high status elites | A Second Life

83. Some Distich, Alright?

At this time we are brought to a crisis, an acute worry, that glitters with joy that here at this point we, the ordinary mongrels, must move to act against the non-humans (for so they have declared themselves – self distancing from ordinary people’s lives as if we were bêches de mer crawling across the sea bottom, and they full human beings collecting us from above to sell and eat¹.

At this time the carnival opens, with scarlet flaggings and well-dappled pellicules covering the quay, at night-time with all the glorious creatures we hope to become: tapirs, gryphons, anything with hooves – alas! we cannot be reborn as these – unless we choose not to be victims & break at last, burst through all the forces that threaten us, so that then, in an eyeblink, all of history turns miswritten & we are at last welders of new being for ourselves, using laughter not worry, as the pattering sparks fall harmlessly into the dust & their fierce shine will protect us, here on the quayside at midnight now, suddenly smelling of meadowsweet², let’s gather at carnival & meet.

1 trepanging

2 from the banks of the Torridge here

82. All Now Making Sense at Last, Alas!

these relics or fragments now
– abrade into dust
  mix w/ yr spittle
  build up
           then breathe
                miswrite their names

reborn w/
flaming red hair
– scarlet
why not?

appearance is all
only the shine
– when that’s gone
burst

Verwandlungzauber zu einem Tapir
eterocliti, tapiri e preoccupazione rendono un paio
sulla strada vanno sulle gambe tozze
camminare con gli zoccoli troppo sensibili

significant ceremonies
news of Sheffield¹
delicious laughter
let’s wait
for carnival together

what is more use here?
   – the world and all its people
     the poem and all its words
     what has been
     or what will come
     remains here now
huge in an eyeblink astart

meadowsweet across the Rhine
– what can it epitomise?
what familiar perversity
threatens now our waterfowl?

maybe no real worry
    – let’s learn German
      get a job
      decide which warband
      might protect us best²

1.(a) At top of steps, some half-mile from the sea³
      Sat——in the morning and out of the sea up to him
      Came——seeking favour and on left and right
      Stood——quick as trees, then said——
      These are ours and therein all that is
      And the living creatures of the field and fen
      Made echo sound upon the day’s platface.

p 318

(b)   The Towers came nearer over the mist.⁴
      I heard my kind pattering all about
      The shafts, the upward and the downward shafts,
      And rolling silent out in silent daylight
      Innumerous pellicules.
                             Passed the X
      And cliff of many windows, slept along
      Crossed by the Pass of two Towers
      And so ad infinitum to the stars.

p 319

(c)   It is today, when silence falls,⁵
      And all the people standing on the quay
      To watch the big ships sail away
      Stop waving to their friends
                                   and say
      The answer to the sun is death

Charles Madge, “The Hours of the Planets”, p 324

2    You above all who have come to the far end, victims
      Of a run-down machine, who can bear it no longer;
      Whether in easy chairs chafing at impotence
      Or against hunger, bullies and spies preserving
      The nerve for action, the spark of indignation——
      Need fight in the dark no more, you know your enemies.
      You shall be leaders when zero hour is signalled,
      Wielders of power and welders of a new world.

C. Day Lewis, “‘You that love England’”, in edited by Michael Roberts, The Faber Book of Modern Verse (Faber & Faber, 1936), p 265

what’s offered
by little creatures
                    all inside
won’t redeem
             just carry on
             dappled in the shade

all our disordered selves

1 drips of water, drips of steel

2 The future is feudal; the past was progress; the present no longer

3 “The rise of the bourgeoisie”

4 “Glimpses of reality”

5 ♂

81. When Need Met Mud Again (at the Dig in the Woods)

So it is all tender. What accumulated, the opposite of ordinary, made us replete. You know this. The novel elements – some performance! My instincts say: it was the adventurous outsiders, those well-belted ones, their alcohol, their poems, their anxiety. In reality, it is generally found, the horizontal zones appear shorter, whereas particular individuals are represented by more colourful statue menhirs. Offa, David, Anna, the Bretwalda & all the Bishops – just incised decorations. These relics or fragments – yeah, we’re fucked all right, typically so.

Their battleaxes, their Bell-Beakers, their well-designed shopping centres – something like a new social reality. It’s not we’re scared of self consciousness, just the radical upheaval it symbolizes. It’s all a textile-like ornament that has transformed us laughing into customers – as if we were tapirs or toddlers, marginal prepositions to understate our ritual life. Our gathering places soon seem stupid, & our appearance jokey as broad bellied pots. This is expressed badly, I fear, crouched & psychotic today.

A community could present itself this way. Established values & significant ceremonies have been absorbing dye for 4000 years. Babies are flayed: they whined. This has a dramatic impact. The powerful ones (the hedgies and their thugs) adapted challenging postures. “We are indigenous groups,” they suggested. No impact. Their emotional imagery was complex & uncertain. The trolley-boy epitomized the disadvantaged elements – a dry detail for such an intrusion. That he was twinkly is unexpected, but not unpleasant – the warriors, though, unpredictable, disruptive characters.

Yeah, names are noisy. But they are never monofunctional. What they schematically represent may be archaic & largely alien: bone rings, drinking cups, encounters at Starbucks – but their widespread appearance demonstrated not just prominent individuals but ordinary working persons, more mobile populations as a whole. Meadowsweet across the Rhine Delta balances the armoured ducks at the office. Such figures represent not marginal groups or local élites but everyone. Your name is there as well. What a fucking performance! Give me my typical drinking vessel now! This zone is now veiled. Slender numbers to epitomize.

In the soft bank of the fragrant
The worst drops backing down –
That they are there!

Their earth
Exotic, the strange leaves
Number and the archaic soft things
Think at the grave

The rest of it
Displays from their mud
Startling eyes in the small words
They who are there.

Their psalms
Nuzzled thru the frauds, the lips that show them
Held in the disorders
Of self

The soft names
Casting fact
In this in which the worst drops
Scatter, and start out.

80. Some Questions About These Poems Answered 1

(written June 6-9, outside Starbucks & in Sainsburys Café, Jackson Square Shopping Centre, Bishops Stortford)

And why shouldn’t it all be tender, as well as what it is? Isn’t it that flayedness to everything which makes us human – otherwise just a mass of instincts & drives, like insects or computers, or the sort of man totally locked within the armour & armature of his own masculinity, blundering ever onwards. That was the plan. This is its opposite.

No, of course we can’t say what we’re on, what we’re off. Do you really trust prepositions? Like, they are important – familiar Oppen quotes here – that’s why I use them, but they are so, well, emotional. An off day. Feeling offish. Turning on. All the positioning is internal – inside it/outside it, around it/about it, by it & to it – “get off!” “get on!”

And her – who does she think she is? Who does the language think she is? We’re in the shopping centre, the trolley-boy is wheeling his noisy train past, it’s sunny outside, there are dogs & babies & all the rest. Come on (or off) – you’ve been here lots of times, haven’t you? If you haven’t, dear reader, this poem may need additional footnotes to indicate how life is living itself at this point of writing. It’s not difficult. It’s just how it always is. What you actually do inhabit.

But we’re insistent – an act of memory concerning her. Within this poem there are many actors, & many may be female. Are they the same? Are they different, separate? Well, all names for a start. You ascribe the gender, I just give words. Each instance could be unique, or a fragment of some multiply diffracted higher reality. Oh fuck! That is out of our control – back in the hands of Offa (you remember? Bretwalda & King of Mercia, then stupid duck joke – kin to Anna, maybe, King of East Anglia & Lord of Essex. They did love those cross-gender names in Dark Age England. We should respect that and enjoy.

Rheged
       drops liquid
             veiled
                        under Elmet
                        before it

– not Hughes
  but Taliesin
      knowing & prophesying
      did
      actual things
      glamorous in the rainy air
                   the far South
                   may be Rochdale

Well, that is so definitely offish – really badly. These adverbs add voice – an unpleasant whine mostly. Occasionally balanced. So — what. We need a half question mark here – named the quesma. You picture it. Go on. Do so.

Sometimes, though, the semantics are plain & apparently monofunctional. Take the openplan bank. Modern, friendly, or, “friendly” – but in fact most of the people you encounter working in banks are really nice, so that’s not so much scare quotes as labelling automatic ideologically motivated abuse. Even an office layout can make you feel good. Environmental design works on us as powerfully as language, though with less self-consciousness.² But the anxiety Dave reported as actual & unexpected – everyone fearful. Someone might come in, armed, & threaten, injure or kill. It could happen. Banks – yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. We do. But an ordinary waged person, dealing with customers at a desk? Do they deserve worse than you? Really?

real criminals then
                         – psychotic as hedgies
                           use & abuse
                           not a trade
                           a vocation

                           fucked up to enter³
                           OK but
                           taking your things
                           what you need
                           & have made
                                               – by force
                                                 or by fraud

how different then from rulers & other
                           high status elites
                           their hired thugs

                           actual criminals
                           against human law
                                         all of them

Yeah! Let this be a positive poem, twinkly as a tapir’s dainty little hooves, unpredictable, ridiculous & true as a performance by Holly Pester, noisy & bubbly as a toddler, unabashed by ideology, fashion & correctness, as friendly to bank workers as to poetic workers, even academic workers, happy to be here today answering your questions,⁴ & its own questions,⁵ all questions. Right – who’s next?

1 & even more raised, we are sure

2 It falls over if it tries this.

3 Isn’t that true of all vocations? Priest or poet – who is the more fucked up?

4 preferably by other questions

5 always w/ other questions

59. Particular Dust

All these things here where
Hertfordshire drops into Harlow & Essex
and people eat & drink as they will

I’m planning to doss at my mate Mark’s
as Karla said, time to stop running
now to gather our memories & see
what we should do together now
make up our choice, decide how to act

This is what she said – she’s the one
really good with the language we use, she sd:
What we need like some vast disordered feast
where we consume all our enemies together
w/ rye bread, cheese & cool beer joyfully
get rid of them all in a single natural act

It could be anywhere we start, just
not some ludicrous gross out but let it be
a holy meal of our enemies’ flesh
we shall be joined – no one left
on the outside now, only us, a we
ready to improvise, tenderly & in wonder
a new world out of the mess we made of this old
that’s why we will start anywhere & even
the particular dust of loneliest Hertfordshire

OK then, girl, I said, let’s separate
go off into the actual wilderness there
then return & meet up, our voyaging
our vagrancy focused & transformed
oh, I can manage it sometimes as well

that’s how we are a real team I say
Karla + Darrel 4 Ever Where Ever When

Pleasant are the cries of children in this winter sun

OK then we’re held here too it seems
illuminated by this transient sunshine, pale & cheering
a little bite to eat & no big feast
but we’ll share in it together, freely & commonly
give Karla & Darrel a little space & time then
to sort out their heads & next make sure
they’re rooted within their bodies still: sometimes
we are old & sometimes young, but life, well
is always like that don’t you find? really
time to move out, or in, or deeper in
wherever the dimensions’ doors will open and
the imperceptible revolution of the world transform us
light into life & liking & licking
not explaining: listen to this: