(W.B. to his nurse, London, circa 2002)

How beautiful if curved lines were formed within & on
a plate of rare design, of zinc - and at the touch of notes
made patternings of clear inner sound - in musics of light, or fire scripts
each sound a master letter, written out in luminous fire
each inner linkage of a word and script made visible –
and if we spoke as writing, our thoughts already words ...
          ah, then we'd know
                    how thoughts became these words
or those.
               "The Towel of Babel."
               A child goes goo-gaa:
                                             learns to recognise
and learns to blame another (copying her mother). Language
measures out the whole nine yards
                                                of wool
whose kitten trail we might have wished to follow
once, so long ago, only to realize it had
no destination
                    & even the guilty kitten had wandered off
leaving us to consider … what?
Language has its semiotic and mimetic aspect
                                           yet the organ of our speech
the mind, made letters for its voice, the letter speaks,
its word and marks are one, the patterns of its sound are
electricity, red-current-sparks fired along the axon to trip the waves
of sound: and this device, this glowing plate I speak of
                          mechanysical machine –
well, maybe it could help us find our natural script.

Hah! Hah!
             No more of strangled syntax sweated out
between ruled lines, but everywhere! the all, all one!
                                                                 Why,
was not the whole creation uttered into being by God?
             were not these written marks
                          bound up with the Word
which made us all, we animals who use speech? One lovely word
containing all, all generals and particulars of drawings, paintings,
sculptures, buildings out of granite buildings
moulded out of air
                          clogging up my memory
as those wooden shoes that workers used to wear, sabots,
were to derail the locomotive of history ... or not, I fear.
                                                                 Where was I?
Ah yes! That this machine would fuse each sound to script
as raggedly precise as halves of broken eggshells joined
as opposites are one, are deeply true - each particle of thought its negative ion –
for it's well known by now (by me) that written language
grew out of this celestial notation
of melodies, of the divine –
                                      I'm right, I'm right.
                          It doesn't come from us, you know
            but from the angels floating out of reach. I mean.
I mean.
            Just listen to the poverty of speech.

*

Which leads me to a further thought, affinities we share, I trust
(you follow?) as the sun and moon are paired, as Romanticism
bears its traces of the baroque.
                                    Let me explain! I can,
if you'll allow me to digress and repossess my way.
Ah yes. It all comes back to the symbol, cher image
(a memento mori)
which is only a form of writing, after all, if you're a symbolist,
whose meaning can be summarised in words
            just as for the medieval allegorists
                                                images were signatures,
mere monograms of essence, not the thing itself
in a masquerade mask; and, at the same time, the written script,
the actual black of the words was not subordinate,
not cast away like dross
once fire images were forged in the reader's mind
but absorbed, along with the freight they bore, the very patterned shape
            and hence the great love, the great pains they took
with type
and the look of a page.                         Simple stuff, really:

            Our own chaste love would be expressed by swans
their base Venusian couplings by graveyard crows.
            They really scored it into you,
they gouged it into your brain!
Inscription, image – the whole double-bind of Christianity,
the triple bind, if you allow the incantations
as they did
                (fill up my water glass, if you would, I grow a little muddy).
Suffice it to say their view of the relations
of script and speech
                        was complex, divinely underwritten –
fully comp, I mean, not merely against fire and theft
or accidental damage to another's soul. Indeed, indeed
not only does their whole philosophy rest on this
their inconsistencies
                        are a cut of the same water.
                                                What are they? What?
I'll continue till they become apparent, if it please you.
            Meanwhile, I'm back to the romantics, and whatever it was
they owed to the Baroque –
                                    Oh and how's the PhD?
Still going? Good.
Don't bother with my stuff, I've been done.
                                    And please stop taking notes, it throws me.
Your memory's so much sharper, dear, than mine, let alone
that of the average allegorist – fables were for simpletons, after all,
those who can't remember facts or arguments: all those for whom
no proof is sweeter than a pudding with a child's leg in it –
            Ah! you're so pretty, dusky too;
            you'll get the job I never did, I know it.
Oh please! there's no need to run off in a huff!
                        Where was I …
… hmm, yes, on those picture poems they revell'd in.
Didn't they contain, in essence
the idea that changing line-lengths
                                    imitating organic form
would also yield the rise and fall of speech? Especially in your great poet
Coleridge, who also thought quite natural storms
could be materialisations
of cosmic reverberations.
                                    Only John Donne, it seems, has held
trepidation of the spheres to be quite innocent. Goethe?
Schmerter!
Yes, I know, it all came back in him, or never went away,
that classical sense of the interconnectedness of higher and lower forms
(guess where we were placed!)
and of being's intractable Granny knot –
which even the blockhead emperor, Marcus Aurelius
fancied he could unravel, unpick it in his tent at night
in fumbled Greek - and off to slay a few Sarmatians
after light nocturnal anguish
(how that centurion's armpits stank)
after breakfasting on honey.
                                    Let's hope this honeycomb of mine
establishes an indissoluble link
between the verbal and visual
                                    manifestations
                        of the baroque –
its teeny-bop horror shows, that clunky mix of metres
jammed together in those naff old German plays
            that had to be set up fifty ways
whose high and low were oft chained up in clink,
(not often changing places though)
whose Jesus walked in carrying a great armful of bones
angel faces turned deathsheads, rosy cheeks urn-grey.

 

*

You like this stuff? Because of your tender years no doubt.
          Even your sex might fit you for consideration
of the body in its non-purified aspect, its frangibility, its stench,
its death-like sheddings. Oh, and don't tell me again
I'm in good shape for my age – let's keep it light, my sweet –
but I expect you'd like the way they cut the body up
and made it weep
                    and seep
so openly with blood – it was because they hated it
they thought it necessary to sacralize it thus –
by dismemberment made fitter than as a living whole
as which sensuous entity it can be no symbol but itself
          whereas once they had it in bits
they pulled the sacred from the profane
like a rabbit from a black top hat. In those vivid, nasty
emblem books the charnel house remains
became a floating box of severed symbols
whose true meaning was revealed, as written and ordained,
in fragments
                 somewhat like the clues
in a plotless pseudo-antiquarian detective book
some gallery of stumps and stars
                                        I wouldn't be seen dead in.

The emblematists too had a penchant for clichés,
yes, in the Tragic Dramatists
                              there's a certain torsion
from lashing up the borrowed bits and bobs.
                                                  Dealers of death-cards.
For whom the glory of your hair would signify
your many and varied thoughts, my dear
your fine head, your breasts, your large ribcage
your magnanimity and courage, those magnificent hindquarters
your strength, your rage, your lion's roar –
                                                  I daresay
they would sooner celebrate the chastity of Agatha.
Her undecayed birth-member in the grave – only
martyrdom could fit a female body to be emblematic
          their physical pain was useful grist to a plot-mill.
Agatha carried her breasts in on a tray
                                        thus became
patron saint of bell ringers, clochards
                                                & bakers of small round loaves.
Those jokers viewed the mind-body split as absolute. Rene
Descartes dualism
as baroque as his stolen thought was antique –
and anything like a theory of the passions
has a stinging smack of the medieval mind
whose spirit is always drifting upwards
while physical bodies stay home & sweat their lice.
So.
For the dramatist of the baroque, a torturer yields
a firmer base for audience emotion
than Aristotle's tragic conflicts, added to which,
          they obviously liked to watch –
compared to rape, dismemberment
                                        & flaying women's flesh
arousing fear & pity in respect of a toff's tough break
was chancy business at the late medieval kiosk.
Then as now, I think you'd find it so
                                        if not I won't quarrel.

          But once you had a corpse to play with
the fun of allegorisation could begin. Off a king in the first five minutes
then you've got something.
                              Oh. I sound like him?
Sorry, sorry. That definitely, definitely won't happen again.
          Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, yes?
Allegorisation can only be carried through in respect of a corpse.
Characters die in order to enter
the world
of allegory: it's transparent.
                                     Your immortality's a bagatelle, my sweet,
                                                  my little bag of chocolate fudge –
compared to your value as dead meat.

*