Words, words, words

There's a particular kind of absurdity that creeps into the language when people are trying to be formal. You notice it a lot in the distortions Don Watson complains of, and if you've spent any time in the public service you'll know immediately the kind of false, convoluted, roundabout rhetoric that passes for intelligent discourse in that culture.

I came across a particularly absurd specimen recently, when I had to call a government phone line. The young person on the other end, clearly aspiring to a tone of formality and dignity, found himself not only subverting good grammar but inventing entirely new words.

He asked me for "the residential address of yourself," which no doubt sounded to him much more impressive, or at least more correct, than "your residential address"; and he promised me he would "make a note that you've callen today," obviously feeling that ordinary past tense ("called") doesn't sound nearly as grand. 

George Orwell complained in 1946 that modern English was afflicted with false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. It seems the disease he complained of then has continued to grow, even as the resources of the language itself have shrunk. The unabated impulse to sound formal now has fewer words at its disposal, but it wants more than ever to use more words than necessary - even if it has to make them up.

Leave me a place underground

There’s an innate symbolism in the act of exhuming the body of a poet. It makes patent the contrast between his literary afterlife and his bodily mortality. It speaks of the persistence, among the detritus of human history, of objects laden with meaning; objects that can be read and can shed light on the past. The act of making a poem is itself both a burial and an unearthing of meaning. 

Pablo Neruda died in September 1973, within days of the coup that brought Pinochet to power in Chile. A couple of years ago accusations surfaced that he had not died of cancer as supposed, but that he had been murdered by the regime. Last month, his body was exhumed. Initial tests show only that he had advanced prostate cancer when he died; we still don't know if he was poisoned or not. 

The poets’ words will always outlast the works of tyrants, but here, the poet himself is reclaimed in the bend toward justice of the moral universe’s arc. Justice demands this unearthing, and poetry can't help but attend it. Of Neruda's own work, what comes inevitably to mind is his poem "Leave me a place underground." I’m not sure I understand this poem, but I know it’s deeper than any mark left by the dictator, and it will live far longer.

Leave me a place underground, a labyrinth,
where I can go, when I wish to turn,
without eyes, without touch,
in the void, to dumb stone,
or the finger of shadow.

I know that you cannot, no one, no thing
can deliver up that place, or that path,
but what can I do with my pitiful passions,
if they are no use, on the surface
of everyday life,
if I cannot look to survive,
except by dying, going beyond, entering
into the state, metallic and slumbering, 
of primeval flame? 

And warm desire

Here, the trees are nearly bare; the days are growing darker; the cold is closing in and nightly frosts begin to take the flowers. So Milton's little 'Song on May Morning' belongs to another world. But it's somehow warming, somehow cheering this chill day.

Now the bright morning Star, day's harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose.
Hail bounteous May that dost inspire
Mirth and youth and warm desire,
Woods and Groves are of thy dressing,
Hill and Dale doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early Song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long.

Gold oft tried and ever new

For my mother, at whose knee I learned to love John Donne. He wrote this 9th of his Elegies, “The Autumnal,” for George Herbert's mother Magdalen, his patroness, to whom he also dedicated his Holy Sonnets. Happy Mothers' Day, Ma.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace

As I have seen in one autumnal face.

Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape,

This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.

If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame;

Affection here takes reverence's name.

Were her first years the golden age? That's true,

But now she's gold oft tried and ever new.

That was her torrid and inflaming time,

This is her tolerable tropic clime.

Fair eyes, who asks more heat than comes from hence,

He in a fever wishes pestilence.

Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they were,

They were Love's graves, for else he is no where.

Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit

Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorit;

And here till hers, which must be his death, come,

He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.

Here dwells he; though he sojourn ev'rywhere

In progress, yet his standing house is here:

Here where still evening is, not noon nor night,

Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight.

In all her words, unto all hearers fit,

You may at revels, you at council, sit.

This is Love's timber, youth his underwood;

There he, as wine in June, enrages blood,

Which then comes seasonablest when our taste

And appetite to other things is past.

Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platane tree,

Was lov'd for age, none being so large as she,

Or else because, being young, nature did bless

Her youth with age's glory, barrenness.

If we love things long sought, age is a thing

Which we are fifty years in compassing;

If transitory things, which soon decay,

Age must be loveliest at the latest day.

But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack,

Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack;

Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade;

Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out than made;

Whose every tooth to a several place is gone,

To vex their souls at resurrection:

Name not these living death's-heads unto me,

For these, not ancient, but antique be.

I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay

With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day.

Since such love's natural motion is, may still

My love descend, and journey down the hill,

Not panting after growing beauties. So,

I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.

A hundred billion bottles

Since writing the previous post, I've had occasion to think again about the message and its meaning. I've remembered that I wasn't in fact schooled by the New Critics, though my sensibility might suggest otherwise, but in post-modernism, in multiplicities of meaning, and in the sway of cultural materialism. Here, then, in deference to my schooling, are some alternative readings.

1. The message as evidence of a late twentieth-century crisis of masculinity. Jonathan, incapable of relationship and even of conversation, has recourse to a wild gesture of evasion. Like so many women of her generation, Mary waits in vain for the fulfilment of his promise. But he is in the end a child and not a man.

2. The message as modern tragedy - this is the reading Beth and Brad seem to advocate. In classical tragedy, pathos arises from the hero's innate greatness and nobility, whereas in modern tragedy, the hero is precisely unheroic, ordinary, even ignoble. He is frail and contemptible, neurotic, unreliable, self-absorbed and self-destructive. In a film version, Jonathan might be played by Paul Giamatti. Or, if it were a Wes Anderson film, by Jason Schwartzman.

3. The message as psychoanalytic biography. We know that the wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 off the coast of Newfoundland, not far from Nova Scotia, so it's highly likely the note is connected to that episode in some way, certainly symbolically if not actually. Perhaps our protagonists worked together on the discovery. A tendre develops, but Mary's feelings are not reciprocated. In fact, Jonathan is gay, but the rigid cultural mores of rural Canada in the mid-1980s make it impossible for him to confess this to Mary. Instead, he promises friendship and corresondence, then returns to Nova Scotia, leaving her on Newfoundland. He writes as promised, but sending the letter feels like the final act of deception. Instead he encloses it in a bottle, thus 'bottling up' his emotional authenticity, and hurls it into the North Atlantic, in the general direction of both Mary and the shipwreck that brought them together, that now symbolizes both the 'wreckage' of Mary's hopes and the repression or 'burial' of Jonathan's true self.

4. The message as literary artifact. There are a number of internal contradictions in the structure of the message which give clues to its provenance. There's a shift between the first two lines and the second: "I hope we can keep in correspondence" carries a very different connotation from "I said I would write"; a prospective hope followed by a statement of past undertakings minimally fulfilled. This suggests the message was begun in one frame of mind, and finished in another. "Your friend always" has a note of finality, as though he didn't expect a continuance of the correspondence; which, indeed, his method of correspondence would seem to confirm. Finally the date, written diagonally across the bottom left corner: only a year, no day or month, which suggests that the message was destined to be a relic, consigned to the deep waters of history, rather than one of a series anchored in particularity.

5. The message as hoax. The name and date attached to the message are intended to deflect inquiry from its real author, Francis Bacon.