accompanied by the images of sites

Proustian persons never let themselves be evoked without their being accompanied by the images of sites that they have successively occupied. Sites, moreover, that are not necessarily only those where they have really appeared. For to the series of real places where the hero remembers to have seen them there is added the image of the places where – even before they were encountered in flesh and bone – the hero dreamed of seeing them.

(Georges Poulet, Proustian Space, tr. Elliott Coleman, from Modern Critical Interpretations: Remembrance of Things Past, 1987, ed. Harold Bloom)



The eager look – on Landscapes
as if they just repressed
Some Secret – that was pushing
Like Chariots – in the Vest

(Emily Dickinson, The Tint I cannot take – is best, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson)

after you move your eye

A hallway runs through this flat from the front door to the room at the back, and as I was walking down that hallway yesterday I thought of the word telescope in my last post and gradually I felt worried. It seemed important that I should turn on the computer and change telescope to magnifying glass straight away, otherwise people would think that I didn't know what I was talking about, I thought.

But reading the post I saw that it was not telescope I had written but telescoping, and so magnifying glass would not be able to replace it, because the word I needed, which would have been magnifying-glassing, did not exist, and even if I had claimed my right to domination over my own small bit of language and invented the word I wanted, the sentence as a whole would have become obscured by this distracting showboat of a phrase, doing me no good and doing it no good either, and not helping anyone who tried to make sense out of me, in fact ruining everything. I had been reading several books of poetry by the American poet Louise Glück, and for a 2006 collection named Averno I remembered that she had written a poem called Telescope, in which the poem's "you" takes a telescope away from their eye and feels a vertiginous unreality. "There is a moment after you move your eye away / when you forget where you are / because you've been living, it seems, / somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky," she writes.

The telescope has given you a sense of closeness, she says, but that closeness is false; you do not live in the night sky with the planetary bodies; you are not "participating in their stillness, their immensity" as you imagined. Gradually the you realises that its sense of identification and unity was false, and as it achieves its quietude the poet concludes like this: "You see again how far away / each thing is from every other thing."

But as long as you had the telescope to your eye you had an equivalent of metaphor: disparate objects had been persuaded to unite, or to exist in the same place. We cannot live in metaphor, we are apart, every poor metaphor is fighting against the separating powers of the universe, all microscopic pinpoints snubbing one another and rolling around like grapes on a tray. Two of the writers I've read recently have gone out of their way to say that metaphor is important to poetry. One was Jorge Luis Borges and the other was Susan Sontag, and their examples were so similar that I wondered if Sontag, whose speech (she was accepting the Jerusalem Prize) was published decades after the Argentinian died, had found the idea in the same place that I did, the 1967-8 Norton lectures that came out with Borges' photograph on the cover over the title, This Craft of Verse.

But perhaps that is impossible, because the lectures were left in a recorded form for "more than thirty years" said Calin-André Mihailescu, the man who arranged the publication, "the tapes gathering dust in the quiet ever-after of a library vault" and so Verse didn't come out until 2002, one year after Sontag received her prize. The similarity seemed so great while I was reading it, however, that I wanted to believe she had somehow known, a message getting through, maybe a verbal report, but why would anyone bother to hold onto that nugget of information for thirty years, "Borges said that metaphor was essential to poetry, and he used such and such specific examples"? Or was she there in the audience, her mind clinging to this part of the lecture for decades before she found a use for it?

"One difference [between poetry and prose] lies in the role of metaphor," she wrote, "which, I would argue, is necessary to poetry. Indeed, in my view, it is the task -- one of the tasks -- of the poet, to invent metaphors." Borges says more or less the same thing but he comes to it out of a discussion of Leopoldo Lugones an Argentine poet who composed hundreds of new metaphors for writers to use when they referred to the moon.

Sontag also refers to the moon. I would like to bring out examples to prove my point about their similarity but both books were due back at the library about a week ago.

It's probably a coincidence and I don't want to use that as an excuse to dismiss it. What a strange thing. (But I know from past experiences that if I borrowed the two books again and tried to find the similarities I would be left wondering what I thought I had seen -- "These aren't alike; this is tenuous.")

Emily Dickinson's metaphors conduct the shrinking and growing effect that I was trying to get at with my telescoping and magnifying glass. Now I try to approach the idea of violence in her work, my impression that her metaphors, which jam objects together in startling ways, are violent towards their material, sadistic even, and I tell myself that if she could speak to the Abbey in He parts Himself -- like Leaves she would say, "You want to be strong stone because you are an abbey, but I will maintain a grip on you and with my powers I will turn you into quaintest Floss." She is sadistic with whimsy, I decided. What can I compare that to? A burning giraffe entered my head. Surrealism! What is an Abbey made of Floss? It is as weird as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella," Lautréamont's phrase that was borrowed with honours by André Breton, the strangeness of that, and the threat inherent in those ridiculous objects, the sewing machine with its stabbing needles, and the dissection table, which is, after all, a table where things are dissected. Surrealist whimsy is not kind, it loves to startle you with its viciousness, it takes a man and replaces his face with an apple, or it teases the Mona Lisa with a moustache, it dares you to underestimate it and call it childish, ludicrous, and silly, and so does Emily Dickinson, who sometimes seems to be a girl of about six exclaiming, "How happy is the little stone / That rambles in the road alone." In his introduction to her Complete Works, Thomas H. Johnson tells me that her famous correspondent Thomas Wentworth Higginson "was never convinced that she wrote poetry. As he phrased his opinion to a friend, her verses were 'remarkable, though odd … too delicate -- not strong enough to publish.'"

of quaintest Floss

There were no libraries close to us in Arizona and for six months I borrowed nothing, but now we're within walking distance of the Clark County Library System, one outlet of, and they have books upon books, three copies of the Purgatorio, three Complete Shakespeares, two Anita Brookners that I hadn't read, two Hannah Arendts that I hadn't read, two translations of Murasaki Shikibu's Diary, ("As autumn advances, the Tsuchimikado mansion looks unutterably beautiful"), Helen Garner's First Stone, which was unexpected (and more than one Richard Flanagan, and strange, strange, finding those Australian names here, and what do they make of Robert Drewe's Shark Net I wonder, and then I wonder why I wonder), and the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, the poet slipping through telescopic hallucinations small and large with Alice in Wonderland quickness. The Sun is huge, the Daisy is small, she has them both, she puts them together with a dash for handcuffs. The Frost that possesses the World is a respectable and dark Sepulchre, but the Sepulchre is made of quaintest Floss, and the Abbey is a small Cocoon. The sea will overwhelm her as though she be Dew, but she will stare it down with the force of her small nouns. What does it conquer? An apron. A belt. Sea be not proud. It will fill her shoe with pearl. The world is animate and full of intentions. The Sun has a Whip to drive away the Fog, and the ship that walks on water must have feet. This is an uncracked logic.

Such will to power transmitted through so many tiny Bees.







That line of Murasaki was translated by Richard Bowring and published in the Penguin Classics version of the Diary. She goes on with this sentence: "Every branch on every tree by the lake and each tuft of grass on the banks of the stream takes on its own particular colour, which is then intensified by the evening light." Yes, answers Thoreau. "Was there ever such an autumn?" (The Journal, Oct 14, 1857) Both Murasaki and Thoreau were awkward around people, I notice, or both thought they were. Both of them wonder if they seem cold.

The Dickinson poems I've mentioned here are, He parts Himself—like Leaves—, I started Early – Took my Dog –, The Sun and Fog contested, and There is strength in proving that it can be borne.

Looking at it from the outside, the library branch near us falls somewhere between ZMKC's library in Budapest and her library in Canberra. Not so many knobs as the first one. Not so low as the second one. You enter it from the car park and not the street. If you walk into the building from the street entrance you come into a small round foyer with a flight of stairs at the back and signs saying Theatre.