatter himself through the two books, emerging from the author's brain at different times.

I know, I know, I know, I'm aware: people reading a book are often amazed when they see how nicely it reflects something they already know. "Look at this sentence here, they've been reading my favourite --" "Nuh," says the author, interviewed, "never heard of it. Total coincidence. Bizarre."

But whether she thought about Benedick or not is less interesting than the idea that she could have done so, that these conjunctions leading to results are possible, and that evolution therefore is capable of mysterious courses.

like an amoeba and a giraffe

Calves are born from cows and worms are born from corpses as everybody knows, says Lucretius, but if worms have souls then does this mean that a person's soul, after they die, divides itself into parts and each part enters a worm? He is asking rhetorically because he already knows that the answer is no, of course not, each worm has its own private soul, which it obtains at birth as it germinates inside the corpse.

No two souls are ever the same, he adds, each one is different, they are modulated, and so, reading this, I realise that the Lucretian sense-seeds of hearing and seeing must modulate too, like the souls of worms and people and also the cows, different each time, or else we'd see nothing but a single plane of colour and never hear anything except a single unending sound. One sight-atom must be red, the atom next to it not quite red, the atom next to that one even further into the colour brown, etc, small changes between definite states, those definite states being pure red and pure brown, very rare, and perhaps only ideas in our heads, ultimate measurements that we need to keep to ourselves so that we can describe our world of modulations, holding onto that pure brown so that we can look at a tree and judge it "light brown" or "greenish brown" or in other words not-pure-brown; and anyone who assumed that it was striving for the colour brown in the first place would have to call it an imperfect tree and a failure.

The difference between light brown and greenish brown is the difference between hoops and hoopla; the physical differences between the words are not great but the understood difference is much greater, a hoop is not a hoopla, a hoopla is not a hoop. The contrast between the two letters and the one letter is the journey between one country and another country.

Hoopla and hoop, by the way, goes back to a post I made a few days ago (I'm putting this here in case someone out there is asking themselves, Where did this hoop-hoop come from?), when I was talking to M. about wordplay in French, and the reason I was considering French in the first place, was that I had seen a review for a book by Gérard Macé at the Complete Review website, and from there I discovered an article that mentioned the prose poet Jean Follain, and also another prose poet, Francis Ponge. There was nothing by Macé at any of my local libraries, but I found a copy of Dreaming the Miracle: Three French Prose Poets: Max Jacob, Jean Follain, Francis Ponge and read that instead.

Ponge wrote (this is a word I saw applied to him) cosmologies, and like a god or wizard or autistic naturalist he would take a single thing, "Snails," for instance, or "Fire," and concentrate on it until it was a universe of separate parts or actions -- he wrote a tense psychoanalysis of water ("passive yet persistent in its one vice, gravity"), and saw a generative world-making power in the development of bread in an oven.

He is the father in Bruno Schulz's short stories and bread and fire are his mannequins. He announces new characters and natures for every nonhuman thing he considers. His fire doesn't have the usual personality of written fire -- it's not angry blazing fire or glowing cosy fire -- fire, a phenomena judged by the way it warms or threatens humans -- this is an alien fire, self-contained, strange, "it moves like an amoeba and a giraffe at the same time, its neck lurching, its foot dragging …" an effect of radiant oddity that doesn't only appear in Ponge, of course, or only in prose poetry, and I thought of Les Murray giving muscles to a liquid in The Butter Factory, "paddlewheels sailed the silvery vats where muscles / of the one deep cream were exercised" or Alice Oswald, in her new spin on the Iliad, bringing death down on an ancient Greek with the modernity of a lift. "They met a flying spear / And like a lift door closing / Inexplicable Hephaestus / Whisked one of them away / And the other died."

A reviewer pointed out the lift door and I thought, he's right, a lift door in the Iliad, what a mind, to think of that, what an intelligence, and I was filled with respect for Alice Oswald, and compared her to the Lucretius translation I was reading, which, although it was published in 1916, uses archaic language, all "doth" and "e'en" and "nay," as if the poem had been translated much earlier. The translator loves "vasty" too, as in "vasty deep." There is no Deep in this book that is not also Vasty. Those two words together in that order, "vasty deep", sends the culture-brain zhooshing away like an omnivore vulture, to Shakespeare, Henry I, Part I, and Glendower announcing that, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," but Lucretius' translator William Ellery Leonard does not have a use for that reference, even though he's the one who put it there; there is no indication that he wants to connect On The Nature of Things to Henry I, Part I with any theme, any idea, any mood, or anything besides those two words, "vasty deep" which run between them now like a fishing line, with the fish on one end and the rod on the other, each made of a substance alien to the other, one flesh, the other wood or plastic -- and each one moved by different aims, one to live, the other to kill. Leonard the fisherman has pulled up Shakespeare on his hook but now he doesn't know what to do with him, all he can do is let him flop back in the water, and then, pages later, fish him up again with exactly the same bait.

It looks as though he had the words "vasty deep" trapped inside him in a mental folder labelled Use This! Correct Poetic Language and when the right Latin trigger arrived in the poem he was translating then they flowed out like a native force, as Blanchot saw words crowd through an author: "Words give to the one who writes them the impression of being dictated to him by usage, and he receives them with the uneasiness of finding in them an immense reservoir of facilities and effects already assembled -- ready without his powers having any role in it." Leonard had been infected by this fragment of literature, possibly picking up the sickness from a schoolbook like the one I found a few years ago at a library sale, a copy of Henry I, Part I, with an index of words at the back, an introduction for children, and the owner's name and the number of their class written inside the cover.

So assume that the translator was haunted as Lovecraft's characters can be haunted, through the medium of a book ("No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet," writes one Lovecraft narrator, shuddering with madness) but the American's Old Gods are unsubtle haunters, they make their victims gibber, babble, rave, stare, suffer visions, and argue with their colleagues ("It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic" says another narrator, referring to a scientific expedition), but the haunting known as Henry I, Part I only has this very quiet manifestation -- it makes you write vasty deep several times in the same poem -- the subtlest ghost you've ever met.







Ponge was translated by Beth Archer Brombert. Blanchot is the same Blanchot I quoted a couple of weeks ago. I've probably used the Murray before as well. Lovecraft's "no hand had touched that book" comes from the end of The Shadow Out of Time and "this contemplated invasion of the antarctic" comes from the first sentence of At the Mountains of Madness.

The Shadow:

It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case -- the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet.

Glendower's line exists so that Hotspur can make his smart reply: "Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?" and it probably wouldn't be so memorable if it wasn't being chased up by that quick snap, which fulfills everybody's dream, l'esprit de l'escalier realised before it's too late, and the responsive one rescued from regret, saved by himself, which is the best way to be saved.

The great thing about that lift door in Oswald's poem, is that it sounds absolutely natural and normally descriptive, and yet if you describe it baldly, "Alice Oswald put a lift door in the Iliad," it sounds as if it might be attention-getting and purposelessly strange, something that leaps out and throws the poem off, sucking all of your attention to that novelty -- but it doesn't, it is purposeful, the poet maintains her rhythm, treating it as if it's any other bit of description, and it suits everything -- the finality, the sharp mechanical bang-bang of the action -- it looks right.

But why should I say it should sound strange, I ask myself (this is me, asking myself: I ask) when people have been doing this for years, back, back, down to Dickens and the modern science of his fog-dinosaur, right next to -- in the same sentence as -- the waters of Genesis and a city? "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."

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.

then, from hour to hour, we rot

Now and then we have a chance to visit an art gallery, and I notice that when an Arizona artist decides to paint or photograph a desert plant, the plant they usually choose is a cactus, the bollards of the barrel cactus or the prickly pear, or the obvious saguaro, or, more rarely, the cholla. The two cholla that we see most often around here are cylindropuntia bigelovii, commonly called teddybear for the sake of its apparent, but false, fluffiness, and cylindropuntia fulgida also known as the jumping cactus, for the way knobs of it seem to leap and attach themselves to your clothes as you walk past. Early European-American artists had the same problem with unfamiliar terrain as early European-Australian artists, the hand with the paintbrush veering back into the shapes it had been taught in preference to the shapes that were in front of its eyes, and in a painting in the Phoenix Art Museum, you can see that one of those hands has turned the cholla into parasols, so that a river valley becomes a landscape of bushes and umbrellas.

Make me a painter, I said to M., and I'd ignore the cactus and paint the grass and branches, because the desert is full of brilliant spindles, those very long thin white arching growths that make fine lines across one another, streaks and sweeps of movement and monochrome Bridget Rileys, and then there's the way those small grasses have been moulded into waves, combed like hair in the directions of the washes (the rain must have run across them once and left them frozen in that position, Medusa rain) -- and that same small green grass is growing now across its ancestors from last year, all ash-grey as if struck with an apocalyptic blast, the bright green extraordinarily vivid over the withered and dead grey, as Proust, according to Tadié, grew over Ruskin: read him, translated him, absorbed him, and passed on, developing, sprouting, taking nourishment. (This is not a secret, but Tadié makes it sound vampiric.)

Perhaps they do paint those grasses, the artists, and then they don't exhibit them because they believe that grass won't sell, so they exhibit the cactus, and keep the unpopular subject matter at home in their studios, or give it away to friends. Look at you for example, I say to myself, if you only knew yourself from your public exhibition in this blog you'd think you read almost nothing but Proust and Stead and a few dead Britons, because you never mention the Kawabata you read in January, or the Canadian Margaret Laurence, or Three by Peter Handke. Ditto, perhaps, for the artists of Arizona: they keep their grasses back for reasons that they never consider, or their eyes skip past them and they go on to the cactus as naturally and lazily as you go on to Proust. Or not lazily: "This," they say to themselves, "is a subject worth extrapolating, the curve along the side of this barrel cactus ..."

Online there's only one sign that I've read Kawabata -- I submitted a sentence from the first chapter of Beauty and Sadness to the literary clock project in the Guardian. "At midnight his wife and daughter might still be bustling about, preparing holiday delicacies in the kitchen, straightening up the house, or perhaps getting their kimonos ready or arranging flowers." Searching for more literary time, I sketched out a hesitant theory: that almost everything in fiction happens on the hour or at half past, or maybe, more rarely, a quarter past or a quarter to (some Americans say, a quarter of) but never at an irregular time, six past two, or eleven thirty-seven. When Kevin Jackson put together an anthology of prose time, The Book of Hours, he discovered mainly rounded times, for example, Edith Wharton in her House of Mirth, "Four o'clock found her in the drawing room: she was sure that Sheldon would be punctual," and Shakespeare, in Act Two, Scene Seven, of As You Like It:

And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock:
Thus we may see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags:
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.'

In Jackson only the comedy writers use irregular time. Sarah Dunn in A Day in the Life of an American Slacker, circa 1994 finds activities for 1.26 am and 2.42 pm.

3.14 pm. Leave the house and wander around aimlessly.

Ask me to search for for irregular times and I'd look in comic novels. Graham Greene's nonfictional In Search of a Character / Two African Journals, comes near irregularity once or twice, "At 2:10 pm at last away. Terribly hot. Uneasy siesta," but usually rounds things off: "Explosion in one ship at about 6 a.m. and a warning bell to the crew," "A rough day between 9 and 4 and a little before tea I was sick." Dorothy Wordsworth in her diary does the same, toying with irregularity but returning to roundedness: "I walked to Keswick. Set off at 5 minutes past 10 and arrived at 1/2 past 2." "We had not much sunshine or wind but no rain till about 7 o'clock when we had a slight shower."

In The Man Who Loved Children even the baby being born tries to adhere to a rounded schedule. "See what time it is, Looloo," Sam says.

It was six-thirty. When the baby's cry came, they could not pick it out, and Sam, eagerly thrusting his face amongst their ears, said, "Listen, there, there, that's the new baby." He was red with delight and success. They heard voices, and their mother groaning still, and then, quite free and separate, the long thin wailing, and voices again.

"Six-forty-five," said Louie.

Conclusion? People don't think in irregular times, they don't consider them, they shy away from them, they think they're funny or ridiculous, too precise and Puritan (they fix you down, perhaps, they say, "You are in this minute and no other," and life itself is so natively vague and many-sided that any kind of pinpoint seems wrong, it makes us a little frantic maybe; in that contrast lies Dunn's humour), they lack the rings of generosity that surround an o'clock or a half past. We spend most of our lives in time we don't want to think about. Things happen about 6 a.m. but never about 5:56. Five fifty-six is only five fifty-six. Five fifty-six is finite. Five fifty-six dies quickly. Six o'clock has a whole hour to play with before it turns into seven. Long-lived six o'clock, short-lived five fifty-six.

I'm inhabiting one of the ridiculous minutes right now. It's eight forty-eight in the morning.

The narrator of Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell, which was the second novella in my Three is an Austrian man on holiday in the US. He visits several places in the east and south, which I had no mental references for -- and therefore they didn't interest me, they might as well have been Mordor -- but then he went to Tucson, south of us, and I lit up like a tour guide, ah! yes! Tucson! even though I have only been there once, briefly, when someone drove us through the downtown area. "There ain't a lot here," the driver observed, and then we went to a shopping mall, where there was even less. The only shop with any customers was a pet store where a Mexican woman with long nails was making a rattling noise on the glass cages to attract the attention of the puppies. All of the shopping centres -- malls -- I've seen in Arizona have been indoor urban ghost towns, with a few people sitting by a fountain, a family pushing a child in a stroller, a Macy's, and when you stand at one of the decorative palm trees and look upwards you can see two or three tiers of shops without customers.

These are called dead malls, says the internet, and they are an eerie experience, well-lit and expectant and inhabited by security guards who must get a lot of leisurely exercise, strolling and strolling, as we stroll up and down the dirt road outside this house, although in our case we see the footprints of animals impressed in the dust, lines of forks arranged heel to toe that mean quail, and the tiny clawed fleur de lys of the ground squirrel, all unknown to the guards of the dead malls, who see only goods behind windows and the open neanderthal caves of absent shops.*

Handke's narrator, landing in Tucson, notices desert around the runway. "The city is in the middle of a desert, a hot wind blows all day; sand clouds race across the runway, and on both sides of it there was cactus with white and yellow flowers." If there were flowers then he must have been here at this time of year, springtime. He sees an agave, a lawn, and a palm tree by a swimming pool; and I think those are the only plants he notices in Arizona before he buys a plane ticket and flies to Oregon. There he visits two places, first a logging town named Estacada, "Charred tree trunks, gashed hillsides, burned trash bins," in the forest south-east of Portland, and then Twin Rocks, "a town on the Pacific coast some seventy-five miles west of Estacada" (seventy-five miles: even alienated characters think in round zeroes and fives) where he stands by the sea until another person appears. "With rigid, graven faces we approached one another; suddenly she looked away and screamed," translates Ralph Manheim. Like Estacada, Twin Rocks has "burned-out trash bins."

We didn't go to those places but that was the Oregon we saw, a state made up of forest and coast. It's the rivers that haunt me though, running by the sides of the roads, and then rushing away into the trees, coming from somewhere and going to somewhere -- mysterious amber rivers, with no beginning and no end, like a point on Kant's line, a moment connected to time by the action of the observer, but ours were not connected, they were only the segment moments, and the beginnings and ends of the lines were invisible to us. My parents went through Oregon some years ago, on a train, at night, said my mother on the phone, and they saw nothing but darkness.







*While they're on duty, that is. Off-duty they might spend hours walking up and down dirt roads looking at quail prints for all I know.

Beauty and Sadness was translated by Howard Hibbett.

a hydra to deliver out a hiding

I might have been reading one of Greg Baum's articles when it occurred to me that some of the more imaginative football commentators, verbal and written, do as Dickens did, and superheat their prose with allusions, both classical and vernacular -- treating the classical as a more powerful and tweaked version of nonetheless natural language, so that if Dickens can, in chapter eleven of Bleak House, allude to Macbeth by writing, "It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby’s, in Cook’s Court, where Guster murders sleep by going ... out of one fit into twenty," then Greg Baum can allude to Romeo and Juliet with,

Perhaps also, it was Gary Ablett's valedictory as a Geelong player, for Gold Coast's bullion will weigh more heavily now. If so, this was parting with sweet sorrow; in a team that was crushed ...

Rex Hunt, calling Saturday's Grand Final on Triple M, urged the players on the field to, "Run like the Light Brigade!" meaning, I suppose, quickly and forcefully and in a heroic manner. This was delivered in a shout, at the heat of the moment, without preparation or special treatment, as if a reference to Tennyson is more or less the most natural thing in the world to summon out of your memory half-way through a Saturday afternoon in 2010 at the climax of the footy season.*

I'm not sure exactly what goes on here, but it seems to me that the emotion that collects around the phrase in its original context, plus the emotion of recognition, the extra scrap of mental effort that goes into making that recognition, the unexpected engagement of the brain in directions that it didn't expect to be engaged right at that moment -- the surprise -- the joke -- the reminder of the larger and less focused world -- coupled, in a contradictory way, with the comforting endurance of tradition -- gives the allusion its kick, its heightened burst, in an atmosphere that is already heightened by the tensions of the game; and wraps football itself in the mantle of history, as if those forty-four men and their Sherrin and a crowd of one hundred thousand and sixteen, are part of the same world as -- are unified with -- poets and warriors. Which, you could argue, they are, simply by being human, as the poets and warriors were human, and alive, as the poets and warriors were alive; and everything mixed together, a vast web of human behaviour, with Collingwood and the Saints tucked in there somewhere next to the Mayans, the Greeks, and Proust's imaginary Françoise, the cook who is also an artist, and her teased kitchenmaid, Giotto's Charity.

And the language used around football is intensified anyway, with slang, with ritual descriptions, and with a habit of grand phrasings, so that the game, in the prose of football journalists, is transformed into "the land," as in, "He's the fastest runner in the land!" or, "He's got the finest boot in the land!" as if the speaker is conferring magical qualities on knights and princes. Australian Rules takes on the enclosed attributes of a principality kingdom, and it becomes apparent that its true language is the language of mythology. Ablett, Baum writes, "is, as all the world knows, Gold Coast's cynosure and the club's ardent courtship of him has grown into a saga." In another article: "Football fans love signs from their gods: here were three." A team can be a "hydra." "Collingwood played its patented total football, marked by feverish, frenzied tackling, with lots of goalkickers, a hydra to deliver out a hiding."** When the final was followed by rain, then a vivid and symmetrical double rainbow, M. noticed that the last part of the rainbow to disappear was the leg that landed near St Kilda, and suggested that it was a prophecy.







* Although Tim Lane confused everyone around him when he decided that a game between Sydney and West Coast needed a direct quote from his lordship's Ulysses.

** I've seen Caroline Wilson use 'hydra' as well, but where that article is I do not know.

Why -- I'll add this in case you're outside the Rules umbrella and you're wondering -- why a prophecy? Because the game was a draw, and the two teams have to play again next week, and one of the teams comes from St Kilda, a bohemian seaside suburb in the process of returning like a greedy dog to its pre-bohemian state of gentrification. It took its name long ago from a schooner named Lady of St Kilda, which took her name in turn from a Hebridean archipelago where there never was a saint.

Update. St Kilda lost.