wide the arms

Two lines in Mary Oliver that bother me particularly are “when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse | to buy me, and snaps the purse shut,” from When Death Comes, which I found in the New Poems 1991-1992 section of her New and Selected Poems: Volume One, 1992. The second line does not need to exist because the act of purchasing is already implied by the removal of the coins from the purse, and the notion that dying can be represented by the textual description of an open object such as door, coffin, or tomb being closed, has been used so often that by now it is contained inside the word “death” as a matter of course. When Geoffrey Hill uses ‘signal’ twice, close together, in Holbein, 2007, the second usage both echoes the first and also expands it beyond the figure who is “spreading | wide the arms as a signal.” That figure takes on an additional identity: he is dissolved into motions that are universal to the point of being inhuman. The scene is an execution; he is also being removed by the language. A certain power of choice has been abstracted from his behaviour and he is communised. The words “In fact it’s” in the lines “In fact it’s all | signals” are the language of someone who is making an assertion that may be baseless: “in fact” is what can be used in place of an explanation and the contracted “it’s” suggests that this is being said quickly, perhaps even carelessly or with a sudden, unstudied ease, enlightenment, or despair. So this “In fact” is the poet signalling a flavour of possible insincerity, surprise, or laziness in the voice that is not or not quite his.

The voice has also been produced in isolation from any suggestion of human flesh, which differentiates it from the crowd-voice that Dickens mimics or echoes (& plucks up & drops) in Epsom. Everyone that Dickens ever heard speak, you say, is dead. When Oliver Lawson Dick edited John Aubrey for a 1949 edition of Brief Lives he rearranged the details of Edward Herbert’s entry chronologically so that Herbert’s death was positioned at the end of the section, and the description of his home, Castle Montgomery, near the beginning. When an edition is not so reshaped then the castle is at the end of the entry, not participating in the movement of narrative through Herbert’s life, leaving the reader to make out of it whatever they can, and the entry begins with the man almost dead: start: dying. Aubrey repeats gossip, as everyone points out.

without some legitimate cause

In conclusion (tapping pages on the podium and licking my thumb), Knut Hamsun is ambiguous, and I like Geoffrey Hill when he says

... glowery is a mighty word with two meanings
if you crave ambiguity in plain speaking
as I do.

Hamsun is a plain word; he tells you he's plain, and so this is part of his ambiguity, the plainness, while Hill plains you with these puns or rhymes so daggy that I'm consternated, writing

Wootton
Spot on

in Clavics and what is this, you wonder: John Skelton?

Then I stop feeling consternated because I believe that it is indeed John Skelton, revenant with influence.

Now that I have read Best European Fiction 2010 as well as Knut Hamsun I have decided that a writer should always be a bit stupid or not-knowing of themselves, the way that Gertrude Stein advises in Paris France, because the writers in Fiction all seem to know who they are and what they're doing, they write wittily in vignettes or they write towards a clear end (the teenage prostitute is going to go from disaster to disaster in that one story and you know it); they might surprise yourself but not themselves. It was so eerie that I fell into a melancholy and thought, "How can these authors be alive?"

I was so riveted or spelled that I read the whole book slowly in that dreary mood.

There was a mismatch between myself and these writers who were proceeding absolutely smartly or knowingly to the end of the story, but there is also a mismatch between themselves and Ruskin, who was not calm in what he knew; he will stand there in public and sound bewildered even while he is telling you what's what; he will still behave raggedly if it seems true to him to do so; on one hand he is trying to persuade you, and he wants it forcefully, but on the other hand it is not right not to acknowledge his puzzlement; he sees that he is not completely correct and he will not gloss over it, he must say it; he won't pretend.

I can understand, in some sort, why people admire everything else in old art, why they admire Salvator's rocks, and Claude's foregrounds, and Hobbima's trees, and Paul Potter's cattle, and Jan Steen's pans; and while I can perceive in all these likings a root which seems right and legitimate, and to be appealed to; yet when I find they can even endure the sight of a Backhuysen on their room walls (I speak seriously) it makes me hopeless at once. I may be wrong, or they may be wrong, but at least I can conceive of no principle or opinion common between us, which either can address or understand in the other; and yet I am wrong in this want of conception, for I know that Turner once liked Vandevelde, and I can trace the evil influence of Vandevelde on most of his early sea painting, but Turner certainly could not have liked Vandevelde without some legitimate cause.

(Modern Painters)

It would have been easier to pretend that his hatred for Dutch seascape painters was only mild, and to have pushed the difficulty away like that, and to have looked serene at the end instead of puzzled (it's probably what I would have done. I am a coward), but instead he insists that people who like Dutch seascape painters are a mob of loons, which is a good thing for him to say because it will leave everything disturbed and unsettled. Turner likes them, he likes Turner, what can he do? "There is another man within mee that's angry with mee, rebukes, commands, and dastards mee," says Thomas Browne.

the chief ingredient of this composite? Scorn.

Defending himself, he suggests he is too porous but imperfectly porous even, not everything getting through: penetrable, enstormed, deaf, "I'm deaf, and have to speak at random," though others are not leaky; a woman is "charming," a dog is "yellow," just one adjective each is enough for that summary, a solid nice adjective, so, not everything is indistinct and hard to understand, a teenager in the United States was wrong not to care when her mother sold the family home. "She should have laid her cheek against that wall and never gone away from it." What is he reflecting on here, besides a fact of his time overseas?

Language, that is to say, does not issue from reflection but is an inherent element within the activity of reflection itself; it is an integral part of the body of reflection.

-- wrote Geoffrey Hill in the essay Poetry and Value. There's a contrast between the helplessness that Hamsun describes and the control that he asserts. Something between those two states is unstated. The words "Shipwrecked sailors lie quiet as dead goats | in a winding sheet of sponges," occur to me, from Sally Purcell's translation of Nikos Gatsos's work of 1943, Amorgos -- the feel of smothering, I think, is where that goes (there's a beautiful poem) -- and then -- I try to remember if Hamsun's characters ever have those moments of revelation that fix an impression by attaching it to some memory or influence from the past, those moments of conclusion, like the one that Henry Miller described in a letter to Anaïs Nin, dated July, 1933, when he told her that "a whore sitting in this cafe" had "a composite" resemblance to his mother, his first wife, and his second wife. "What should I say was the chief ingredient of this composite? Scorn." So he is able to summarise three women from three different periods of time; he reaches a kind of fastening. "I see the three of them by their nostrils, that telltale dilation."

Hamsun would have been angry if anyone had tried to enclose him in the way Miller has enclosed the three women. There is nothing in Overgrown Paths that makes the author more scornful than one doctor in an asylum who pretends to know about him. "This was probably his way of showing his staff how infinitely deep his investigation of me went, almost back to the womb." A bully, this psychiatrist Langfeldt. "He knew that the staff would remain silent." This is what you are like when you want people to think that you absolutely know things. "[A]ll the modern knowledge he has picked up from textbooks" is not as intrinsically right as the author's humble confusion, good confusion, as Nagel's confusion is good and ultimately harmless; as the narrator in Hunger harms no-one but himself. "An intentional helplessness, an infection from the Bible"

He [Langfeldt] is so secure in his knowledge. But that is not the same as being secure in the old knowledge: nothing can be known for certain!

(Yet, yet, Hamsun will psychoanalyse him: "Professor Langfeldt knows in his heart that he is not very well suited for delving into and fiddling with the intimacies of someone else's marriage.")

falling of waters

There are senses in all three of them, the touching in Lawrence, the seeing for Wordsworth and the listening for the character in Jahn, Geoffrey Hill being closest to Lawrence, early Hill most directly: “There is no bloodless myth will hold,” from Genesis, and those lines about things being struck, faced, and walked on; then going on through more forces until the revealment of forces becomes one of the oeuvre's purposes. “The mountain stamped its foot | Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut | With wads of sound into a sudden quiet” (God's Little Mountain (1959)). The biggest force has always been the one that is trying to shut him up. It appears in different disguises. “Recap on words like compassion that I | never chanced in your living presence” (In Memorium: Gillian Rose (2007)).

John Donne in his tenth sermon believes that prophets should always speak with strength, which means against some opposition. “[T]hunder, and wind, and tempests, and chariots, and roaring of Lyons, and falling of waters are the ordinary emblems of his [ie, God's] messages, and his messengers, in the Scriptures.”

Dorothy Wordsworth, though, just states everything that is most immediate: that's how she seems to proceed, and very gentle, but I never forget her glittering sheep, which I mention often.

“Do I need to touch the world if I want to experience it at the swooning level, or do I look at it instead, or hear it?” you ask, and there you go; you have various replies. The purpose or goal is that greater privacy which comes through the flesh: other people might make up thoughts for you but no one else can look for you, and no one else is swooning in the garden except Mrs Morel. Lawrence is all about a collaboration between flesh and non-flesh. Still, it looks as if it is the frustration with people outside himself that helps him to write, especially later. The Plumed Serpent is a frustrated book. Not even the violence at the end seems cathartic for him. In Sons and Lovers it is enough to have Mrs Morel putting her hand in a flower. In Serpent he wants cults, drums, and costumes, and I laughed. An artist needs to find their scale, said Richard Tuttle as he was being interviewed by Ross Simonini recently. “One can distinguish between scale and size. Usually, we are happy with the issue of size—if it's small, it's small; if it's big, it's big. But scale is a question of the individual. Each person, everyone ever born, has a unique scale. They have it like a unique fingerprint. You can decide to find your scale. The day you find it is a day you remember. It changes your life. Your parents may determine your size, but you determine your scale.” In the Serpent I think I see Lawrence mislaying whatever it is that Tuttle means by the word scale. Lawrence is scaled to a lily.

imagine singing

What about the other poets in the Anthology?

The first time I read Bertram Stevens' choice I came away with a quick impression of softness and grandness or quietness and grandness, the language of grandness (“gold,” and “purple” objects, verbs happening “oft”) without royal aggression: here were people who would rather talk about roses than say anything satirical, here nostalgia was the fad, never comedy – and even on a second and third look it's not a funny book, Stevens not a man who cared about humour in poems (see his selection from Banjo Paterson -- nature things and Clancy of the Overflow), and Walter Murdoch in 1918 wasn't mad keen either, in The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse – still, the different level of attention in the second and third go-arounds penetrated that first impression and now I realise that a few poets like John Farrell (1851 – 1904) had the impatience that I smelt faintly, faintly when I was reading Bathgate's Sydney.

“The noisiest find quiet graves,” is the way he sums up the deaths of British adventurers abroad in Australia to England (1897), which may not look like much but when I saw him write in close phrases through the whole poem I thought that here was a poet whose ideas came to him so vividly that they came as song.

“I imagine singing I imagine | getting it right,” wrote Geoffrey Hill once, and Paul Muldoon, talking about T.S. Eliot in 2011, said, “He has a great ear, a rarer and rarer commodity these days, even among fairly highly regarded poets.” Ezra Pound is an advocate of song in The ABC of Reading. It's possible that Hill, who admires Pound, was echoing the ABC when he associates “singing” with “getting it right.” But Hill is hard on himself and uses absolutes. Not “getting it acceptable” but “getting it right.” “Either the thing moves, RAPMASTER, or it | does not,” is what he believes* in Speech! Speech!, the enjambment reminding me of the same before the word “mute” in Wordsworth's There was a Boy, which I would not have thought of if Himadri at The Argumentative Old Git hadn't written about it in July.

The moment of silence before the admission of incapacity, that's what I'm looking at, does not speak in one case, does not work in the other. “Hopefully, RAPMASTER, I can take stock | how best to oút-ráp you.” There's always something to live up to. (The Moldovan bots have overtaken the Russians in my stats.)

* He challenges the value of movement ("I disclaim spontaneity, | the appearance of which is power") but not the fact of it. "I wíll | mátch you fake pindaric for trite | violence, evil twin."

more pains have been taken to obviate the objections

In many of his poems, essays and lectures, Geoffrey Hill has let his readers or listeners know that he is haunted by the likelihood of “appearing a fool.” “To undertake any assessment of the meaning of value is to risk appearing a fool. To pronounce upon human values may expose one as an ethical charlatan,” he says in the second paragraph of his Rhetorics of Value. Aware of perfection, he feels himself falling short. He is obliged to let people know about it too – why – when he could have said nothing – he could have gone on with the essay and left those sentences out? Why obligation? Coetzee is dissatisfied when he senses a blank gap between the other arguments about Richardson's Clarissa but he is writing at the expense of strangers.

Richardson himself saw that the nine volumes of Clarissa had failed because people didn't comprehend every aspect of his mind, though he was praised and enriched, “and contemporary readers traveled to the Upper Flask, the tavern Clarissa and Lovelace stopped at in Hampstead” and the other author who had satirised him, Henry Fielding (who wrote his first novel because he was unhappy with Pamela), was rapturing in a letter, “Let the Overflowings of a Heart which you have filled brimfull speak for me” (October 15, 1748), still he was going to write his postscript to answer his failure.

The more pains have been taken to obviate the objections arising from the notion of Poetical Justice, as the doctrine built upon it had obtained general credit among us; and as it must be confessed to have the appearance of humanity and good-nature for its supports. And yet the writer of the History of Clarissa is humbly of opinion, that he might have been excused referring to them for the vindication of his Catastrophe, even by those who are advocates for the contrary opinion; since the notion of Poetical Justice, founded on the modern rules, has hardly ever been more strictly observed in works of this nature, than in the present performance.

Dissatisfaction is a fuelling force, so Ruskin believes when he tells his students in The Elements of Drawing to start by shading a tiny strip of paper; they should need nothing more than this to show them how bad they are. “By getting a piece of gray shaded ribbon, and comparing it with your drawing, you may arrive, in early stages of your work, at a wholesome dissatisfaction with it.”

Widen your band little by little as you get more skillful, so as to give the gradation more lateral space, and accustom yourself at the same time to look for gradated spaces in Nature. The sky is the largest and the most beautiful; watch it at twilight, after the sun is down, and try to consider each pane of glass in the window you look through as a piece of paper colored blue, or gray, or purple, as it happens to be, and observe how quietly and continuously the gradation extends over the space in the window, of one or two feet square. Observe the shades on the outside and inside of a common white cup or bowl, which make it look round and hollow; and then on folds of white drapery; and thus gradually you will be led to observe the more subtle transitions of the light as it increases or declines on flat surfaces. At last, when your eye gets keen and true, you will see gradation on everything in Nature.

By this formula, dissatisfaction is not a key to knowledge, it is the key to the state of humility that will keep you calm and quiet so that knowledge can come in, but what if the dissatisfaction doesn't stop, I wonder. It is not a car, it is not a bus, it doesn't have a route on a timetable with a start and stop point; and what if it burns on and burns on like a coal seam – then Ruskin is – deciding that the fuel will burn anyway, so cook something while you're there.

garlands ye have

Bathgate wants to be understood as well, but he is not like them – in what way? he expects comprehension as well as wanting it -- he is not like the artist that Ruskin describes when he writes about Lord Lindsay's Christian Art in 1847: “we are critically aware of all our deficiencies, too cognizant of of all that is greatest to pass willingly and humbly through the stages that rise to it, and oppressed in every honest effort by the bitter sense of inferiority.” Hill, after quoting Shakespeare at the podium in 2012 or 2013, stops and wishes, out loud, that he had a modicum of talent. On another afternoon he imagines dead writers judging him whenever he gets sloppy. “We are now aroused suddenly in the light of an intolerable day,” says Ruskin, “our limbs fall under the sunstroke – we are walled in by the great buildings of elder times, and their fierce reverberations fall upon us without pause.”

Bathgate feels the dead benevolently in The Clematis, he accepts the poetic language that they have passed to him, “garlands ye have,” “methinks thou dost,” “thee to show thy;” and he believes in the concord that concludes so many poems and books (until the history of writing in the English language could be described as a row of open clasps being spied and fastened – or the struggle for an ultimate representation of Leopardi's translated word, appropriate), the passage of summing-up and unity that Samuel Richardson's books will carry on for pages and pages, the dramatic climax of Pamela occurring just over half way through the story, the rest of the book dedicated to the rapprochement of the characters and the establishment of rules, followed by more issue in which lessons from the narrative are explained efficiently, so that the reader knows what they were expected to have deduced; everything has been concluded now, even their deductions, a state that Hill's later poems avoid, the last line of The Triumph of Love suggesting that nothing has changed except the vital and tiny presence of a solitary comma, which could be understood in different ways.

Richardson's own books have been understood in different ways, in spite of him, with the critics ignoring his notes whenever they feel like it and trekking implacably to their own conclusions. “Clarissa is read as a novel about violability and violation, about the rights of the self to self-determination. I will be approaching Clarissa from a different angle ...” (J.M. Coetzee, Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, from Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986 – 1999, referring to a specific area of critical consensus that was current during the 1980s ...)

the 'world' in general understanding

I was going to write something about Bertram Stevens and singing next but Miguel of St Orberose brings up a point in the comments – I reword it into a question like this -- Is it wrong-headed to compare old poets, who are adhering to the aesthetics of their times, to new poets? I was wondering similarly while I was writing the last post but the word I used when I was talking to myself was fair. Was it fair? Strange fairness when one party had died and the other one would never know; this was fairness being acted out for the living and the present people, who would maybe feel it transmitted into themselves through the medium of correct and balanced feelings or emotional sniffer dogs implanted early and reinforced.

Incoherence, though; I was approaching Bathgate through the word incoherence, which had come into my head when I was re-reading that old interview with Geoffrey Hill.

Incoherence (I considered) is eternally available to everyone and the year 1889, which was the publication of The Clematis* would not have forbidden incoherence, the 1800s being so hectic in the Anglosphere and Ruskin breaking down, even at the end of Praeterita when he is pointing out the quiet and peacefulness; still he is not quiet and peaceful but must worry back over what he has written: “… totally above men of the 'world' in general understanding, courtesy, and moral sense. Men of the outer world, I mean, of course ...” -- joking a little but still craving in general to be understood both at the atomic level of a single word and in the overarching meaning, which he complained nobody got, and instead they pulled quotes out of his books and showed them around, saying they were beautiful. I do not want to be beautiful, he wrote. I want to be meaningful. But Oscar Wilde defended him after his death by writing

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s gallery ...

The dirt world would not understand him either and his ditch did not work.

This is Hill's habit too, in lectures and poems, this way of picking back over a word he has used, this restless irritation, stung by words as if they are insects he has sat on, he goes, he has to scratch, but he has to sit down in the grass again too, he sits, he gets bitten, he quotes the OED, he sits down again and has to get up again. He will never be able to settle comfortably on a word and rest there like a man on a soft cushion. The dead are misunderstood as well, he worries. They are ignored. Very much like words in that respect. People assume their compliance without asking.

Somebody should make a list of writers whose clarifying nitpicks are also a style, eg

Hill
Ruskin
Stein
Robert Burton?


* I've just ("just" is at ten forty-five, the morning after I made this post) read a review of Bathgate's Clematis book, Far South Fancies, in an edition of The Literary World (July 19, 1890). The reviewer's opinion in a nutshell: "So far as the human element in them [the poems] is concerned, they are of little value [...] But Mr Bathgate has an eye for scenery."

this by others is descried

The first line of Hill's first published book (unless I've got this wrong) was, “Against the burly air I strode,” Genesis (1959), going on into more combat: “tough pig-headed salmon,” “triggered claw,” “fierce and unregenerate clay” “to ravage and redeem the world,” an atmosphere of struggle that almost does not exist in this Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Bertram Stevens, where the tone is usually the one in Michael's Personality, the authors easily acquiescing to their own ideas and language easily acquiescing to the authors.

Fair crown of stars of purest ray,
 Hung aloft on Mapau tree,
What floral beauties ye display,
 Stars of snowy purity.

(from The Clematis, by Alexander Bathgate)

Bathgate was a New Zealander. Stevens has decided to include poets from New Zealand for reasons that he doesn't explain. Proximity and small population seems to have connected them in his mind. “Australia was first settled by the British a little more than a century ago, so that we are still a young community. The present population, including that of New Zealand, is a little under five millions.” The Clematis exists in opposition to the spirit of Hill, who says, “I do feel that everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence. And I think there is something naturally incoherent in me, just as I think there is probably something, at some level, anarchic, because the kind of obsessive concern I have with order in the early work is one that somebody has who feels all the time how endangered order is, and what a potential threat to order he is” (from an interview with the Paris Review.)

But Bathgate feels close to his opinion of the clematis flower, not incoherent or battling, he uses words for beauty, “fair,” “purest,” “snowy purity,” “stars,” without contradicting himself; the only opposition in the poem comes from the darkness of the mapau tree versus the brightness of the petals, “'mid sombre leaves.” Then he tells you that the deep colour of the tree is an asset for the little flower because it describes strength.

His strength, thy beauty, both unite
And form a picture to delight.

Next Bathgate reveals that he has been thinking of another union all along, and the perceptible union of the flower and the tree was a visible sign indicating the existence of other compatibilities, ones that can only be intuited; the minor troubles the clematis has faced (“weak stem“) were all temporary and solvable; each indicator of disunity was a false flag.

Fair flower, methinks thou dost afford
 Emblem of a perfect wife,
Whose work is hidden from the world,
 Till, perchance, her husband's life
Is by her influence beautified,
And this by others is descried.

What Bathgate sees is ultimately coherence and the poem moves into that coherence, it is coherent in its language, it does not contradict its own author, there is not “something naturally incoherent in me,” and order is not endangered – order exists in nature. It is there in the trees. “'It is not nature's way to be distraught.” (Hill, Expostulations on the Volcano (2012)) On the other hand “Words | Render us callous the fuller they ring” (ditto). Bathgate assumes that his words are full.

ever racked with ailments fresh

Michael agrees with Butler. “To choose what I must be is mine.” In other words, he will decide to maintain himself post-corpse by performing correctly “the deeds which we have done in the body.” He suggests obstacles to the easy achievement of those deeds, citing “this feeble frame, | For ever racked with ailments fresh” but in the next stanza he reveals that those problems have been introduced so that they can be argued into smaller importance. “This is not I.” (“I” at some points in the poem is neither the physical body nor the personality – since the personality can be estranged from it – but I think this is the fault of semantics rather than metaphysics.)

Geoffrey Hill, in his Tanner lectures, has another point of view, different but likewise rooted in a Christianised culture: “the nature that is most intimately mine” (which I believe corresponds to Michael's notion of “personality”) is necessarily penetrated and corrupt; it is not so free of its physical existence.

My language is in me and is me; even as I, inescapably, am a minuscule part of the general semantics of the nation; and as the nature of the State has involved itself in the nature that is most intimately mine.

If it is “intimately mine” then the simple solution that Michael proposes in his poem – when you discard the body in death you are discarding everything that isn't you – is being questioned. But it depends. How intimate is Hill's intimately? How intimate do you want it to be? To get rid of that question you could say, “Not as intimate as that.”

If Michael, static in the afterlife, has discovered that he was right, then is he reading Hill's oeuvre -- which has been in a condition of struggle from the first line of the first poem in his first published book -- and muttering, “Geoff, Geoff, what a waste of time”?

with distasteful feast

Science appears to be the most professional and dissecting field that Powys can think of and he hates science whenever it is close-structured and tries to answer questions, so he creates (out of the flesh of his own hatred) a disgusting scientific man who would rather vivisect a dog than rescue his own daughter in Morwyn or the Vengeance of God, hypocritical Mr. ---, a maniac and torture addict whose ghost colludes with the ghost of Torquemada on a flying ship in Hell after a meteorite hits the main trinity of characters and pushes them through the surface of the earth for the sake of a book that the author, in a 1937 letter, called "slightly like Dante, but not really."

Mr. -- and the Inquisitor are both torturing with the same true motivation, states Powys. They might tell the rest of the world that they are saving souls or producing medicinal discoveries but really they both have a slavering craving for screaming and cruelty, and the same goes for the Ku Klux Klan, who dwell in Hell as well, along with European settlers from East Africa, and anyone else he can think of who might make his vivisectors look worse by proximity.

Geoffrey Hill speaks critically when he finds, in Cardinal Newman, a set of words that skip along on their nursery rhyme the way "dwell in Hell as well" just did, and when I think of that, and of Powys' I-won't, I decide to keep my hop-skip because it makes me feel as if I am obscurely ruining Geoffrey Hill. Hill has his own wordplay tactics, sometimes using the Elizabethan method that combines a noun with a surprising adjective, "high-spent poverty with distasteful feast," in The Triumph of Love, and sometimes, as he does a while earlier in the same long poem, repeating a word while he calls your attention to another meaning that the previous iteration of that word might have had, if the poet had put it in a different setting; but he did not. So calling your attention to I did not as well as I did.

Southwell, addressing the cordial
cordially: "it does my heart good."

Hill's art is the art of not letting you take words lightly (which should rightly transmit itself to the poem as a whole, not taking that lightly either), and it is the opposite of "dwell in hell as well," which asks you to enjoy the easy movement across the surfaces of the words, downplaying their histories and their meanings in favour of immediate music. Whereas the drop between "cordial" and "cordially" is a link between meaning and meaning with cordial as trigger and vehicle.

looking fixedly

So there's humour in a disability, I mean Ruskin thwarted, but Ruskin with his skill is showing himself thwarted; the paragraphs are his triumph over a defeat that he is pretending to have (say that he only pretends to have it so that he can win, suggest that all writing is winning, and that the hapless compulsion to write in Beckett's narrators is the hapless compulsion to win, life's betrayal of the loser), the physical matter of the world is against him (but revenge!, he calls its bluff), it is the comedian: it presents him constantly with girls when he wants forty male thieves, the shapes of bodies standing between himself and any evidence of the world's sympathy for his desire for men's presences, just as the physical world stands in front of all artists and indeed in front of all spirits as they steer around in their skeletons wondering what is going on and why doesn't anything work as well as it should and "how did any man twist away | soul-free from that shining," asks Geoffrey Hill (who believes in Ruskin and has mentioned him in poems. During one of his Oxford lectures he notices that he is in the place that Ruskin and Carlyle occupied over a hundred years before, and he says so, and repeats it), contemplating the substance of underground coal and the miners who worked it, in his homage to Wales, Oraclau/Oracles -- art is one of the refinements of that -- the idea is hovering in front of the inner eye but in the outer world the wood of the stretcher has cracked or the studio is out of glue or your rock falls off a truck, as happened to someone I know when it was too late to do anything except continue with the installation in spite of the crack -- the spirit saying, go on, go forward with my idea, while the body tries to cope with this rock or this stretcher bar -- and Ruskin discusses his inabilities more or less often, though not as often as John Cowper Powys in his autobiography, who will tell you that he is useless at this thing or that thing, or that he looked ridiculous in this situation or that situation, or that he is "a sadist" and "perverse," and crippled by his ulcers, he spits, he dribbles, he is constipated, and for years of his adult life he wants to eat nothing except bread and milk in a bowl, he is motherless, even though he had a mother, Mary Cowper Johnson, descendent of Cowper the poet, and what I mean when I say "motherless" is that he never mentions her and can anyone tell me why or do I need to hunt down Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys by Morine Krissdottir to find out, because it is strange, in an autobiography, to tell us that your father had ten more children after yourself, the first, without mentioning the mother who gave birth to the eleven, never saying that she existed in any capacity or form, never using the words "my mother" in connection with yourself, and never explaining the omission, as if a country reverend could give birth to eleven children on his own, or pluck them off trees, or find them in the font, or do some other harmless, painless thing that produced or procured children somehow, which is ridiculous, and yet the assurance of John Powys in this matter never cracks; and there has never been a writer who more casually and naturally neglected to mention his mother.

"What object whatsoever he fixed on, were it the meanest of the mean, let him but paint it in its actual truth, as it swims there, in such environment; world-old, yet new and neverending; an indestructible portion of the miraculous All," wrote Carlyle in The Diamond Necklace (1837, a few years before the first volume of Ruskin's Modern Painters), asking for the dignity of Things ("looking fixedly at the Thing"), dignity given through the quality of attention being paid, and this attention I believe is evidence of love: a love of any Thing, the love more important than the worldly importance of the Thing ("were it the meanest of the mean") but we must have love. Give it and give it until the world drowns in it, then the rising water will pull the objects up in our estimation, is my reading. The Thing will swell. It will be a treasure. Love for everything and the whole life dedicated. What work. "I am nearly convinced," writes Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing,

that when we see keenly enough, there is very little difficulty in drawing what we see; but, even supposing that this difficulty be still great, I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, then teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw.

Powys the author does not look at any mother although Powys the boy must have looked at one. He gave nicknames to the inanimate objects around his house, seeing spirits in them. He had a set of respectful manners for his walking stick. "Our buried giant," Hill calls him. "Of the eyes that men do glare withal, so few can see." (Carlyle)

pathless with untrodden snow

Summer was almost all sunshine, now winter is sunshine again but colder and I swear it was like balm to have Jane Eyre sitting around staring out the window at the drizzle in Charlotte Brontë's book, a subterranean sensation arising in me as of real drizzle observed somewhere far away, down a tunnel, associating itself hazily with the English countryside, where I have never been, also with Melbourne, where I have seen most of my drizzle (wattle blotting it), and Oregon where the moss was damp; gradually, motivated by longing, I saw a picture of her countryside as as I have seen it in films, trees black-trunked because they are soaked (why black though?), the grey clouds, "rooks" because there are rooks in these scenes (I have to insert crows, I don't know rooks), long green lawn, damp muted light, perfect for sheep wrote John Dyer in his poem about sheep, The Fleece which is only available online in a scanned version that makes every s an f so that the glassy sea is the glaffy fea, and I love this rain, said Geoffrey Hill once to an interviewer as they sat in a room somewhere in Britain, but a poet being interviewed in Las Vegas would rarely and by mad fluke have the chance to say that they loved rain (looking out the window at it as G.H. was in the interview, the interviewer perhaps remembering that The Triumph of Love begins with these words that are attentive to rain: "Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain scarp" and the poet talking to himself throughout the poem, then realising the particular existence of phenomena more concretely at the the end; to show you this he repeats the line and changes the a to the or that is my interpretation: Sun-blazed, over Romsley, the livid rain scarp.); it would be a significant event and a huge drama, the air beforehand not so much freezing as thick with rain-smell, thicker than I have smelt it in places where rain is normal. So thick the other day that it was if the atmosphere had rotted. (It is not like that when wind blows.)

A character in a novel set here would not spend the first portion of the book looking out the seeing rain, rain, coldness, rain, over weeks and months and years, as Jane Eyre does while she is a child having a bad time, the weather improving when her times get better, a disaster presaged with a lightning bolt, and her despair described with ruined weather.

A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead -- struck with a subtle doom.

There would have to be some other way for a Las Vegas novelist to show you misery in the weather over months and years; they would have to use the opposite of rain, so I'll say heat, and then we have to make it terrible not warm so flat heat, years of hardbaked sky, and then, when the character is happier, modulated cool weather, a mist scene on Mount Charleston with fog coming up the long ravine as the character makes her way down the hiking trail by Cathedral Rock. Clouds, mist, a change, relief: we are meant to reflect on the character's changing circumstances, now not relentlessly bad but improving.

She has been employed on a horse ranch where she falls in love with the owner, Bob Rochester, who manages a small chain of suburban hotel-casinos. He is devoted to her. He is ferocious. Shania Twain had her chance with Bob but she gave him the cold shoulder when she heard that he did not in fact own a controlling share in Caesars Entertainment.

Brontë's Eyre in England sees spring, birds, blossoms, and her life is opening, her love is awakened, but the weather in this Vegas novel has a different character, not so gentle, green, and blossoming, the light is rarely muted, normally bright, and this difference changes the course of the story; events and thoughts become appropriate to a desert, the heroine's thoughts are not like the thoughts of Jane Eyre even in translation, she has developed in a way that is the opposite of the way that Jane Eyre has developed, the dryness and the heat have reversed her, the curled plastic spines of the barrel cactus rather than the short thorn of the roses like the fingers of tiny starfish; she is directed by these changes until she decides she will murder Mr Rochester and stab his mad wife who has been sequestered with a pony in one of the stables on the ranch.

The mad wife Bertha catches her, chops her up instead in self-defence, rescues Mr Rochester from the pit of Jane's death trap which I am associating now with Eli Roth's Goretorium (corner of Harmon and the Strip, second floor, find Walgreens and look up), is cured of her madness by explosive bravery, sees the light, becomes sane immediately, becomes the hero, refuses to stay married now to Mr Rochester, obtains a quick divorce downtown, and is recruited by one of the ten dozen bail bondsmen who live there in the area around the Stratosphere where everybody wants to sell you meth. Your mother may have been a Creole loon, says the bail bondsman, but I have a non-discrimination policy.

AND THUS IT IS IN THE LAND OF THE FREE.

the centralising influence

Create a vacuum, thought the churchmen apparently, as they were writing the documents that appeared in Hillgarth's book -- draw attention to a contradiction -- a crack will be created there, the universe no longer naturally bound together in that area of the pagan mind -- who created the universe if our gods had to be born? wonders the hypothetical German confronted by Boniface's honest craftiness -- the new idea will ooze in, this new root will sprout, we will be both question and answer, and A manager, said a casino security sergeant to me recently, never asks a question he doesn't know the answer to, but the new Germanic parishioners were not au fait with Latin, they were not sympathetic, they were not Mediterranean though the missionaries were Mediterranean, the instructions had to be changed for them; some tried to graft the new system of worship onto old practices and have sons inherit their fathers' churches -- no, no, said the central church, this is not how it is done -- grinding their teeth in prose -- and Hillgarth picks his excerpts to make you see the rules gradually growing, you can detect the churchmen becoming more law-bound, less ecstatic, less excited, less direct, differently bossy, no longer assuming that they are confronted by a unity; it appears that the unity must be created now consciously, with instructions, not trusted but built.

(Geoffrey Hill, speaking at Oxford University on the meaning of the word eccentricity, said that the original orbit of any revolutionary social movement is eccentric or asymmetrical until "the centralising influence of bureaucrats takes charge" -- then symmetry asserts itself -- the Egyptian uprising in 2011 was his example. (Eccentrique to the ends of his master or state, May 8th, 2011))

Hillgarth works his way chronologically through the centuries. In the beginning, when he is taking examples from the 300s AD, he has passages that address multitudes, Victricious of Rouen telling the crowd they're all loved and valuable, they, the virgins, the widows, the soldiers, the boys, the monks, are all adorable, all able to adore, "let us exert ourselves and put forth sighs from the deepest veins of our bodies" (translated by the Rev. Fr. Jacobus Mulders, S.J.), and then there are epitaphs trimmed into stone for a public audience, "Here there rests at peace the servant of Christ, the Honourable Lady Guntelda ..." (translated by E. Diehl); but by the 6- and 700s at the end of the book there are private letters describing covert plans, the addresses now start with lists of formal church-titles, a phrase like "beloved brother" appears to have become standardised, Bishop Daniel sends his secret guidelines to Boniface, certain ideas are forbidden, decisions are laid down, a wall of laws is being set up to compete or collaborate with the secular kingships; the church starts to make decisions about marriages, charity, land distribution, and clothing. "Each woman, when she communicates, shall have her veil ..." decided the authors of the document known as A Diocesan Council: Auxerre, 561- 605 (translated by C. de Clercq), and a monk may not wear a stole or a ring.

Thus you've gone from mystics to bureaucrats or from external rhetoric to internal canniness, or from largeness to minuteness like Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, which in some ways really is "a history of every one" as it promises, mimicking this movement of forces, the accumulation of increments; everything is reconfiguring, the religion becoming a device with humans responding to its grip, the orderly mind that the churchmen prescribe for the tribesmen is also the order they have found for themselves in this industrial revolution of the brain.

All of this insinuates itself into the religious community over the course of four hundred years, 350 - 750, according to the book's title, human beings calibrating or being calibrated in this way, which is mirrored in secular ways as well at the current time, too, on the internet, the freewheeling messy days gone, gone the days when a personal website was an animated .gif of a road sign and three pictures of your favourite fairies against a field of purple though everyone visited you nonetheless, lame as you were; now there is more to assimilate and less to experience; perhaps this would have been Hillgarth's perception too, if he had lived to see it -- the book published in 1969 -- I think he has to be dead -- once he was the "Assistant Professor of History, Harvard University," according to the front of the book -- tidied away like autumn leaves by now, mouldering with oak and elm and the other trees around which druids in Europe once (according to the documents he arranged into a book) bound their fillets -- a fillet in this case meaning, a band of cloth.

designed to be seen in relation

I was reading Ruskin's Fors Clavigera when I came across Giotto's Charity, like this, in the Ninth Letter, "and make the field gain on the street, not the street on the field; and bid the light break into the smoke-clouds, and bear it in their hands, up to these loathsome city walls, the gifts of Giotto's Charity, corn and flowers." Of course I was rivetted immediately, as you are too, I know, because Proust read Ruskin, translated him as well, critiqued him in the preface that has been published separately as On Reading, and he uses Giotto's Charity in Swann's Way, Swann himself giving that nickname to a kitchen maid who wears "ample smocks" which "recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his paintings." Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity? he says to the Narrator, in Moncrieff's Englishing.

And, so, because I have a human mind and because that mind likes to link thing to thing and make what seem like logical deductions at the time (following the same neat and weblike system as more obvious logical deductions, such as, for example, the one you'd come to if you saw a body hit the pavement ahead of you, then looked up and spotted an open window) -- because my mind likes to deduce, and I can't say the same for yours, since it would be presumptuous, you being you and not me, so I shouldn't -- and perhaps I shouldn't even say this about me, but that's another deduction, and as I said, I'm addicted to them -- a hunter in a jungle, thrilled by pawprints -- anyway, because my mind likes to deduce, I thought that Proust must have had Giotto's Charity lodged inside him after reading the Fors, and, therefore, when the opportunity arrived for a comparison to surge up in his mind and run out of the brain into the medium of language, which was waiting like a prophylactic to enclose it, then Giotto's Charity was there, ready to go, schloop, into the rubber. Well done Giotto's Charity -- provided by chance, stored against need, and utilised at last. The final step being the rare one. Think of all the brainstuff we never use, piles of it, lounging in heaps. They talk about an author's influences; one day they should look at all the author's noninfluences, all those hundreds of books they read and forgot. Reading: what a near-total waste of time.

If all the authors in the world mentioned Giotto's Charity in every single book then I would probably have passed over it in Ruskin and taken no notice, but as it was the words gleamed out at me, a point of focus and apparent clarity, golden bridge for a second, and I shaded my eyes, impressed by the shine or sheen. And the same when I came across the phrase "all the year round" on the first page of Charles Dickens' introduction to the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, knowing that he used the same set of words twenty years later as the title of a magazine. That human habit of linking, too, might have been the reason why an article about Geoffrey Hill appeared in the Guardian on January 31st, an article that ZMKC linked to in a comment after my post about Les Murray's Manuscript Roundel. "Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill", is the article's title, and the journalist, Alison Flood, was referring to a lecture Hill gave last November in Oxford. It was one of the same Oxford lectures I was listening to while I was unscrewing my bottle of oil. Duffy in an interview had decided that "the poem is a form of texting" and Hill in his lecture disagreed, saying that poetry is language condensed but texting is language truncated, and also that "texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below," which is true.

He mentions two of Duffy's poems, and mentions, too, her background and his, very similar, he says, neither of their families were wealthy. One of Hill's grandmothers at least was very very poor, as we know from the Mercian Hymns. She was a nailmaker, "hare-lipped by the searing wire." "Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak / this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood / and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg." But he and Duffy have gone in different directions: she is Britain's poet laureate, a populist, eager for outreach, and he is Geoffrey Hill, with a reputation for difficulty and being a crank and a harlequin, as he describes himself, a Ruskinian role -- Ruskin in the Fors is aware of his popular place as a crank, and plays with it -- I think plays is the right word -- he plays with it and also is it; and the same with Hill, who refers to himself in the lectures as a "Ruskinian Tory," and again in an interview he gave afterwards. "I would describe myself as a sort of Ruskinian Tory. It is only Ruskinian Tories these days who would sound like old-fashioned Marxists. I read and re-read Ruskin, particularly Fors Clavigera."

But Duffy. It's worth mentioning that Hill doesn't drag her into the speech gratuitously, no, this isn't a tangential attack, instead he integrates her, combining her with other references, for she is, it seems, like them ("them" being the Elizabethan poets, London riots, popular singers, and other items he mentions) part of the ordinary material of his days, whatever came along to aid him, debris that he seeks out or scoops up by chance. She is part of a larger atmosphere of opinion. He brings her in as he brought everything else in, ideas clustering around a core, a hazy rather than direct method of building an essay-point. As far as essays goes he really does essai, like Montaigne, like Fors too, in a cumulative way which lets him wander, like water in a mangrove swamp, as opposed to, say, water firing itself straight down the chute of a ravine, instead spreading out into marshes, pools, and billabongs, but always remaining water. So too Geoffrey Hill, no matter what he talks about, always reminds you that he is Geoffrey Hill. "Shit-eating grin," he happens to remark at one point, discussing the behaviour of politicians, and the phrase seems so appropriate that he stops and relishes it all over again, "shit-eating grrin," and gives his considered opinion of the words. And he marvels as he remembers that he is standing near a place where Ruskin lectured, once upon a time, with Thomas Carlyle in the room, a pair of friends, although Ruskin wouldn't let Carlyle have free run of his garden, because he spat.

But the point I was getting to when I mentioned the Guardian, was that the interview Hill read, the one with Duffy, was published in the culture pages of that same newspaper, as was a review by Sam Leith which Hill critiques later, and in fact listening to these lectures I get the impression that he reads the book pages of that publication pretty avidly, and so, when, at the end of the lecture, he makes a disdainful comment about the art and culture sections of newspapers overall, you could connect that disdain back to the Guardian in particular, although all other papers can be implicated as well, since he didn't name one when he was doing his disdaining.

I suspect that the link between the article and the speech, the initial bridge, the moment when Alison Flood felt the focus of alertness take shape between herself and Geoffrey Hill, was the same instant that he brought up the name of her employer, a word to which she must be perpetually alert, brain trembling for its cue like brain of lynx or jackal, his voice tickling the trigger marked Guardian inside her head, so that the true subject of "Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill" is not Geoffrey Hill or Carol Ann Duffy or the lecture or Oxford or poetry or professor or laureate, but the paper itself.

richer than the humblest real one

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

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

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

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

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

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







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

overcome, in this particular area, as we are all overcome

A week ago, or more than a week, I was waiting for a show to begin when I overheard one of the women behind me talking about "my last trip to Italy" and "my next trip to Italy" which had to include Venice, she said, because Venetian architecture was interesting. She had seen the architecture in Rome, and it was interesting and she had seen the architecture in Turin and it was interesting and in fact the architecture in all of Italy was interesting, and there was one place which was not only interesting but clean, "no trash, no graffiti," but I didn't catch the name of that town, wherever it was.

Interesting was the word she liked, and she used it so often that I wondered what she saw or felt when she said it, and what was being subdued into that concertina packed with folds -- the compacted instrument called Interesting -- on one fold the Colosseum, on another fold the Pantheon, on another fold a dome, a tower, a flight of doves (and "craftsmanship" suggests ZMKC), and on other folds the architecture she expected to see in Venice, all the architecture she had heard about, cool walls, archways, canals, an effusion of statues -- Alexander Herzen's "magnificent absurdity" -- "To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself; but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of a genius," he wrote, and then he went on and called the Venetians "eccentric:" "There is no earth, there are no trees, what does it matter?" he imagined them saying, "Let us have still more carved stones, more ornaments, gold mosaics, sculptures, pictures and frescoes. Here an empty corner has been left; into the corner with a thin sea-god with a long, wet beard! Here is another empty recess, put in another lion with wings and a gospel of Saint Mark! There it is bare and empty; put down a carpet of marble and mosaic! and here, lacework of porphyry!" -- a frame of mind the woman must have seen before because it was incarnate only a short way away on Las Vegas Boulevard, a street that anyone could describe with an echo of Herzen: There is no river, we are in a desert, what does it matter? Let us have a lake, a fountain, a canal, a waterfall! Let us have still more gilt statues, more magicians, more lights! There it is bare and empty; erect the Sphinx, the Statue of Liberty, and the Eiffel Tower!

But the audience is the pivot of a difference: the Venetians lived in their decorated city and enjoyed it proudly, but the decoration in Las Vegas is all in one area, and it is not for the residents, it is not theirs, they do not live in that area, and nobody minds whether they enjoy it or not. The statues and waterfalls are meant for tourists, who have no reason to judge the street with love or sympathy; they can go home. If we could get the decorative frame of mind out into the suburbs then this city would look like the Butterfly Club and the Palais Idéal, and people would feel absolutely eminent --

Around all of Vegas the mountains stand, bare, brown, wrinkled, and beyond that, if you're high enough, you can see the long stripped plain of the desert, a hot death; and Venice is approached by by a plain, a river, and a dusty road, wrote Ruskin in 1851; and if you leave Las Vegas and climb one of the mountains then you will see the city in the sunlit valley like a scatter of glitter, or if you approach at night then this massy airy upshot light of the Luxor rises out of the desert behind a confetti of smaller lights, or if you stand in one of the suburbs then you might not see the casinos at all, only townhouses among stones, or the public library where a huge man comes out of his small bashed white caravan every morning and walks away with his dreadlocks tapping at his ears.

As you come into Venice on your boat, writes Ruskin, you will find yourself with nothing grand in sight, only "dismal arches," and "low and confused brick buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town." This is probably not the interesting architecture that the woman sitting behind me expects to see, these areas are not the Venice she imagines, and yet they are Venice, they are not anywhere other than Venice; they are the stair in the children's poem that can only be described by very simple references to the places where it's not: not at the bottom, not at the top, "It isn't in the nursery / It isn't in the town … It isn't really anywhere / It's somewhere else instead," a place like an English manufacturing town, but not quite, or like a towered region, but not quite.

"Ruskin's was a great and scrupulous mind," writes Geoffrey Hill. The scrupulous mind opens his Stones of Venice by telling the reader that he has not trusted other sources blindly but wherever he mentions a measurement in the book it will be a measurement he has taken himself. However they must excuse him, for he did not travel incorporeally and in his imagination, as they are about to travel while they are inside his book, no, he went with a real body in space and time, a nonideal method which comes with restrictions. Sometimes he couldn't get close enough to see a thing; always his understanding was not as adequate as he would have chosen if he'd had a choice. "Life is not long enough; nor does a day pass by without causing me to feel more bitterly the impossibility of carrying out to the extent which I should desire, the separate studies which general criticism continually forces me to undertake," a fret he has already brought up in his journal:

Several times about the same time on Sunday morning, a fit of self-reproach has come upon me for my idling style of occupation at present, and I have formed a resolution to be always trying to get knowledge of some kind or other, or bodily strength, or some real available, continuing, good, rather than mere amusement of the time.

(June 6th 1841)

The character of the Stones has been won from the struggle of its author: he searches for the right description, the right idea, he draws comparisons, but the further he travels into the comparisons the less accurate they seem to him, and the more adjustments he needs to make, and the more he refines the more he needs to refine, the more he sees the more he finds himself seeing. The row of "dismal arches" is noted, and then his eye carries on like the eye of a picture and sees the end of the row, where the brick buildings begin, and the "line" of these buildings needs to be described; it is "straggling." Then there are "four or five domes" rising over that straggling line, and they are "pale" but "the object which first catches the eye" is not those pale domes, it is "a sullen cloud of black smoke" which broods in the air over the straggle -- not over the whole line indiscriminately, he observes, but over a specific area, "the northern half of it." The black smoke has a source, and his eye finds that too; it is "the belfry of a church." Now finally he relaxes into a simple pronouncement: "It is Venice."

It is his scrupulous nature that compels him to write down this string of words: straggling had to be there because line was there and line had to be there because the brick buildings were there, and each one cried out for its due, and then a movement had to be worked out, from one end of the line to the other, and from pale to black. "Style is not simply the manner in which a writer 'says what he has to say,'" states Hill, "it is also the manner of his choosing not to say." Ruskin would rather choose to say, than not choose, but his own humanity obstructs him -- or so I imagine when I read -- he would like to be superhuman -- "I wish Vesuvius," he writes in his diary, "could love me ..."

That sentence, It is Venice, is not meant to sum up the city or act as a conclusion or a final resting place, it is only a pause, a musical beat, a moment of introduction -- see -- he is going to go on explaining Venice for the length of another two books, and by the end of volume three he is still finding new topics. The last chapter before the one called Conclusion is a digression into a subject he labels "Grotesque Renaissance," and in order to discuss the Grotesque Renaissance he discovers that he has to mention a number of disparate things, the poetry of Samuel Rogers, for example, and cottages in Scotland, "the instinct of playfulness" (in four subsections), the "destructive phenomena of the universe," the greatness of nations, Divine beauty, Flemish streets, Biblical Evangelists, the differences between species of dream, and the Inferno of Dante. The "It" in "It is Venice" is not Venice. It is only the euphoric impression that comes to you before you realise that Venice is impossibly complicated. (False mastery followed by apprenticeship; life is an agony of ignorance for the scrupulous.) A description of the Ducal Palace alone takes up nearly a hundred pages of volume two. There is so much ground to cover that the author shortens his observations into lists --

LXVII. First Capital: i.e. of the pilaster at the Vine angle.

In front, towards the Sea. A child holding a bird before him, with its wings expanded, covering his breast.

On its eastern side. Children’s heads among leaves.

On its western side. A child carrying in one hand a comb; in the other, a pair of scissors.

-- which recur for pages.

LXXVII. Eighth Capital. It has no inscriptions, and its subjects are not, by themselves, intelligible; but they appear to be typical of the degradation of human instincts.

First side. A caricature of Arion on his dolphin; he wears a cap ending in a long proboscis-like horn, and plays a violin with a curious twitch of the bow and wag of the head, very graphically expressed, but still without anything approaching to the power of Northern grotesque. His dolphin has a goodly row of teeth, and the waves beat over his back.

Second side. A human figure, with curly hair and the legs of a bear; the paws laid, with great sculptural skill, upon the foliage. It plays a violin, shaped like a guitar, with a bent double-stringed bow.

Third side. A figure with a serpent’s tail and a monstrous head, founded on a Negro type, hollow-cheeked, large-lipped, and wearing a cap made of a serpent’s skin, holding a fir-cone in its hand.

Fourth side. A monstrous figure, terminating below in a tortoise. It is devouring a gourd, which it grasps greedily with both hands; it wears a cap ending in a hoofed leg.

Fifth side. A centaur wearing a crested helmet, and holding a curved sword.

Sixth side. A knight, riding a headless horse, and wearing chain armor, with a triangular shield flung behind his back, and a two-edged sword.

Seventh side. A figure like that on the fifth, wearing a 337 round helmet, and with the legs and tail of a horse. He bears a long mace with a top like a fir-cone.

Eighth side. A figure with curly hair, and an acorn in its hand, ending below in a fish.

He perseveres, he iterates, but the reader knows that it all feels inadequate to him for he says elsewhere in the book, "The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; it is not going too far to say, that it is most influenced by what it detects least … Indeed there is nothing truly noble either in colour or in form, but its power depends on circumstances infinitely too intimate to be explained, and almost too subtle to be traced." So Venice can't be compassed with lists, or with physical description, or with historical description, or with any description ("too intimate to be explained"), the Ducal Palace is a Questing Beast and he is a Pellinore, chasing it in rings around its columns. His intelligence introduces him to this idea; his intelligence shows him the impossibility; we can all say the word immortality but we are all mortal.

And there are more possibilities. Earlier he saw a piece of work that struck him the wrong way and there his tone changed and he became sarcastic: "The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a pen is called penmanship, and when it is done with a chisel should be called chiselmanship, the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea by expanded pocket-handkerchiefs." If he had hated Venice instead of loving it then the tone of all three volumes might have been like that, the Venice of the Stones of Venice would have been a different Venice, because here, although there's no sign that he saw it as he was writing, was a doorway to another Venice, which only sticks its head out of his book now and then, a Venice despised by John Ruskin, hidden usually behind the Venice he respected, and behind that Venice another Venice, to which he is indifferent, and behind that Venice another Venice, which he never visited, and behind that Venice another one, to which he migrated permanently after marrying an Italian woman, and behind that Venice another Venice, where his mother died of food poisoning -- all of these are fantasies now -- and behind that Venice another one where the duty of tourism exhausted him until he didn't want to write the word Venice ever again, and behind that Venice another one, le città invisibili, explains Italo Calvino.

These three volumes are the record of a fight against the despair that has occurred to a conscientious human being who recognises infinity, and Ruskin finds his rest in two places, the idea of Art and the idea of God. He seems most sure of himself when he is sensing the sublime. Geoffrey Hill, who is thinking of a sentence in Unto This Last, writes sympathetically: "He is overcome, in this particular area, as we are all overcome at some time or another in our particular areas of discourse, by a kind of neutral, or indifferent, or disinterested force in the nature of language itself: a force that Coleridge describes incomparably well in the sudden blaze of a sentence at the beginning of Aids to Reflection: 'For if words are not THINGS they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.'"

The woman behind me sounded confident in her single word, she didn't pause or apologise (Ezra Pound said that his great-aunt-in-law used "beautiful" all over Europe but apologised) -- she was happy -- she sounded happy -- she sounded happier with her one word than Ruskin sounded with his three volumes -- she had found a word through which the "disinterested force in the nature of language itself" could be ducked or defeated or ignored (something in her had felt infinity approaching and defended itself with Interesting) -- she had short-circuited struggle -- and then the musician arrived.*







* A Senegalese guitarist named King Ibu. He sounds something like Habib Koité (he pointed this out himself, and it's true). The Herzen excerpt comes from the end of My Life and Thoughts. Constance Garnett translated. Ruskin wished that Vesuvius could love him on April 20th, 1841. "I wish Vesuvius could love me, like a living thing; I would rather make a friend of him than of any morsel of humanity." I was reading Geoffrey Hill's Collected Critical Writings. I found the Pound quote in Hill's book, and then I looked it up online and found it again on Google Books in Pound's Pavannes and Divagations: "she consented to admit that the one adjective, beautiful, was not universally applicable to all European phenomena ... but continued to use it with apologies." The "children's poem" is Halfway Down by A.A. Milne.

The Butterfly Club is a cabaret saloon in South Melbourne.

Later: A post about Ada Cambridge at the Whispering Gums blog sent me away after her poems, and it looks as if she wrote about Venice too:

Numb, half asleep, and dazed with whirl of wheels,
And gasp of steam, and measured clank of chains,
I heard a blithe voice break a sudden pause,
Ringing familiarly through the lamp-lit night,
“Wife, here's your Venice!”