>Who is your writing I?  
>
>or, if you prefer to respond to the question:
>	Who are your writing I?

The idea of impersonality is something that has always exercised me.  I've always aspired to a sense of anonymity in my poems (which may surprise some people).  For some years I've taken refuge entirely in form.  I don't know what I'm doing at the moment, but I know it's a shift beyond what I've been doing for the past decade or so.

I didn't write any directly "personal" poems until I was about 25: and then for years I couldn't seem to write anything else.  I got pretty well sick of myself, but at the time it seemed necessary to somehow examine the subjectivity that is my only tool.  I wrote a novel, Navigatio, which is precisely about this question, and also the question of relationship (in a few senses - writer, reader, self, other, fact/fiction, memory/consciousness/self etc etc).  It's hard to extract, given the nature of its argument, which proceeds metaphorically as well as in other ways, and jumps from meditation to biography to fiction etc but perhaps these bits might be of interest in relation to your question:  

from Chapter 3

All language is fiction, which is not to say it is a lie.  But behind and before language, beyond its polarities and contradictions, exists the shimmering expanse of what is.  And it is desolating to discover, as we approach the margins of presence, that what appears to be manifest is as unstable as words are, that everything we can understand is shaped by our sensual perceptions, that not even matter can be absolute.  No wonder we return, with empty hands, to language, for it is the only place where truth exists.  We already know the dilemma of words, their deceptiveness, their glamour, but perhaps within them still exists a centre where a meaning might yield itself to our seeking bodies.  Like an optometrist continually shifting lenses in front of a staring eye, I am looking for a form through which I can refract, however fleetingly, a clarity.  And this is so riddled with uncertainty:  my instruments are too crude, my sightings unverifiable, my destination unknown, and truth a horizon continuously receding before meŠ

from Chapter 7

I am sometimes afraid, when I lose track of the time, or am unable to account for a missing object, that I am inhabited by another self about whom I know nothing, and who may, if I am not vigilant, overtake my consciousness and commit acts that I consider abhorrent and of which I have no memory.  This other sometimes appears in my dreams.  It is always a terrifying presence which coldly desires to destroy me.  The threat is always physical and always male, but to construe it as an expression of external fears is misleading.  I am most afraid of this shadow within myself. 

	Who is this I who writes?  I am writing a poem, the poem of myself, and this I who writes is and is not the same person who brushes her daughter¹s hair and sends her to school and does the washing up and sighs heavily before sitting down at her desk.  I am the I who obeys the imperatives of the poem, I am a haunting of myself by myself.  My meaning will, for the moment, have to inhabit the spaces between these words:  you will have to take these sentences and measure them against your own fears, and so gauge my failures.


from Chapter IX, Accounts

In rare moments I can still feel this pleasure in its naive first sense, the conviction of a leverage which could topple anything.  Writing is possible only because this remnant of childish omnipotence persists through all the dulling failures of adulthood.  Yet if it were not for these shaping and devastating failures, if that omnipotence still lay within the width of my hand, the desire to write may not exist.

	When as a child you first read a book, there are mountains and forests and lakes, and they are all real, as real as your hand turning the pages, more real than the narrowing world which bars your perceptions with its prohibitions of time and space and convention:  and in the fabulous stories which unfold before you their mysteries, the legible mysteries which reveal the colour of a single leaf and the precise sound of a pebble rolling in the stream of a mountain you have never seen, the hiddenness and incomprehensibility of your life is translated into a seed which lies beneath the surface of the warm, imagined earth, which remains hidden and enclosed, which itself will never flower into comprehensibility but conceals in its nascence all that is unrevealed in the explicit fantasy of the story:  the truth which is planted there, inexpressible in any other way.

	I cannot understand myself except through language.  This is a misfortune:  there are better, simpler and more direct ways of understanding.  They are the spaces of silence which we inhabit fully, the epiphanies which are always Edenic, which language struggles so hard to enter and, in doing so, exiles us from the garden.  And yet, in its trespass, a poetic language retrieves the unanaesthetised reality we inhabit at our births, and reminds us that, in its perpetual destruction and restoration of language, its serious play and playful seriousness, its derangement of dualities and smashing of unities, its acceptance and rejection of mortality and finitude, poetry is nothing if it is not a making of love. 

...beauty is nothing, sang Rilke, but this terrifying beginning...   The terror of beauty is that everything is beautiful.  It is the chaotic self, the chaotic body, the chaotic world, fragmentary, diffuse, unassigned to meaning, against which form, an aesthetic armour, a self by which we understand our given selves, defends itself from the chaos within and without it.   And yet art contains the terror of obliteration, which inhabits the centre of beauty.  It admits the reality of death, of human finitude and failure, it admits that the world is not us and that we do not control it.  This admission is love:  the voluntary renunciation of self-tyranny, the ascension to the place of ordinary beauty, which redeems nothing.


Alison




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