Sunday 16 September 2012

The Doctor and the Crab





The doctor and the crab is one among the many series of literary experiments I have been conducting on Twitter ever since I have been on it. The question is how far can Twitter's 140 character format serve as a literary form. Can it be liberating? Can it feel free yet disciplined? Can it feel as though it had to be that way and no other? Can it be poetry?

For that reason I have written haiku, distichs, couplets, clerihews, and composed small episodes of various kinds, like Kafkaesque micro-fairytales, humorous anecdotes, philosophical games (if I can dignify them in such a way) and poetic conditions or prose poems. The imagination creates a location and immediately has to shape it. That is the poetry.

The current series involves the doctor (who has appeared in a number of my earlier efforts) and a crab. The starting point was a tweet by the poet Magda Kapa, to which I answered as below, and to which another contributor, Nox, added a remark. That's enough. This is the series so far. The italicised passages are mine.

Magda Kapa: North Sea Crabs for breakfast, North Sea Crabs for lunch, North Sea Crabs for ever!
  • GS: Why not just dangle off the end of Cromer pier and become a crab? 
Nox: If Thomas Bernhard and Bruno Schulz had a progeny, this is the story he/she would write!  [And so I wrote of course....]:
  • The desire to write a novel in persona of a Cromer crab is not to be lightly entertained, remarked the doctor, pushing aside the flounder.  
  • How muscular do you consider a crab to be? demanded the doctor, glancing up at the stormy sky. We haven't much time! Hurry!  
  • The doctor removed his crab-shaped ring, laid it on the table and watched incredulously as it began to move towards the salt cellar. 
  • I will never countenance crab sandwiches, the doctor declared. To me crabs are souls. See this carapace? he asked. I too am carapace.  
  • It was when the doctor started moving sideways along the beach that the crabs came to him in the rain with a fearsome clacking of claws.  
  • Now I too am a crab, thought the doctor. Now I too move sideways. The sea put out a long tongue and the sand slipped beneath his claws.  
  • In my early life as a crab, wrote the doctor, it was the rotten sex smell of the sea that nearly did for me. No therapists in the North Sea.  
  • It just didn't feel right at first, wrote the doctor. I mean a crab is just a crab to begin with. Those crazy eyes! But then it gets to you.  
  • After a while you begin to think like a crab, said the doctor. Edward de Bono with claws. Everything is lateral. Everything is salty.

The temptation for some readers is to identify the doctor with the writer, which is an alluring but unproductive line to take unless the reader is a psychoanalyst / therapist by inclination or profession, seeking to discover symptoms of some given personal condition in phrases like 'the rotten sex smell of the sea'. There is nothing to stop the reader reading in that fashion, but it is as well to remember that the imagination is not entirely circumscribed by the  writer's condition. The balance between memory, observation and imagination is complicated. Besides, I have already invented my own absent therapist in the piece itself.

In this case, for example, both doctor and crab are aspects of the imagination. The imagination is not preoccupied with the condition of the imaginer, but runs around playing, seeing what else is possible to feel at depth. That is important because the position of the imaginer has to remain free and unfettered by ideas about himself / herself. So one may imagine oneself in the doctor's position all the better because one is neither doctor nor crab, and  it is worth remembering that the imaginer might well have said something completely different. The imager is not concerned with solving his own problems, should he even perceive them as problems, because any solution would be the answer to a spurious question. The question is not self, but the world.



14 comments:

Gwil W said...

Cromer was the Queen mum's favourite beach! Maybe she'd have a crab sandwich for lunch. Could be. There would doubtless be a doctor nearby. She had terrible problems with fish bones.

George S said...

Ah, the Queen mum. She could have stayed in the lantern tower of the Hotel de Paris overlooking the Pier. She could even have a created a Peer or two for the sake of euphony.

Dave said...

I enjoyed seeing this unfold on Twitter yesterday. I got bored of Twitter haiku a couple years ago, but your experiments are really breathing new life into the micropoetry/microfiction genre. Keep it up.

George S said...

Thank you Dave. I'll try. I am a little wary of the haiku and its purities.

MichaelsRamblings said...

I enjoy your tweets. I watch out for them. Twitter is ideal for micropoetry/microfiction. I have long considered a microfiction seam. May your innovative tweets continue.

@michaelcrossann

Gwil W said...

The tale is ripe for a limerick.

Short-sighted doctor Joe Crab
Took his darts instead of his bag
When he went on his rounds
Through Cromer town
He gave one peer a prick for a jab.

Harry said...

Hi George,

Re the self/world dichotomy presented in the last line of your interesting post:

Is there ever any substantial barrier between self and world?

...or to put it in a less abstract light: is there any substantial barrier between here and our potential to do stuff here (to create things, say)?

To negate the real actor/creator/interpreter self seems, to me, to negate the world and its great diversity.

Regards,

Harry.

George S said...

It's a matter of which way we are facing, Harry. Of course one cannot detach the self from the world - one is, after all, IN the world. But for a writer I think it is good to be interested in other than the mechanics of the self. (I write as one who is a good deal interested but reckons that counterproductive.)

Harry said...

George,

I know what you mean, and 'detachment' is worthy of pursuit and a particular type of effort; but I strongly suspect that it is a sort of illusion, that there can never be complete detachment/ objectivity (but that certainly does not mean that we can't, or shouldn't, try!)... and that's fine while it is an illusion, but maybe not so fine if it becomes a delusion.

I think the facility to detach to a degree is itself a function of the self, and maybe quite an excellent function, if sincerely achieved.

Regards,

Harry.

George S said...

I don't think I have argued for detachment. I have argued for a different kind of attention. The point of art is not to provide an interesting speciment for analysis, but to get a grasp on the world.

Harry said...

Just riffing off a few ideas brought up there, George; didn't mean to suggest you were arguing for attachment.

Interestingly enough I was just watching a documentary on the Beats that was very much concerned with some of their methods for achieving 'different kinds of attention'. Burrows was interviewed about taking a notoriously unpleasant drug that makes one feel horrible, and he said that he knew he would make him feel horrible if he took it, but he still took it for the experience, which he wrote about. Extreme example, I know.

On your last point: I'm currently doing a course on modern US poetry which involves close reading/analysis of poems. In those discussions there seems to me (even as a very novice writer) to be a big rift between reading/understanding the poem as we are in the course, and the poet's process of creating it. We are reading the poem as if it was consciously constructed from 'parts' that reveal what were evident truths to the poet... of course, this is very likely not the way that the poem was written at all: It was likely written, as you say, as part of an long process of the poet 'grasping the world' (... or, possibly, rendering the world in a way that could be grasped?) by groping in the dark of the process.

I wonder, in light of this, and if it is true, is there a better way to study poetry that is more in keeping with its modes a creation and less like cutting up dead meat on a slab? A more creative, or maybe re-creative, way?

Regards,

Harry.

Harry said...

oops, 'arguing for *detachment*' I meant to say...

Dafydd John said...

This brings to mind
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html

Harry said...

Hee hee, that puts it quite well.