Der gute Kamerad, Alun Lewis, und Die Ringe des Saturn

Alun Lewis's second and final and posthumous book Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets opens with an epigraph from Ludwig Uhland's Der gute Kamerad.

Kann dir die Hand nicht geben,
Bleib du im ew’gen Leben
Mein guter Kamerad!

which assigned the date March 5th, 1944, the date on which Lewis died at the age of 28 on military service in Burma from a gunshot wound which - according to the official report - was self-inflicted accidentally.

Uhland lived from 1767 to 1862. Der gute Kamerad appeared in his 1815 Gedichte from Stuttgart where he had been recently been working as a lawyer.

Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden,
Einen beſſern findſt du nit.
Die Trommel ſchlug zum Streite,
Er ging an meiner Seite,
In gleichem Schritt und Tritt.

Eine Kugel kam geflogen,
Gilt’s mir oder gilt es dir?
Ihn hat es weggeriſſen,
Er liegt mir vor den Füßen,
Als wär’s ein Stück von mir.

Will mir die Hand noch reichen,
Derweil ich eben lad’.
Kann dir die Hand nicht geben,
Bleib du im ew’gen Leben
Mein guter Kamerad!

I had a comrade,
A better you'll not find.
The drum called us to fight,
He walked by my side,
In the same step.

A bullet flew,
Aimed at me or you?
It tore him away,
He lies there at my feet,
As if he were a piece of me.

He reached out a hand
While I reloaded
I cannot give you a hand,
You stay in eternal life
My good comrade!

Maybe it was the German language-connection, but something set me to seeing echoes between the Lewis book and Die Ringe des Saturn by W. G. Sebald.

The first lines of the first poem in Lewis's book immediately signal both the military content and the strong theme of nature which runs through his work ... The poem is called 'Dawn on the East Coast' and begins ...

From Orford Ness to Shingle Street
The grey disturbance spreads
Washing the icy seas on Deben Head.

The military connections of this locale are set out clearly and evocatively by Sebald in Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn). Reading that book readily reinforces the appropriateness of the word 'disturbance' in relation to these places. Concerning Orfordness he writes

War damals, bei meinem ersten Aufenthalt in Orford, ein Übersetzen auf »die Insel« ausgeschlossen gewesen, so stand einem solchen Vorhaben jetzt nichts mehr entgegen. Das Verteidigungsministerium hatte den geheimen Forschungsbetrieb vor einigen Jahren aufgelassen, und einer der beschäftigungslos an der Hafenmauer sitzenden Männer erbot sich ohne weiteres,mich für ein paar Pfund hinüberzufahren und später, wenn ich meinen Rundgang gemacht hätte und ihm von der anderen Seite her winkte, wieder zurückzuholen Während wir in seinem blauen Dieselkutter den Fluß überquerten, erzählte er mir, daß Orfordness nach wie vor weitgehend gemieden werde. Sogar die bekanntlich mit nichts so sehr wie mit der Einsamkeit vertrauten Standfischer hätten es nach ein paar Versuchen aufgegeben, dort draußen in der Nacht ihre Angeln auszuwerfen, angeblich weil es sich nicht verlohnte, in Wahrheit aber weil die Gottverlassenheit dieses ins Nichts vorgeschobenen Postens nicht auszuhalten gewesen war und in einigen Fällen tatsächlich zu langanhaltenden Gemütskrankheiten geführt habe. [pp.278-279]

When I was first in Orford it was forbidden to approach "the island", but now there was no longer any obstacle to going there, since, some years before, the Ministry of Defence had abandoned secret research at that site. One of the men sitting idly on the harbour wall offered to take me over for a few pounds and fetch me later after I had had a look around. As we crossed the river in his blue-painted boat, he told me that people still mostly avoided Orfordness. Even the beach fishermen, who were no strangers to solitude, had given up night-fishing out there after a few attempts, allegedly because it wasn't worth their while, but in reality because they couldn't stand the god-forsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere, and in some cases even became emotionally disturbed for some time. [p.233 of the Hulse translation]

I assume Sebald was at least in some way involved in this translation, nevertheless it seems worth noting that quite different impressions arise from the two phrases “blue-painted boat” and “blauen Dieselkutter”.

Siebald describes Shingle Street as "the most abandoned spot in the entire region ... which now consists of just one wretched row of humble houses and cottages and where I have never encountered a single human being" (p225).

Sogar in dem bei weiten verlassensten Flecken der ganzen Gegend, in der heute nur mehr aus einer einzigen trostlosen Zeile niedriger Häuser und Hütten bestehenden Ortschaft Shingle Street, in der ich noch nie einem Menschen gesehen habe. [pp268-269]

He relates the unusually long embargo on the release on an MoD file on the evacuation of Shingle Street:

Tatsächlich lag bis vor kurzen eine Akte mit der Aufschrift Evacuation of the Civil Population from Shingle Street, Suffolk, in den Archiven des Verteidigungsministeriums, die, im Gegensatz zu ähnlichen, im allgemeinen nach dreißig Jahren freigegebenen Dokumenten, fünfundsiebzig Jahre under Verschluß bleiben sollte,weil sie,einem anscheinend nicht auszurottenden Gerücht zufolge. Einzelheiten beinhalte über einem grauenvollen, in Shingle Street sich ereignet habenden Zwischenfall, den man bis heute vor der Öffentlichkeit nicht verantworten könne. [p.275]

And it is a fact that until recently a file labelled Evacuation of the Civil Population from Shingle Street, Suffolk was in the archives of the Ministry of Defence, embargoed for seventy-five years as distinct from the usual practice of releasing documents after thirty, on the grounds that (so the irrepressible rumours claimed) it gave details of a horrifying incident in Shingle Street for which no government could accept public responsibility" [p.231]

The last section of Lewis's poem 'The Jungle' contains the lines

Only aloneness, swinging slowly
Down the cold orbit of an older world
Than any they predicted in schools,
Stirs the cold forest with a starry wind,

Which I set against Sebald's description of the destructive gales during the night of October 16, 1987.

Jedenfalls ist es mir noch erinnerlich, daß ich meinen Augen nicht traute, als ich von neuem hinausblickte und dort, wo zuvor die Luftwogen an der schwärzen Masse der Bäume aufgelaufen waren, nur mehr den fahlleuchttenden, leeren Horizont sah. Es schien mir, als hätte jemand einen Vorhang beiseite gezogen und als starrte ich nun hinein in eine gestaltlose, in die Unterwelt übergehende Szene. Im selbem Moment, in dem ich die ungewohnte Nachthelle über dem Park wahrnahm, wußte ich, daß dort drunten alleezerstört war. [p.316]

At all events, I still remember that I did not believe my eyes when I looked out again and saw that where the currents of air had shortly beforehand been pouring through the black mass of trees, there was now just the paleness of the empty horizon. It seemed as if someone had pulled a curtain to one side to reveal a formless scene that bordered upon the underworld. And at that very moment I registered the unaccustomed brightness of the night over the park, I knew that everything down there had been destroyed. [p.266]

And the next night he describes how "during the night, doubting what I had seen with my own eyes, I walked once more through the park. As there were power cuts throughout the whole region, everything was in deep darkness. There was no glare from streetlights or houses to dull the sky. But the stars had come out, in a display so resplendent as I had seen only over the Alps when I was a child." [p.267]

Ich weiß nicht, wie ich den ersten Tag nach dem Sturm überstanden habe, entsinne mich jedoch, daß ich mitten in der Nacht, zweifelnd an dem, was ich mit eigenen Augen erblickt hatte, nochmals durch den Park gegangen bin. Da der Strom in der ganzen Gegend ausgefallen war, lag alles in tiefer Dunkelheit. Nicht der schwächste Abglanz von unseren Behausungen und Verkehrswegen trübte den Himmel. Statt dessen waren die Sterne aufgezogen, so prachtvoll, wie ich sie nur in der Kindheit über den Alpen gesehen habe. [pp.317 - 318]

Malouf and Late Style

In last night's interview on Lateline, David Malouf provides insight into the phenomenon, described by Adorno amongst others, of Late Style:

You discover really that your brain does not really work in the same kind of way, and it’s partly to do I think with patience. You know, if you’re writing a novel, for example, you really do have to work at it every single day for as long as the novel takes: that could be six months; it could be two years. And you’ve also got to be endlessly interested in detail, and I think there’s a point you get to as a writer where you become impatient of that kind of finicky detail. And I think that’s the point where you need to think ‘Can I really go on writing novels which demand this?’ Because what I will write will be “thin” rather than dense.

David Malouf, 1 April 2015

Adorno rather than seeing late works, and he is focussing on Beethoven's late music, as "thin"; rather "The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation."

Edward Said, in a piece published in the London Review of Books, characterizes Adorno's thinking: "It is the episodic character of Beethoven’s late work, its apparent carelessness about its own continuity, that Adorno finds so gripping ... Adorno is describing the way that Beethoven seems to inhabit the late works as a lamenting personality, and then to leave the work or phrases in it incomplete, suddenly, abruptly jettisoned."

Malouf's simple explanation suggests that we do not necessarily need to follow Adorno into thinking that an ageing artist such as Beethoven is, by his abrupt jettisoning of detail and apparent disregard for continuity, in effect declaring that 'no synthesis is conceivable'.

Human amidst the inhuman

The final shot of Tarkovsky's Solaris shows that what we might have thought of the protagonist Kris's return to Earth – despite disconcerting signs such as the pond being frozen, the small metal box he had taken with him into space sitting already on the dacha's window sill, and the father inside the house being sprinkled and splashed with hot rain from the ceiling – is really evidence that he has remained on Solaris. The camera zooms out and we see that the little patch of what we may have taken to be Earth is in reality a small island in the mysterious brain-ocean of Solaris.

One of the themes of the film is for the various characters to find a way to be human in the inhuman environment of Solaris and space exploration. But is not the real Earth also just such a small island in the midst of the vast inhuman and possibly numinous ocean of space? And isn't our challenge how still to be human in a reality which Darwin, quantum physics and cosmology has already revealed to be mysterious, vast, random, and not at all centered around this happenstance speck of a species.

Tarkovsky later uses this same device of zooming out to reveal a framing context at the very end of the film Nostalghia. Throughout the film there have been a few dimly lit shots of a Russian rural landscape, like a memory or recurring dream of a place from childhood ...

I have written about these colour-drained shots elsewhere. At the end of the film we see the protagonist and a dog in front of what seems to be this childhood house, lying on the ground looking into a pond. He is the grown man of the present, but the posture – lying idly with a dog and gazing into a pond – is a childhood posture. There is again the telescoping of time that ended The Mirror where the aged mother, after her middle-aged son's death, is seen (still aged as in the present) leading her two small children through the rural landscape around their childhood home (which I have also written about here),

The pond carries a strange reflection which is only explained when the camera zooms out to reveal that the entire remembered landscape is mysteriously contained within the walls of a great cathedral.

In Solaris we zoomed out to show that the context of our limited bound human life is a mysterious alien and conscious ocean. In Nostalghia we see that the entire scope of our lives exist incomprehensibly within the frame and constructed order of a spiritual realm.

Blake's (and Parry's) Jerusalem

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry

The performance of Blake's 'Jerusalem' at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam gave me a momentary pause, it being so strongly identified with England, and Whitlam being such a staunch 'Australianist.' After all, the Barmy Army of visiting cricket supporters sing it before the day's play during Ashes series. But then of course it was the campaign song for Clement Attlee's Labour Party in the famous 1945 landslide ousting Winston Churchill from No.10.  And, having had a not dissimilar educational upbringing from Gough - posh Protestant school - I too find the music invariably stirring; in fact, at the 30 year reunion a short service was held where this was the hymn sung heartily by a bunch of 'old boys' nearing 50.

But then I pondered the lyrics again ... lines such as

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem ...

Parry, who composed the marvellous music, was asked to set the poem to provide a song for the ultra-patriotic Fight for Right movement. Parry had misgivings but did not want to disappoint those who had asked him, and he was pleased - musically - with his resulting work. Yet his misgivings about the political agenda of the Fight for Right grew, and he publicly withdrew all support for the movement.

In this time when seemingly incomprehensible brutality and violence is once again erupting in parts of the world and in our news feeds, it is perhaps worthwhile to ask ourselves what it is that is so moving or inspiring in this hymn, this Call to Arms. Is not the line "Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand" terrifyingly brutal in the way it gives agency to the inanimate weapon. And how would we hear the lines quoted above if instead of the word 'Jerusalem' we substitute 'the Caliphate'?

One's own rhythm

Cesare Pavese

"Il genio non è scoprire un motivo esterno e trattarlo bene, ma giungere finalmente a possedere la propria esperienza, il proprio corpo, i propri ricordi, il proprio ritmo – ed esprimere, esprimere questo ritmo, fuori dalla limitatezza degli argomenti, della materia, nella perenne fecondità di un pensiero che per definizione non ha fondo." Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: 1938, 6 dicembre.

"Genius is not a matter of discovering some external theme and treating it skillfully, but of finally achieving complete possession of one's own experience, own body, own memories - one's own rhythm, and expressing this rhythm, above and beyond the limitations of plot or subject matter." - Cesare Pavese 6 December 1938

Before the strangeness of things ... the taste of dreams

'Emerald Blue' is one of my favourite Gerald Murnane stories, and the whole collection of which it is the title story, is my favourite Murnane book. In 'Emerald Blue' the narrator describes receiving a collection of foreigh postage stamps at the age of seven. "One stamp was from Helvetia. ... He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country of that name. ... More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia. ... As soon as he was able to use an atlas, he searched for Helvetia. When he could find no part of the world with the same name as the country in his mind, he felt for a few moments as awed and delighted as he would ever afterwards feel before the strangeness of things."

This seems to me a masterfully precise description of the inner life and the workings of the imagination. Of course, Helvetia is itself a wonderfully literal metaphor for imaginary landscapes. Murnane is one of those writers whose paragraphs lead you off into your own speculative world; I often find myself often reading a paragraph or two then drifting off into my own thoughts. The great figure in this vein of writing is of course Marcel Proust. Early in Du côté de chez Swann he writes how on waking from a dream of a woman he has known he would set about finding her, "comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginent qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe" ... which Lydia Davis translates as "like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charms of a dream" (this somewhat sacrifices the strong overtones of goûter which has "to taste" and there's that subtlety of "une réalité")

Back to Murnane: "Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion."

Too much going on at once

Frédéric Chopin

In a recent post about alliterative effects in poetry I mentioned a sort of effect which "gets under your skin, or beneath your analytic defences; it sneaks into the brain directly like perfume, or music with too many things going on at once." This type of too-much-going-on-at-once is beautifully described by Douglas Hofstadter in a piece he wrote about Chopin:

"In that same year, Chopin wrote what some admirers consider to be his greatest work: the fourth Ballade in F minor. This piece is filled with noteworthy passages, but one in particular had a profound effect on me. One day, long after I knew the piece intimately from recordings, a friend told me that he had been practising it and wanted to show me "a bit of tricky polyrhythm" that was particularly interesting. I was actually not that interested in hearing about polyrhythm at the moment, and so didn't pay much attention when he sat down at the keyboard. Then he started to play. He played just two measures, but by the time they were over, I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside. This "bit of tricky polyrhythm" had undone me completely."

He goes on to describe that at one scale there is a rhythmic pattern of 2-against-3, but that by accenting every fourth triplet this creates a simultaneous pattern of 3-against-8 at a larger scale. This seems to me to be an excellent example of a general principle about the role of technique in the arts. And the principle is this: the conscious mind under normal circumstances intermediates reality, constructing what is perceived and including its own interpolations and interpretations as part and parcel of our experience of the world.  Thus the role of the conscious analytical computing mind serves to slightly distance us from what we experience: experience is not direct in normal circumstances. When experience is direct we are swept off our feet by the force of it; in this category of experience we might well find certain religious experiences, love at first sight, various psychotic episodes, moments of inspiration or insight, sudden epiphanies, and so forth. Technique is art can so overwhelm the analytical, keeping-track, I-know-what-I-am-experiencing brain that the consructing/interpolating/interpreting processes become overloaded and simply give up and the perceptual experience bypasses all the filters and hits us directly. This is what Hofstadter describes when he says "I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside."