Escaping from metaphor

I was leafing through  the Autumn edition of the Poetry Book Society bulletin, admiring the title poem of Don Paterson’s latest collection, Rain (more on this podcast), when I stumbled across a poem by Toeti Heraty, an Indonesian poet, philosopher and campaigner whose work had been – until that moment – completely unknown to me. But then, one of the virtues of magazines is their potential for serendipity.

The poem – in its English translation, courtesy of the Poetry Translation Centre – is about the gap between words and meaning.

Post Scriptum
by Toeti Heraty

I want to write
an erotic poem
in which raw words, unadorned,
become beautiful
where metaphors are unnecessary
and breasts, for instance,
do not become hills
nor a woman’s body a sultry landscape
nor intercourse ‘the most intimate embrace’.

It’s quite clear
this poem is written in the space
between exposure and concealment
between hypocrisy and true feeling.

There are more poems by her at the Poetry Translation Centre. If I find a way to buy the pamphlet this was taken from I’ll add it here.

The picture at the top of the post is Body Landscape No. 2, by Maya Barkai, at the Saatchi Gallery Online.

Idling away

On Friday I picked up An Apology for Idlers, the Penguin mini-edition (or ‘Great Ideas‘, to use their label) of some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s journalism, prompted in part by a glowing review a while back by Nicholas Lezard. There were other motives as well. I love Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, which conjures, tenderly, a whole pre-electric childhood, and having been partly educated in Scotland Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was inescapable. I’m sure thatI read Treasure Island at some point, of course. But although I’m interested in journalism I’ve never read any of  Stevenson’s.

I’ve only dipped into the title piece over the weekend. It was written in 1877, but there’s a section at the start of it which seems strangely topical:

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.

The text – now out of copyright – can be found online here.

The picture, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, is by the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent.

Return journey

I thought about writing something here when the journalist and novelist Gordon Burn died, quite young, earlier this summer, but realised that I had nothing to add to the encomia that littered the obituaries pages.  “One of the greatest – and arguably underrated – British writers of his age*, said one, and I don’t really disagree with that. His journalism – for me a former journalist – was exceptional. In a world where there is plainly too much journalism I’d seek his pieces out.

But looking through an old notebook I found recently – which read a bit like a longhand blog – there was a piece on an article by Burn from 2005 that was worth sharing, a meditative reflection on a return home to Newcastle after the death of his father, even if his memory, perhaps appropriately for such a genre, is playing tricks. The whole thing is worth reading, even if you know nothing of Newcastle and care even less, but there’s a striking quote and a striking image.

The image is of some elderly Tynesiders singing songs in a pub in the late afternoon. It turns out that they are tourists, living in Greece now, come back for a nostalgic visit. “They were voluntary exiles, travelling in the opposite direction to the economic migrants from the former eastern bloc and elsewhere for whom they had made space; ex-pats come back to revisit not what was actually there, but what they wanted to see.”

The quote is from the American writer Toni Morrison:

“They straightened up the Mississippi river in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use but in fact it is not flooding, it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that; remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

Towards the end of the article Burn acknowledges that he has only recently “admitted” the claim of Newcastle on him.

“It is a nostalgia prompted by the sense that the entire world is now a space traversed by signals, everything virtual, nothing solid; our employments increasingly having to do with abstract operations, every operation stroked one way or another into the digital network economy. To go “home” was to return for a time to a time where, at the risk of sounding like the bleary-eyed saloon-bar crooner, and to quote the historian Robert Colls, nobody talked of “community” and everybody belonged to one.”

Cutting novels

James Buchan had a review in Saturday’s Guardian of Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin, which I mentioned last week. Although he’s broadly sympathetic, he thinks it too long, and suggests a useful rule of thumb for editing novels which is worth repeating here:

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader. McCann’s first chapter reads like Time magazine at its most solemn and sentimental. (“Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey.”) The story proper, as in so many novels, begins some way into the second chapter.

I liked his combination of ‘parade’, ‘effects’, and ‘disgust’. He also has another rule of thumb about the role of vintage cars in fiction: don’t do it.

Two of his characters, downtown junkie artists, are given a 1927 Pontiac Landau, which is forever parked across the narrative. Classic cars should be avoided in fiction.

The rest of the review can be read here.

The picture, of Chris Locke’s ’scissor spiders’, can be found at the 2dayblog.

The dust on the shoes

I had thought that there was nothing new to say – or at least nothing new to say worth saying – about the attack on the World Trade Centre towers in 2001. The symbolism of the event and the scale of the response – emotional as well as political – had wrung out all of the meaning. But it seems that I was wrong. There’s a short reflection in last Saturday’s Guardian Review by the Irish-born, New York-resident writer Colum McCann on the pair of shoes which his father wore on the day of the attack, when he was fortunate enough to escape from the building. He then walked to McCann’s apartment on 71st Street:

My daughter, Isabella, jumped into his arms. She recoiled from the hug and asked if he was burning and, when he told her that it was just the smell of the smoke on his clothes from the buildings that had collapsed, she said, no, no, that he must be burning from the inside out.

My father-in-law immediately swapped his clothes. He couldn’t stand the thought of the suit, the shirt, the tie, what they held, what they carried. He threw the clothes away, but left his shoes by our door. They stood there for weeks, until we finally figured that we had kept them there precisely because they had carried him out and away to safety. They were, in whatever small way, a beacon of hope.

It is still a difficult thing, these days, to pull out the shoes. I still think that every touch of them loses a little more dust. I am paralysed by the notion of what the dust might contain – a resume, an eyelash, a concrete girder, plasterboard, a briefcase, a pummelled earring, another man’s shoe. They sit in a cupboard behind me, over my left shoulder, a responsibility to the past.

McCann has just published a well-reviewed novel about New York and the World Trade Center, Let The Great World Spin. He also writes about the difficulty of finding meaning in the events of that September when, in its aftermath, everything seemed charged with meaning. One way in was through the astonishing 1974 tightrope walk by Philippe Petit, even though it had become a familiar event, through novel, plays, and even documentary film:

But stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted sideways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself.

The picture is from Ellen Sanders’ Crackpot Chronicles, and is used with thanks.

Acts of grace

I’ve always been interested in stories about technique – how stories work – and there’s a good example this weekend in a review by Frank Cottrell Boyce:

Stories are chains of consequence, one thing leads to another. But some of the most sublime stories end when an act of grace or love that means “it ain’t necessarily so”. Abraham doesn’t have to sacrifice Isaac. The Green Knight has the right to decapitate Gawain but barely nicks him with his sword. The prodigal son thinks he has spent all his father’s love but discovers that it is endless.

I’m a sucker for such moments: impossible, for example, for me to watch It’s A Wonderful Life without a lump in the throat during the final scene. And without necessarily wanting to imply a religious meaning (although it’s revealing that two of Boyce’s examples are Biblical), I think the ’sublime’ aspect comes from the moment of transcendence embodied in such acts; the creation through choice and action of a different meaning.

The picture is from The Evolution of Jeremiah blog.

Swimming against the stream

Terry Fontaine, Against The Flow

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I kept coming across scraps of paper with quotes I’d scribbled on them, and I thought it might be a good way to be able to find them more easily. I’ve just come across a few more:

“We must always swim against the current towards the source of the river, because even if you never reach the source, you will at least train your muscles.” (Zbigniew Herbert)

“The matter for the artist is not to describe what he sees but what he feels” (Baudelaire)

“It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee house for the voice of a kingdom” (Jonathan  Swift)

The painting at the top of thos post is by the representative abstract expressionist artist Terry Fontaine. More on his website.

What writers are good at

Mark Lawson had an interesting insight about writers and their strengths while writing about Michael Crichton after his recent death. He suggested that writers could make a living if they were good at one of three things: narrative, ideas, or prose.

Novelists can still flourish within different markets if their essential talent is storytelling (Jeffrey Archer), thinking (John Berger) or crafting sentences (John Updike), but it is exceptionally rare for an author to have the gift of all three.

Crichton, he reckoned, managed two of the three – narrative and ideas. Those who can do all three are rare – Lawson suggests that John le Carre is the best example.

The illustration is from podbean.com.