For the Tempus-Fugitives

by Christopher Norris

  If this is where Complex Words achieves a large advance over Seven Types of Ambiguity then it is here also that Empson breaks decisively with that whole Eliot-influenced orthodoxy according to which we cannot (or at any rate should not) mix up issues of literary interpretation with issues of intention, biography, cultural history, or—lurking behind all these—politics. For it is becoming ever clearer with hindsight just how far the academic uptake of literary modernism via Eliot and his disciples was shot through with political and socio-cultural value ascriptions of a highly conservative and, in some cases, deeply reactionary character. That political valence itself has much to do with the critically mediated notion of the literary work as a “verbal icon,” autonomous and sufficient unto itself. In this view the poem is a priori unbeholden to anything that modern secularizing movements of thought might presume to extract, i.e., some message perhaps more in keeping with present-day beliefs and ideas. What Empson brings out to convincing effect is the way that such highly restrictive doctrines must perforce ignore all the most creative, inventive, and independent-minded aspects of any poetry that merits sustained close reading. Such was his answer to critics of Seven Types, like Rosamund Tuve, who accused him of anachronism in imputing ideas to seventeenth-century poets such as Donne and Herbert—most often skeptical counter-impulses when confronted with less than appealing aspects of Christian doctrine—as if poetry couldn’t be ahead of its time or give expression to thoughts that the poet might not have consciously intended or acknowledged.

  So Empson’s sturdy defense of intentionalism at this stage involved some fairly large allowances for the role of unconscious or sub-doxastic ideas and beliefs. But he was later able to attack the manifest absurdity of “the Wimsatt Law”—the dogmatic anti-intentionalist case as argued most influentially by Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt—not only on the grounds that it ignored the most basic fact about human linguistic-communicative grasp but by way of the sophisticated logico-semantic theory of interpretation advanced in Complex Words. His central point in all this was to defend the basic rationalist-humanist principle that the language of poetry is continuous with—and not in some prescriptive way cut off from—the language of our various non-poetic speech-acts and thought-processes. Otherwise, he thinks, we shall sell poetry short by discounting its claim on our moral, reflective, and critical intelligence while at the same time devaluing “ordinary language” by failing to appreciate the kind of creativity that goes into seemingly prosaic modes of utterance, whether of an everyday or more specialized nature. Thus he writes about those “commonplace,” “flat,” “unassuming” words that are apt to pass unnoticed by the guardians of ideological correctness but whose role in and effect on our thinking is all the more crucial for the fact that their semantic complexity remains well below the threshold of consciousness.

  Indeed the relation between conscious and unconscious (or perhaps preconscious) components of linguistic expression is among the most complex and least understood issues in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, and an issue that is posed with particular force in the case of poetic language. Clearly there is much going on in poetry that exceeds or eludes the poet’s conscious-intentional grasp, not least through the way that rhyme and meter interact unpredictably with what they might have in mind by way of preconceived expressive or thematic gist. Yet there is another, more encompassing, less Cartesian way of approaching the issue according to which what counts as intentional should take in mental events or contents that occur outside the spot-lit zone of punctual, self-present apperception. Taking the term in this expanded sense—as applied to thought-processes, intentions, and meanings that may be subject to a certain degree of temporal spread as well as extension beyond that overly privileged zone—makes a lot more sense in terms of how poets tend to think about the activity of composition. Here I am going partly by my own experience but also by accounts in a similar vein essayed by those for whom the writing of poetry involves a hard-to-explain combination of utterly focused—in the strictest sense “intentional”—mental states combined with an uncommon openness to sundry phonetic, semantic, and grammatical effects that seem to take on a generative power largely apart from—even against—authorial design. Poetry might even provide a useful way of thinking about issues like the problem allegedly posed to any upholder of human freewill by MRI-scan results purporting to show that brain-events occur an appreciable time before experimental subjects register their choice or conscious intent to perform some particular action. This is because poetry most strikingly exemplifies how very hard it is—and perhaps how misconceived the effort—to specify just where the line falls between conscious and unconscious/preconscious modes of thinking, willing, or intending.

  III

  These are some of the reasons—quite apart from the sheer challenge and satisfaction of writing in metrical, rhymed, and (for the most part) long-run narrative and argumentative forms—for my choosing to buck so many of the trends that characterize present-day poetry. The topics of my verse-essays range from the polemical to the reflective, from politics to philosophy, from the broadly general to the (relatively) personal, and from news items chosen for their comic, tragic, or socially symptomatic import to speculative themes focused on aspects of language, consciousness, or selfhood. The forms deployed are all, as I have said, highly traditional and include terza rima, sestinas, modified sonnet-forms, quatrains rhyming abab or abba, extensions of those basic quatrain-forms into longer (8- or 16-line) stanzas, and poems that use just two rhyme-sounds over a lengthy AB sequence with the object of sustaining interest (or avoiding boredom) through out-of-the-way rhymes that bring a novel slant to the topic in hand. The diction is mostly of a middling character—neither highly formal nor downright demotic—though the latter does make an occasional appearance, either for contrastive effect or to express the sorts of sentiment that would come across as straight satire if couched in something closer to the formal norm established elsewhere.

  Most of the poems have some kind of epigraph, quotation, headnote, or explanatory gloss supplied as a courtesy to the reader. The whole business of providing notes is a bit of a minefield, especially since Eliot filled out the blank octavo pages of the first edition of The Waste Land with a mass of detailed notes whose relevance or usefulness was, in many cases, open to doubt. Still Empson, as usual, offers the best case for the defense when he says that it is more considerate not to send the reader off on a time-consuming search for obscure sources of information if you have them on hand. Besides, what that reader chiefly needs to grasp if they want to understand and appreciate the poem—rather than merely know about its sources—is the process of thought whereby those sources were taken up into the author’s expressive-argumentative intent, or utilized (maybe shrewdly exploited) so as to do something new and remarkable with them. As usual Empson makes all the main points in the shortest space:

  When I am not actually faced with explaining [the poems] I feel notes aren’t wanted; but I think people would be more easily tempted to read verse if there was plenty of critical writing thrown in, demanding less concentration of attention, and with more literary-critical magazine or novel-reading interest—I know I should. And there is a rather portentous air about compact verses without notes, like a seduction without conversation.1

  Not so “compact,” the reader may remark, in the case of my own verse-essays, but the issue about notes is much the same: why not offer help where needed or desirable? So I have not let symbolist scruples or New Critical anathemas veto the provision of topical leads, pertinent items of background information, or (occasionally) suggestions as to how things fit together.

  The underlying point here is Empson’s continuity-principle and the fact that, theory aside, we make sense of poetry with the same range of linguistic, interpretative, pragmatic, experiential, and other such widely shared resources as we bring to bear in everyday-communicative contexts. These poems are basically speech-acts that function in various ways—argumentative, in
formative, persuasive, combative, reflective, suggestive, commemorative, etc.—and therefore come out strongly against any creed that denies poetry’s practical-performative power in the name of aesthetic autonomy. So the epigraphs and other such (as Derrida would say) “parergonal” items are there more as semi-detachable parts of the poems than afterthoughts inserted just as a sop to those who might otherwise complain about willful or needless obscurity. Still I have not provided notes and references for the various items mentioned above since this is, after all, primarily a book of poems rather than an academic treatise. A Google search will track down almost anything nowadays with minimal effort and maximal information yield so the whole business of detailed source-referencing has become to a large extent redundant.

  That Eliot’s notes were such an odd mixture of useful leads and archly irrelevant pseudo-information is itself a clear sign of the modernist-mediated symbolist influence that fixes a prescriptive gulf between poetry and other kinds of discourse. No doubt this also had a lot to do with his troubled emotional life at the time of The Waste Land’s composition and with Eliot’s desire to put critics off the biographical trail or discourage speculation about sources nearer home than many of those distractingly adduced in the notes. But it was also an outcome of that whole anti-rationalist complex of ideas that made the discontinuity between poetic and non-poetic language into a shibboleth of aesthetic, ethical, and (though rarely advertised as such) socio-political principle. If the pieces collected here go directly against that doctrine then their collective point, as distinct from other more specific intentions, is to make the case for a poetry continuous with the sorts of thinking that typically occur when people argue and exchange ideas in real-world communicative contexts. For these are situations where, as Aristotle sensibly held, rhetoric and the arts of persuasive discourse may very often count—even count crucially—without the least compromise to appropriate standards of rationality and truth. The poems are thus meant to serve as an antidote to high modernism while also signalling allegiance to that other tradition with its alternative (mainly eighteenth-century) sources and its continuation in poets of otherwise varied character like Auden, Empson, Thom Gunn, James Fenton, Tony Harrison, A.D. Hope, Louis MacNeice, Peter Porter, and (since formal excellence doesn’t always go along with the ethical, political, or basic human virtues) Philip Larkin.

  I should like to thank everyone who read these poems, discussed them, invited me to read them at conferences and other events, offered much-needed support and encouragement along the way, and generally helped me to feel that the project wasn’t too perverse or misguided. They really are too many to mention individually and will in any case know how indebted I am so just let me mention two great singing groups, Cor Cochion Caerdydd and The Eclectics, along with my wonderfully expert, supportive, and inspirational editor David Jonathan Bayot, without whose encouragement at every stage this project would never have been carried through.

  Swansea, September 2016

  NOTE

  1 William Empson, “Letter to Ian Parsons,” cited by John Haffenden in his Introduction to Empson, The Complete Poems, ed. Haffenden (London: Allen Lane, 2000), p. xlviii.

  Acknowledgments

  Some of these poems have been published in journals or on websites as follows: The European English Messenger, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, RARA, The Recusant, Scintilla, The Seventh Quarry, Shakespeare Studies, and Think. I am grateful to the editors and publishers concerned for their permission to reprint those pieces here, mostly in revised or modified form.

  FOR THE TEMPUS-FUGITIVES

  This poem has to do with a neat and arithmetically quite simple explanation of why time seems to pass more quickly as we get older, but also with the reasons why it fails to work as a matter of phenomenological (not to mention personal and emotional) conviction. That the strictures of the rhyme-scheme are meant to drive this point home the more forcefully will I hope come across as one piece of supporting evidence for my case about the merits of a formalist poetic. The title is taken from a treatise by Sextus Empiricus, the ancient skeptic, who denied that human beings were capable of attaining any kind of genuine (objective or indubitable) knowledge, mathematics being one of his case studies. My use of it implies not agreement with his views or those of his numerous latter-day progeny—indeed I have argued vigorously against them elsewhere—but rather a sense of how such skepticism chimes with the reaction of almost everyone on first encountering the math-based account of that speeding-up illusion as the body clock ages.

  It stands to reason once you’ve got the gist

  And figured why, as life goes on, its rate

  Of passage speeds up and it seems you missed

  Some annual fixture just because the date

  Came round so quickly that the old check-list

  Of jobs to do or days to celebrate

  At last proved quite unable to assist

  In your attempt to stop things running late.

  The answer’s one our number-theorist

  Has got off pat: the ratios dictate

  That an inverse proportion must exist

  Between the sum of years you’ve had to wait

  From birth till now and the contractile tryst

  Of time with life that sets life’s quickening gait

  From now on. Hence the chronotropic twist

  That thwarts all vain attempts to correlate

  Your own time-consciousness with what they say,

  Those back-to-Newton clock-watch types who think

  Its flow’s so smooth and equable that they

  Can accurately gauge from link to link

  Its chronometric rate. A simpler way

  Of putting it’s the fact that time-scales shrink

  (It seems) in keeping with the day-to-day

  Expanding ratios now required to sync

  Time further-back with time not so passé

  Or time right now. This feels too like the brink

  Of some catastrophe you’d kept at bay,

  If not by ministry of drugs or drink,

  Then by some trick of thought that might defray

  The cost by making out that there’s a chink

  In that proportion-scheme so things obey

  Sir Isaac’s second law and, in a blink,

  Accelerate so fast you’ll never know

  What happened in the end. So they compute

  Quite logically, those speed-ups in the flow

  Of human time whose rate turns out to suit

  The number-crunchers who purport to show

  How everything’s numerical at root,

  Or how those mid-to-late-life crises go

  Directly into mathemes that commute

  Life-sentences to short-term. These bestow

  The Pythagorean leisure to impute

  All such small upsets to the quid pro quo

  Of time and number that the more astute

  Or numerate among us reckon no

  Great cause for mental anguish so acute

  Since merely products of a ratio

  Whose shortening odds no life-hope could refute.

  Yet it’s through just their method to explain

  That hope’s eclipse (they say) that we may find

  More adequate resources to maintain

  Some equipoise once sensibly resigned

  To overtaking in an outside lane

  Marked “Pile-Up Just Ahead,” while way behind

  There fades from view our last hope to regain

  That old co-temporality of mind

  And world inhabiting the one domain

  Of a life-time that let them both unwind

  Without such contretemps. If we refrain

  From all vain efforts later on to bind

  The time-scales so they synchronize again,

  Or do the sums until we’re disinclined

  To find a cause of existential pain

  In functions mathematically defined,

  Then (
they propose) we’ll emulate the best

  Of Pascal’s thinking. These are not the bits

  About how small he felt or how depressed

  By sheer immensities or infinites,

  But more the thought-experiments that test

  Just how those intuitions fare when it’s

  A matter for math-specialists possessed

  Of some technique that more exactly fits

  Our need to steer well clear of such distressed

  Mind-zones and so make sure the thing submits

  To problem-solving powers beyond what messed

  With Pascal’s autre soi. Thus it permits

  (They’d have us think) the well-schooled mind to wrest

  Some glimpse of truth and order from the pits

  Of inchoate emotion that expressed

  No more than our desire to call it quits

  With time’s fast-forward. Granted, they’ve a fair

  Entitlement, those thinkers, to proclaim

  By dint of proof demonstrative that their

  Procedure’s what best justifies the name

  Of truth and best equips us to prepare

  For moves in the timescale-adjustment game

  Since otherwise the mounting odds would scare

  Us half to death. Then we’d be prone to blame

  The very thought-techniques that did their share

  To quiet our fears for putting us to shame