Hide and Seek

It is with tremendous joy that I am introducing here a guest post by Jim Murdoch, a Scottish novelist and writer, poet, and author of many literature related posts – that could be found on his amazing blog The Truth About Lies, as well on the site JimMurdoch.com.uk. Jim Murdoch for sure knows the real truth beneath all the lies. All I could add to it is this – The one who does not know how to lie, does not know what the real truth is.

I hid and you sook – Beckett, 'Whoroscope'

I have been reading (and not getting) poetry for 35 years. I get some of it but there is far more out there that I don't get. For years I allowed myself to feel stupid when I didn't understand The Waste Land, The Cantos or The Maximus Poems. The fault had to be mine, I clearly wasn't clever enough and so I persisted, read more, understood little of what I was reading, couldn't find anyone to explain what I was reading and pretty much gave up reading poetry as a bad job.

My problem came from the premise from which I was working: words are containers for meanings > poems contain words > ergo poetry contained meaning. I still believe that, at its core, is what all writing does first and foremost; anything else is either a bonus or just coincidental. I've gone down the whole explication route, taken poems to pieces and not known how to put them back together.

Back in January Sean O'Brien won the T S Eliot Prize and there was an article in The Times about him or, more specifically about about.

What's it about? It's probably the question we poets hate hearing more than any other. The article has this to say:

The answer to the problem of "about" is simply, I think, to relax. Speaking after his win, O'Brien said: "We live in a prose world where poetry is an experience. People have to let themselves off the hook, absorb it, be with it and not expect to understand it." Being told that we shouldn't expect to understand things is – in a world of exams and target-setting – not necessarily comfortable.

If the poet isn't going to take responsibility for meaning then who is? I wrote a poem a while ago which addresses this issue:

READER PLEASE SUPPLY MEANING


Writers are all liars. We all are.
But at least they are honest liars.

They write down those necessary lies,
the kind that move men to leaps of faith
or excuse us when we fail to jump.

In the end it doesn't matter that
they let us down in the cruellest ways.


August 18, 1996

What has always fascinated me about fiction writing is its capacity to communicate fundamental truths via out and out lies: George and Lenny never existed, nor did Holden Caulfield or Capt. John Yossarian or Moby Dick or The Grinch. They're not real. They're all made up, figments of some guy's imagination. They're not true and if something's not true then it's a lie. Writers are all liars. I was brought up to believe that lying is wrong but it’s not.

If we examine my poem a little closer you'll see that's it's not as clear as it first appears. The first two statements are fine. They are statements of facts or at least opinions: the narrator believes that everyone is a liar and that obviously includes all writers. But there's a proviso in the third sentence, writers are described as "honest liars", an oxymoron. How can one be an "honest liar"? The second stanza sheds some light suggesting that there's reason, a necessity even, behind their needing to lie; they're doing it for us so that we can in some way justify our actions or abdicate responsibility in some way. But then we have the rider: the narrator says that in fact these writers – which must include himself – let us down and "in the cruellest ways" but what he might mean by that is left up to reader.

Does this poem succeed or fail because it demands the reader does some work? Have I let you down in some way?

Let's consider another poem, 'Orbs', by Carrie Berry. You'll need to click on the hyperlink to read the poem.

Now this is a beautifully presented piece. The twinkling stars which could look tacky manage not to. This poem was read in front of a constellation of astronomers who loved it – they're not like the rest of us, they didn't need to look up "baryon", "fusion waves" or "gamma" to get the thing. The thing is though, they thought they got it but they didn't. They liked the sound of it, because it used terminology they were familiar with but they couldn't see beyond that. "Ebon orbs" – that's got to be black holes? Right? Nope. It's about the way light danced in a girl's eyes. I know because I talked to her about the piece.

The question is: Is this a bad poem? Has the author short-changed us in some way? Does her use of astrobabble detract the reader?

How about this one, the short opening stanza to Beckett's 1930 poem, 'Whoroscope':

What's that?
An egg?
By the brother Boot it stinks fresh.
Give it to Gillot

You can read the whole poem, all 98 lines of it, here.

With some reluctance Beckett provided a series of footnotes to the poem, the first three of which help explain the opening stanza above:

1. René Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting. He kept his own birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity. The Shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.
   
2. In 1640 the brothers Boot refused Aristotle in Dublin.
   
3. Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot.

Does it help? Or would you like some notes to explain his notes? Well, yes, but if a poem needs a pile of notes for it to make sense then is it a good poem? Beckett's poetry is notoriously difficult and obtuse. There's a good article on-line by Andrew Goodspeed entitled: Extremely Difficult & Occasionally Unpleasant: The Poetry of Samuel Beckett which is worth checking out. It is very clever poetry as is the poetry of Eliot and Pound but does that make it good? Some critics don't even consider 'Whoroscope' a proper poem. I've seen it called both a monologue and "chopped-up prose".

It is worthwhile noting what James Knowlson had to say about the piece in his biography of Beckett:

You would need to be a specialist on Descartes or to have read the books that Beckett had read to pick up many of the more obscure allusions. It certainly needs more extensive notes than Beckett added for its publication to make it fully comprehensible.

Should you have to know what a poem's about to know what it's about? Is poetry a game of hide and seek? Should they be puzzles to work out? And if so, don't all good puzzles have answers? Isn't it a disappointment somehow that we're expected to look for answers in textbooks or, worse still, in ourselves?

At the end of her 1991 poem 'Pieces of the Puzzle', Seattle poet Moreah Vestan says quite simply:

Who am I?

I am the writer who must tell you who I am, discover who you are.

I am a witness to your fear, to your faith, to your dance with the ebb
and flow of the moon—driven current of Life.

Who are we?

We are simply pieces to complete each other’s puzzle.

Is it wrong then to write esoteric poetry? No. It's also not wrong to write erotic poetry. It's actually quite a popular topic for poets. So I've heard. Esoterica, exactly like erotica, has a limited audience. And that's fine. What I think is perhaps a little naďve is to publish a poem that clearly has a hidden meaning – a "decoder ring poem" as my wife likes to call them – and then get upset or annoyed when people don't get it.

Sean O'Brien says we don't have to understand poems. But the man in the street being the contrary bugger he is will try his damndest to see meanings where there may not be any; he sees butterflies in inkblots, crabs in star formations and fluffy bunnies in clouds – he's even been known to find meaning in a poem.

About Joyce’s Paralysis III

Joyce at the age of two

If the dominant theme of the paralysis assures wholeness of the book (as noted by so many readers and critics by now), so does structure assures its harmony. In one of his letters Joyce talks about the great care in arranging his stories. The fifteen stories proceed from the individual, only the first tree are told in the first person, to general; from youth to an approximation of maturity. The critic Florence Walzl says that Joyce’s statements and practices indicated that he was strongly aware of the Roman division of the life span and that it was one of the reasons that motivated him to arrange his stories in progressive stages corresponding to the stages of life. According to the Roman division of life span, childhood (puertia) lasted to the age of seventeen; adolescence (adulescentia) from seventeen through the thirtieth year; young manhood (juventus) from thirty- one to forty-five and old age (senectus) from forty-five on.
In accordance to this division, the opening trilogy “The Sisters”, “An Encounter” and “Araby” are about early youth in Dublin. “Eveline”, “After The Race”, “Two Gallants” and “The Boarding House” are included into the second division – adolescence. The stories “Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, “Clay”, “A Painful Case” belong to the third division of the life span, maturity.

The revelation of paralysis starts as individual paralysis through these tree stages. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, “A Mother” and “Grace” depict Dublin public life from aspects of politics, culture and religion. In these stories the author widens individual paralysis to collective one. The opening trilogy about youth is balanced by the trilogy about public life. However, the last story “The Dead” was not the part of the original version and was added later. In this story Joyce melts individual with collective as subliming and effectively ending of the book of the short stories. The spreading out of the central book’s essence in this last story – is accentuated by the imaginary of snow enveloping the whole of Ireland. The way Dubliners are composed reveals his great concern for order in his art. Chronology of the stories and age distinction are of the general importance for the overall circular structure of the book, which serves the purpose of accentuating the general state of society.
Having all this in mind, the question that arises is what assures the radiance of the book, since it is the third aspect of Stephen Dedalus’s, or to say, Joyce’s requirement for any work of art?
If we have a radiant body here, what makes it radiant then?
Perhaps Stephen Dedalus can help here, again. In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man Dedalus overhears, one day, a conversation between a boy and a girl in one of Dublin’s streets. The conversation, just a detail of Dublin’s life, has no obvious value. Nevertheless, as the Magi on January 6, the feast of Epiphany, saw nothing more but a baby in a manger, they saw something more than just a baby, so did Stephen Dedalus see something more in the conversation he overheard, which seemed just a trivial detail of Dublin’s street life. Stephen Dedalus continues:

We recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest objects, the structure of which is so adjusted seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.


But all “babies” look kind of same. How can one recognize one from another? It takes the sharpness of the mind and the power of a writer such as Joyce to underline the difference.

An early inspiration for Dubliners was the work of Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Joyce, a polyglot, learnt Norwegian in order to read Ibsen. What he received from Ibsen was a very important, if not essential instruction for his writing: …”A measure of dramatic life” that Ibsen talks about is actually Joyce’s radiance. So is the case when he takes seemingly quite ordinary details and situations of Dublin life and makes them radiant.
Writing rather realistic stories, depicting some moments from the everyday life in Dublin’s lower-middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century. And at the same time the achievement of transcending of particulars of the life in Dublin and dealing with universal human nature. What Joyce does in stories is, according to him, converting bread into art, the critic Harry Lavin says about the process the following: “His treatment of detail is copious and concrete, but they seem to be there to fill in an outline, to support a theory, or to illustrate the principle.”

Though the plot of his stories may appear simple, and some even seem plotless, his stories are far from that. The critic William Tindal gives the following example:

To the simple reader deceived by surfaces, Joyce’s stories may seem simple, but they are not so simple as they see. To the ingenuous reader, those stories, though complicated enough, may seem more complicated than they are. Simplicity is the reader’s Scylla and ingenuity his Charybdis.


In other words, “Eveline” is not just a story about a girl who is offered a chance for a new start. Neither is “Clay” just a story about an old woman who has her night off. “A Little Chandler” is not just a story about a return of an old friend, not is “The Dead” a story of an annual family and friend’s meetings. Those stories reflect people who are unable to make any kind of positive change for themselves.

Joyce did not fail to identify the source of the misery – the people were captured between the Scylla of British political domination and the Charybdis of Roman Catholic Church.
In “Eveline”, Eveline Hill talks about a field where she used to play when she was a small girl: “Than a man from Belfast bought the field and build a houses in it – not like their little brown houses, but bright brick houses whit shining roofs.”
In “Two Gallants”, Corley prostitutes for a golden sovereign, the sign of the royal power and ultimate authority. Maria’s purse, on the other hand is from Protestant’s
Belfast, which only emphasizes Maria’s dependence. When distracted by politeness of an older British officer, Maria loses her plum cake on a tram. It seems that Ireland has been losing its cake for to long.

Furthermore, the image of the missing priest is the one that recurs in several stories. In the first of the stories “The Sisters”, a priest is dead. In another one, “Eveline”, there is a yellow priest’s picture, but no priest appears. Yellow, not only brown, was also Joyce’s color of death and paralysis. In “An Encounter”, Father Buttler is missing. It seems that with an image of an missing father, a missing priest Joyce wants to say that God is somewhere else, but certainly not in Ireland.
Since there is belief that Ireland is godforsaken country, there are many fallen men. It can be said that Thomas Kernan of “Grace” is a fallen man, who has stumbled in his faith. However, he is really a fallen man, since he fell down the stairs one night in a bar when he got drunk. The story of “Grace” portraits Dublin from its religious aspect. Although Mr. Kernan’s friends seem determined to set him on the right way, his wife has a little faith in that: “After a quarter of century of married life she had very few illusions left. Religion for her, was a habit and she suspected that a man of her husband’s age would not change greatly before death.”
According to Stanislaus Joyce, the fall of Thomas Kernan, his repentance and rehabilitation follow the progress of Dante through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Once again, we witness Joyce’s love of parallel and parody, Divine Comedy becomes “Human Comedy”.

Red Hat

Although it would be more appropriate to name this work a doodle instead of the painting (because it was done only in a twenty minutes or so) - I do not know why but I was satisfied with the final outcome.

Red Hat

Princess Catherine, Bosnian Princess

I have seen in one of the historical books about the medieval time in Bosnia - the blurred image that was supposed to represent one of the last Bosnian princesses, Princess Catherine - from the medieval time. It was crafted on a medieval coin for which there is no saved example. My painting was done as an attempt to fill up the gaps. I guess nobody will ever knew have I outrighted it or not.

Princess Catherine