Back from “Antarctica” with new discoveries

 

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 …

“Wind of change”: the poetic response

 

So, now finally … after “everyone else” did it:

 

 

The reason is that I discovered that I did it already, I think before the change actually occurred but certainly in anticipation of it. And I was very pleased that – unconsciously – I AM still more optimistic than I feel. That was when I sampled a new playlist as part of my “anti-corona measures”, and the first song that got into it was “Wind of Change” by Y&T. I hadn’t listened to any of their music for over a year, I am sure. This CANNOT have happened by chance! But I only discovered it recently - when I was well enough to actually LISTEN to my music again. And loved it: subconscious text relationships – my favourite!

 

The reason why this is a good introduction to a post about poetry is that it IS poetry: “Wind of change WHISPERING strongly”. It actually is a good example for my implicit definition of poetry. Not that something I read IS a poem – short form, preferably in verse or at least containing some kind of binding element that makes the text close in on itself. Poems are certainly an environment where poetry often occurs, often probably in a way I don’t recognize, but still - in my recent experience – much less frequently than I thought. I noticed that my useful Oxford anthology is called: “The Oxford Book of English VERSE” – because it doesn’t limit itself to individual poems but contains lots of samples of verse taken from other – epic or dramatic – texts. But the title played into my observation that most of the poems I had tried were not very “poetic” – that what I was actually looking for is POETRY, not poems.

 

In my experience, poetry always works with some kind of contradictory construction or surficial inconsistency – something slightly or hugely disturbing -  which in “modern” (=post medieval) poetry often is concealed/contained in a metaphor, but not always. (“Whispering strongly” is not a metaphor!). Irony, for example, can be extremely “poetic” as it is often based on a very subtle contradiction – sometimes quite difficult to trace. Talking with Claudia about “The Tyger” and William Blake, I discovered that his poems are a lot more ironic and playful than I realized.  As I discovered, looking for and dwelling on inconsistencies – like “a marriage of true minds” or “whispering strongly” -  helps me to get into a place where I can – and want to - act “poetically” myself. Never in a million years could I write a relevant poem, but I am always prepared to act on it. To let go of my simplistic and utilitarian view of the world in order to look out for what is really REAL.

 

And this means: real in a way that I am genuinely affected by it. There was a sad and very therapeutic reason for me to look into poetry when I realized the havoc the virus had wreaked with my life through social and sensual deprivation – without me noticing it at first. I don’t want to say that poetry can be the CURE, but it somehow raised my awareness of my state of mind. I realized that the reason to look into poems was that they are often a special “breeding ground” for poetry – which can occur in all kinds of literary contexts but somehow had ceased to do so – together with all the many(?) other exciting things in my life. Trying to revive this necessary feature, I was looking for the kind of text designed to express and excite a strong emphatic REACTION to some part of reality. To be able to tell what I am feeling, but also to feel connected. To try to strike this relation with another human mind – or lots of them. In this respect, the image of the American flag fluttering freely in the wind is certainly a poetic response, but the wind of change “whispering strongly” proved to be an even stronger one to the same thing – with the idea of all these social media channels silently buzzing, and billions of people’s minds and lives getting behind the message until nothing else can be heard anymore. Completely inaudible, yet so strong …

 

In a case like this – when I know exactly to what to react! – poetry is not at all difficult to understand. In fact, it is entirely irrelevant to what “Y&T” were reacting themselves because my reaction is instantaneous and complete. As it is often the way with pop songs. As I noted earlier, a Beatle’s song is an excellent means to COMMUNICATE feelings. “Everybody” knows the feelings it is referring to. At the other end of the scale, one of my current favourite songs – “Harmony Hall” by Vampire Weekend – proved completely impenetrable.

 

We took a vow in summertime 

Now we find ourselves in late December

I believe that New Year’s Eve

Will be the perfect time

For their great surrender

But they don’t remember

 

Anger wants a voice

Voices wanna sing

Singers harmonize

‘Til they can’t hear anything

Thought that I was free

From all that questioning

But every time a problem ends

Another one begins

 

And the stone walls of Harmony Hall bear witness

Anybody with a worried mind can never forgive the sight

Of wicked snakes inside a place you thought was dignified

I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die

(Ooh ooh ooh ooh)

I don’t wann live like this, but I don’t wanna die

 

Within the halls of power lies

A nervous heart that beats

Like a young pretender’s

Beneath these velvet gloves I hide

The shameful crooked hands

Of a money lender

‘Cause I still remember

 

Anger wants a voice …

 

 

Not just for me - Wikipedia doesn’t provide any context either, apart from the information that the dorm where the group had been founded was called “Harmony Hall”, which - even if the connection hadn’t been denied by members of the group, which means absolutely nothing, by the way! - doesn’t yield enough to make sense. I’d say, AS A POEM, I’d just dismiss it, but, being a song, the CONTRAST between the lofty tune and the eerie content becomes alluring and totally “poetic”. In fact, the choice of words suggests a traumatic, kind of damaging or crippling experience that left lasting wounds, and which might or might not have taken place in Harmony Hall …? There certainly IS a context – which makes me curious, but in this case it is not even my place to ask because the experience is obviously too PERSONAL to be revealed. And this might be the case for many poems, probably most of the poems that are truly “poetic”. It is certainly one of the reasons why somebody reacted in verse to a certain personal experience, not in long prose. Nobody expects them to explain everything. And there are already the two reasons I discovered so far why poems are often so difficult to read, compared to long prose or drama. With the latter, we usually don’t NOTICE the process of adding context all the time because there is so much content already in the text to choose from – and so much “non-subjective” content, as we don’t usually interpret this content as a PERSONAL choice. In fact, in my experience, taking the author into consideration is usually disruptive to the reading process. With poems, I am immediately presented with the difficulty WHICH context to add because there isn’t much. (Lots of poems, like “Dover Beach”, even leave gaps for the reader to fill in!) And because of this unique situation – that there is somehow the speaker-author and me in this, and nobody else - I am aware that I will never be able to add the COMPLETE context if I don’t know anything about them. Especially the kind of “sub-personal” stuff that I won’t find on Wikipedia … (It is nothing like a first-person narrator – whom we automatically suspect of “pretending”!)

 

Far from being able to overcome this difficulty, I feel as if I made progress insofar as I consider adding context not as a chore that has to follow certain rules but as some kind of game that I enjoy. I don’t have to find the “right” context – if this was even possible! – although, with poems, I have to be extra thorough and follow the text word for word, painstakingly fill in the gaps, and pursue every trail it lays out for me – as these are the rules of the game. This is what can become time-consuming and exhausting – at the moment, I am rather happy to slave at work and in my mum’s garden rather than hunting down poems! -  but it is exactly what makes poetry so effective. I just acquired an absolutely fascinating poem which I cannot make head or tail of. Maybe I never will, but it is constantly tempting me to try. (Of course it’s ultra-scary …)

 

 

Not Waving but Drowning  (by Stevie Smith, 1902-1971)

 

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

 

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

 

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

 

 

I should be unable to add any context, as I cannot put my reaction into words – but the reaction is there nonetheless, and it is strong. Kind of horrified, yet there is an ironic twinkle all the same … Which means, IF I am reacting, I AM already adding context! In fact, I am doing this as soon as I start reading, and it only ceases when I stop. I am even adding context when I don’t understand a thing … which is kind of absurd. But, thinking about it, I had a few experiences of this kind that were some of the best I ever had reading. And the absurd idea of constantly trying to add context even when I am clearly unable to do it, somehow helps to explain it to myself. I remember reading Goethe’s “Märchen” (=“fairy-tale”) a long time ago at uni with absolute delight. It is probably the only “context-free” text I ever read, there is absolutely nothing in it that makes any sense, but it is absolutely beautiful to read nonetheless. It was one of the most intense experiences reading I remember, just the sheer delight that somebody might have achieved to write something like this, hundreds of years ago, and me able to read it … And right now I have a similar experience that is repeated every morning - or rather between four and half past four every NIGHT when I inexplicably wake up and cannot go back to sleep – with a novel called “The Master and the Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is one of the few wonderful absurd texts I have read. Instead of being annoyed that I cannot sleep, I take up this book and read about half an hour before getting up, and I already know that my life will be sadly diminished once I am through with it. Nothing about this book makes the least bit of sense, I cannot get my head around all these Russian names anyway, and there is not a single character in it that I find the least bit interesting, so – shouldn’t be something I would enjoy reading! I don’t know – maybe it is just this feeling of being able to read something without any RESTRICTONS whatsoever that come from context. To CONSCIOUSLY exercise the freedom I ALWAYS have when I am acting poetically. When I am in a world where I can do absolutely everything.

 

And there is another observation I made: All these texts - except “Märchen” - are really about the most terrible things in life: oppression, danger, fear, isolation, death, mutilations, total chaos, and heartbreak … and it is delightful to move them about in this way, as if they were light as feathers, not dragging them along like heavy chains. Going about this for half an hour before getting up and into the yoke again appears like this unexpected privilege …

Weird, that THIS seems to be what really works. The way I most enjoy being alive - before anything else is added to it, before I START getting connected – and fettered – to anything. The way I enjoy being ALONE. (I don’t even want to read it at any other time of the day.) At the beginning of my post, it was all about being connected – trying to understand other people and feeling understood. But there appears to be the opposite as well which is important. It is like going on a brief trip to Antarctica every morning – something I always wanted, I think, but knew I would never do. To go where there would be absolutely NOTHING I understand. A feeling of total emptiness and isolation. But still I am here - where I understand nobody, and nobody understands me - but it doesn’t matter. I am here, and I am fine because I enjoy being alive and “doing it”.