From the Reading Diary: Kenneth Patchen’s Selected Poems

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Lee

Kenneth Patchen is interested in, among other things, the way the branches move on the trees to create visions and to scratch the surface of the stars in the night sky. He’s also interested in the cruelty that men – mostly rich men with political power – do to their fellow human beings. But his poems seem to come straight from the senses, unmediated by any ideology.

The poems in Selected Poems were originally published between 1936 and 1957. So they precede and slightly overlap the period in 20th century North American literature that I find most interesting: the time of the Beat Generation. And in Patchen’s pages it’s easy to detect some of the influence he had on the writers who came after him.

Many of these poems have a rhythm that to me sounds like Charles Bukowski. I can hear that voice very strongly here, strange because of the sense of Patchen’s lines, a sense of hope, something largely absent in Bukowski. Take Patchen’s What is the Beautiful? for example: beginning with harrowing images (“Needles through the eye. / Bodies cracked open like nuts.”) and ending with a statement of faith in the goodness of humanity (“I believe that every good thought I have, / All men shall have.”)

Patchen is more akin in spirit to Allen Ginsberg than to Bukowski, writing of the mysteries of nature and the happiness for humankind that can come from universal love. A major influence on Ginsberg was William Blake, who also was happy to philosophise in his poems and prophesy a new hope for humanity, and Blake seems to come through on the pages of Patchen too.

Patchen’s poetry is powerful, with something to say. I started reading Patchen because I read Henry Miller’s essay about him (“Patchen: A Man of Anger and Light”), where Miller portrays Patchen as a man who is restless and angry and dissatisfied, and must create fire in the world to protect his own sensitive skin. Reading Patchen finally, I’ve got a feeling for myself of that fire, and also a sense of the hope and beauty that the poet saw in the world.

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Notes on William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg May 5th, 1951

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Lee

In a letter to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs seems to be saying that he’s incapable of envy. Envy arises from a particular kind of ignorance, of which Burroughs has cured himself:

“Envy and resentment is only possible when you can not see your own space-time location. Most of the people in America do not know where they really are so they envy someone else’s deal. But this envy is not a universal law …”

Burroughs knows where he is, and to know where you are is to know you can’t be anywhere else in that moment. Envy makes as little sense as wishing you were a different person. Even if you can, over time, change things about yourself, you can’t change who you are, nor where you are now.

“To illustrate my statement which is a law I never saw an exception to: Can you imagine a man in a lifeboat getting envious because somebody somewhere is drinking champagne? No, because he knows where he is. All envy is based on the proposition ‘I could be getting that.’”

The man in the lifeboat knows that now is not the time and place for champagne. He knows he couldn’t get champagne now if he tried. Perhaps he dreams of drinking champagne when he gets to shore. But for now he feels lucky to be alive.

All this seems to rest on Burroughs’s very simple notion of what it means to be yourself, to be “I.” The “I” is defined by its space-time location and that is all. I cannot be anywhere else, nor can I be anyone else. My position in space and time means I have this body in this moment, these possessions, this mind …

But rather than make a philosophical judgement of Burroughs’s stance – based on an evaluation of a metaphysics he may or may not adhere to – I prefer to take it as a description of how Burroughs feels when he is centred and free from envy. He says: if you know your space-time location, then you cannot feel envy. Reverse this and say: when you’re not feeling envy, you’re aware of your space-time location. Burroughs believes he can see the world more sharply and clearly when his vision is not clouded by negative feelings of envy.

Probably Burroughs felt envy and resentment from time to time, same as the rest of us. And isn’t it right sometimes to wish for something other than the status quo? But in his letter, Burroughs is reminding his friend that the starting point for any change is always the here and now, the “I” and its own unique potentials and limitations.

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On Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Lee

The poet’s task is to find the right words, or the true names of things. And in A Wizard of Earthsea, that’s the task of wizards too. You find the thing’s true name by capturing its essence: by seeing what is true of it, at the deepest level, beneath its surface. A thing is named for the way it appears to the keenest eyes. So it takes the eye of a poet or wizard to find this truest name for a thing.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is a book about a boy, whose true name is Ged, who is on the path to becoming a wizard. And he grows up and goes on his first quest, to rid the world of an evil shadow that has entered his world from another realm. Published in 1968, the book is a classic of the fantasy genre, and a great work of literature. Le Guin was a poet, and conjured up a deep rich world for us to enjoy, as real-seeming as any in fiction.

“Light is a power. A great power by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is.”

Three things human beings have in abundance are life, light, and time. It takes a long time to get poetry right, to find the right words and the right names for things. But there is always time enough, and life enough, and light enough to see by, should the poet choose to use them for this purpose. Though Ursula K. Le Guin is now gone, I’m cheered to think that she used the abundances in her long life to find the right words for us, time and again, to create realities that deepened our own world and show us again and again the essences of things.

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A Feeling of Connection: Anthony Burgess and His Characters

Posted on January 22, 2018 by Lee

Anthony Burgess tells his story through his characters, in a way that makes him stand out among writers. Many writers of fiction tell their stories primarily through the narrator’s voice, and characters are presented to the reader through this medium. The narrative voice is usually so important because it will colour the whole story, influencing the readers’ perspectives on the characters. But Burgess seems to inhabit his characters fully, making them speak and act and think so that we seem to hear and see them for ourselves, and the story moves along, driven by their actions and dialogue and resolutions and changes of heart, as they introduce themselves, develop and make discoveries, and leave the stage again. Burgess’s novel is theatrical and visual.

Time for a Tiger is the first novel in Burgess’s “Malayan Trilogy”, written in the 1950s. He saw Malaya first hand, working as a “colonial education officer” in Malaya and Borneo during this time. He prided himself on his knowledge of the local language, and understanding of the culture, something which other colonial writers often lacked. William Somerset Maugham was something of a model for him, but Maugham would write about the East with a Westerner’s eye, without a great understanding of the local culture.

Though the novel is filled with curious characters, Victor Crabbe seems to be the main focus, and is perhaps based on Burgess himself. Victor is a history teacher in a Malayan village, and differs from most of his white associates by having, or at least priding himself on feeling that he has, a real sympathy with the locals. Part of him wants to return to England. “But,” he reflects, “I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes, just before dawn breaks, I feel that I somehow enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me.”

Perhaps the purpose of the novel is to explore this complicated feeling of connection with a foreign country, in this case the somewhat paternal feeling Victor has for a colony whose independence is just around the corner. The new characters that Burgess introduces at every turn stand, in one way or another, in contrast to Victor. We get the locals wondering at his eccentric ways, such as his refusal to travel by car, even though he is rich, highlighting the way Victor stands out in this country in many ways still strange to him, how alien he seems to the locals despite his professed love for them. We get Victor’s wife Fenella, who simply wants to leave this climate and this culture and return home. And Nabby Adams, on the other hand, seems rather close to Victor, with his friend Flaherty telling him “make up your mind about what bloody race you belong to.” Nabby and Victor are both picked up often for “letting the side down”, and losing sight of their own white identities. (“The fact was that Victor Crabbe, after a mere six months in the Federation, had reached that position common among veteran expatriates – he saw that a white skin was an abnormality, and that the white man’s ways were fundamentally eccentric.”)

Burgess is a great example of a writer who knew how to “show don’t tell”. For every point of view through which Burgess wants us to explore the landscape, there will be a living breathing character who embodies that perspective. Like Dickens, Burgess writes stories that often seem theatrical, since the drama is always moved along with descriptions of people, what they do, and what they say. (I seem to remember that Burgess himself makes a similar observation about Dickens somewhere.) Though it is a sort of trick – of course, there is a narrator, guiding you and nudging your perspective – the illusion is complete and putting the book down I feel that I’ve been watching actors moving on a stage, rather than listening to a story-teller.

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A Sad Note: Henry Miller’s Aller Retour New York

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Lee

640px-The_center_of_New_York_1932Henry Miller believed that a real writer can find inspiration in anything, be it “a smokestack or a button”. I always enjoy Miller, whatever he’s writing about, because whatever the subject matter he’ll make it interesting. But some of his books I like more than others.

Aller Retour New York is Miller’s account of a trip he made from Paris to New York and back again. It is written in the form of a long letter to Alfred Perlès – whom he addresses mostly as “Joey” throughout, as was his habit – and this gives the book a conversational tone, making it appear somewhat more down-to-earth than some of his other works (such as the Tropics or Black Spring). Perhaps it is the matter-of-fact and less frequently psychedelic quality that makes this one of my least favourite of his books. But there’s another thing too.

As in all his books, Miller is writing about life. He restates here his philosophy that only being on “the streets” and seeing real life with your own eyes can make you understand it, since by living you learn the logic of life. And he paints a wonderful picture of what it means to enjoy life: for example, when drinking in Paris “I feel the friendliness of the wine and of the carved cutlass which stands in a corner by the window. I say now what I have never said in America: I feel a profound contentment.”

He’s never happy in America, and this spoils the book for me. I never get a feeling for the country. He never takes us beneath the surface. Half the book is about the USA, but he just repeats again and again the same message: America is dead, and all of its inhabitants are dead too, and anyone with any life will be crushed by the American way. He has very little positive to say, and this makes me think he just doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand what America is. I’d feel far happier reading a writer who loved his subject matter, in the way that Miller loves even “just a windowful” of Paris, enough to make his heart sing. Miller is better when he’s singing a joyful song inspired by the fullness he sees in the human spirit, than when he’s being mean-spirited, and griping about the society that rejected him.

(Image: The center of New York. In: “Flug und Wolken” (Flight and Clouds), Manfred Curry, Verlag F. Bruckmann, München (Munich), 1932 via Wikimedia Commons)

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Henry Miller and Doing More Work

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Lee

If you want to create – to paint, to write, to make music – you need to do so in the face of the pressures and demands of modern life. It’s about maintaining an inner equilibrium, carving out a space for yourself in which you can work in peace, free to follow your muse in these hours when you’ve put some distance between yourself and the world.

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, as its title suggests, is a book about finding that place of stillness and quiet in which you can carry out the activity of creation. It’s a collection of essays, but the theme of the artist in the modern age runs throughout. The first essay, entitled “The Hour of Man,” sets the tone, being an essay about the importance of setting aside even just one hour a week in which you turn off all devices – in those days he’s talking about turning off the TV and radio and putting down the newspaper – and thinking about your place and purpose in the world. But other essays on diverse themes – the writers Henry Miller admires, the meaning of money – are also written to the same tune. So, for example, in an essay about Kenneth Patchen, we learn about the poet’s sensitivity, and how his art – “a mantle of fire” around him – served as a kind of protest against the world that also protected him against it. And in “Money and How It Gets That Way,” we learn about the symbolic value of money, and how we might use it without being deceived by it – without getting sucked into the pursuit of money for its own sake, and forgetting that money exists for us: to serve us, the individuals who handle it every day.

The pervading message is: whatever happens, create! Whether it is money, meditation, or art itself, its greatest purpose for the artist is that it helps to create a space in which more work can be done, where the artist can realise herself over and over, and become every day the creative individual she is. Stand Still Like the Hummingbird is one of my favourite books because, while covering many different topics, it sings over and over its refrain of hope for the artist.

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Identifying Things

Posted on December 18, 2017 by Lee

Identification, says Korzybski, is a blunt tool. Language is a box full of tools, all imperfect, none quite fit for purpose, their functioning performative and never exactly descriptive. Meaning: anything we can say about the world is never quite how the world is, a chair is not “a chair”. Is not the word “chair” that we use to identify it. Using the word “chair” helps us to get along. But there are drawbacks to getting along with imperfect tools.

Just as it can be tiring to use the wrong screwdriver, even if it’ll get the job done in the end, so it’s fatiguing to use the wrong concepts, even though we seem to get along fine at the time. “What’s wrong with you?” “I’m just tired.” And that’s enough to explain away the nausea.

And other times we can feel we’re not getting on fine at all. The exhaustion is palpable, and we start to press uncomfortably against the limitations of language. Thinking in words isn’t working. But how else to think?

Using the words I have at my disposal, it’s difficult to think of myself as a process, rather than a state of being. And yet I seem to be changing all the time. I’m feeling out of sorts today, and I don’t know why. “I’m confused”, “I’m tired”, “I’m sad” … None of these quite seems to fit. I’m not any one of these states, but a point somewhere between them all. And others I can’t name right now. Even this isn’t quite right. “I am I.” Even this. I’m not this point, or this thought, or this body, or anything. No thing, no state. What am I?

I close my eyes and stop thinking. Ten, twenty minutes meditation and I’ll be right again. Stop thinking. That’s the goal, but do you ever stop thinking? A different kind of thinking then.

I see that oscillating point now, shimmering between the different states of being. And soon I’m following its vibrations, and I don’t see it at all, only feel it, and what I see now are only ripples of colour, and shapes in shifting shadow. And then … When I open my eyes, what I have seen falls fast from my memory. Waking from a dream. Perhaps it’s not what I saw, but what I felt, the images there were a side-effect, might have been anything. Ephemeral symbols, necessary for the dream but torn away now, never to exist in that connection again.

Language wants everything fixed, so this means that, and that means this. But people change, and maybe ephemeral symbols, that can be picked up and used and then unattached again and put down when the dream is over, are the only symbols we can use to describe what it is to exist as a human being, as a person, as anything.

People change. “When you stop growing you start dying,” as William Burroughs said. It’s change that’s so difficult to describe.

You get to a point where you’re comfortable and you stick. There’s nothing to be gained by taking a new risk in a land governed by identity. So I assert that “I am I” and forget that when these words were first uttered they were intended for a platform, a jumping off point, a dead “I”, springboard to a higher self, an ongoing process. But instead I say “I am what I am” and I’m contented.

Blunt tools are perfect if you want to wear yourself out. And down. And maybe this is what we want: to be just tired enough at the end of the day to be able to say “I tried, I did my best”, contented after our ten hours, to work, and work, and back home again. And not fearing death, because death is just the end of a process of winding down, from the anxiety of youth, to happy tired middle age, to the inertia of old age, and on to and into the grave.

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Toynbee and the Enlightenment

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Lee

Arnold J Toynbee has some bad news in Volume VI of his A Study of History: Western civilisation is showing all the signs of being in its final decline.

Civilisations decline when they fail to respond to challenges they face. History has “rhythms”, and the whole of Toynbee’s Study has been an attempt to give names to these rhythms: “challenge-and-response”, “withdrawal-and-return”, “rout-and-rally”, and so on. History is only made where its rhythms persist, where challenge is met with response, where withdrawal is followed by return. If Western civilisation cannot respond to its challenges, or withdraws into itself never to return, is routed never to rally, then it will be replaced by some other power, and the march of History will continue without it.

For example, Toynbee points to the Enlightenment as an inadequate response to a challenge. From the 18th Century onwards there has been an accelerating decline of religion, the glue that – Toynbee believes – holds society together. The West’s big response to this crisis was the Enlightenment, which attempted to unify the disillusion already prevalent in society into a new world view that championed reason and science and left faith to one side. As a result, the decline of religion – decline of belief in faith, hope, and charity – was allowed to continue, reinforced by the new movement. The challenge of the decline of religion was never properly met, and as a result Western society has been in decline ever since.

Toynbee’s view is strange to me, since I’ve always been taught of the centrality of faith, hope, and charity in Enlightenment thinking. Immanuel Kant and many of his followers emphasise the importance of faith alongside scientific enquiry, they and other thinkers stress the hope that science and critical thinking brings for humanity, and the Enlightenment brings with it new humanisms and liberalisms that put the needs of the poor at the centre of political thinking. I can’t think how any more “religion” at the heart of the Enlightenment project could have made the response a better one.

But perhaps that is exactly the point. I cannot think of a better response than the Enlightenment because it has already done its work, and I already live in a (disintegrating) society largely devoid of religion. I can’t imagine what new religion might have arisen to replace the failing Christianities that emerged both from Rome and the Reformation, because to imagine such a new religion would have been a huge creative act, far beyond the powers of one like me who – on most days at least – blithely accepts the non-existence of God. Religion simply isn’t a problem for me, because I have no need for it, living as I do in the ruins of Western civilisation.

And this is what makes Toynbee intriguing to me: his suggestion that History has shaped the imagination of the individual, determined which possibilities are within our grasp, and, conversely, what possible worlds lie outside our field of vision. Having finished reading Toynbee’s Study, I’m left with an eerie doubt that we might not live in the best of all possible worlds, and that the solutions to our problems might forever elude us, for as long as our civilisation lives.

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Review: The Moon and Sixpence

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Lee

I picked up The Moon and Sixpence, having heard it was “inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin,” expecting to read a novelised biography of the artist, with an appropriate level of artistic licence. What you get with this book, in fact, is a fictional work that uses the real life of Gauguin only as a starting point for a gripping drama with a compelling anti-hero at its centre.

The Moon and Sixpence, by William Somerset Maugham, is the story of Charles Strickland, a painter and struggling genius. Strickland suddenly leaves his wife and his day job and flees to Paris, to commit himself to painting, to the shock of all those in the polite society around him. The story is narrated by a writer who moves in these polite circles, and becomes acquainted with Strickland when he’s given the task, by Strickland’s wife, of following the artist to Paris, to try to persuade him to return.

The narrator struggles to understand the struggling artist, and this lends a mystery to the portrait that I found appealing. Strickland is always calling the narrator a “damned fool” or the like, for failing to understand what drives the artist. The narrator simply cannot understand why a man would throw off all his duties, hurting others in the process, simply in order to paint. Though a writer, the narrator just is not an artist, and so can never understand. It puts us, as readers, at a distance from the artist himself, we seem only to see him side-on, literally a profile of the artist with only hints at the depths. It’s been suggested that Maugham’s inability to penetrate the depths of creative genius is a weakness of this book. I would say rather that it’s this that gives the book its distinctive and compelling quality, its realness in helping us to see what it would mean for an ordinary person to come into the presence of true genius.

Rich and enjoyable, The Moon and Sixpence is one of Maugham’s best works. Full of thoughtful and sometimes deep (if not strictly original) insights, it will keep you thinking as you turn the pages to see what happens next.

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Reading Toynbee

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Lee

Perhaps there’s nothing you have to do and nowhere you have to be. You’re on your own, so you’ve only yourself to worry about. But what is there to worry about when you’ve only yourself to worry about?

A quiet spot of reading. I’m usually a noisy reader. I cry out, I laugh, I write hasty notes in the margins. But what would it be to just read? Is it possible to sit and be still and just listen?

Would I even be aware of what I was reading? Reading is usually a conversation. I react. I chime in. What could it mean to read a book in silence?

Thinking, perhaps? But no, to think is to surprise yourself, to react and respond to what you discover. Thinking is a noisy process too. Thinking is not the same as being still and silent.

A time to stop. There is nowhere you need to be, nothing to think about. When I pick up the book and start reading, the words are already familiar to me. And whatever I don’t understand I already know is irrelevant, it’s not for me, and I can let it pass. “What we cannot speak about …” I am happy not to understand. It’s not my business, for now at least, in this moment.

Arnold J Toynbee has his own concerns and his own character. He says things I can’t agree with. And usually in my noisy reading I assume I’m supposed to agree, and I become obstinate, and I scribble exclamation marks and questions in the margins. But now I watch him speak and I smile, and I learn what sort of person he must have been to say these things. I enjoy him, as the narrator of his own story. I reserve judgement.

I still write in the margins, it’s an old habit. But I pause before I write. And what I write is appreciative, not combative. I note the story that Toynbee is telling, and I try to enjoy it. It’s a tale of a vast empire that brought peace and justice to the world, but is now in a time of trouble, and probably decline. It’s a fabrication like any other.

Slowly I’m building the picture piece by piece. I think back on my own past wrongheadedness, and wonder at the ways I must be wrongheaded still. I’ll look back and shake my head at what I’m writing now. And I forgive myself and I have no regrets, just as Toynbee now, in his grave, regrets nothing.

There’s nothing for me to do here. I know this well enough already. What I don’t understand is not for me. I listen as I would listen to a friend on a late evening, through a pleasant drunken haze.

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