Things Believed Lost
Yes, I'm inflicting my juvenalia on you
Around 1999-2000 I started writing a sequence of poems titled The Spirit Zone, named after an exhibit in the Millenium Dome. I was in my mid-20s at the time. The poems are a mixture of good and bad, original and unoriginal, and it’s probably fair to say that the good and the original coincide less often than one might hope. But I do think they have their moments.
It will surprise no-one familiar with the work of the late Sir Geoffrey Hill that I was in the middle of trying and failing to write a PhD thesis about his poetry at the time: there’s a lot of G. H. in these poems, both at the level of vocabulary choices and stylistic tics, and at the level of modus operandi. Etymology is load-bearing throughout, double-meanings are called upon to pinpoint argumentative cruces, and there’s a general sense of language simultaneously being thrown about with noisy vigour and experienced as an obstacle, a tangle of constraints. I’ve tried in the years since to work my way free of the stylistic tics, but more recent poems are demonstrably playing some of the same games, or inveigling themselves into the same kinds of snares, underneath it all.
I thought I’d lost the sequence, and was rather cross about it, but it turns out I had actually had the sense to take a digital copy, so here it all is — a snapshot of a particular sort of young person’s sensibility at the turn of the millenium…
The Spirit Zone
I’m reminded all the time of some callow board-school boy, full of wits and powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him and stern ones merely annoyed: and one hopes he will grow out of it.1
— Virginia Woolf
i.
For the grand opening predict, conceitedly,
the usual wash-out; smirk as some bright spark
sets off the sprinklers. Nothing more typical
of the national climate than constant drizzle:
the blatter of newsprint, spray of high-flown
gobbings; the fine, horizontally driven
mist of denigration you run up against.
The hissing pavements. Not so much dumbing down
as damping down. A pissed-on, pissed-off parade.
Still, onwards and — supposedly — upwards. The posters
show clemency, a parting spread of cloud,
the sun by signal accident revealed
for imitation. Arise off cue, then; dazzle
among dim forecasts. Draw some kind of crowd.
ii.
Discuss, over spritzers, the shape of the estate,
the shade of things to come. Ésprit de corps
has gothic overtones: the undertaking
proposed could involve one hell of a jolt.
Put your hands together for the body
politic; its multiple piercings, brandings,
lesions; tattoo-removal scars the marks
of erased liaisons. This is your cowed
Leviathan, cool Britannia newly risen
from her various slumbers. The jaded ring
inseparable, in spite of much soaping
and scouring, from the purloined digit,
or finger of accusation. The rigid neck.
The brow in stitches. The stiff upper lip.
iii.
Suppose I read you right. You say you want
to switch substrates; to offload, upload
yourself into the archives — is that it?
I am trying to imagine the transfer
protocols for the unconscious. Perhaps
I am being too literal. You are searching
for renown — renommé — and have scored
an impressive number of hits. All the same,
it is love-doc Leary’s reputed signing-off —
why not? — that sounds most legendary
somehow. High-tech embalming for the faint-
hearted cannot compete with that wry nugget:
true wisdom at the asking-price, which is
the just conclusion of immense conceit.
iv.
What a time to go dragging religion in,
or through. I have never wanted so much
to believe in Teilhard’s chastity, his noösphere
engirdling the earth in a close nimbus
of conciliation, as to find some other word
than wretched to describe the whole arena.
For Teilhard it is love’s alchemy brought
to bear on love itself, virginity
reset amid corruption (type control —
alt — delete) that forms the catalyst
for our conversion. Not to get bogged down,
God forbid, in morbid details, but isn’t there
something amiss in this phenomenal
account — some hidden scandal biding time?
v.
Back to the stumbling-block, the necessary
woeful impediment. See where the sandal
scuffed the stone, the inoffensive stub
peeping out of the dust. Teilhard devotes —
appropriately — an appendix to the matter:
the quantum or quotient of harm, per inch
of the way travelled. As humankind is hitched
to perfection, each loss is amortized
in advance; but as for all that trippy prose,
read theology as an art of tumbling, a fall
taken with comic grace. Or is that cosmic?
And isn’t that mythology? Whatever
precipitously grazes and befouls us stands
in each case as its sovereign occasion.
vi.
Disclose imaginary meetings, the sheer volume
of events encompassing, at the last, its own
immutable bounds. God is in many minds.
Let time be a pure spectre, exorcised
time and again through spectacle — the New Age,
now well into its adolescence, might just pass
into senility overnight. But as self-worship
is never out of vogue — as each new product’s
glowering aura outshines the constellations —
you might as well admit to being spooked,
possessed even, by what lies on the far side
of your fatigue. It holds some promise, even
as it is withheld, or whittled down to a spare pledge
redeemable at the old maestro’s pleasure.
vii.
You were saying, about religion? Ah,
yes. Dereliction was the theme: Dover
Beach, et cetera. Curious how the last
word on the subject was spoken — assuredly —
over a century ago, and yet here we are,
aren’t we, still chewing it over. Do you spit
or swallow? Pit yourself against the seething
abyss, or wallow in unfathomable
desolation? Nobody has yet thought
to appoint a Minister for Anarchy.
Lacklustre mystics, patrons of the void,
I hear you well enough: nothing detains
the spirit quite like utter emptiness.
Get lost. And take your manky relics with you.
viii.
The Millenium Dome? That would be Foucault’s
hard-nut pate. Forget, for a moment, the punk-
pyloned Greenwich pantechnicon; recall,
instead, the self-styled slaphead historian
of savoir faire hovering in his kimono:
begetter of disciplines, hag-magnet, sado-
or pseudo- scientist or savant, pacing
the archives of lethal cunning and conceit —
lethal from Lethe, remember? — hoovering
the word-dust, the unsettled motes of truth.
What wouldn’t he have said. What wouldn’t he
have left unsaid. Translate, erroneously,
L’histoire de la sexualité as The Story
of O. Leave it at that. I said, leave it.
ix.
Try to keep up. We were talking — to recap —
about sex and violence. As I no longer own
a television set, I am of course unqualified
to discourse on either topic. The lifting
of skirts or shirts (depending on one’s target
audience) is a perennial theme of verse.
So, too, are fisticuffs, glassings and multiple
stab-wounds. Do I sense a connection?
Stir in metaphysics, and you have the very
substance of the modern lyric: the canvas
spotted, then smeared, with bloody goo; beyond
ostentation, beyond melancholy, the blasted,
wasted talent — prophetic by its own
lights — up to its eyes in seeping plenitude.
x.
Arrogant says it all. I have given up
dodging — deflecting — that curt epithet.
It is through arrogation, taking up
what is not yours by right nor anyone’s
by right, that you begin to make headway
into indebtedness. Not irrigation.
To ask, how were you fed and watered, who
silver-spooned those words into your mouth?,
is fair enough, but snubs the awkward part
that nurture sets in motion — that’s the spirit,
unwarranted and not easily forgone,
that lands you in it. Try passing off malfunction
as self-possession — the TV’s broken, is it?
All right, own up — who’s sitting on the remote?
xi.
For amusement, re-run the delectable nude scene:
if you pause at the right moment, amplify
the brightness and contrast together, you can draw
the body parts out of their native shadows,
the shielding crux or crotch — mere faces blur,
farcically, in that saturating glare.
Troubles march in long lines, as it says
somewhere around the outset of A. D.’s
Pornography: here they form an unseemly rabble,
an indecent rout. Does clutter in itself make up
a system? Oppression is contingent, a low
defilement; noise to emancipation’s signal
which at this far remove is overheard —
as ever — as a trailing shriek of feedback.
xii.
Dust off, buff up, the crazy leather gear,
the implements of antique design; slave-
irons and scolds’ bridles made to measure
roughly the breaking point of concentration.
Deck out the pleasure vaults with angular
memorabilia, putting out of mind
the less-than-human human miseries,
disgraceful mercies, desiccated cries
that have withstood your humour, and stand still
in attendance as you wield your privilege.
Consent is not at issue, but contempt
is caught in the act, whatever the spirit
in which it is commissioned; so you bring
to condemnation even your good will.
xiii.
A gift from German: Geistesblitz, which translates
as brainwave, and which may have given
inspiration to the flash think-tanks, the mind-
cisterns flushed with innovation. Was the first
brainstorming session held in an air-raid shelter?
Facetious etymology will get you
a long way, as will schoolboy humour — the distant
fascination with bodily matters, the atrocious wit
and cowering misogyny which once passed
for full alertness. It raised the spirits, being
the privilege, of some of our finest unbearable
born-leaders — and others, by crepuscular disnature
entailed to rife invention and sly triumph:
the backroom boys, brainboxes, gauche street kids.
xiv.
Recalling a lost tenor is not quite
the same as bewailing vanquished privilege,
but it’s a close-run thing. Women, as always
in such recreations, advance under the sign
of calamity. Read Jude, or The Good Soldier,
as I was once instructed, and draw your own
map of the waterfront. Better still, refer
the letter of the genome to the seemingly-
intractable phenomena of sex, the bitter
typecast disputes. But allegories are not
legalities, however you read the interminable
print-outs. Could a woman have written
The Triumph of Life? Not even Shelley
quite succeeded. Still, her creature lives.
xv.
For the spirit’s own — its amour propre — you could take
exception, as a rule: exemption, claimed and disclaimed,
from the laws of trial and error, although for some
it is everywhere in evidence. Call that
special pleading, if you like: in competition
with mundane matters, it registers
as next to nothing, an out-of-the-way concern
of cranks and obscurantists. Now, though, the way
itself is grown obscure, clogged with un-
feasible outgrowths, coiled monstrosities.
Genetics is a wind-up (rhyme wind with sinned
or signed?) all right — try meditating
your way out of that one, buster —
what’s next, after all that? The selfish poem?
xvi.
Yes, possibly. I am dismayed, says one
pen-gnawing apologist, by your negativity.
Getting into the spirit of things — the Zeit-
geist — is imperative, even if it means
having a ghastly time. Hostility
is the preserve of the old guard: your paying
customers will vouch for their money’s
worth. Are you seriously complaining
or just raising a stink for the sake of distinction,
i.e. trying to be clever? Bloody prefects.
Esprit d’escalier dictates the smart answer
a decade or so too late, or just in time
for the latest round of square peg-bashing.
There’s always one. Yes, trying — very — sir.
Well, there it is; and there I was. Reading it now, it has a very “Dominic has not yet realised he is autistic” flavour to it, although self-understanding in quite those terms was not so widely available at the time. “Crepuscular disnature”, eh? “Try passing off malfunction / as self-possession”, and so on. Whatever else has changed, I continue to be very trying…
She was talking about James Joyce. I actually lifted the quotation from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, where it appears at the head of the chapter “Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and the Anxious”, which is all about the cultural disorientation of class-displaced scholarship boys (girls? what are they?).