Notes on the poem
Der Turmbau zu Babel

There was a TV interview with Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, in which he described the genesis of the song, Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

The album (Wish You Were Here) version of the music opens in a premonitory wash of sound, with droning, synthesised strings and bleached, trumpet-like synthesiser figures sounding out among a glassy tinkling of suspended chimes; from this introduction, a sinuous, slow-tempo, abstracted blues guitar solo unfolds. Then the solo ends, and the song appears on the edge of fading away – at which point a very haunting pattern of four notes, played on a guitar, occur, inaugurating a new passage in the music. I am not a musician, but I seem to remember that these four notes were spoken of with fascination and even with a kind of awe by other interviewees – evidently, there is something musically distinctive, unexpected and mysterious about them.

It was about the advent of these four particular notes that Gilmour was speaking. In his self-effacing way, the guitarist described himself as sitting around, at home perhaps, and relaxing, playing an acoustic guitar – just a kind of doodling, really, without any definite direction or aim, a strumming, or a tinkering…

So there was no question of a moment of passionate inspiration, there was just a gentle investigation of sound. He played like this for some time, with no sense of anything particular occurring. And then, he said, (something like) 'these notes fell out of my guitar' – speaking of what was to become the eerie four-note motif from Shine On…

Well, this seems to me one model of how works of art are produced. In Gilmour's description, it is almost as if Gilmour himself is absent from the process of creation. He didn't say 'I played these notes', or 'I found these notes' – but speaks only of the notes falling out of the guitar. The event is so subtle as to run shy of the feeling of 'gifts' – artists speak about pieces being 'given' to them, but in Gilmour's example here, the moments of creation seem too low-key for that. Are we in the domain of accident or chance? Even these notions seem, to me, too clumsy to apply in this case. Again: the mysterious motif to the song just falls out of the guitar. This makes me think of those stories of women who never realise they are pregnant, and are surprised to find that, one day, they are giving birth.

Der Turmbau zu Babel is a.m.'s second poem (the first being the alphabet poem My Little Alphabet). Der Turmbau holds a special place in my affections. I feel a kind of rueful tenderness towards it. In my memory of the writing, the poem looms almost as the direct opposite of that seamless, easy delivery recounted by David Gilmour. I worked on the poem for several years, and it passed through a long series of manuscript rewritings and corrections. I laboured hard over it, and for a long time it would not cohere into what I felt was a convincing whole. I feel that, in the end, this poem taught me a lot, and I'm grateful that I didn't abandon it, and stayed faithful to it.

From my own perspective, the notional 'interior' of composition, I believe I found the poem so recalcitrant because I was trying to carry the whole length of the poem in one, sustained style – the style also providing a consistent mood and tone. But, as a result of seeking this monolithic voice for the poem, I found I was making very awkward transitions between stanzas, and introducing new material to try and patch the gaps. This new material generated further unconvincing seams, which I again had to try and smooth down. It was only at a comparatively late stage of composition, when I began to see Der Turmbau itself as a kind of 'ruined tower' – in other words, to accept that it was broken, and breaking, and could not be mended – that I found myself free to accept the disruption which the writing itself had created. This was very liberating. I was then able to discard the 'patching' or 'fudging' material, and start afresh with different stuff.

I suppose the most decisive example of this disruption is the transition in the poem at the stanza beginning with the lines:

Joists — winches — hammers — nails;
carpenters and arc-light: ropes and chains.

This staccato stanza breaks with the earlier rhythm of the poem. The following stanza is a quote or paraphrase from the Alice stories, where the White Rabbit runs past, checking his fob watch (does he check a fob watch?)…

Once the decisive break was made, I felt I was able to change the emotional temperature of the poem, and to move through the poetry more easily, emotively, generating and encountering new spiritual sites and loci of semantic intensity, of charges and discharges of figural energy.

Der Turmbau is complex allusory web, and I think it is one of the key poems in a.m. Readers who don't like poems being 'unpacked' for them should look away now!

Der Turmbau zu Babel, and its context within a.m.

The title of the collection, a.m., consists of two letters, commonly used as an abbreviation for 'morning' (from the Latin, ante meridian, 'before mid-day'). The first poem of the collection (My Little Alphabet) was actually written for a friend's young daughter, Hannah, in order that she might familiarise herself with the alphabet (as a teaching device, I think the poem failed spectacularly)… But with My Little Alphabet, I was interested in writing something which produced sensitive arrangements of sound, and which at the intuitive level made the alphabet crackle with energy, drawing a reader / listener to the graphic and sonic displays of words, their bonding and interactions…

Anyway, Der Turmbau follows this alphabet poem. (When I settled on the choice of poems for a.m., I felt that this sequencing of My Little Alphabet and Der Turmbau was very appropriate…)

Der Turmbau is the work of someone entering their early middle age (I believe I was 32 when I began writing the poem), and looking back on the world of childhood and maternity. Childhood is seen as the morning of language. Language is inherently cultural and social – so although any child comes fresh and new to language, the language itself has only arrived after a long, long journey. Any word is a kind of luminous tomb, or a ghost story – words haunt themselves.

Der Turmbau embeds itself in the culture of childhood – of Sunday Schools, and the bible (memories of my own childhood in rural Leicestershire). The Book of Genesis is mentioned – with the paradox that genesis is already 'dog-eared'. Fresh creation is ancient. The creation of the world – the Creation, in biblical terms – is always occurring, and has always occurred.

The story of the fall of the Tower of Babel occurs in the Book of Genesis – so one way of looking at this is to say that the poem forms a kind of hermeneutical loop. The story of the fall of Babel can be seen not merely as the division of men and women into languages, but the division of men and women from language – as a kind of exile into confusion, where the heaven of an absolute meaning is lost, and will never be possible again. The fall of the Tower is the mythical fall into interpretation, and semantic relativity.

The poet is seen as an 'infant builder', erecting a tower of wooden alphabet blocks. The self-absorbed poet is also seen rather pompously issuing diktats – 'Every writer must rebuild Babel'. The mature poet is thus (very schematically) the third of these three builders, and the result of the constructions, both in language and life, of the previous two.

The poem's opening stanza runs:

Since you've gone, I've fallen so quiet…
Days, I walk out onto Jesus Green, where the dawning cold
makes a slowing world slur, growing numb, and speechless…
Nights, I write of senseless things.
I speak to senseless things…

By a kind of metaphoric implosion or an allusive rebonding process, the poet himself can be seen as the Tower of Babel. ('I've fallen so quiet'). He has fallen into a confusion which threatens to silence him. This is the world of the shock of bereavement, the loss of maternal foundations. The fall of the Tower of Babel can be seen as the myth not only of the descent into confused senses (the break up of language into tongues, and the breakdown of some transcendent unified word into the vivid, dimensionless electrics of semantic struggle, of doubt and interpretation), but also of the encountering of the senseless itself – the point at which meaning dies, at which language fails, and where the universe awaits us, unutterable, relentless, humbling and semantically unbearable: beyond grammar, above nuance, without language. This placeless place could also be seen as a figural death – for the poet, the threat of the disintegration into a kind of nonsense which is not merely the writing of a bad poem, but the end of the conceivability of poetry, or of coherent thought occurring as a coherent identity.

I regularly used to walk over Jesus Green – a common near the river in Cambridge – during this period of my life; the name of the common, of course, is a further gentle indicator of the pervasive presence of biblical influence in English culture. (a.m. often alludes to biblical figures or episodes, or more hazily to the world of the 'People of the Book' – poems are called Pilgrim Eventual, Joseph and Belshazzar; Noah appears in Transporter, Sine Umbra Nihil and Pacific Union – references are scattered throughout the poetry)…

Because of the important metaphor of the Tower of Babel, the notion of construction is vital to Der Turmbau, and is crucial to my understanding of the world [1]. There are the sounds of building and of maintenance, culture and pruning, in the opening stanzas. (We are building meaning.)

How carefully we build: day in, day out.
Nursery books: Potter and Grimm.
A tower of stacked, wooden alphabet blocks
with their A is for Apple
and Z is for Zebra,
a vertical word raised from the crawling floor
of the infant builder, a toddler in pale-blue dungarees,
suddenly tumbling here, spilling down in a chunky wave at my feet,
on the hard cold ground of Jesus Green…

And when Babel fell, what did it leave?
A cloud of mortar, and the word for 'tower' in Iraq.
A plastic tortoiseshell haircomb on a scuffed pine dresser…
A wedding ring we couldn't pull from your finger;
slippers and shoes — Singapore high-heels — shoes, and shoes…
Whippets and dobermans, alsatians and springers,
with their moist, sirloin tongues lolling out,
running wild on the frosty grass.
And a scent of burning plane trees…

We can say that a child builds him- or herself, in part, out of learning, stories, play. (There's a kind of historical serendipity in the reference to 'Potter' – when I first drafted the poem, the reference was to Beatrix Potter, not to the all-conquering Harry).

Naturally enough, there is a cyclical figurative rhythm to the poem involving building and collapse. The nursery is a kind of building site, but the world raised there descends in ruins when the poet has to come to terms with bereavement. The references in the line mentioning Iraq have a grim allusory resonance at the time of my writing these notes (29.03.03), but this stanza was written long before this 'Second Gulf War' (though not before the First Gulf War) – I believe (though I'm not sure) that Babel's historical provenance was in the land which is now once more the site of conflict.

Even the 'A is for Apple' is, in my imaginative matrix, a thing of biblical weight. The apple of course is the symbol of Man's fall from grace. It is the fruit of knowledge, and the fruit of ignorance – the seeded fruit of an initiatory moral self-awareness. I believe Babel has been understood as a second kind of fall – or a third, if one includes the rebel angels' fall from heaven. I find something idiotically pleasing about the fact that the English 'apple' begins with the first letter of the alphabet.

Der Turmbau, with its references to apples and falling, is echoed and amplified by further poems in the a part of a.m. – in 1976 Streets, and in Transporter – where biblical organisations of the the meaning of the world begin to encounter more rationalistic ones, those of science – with Newton's apple, and the phenomenon of gravity, the devising of the so-called 'clockwork' universe, and so on. (And the first poem of the m section of the book contains allusions to Adam, after the Fall, feeling snow falling on his face for the first time)…

Now I'm back down where the towers began
in roots of alphabet,
and your voice speaking, saying
'A is for Apple,
B is for Bear'…

The tower (construction) of human understanding is seen as being founded in language, and the tower of language is seen as being founded (in this intimate case) in my mother's voice. My mother, Sheila, is later understood as 'the first word between two silences'. The poem attempts to understand maternity's part in the domestic deep source of language and of life.

Der Turmbau develops from this stanza onwards, and for a while fans out in a haze of memories and allusions. It is a poem of shock, and of shockwaves circling outwards. I believe the poetry rides a kind of double shockwave. It is a poem of death. [Philosophically, I don't think one can speak death – speaking is living, and death is 'not an event in life' (Wittgenstein). (Although it sounds irrational, perhaps one can more accurately say that death speaks the poem)]…

But Der Turmbau does speak about the death or collapse of a certain set of illusions. When I was younger, and I first became aware of Literature as an organised endeavour (as opposed, I guess, to being just 'stories' or 'poems'), I simply assumed that Literature was somehow permanent and immortal. In the scenario I had written for my own life, I would grow up to become a great writer, and my work would become part of the canon, and would live forever.

This will probably sound absurd, of course, and for a variety of reasons, but looking back now, I feel it was a genuine – if perhaps slow-acting, insidious – shock for me to realise that the constructs of Literature and of language were not at all immortal. Unquestionably, my reading of Derrida's early work, and analyses of it, and of other structuralist and post-modernist works, triggered the dawning of my understanding that 'Language was mortal'. This very belated realisation is particularly ironic, as the grain of my own theory before I encountered post-modernism was concerned with a notion of 'drift' – of the inescapable crawl and shift and atomisation of human life, our inability to remain 'true' – real – 'true to our word'. For some reason, although theoretically I had this sense of things, it was only with the double shockwave of Der Turmbau that I really grasped, really felt, really was, the consequences of this state of drift; and only then that I realised how vulnerable and provisional all meaning and all poetic endeavour actually is – until then, I had somehow managed to selectively absolve poetry (and my own status as a writer, of course) from the general wrack and confusion, the uncertainty and the hodgepodge of it, the fudged, trickling, often desperate struggle to keep things going, keep things in place, keep them secure…
This double shock of bereavement – in some ways, the loss of my own foundations – is perhaps the core concern of the the poetry of Der Turmbau. I would say that, in one sense, bereavement is the deep loss of permanence, the exposure of the bereaved person to the open skies of the world, leaving the person uncapped; bereavement is to know ephemerality deeply. This ephemerality can be agonising – the suffering of someone you love, where suffering is ephemerality borne in a most acute and irreversible way – can be harrowing. In my case, at least, I experienced bereavement as the loss of durable meaning, and the need to survive in a world in which meaning does not and cannot endure itself, nor endure the local occurrence of how it is, a human being. Buddhists might perhaps say one realises bereavement – comes to an understanding which makes real, so that one is that understanding…

The poems of a.m. have been described as elegiac. I would like to quietly resist that description. The poetry of Der Turmbau, for instance, is not elegiac, it is not a poetry of mourning, or of lingering over absence: it is struggle. I do not write poems reflectively, meditating upon events which have occurred: my poems are events, and I experience them as events. Moreover, they are not 'literary' events – I do not write 'literature', if literature is seen as some kind of conquest of convention, the ordered application and subversion of rules, and the narration of one's own place in some notional canon. My poems are not separate from nor outside of life: they are life. They are living. They are not to do with a stately coming to terms with experience: they are experience. (This, anyway, is how I believe them to be.) Der Turmbau is not, in my understanding, a finalised elegy, but a process of attempted comprehension. In this, I believe it's characteristic of a.m. – these are nearly all poems of struggle, of endeavour, of experiential labour…

The middle stanzas of the poem open out into that sense of the 'uncapped' exposure to the world of which I've written. Cambridge stands on a plain, and I sometimes think of it as a city which is a kind of toy cousin to other cities which stand upon plains. (Having grown up in Middlesbrough, an industrial city on the northeast coast, I do sometimes feel there is something very toy-like about Cambridge – it's like something which has fallen out of a musical box, and the colleges are like little model forts or barracks with their walls and quadrangles and guardrooms)…

In these middle stanzas, the poetry's experience of the shockwaves occurs. The troubling matter of death, the simple fact that my mother doesn't 'mind' anymore, and will never mind again, generates a kind of panic, a fluster, a desire to create. The ego of the poetry is threatened:

I write a tower upon the plain
you don't mind, you don't mind.
I write a tower upon the plain,
I mind, I don't mind.

Around the tower is emptiness,
the call of space, the wind and clouds —
you don't mind, you don't mind.
I mind, I write, anything, I don't mind.

The poetry oscillates, switching on and off, minding, not minding. The ego, the 'I' – that 'poor little tower' – is figured as a kind of Babel. Towers of course figure strongly in literature – one of my favourite poems is Browning's Childe Roland, with its ominous and mysterious tower, a nexus of psychological distress and attractive disaster. In Der Turmbau, the 'I' flickers on and off, makes sense and nonsense, sense and nonsense. Meaning makes the 'I' visible – conspicuous. Until language (in this case, poetry) creates meaning, the meaning does not exist. Once (in Der Turmbau's configuration of things) meaning is raised, it stands out; but it is also razed, and erased, simultaneously. Emptiness – here, 'emptiness' is the end of meaning, the zone without understanding, the unspeakable, the universe beyond the Word – is the ground upon which the tower is thrown up; it is the possibility of meaning, and the thing which terrorises meaning:

Poor little meaning, poor little tower,
anything, space, the wind and clouds, I mind
you don't mind. I am such
a little man, the emptiness is wheatbelt, Iowa, Ukraine,
the emptiness of the plain, I write
and the words go standing with just a little shadow:
the clouds go over it, and the wind blows through it,
standing isolated upon the plain,
that poor, physical, conspicuous little thing
with the emptiness full of skies around it,
wheatbelt, Iowa, Ukraine —
you don't mind, you don't mind, you don't mind.

Little fields of Iowa, little Kiev, little Jesus Green,
frost on open spaces, a toy Ukraine,
I write what I mean to be,
trouble whirling through the stillness,
a column of dust and a yapping dog,
I write what I mean to be:
the word is full of skies,
and the skies are empty.

These are paradoxical reaches of work – the poetry encounters a terrain where an emptiness is full (of skies). But the poet, in a ragtag, ramshackle way tries to (or perhaps, inevitably must) respond by building, by constructing meaning – by attempting to rebuild the Tower of Babel. 'I write what I mean to be' is a philosophical firecracker, but the poet sees himself as 'a column of dust' – which is a sharp, allusory contraction: the 'I', that columnar letter so fraught with significance and insignificance, is of dust – and I believe that the image involves the red dust from which God created Adam, the dust of humanity, and the dust of the Tower of Babel, simultaneously rising and falling, creating and destroying, understanding and failing to understand…

After these rather formidable semantic oscillations, these contractions and expansions, the poetry reaches a more stable phase. Then, in a much calmer way, the figure of the fall of the Tower of Babel is restated:

The fall seems constant, with a soft roar,
and only an Usher or a Russian might notice it.
It was the term for 'water' in Japanese —
the word for 'telecommunications' in Urdu —
and the Blue Guides and Ladybird books,
Kierkegaard and the Koran,
crushing and grinding, the whole thing
toppling towards a ground
as strange as Rumpelstiltskin's eyelashes
or scented like a strand
of Rapunzel's auric, waterfallen hair.

This gathers together some of the figural elements of Der Turmbau – the texts mentioned are meant to be emblematic: practical guides, books for children, philosophy, a great religious text – are seen almost like bricks in the Tower, which is falling. The references to 'only an Usher or a Russian' are in the first case to a character in the Edgar Allen Poe story, The Fall of the House of Usher, where (if I remember rightly) the protagonist possessed hyperdelicate senses; the second case, the 'Russian', is Aleksandr Blok, who spoke of hearing the roar of the Russian revolution (before it actually occurred), and who seems to have possessed Usher-like sensitivity, particularly to sound.

The poetry, having witnessed (as it were) its own central metaphor, moves towards its conclusion, passing through memories and reflections upon some of the issues I've already discussed.

Der Turmbau zu Babel ends with a series of ringing, trumpet-like final stanzas, most of them single-line stanzas. The final line ('Because everyone must be forgotten') is a kind of radical adaption of, or response to, a line of Auden's ('For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?') which ends Night Mail.

The line which initiates this final movement is 'I want to say your name to the morning'. I cannot say for certain, but I believe this was the first line of the poem to come to me, possibly as I was walking over either Jesus Green or Midsummer Common (this is my memory of it, but it simply can't be verified, and may be an artefact of the poem itself).

Who can say really where a poem begins? Or speak of a moment of genesis? We can believe in key moments, but life is so very subtle, and recedes before us without any moment where it locks into a final position. I like to think that the first line of Der Turmbau came to me as I was walking across a common in Cambridge, in 1992 or some point around that time. But is that line the real genesis of the poem? Der Turmbau itself treats of childhood, of learning alphabets, and being taught language. The poem also promises:

I'll make poems of bulrushes, green cradles
drifting on a voice of waters,
as intimate and internal
as the small
boat of a womb

– and one can suggest that the genesis of Der Turmbau lay in that small boat, or indeed, at any point further back along the great genetic stream of humanity… I think that, for me, the truth is that all origins are to be found in the poetic element, 'the voice of waters' – the word poem derives from the Greek for 'make, create'.

[1] There is a Buddhist quote: 'the opening of flowers is the occurrence of the world' – I believe that the opening of words is the occurrence of meaning (which is the world for human beings)…

[2] I believe human beings are essentially creative – in other words, we are not first human beings, and then create, but rather that to be a human being is creation itself. [The recent poem, Constructed, (which I hope to make available on this site at a later date) is in part concerned with this understanding of things.]
Because we create our world, it follows that the world is not obtainable as an object. There is no 'Nature' which is semantically chaste. The world is not separate from us. There is no semantic hiatus after which an objective world begins. For human beings, the world occurs as human beings…

Well, this is not the place for a systematic discussion of philosophy – even if I were capable of such a discussion. But it may be useful to readers interested in the philosophy of poetry if I just add here that I see human beings as founded upon possibility – i.e., as creatures who may change their world, radically, at any instant – and they are founded upon possibility because they are founded upon meaning. Meaning is never definite: it is always only possible. Meaning is, in the current terminology, indeterminate – meaning never settles, it is endlessly creating, it cannot be verified, and it will not cease until humanity ceases.

Poetry, for me, is the ultimate locus of meaning, the condition in which meaning is most liberated and most dynamic: poetry is the pride of meaning. When human beings occur as poetry, they occur more purely as human beings (in my evaluation of humanity), as liquid matrices of possibility, with their own semantic potential intensified and realised as a kind of alertness; they are semantically open, not closed. In poetry, there is liberty – a liberty which is experiential, realistic, and in which anyone may grow to see themselves as they are: unprecedented, generous and fundamental to the world.

[3] Towards the end of his life, on being asked why he no longer wrote poetry, Blok responded, tragically, with: 'There are no sounds anymore. Can't you hear? There are no sounds' – a comment not merely upon his own immediate situation, but (I believe) on the chaos into which Russia was descending at that time, the moral disaster, a spiritual Babel where, for Blok, the possibility of sound (and therefore of poetry, of course) was ceasing, and meaning was no longer really meaning, but a decadent simulacrum of meaning, the political charade of meaning… Blok, I believe, depressed and ill as he was at this time, experienced the end of meaning, the cessation of genuine semantic activity – an atrocious event for anyone, but for a poet, almost unbearably poignant…

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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