Grimspound and Inhabiting Art

by Rod Mengham

  McQueen’s practice in this film and other early works has been seen as non-narrative and therefore, almost by default, as poetic. Certainly, poetry has been described – most influentially by Roman Jakobson – as being organised primarily along a vertical rather than horizontal axis, consolidating its meanings not by means of the consequential unfolding of story, plot and hermeneutical progress, but through the amplification of figure, trope, consonance and what we might call idea-rhymes. In this sense, the progress that is gained through reading a poem is not linear in character, and might well be thought of in terms of circling round and round the same set of concerns in order to augment and refine our awareness of them. Certainly, this is the effect of reading the poetry of Hart Crane, whose work returns several times to the Statue of Liberty, giving it an unusual depth of context, and a salutary ambiguity. The most complete single statement of its potency as a socio-political emblem for the historical significance of American statehood is Crane’s poem ‘To Liberty’:

  Out of the seagull cries and wind

  On this strange shore I build

  The virgin. They laugh to hear

  How I endow her, standing

  Hair mocked by the sea, her lover

  A dead sailor that knew

  Not even Helen’s fame.

  Light the last torch in the wall,

  The sea wall. Bring her no robes yet.

  They have not seen her in this harbour;

  Eyes widely planted, clear, yet small.

  And must they overcome the fog,

  Or must we rend our dream?54

  This poem written at some point in the late 1920s and unpublished during Crane’s lifetime may have been left unfinished. It is tempting to think that its thirteen lines might reflect an attempt to respond to Lazarus’s fourteen line sonnet. I quote it here because it draws symptomatically on other traditions of thought about American liberty than that now associated with interpretation of the statue since Lazarus’s poem was affixed to it, both physically and ideologically.

  The most immediately striking difference is the identification of the figure as a virgin, since this forges a link with the earliest personification of America as Virginia, with the name given to the earliest settlement by Europeans denoting a land previously untouched, even though the first settlers would have known very rapidly that there was no basis in fact for such a claim. But the name stuck because the idea of the land as a tabula rasa was needed by Europeans wishing to fashion a way of life there that was a projection of the desires they had brought with them from the Old World. Crane insisted on the essential ‘virginity’ of America throughout his work, precisely because the experience of first landfall was repeated hundreds of times over with the arrival of each boatload of immigrants from elsewhere. America became the screen on which the immigrants would project their hopes and wishes for a fresh start. Crane’s major work ‘The Bridge 1930’ begins ostensibly with an address to Brooklyn Bridge, but the address is deflected almost immediately by an acknowledgement of the Statue of Liberty, viewed across the harbour. The switching of attention is partly cognisant of the allure of the statue and what it represents to those seeing it for the first time, an allure conceived of precisely in terms of cinematically curated desires:

  I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

  With multitudes bent towards some flashing scene

  Never disclosed but hastened to again,

  Foretold to other eyes on the same screen55

  America itself is being conceived of as a spectacle of illusions: fantasies of renewal and redemption – deceptive fictions for the most part, but necessary fictions all the same. The power of dreams is such that Crane imagines it detaining even the Statue of Liberty itself:

  And Thee, across the harbour, silver paced

  As though the sun took step of thee, yet left

  Some motion ever unspent in thy stride, –

  Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

  If we pause to ask ourselves the question, What does the Statue of Liberty think?, the answer is, according to Hart Crane, the same as every refugee who gazes on its face – it is ‘stayed’, which is to say that its desires are arrested, in a condition in which freedom can only ever be qualified. Every refugee knows that movement is the first condition of their freedom, but Crane observes and dwells on the fact that Liberty herself is in a pose of arrested movement: of stasis, in fact. The idea of Liberty literally outruns the reality.

  Even more revealing and suggestive is Crane’s opening address in the same poem, which is made not directly to Brooklyn Bridge, but to a seagull flying above it:

  How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

  The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

  Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

  Over the chained bay waters Liberty –

  In defiance of the ideological version of freedom represented by the architecture of public statuary, the climbing motion of the seagull is ‘building’ towards an airborne expression of true freedom. There is an astonishing parallel here for the viewer of McQueen’s film between the circular pattern of the ‘white rings’ left on the surface of the ‘rippling’ sea where the bird rests, as well as the circular pattern of its flight as it wheels ever higher above the harbour, and the circling manoeuvres of McQueen’s helicopter as it traverses the same airspace. Crane underlines the natural freedom of the bird by insisting that the ‘bay waters’ under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York are ‘chained’, in a deliberate and provocative allusion to the broken chain that lies at the feet of the Statue of Liberty as part of the work. By comparison with the seagull’s unconditional freedom, the sculptural representation of a broken chain is no more than a rhetorical gesture, since the motion of the statue is impeded regardless. By juxtaposing Crane’s gull with McQueen’s helicopter, we can appreciate the full force of the latter’s irony in tracing out a cinematic architecture with the flight paths of an authoritarian reaction to what, in 2009, seems an extenuation of political paranoia.

  To return to the two verses of Crane’s poem ‘To Liberty’, the second half of the first verse evokes the epic tradition that gave poetry real ideological power in the forging of nationality and statehood. The reference to Helen in connection with a ‘dead sailor’, alludes to the twin aftermaths of the Trojan War, in the story of Odysseus, who was to be turned into the archetypal exile for European culture, and the journey of Aeneas, departing from the ruins of Troy to found the state and future empire of Rome. Crane’s sailor does not share either of these illustrious fates and is a reminder of the many unremembered refugees and exiles whose stories – and sometimes, whose lives – are simply lost. Crane’s second verse insists on the lighting of torches for those who have not yet returned home or, more realistically, who have yet to reach their new ‘home’. The outcome of all those anticipated journeys hangs in the balance, since it is too early to decide what ‘robes’ to wear, in expression of mourning or celebration, and Crane’s virgin here seems to double for the widows whose part in the national story is given architectural expression in all the ‘widows’ walks’ seen in houses along the coast of New England. The poem concludes with a set of alternatives which render ambivalent the advantages of seeing through or past ‘fog’ to ascertain a reality which might do no more than ‘rend our dream’, suggesting that Liberty is more of a dream than anything else, and that its insubstantiality must be recognised even if it is repeatedly embraced.

  Of course, McQueen’s film does not refer directly to these poems, but it works in comparable ways and elicits reflection on the same range of concerns. As a British-born artist of Grenadian and Trinidadian descent, McQueen is in a position to be especially sensitive to the fundamental challenges to a sense of identity that translocation involves, including the impossibility of fully replacing one idea of ‘home’ with another, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of exile. Among his own stated artistic influences, he has named Beckett w
ith some frequency and has incorporated Beckett’s own language into the titles of several of his films and exhibitions. He admires Beckett’s economy of means, combining resonance with extreme concentration, and emulates the writer’s carefully calculated reticence and obliqueness. But his work also overlaps many of Beckett’s central concerns in its conceptual focus. Beckett is in many ways the exemplary writer as exile, going further than many in his use of a second language as chief means of expression for the majority of his works written after departure from Ireland. All of these works dwell obsessively on departure from home and on the locations and relationships left behind, insisting on exile, vagrancy and the necessity for increasing the distance between origin and destination, while always looping back psychologically to repetitions with variations of the same scenarios, revisiting past dreams of anticipated futures, and reviewing past decisions in order to recapture imagined alternatives. Beckett’s abandonment of English to write in French reverses the priorities encountered by emigrants to the United States, but parallels their situation in having to remake the self through acclimatisation to the mindset and sensibility permitted by the host language. Part of the self is inevitably lost in translation. Beckett typically writes in French about a past Irish self originally constructed through the medium of English. For much of his career Beckett deployed a wry comedy to camouflage an unbearable degree of emotional damage and to convert this into a pretext for resilience, while in his late works there is a much more anaesthetic evenness of tone, suggesting an excessive degree of self-alienation.

  But even in his late English works there is an obsession with the point of origin from which one is irrevocably removed, requiring a constant reassessment and redefinition of concepts of home, of the maternal and paternal, of the landscape that provided initial orientation in the world. A focal work for McQueen is the short play Not I, whose opening words ‘Into this World’ when transplanted to the filmmaker’s world immediately relocate the Beckettian reference to birth to the settings of a twenty-first-century socio-political reality. McQueen was to use the phrase as the title of his show at the Thomas Dane Gallery in 2004. But the structure of Beckett’s text, organised around key moments of uncertainty about the identity of the self, involves a compulsive circling around the experience of dislocation and disassociation that is reflected in the many-layered, concentric movements of McQueen’s Static, a more detached and meditative work, but one which is never very far from a sense of political pressure, and touching incidentally on so many of the same threats, anxieties and lost illusions.

  2016

  The Prose Poem

  One of the main points I want to make in this essay about the prose poem comes out of reading something which isn’t a prose poem, but a passage from a novel. The novel is Dickens’s Great Expectations, published in the weekly All the Year Round between 1 December 1860 and 3 August 1861, and the passage I’m interested in was published on 11 May 1861. It concerns one of the most momentous narrative junctures in the novel: momentous because it describes a protracted moment, but also because it records a life-changing experience. The experience is that of passing from a state of self-possession to that of being effectively the property of another, and it hinges on the management of time:

  Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time, and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they rocked, that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten light-house. Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows (opening them ever so little, was out of the question in the teeth of such wind and rain) I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out, and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and that the coal fires in barges on the river were being carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.

  I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at eleven o’clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many church-clocks in the City – some leading, some accompanying, some following – struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.56

  The passage describes a spell of time, stepping out of the main narrative flow of the novel and setting up some boundaries that keep at bay the pace and rhythm of that flow, before stepping back into it with the sound of a literal step upon the stair. Pip, the narrator, is comfortably in control of his own timetable – he puts his own watch upon the table, and sets aside a precise amount of time for reading – but the comfort he takes from being able to choose the order of his life is about to be revealed as complacent and illusory, since the step upon the stair brings the knowledge that Magwitch has devised a completely different and conflicting schedule for Pip’s sense of direction and purpose, completely altering his understanding of the relations between his past, present and future. This is the moment when one schedule is engulfed by the other, when several possible futures disappear. And this dramatic change of time signature is backed by the striking of the hour at different times by different churches, disclosing a hinterland of different temporal measures, a multiplication of plans and frameworks for living, a plurality of different stories contained by the city, whose sheer volume and lack of coordination are overpowering to the solitary individual.

  Pip himself emphasises his solitude; his actions reveal a desire for solitude, a need to retreat from interference. Dickens puts him on the top floor of the last house and makes him imagine, retrospectively, that it must be like dwelling in a lighthouse, in a living space whose confinement and remoteness from the rest of humanity is what makes it attractive; his rooms have windows, but they are all black; the buildings have lamps, but they have all gone out; there is no visual evidence of anyone else alive, or of any living thing, for that matter – only the fugitive gleams of a few primeval flares, ‘red-hot splashes’ being carried down the river as if on a flow of lava.

  And in this physical and imaginative isolation – there is just Pip among the elements – the most appropriate action for Pip to perform is reading; he shuts out the disorientating spatial dimensions of the city, focusing on the small space of the book; and he shuts out the confused and confusing temporal dimensions of the city, by tethering the minutes and the hours to his own watch, and by entering the time of reading; what Pip is reading is another text than the one he is in, Great Expectations; and the kind of text he needs, even if he does not know it is what he wants, must be something like a prose poem.

  Why do I say this? In 1860, during the year in which the serialisation of Great Expectations commenced, James Hogg published the last of his Selections Grave and Gay from the Writings published and unpublished of Thomas de Quincey. It included De Quincey’s essay ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, which asks the reader to compare the effect of the knocking with the experience of being ‘in a vast metropolis on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave’, resulting in ‘the silence and desertion of the streets’ and ‘the stagnation of ordinary business’. De Quincey then focuses on the relevant scene in Macbeth in terms that are strikingly close to those employed by Dickens in the passage from Great Expectations just given:

  In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated – cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs – locked up and sequestered in some deep recess: we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – la
id asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is that when the deed is done – when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish: the pulses of life are beginning to beat again: and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.57

  De Quincey’s emphasis on insulation, sequestration and deep recesses; his looping together of ideas of suspension, trance, syncope; and his breaking of the spell with the return of hearing and the insistence of the knocking that recalls the ordinary rhythm of time marked by the ticking of the clock or the chiming of the bell – reminding us also of the tremendous forward momentum of the dramatic action in Macbeth – all these features are at the centre of Dickens’s passage written a few months after the book publication of the essay. But what is also at the centre of De Quincey’s essay, but not mentioned, in fact effaced, is that the cessation of all the goings-on of the world in which we have to live, according to measures and rhythms imposed upon us by others, is occasioned not only by the work of darkness, but also – and for De Quincey especially – by the workings of opium: by its ability to estrange us from our familiar routines, surroundings, and relations, and even from our own bodies, imprinted with the actions and reactions of the habitual.

  The syntactical structure of De Quincey’s rendition of the trance is itself a performance of extenuation, of delay; of prevarication through paraphrase and revision; withholding the moment when the sentence completes itself and breaks the illusion. The text seems to be mesmerised by its own ability to spin things out – what Ruth apRoberts refers to in her essay on Biblical parallelism in English prose as ‘self-exegesis’.58