-
About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Peter Taylor in triple vision by John Matthias
2. Representation in millimetres by Alan Wall
3. Gianfranco Rosi’s marginalia by Simon Collings
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! You may never catch up, but YOU CAN START HERE: Kino Atlantyk and more prose poems by Maria Jastrzębska | At this moment by Rupert M. Loydell | How the robots of the world’s richest man decide what you may read by Ian Gardner | ‘Measuring Distances’ and four more prose poems by Kimberly Campanello | David Baddiel, another famous Jew by Howard Cooper | John Fowles, Gentleman by Bruce Kinzer | Art and Innocence by Victor Bruno | San Miniato, a poem by Michelene Wandor | To Field Flowers, a tribute to Philippe Jaccottet by John Taylor | Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley | ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor | The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall | Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
Contact The Fortnightly.
Books received: Updated list.
-
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
Time Out’s New York listings here.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein. Now running.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement and submission guidelines.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
Viduities.
By ALAN WALL.
IN KRAPP’S LAST TAPE, Beckett presents us with Krapp listening to the tape-recordings of his own voice from many years before. Suddenly he stops the spool and plays it back. The word that has snagged in his mind is viduity. He used it once, and so must once have known its meaning, but he does not appear to know its meaning any more. He goes backstage into darkness and returns with ‘an enormous dictionary’, in which he discovers – or rediscovers – that the word signifies ‘State – or condition – of being – or remaining – a widow – or widower.’ Krapp finds himself a little baffled by that phrase ‘being or remaining’, and repeats it.
Within six years of America’s twentieth-century involvement, there were said to be three million spiritualists in America…
There had never been such a sprouting of spiritualism since its birthing years of 1848 to 1854 in the U.S., when the Fox family of Hydesville got things moving swiftly upwards through the astral planes, with the knocking sounds of spirits from the other side. Within six years of America’s twentieth-century involvement, there were said to be three million spiritualists in America, their communicative urges dutifully serviced by ten thousand mediums. Now once again, as the Great War ground on, there had been séances held every night in one great city or another. The number of those who suddenly discovered a gift for establishing contact with the other side, or receiving messages therefrom, was effectively beyond counting. The Society for Psychical Research had been formed in 1882, by Frederic W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney. And there were those, like W. B. Yeats, who believed it was only a matter of time before the existence of beings in a life beyond this one would be securely established. Scientific proof would be forthcoming; they were in no doubt of that.
So what happens, we are entitled to ask, if the addressee is reported missing in action, but the urge to communicate with him remains as strong post-mortem as it had been before the presumed fatality? One possibility is that what Jakobson calls the contact has to be substantially modified so as to take the recent death into account. The physical addressee is replaced by an enhanced contact or physical channel; in other words, the medium expands to fill the space allotted to it, for in this instance, the medium is the message. The medium in the shape of a psychic facilitator has arrived. Through the preternaturally endowed communicator the barrier between the living and the dead may be broken down. Conan Doyle put it thus in one of his notebooks:
All you need is one who is enhanced by the requisite sensitivities to the relevant vibrations, the whisperings, the rappings. This was a time, we should recall, when it had dawned on humanity that our realm of perception was radically delimited. We might live inside the visible spectrum, within our own circumscribed audible limits, but there was plenty going on outside those parameters. Even a dog hears sounds too high-pitched ever to register in the human auditory system. Because you cannot see infrared or ultraviolet with the naked eye does not mean those regions of the spectrum do not exist. They are packed with information we can only access by special means. In other words, we need to discover the right medium of enquiry.
Jakobson also lists the six functions of communication, one of which is the conative. This is the mode of second-person address, the vocative I-Thou, which articulates communication in the intimate space of a direct address. This function occurs more frequently in verse and song than in prose (except in the epistolary form). And we note how frequently the addressee in the conative mode, particularly in verse, can be either dead or entirely deaf to our multiple entreaties. Jakobson nowhere addresses the significance of this, but it forms a substantial portion of our cultural inheritance. We have spent so much time talking either to the non-respondent gods, or to the dead, frequently in verse. What does this tell us about ourselves and our culture? Physical absence in perpetuity, it appears, in no way precludes our earnest communication.
Dead Letters
IN HIS POEM ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes:
What does it mean to engage the conative function with an addressee who never answers: who seemingly cannot answer (in the human rubric) and yet must still be obsessively addressed? What does it mean to intone a psalm to Adonai, never expecting a reply? What does it mean to write poems addressing the Almighty (as Hopkins did) to which no reciprocal communication will ever be despatched? The Dead Letter Office to which Hopkins alludes was a necropolis of failed communications. This was where mail that could not be delivered ended up, often waiting there for years before the enigma of the addressee could finally be resolved. So what exactly does it signify to be talking to the dead? Or, for that matter, to so ventriloquize the dead that they would appear once more to be talking to us? Practising as a doctor in Portsmouth, long before the Great War, Conan Doyle had held a séance in which a commercial traveller asked that his family in Slattenmere in Cumbria be connected on his behalf. Doyle duly wrote and posted the letter as requested. There was no such place as Slattenmere, and the letter came back finally, via the Dead Letter Office.
The means of communication between soldiers in the trenches at the Western Front and their loved ones back in Blighty were letters and postcards. And then the dread communication might be delivered in the form of a telegram: Regret to inform you…. So this one too had gone.
The true spirit is eternal. Our funerary monuments tell us as much. A poem can be a kind of funerary monument, fashioned in words instead of stone.
Another husband, father, son or brother had stepped out of the air to join the fallen. When Helen Thomas received hers, it said that Edward had died on 9th April 1917. He had been killed by a shell-blast at the start of the Arras offensive. A month later Helen wrote to Robert Frost and his wife in America: ‘…how rich I am in his love & his spirit & all that is eternal, & all that was & is between us that he said again & again “Remember whatever happens all is well between us forever”.’ In other words, although he has died in body, he has not died in spirit, for the true spirit is eternal. Our funerary monuments tell us as much. And a poem can be a kind of funerary monument, fashioned in words instead of stone. The elegy is a continuance beyond death of the one who is seemingly lost for ever. This is the burden of Milton’s lines about Edward King in ‘Lycidas’:
The dead, when they are significant enough, enter the region of anamnesis. And significance here means love.
Anamnesis
All culture is based on memory. As Jones was fond of remarking, ‘If you wish to insult the Muse, forget.’
All culture is based on memory. As Jones was fond of remarking, ‘If you wish to insult the Muse, forget.’ A chronicle is only meaningful if we can retain the sense of what went before, and the same applies to a novel. You cannot understand this page unless you retain remembrance of previous pages. Whatever we designate due matter for anamnesis is what we deem unforgettable. All cultures surround their most treasured anamneses with ritual. Ritual is a physical form of remembering. In the Christian cultus to which Jones subscribed, the Eucharistic sacrifice at the heart of the Mass is the central event of life, to be repeated daily. The voluntary self-immolation of Jeshua of Nazareth ordained the religion that was to follow in his name. And he had proclaimed that ordination the night before when he entered the order of signs by instituting the Eucharistic meal for his disciples.
All poetry is memorial. It calls to mind and litanizes that which must not be forgotten; that which the poet, as cultural remembrance, is exhorting us to recall. So we have Yeats in 1916:
And here again is Edward Thomas:
They are both doing the same thing, and both doing it in the same year, 1916. Litanies present themselves as life-saving repetitions. They remind us, to use the words of David Jones once more, that we must work within the limits of our love. And the central act of anamnesis will be illocutionary: we utter the words that incant the desiderated action or presence. We build the temple out of stone in order that the spirit should inhabit it; we build the temple out of words (litany or poem) so as to welcome the spirit home. The beloved being is brought back into focus on the altar of our rite. This is re-calling, re-membering, re-collecting. I have made a heap of all that I could find, wrote Nennius, one of Jones’s primary sources. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, wrote T. S. Eliot, with the ruined landscapes of the Great War forming a backdrop to his words.
Creating a Psychic Space
The Terrors of the Dead
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click twice.
THE CENTRAL STATEMENT of the Mass is the priest’s utterance: ‘This is my body’. The tense is present. He does not, after all, say, ‘This was my body’, though Jesus has been certifiably crucified these last two thousand years. The words, taken from that ceremony where the order of signs was first entered, utter a presence. He who was dead is now living. The words of the liturgy are performative.
We are outnumbered by the dead. Should they all return at once, our world would be crowded, perhaps beyond endurance. Bob Hope waits in cryonic suspension, ready for that moment when the medical technology can restore him to the ranks of the living, where he might once more set the table on a roar, as Yorick too had done, before they laid him in the earth, before digging him up again. A prolepsis of archaeology. The earth holds the dead for us, like a safe deposit box, until we are ready to bring them out into the light once more, thus to begin our painstaking analysis.
The idea of encountering the dead has haunted poetry from its beginnings. The first real poem we ever created was Gilgamesh. In that the mighty ruler has to confront the fact that his beloved companion, Enkidu, has died, and gone to the dreadful region where the dead are punished, not with judgment, but merely with the hideous reality of imprisonment in the land of the dead, where you are dressed as birds in black feathers, and must eat dirt. There is no escape from this fate; cryonics have not yet made their entry. In Book 11 of The Odyssey, Odysseus travels to the place where members of the Underworld might be met. The shades arrive, hungry for the blood he offers. It is evident that the greatest blessing they might receive is forgetfulness. Then there is Book 6 of The Aeneid, where Aeneas travels to the land on the dead. And then there is Dante’s Inferno, where the dead really do get their just desserts.
Solaris
ONE OF THE most extraordinary evocations of the dead, and the illocutionary force with which the psyche might summon them, is Solaris. This is the film made by Andrei Tarkovsky from the novel by Stanislaw Lem, who came to regard the film as a travesty of his book and very nearly disowned it. In both film and book a new planet has managed somehow to insert itself into the solar system. It constitutes a sea of liquid gas. In its vicinity curious occurrences take place. The most curious of them is that the dead come back to life, reconstituted apparently as a ghostly physiology of neutrinos. Even if you destroy the revenant once more, he or she will rapidly be reconstituted. They are infinitely reconstitutable, and amnesiac. Their only connection to memory is the remembrance of those to whom they are attached. They are like a prosthetic manifestation of the memory of the other.
The dead appear to be activated by the psychic potencies of those whose obsessions resurrect them. The return is not necessarily welcome.
The dead appear to be activated by the psychic potencies of those whose obsessions resurrect them. The return is not necessarily welcome. Kelvin tries to fire his dead wife Hari back to earth on a rocket, so he might be rid of her in perpetuity. But she returns the next day. His own troubled remembrance, it seems, cannot be so easily shortcircuited by its own manoeuvres. She is the reincarnation of the troubled part of his memory in which she subsists. She has a home there which cannot be demolished. And one of the questions the film asks is this: how much do we really want the dead to return? If Bob Hope were to arise now from his sepulchre of chilled hydrogen, having been sustained in his state of cryopreservation, would we really thank him for the memory? Or, like Kelvin with Hari, would we try to find a means of disposing of him once more? What was it like at the evening meal that Martha and Mary prepared for their brother, Lazarus? What questions do you ask? ‘So, what’s it like being dead then?’
Remembering the Remembered
‘DO THIS IN memory of me.’ Thus Jesus, on the first Sherthursday feast, inaugurating his own anamnesis. And Geoffrey Hill at the beginning of his magisterial poem ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy’ has these lines:
The text of memory might demand more of us than we are ready to give. And when a writer dies, it is the texts that remain. Helen Thomas began to memorialize her husband, who had so effectively memorialized beloved parts of the English landscape, turning topography into a kind of liturgy. She did not pretend that the memorializing was unproblematical. Thomas was a difficult man, and knew it. With downswings of mood so dreadful that they placed a curse not only on him, but on all in his vicinity. His poems of 1916 can be seen as partly penitential: a making amends for his failures as husband and father.
But Helen loved him; loved him enough not to sentimentalize him. She tried to see him steadily and see him whole. She knew the poetry had come out of pain as much as exhilaration.
It is notable how religious the language of memorializing the fallen in times of war often is. The sacrificial self-immolation of Christ seems echoed in the sacrifice of the serving soldier. Blood spilt can still make the land sacred, though perhaps with less conviction as each fresh year goes by. Modern warfare still links up with primitive rituals. To repeat David Jones’s remark, to insult or even widow the Muse, all you have to do is forget. Or designate memory a region for prosthetic devices, to be cached inside computers and in cyberspace clouds. The price of her viduity will be the shallowing-out of all our lives.
♦
NOTE.
Related
Publication: Wednesday, 1 July 2020, at 09:43.
Options: Archive for Alan Wall. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.