But, first: why not? A chain of telling that requires discrete and distinct
figures, already in some sense familiar, acting across a background, largely
unexamined and abandoned merely to suggestion, towards the achievement of,
or the failure to achieve, certain goals, whose importance holds the earlier
periods in suspense until in some final resolution all that is significant
crystallizes in a perfection of plot and motivation, and all the rest, wanting
any real brush with language, retreats once more to ground: that's narrative
as I knew it thirty years ago, and it seemed then, as it does now, inadequate
to the world of my experience.
To avoid the fate of perpetrating such stuff, I instead wrote a poetry which
found itself increasingly characterized by argument, deploration, pleading,
threats, until I realized that I didn't like how that worked either, and stopped
writing altogether for about twenty years.
But I went on thinking and planning and testing and learning, though largely
just in imagination. I took a shine to the detective genre in which, in theory,
any object or event can be a clue and, as such, be exalted into meaning as
the everyday world sifts through the riddle of observation, inference and
deduction. But, even there, the world existed only towards an end in which
all might be revealed, and the head of Holmes had a strictly limited inventory
capacity.
Eventually, it was only in the parallel forensics of Gombrowicz's "Cosmos"
that I found some satisfaction with detection, since nothing is revealed there,
and the patterns and clues are rubbish and trivial chatter remains fraught,
even on rereading.
I had by this time resumed writing poetry, though with conventional narrative
either expunged or twisted, and temporal change borne instead by repetition,
either incremental or with calculated variation. My models for this were in
the refrain structures of folk-song, often mediated through the likes of Yeats
or Lorca, and in the interplay of stasis and movement in Chinese parallel
verse. I was forced to recognize, however, that the 'lyric' mode which I practiced
was quite as prone to exclude the incoherent world as was the mannered narrative
I so distrusted. I had also encountered Cage for a second time, and with more
understanding of how the play of ambient noise across the receptivity of his
spaces might circumvent those exclusions and admit what might otherwise not
be acknowledged.
I wrote a longish 'bicameral' piece called Syzygy, consisting of two
halves, The Drift and The Net respectively. The
Drift consists of twelve compact, elliptical, but distinctly 'lyric'
poems. The Net is a single poem of 72 long lines, comprising 24
three-line stanzas. Significantly these two sections are made up of exactly
the same phrases reordered, rigorously and exhaustively mapped through a one-to-one
matrix, the exact structuring of which is not directly relevant here. There
is a brief set of notes added, which ground some of the detailed references
of The Drift within the empirical world.
For me, much of the significance of the poem is in the way in which sequences
of phrases in The Net, arrived at through the blind deploymen
of predetermined procedures, carry a force both of lyricism and of narrative,
intense though severely fragmented in both cases, which revealed a meaning
different from and additional to anything I had deliberately written into
the work. Having lived with it for over two years now, I have come to understand
that "with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold" and how "devastation
fell attending headbone the high" while "outside the foundries the
clumsy the deadlocked disintegrates" though "not a tremor manifests
the rare the quickening across these settlements" . So, I had confirmed
for myself that a densely overdetermined language, functioning in its most
intensely personal mode of the lyric, could survive radical disruption and
return from that alienation a yield which the reader might gather. It gave
the world an in.
I had meanwhile read all the Fu Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer, intrigued the
Chinese Doctor's ceaseless attempts to appropriate the world by abducting
experts in all fields, whose task was to analyse and replicate in enhanced
form all aspects of the workaday world. It matched my sense as a child that
what I saw in mirrors was a world diligently assembled by unseen agents to
match that which I inhabited, and I watched carefully for small discrepancies
to justify that sense, but never found them, and the specialists of Fu Manchu's
underworld empire attended only to the great realms of science, technology,
politics, always were disbanded by resurgent law before their analysis could
address the classified advertisments in the newspapers, the torn betting slips
outside a bookie's shop, the inconsequential gabbling of drunks in a pub.
The workings of what I came to know, through Marx, Adorno and Benjamin, as
phantasmagoria fascinated and appalled me. And how is responsibility to be
assigned across mock-worlds if not through the causal chains which are narrative's
stock-in-trade?
Therefore:
while detailed depositions state
how further on
within the wood
. . .
the bright axe
blossom suddenly
the long bones lever
up from it like anthers
and beyond the startling
calyx of teeth
an avid buzzing perishable
fruit set thicken
and disintegrate
to load with sweet
secure deposits
of afflicting gold
their remote cells . . .
Here is not just one narrative, but two. Firstly, the sequence of blossoming,
the detail of anther and calyx expanding, the fruiting adumbrated in the gathering
of bees about the flower, and their dispersal to the hive where they load
the cells with honey. This apparently natural and value-free sequence is overlaid
on another causal chain, which starts with the felling of a tree by a logger
with an axe (commercial or strategic deforestation has a long and significant
history in Ireland as in much of the developing world today). From this action,
the causal sequence is run backwards, seeking earlier sources where responsibility
may be assigned: the long bones of the arm, the gasping jaw of the labourer,
give way to the investors depositing their profits in banks. This single instance
is simple, but the structure of reversed causality running back from an act
of violence against the person or ecological ruin, masked meanwhile by a natural
sequence of a bird fledging or a mineral cystallizing, is repeated twice more
in the poem, broken by cases for and against the possibility of asylum amid
such wilderness. Here, I began again to write narrative because the forensic
process it allows seemed to me necessary to any possibility of living ethically,
of recognizing and fulfilling due responsibility.
Another narrative genre which interested me is that of scientific experiment,
where the researcher actively intervenes in the course of nature, attempting
to limit the causal influences at work, so that one element may be manipulated,
and the change in another, dependent element, observed and measured. It is
intended that the record of correct prediction and accurate calculation of
effect may then grant understanding of what was previously obscure.
"A body thrown vertically down from the top of a tower moves through
a distance of 88 feet during the third second of its flight. Calculate, then,
the speed of projection, and determine the speed at which the sleeve begins
to move upwards."
And yet, it is in a field complex with uncertainty, that we attempt to understand,
to categorize, to measure, and the experimenter must attempt to exclude all
forces not considered relevant to the investigation, and accurately account
for all that ensues.
"When he attempted to speak to her, the patient jumped off the bridge
falling some 30 feet into about 20 feet of water. There is always a chance
therefore that the critical act or change may take place when the observer's
eyes are withdrawn."
Yet we must dispassionately observe, measure and record.
"Mild plethora of the face ensued, it being divided into three parts,
namely: the forehead, fair complected, one; the nose, another, sand present
in abundance there admixed with small crustacean shells; and from the nose
to chin, exhibiting extensive tooth loss though with roots intact, another.
Notice the blood tinged fluid coming from mouth. Red is warm and radiates
across the ground."
In such a manner, sometimes we come to face what can scarcely be countenanced.
"It may happen that we are not aware of all the conditions under which
our researches are made. Some substance may be present or some power may be
in action, which escapes the most vigilant examination. Not being aware of
its existence, we are unable to take proper measures to exclude it, and thus
determine the share which it has in the results of our experiments."
Though the outcome be uncertain, may we still presume to have advanced knowledge
in certain quarters? Lacking the machinery of suspense, to what end may such
a narrative aspire?
"A man has several bones in all, and beauty is lost when meaning and
form are split asunder. The handsome man must be swarthy, and the woman fair,
etc., the genitalia, both internal and external, without injury. Provisional
diagnosis: probable drowning. And had we exhausted all the known phenomena
of a mechanical problem, how can we tell that hidden phenomena, as yet undetected,
do not intervene in the commonest actions? I will not tell you about the irrational
animals, because you will never discover any system of proportion in them."
The plausibility of narrative is increasingly an issue for me, and not without
reason, perhaps, given the dominance of contending master-narratives in the
interpretation of the Irish past and, consequently, in my present world. From
such master-narratives it seems worth trying to retrieve as much as may still
have value. I have tried this in a recent long work called Trem Neulpart
prose, part 'verse'which I see as, in part, an attempt to recoup part
of the history of my world from what Beckett terms 'the uniform memory of
intelligence'. "Genealogies. The elementary tables. Dictionaries, assembled
in blind frosts. Grammar and chronology. Libraries. Index: the Encyclopaedia,
damascened with ice. So is the perfect body of knowledge dislimned."
How may one conduct a narrative of change, of loss and recovery, of breakage
and continuity, without presuming the existence of distinct agents, freeing
them incredibly from their ground, and committing a plotwork of events, utterly
plausible because familiar and foreknown? Scholarship has shown us how the
integrity and closure of the human agent was arrived at in early Greek poetry,
must we take that achieved unity as more than provisional? Can we not tell
without it?
"We build ourselves through the world and each through other, and this
proceeds to death as the world alters with experience." The bodies in
this plot are not distinct, either from one another or from their ground,
they emerge to make themselves, enjoy a transitory closure, and then resolve
again into a ground which offers further figures. "When the biology of
your body breaks down, the skin has to be cut so as to give access to the
inside. Later it has to be sewn back like memory, when it may house all knowledge.
Memory is our comfort and our attire. Fashioned with our hands it is the accomplishment
of our dreams and lapses; always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding
one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns. Pretend I'm lost and try to find
me."
Because I wish to work comprehensively with the world which I inhabit, however,
and because that world is current with named identities, I have admitted one
such, and one specific narrating voice to speak of him. I have permitted myself
also two specific occasions in time, one exactly situated starting at about
11 a.m. on February 15th. 1838), one not. Between the two is a connection,
and my essay is to account for that, to recount it. "Do not think it
coincidental that memory should begin to fail just as taxonomies become a
prominent tool for thought."
As, I believe Braudel and the Annales school refocused history on the wholeness
of ordinary lives, their habits, orientations and crises, by attending patiently
to things left, I see my present course, of rendering the experience of connectedness,
as being sustainable only through exercising a similar patience with language.
No longer expecting to find there an exact mirror-image of the world I know,
but rather to have it deliver me one I don't.
We will read
every day
in the afternoon
When shall we learn
to write?
We shall soon
learn
I once went
to Europe
but I do not now
remember
what I saw
there
It is in preferring to concentrate on the unpredictable ground rather than
to people it with puppets of my own making that I have elected in these more
recent pieces to work increasingly through collage. Each fragment of language
I adopt is already tale-bearing, a vector: carrier from a prior host, director
of action also across the space of my world. And the point of such a narrative?
Interim figures on an interim ground; preservation of the complex weave of
actions, not denouement; attachment understood embraced abandoned; wanting
executive or summary.
Notes
1 All quotations are from Syzygy (Wild Honey Press, Dublin, 1998),
available on the web at the Sound Eye site http://indigo.ie/~tjac/Poets/Trevor_Joyce/Syzygy/syzygy.htm
2 Without Asylum (Wild Honey Press, Dublin, 1998)
3 Damaged, we bleed time. This is the central one of a sequence
of three prose-poems called Hopeful Monsters (Wild Honey Press, Dublin,
1999, forthcoming). This section is available on the web at the Alsop Review
site http://www.alsopreview.com/tjdamaged.html
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Samuel Beckett: Proust (Calder and Boyars, London) p.32
9 Trem Neul, section XLII. The complete text will be included
in my forthcoming collected poems, with the first dream of fire they hunt
the cold (New Writers' Press, Dublin, 1999). The title is from a phrase
in the Irish language, meaning "through my dreams".
10 I have in mind the first chapters of Bruno Snell's The Discovery of
the Mind (Harper and Row, New York), and of E.R.Dodds The Greeks and
the Irrational (University of California Press, California).
11 Trem Neul, section XI.
12 Ibid, section XV.
13 Ibid, section XXXI
14 Ibid, section XXVII
Issue
One
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