William Bibby

The Principle

Friday, 27 January 2012 at 12:31

The Principle


I feel we have reached a decisive moment, or rather a moment of decision. I don’t mean a moment I mean a passage. But then all passages of time become, eventually, decisive.

How many millennia passed between the fully established practice of flaking that hard shiny flint, its use in skinning and butchery and weapon heads, and the smelting of bronze? A principle was established, utilitarian, pragmatic and uncomplicated and the principle went unchanged for thousands of years. Nothing changed. In that period of roughly 2.1 m years the flake ruled supreme. It made the weapons, the skinning tool, the butcher’s knife, it traded, struck fire, created skills, proposed a logic, trained minds, educated, explored and finally pointed a way toward a fresh principle; bones, a heavier mammalian artillery. This principle lasted, in comparison, an extremely short time, replaced soon enough by the Bronze age.

I mention this only to illustrate the principle of the Principle.

The principle, to begin with, is never noticed, always peripheral, its nature, its force, is to become habitual. This habit forming gives a burgeoning energy to the periphery that is then noticed and given central dominant focus and instantly acquired. This becomes a new principle. Simplicity gives way to complexity as new principles multiply and are adopted. The displaced principle carries a charge however and remains in place although much diminished in energy.

Poetry is built like this. Literature, culture, society.

‘New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral forms,’
said Viktor Shklovsky who was applying it to the Soviet cultural habit of ignoring mistakes instead of learning by them as if his effortless mechanical formalism applied to poetry alone. If you take out ‘…in art…’ the peripheral forms that come into focus can be anything, tools, ideas, insights, imaginative processes and of course principals.

The Principle is only a set of rules, a matrix laid down by its own logic. The principle builds itself; the rules are not applied by an exterior mind. The principles by which we function are so vast in number that to comply with the rules many of the actions have to be more or less self motivated. We do not, for instance, manipulate the trajectory of every electron around its nucleus, although we may now do this a little if we wish. But the countless, almost infinite, number of electrons whizzing about their business need no input from us to determine their position or speed. 99.9% of the natural Universe does its thing without let or hindrance from us. We can only alter the principles that exist in our traditions and cultures. We can only alter what we build. In that respect we are certainly the greatest creator in the Universe. Constantly creating, ordering and adapting consciously our positions and energy; Nature just follows the rules that the Principle organically formed, we change the rules, never satisfied until every limitless one is changed.

Scientists like to talk about ‘The First Principle’ in as much that if you understand how something began then you can follow its progress to the moment that you observe it, now, and have a more profound knowledge of it. This is also termed the things evolution. It affects the social progress of individuals and societies just as much as the combinations of the Periodic Table.

The evolution of something also influences others evolutions. The principal builds on influence, the slow accretion of subtle complexities. In poetry and literature this is self-evident. You can track the course that was taken between the Eddas of Snorri Sturleson  and The Waste Land of TS Elliot or Crow by Ted Hughes. Every step of the way is influenced by the pile up of poetic imagination directly behind it, or, more properly, directly preceding it. Sometimes there is a lurch back as a cul de sac is recognised. Dryden gets dumped for Donne’s resurrection. The pre-raphaelites blossom, tended by Arnold and The Wreck of the Deutschland written by Manley-Hopkins. The influence in the Principle doesn’t always abide where you expect it.

Yet influence is not the main consideration here, it is a side show. The Principle’s primary characteristic is hidden from our view. The ‘thing’ of a tiny amount of space and time that began, apparently with a bang, is the first principle and its primary characteristic is that, it isn’t real, it’s an illusion.

Stephen Hawking talks about why a creator should create us in the vast complexity of the Universe when we are so totally insignificant that, if a creator existed, we wouldn’t have attracted its attention anyway.

He misses the point about ‘us’. It is ‘us’ that makes the Universe vast and complex and considers us insignificant. It is our consciousness that makes it appear real or at least a suitable subject for enquiry by the consciousness’s of the likes of Stephen Hawkings’s.

The Universe only exists because we are conscious of it. This is another Principle, the anthropomorphic one.

Beyond principle lies the Unprincipled where there are no laws, no morality, no ethics. The Unprincipled reality is absolute freedom.

God is mans construct. Beyond the principles of boundless infinite nature lies the Unprincipled lawlessness of Love. This is where poetry resides.

Poetry & Truth

Monday, 3 October 2011 at 12:26

 

  

Poetry & Truth


A justified scepticism might be the only possible way to approach this association but I am not talking about The Truth. Poetry arrives at truths through a variety of means while all the while circling its own ideal of Truth, expressed by individual poets, and acknowledged by their readers.

What means does poesy employ? It suggests certainties that upon closer examination are not empirical at all but address an ‘unsaid’ thing, an ‘unsayable’ thing that finds its echo in the interior lives of humanity. For instance: The darkest hour lies afore the dawn (Milton, Paradise Lost). Firstly it is untrue; the darkest hour of the night is when the sun is at the exact opposite, and therefore most concealed, part of the earth from the observer. This is not the hour before dawn. In fact the statement is a lie as Milton obliquely acknowledges. And yet there is some universal truth in the fact that the most despairing of moments lies just before the crisis turns. Now of course this is metathetic. But we need to understand what truth is being given a metaphor as a tool for understanding. The truth is difficult to see, it cannot just be the universal experience of darkness at the end of travail, just before things begin to improve because that is only a linear torment. The longer the crisis the more despairing one becomes is not a truth it’s a fact.

Facts aren’t truths. Bullshit beguiles truth and is often dressed as fact. Here is Dr. Johnson: ‘… you may say to a man, “Sir, I am your most humble servant”. You are NOT his most humble servant. You may say, “These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times”. You don’t mind the times. You tell a man, “I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet”. You don’t care six-pence whether he was wet or dry.’

That the truth is here represented by cant, a foaming sentiment of sympathy expressed essentially as lies, nevertheless holds a truth about the communication of one human to another. It might be the case that everything is the truth. As Goethe said “Only everyone can know the Truth”.

Not only the expression of truth but also the yearning that truth is present. Although this is a risky business as Mrs. Bennet found out, ”It is a universally acknowledged truth that a single man of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”.  Of course this would be a delightful outcome of the unappropriated wealth of a single man, but it isn’t necessarily true. To be pedantic, there may very well be single men of great wealth who abhor the idea of marriage. We can’t be sure. And that’s the point.

Truth isn’t something that determines existence and it can’t determine poetry. Humanity has been driven along its various roads by lies as well as truth. Some might argue that ‘lies’ are the more prevalent, and here I think poetry steps in to clear up the muddle to an extent. Truth and honesty are partners, truth and dishonesty have no living space but dishonesty if it reveals the truth about the poet (or about anything) may well be universally honest.

Byron would have loved the idea of a team game played in one continent only, being ascribed with the title ‘World Series’. His nose for bullshit specially with his well documented dislike of Bob Southey, who became Poet Laureate after Pye, was mostly directed toward his declarations that everything was rubbish except money. Don’t talk to him about the ‘legacy of the poets’ or the ‘subtle definitions of grace that befall the poets sensitivities’, it’s all nonsense….gimme money, money is all I want. Yes, he and John Lennon would have got on well. ‘The Corsair’ a shortish poem by Byronic standards, published by John Murray in 1814  sold 10,000 copies on day ONE. A figure that none in the English speaking world has ever come near to; Byron was ecstatic.

But creating a falsehood (a World Series) about an activity in some ways highlights the shadowy movements behind the false. Falsity and truth are also very closely joined, as any policeman will testify. The more false the statement the more the truth unfolds. This is brinkmanship on Truths behalf. As if it knows ‘….that it will out’. For the USA to call their American Football league The World Series, when it patently isn’t a world series, pricks out tiny particles of truth about the American psyche. Or rather, points toward areas that need examining, and what other reason to examine some body but to discover a truth about it.

Or to discover the nature of a thing. That The Truth has a nature is open to opinion but what isn’t, is that some things bring results and some don’t and the nearer action is to one’s own truth the more dramatic the results. If Dr. Johnson had insisted, in his little sermon on cant, on being plain speaking an altogether different effect would have been had, so that when his sympathy was elicited the feeling would have been an overwhelming sense of the ’correct’, the ‘genuine’; closer to truth.

Poetry does this all the time. The German poet Durs Grunbein (his selected poems are published by Faber, translated by Michael Hofmann)
wrote in his long poem ‘Variations on no Theme’ about a ‘…sort of I’ll Call You life’ where we wait for the call that determines our actions/destiny, the call that ‘trues’ us and makes us aware, enables us to act. This waiting for a truth to appear in order to act, paralyses us, and we become immobile. Grunbein’s work is, for me, all about this existential terror of the inevitable. Where we are unable to move because we cannot separate the important from the unimportant. In another poem about the bombing of Dresden called ‘Europe After the Last Rains’ he talks about his grandmother, Dora, ‘…..walking / calmly in the line of refugees, on tottering legs / to the afterlife.’ The destruction so complete that no one survived; life was making its call, all you could do was to walk helplessly with your helpless companions towards the inevitable vanishing in the flame. (He suggests, incidentally, that Hiroshima was plan B for the atom bomb; Dresden was plan A)

Like dreams, poems have more to do with the poet and the poets vision than they do with reality, yet in some respects, this self determination of poets to capture something of the truth is only the capture of a completely authentic unobscured crystalline structure of themselves and it doesn’t matter what this reveals. Good, Evil, Boredom, Sadism, Love, Compassion as long as it’s genuine. Capturing this and making it interesting is the art of Art.

Neitzsche said ‘History is of no use to me’. We don’t need the truth where we are going, let alone facts. We can make it all up and it’ll be as close to the truth as anything else. Who could possibly decide? But we make the art, write the poetry and free the human imagination. It is this mystery that manufactures human love. Its unknowingness is a hint that that is where the Truth abides. That is important.

For The Truth despairs over being seen, since its fragmentation into varieties of facts and lies leads always to the same result, ignorance. A principle of which declares, that which is unimportant is important and that which is important, treated as worthless. This, poetry now, needs to continue to energetically correct.

Seamus Heany and 'Stern'

Friday, 10 June 2011 at 10:40

Web Log 4

The Critical Artifice

No 4 LITERARY POEMS

There is no parliament of literary critics; solitary and remote they internalise their view and then re-construct it and allow it to take an outing. They are essential because they are the closest approximation we have in the west to the perfect reader. Especially with poetry the reader is a rare creature.

There is a landscape to criticism that is immediately familiar: the absolution or condemnation of the history of the artist; the current position of the artist in the cultural firmament; an intimate knowledge of the artist, always used to throw a mordent light and cultivate readership,
an infamous one was Al Alvarez on Sylvia Plath, A Savage God: A study of Suicide; secondary cultural concerns regarding existing mores and looking over the shoulder at what others have said.

Naturally not all readers are able to be critics and some critics are notoriously bad readers who deliver on achievement and gossip when feet of clay are spotted, especially sexual slitherings. The writer suffers much at the hands of these (not so much nowadays as all publicity is deemed profitable) but can then be elevated by another mature audience; who the king, who the one pleading for justice?

For the following poem by Seamus Heaney from District and Circle (Faber and Faber 2006) I shall attempt two quite contrary readings.

STERN

in memory of Ted Hughes

‘And what was it like,’ I asked him,
‘Meeting Elliot?’
                           ‘When he looked at you’,
He said, ‘it was like standing on a Quay
Watching the prow of the Queen Mary
Come towards you, very slowly.’

                         Now it seems
I’m standing on a pierhead watching him

All the while watching me as he rows out
And a wooden end-stopped stern
Labours and shimmers and dips,
Making no real headway.


Virtually every word in Stern points to another meaning. A codified literary assembly of phrases and syllables about literature, the poet who observes and the poet who is observed talking about a poet who’s influence both poets have had to find their own escape route from. Nothing, it seems to me, in this poem is as it appears and as an example of a literary device to discuss a literary critique I can’t think of a better example.

The first reading takes the usual form of a skim to feel for the door handle. Heaney tells the story in the first stanza of Ted Hughes meeting T.S. Elliot. This is recounted in the Letters of Ted Hughes (   ) when TH met T.S. Elliot for the first time at a Faber and Faber party after the publication of his first book of poetry A Hawk in the Rain. Ted Hughes described Elliot’s hands first in a letter to his sister Olwyn Hughes ‘He has huge thick hands - unexpected‘ and then on another occasion to William Scammell the description which Heaney recounts in the poem. Heaney seems to be eager to hear this story ‘And what was it like?’ as if the monumental moment was the most important thing, not the man himself, otherwise he would have surely asked what was he like? Elliot was of course not only the pre-eminent poet of the era and the most famous contemporary poet of the time (a fact that cannot be ignored since both Hughes and Heaney are the most famous contemporary poets of their time) but also poetry editor and one of the directors of Faber.

‘When he looked at you….’ recounts Hughes it was like the prow of the largest ship in the world coming toward you. When he looked at you. As if Ted Hughes was projecting his own future fame onto T.S. Elliot’s current fame. What other words could describe this look: poise, majesty, confidence and above all a superior curiosity about this new prince in the Elliot kingdom. The Hawk in the Rain had won The Galbraith Prize and been highly acclaimed. Not a fear of usurpation or an annoying rivalry but rather a benevolent wish to understand the new poet’s poetry, perhaps to give encouragement, perhaps to curry friendship. Elliot looked down from his massive height, stooped to bestow his blessings and Hughes caught the look, held the gesture and gave it a vaguely mocking analogy.

Heaney remembered being told. A decade or more after Hughes’ death Heaney recounts it again for us. For Heaney too, Elliot, the great English/American bard, cast a long shadow, The Waste Land and the Quartets defined modernism in English poesy. All poets struggled to emancipate themselves from Elliot’s grip just as many poets of today struggle against the influence of Hughes and Heaney. So in this respect Heaney is also making a memoriam for Ted, his friend, ( Heaney said the following of Ted Hughes’ death No death outside my own immediate family has left me feeling more bereft) and also himself. He is saying we are Elliot’s heirs.

In stanza two one poet watches the other. One no longer alive but struggling to leave the shore of his precursors and join the other’s, the Elliot’s and the Frost’s and the Shelly’s and Milton’s etc., a very full burial ground of illumination and extravagant brilliance, yet still homaged by contemporary poets, unable to leave, his influence settling but not yet settled, Hughes struggles to leave his legacy and be at peace.

Seamus Heaney is saying, ‘Hughes like me can never leave the shore, the mainland of poesy, for he is immortalised by his work, like Elliot before him. He watches me unable to put any distance between us, for inevitably I shall follow him in my Arthurian death boat, tethered to history.’

And the title ‘Stern’ is all about farewells. As a ship sets from the safety of the harbour its stern is the last thing seen; the part of the ship that carries the rudder, the means of direction. Also the Stern is the opposite of the Prow that Hughes saw coming toward him when he met Elliot. Undoubtedly, although Hughes and by association Heaney have been the Prow’s to many poets, their farewells will be the slowly disappearing reversal of ascendant fortune and excellence. In this poem Heaney is preparing for his own departure.

On the other hand Stern can be read as follows. His meeting with Elliot is overwhelming, the poetic ship of Elliots Waste land moves relentlessly towards him; overpowering him. Thomas Sterns Elliot is an unmovable object whose presence defies him.

Heany watches Ted Hughes row out, his wooden stiffness, shimmering and labouring to make headway, his exhausting abundance of work, making no real impact.

It is indeed a stern critique about his friends inability to answer the poetic masterfullness of Elliots genius.

AMBIGUITY

Monday, 6 June 2011 at 11:52

AMBIGUITY


The ambiguous in poetry has been covered convincingly elsewhere most notably by William Empson in ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ published in 1930 when he was only 24 years old.

Interestingly I’ve noticed that metaphor in poetry tends to peter out as the poet ages. Ambiguity creeps in as the final piece of machinery available for saying the unsayable, which is one of poetry’s functions, both politically and spiritually. Similar to Matisse or a painter of genius, or any painter, whose late work becomes sparser, more colourful which it seems to me is the equivalent of ambiguity in paintings.

Let us watch this for a moment as it turns from one thing to another with very little alteration.

She gave birth to him when he was 19 years old.
(This is definitely ambiguous grammatically but can only mean one thing since the other is impossible)

She gave birth to him when he was already 19 years old.
(This is less ambiguous because ‘already’ stabilises one sense but doubles the confusion in another.)

She gave birth to him and he was born, 19 years old.
     (This clears the matter up.)

Here we see ambiguity transform itself into metaphor. The meaning of No: 3 becomes clear but unworldly, alien, surreal and anguished. The writer must clearly mean something else.

In the late work of the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), ambiguity and the use of colour (in this case the words used for colour), became a steady motif, a kind of heliograph that flashed the same message again and again, we cannot understand this existence all we can do is discern it.

Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight

Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,
Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are
To be anything else in the sunlight of the room,

Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,
Too actual, things that in being real
Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way
We feel and, therefore, is not real, except
In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,

Of yellow as first colour and of white,
In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,
Enormous, in a completing of his truth.

Our sense of these things changes and they change,
Not as in metaphor, but in our sense
Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.

It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.
It is like a flow of meanings with no speech
And as of many meanings as of men.

We are two that use these roses as we are,
In seeing them. This is what makes them seem
So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.



He starts with an almost casual injunction to agree with him that the colours are crude, ‘…black reds, pink yellows, orange whites….’ and continues to argue that one can say very little about these flowers and their colours except that they are themselves. ‘Too actual…’ and then makes the hidden visible by suggesting that to imagine these would be to make them less than what they are. Clearly imagination usually amplifies what things are. Not in this case. Is there another condition available to us where imagination is less than the reality?

Wallace Stevens suggests, in the next stanza, ‘feelings’ as a possible conscript. Very real things cannot be advantaged by imagination yet they are only a consequence of how we ‘feel’ about them; so is our ‘sense’ of reality greater than our imagination of it? Is it that our senses make reality real?

This is his question. Now he has to answer it as a rhetorical device, he acknowledges this, as you will have noticed.

The ambiguity of the poem now revolves around the use of the very duplicitous word ‘lie’.

‘…..In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,
Enormous, in a completing of his truth.’

Either our senses can lie (down, surrender) still (quietly) in the face of reality and just discern the truth of the colours, in this case, that lie within, as humans lie (down) when exhausted (enormous) by the realisation (completing) of the truth of things OR the senses with which we have been endowed have always lied (deceived) and still lie as men lie, enormously, to complete the truth as they see it. In the same way as our senses lie to us in order to complete the feeling for something that we desire.  ‘Our sense of these things change as they change…..in our sense of them’ (our desire of them).Which?

In the end the answer has to hinge, as in all things, on love. Not on metaphor which he wants to bring to our attention in the 5th, stanza.

Our sense of and for others exceeds the metaphor inherent in the phrase ‘…heavy changes of the light’ Sense exceeds speech yet retains as many meanings as there are human beings. Especially us two who he includes in a sudden and breathtaking intimacy in the final stanza. It is as it is…beyond understanding, yet not beyond the discernment of love.

A Receipe for Disaster

Tuesday, 1 February 2011 at 10:35

A RECIPE FOR DISASTER


I would like to find an equation to express a situation in which Time and Space could operate independently. The word ‘situation’ is suitable because it implies a ‘state’ or ‘place’ that is human rather than applying an abstraction to the query.

As we are, significantly for us, the most conscious beings in the Universe (that are not merely speculative) then the matter of Time and Space are of the greatest importance.
One important matter for us, one of many such matters, is the question of what happens when the discreet space of the individual is extinguished?

Clearly, after death, the individual does not occupy a body (it may not occupy anything) the mind being extinguished with the corpus. Time and Space, being best mates, are central to the construction of this equation for two reasons:
Humans are obsessed with when things commence (Memory) because they are neurotic about when things cease.
Space can only exist if it takes an increment of time to traverse it.

The first is self evident and deals with human fallibility. The second is the reason for it. We shall now brood on Number Two.

Both physical Physics and theoretical Physics have, as yet, failed to discover a single thing. The Single Thing.

Everything that has been discovered has always contained other ingredients, sometimes, as with a photon, the other ingredient, although measurable, has no substance or no Mass. Nevertheless the First Thing has not yet been found. There is something, however, that has happened that has had a measurable result that aspires to those laurels.

The fact that its small doesn’t matter at all, because very small things always become very big, or contribute to bigness while the observable smallness of far away galaxies belie their vastness. Thus Space and Time were in the First Thing, which means that the First Thing had, at the very minimum, two ingredients. It had to for Space to exist allowing the increment of time to transit across it.

The old Hindoo at this point would laugh and wag his head and tell us that we are talking about duality. We are.

So the First Thing contained Space and that is where Time commenced. It couldn’t have started earlier than the birth of the First Thing because then there was no Space.

But perhaps this is not correct. Perhaps there is a way of looking at the First Thing (and the commencement of Time or the Beginning) which allows a situation to exist in which Time is present but Space isn’t.

The First Thing was created by the Big Bang (BB) but the BB itself has a certain anarchy that needs investigation.

First we have to separate the First Thing from the Big Bang. It is an island without a sea. It is a port for embarkation without a ship. It needs nothing to generate it yet there must have been a generator. It is but is not. That is its secret.

There must have been time before the Big Bang but the time can’t be measured and, for us, this is the problem. In exactly the same way as it is impossible to measure the time before birth. It exists but only as a latency that has an existence before it bursts.
This latency has, of itself, it seems an evolution. The evolution exists although the time measured, its memory of itself, is only of one moment and that is the best that can be said: it is measurement itself. It is a situation that will exist but is in this present moment, dormant. The seed is available but the egg has to be conjured. What happened before the Big Bang dissolves into poetry. Everything is correct. There are no flawed arguments.

Prior to the Big Bang, Time was benign, a whim, a caprice. Time it appears at that Time, could do without Space. It existed as a flow that required no passage. The latency of Time to describe itself and give itself a dimension in which it could be finite instead of eternal in which it could have movement, squeezed out Space in the Big Bang. Matter is the child of Time, and its children live within its immovable embrace.