Of course this has nothing to do with anything, but, coming back to work after mixed Easter holidays with ice and snow, staying home (which was the good bit!), and minor family and computer troubles, I had nonetheless reached an almost Buddha-like state of inner peace, until I opened my mailbox … Don’t get me wrong: I would never have expected my employer to come up with a corona testing strategy for their employees who are, like me, stupid and unimportant enough to come to their workplace for work – not stay at home regardless of having anything useful to do there. (I know that I am an idiot, but my job description is identical to the one Francis Underwood utters in the very first episode of “House of Cards”: I have to be at my workplace to drain the pipes and keep the sludge running.) I wouldn’t have complained one bit if the management of Technical University had just kept their mouth shut, and would have gone and got my own test every week as I have started doing. But they actually had the nerve to announce their “testing strategy” which consists in issuing a form that entitles us to one test a week free of charge - to get at a pharmacy or testing centre – which is exactly what you can get ANYWAY for about a month now with no need of any stupid form!!! My respect and admiration for all the super-resilient people – from mothers in home office to teaching and medical staff – who managed life during the pandemic is INFINITE and is only surpassed by the awe inspired in me by the people who created these vaccines! Contemplating their level of efficiency, I feel not just unimportant, as usual, but obliterated. In the beginning, I was even relatively tolerant of the politicians. I never would have believed the amount of incompetence and impudence of the political and administrative lot until Angela Merkel announced her idea of “days of rest” over Easter. I was a bit annoyed – like everybody else – because that would have meant that the shops would be closed, and instead of rest everybody who is not a politician and has to do their own shopping would have experienced extra stressful and crowded Easter preparations … but I still thought she knew what she was talking about. She didn’t! She had to take it back because it would have been impossible to come up with a viable definition for “days of rest” in time for Easter … I think that was the first time my blood pressure rose substantially due to corona measures, and now it is official! Compared to all the preceding blunder and bullshit it appears like a trifle, but for me this was the last straw. For the first time – and the last! - I threw a tantrum in our chatroom – which nobody appreciated, of course. I couldn’t write anything like this, though, that’s why it got in here.
Let’s see if have anything sensible to write on top of that ... I am not quite sure. I am not really into reading at the moment. Of course I am always listening to stuff, and am watching stuff, but it’s not quite the same as usual. Maybe because of all the inefficient dithering around me I feel threatened and worthless, except when I am exercising or doing some kind of handywork – which is probably not that efficient either but which I am very inventive in finding if it doesn’t find me. Therefore I haven’t really made any progress on poems. But I struck on one interesting problem that was present from the beginning of my blog in different forms and different contexts. Focusing on poems, it kind of came to a head. I realized that I was not just more successful with “historical” poems but that I am unable to read contemporary poetry most of the time. I sometimes get hooked, like on “Not Waving but Drowning”, but I never get the feeling that I understand enough of what I am reading. In my last post I reflected on how much I can enjoy “contextless” reading – but ONLY if I assume that there really is no context I am supposed to be adding. “Märchen” and “The Master and the Margarita” never felt like INCOMPLETE texts. In fact, they are quite different texts, context-wise, because with “Märchen” I was just enjoying the POSSIBILITY of contextless reading – which, in my experience, is an important part of almost any instance of reading I really enjoy. Probably since my father read “Max and Moritz” to me when I was one year and a half. It is just dwelling on the words and their power to stimulate my imagination. (Listening to music, it’s a much bigger part of my “reading”. The question of understanding doesn’t even arise.) In “The Master and the Margarita” context is added all the time, and so much of it that it is a challenge to process because, if we don’t know where the story is going, we cannot read over the unimportant bits as we cannot identify them. Everything appears to be intertwined – or at least COULD be – and at one point I formed the suspicion that these different names and ways to refer to a person were a ruse to confuse the reader even further. And usually this would annoy me – and probably did, in the beginning – but somehow all this made my brain hyperactive, and that was what I needed. At one point I began to enjoy it and just kind of ride the waves and be happy that I never touch ground – like Margarita when she becomes a witch and is riding her broom all over the city, my favourite bit of the book. But it is seldom that I enjoy something “without reason” for such a length of time, and – unlike “Märchen” – in truth there isn’t a contextless text here. I just have to read on and on, and wait for the complex CONTEXT-BUILDING PROCESS to proceed on its own. In the end, a different texture of reality has emerged that is very unlike what I experience as my everyday reality. And I don’t think I would have enjoyed this process so much if I didn’t believe that this structure of reality was at least as valid as the one rational or practical - or wishful! - thinking imposes on everyday events. There is a logic of reason and happiness, but shouldn’t there be one of chaos and catastrophe as well as – in truth - there is at least as much of it in our lives? If there was, it would be kind of like this.
The reason – or reasons – that poems usually don’t work like this is that they are short and often they are deliberately elliptic. Reading them just doesn’t take long enough for a context-building process like this to unfold inside me. And the elliptic structure makes adding context a constructive principle. The latter is not always the case, for example the sonnets I read by Shakespeare and Barrett Browning are not elliptic – nor is “The Tyger”, though other poems by William Blake might be, for example “London”. One might argue that fictional texts are necessarily elliptic, but I just noticed how big the difference can be when I am dealing with contemporary poetry. To be exact, I shouldn’t say “contemporary” because it is more about the fact if ANY historical context that I know of can be added. This could be context about events or circumstances that applied ten years ago as well as centuries ago. But with contemporary poems I am usually lost. Almost every single one of these texts feels elliptic because of their intimate nature – they are often very concrete, dwelling on personal or momentary experience and perception – but the “data” we would need to describe the situation they refer to are missing. Compared to this, long prose is usually teeming with information. We are taking our pick to make our own text. It also, as a rule, presents us with several fictional characters, and fictional characters appear to us complete, whereas real people never do. In poems, this REAL person whose voice we are hearing is almost always present, one way or the other. Just one example from my “Oxford Book of English Verse” to make this less abstract:
Antony Thwaite (1930 -)
At Evening
They were always there, at the end of the garden or elsewhere
Talking unfathomably about whatever it was
In a way that even in childhood I could understand
Enough, at any rate, to feel frightened of.
And here they all are again, as I stoop to brush off
Four or five grey hairs from the arm of the chair – still talking,
Their heads close together, familiar faces in congress,
Knowing I’m there, not afraid to talk when I’m there,
But secret too, surreptitious. I wish I could hear.
The shadows move down the garden, the bonfire smoke
Drifts across hedges, the smell of the smoke pricks my nose,
The hairs on my arm stand up as evening comes on:
And still they are talking, talking, and I want to go in,
Into the house where I know I have always been.
It is so concrete, feels so close … and yet I feel left out because the most important information seems to be missing. It is very intimate information about a person which I will never get to know. I’ll never really understand why somebody wants to talk to the public through poems. Maybe they don’t. Maybe, like myself, they are just looking for an excuse to talk to themselves …? But it would be a pity if nobody listened. I mean, it would be a pity if I didn’t have poems to listen to. Reading this one – though it is again scary! - made me feel so calm …
Yet I suddenly understood why I was throwing a tantrum. And why I didn’t “delete” it though I knew that it was ridiculous. Of course it is also a poetic utterance – not throwing the tantrum but deliberately putting it into words. My theory (and practice) is that every decisive act of creating text makes something HAPPEN – more than we ever realize. That’s the reason why my favourite word of all times is the Icelandic ráða, derived from Germanic re: ðana (“reden” in German - cheers Wikipedia!) – which basically means: talk. But it is virtually untranslatable. Trying to read Icelandic sagas in Old North, I realized that the quantity of different meanings this word can take is potentially infinite because it is a placeholder for some kind of logical structure like “to make things happen by talking”. A potentially infinite number of things. This made me realize that “our” firm distinction between talking and acting is artificial and unhelpful. Talking has to be linked to acting, or feeling, or bringing things forward one way or the other. Otherwise it is incomplete and superfluous. Like the maddening delusion that, if we have talked, we have already resolved the issue. But there are productive ways of talking and others that are not, and I have a sixth sense for these. I can smell the bullshit. When I am talking so much – in this case writing – it is in order for something to happen. Therefore it usually does. In this case, deliberately throwing a tantrum – twice: about Merkel’s “days of rest” and about my employer taking the piss on corona measures – catapulted me out of my inner lock-down. The feeling that I couldn’t do anything anyway except being patient – because I can. At least we have testing now, and I can go and get a test once a week – more often if I pay for it. And that means I can meet people without a bad conscience about possibly spreading infection, I can be at work without having a bad conscience about not being in home office (how absurd is that!), and maybe someday in the far future I will be able to go to the cinema again – if it still exists. And it definitely zapped my brain and brought me out of this sluggish state where I think it doesn’t matter what I think because nobody is listening. Of course nobody is listening, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is going on inside me.
In short, it woke me up, and I looked around and realized that I had struck on something fascinating. I just saw this little hole and poked and came onto a gold mine. Or something like a huge cave with lots of unknown places to explore. As has happened in the past, my INABILITY of adding context made me aware of the mechanisms of CONTEXT-BUILDING. Not as something from theory, but as something that is HAPPENING when I am reading. Basically the fact that context mostly isn’t something that is outside the text, kind of ready-made, and has to be brought in to make the text complete, but that most of the context-building is “done” by the text itself. Meaning that there are so many more ways for fictional text than I realized to STIMULATE ME to build context. Already I am becoming more successful at reading these poems, just contemplating the possibility! Of course I am just about to start, collecting material, but I have a feeling that I am now back from Antarctica, with a world of new ideas ready to kick off …