I thought I'd have another crack at this in the light of the responses made
(though I'm sorry Robin I haven't had chance to assimilate your paper) ,
before I leave for much further and weirder mountains.

I'm uncomfortable about the prioritising but anyone who's not interested
can skip/erase, and it also occurs to me that Jeremy Prynne's late poetry
evinces in very extreme form a condition of address which is almost
ubiquitous in modern poetry, mainstream or otherwise, which you could put
as "Referring to something as if the reader already knows about it." Poets
like Heaney and Hill do it again and again (usually as a delay at the start
of a poem  before putting you in the picture, a teasing uncertainty quickly
resolved, but also as a running distancing from the event).  At its best
(as in R.F.Langley for instance) it is the very vehicle of transfer, an
opening of meaning out from where it was found as the reader's question is
resolved into the world. It's everywhere in Western poetry. What is John
Wilkinson's normal procedure but a recherché extension of the identical
process?  But in Jeremy Prynne this not-knowing seems to open meaning so
far and so wide that it blocks itself. But in a sense it's no more than the
condition of poetry itself, that self-standing of language, which he runs
to its crisis.


So, yes, sure, the words "dipper cargo" in Not-You (i) are best
contextualised as people in a fairground big-dipper, it seems stupid of me
not to have thought of it.  Does that then settle those two words, let
alone a line or more? I fear not. To get an abstractive sense out of a
passage in this stuff you have to fix a phrase such as "dipper cargo" and
regard it as resolved so that it can become a usable syntactic element in a
sequence of such. You can do that up to a point if your fixing  fits with
other fixes you make in its neighbourhood, but the interpreting process
always knows it is less than the whole of what's going on and inevitably
comes up against an impasse at attempts to extend itself. We become aware
that the author is not doing any fixing at all, indeed he is going out of
his way to put pitfalls before the path of the fixers.  The fixing is done
by eliminating superfluous meanings but the context will only support this
to a friable degree, and in the end they have to return. That fat bobbing
white-chested bird (I saw three of them last week) has to be let in, simply
because there's nothing to keep it out. Isn't that how singular discourse
operates, by constantly eliminating unwanted meanings? and as this
discourse abhors singularity on principal there's really no way of keeping
any of them out.  Thus in courting a linguistic totality it must also risk
nonsense.   "Sensible" interpretations are very useful but they don't solve
the problem of the poetry. Each trouvaille is cancelled by its context, and
we return to our primary defeat.

Keston's reading of the short passage as an abstractive economic historical
account is quite convincing as far as it goes (but ignores "twins") indeed
I can see a lot of the author in it, and I'm tempted to say---

"Yes of course all those stupid common people who devastate the economy by
paying to have themselves thrown about for fun so of course the exchange
gets tilted to a speed-thrill distortion which imbalances the whole
perceptual field the big dipper crashes and they go off singing Danny Boy
because they no longer know where they belong..."

(Danny Boy by the way is a well-known Irish sentimental song and a
danny-boy indecision is an uncertainty as to whether to return to the
homeland or stay abroad earning a living. That seems to me a different
usage from "dipper cargo" and it is certainly pronounced with a sneer,
though there are far finer songs than Danny Boy expressing the same
dilemma, which, I would have thought , is not necessarily seen as a
question of choice. (Actually the tune of Danny Boy is a very beautiful one
which was discovered by Percy Grainger in the Petrie collection after it
had lost its original words; he did several luscious instrumental
arrangements of it but the words were added later by someone.))

There is this kind of disdain in the poetry, but I think that by fixing
singular readings along these lines you risk highlighting it, whereas I
think it's only a factor of a much "larger" faith.

Me, I'd rather read the whole poem insofar as I'm able as a kind of Blakean
thesis on the fall into single vision seen as an event of language itself,
enacting a whole curving descent from some primary point at which a
perfectly balanced and self-identical, unknowable, double-self "blinks"
(signals or blanks out the moment) and sets in motion a threading of
meaning out of wholeness which gets distorted and breaks, its double
richness fallen into alternatives running alongside, but can't maintain the
stress and finally splits into the singular (cuts off a hand to spite a
face) in a land of  cheap bargains easy understanding, ready repairs etc.
to the point where language means with the greatest ease  but matters not
at all. A shattering descent into the utilitarian real, from total
discourse through the doubleness of symbol/allegory to the duplicity of
commercial discourse to the poverty of the unitary . And that, it seems, is
the nadir from which, at this stage, we can only see that primary richness
and beauty as a forward negation or death. So ahead of us the reconstituted
doubleness of death rebuilds language into its new darkness, no-longer
singular, no longer meaning, but as it must be ever after, shadow falling
on shadow as the ghosts we become silently speak multiple nothings which
nobody understands to the future.

That was a terrible mess but I haven't got time to refine it, I should be
packing for my holiday.

When I say I read the poem thus I don't mean I want to exactly I mean I was
unable to prevent it,  I don't at all want to entertain such high catholic
notions and can't believe they're merely what I "bring to the poem", though
they're familiar to me because I once did a detailed study of Blake and he
took me over.

And I don't mean either that the poem sets this up and tactically narrates
it by symbol or figure; I just mean it as a throw at what might emerge from
the author's avowedly anti-rational mode of composition when he follows
through some  possibly quite commonplace experience which he has to conceal
from us, and sets language into a reverberatory mode beyond his own direct
control. The "Blakean" is just one way of coping with it. Or rather not
coping with it. I arrive at it only by recognising the scornful tone in
which items from the present circumstantial real are set, and working back
from that to the ends of the poem. Such matters as what may be understood
or represented by the "twins" remain, as far as I'm concerned, completely
lost within the word for it, and probably always will be.

For the  text seems to declare itself unassimilable and to despise
assimilation as such. The "shadowing" of allegory is redoubled into a
negation of meaning as it abandons the referent or becomes its own
referent.

I just don't think it's any use (Keston) trusting to the future. What
reasons after all do we have for believing that this kind of language-use
will be viewed in what, 30, 50, 200 years by any  number of people and read
and understood with ease?  Absolutely none, because as I said before it
isn't difficult, which is a relative condition, it's impossible which is an
absolute condition. It despises relatives; it despises alternatives; it is
Abraham recognising quite correctly that the ram is an irrelevant stroke of
chance.  It posits the only thing really worth knowing as absolutely beyond
the person and speaks with scorn of the lives we lead here or at any rate
the tools of those lives.

The text might agree with Keston in the need for a new and different
reading-act to cope with itself but if so it proposes it as an
impossibility, a fiction, a thing set at immense distance in past and
nonbeing, unknowable at any rate to "us". Maybe as something that can be
just touched on in moments of realisation, like an epiphany. Maybe as a
primary creative or ecstatic condition now lost to us except in this
poetry. Maybe it does hope for the reconstitution of this reading-ability
in some unknowable future, though the endings of this poem and the whole
book suggest that only as a forlorn hope.

But I know of no evidence that the act of reading has changed essentially
in the last five thousand years. I find Olson's work on Mayan glyphs most
unconvincing in this respect and I disagree with some of the stress in Rod
Mengham's book about the origins of language. It seems obvious to me that
the first scripted signs were mnemonics to pre-existing narratives. The
book Ayer's Rock by Charles P.Mountford (1965) clarifies this, and the
signs he deals with are strikingly similar to Neolithic engravings and even
to the non-pictorial marks in Magdalenian sites. The central event has
normally been the act of recognition. Of course the script then goes on to
condition recognition but I don't see that it ever substitutes for it to
the extent that its being constitutes or bears a shifted reality which
necessitates reading in a hitherto impossible mode. My impression is that
an index to the recogniseable has always been an essential hinge or
grounding of the language-act. But recognition, except of words, is
precisely what we are denied in Not-You.

The stories "recognised" in language may indeed happen in another world, a
pastoral or mythical elsewhere against which we know our own world, but for
language itself to enter that condition would be a different matter, it
would be the speaking of tongues, it might even be self-defeating.

The end of the whole book seems to (there we go again "seems to") settle
resignedly for putting up with the actuality in which we cannot know the
fully real but can merely mean in the enclosure of the temporary real.


I could be miles off the point in all this, but as I see it it's a priestly
belief, I don't think it's easy to get away from that.  It didn't used to
be, and that's what I mean about a change which came about in this poetry
in the mid-70s or so.  At some point and for reasons which I don't
understand it was decided that truth was wrapt away in expertise of such
distance that even the knower couldn't really know it.

I'm only interested in all this hand-wringing over JHP as it bears on
poetry as a whole, which it certainly does, possibly quite dangerously.

But the  poetry itself has retained an extraordinary dignity through these
alienations, don't you think?


/PR
Spring Bank Holiday 1998. A few hours and I'm off in fear and trembling to
zones I used to think were invented by Bram Stoker. I'll have to suspend
BrPoets for three weeks and look forward to getting back to further
discussion of Adorno's line on Billie Pigg.




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