a small eternity

I've posted Louis MacNeice on here before but I just read this and the final lines really hit me and I wanted to keep it somewhere I could find it again. I get to study him next semester! So excited. AND LARKIN. Oh English degree, you so awesome.

The Suicide by Louis MacNeice

And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact
Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago,
This man you never heard of. These are the bills
In the intray, the ash in the ashtray, the grey memoranda stacked
Against him, the serried ranks of the box-files, the packed
Jury of his unanswered correspondence
Nodding under the paperweight in the breeze
From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked
Receiver that never got mended and here is the jotter
With his last doodle which might be his own digestive tract
Ulcer and all or might be the flowery maze
Through which he had wandered deliciously till he stumbled
Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked
On a manhole under the hollyhocks. The pencil
Point had obviously broken, yet, when he left this room
By catdrop sleight-of-foot or simple vanishing act,
To those who knew him for all that mess in the street
This man with the shy smile has left behind
Something that was intact.

this doesn't mean i'm coming back to blogging

though part of me thinks I rather ought. No, I've just been on a huge e.e.cummings binge lately - what is it about the lower case that makes everything feel rushed out and desperate and sincere? - which was the kind of thing I'd have talked about here if I hadn't gotten out of the habit. Summer's the exact right time to pick old hobbies up again, though, isn't it? too much free time.

ANYWAY, in the midst of my big cummings rediscovery (and while I'm meant be reading All The Evelyn Waugh Novels Ever, so way to get distracted, self), he got quoted on the current highlight of my televisual week, BBC2's 'The Hour', which is beautifully shot, full of lovely performances and seems to get better every week, after a slightly unconvincing opening episode. The three leads are all fantastic but Julian Rhind-Tutt is sort of stealing the show a bit by being a perfect creeper - and to think that he was one of the great, charming loves of my mid-teens! That's the magic of acting. Apparently I'm supposed to find all the characters very annoying but I somehow don't? It's odd, and terribly subjective, but I do occasionally have the HUGEST love of characters who are slightly pompous/pretentious/dickish/unloveable/whatever, and sometimes absolutely no patience with them at all. Perhaps it's just because I really do think Ben Whishaw is one of the best actors of his generation, but I find Freddie more endearing with each episode - it's the father relationship and the small house and the fact that he's just a snapping working-class terrier underneath all that seeming self-confidence, I don't know, I like that kind of thing. And yet, on the flipside, I have vague memories of being totally unable to finish Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty' because all the characters were SO unsympathetic and insufferable, so it's not like I just bloody love bastards.

As a side-note, I just had a massive brain short-out and forgot both the title and author of that book (I haven't been sleeping well lately, give me a break), but managed to successfully locate it by googling, "novel 80s thatcher booker gay". Which gives you both an insight into my brain - couldn't remember the title or author, but DID recall that it won the Booker, what - and a very condensed insight into the plot, if you haven't read it. Also might suggest that I'm just dreadfully unsympathetic to Fictional Tories, as opposed to Fictional Bastards more generally, but then who knows.

None of this is what I came here to say. Here's the e.e. cummings that got quoted on 'The Hour', because why not:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

and soon, my friend, we shall have no time for dances.

I don't ever write in this anymore. Sometimes I miss it and think I ought to start it up again, but when do I ever have the time? And what on earth do I have to say for myself? (Of course, a more pertinent thing to wonder might be what I ever had; the importance I placed upon the process of saying it used to be impetus enough, but isn't now. I wonder why that is.)

Still. I read this today, sort of by accident in a quiet, dusty, secret little room and I wanted to keep it somewhere because I thought it was just lovely. I'm not sure why, exactly, I found it so lovely, but perhaps if I put it here and don't lose it, I shall come back to it at some point in the future and puzzle that out. Oh Larkin. You're so bloody depressing but you make me so happy!

This was your place of birth, this daytime palace,

This miracle of glass, whose every hall

The light as music fills, and on your face

Shines petal-soft; sunbeams are prodigal

To show you pausing at a picture’s edge

To puzzle out a name, or with a hand

Resting a second on a random page –

The clouds cast moving shadows on the land.

Are you prepared for what the night will bring?

The stranger who will never show his face

But asks admittance; will you greet your doom

As final; set him loaves and wine; knowing

The game is finished when he plays his ace,

And overturn the table and go into the next room?

                                        - II, from The North Ship by Philip Larkin.

I've been reading a lot of Yeats today so maybe I should have posted some Yeats. I'm afraid that I do like him, but I just don't LOVE him in the same way I love Larkin and Siken and my other favourite poets; maybe some people just speak to you and some people you can, you know, appreciate, without being incredibly moved by. Maybe that's why poetry is cool.

and stir the dust underneath the thrust of my clicking heels.

I miss this blog. Perhaps I'll try to get it going again over the summer. That might be nice, mightn't it?


That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

--and not simply by the fact that this shading of
   forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
   the gloom of cypresses
   is what I wish to prove.

   When you and I were first in love we drove
   to the borders of Connacht
   and entered a wood there.

   Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

   I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
   rough-cast stone had
   disappeared into as you told me
   in the second winter of their ordeal, in

   1847, when the crop had failed twice,
   Relief Committees gave
   the starving Irish such roads to build.

   Where they died, there the road ended

   and ends still and when I take down
   the map of this island, it is never so
   I can say here is
   the masterful, the apt rendering of

   the spherical as flat, nor
   an ingenious design which persuades a curve
   into a plane,
   but to tell myself again that
   the line which says woodland and cries hunger
   and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
   and finds no horizon

   will not be there.

.                     -- by Eavan Boland.

and instructions for dancing.

It's Monday again! Further to last week's post, I wanted to put up some Larkin today; it seemed fitting, because Patten was influenced by him, and also this is my own damn blog and I'll talk about my favourite poets if I want to. Part of me was reluctant to immediately go for it with More Poetry, to be honest, and felt that I should look out something else, but I only really got into it as a form within the last few years and I suppose it's something that I feel I can - as me, now, the way I have become - really...hum. I've tried several times to phrase what I mean and can't seem to manage it. What I'm trying to say is that I think more subjective inferences can come from poetry than most other forms, that I think you put a little of yourself into them just by reading them, and that-- That doesn't really explain it either. I don't know.

Anyway, it's all a moot point because I've left my copy of The Whitsun Weddings in Liverpool: I only own Whitsun and High Windows, and prefer the former (so if anyone has any books of his they want to donate to the cause of Me, do get in touch). Anyway, I didn't want to locate a poem through a combination of my own memory (poor) and The Internets (giant), & thought it better left until I'm back at uni.

I got my predilection for Larkin - and, in fact, the book itself; an eighteenth birthday present - from an ex of mine. We used to talk about literature a lot, although he was far more widely-read and a lot better educated on the subject than I was; I'm embarrassed to think how boring & stupid I must've sounded, looking back. But thinking about him and those conversations, and what I was going to blog about today, made me consider the other very literature-y relationship I have had in my life - although this one isn't a Relationship-with-a-capital-'R', but a friendship.

My friend Celia is one of the cleverest and most interesting people I have ever been priveleged enough to somehow, inexplicably, be liked by and friends with. We've known each other for a little over a year now but only really got close around May 2009, and would send each other these long, rambling messages and emails (to complement our long, rambling, every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone conversations), full of poems, quotes, bits and pieces of ephemera we thought the other might take a fancy to. Life's gotten in the way a bit of those every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone calls, though we miss them and still make an effort to stay in touch, but the good thing about emails and messages and letters is that you can kind of - hang on to them.

So! I thought today I would find & post a poem that was sent to me by my good friend Celia. I could have picked any of several, but this one struck a chord with me today; she didn't know the title, so I don't either, but let's imagine it's something pithy. It's by Charles Simic:

"Incurable romantic marrying eternal grumblers.
Life haunted by its more beautiful sister life--
Always, always... We had nothing
But words. Someone rising to eloquence

After a funeral, or in the naked arms of a woman
Who has her head averted because she's crying,
And doesn't know why. A hairline fracture of the soul
Because of the way the light falls on these bare trees and bushes.

Sea-blackened rocks inscrutable as chess players...
One spoke to them of words failing...
Of great works and little faith, of blues in each bite of bread.
Above the clouds the firm No went on pacing.

The woman had a tiny smile and an open umbrella,
Since now it had started to rain in a whisper,
The kind of rain that must've whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except

That someone kept watching it come down softly"

yep.

edit:
after several attempts and a bunch of failing, I just managed to locate the poem somewhere other than in an email from my friend. And would you look at it! It has a title (Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness) and stands a whole stanza and three quarters longer than it is replicated here. I thought for a long while about whether or not to edit in the additional parts, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is, as I first read it and have always read it. You see, as so much of this post is about subjectivity and ownership and defining my relationships to people by writing that isn't mine, it would seem oddly, I don't know...hypocritical, or something, to sacrifice the truth of my interaction with the poem for the truth of the poem itself. That's right, Charles Simic, I went there. Suck it.

(no don't)

Anyway, but I've linked it here as a concession, and I must say that I adore the last few lines. "Serious children at play" - that's Nietzsche, I suppose? A reference to Nietzsche, I mean. "A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play," and all that sort of business. What a nice idea.

i have recently been attempting to construct a bishop.

I started this blog to be a record of my time at university, but am so absolutely dreadful at keeping it up-to-date that, whenever I think about this little patch of the internets I like to call my own, I feel a profound sense of shame. I've thought for a while that what I might be in need of is a little bit of structure, and now I know what it should be.

Firstly, I am an English student (single honours, although looking into becoming joint with history; irrelevent, but sort of worth noting) and secondly, I half-heartedly keep a commonplace book. I say 'half-hearted' because I'm absolutely as rotten at that as I am at blogging, but I have a lot of love for the whole concept of commonplace books and you will be hearing more from me on this subject at some point.

ANYWAY. For this reason, writing that is Not My Own is a very big influence on my life and my brain, so I've decided that every Monday I am going to post something here, like a poem or an extract from something, but not necessarily either of these things, that I enjoyed. I might talk about why I like it or it moved me, or I might not, but it seems like...it seems like a nice e-rendering of my headspace. A sort of cyberspace version of the beautiful commonplace book I left in Liverpool (and miss), a present from my flatmates.

I know that it's techincally Tuesday now, being 2am and all, but I care not! This week's piece of writing is These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men by Brian Patten:

These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making.
Something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all the others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud.

I decided to start with this one because the poet comes from Liverpool - he went to school on the Smithdown Road, apparently - and is, in fact, part of a movement called the Liverpool Poets. That's right. He used to pal about with people like Roger McGough, but I hadn't heard of him until I read this, AND he apparently received some kind of encouragement from Philip Larkin - one of my favourite writers.

The reason I like it, I suppose, is complex, and I don't want to deconstruct it on here (not tonight, anyway), because I don't think that would be dreadfully interesting. But it can be summed up with a quote from an Alan Bennett play:
"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

Two for the price of one, this week. And now to bed.