The Crowd crowds in

Exhausted. Bad sleep. Working till close to 10.00 just to stand still, so more Crowd. Two parts that link.





Wedding. Honeymoon journey. Anticipations of sex. The sweet awkwardness, fear and anticipation. The nervousness conveyed with delicacy, humour and tact, without an ounce of sentimentality. The crowd remains individual and human, resolving itself into two fellow passengers. Switch to - is it? - Niagara Falls and a patch of pure lyricism, the patch owing to anyone anywhere, but never more than is genuinely and properly felt. Like an arrow shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain, wrote Larkin in 'The Whitsun Weddings'.





And then she lies back on the grass, and the words: You are the most beautiful girl in the world! appear. He speaks his little bit of poetry about the Falls. Anybody's poetry. A happy domestic scene follows. Family arrives. Joke falls flat. It matters. No-one fights sea monsters or takes arms or challenges the gods but it's an epic journey all the same.


... from cafes
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed abroad: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing...


Vidor lived to be eight-eight, dying in 1982.

The Crowd, Part 2

No attempt to show the central character as any more or less than he might be. The gum-chewing date. The awkward way he puts his arm around her on the bus. The disposal of the chewing gum. The casual cruelty and yet the pity. All the fun of the fair. The phantasmagoria. The snog. The exposure. The exhausted ride home. The preliminaries. The marriage, sudden, substanceless, questless. Fate winding and unwinding. It is not a quest but a survival-and-loss narrative, an extraordinary epic project: Mass Observation as tragedy.

It's not the Hollywood myth. Rooted in Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos but not exactly critique, not ideology, instead a kind of lyricism partaking of both epic and tragedy. Theodore Roethke's poem Dolor, might have been written for it.


Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.



I loved this poem the first time I read it. There is something in it recognizable at a very deep level regarding the sheer, stubborn objectness of objects in a world where people too are objects, among crowds of objects.

My thoughts are still somewhat scattered and fragmentary. I have been writing poems, three in as many days, five in ten. And redrafting. Composition always slightly discomposes me.

Hard to resist...

This...



...via NoolaBeulah. Get me five loaves and two fish. No, on second thoughts, forget the loaves. Bring seven fish.

Merckle and Cory

Adolf Merckle suicide: German who lost £1bn in the financial crisis jumps under train (story). Put in mind of several other stories, including the one below.


Richard Cory
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked,
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.



A train, not a gun, in Merckle's case. Merckle might have been slim and handsome once. The interesting technical thing in the poem (and there is a lesson, a vast complex, difficult lesson, to be learned here), is that it succeeds because of a deliberate clumsiness. I am thinking of the last line of the second verse, with that flat 'and'. Glittering while walking is splendid but the and' makes you feel you have stumbled into it. Getting the right clumsiness is the trick.

There is another version of Richard Cory, by Simon and Garfunkel. Here it is:

A Brief Personal Note on Gaza

Much as I would love the current conflict to stop immediately I suspect it will go on now until a certain negotiable point has been reached. I don't think that point has been reached. I don't say that because of any wish I might have. It is simply what seems obvious. This is because I think the Israeli action is not about 'punishment', collective or otherwise, but about 'deterrence' and Hamas rockets are still going in.

In the meantime I have not signed any petitions because, as far as I can see, they are mostly being aimed one way only. I could not do that. Not because I think Israel must always be in the right. I regard Israelis, and Jews generally, as no better or worse than anyone else, with much the same spectrum of behaviour and reaction. There are miserable bastards there as everywhere else.

What I have done is donate money to UNICEF, specifically for helping the children of Gaza. I hope it goes to them. I commend this way to those who care more about the suffering than about the perceived evils of the Jewish state, Israel. That, for now, is the last word I am saying on the subject.

On Blogging 3: the politics

I used the impersonal third person pronoun quite deliberately then. Blogging is a question of ones. Websites become meeting places of potentially thousands of ones. But one is never exactly in a crowd, operating with the full dynamic of a crowd. It is not, in other words, a mob. I like that. People get excited, people say things they may or may not regret, people erect personae and pseudonyms to try out views and opinions. That seems healthy to me. The important thing is that they talk. When I first came across one of the most popular political sites, Harry’s Place, it seemed to me like a bar-room brawl. It was rough and rude. No one actually got hit. People could come and go there, like the ubiquitous Benji, and make contrary noises, but no one beat him up. It is only voices that are being kicked and punched. It is writing. Good writing is real, as I have said: the written existence, and the written existence should be able to take a beating. But even a written bar-room brawl quickly grows tedious. The writing goes out of the window. One might support (broadly) one side against another, but abuse is just abuse after a while.

Nevertheless there is a considerable amount of intelligence circulating in such places, at higher or lower temperature. I myself joined a website as an occasional contributor. The left wing Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War was Left as I understood, or rather liked the Left, in that it was clearly egalitarian and sprang from a kind of gut connection to what seemed to me passionate and worthwhile in the consciousness of the poor and the underprivileged. As the name suggests, it started as a reaction to something said by George Galloway about Christopher Hitchens. I am not a hero-worshipper of any sort but I’d take Hitchens against Galloway any time. Nor was I a supporter of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It wasn’t so much that I was for them that I disliked the grounds and forms of rhetoric on which they were opposed. My favourite saying is the Simone Weil I have often quoted: Obedience to the force of gravity: the greatest sin. And in my field, the arts and humanities, there is a very strong gravitational pull. It doesn’t, of course, mean that the gravity is wrong, but it is always behovely to resist rather than going with the flow. Especially, or so I feel, for a writer.

Eventually of course one spends more time with like-minded people. There is local gravity everywhere you stand. One ought to resist them too, simply on the anti-gravitational or Groucho Marx principle of not joining any club that would have you as its member.

See, I have shifted through one’ and I’ to ‘you’. That ‘you’ is the sign of an emerging credo. The pronoun I have so far left unused is ‘we’. That is the pronoun I most distrust. Oh, how very much I prefer ‘you’ or ‘one’ to 'we'. Much harm comes of 'we'. One is simply stuck with ‘I’.

On Blogging 2: The social aspect

The web, as has often been said, is an entirely new social space. I don’t accept the criticism that it is purely virtual, any more than a letter is. The first novels, Pamela, and Clarissa by Samuel Richardson were epistolary, comprised of letters between people who were not in a position to speak directly to each other. It is the written lives of people that engage, but those written lives are lives all the same, real, tragic lives.

The virtual aspect of the web – the lives of the Sims, for example – might be interesting if only it wasn't such bad writing in terms of plot, character, option, dimension and everything else. Good writing is never virtual in that sense. There is always a mind and body and heart in it. That gives it plot, character, option, dimension and everything else. Good writing is being really there.

The social space formed by blogs is a real space with real people in it. And it is a remarkably wide, almost limitless space. It is, in many respects, a revolutionary space, similar to the one created by the technology of mass printing, or what McLuhan called ‘the Gutenberg Galaxy’. It is, of course, one of a clutch of revolutionary spaces such as data storage and retrieval, close circuit TV, live broadcast, computer graphics, digital photography and a few more the reader here will no doubt think of. Most of these others, however, are generally more problematic than blogging if only because blogging is not, as they are, one core addressing a mass, but a series of one plus one plus one thinking, really being there.

And they can, really, be anywhere. Some tell you more than others about their physical location. The physical location can be the point. Others are geographically more elusive. It is possible to locate them too, but unless they say where they are, I think it is presumptuous of me to enquire. I know that I am in touch with people in all corners of the earth.

By being in touch I mean two ways, First, simply by reading them; second, by engaging them in conversation through their Comments section. One discovers differences and affinities. One discovers tempers, habits, interests, obsessions, voices. One may agree or disagree with them, but if one keeps returning to them it is because they are interesting and substantial. One guesses at their dimensions as one would with real people, really there in front of one.