We’d better not talk about him any more.
Daniil Kharms (1937), translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler
Bourgeois News
Floods are frequent because the rivers of Britain have been neglected for a century. Positive movements of transgression carry the sea and its deposits over the lands, drowning them and their features under tens or hundreds of fathoms of water. Efforts to advance the prosperity of the country should be directed towards building on the foundations already laid by the native himself, rather than to hazardous introductions or innovations. Commercial possibilities are not clearly and courageously visualized, and the new ventures are often the product and concern of individuals facing the traditional difficulties of lonely pioneers. The indoor staff remains comparatively small. The vigour of mountain building, of volcanoes, and of other manifestations of unrest, has shown no sign of senility or lack of energy. An operator received concussion and a wound on the head from a cast-iron cover blown off a 60A switch-fuse box.
Geodesists have welcomed escape from the rising and sinking of the crust. To follow their food from over-grazed or sunscorched regions they required to be able to migrate easily and quickly. Today you cannot fight summer-heat with haphazard measures. The fermenting mass is turned three times. Nevertheless the gates are not kept locked and there is a considerable freedom to the public provided no fires are lighted and respect is shown for the plantations.
Colonel Popham, who began work as a tea planter, murmured, ‘They say a man is too old at forty. Or is it fifty? I think it must be seventy or eighty. I speak four different Chinese dialects fluently. It helped a lot. Then the slump came and trade went stagnant. I have lost all my money, but I can always earn more. As soon as I have saved up enough I shall put it all into another show. What is money for? If it is to be spent it finds work for a lot of people and keeps in circulation. Our seventy-eight-year-old customer said he had taken the umbrella with him round the world, through jungles and across prairies. He boasted that he had never lost it because he would never lend it. He brought it to us to be re-covered. That was less than five years ago. We now occupy three floors of the building where we began, and have overflowed into an adjoining building. No company such as this with a fine tradition for honest dealing with native peoples can remain in a depressed condition for an indefinite period. A reorganization scheme has been delayed owing to some difference of opinion with the American (Guggenheim) interests. That has now been settled, and the way is clear for the reorganization plan. London could be reached in twenty minutes. Rows of imposing neon-lighted shops erected. Supercinemas built.’
* * *
The mountains heaved up like a rough sea for twelve miles, and the hamlet with its 200 inhabitants disappeared. Two mailcoaches arrived safely at their destination, but with the drivers frozen dead in their seats. Trains were buried for three days. London awoke to chaos on the 19th. The snow lay a uniform solid three feet thick and fifteen feet in drifts. Many boats careered wildly along the road, crashing into houses and other buildings on the river bank. The crew of the Strathrye soaked their beds in paraffin and ignited them to attract attention. Days were passed in making shrouds, in farewells, in drinking holy thin soup. The schools were empty so that the whole family could die together, and no debts were paid.
Shortly after midnight a great light was seen to be appearing on the high hills a little way off. As the light became brighter they shrieked and lamented and wrapped themselves in white cloth. The light, however, turned out to be the primitive acetylene lights of an early motorcar. The aborigines immediately proceeded to take the carburettor to bits with a great deal of interested chatter that thoroughly frightened the traveller. To his amazement they then put the pieces together again, after which the engine worked perfectly and the boat went on its way.
* * *
A man of fifty-nine will sit next Sunday on a divan of cloth of gold and precious stones. Ten million people in all parts of the East will give thanks. He looks beautiful. His neck has grown straight and supple. He swings his head about more than usual, as if he enjoys the movement. Fir bushes grow around, the path has been kept weeded, but no one visits this strange, empty mausoleum. Mrs King has resolutely refused to allow the body to be taken out of her home. ‘She still regards him as living.’
He was interested in the stock market. But in New York the market closes at 3 p.m., which is noon in Hollywood. The rest of the day was empty. He had no hobbies. He went from one extreme to the other. He tore his nervous system to shreds worrying over grievances, more often imaginary than real. Then suddenly he would thrust his worries from him and be the most gay, charming, high-spirited companion in the world, full of a vaulting optimism as little justified as his depths of gloom. He had said that he made his wife an annual allowance up to 1917, when he gave her two factories. Then he was in poor circumstances and could not do any more.
‘At last I found what it was,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see my wife. I wanted her to grumble at me for eating the wrong food and wearing the wrong clothes. Pretty bunches of evenly sized bright pink and yellow sticks may attract her and increase the sales of rhubarb, which have been declining for some years.’
* * *
This is an interesting Government. And a strange one. It is big. Very big. It is strong. Very strong. Yet all the three leaders of it are discredited. Far from being extinguished the antelope has become a menace, since it is roaming the south-west of the province in herds, and farmers are imploring the Government to protect them from it. Even the most thorough-going rogues have enjoyed such popularity that thousands of admirers have refused to believe any ill of them, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Japan, for instance, has had her representatives in special training for weeks at a camp near the old Shogun city of Kamakura. What we have to do is to listen to the tiny voice of conscience and not smother it. In the past two or three weeks I have been visiting armaments works. The net result of my conclusions is that I do not think the country can afford to allow valuable men like Sir Charles Craven to be wasting their time giving evidence before armaments commissions. It takes around eight months to make a 4.7-inch gun. It does seem to me a poor kind of compliment to the intelligence of the councillors to suggest that they do not know their own minds from one day to the next. As they must not leave their room during the deliberation, which will be long, twelve beds have been installed for them. In the course of yesterday, the successive bulletins were of a more reassuring nature: ‘The most probable cause is the present state of flux in native life, the disappearance of tribal discipline, and the results of undigested education. It is possible to change some factors; it is not possible to change geography.’ These reassurances did not everywhere produce the desired effect.
On the third day, using wire ropes, the wreck was lifted to the surface, but a swell on the sea made it impossible to get it onto the lighter. The ropes snapped, and the flying-boat drifted for 100 ft., and sank in 60 ft. of water, where it remained. As the day wore on, and the anticyclone began to withdraw to the Continent, three quarters of those present made for the door. There was no panic. They could go on their way peacefully, because they were strong.
Charles Madge (1937)
Lozanne
It was seven, it was nine o’clock, the doors were closing, the windows were screaming. You bent over the shadow that lay on the floor and saw its eyes dissolving. The band about your forehead began to turn. The band of fever.
The armchair turned into a palace, the carpet became a bank of withered flowers, and then it was time to go. Every semblance of that which had gone before became the means by which you ascended the great staircase. And took your place among the stars.
For it is significant, is it not, that the blemish about which you were so insistent was nothing less than that interminable voice which haunted you in your dreams, saying ‘I love you’ over and over again. And the panelling of the room where they asked you questions was made of exactly the same
wood as the mallet which you had to hate.
The dusty and ashen residue of a passion that now raged elsewhere, but still raged, rose slowly upwards to the surface of the lake as your blood sank slowly through it. And the other returned to ice. Oh, I can see through your eyes now and I can see what flame it was that melted everything before it! (Though the obstinate sod refused to become softened by the rain of thaw.) But you were spared passing through that black box where a masked man kisses his victim before her death. I ask the glass again: Who gave the victims right to refuse life to those who refuse to be victimized?
Those who damned shall be damned.
David Gascoyne (1936)
In Praise of Glass
Glass, Buddhistic glass, full of images yet lacking one of its own: the one that receives my profile and returns it: that takes in reckless sunsets but doesn’t absorb them into its blood: the one the rain washes – the eternal rain and the sensual earth – and yet that remains marvelously dry.
The glass that gathers and relinquishes forms: glass with a coastline, glass with the whole forest refracted through its gorgeousness, in the windows of the poor; glass of the goblets where the wine believes it is alone, rising straight up in the air like a miracle, in which the water thinks of itself as a brimless fountain. Glass that holds the lamp’s flame and whose cheek doesn’t burn. The glass, always as happy as the righteous, without stains of its own, without tears of its own, though burdened by others’ tears, innocent as an Abel of the earth.
The glass without veins for blood or joints like wrists; the unanimous glass: the glass that doesn’t thicken or endure anything superfluous: sufficient, like something perfect.
The glass, my soul’s only envy.
The glass that helped water in its desire to remain, to lie in the hollow of the hand without treachery, to be loyal to the eye that watches and loved it, like a loyal woman: that gave the water a second body, one that doesn’t escape like an arrow, crazed with its own modest restraint.
The glass of our windows, where night rests its hands like a great ivy, so that it can be seen and so that we don’t completely forget it.
The glass of my desire: the glass that sits still in the midst of the ferment of creatures; that will never boil; that will never belong to anyone but itself.
The glass, fresh as a temple is always fresh, preserved from old age since its earliest day, with its enduring childhood, with no pretty growth and no ugly growth.
The glass discovered with joy, like a Christ, by men who have never since been able to find anything better than that discovery.
The glass that always emerges as something of a surprise, something unexpected, from the hands of the workers, who always feel a bit abashed that it comes out resembling the soul, as it leaves their black and knotted hands.
The workers who made glass all their lives arrived in heaven and found that it resembled what they had made on earth: a glass purified of distance, of large and small dimensions: in which God was so far away and so close that it frightened them. Without knowing it, they had been trapped in a glass reproduced with their faces, their shoulders, their feet, and they saw their second shoulders and their feet freed from corruption. They still experience the shock of learning that they too were made of glass material as they moved through their workshop casting hard shadows against the walls. The glassworkers compensated with their hands, which went through the fire like the salamander straightening and calming the crucibles.
The metalworkers came to a violent copper heaven; they are happy in their violent joy. The woodworkers came to a heaven that smelled of maritime pines, a heaven echoless, still, and dry as old age. The glassworkers in their heaven watch the others: the copper heaven, the pine heaven, and the others too.
Gabriela Mistral (1933), translated from the Spanish by Stephen Tapscott
from The Orators
Argument: I
Lo, I a skull show you, exuded from dyke when no pick was by pressure of bulbs: at Dalehead a light moving, lanterns for lambing. Before the forenoon of discussion, as the dawn-gust wrinkles the pools, I waken with an idea of building.
Speak the name only with meaning only for us, meaning Him, a call to our clearing. Secret the meeting in time and place, the time of the off-shore wind, the place where the loyalty is divided. Meeting of seven, each with a talent.
On the concrete banks of baths, in the grassy squares of exercise, we are joined, brave in the long body, under His eye. (Their annual games under the auspices of the dead.) Our bond, friend, is a third party.
Smile inwardly on their day handing round tea. (Their women have the faces of birds.) Walking in the mountains we were persons unknown to our parents, awarded them little, had a word of our own for our better shadow. Crossing ourselves under the arch of a bridge we crucified fear.
Crofter, leader of hay, working in sweat and weathers, tin-streamer, heckler, blow-room major, we are within a vein’s distance of your prisoned blood. Stranger who cannot read our letters, you are remembered.
Rooks argue in the clump of elms to the left. Expect what dream above the indented heel, end-on to traffic, down the laurelled drive?
At the frontier getting down, at railhead drinking hot tea waiting for pack-mules, at the box with the three levers watching the swallows. Choosing of guides for the passage through gorges.
The young mother in the red kerchief suckling her child in the doorway, and the dog fleaing itself in the hot dust. Clatter of nails on the inn’s flagged floor. The hare-lipped girl sent with as far as the second turning. Talk of generals in a panelled room translated into a bayonet thrust at a sunbrowned throat, wounds among wheat fields. Grit from the robbers’ track on goggles, a present from aunts. Interrogation of villagers before a folding table, a verbal trap. Execution of a spy in the nettled patch at the back of the byre. A tale of sexual prowess told at a brazier and followed by a maternal song. The fatty smell of drying clothes, smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun. Establishment of a torpedo base at the head of the loch; where the bye-roads meet, a depot for tractors, with sliding doors. Visit to a tannery in the hill-village where the stream runs under the houses; to the mine with obsolete machinery, an undershot wheel, steam pipes in the open, swaddled in sacking. Designs for the flow sheet of a mill. Sound of our hammers in the solemn beat of a quarry, and the packing of labelled specimens in japanned boxes. Theories inter-relating the system of feudal tenure with metabolic gradients, and arguments from the other side of the lake on the formation of hanging valleys, interrupted by the daughter of the house with a broken doll. Writing reports for Him in the copper-green evenings. (Trunks caught by the grapnel dragged inert towards the spurting saw, ewers of warm milk, the sugary layer under the rind, and pipe-lines clamped to the rock) and at the tiny post-office, His word waiting.
If it were possible, yes, now certain. To meet Him alone on the narrow path, forcing a question, would show our unique knowledge. Would hide Him wounded in a cave, kneeling all night by His bed of bracken, bringing hourly an infusion of bitter herbs; wearing His cloak receive the mistaken stab, deliver His message, fall at His feet, He gripping our moribund hands, smiling. But never for us with notebooks there, a league of two or three waiting for low water to execute His will. The tripod shadow falls on the dunes. World of the Spider, not Him.
Rook shadows cross to the right. A schoolmaster cleanses himself at half-term with a vegetable offering; on the north side of the hill, one writes with his penis in a patch of snow ‘Resurgam’.
Going abroad to-day? Under a creaking sign, one yellow leg drawn up, he crows, the cock. The dew-wet hare hangs smoking, garotted by gin. The emmet looks at sky through lenses of fallen water. Sound of horns in the moist spring weather, and the women tender. I feel sorry for you I do.
Girls, it is His will just now that we get up early. But watching the morning dredger, picking the afternoon fruit, wait; do not falsify our obedience. When we shuffle at night late round up-countr
y stoves, although in waders, a dance of males, it is your hour; remember. It is your art just now against the inner life. Parting by hangars we are sorry but reborn.
Wrap gifts in clothes, prepare a present for a simpler nation. A heliograph seen from below, a camera with smuggled lenses: a soured drink for the tongue, a douche for the unpopular member, a dream dirt-cheap for the man of action. Leave the corks behind as warning of wires, let the shafts be fenced as before, leave ordinary kindness.
Going abroad to-night? The face lit up by the booking-clerk’s window. Poetry of the waiting-room. Is it wise, the short adventure on the narrow ship? The boat-train dives accomplished for the hoop of the tunnel; over the derne cutting lingering, its white excreta. Too late: smelling the first sea-weed we may not linger. The waving handkerchiefs recede and the gulls wheel after screaming for scraps. Throb of turbines below water, passing the mud islands, the recurrent light. Past. Handrail, funnel, oilskins, them, His will. The lasting sky.
W. H. Auden (1932)
My Occupations
I can rarely see anyone without fighting him. Others prefer the internal monologue. Not me. I like fighting best.
There are people who sit down in front of me at the restaurant and say nothing, they stay on a while, for they have decided to eat.
Here is one of them.
See how I grab him, boom!
See how I re-grab him, boom!
I hang him on the coat hook.
I unhook him.
I hang him up again.
I re-unhook him.
I put him on the table, I push him together and choke him.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 21
