’„, in þe apparaile of a pore man and pilgrymes lyknesse
Many tyme god hath ben mette.’
—from William Langland’s Piers Plowman, ca. 1390
(þ is the middle english letter for ‘th’. ð was also replaced by ‘th’. Ben Johnson in his English Grammar(1640) was mad as hell with the trend to use ‘th’ for both these letters, which he said had needfully different sounds. But þat is the way ðings rolled.)
Drawing and poem by David Jones
You can hear the silence of it;
you can hear the rat of no-man’s-land
rut-out intricacies,
weasel-out his patient workings,
scrut, scrut, sscrut
harrow out-earthly, trowel his cunning paw;
redeem the time of our uncharity, to sap his own amphibious paradise.
You can hear his carrying-parties rustle our corruptions through the
night-weeds – contest the choicest morsels in his tiny conduits,
bead-eyed feast on us; by a rule of his nature; at night-feast on the
broken of us. Those broad-pinioned;
blue-burnished, or brinded-back;
whose proud eyes watched
the broken emblems
droop and drag dust,
suffer with us this metamorphosis.
—extract from In Parenthesis, 1937. The drawing is Dugout Rats, 1916; made whilst in the trenches of the Somme.
Language of the riots
Of all the analysis being rushed out in response to the riots nothing has been written that sounds as honest and full as the riot girls on the bbc radio show who said, ‘We’re just showing the rich people that we can do what we want.’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424) Apart from being a lovely clear sentence with a great rhythm (joke, but true) the line’s form and content is in unity. Something in them resonates and they have the words to express it.
The political and journalistic class don’t. Think about Cameron or Miliband, every time they start making a point about morality. Suddenly a little rupture opens up between the words and the meaning. The words seem to shrink. It is the overpowering feeling of modern British moral talk—a disconnect. The concepts get articulated but only the mouth is engaged, the rest of the body is numb. Or a faint engagement of the heart, a remnant of what is desired. And it is the most common feeling I’ve had while reading the commentators and listening to the politicians. A speech that tries to find words for sentiments that don’t really have any belief. Calling society sick when they mean that they themselves are in robust health but an underclass is ill and in need of their corrective. Why is none of them saying ‘we are sick…’? That shift in language would suddenly give someone a genuine voice—a full bodied voice. A speech whose burden would be shared by a community, a people, a history, a Fall.
Some deeper problems in Britain are being articulated in these articles, not in the meaning of the sentences but in the ever diverging paths of the words and their feelings.
“For a LION roars HIMSELF compleat from head to tail.”
A line from ‘A Song to David’ by Kit Smart, 1760
From an Aharon Appelfeld interview:
Tikkun: Talk about your writing process.
Appelfeld: First you have a narrative and a melody that is a leitmotif. If you’re following this leitmotif, you’re speaking with melody. You’re following that melody. According to the melody, you are changing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)