INSTRUCTING MANUEL

Thank you in selecting that device for years, of not troubled, and peace—minded usage, in the office or house or equal hygienic proofed (is recommended) places.


Instantiating:

1) Simplicity re- attach part labeled (1) along part labeled between ‘ankle L shew’ (see list of objects in page 2 of this pamph let) (see diagram pages in page 3 of this pamph let) and ‘between ankle R shrew’ (see list of objects in page 2 of this pamph let) (see diagram pages, in page 3 of this pamph let) keen one’s wrists past the fetlock-foam to trowel L (nominated L) and Right (nominted Right);

2) Sat down to your chair, doff recalcitrate your shoes and encourage the button ’ SLUICE ’ (see page 2 of this pamph let)

3. Dail on the left of that device is for the infreqeunt usage to be tended and Never arrived to ‘dozen’ (12).

FOOTAGE WHICH IT WOULD BE LOVELY TO TRACK DOWN SOMEHOW

1. There's a set of clips in an old documentary on the pyramids of Giza -- I forget its name -- cut from an interview with I. E. S. Edwards, a well-respected Egyptologist who died in 1996. His The Pyramids of Egypt was a favourite book of mine as a child, full of gentle awe and restrained wonder, and to see and hear the man talk was a joy. He was round-faced, old, white-haired, at this point, sat comfortably in a comfortable chair in a comfortable, book-lined room, in a position which made him seem neckless without being particularly overweight. His voice was delicate, without a trace of the Welshness I was expecting from someone called Iowerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards, slightly crumbly and croaky, ever so posh. The programme strays into the territory of people like Robert Bauval, a "pyramidologist", a probably self-coined term for practitioners of a more fanciful realm of totemic theorizing and pseudoscience, understandably viewed with an amount of distrust and scorn by Edwards and his rigorously academic cohorts. The sight and sounds of Edwards, during this interview, mentioning that these people are sometimes referred to among the academic Egyptology community as "pyramidiots", chuckling at it, and then struggling to continue, just because of how amusing he clearly finds this quiet pun, is one of the most delightful things I've seen on television.

2. Along similar lines, there's another documentary I remember on the Nazca lines, which also treads the dodgy path between rigorous anthropological (and, here, mathematical) study, and the slightly batshit work of people like Erik von Daniken, who published about a million books asserting that the enormous trapezoids on the flatlands of the Pampas were constructed as landing strips for alien crafts. There's was a fascinating woman, Maria Reiche, a German mathematician who ended up spending the last few decades of her life living on these flatlands, studying the geometries of the various shapes there, and campaigning to keep them protected (from human intervention, not from weather -- thousands of years have passed and the trapezoids, lines and pictures have remained unaffected by the latter). There are small clips of archive footage featuring Reiche herself, staggering across the flatlands; or sat in her small hut, wizened into resembling an actual Nazca shrunken head, or a figure painted on pottery from the period referred to as "Nazca 5" (stylistically more gruesome, grizzled, warlike, due possibly to severe drought), poring over unimaginably complex mappings of an unimaginably sophisticated, still-unexplained system of markings from thousands of years ago.

3. Yet another documentary, which I actually remember the name of -- basically any scene from Rannoch The Red Deer, which followed either the whole life, or the final year in the life of, this beast in Scotland. Every scene was gorgeous.

4. The Rotten World About Us was a fascinating and genuinely perturbing documentary on fungi, which must have been repeated a few times since it was apparently made six years before I was born; I've definitely seen it, though. Most of it is incredible, but the clip I really want to find somewhere is time-lapse footage of the 'Octopus Stinkhorn', Clathrus archeri, expanding from its egg into its full form, which presumably takes a few hours. Speeded up it's like the hand of some angered Moloch, springing out of the earth and hooking his way out of hell. Over Christmas, actually, I discovered it's amusing to get extremely drunk on whisky, do a google image search for these organisms, and stare at the page, convincing yourself that every one is the Devil incarnate; not a part, but each one the whole, containing every conceivable threat and warning in solution. Remarkably easy to do, and really quite frightening.

5. Slightly more cheerfully, Les Dawson did one particular performance of his "blowing out the candle" joke which I think's funnier than all the others I've seen, and typically it's none of those which are online.

6. Kenny Everett strides onto a stage covered in scaffolding with green and yellow lights strangely placed, and what looks like dissipating smoke from a special-effects explosion. He's wearing a torn tartan kilt, I think, and a tartan beret which he keeps adjusting. "Hello. I'm Barbara Cartland, and you're all under arrest. I'd like to read you an extract from my latest romantic novel. When Lady Penelope swoons, her bosoms pop out like balloons. The butler stands by with a gleam in his eye, and pops them back in with warm spoons." It's fucking brilliant.

SOUNDS LIKE RAIN

Bacon frying. Sustained applause in a school hall. Seven hundred games of Kerplunk being lost. A basmati spillage on a slack kettledrum. A high-ceilinged warehouse of underpaid pistachio-shellers. Esther Ofarim shaving Abi’s back. Whatever mechanism it was that powered the organ in St. Michael The Archangel Church in Alcombe. An amplified anthill. A hundred or so fruiting bodies of the coprophilous gasteromycete Sphaerobolus stellatus, launching their spore-filled projectiles across Fuller’s laboratory in the thirties; one, apparently, hit his ceiling. As few as four gulls walking across a perspex roof. Dan’s friend Ewan running his double-bass bow through his hair again. A stadium of damp football rattles. The thoughts of a greyhound being dumped. A Besson B-flat piston-valve euphonium full of warm spit. Brown noise, apparently. A chevron-painter in Herefordshire stopping for a sandwich. Eight thousand eggboxes flashmobbing at Kilburn tube. When the stylus skips too far and your turntable starts ‘playing’ the paper label.

The steady pink-pink-pink of a can of Coke Zero that was opened at least an hour ago and has been standing forgotten ever since, while through the oblong window Bruno Lawrence wrestles with the theology and identity politics of finding oneself to be the last man on Earth. The tidal susurrations of all twenty-seven checkouts at ASDA in full service as twenty-seven trolleys are unloaded by the fistful and a further twenty-seven are re-loaded by PVC sacks that sort of hold uniquely unstable arrangements of carefully selected groceries and household goods. Thirty-nine handheld air guns connected by semiopaque tubing to a suspended array of 3/4" pipework in the two minutes or so after the hydrovane compressor is powered down for the weekend. Drumming steadily with fingers on the mattress and one's ear laid on it, stifling pillows pushed away, feeling the sheet creak against the thirteen-year-old ear, cool and smooth, pressing back, much like Antony's chest had felt in the stillness of the afternoon just gone, not having dared to push any further, but now in the certain night, there where he was not.

Sealing Wax

Tad hated wearing his seatbelt. Its purpose never seemed to sink in for more than a few seconds. The people who ran the minibus had stuck four A4 sheets near his seat (the one on its own, at the back), all of them saying, in large Arial, "SEATBELTS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES!". These were completely ineffectual, and he'd unbuckle himself as soon as he thought nobody was looking; if hindered in this, he might get slightly aggressive, and start jabbing at things with his stick. You were never sure whether he was genuinely forgetting, or was selectively doing so becuase he did, after all, forget everything else, and thought it might go unnoticed. He was ninety-eight, and these trips on the minibus were really the only occasions in any given week on which he left his house, despite his energy and general good health. He could probably have outrun you only a year or two ago, you thought. Certainly his dexterity with a safety buckle was extraordinary.

Ivy, who sat in the seat across, was less well; she was over ten years Tad's junior, but looked like a drawing of Silas Marner, giving "the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube". She was tiny, hunched. Her favourite phrase was "bugger, bugger, bugger!", a catch-all expression of good-humoured but deeply-felt annoyance, usually at her body's inability to move at the speed of her mind.

Occasionally, with Tad, there would be a brief moment of clarity. You vividly remember, once, noticing him staring at Julie, who brought the Kenco and the PG Tips, for an oddly long time, and not at all vacantly. He had suddenly turned to you, saying, "she's a kindly soul, she is. Such an unmagnificent lady, but I don't altogether think it will matter."

On one occasion, the first morning you met him, he developed a sudden sprightliness of manner — oddly, posturing himself deliberately more decrepit-looking; more compact, stooped — and, twinkling, he leaned conspiratorially over, and said: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...

Then he tailed off. He would, always, tail off. You realised, or were told, that this was something he did every day, often more than once. There would be a pause, and he would tell you where he first heard the poem. He was about ten — "no, nine", he'd say, "and ten months", slightly irritated — and his father had taken him and his family up to Landacre Bridge, on Exmoor, for a picnic. He told you the course of the river Barle, and described in detail the stonework around the five arches of this bridge. They had crossed the river and walked to Cow Castle, a large Iron Age fort on a steep hill. They'd clambered down the other side and swum in a pool; a stiller, wider part of the Barle — you can't remember its name now — and then had sat on the side. You later recalled, though you weren't quite sure why, Nell, struggling to remenisce about a springtime rowing trip to Lake Como, in Samuel Beckett's Endgame: "It was deep, deep. And you could see down to the bottom. So white. So clean."

Tad and his family had walked back over Cow's Castle, back to Landacre Bridge; and they had scraped the insides from reeds and rolled them into small off-white balls, or wrapped them round the thumb-tip and pulled them tightly, so that the seedheads flew off. They'd eaten sandwiches. And Tad's uncle, scouring the riverside for good skimmers, had looked up at him, saying: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...

And then, Tad's whole face, from the chin to the scalp, and beyond, into his ears, would break into a bright, glowing smile, and he marked each weighted syllable with a bouncing index finger in the air, as he recited: ... of cabbages— and kings! ...

"No," after a pause, he'd say. "No, thats's not right. There's another bit. Something comes in between."

The first time you met him was the first time you'd heard the poem, so you couldn't help. But he could never remember what it was that came in between, however many times he told the story. Once people caught on, it became a great game, particularly for Ivy. He'd lean over and tap her on the shoulder. "What is it, Ivy?"

"Ooh, I don't know, Tad. It's all a bit higgledy-piggledy in here, now." And she tapped herself on the forehead, giving a knowing grin to somebody nearby. She could recite more than this line; you later discovered she had the entire poem committed to memory. "Is it clogs, is it? Something to do with dancing, or— or walking? Like a walking stick, or a pair of shoes."

Tad would clap his hands together, and keep them together, tilting his head toward her: "Shoes! To talk of many things. Of shoes... of shoes, and..."

Sometimes, he would remember ships on his own; sometimes it would take a further twenty minutes of steering and easing from Ivy. Twenty minutes, at the lower end, deliberately so. Ivy dragged it out as long as possible; she'd figured out that remembering this line, the one thing he could never do, was just about his favourite thing to try to do, even while he weakly feigned grumpiness about it. Sometimes he would be skirting near the word ships (or shoes, or sealing wax, depending on the day's progress); and sometimes, he would even suggest it and then discount it: it was somehow a blind spot, like the signs about the seatbelts, something he simply wouldn't or couldn't see.

—

You felt he was right about Julie having no magnificence to her. The fourth time you met him, he was telling the story again, this time to an old lady from Alcombe called Jean. You saw Julie roll her eyes, entirely affectionately, and without a hint of any real exasperation (this was reserved for the seatbelts; Julie had, as she often said, "done health and safety"); and when Tad reached the inevitable stumbling block in the story, she bumbled over. "Oh, come on love. You always remember in the end! You've told it so many times I know it myself now!". She plucked a piece of paper from her pocket, and wrote in biro, in block capitals:

SHOES AND SHIPS, AND SEALING WAX

"There. You keep that," she smiled.

Tad had thanked her, full of genuine delight as ever to have recalled the line, and she taped it up on the back of the seat in front of him, moving a notice slightly to the right to do so. Whether or not he'd have taken it in or not, or even noticed it at all, didn't really matter: within a few minutes he'd forgotten all about his story and was gambolling out of the bus; it had arrived at a layby near Dunkery Beacon, highest point on Exmoor, and it was time for morning tea or coffee. Tad had mumbled something about custard creams.

Ivy mumbled something to the contrary, also about custard creams. She frowned, pursed her lips, took down Julie's note as delicately as she could, and put it, screwed up, into her pocket.

1. Landacre Bridge, photograph by Catherine W. Barnes, in
Snell, F. J., The Blackmore Country (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911);
2. Cow Castle, photograph by Keith Stuart;
3. North Hill, Minehead beach, and Blue Anchor Bay, seen from near Dunkery Beacon

Taped over (1)

I've been reading Dr Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After The Bomb again. That world or this one, I don't care which, but today I want to be in Marin County in the afternoon, where I can walk or bicycle to the coast or even drive, and stop, looking out over the bay at San Francisco, and know that I don't have to go there unless I feel like it, and that I probably don't, and will therefore find something else to do.

From the undergrowth, a viridian crab might scutter out across the chalky-white ground, a piece of green cheese held aloft in its left claw, to be followed minutes later by a dogged pursuer, wheezing mechanically from its motor and servos, casting with a long gooseneck antenna for the wake of its intended. Trundling along anyway, happily aware of the warmth of the winter sun and the sounds from the sea, if it has the capacity, and let us believe that it does...

One point on a map exchanges places with another.

A
"Good morning, and how did you find yourself this morning?"

B
"Well, I just rolled back the sheets, and there I was."

Echo Unvisited

INTERLOCUTER B: In his bedroom he’s got (.) he’s got this (0.2) a CD (.) it’s a stereo really (0.5) in the shape of a (.) of a jukebox and a (0.8) on the wa:ll there’s a err there’s this clock and it’s a an electric gu(h)itar (laughter)
INTERLOCUTER A: [Yeah?
INTERLOCUTER B: [it’s like yeah it’s like that game they play on the radio (.) only (.) you know (laughs) only it’s one thing in the shape of another.

There are those that we cannot love, those that we will not love – the unloved and unlovely. Upon such things, let us for a moment dwell. My intention first of all is to draw to mind a common scene, a British high street in the early part of the twenty-first century. It is important that you try to picture the thing I’m describing here, the herringbone bricks of pedestrianization buckled by two decades of wear; seasonally-blighted hanging baskets mounted from lamp-posts at intervals along the street. This is not London, though it might be; this is not any of the major cities, though it might be one of those equally. It is common, it is everystreet, but it is best depicted in the provinces where scale and ambition are smaller.

We have, let us say, an old Savoy Picture House on a corner: white Portland stone with statuary of Thalia and Melpomène dancing on the roof-top. It has been converted into a McDonalds restaurant since 1986. We have, let us say, a large neo-Georgian post office of the early ’30s; groaning and impressive and serving as an outlet of Argos. Banks scuttle the length of the street like apologetic hermit crabs in the vast shells of interestingly named Victorian banks long since swallowed up and forgotten about. There is a shoe-shop, probably, it may have closed; a travel-agents, ditto; a 1960’s Woolworths building now occupied by a shop that sells toilet brushes and dog food for under a pound. All of this is there, and for the most part unlovely, but it is not what I want you to look at.

Between two of these buildings there is another; it is hard to tell you what it is, it might be anything. For the purposes of our imagining though, let’s think of it as a former TSB or an Early Learning Centre. It is a small building, just a shop front and a storey above. It was built in the mid 1980s or early 1990s in a style that is probably best described as Provincial Post Modernism, though we will not call it that. We will not call it that, because I think what this building amounts to is a process common to all architecture, indeed to all artifice. Labelling its style would pin it down to an idea separate to its individual qualities, and in degrees both elevate and diminish it. I do not want us to dismiss this building, no matter how ordinary or unloved it might be to us. It is as worthy of our attention any piece of poetry or art:

Be Yarrow Stream unseen, unknown!
It must, or we shall rue it:
We have a vision of our own;
Ah! Why should we undo it?
The treasured dreams of times long past
We’ll keep them, winsome Marrow!
For when we’re there although ’tis fair
’Twill be another Yarrow!

It would be simplest for me to give you a picture of the kind of building I mean. A photograph could be found somewhere on the internet, and linked to, and you would know instantly what sort of thing I am talking about. I am not going to do that. I am not going to do so because I trust the argument given by Wordsworth in the passage above, which is a stanza from his poem ‘Yarrow Unvisited’. The poem, composed during the poet’s tour of Scotland in 1803, imagines a visit to the Yarrow Water, the river that ran beside Walter Scott’s house Abbotsford much detailed in his writing. Wordsworth did not visit the Yarrow that year, and would not do so for another decade. Dorothy noted at the time that they ‘debated concerning it, but came to the conclusion of reserving the pleasure for some future time’, and so the visit was not undertaken and it is not in the poem either.

Indeed, ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ is a poem about the process of picturing a thing before it is seen: ‘We have a vision of our own; / Ah! Why should we undo it?’ is the question at the heart of the matter. The image of the river is present and possessed at the point when it is still ‘unseen’; a point stressed in the possessive words ‘have’ and ‘own’ in the third line of the stanza. Yarrow ‘unseen’ belongs to Wordsworth in a way that the seen river would not. It is the discrepancy between these notions of seeing and possession that are crucial in the poem; how can we own the thing we have not seen? How can we not?

The form of Wordsworth’s poem, based upon a 1701 broadside ballad Leader-haughs and Yarow, reflects this issue. The first, third, fifth and seventh lines of the stanza are written in iambic tetrameter; the alternate lines in trimeter with a hypercatalectic – an extra syllable added to the line’s final foot. The effect of this is an alternating scheme of masculine and feminine rhymes – the first and third lines rhyme on their final syllable ‘known’ and ‘own’, but the second and fourth also rhyme on their penultimate: ‘rue it’ and ‘do it’. Modern readers might note of the alternating masculine and feminine rhymes a similarity to Betjeman’s poem ‘Youth and Age on Beaulieu Water’ (1945), and perhaps the effect of it in both poems is to replicate the waves and movement of water. This might be the case, but there is more happening in that form.

What we must look at is how Wordsworth views the river which ‘we have’ despite not having visited it; it is ‘unseen, unknown’. What these terms suggest is not simply negation but also reversal. Firstly, they are negatives suggesting that in the present the river has not yet been seen or known; seeing and knowing are what might only exist in the future. However, the use of the word ‘undo’ in the fourth line prompts us towards another reading; to ‘undo’ is quite a different thing, a reversal of an act that has already been carried out. We can only ‘undo’ that which has been done; in the same way, we might read the first line of this stanza to mean that we can only ‘unsee’ that which has been seen, ‘unknow’ that which has been known. We assume of the alternate lines that they are written in trimeter with an extra syllable added; but equally they might be tetrameter with the final dipody cut short. These lines, put plainly might be ‘undone’.

The act of imagining is the primary instinct in the poem. To go to and look at the river would not be to ‘see’ it; for in doing so we would find it to ‘be another Yarrow’ a thing different from our own(ed) version. To fill in the ‘missing’ syllables of the alternate lines, would render it another poem. Our lack is our strength here; we own best that which we do not have and must thereby imagine.

And so, I do not want you to look at the building in the High Street, I want you instead to see it. It is, as I have already stated a small building. It is built out of brick; not simply brick but bricks of different colours; the main body is a yellow brick, around its shop front are two blank-faced pilasters of red. Beneath the two oblong windows of the first storey are panels of a greyish, bluish brick. The building is symmetrical. It rises to a brick pediment that houses a small, circular window. This is not a real window – there is not a room behind it – merely a network of pipes insulated with silver foil, though you cannot see this for the ‘window’ is glazed with opaque black glass. The window frames are red. I think they are red. They are red, or blue, or possibly green. They are probably a primary colour. The pediment is topped with a composite stone, a little like sandstone in colour. You can see the joins of mortar between each slab; these provide a rich habitat for moss. A ball tops the pediment, a globe if you will, a little larger than a football made in the same composite stone.

Can you see it yet? I really want you to try to.

Two oblong windows in the same primary-coloured UPVC frames occupy the first storey. In both, the glass is divided into four panes; behind which there is a halogen-lit office which may, or may not, be connected to the shop beneath.

On the face of it, it is not a very interesting building; it is less showy than the Savoy Picture House and meagre in its proportions against the impressive post-office building. If buildings expose the preoccupations of the age they were built in, then this building – squat, simplistic, cheap – gives a grim insight into the last two decades that may have built it. But see it; really take in what it is about. These buildings – up and down the country, infill in streets of greater structures – wants to be something else, something better.

Look at the out-of-town supermarkets of the same period; structures not constrained by space or finance in the same way as this pitiful structure. These sprawling edifices to Mammon, do not want to look like places where you buy nappies and diet coke in bulk. They decorate themselves with long external arched colonnades, pitched rooves, a clock tower perhaps, a weathervane or two. They desire to be the old market-halls of England made large, made comprehensive. They want us to look at them and feel those same warm feelings of love that we get when we find ourselves unexpectedly in country market towns. Only we do not love these supermarket buildings; we barely think of what they look like, we often hate their intention in the first place.

The intent of our 1980’s high street building however is surely less objectionable. It cannot be claimed that it is ‘killing the high street’ in the way that the supermarket might, because it is contributing to it. Yet we still do not warm to it, we do not want to love it. Our grounds for this are predominantly aesthetic; we do not take it seriously, we don’t think it deserves our love. To a degree, it is engaged in the same false nostalgia as the supermarket; only its reference points are other high-street buildings. Its pediment, roundel, globe, all point towards it wanting to be something grander, something Palladian, but it doesn’t really look anything like. Perhaps we do not like it because we think this nostalgia is ‘fakery’; yet all its neighbours in the street are also historical shams.

Our building occupies a shape. It is the shape of some other building. In silhouette, it might not differ greatly from a Georgian house, but in detail it is something other. This is the great difference between it and the 1930’s post-office. The post-office attempts to mimic a Georgian building in its dressing: fanlights, steps up to the door, big brass knobs. It hopes that we might look at it and not consider that it is not a Georgian building, though perversely where it differs most is in its scale. It performs mimicry of style and embellishment, and we take it seriously as such. Our 1980’s building merely echoes shape; and our response is somewhat different.

A few years ago, I taught John Hollander’s poem ‘Swan and Shadow’ to a group of undergraduates. These students, eager to succeed, were honed to seek out and analyse “serious literature”. They had fallen under a common misapprehension that their task in hand – their task in studying, their task in life – was to identify things that were “good” and things that were “bad”. “Samuel Beckett is a good writer”, “Tom Clancy is a bad writer”, “William Blake is a good writer”, “Shakespeare is an overrated writer”; these are the kinds of things you hear. They are meaningless statements, easily totted out, and utterly irrelevant. Yet, I think because of the way formalised education directs us towards some things in favour of others it is common to develop a sense of value-judgement in this act.

The students, faced with Hollander for the first time, took it to be a joke; a test, perhaps – it was the Emperor’s new verse and I had put it in front of them to see if they would fall into the trap. “It’s just shaped like a swan,” they sniggered. They dismissed it as a novelty:

                              Dusk
                           Above the
                      water hang the
                                loud
                               flies
                               Here
                              O so
                             gray
                           then
                          What             A pale signal will appear
                         When         Soon before its shadow fades
                       Where       Here in this pool of opened eye
                       In us     No Upon us As at the very edges
                        of where we take shape in the dark air
                         this object bares its image awakening
                           ripples of recognition that will
                              brush darkness up into light
even after this bird this hour both drift by atop the perfect sad instant now
                              already passing out of sight
                           toward yet untroubled reflection
                         this image bears its object darkening
                        into memorial shades Scattered bits of
                       light     No of water Or something across
                       water       Breaking up No Being regathered
                        soon         Yet by then a swan will have
                         gone             Yes out of mind into what
                           vast
                             pale
                              hush
                               of a
                               place
                                past
                      sudden dark as
                           if a swan
                              sang

Of course, it is shaped like a swan, but that is not the end of it – there is a lot more to say. Firstly, it is shaped not ‘just’ like a swan as the student said, but as a swan and it’s reflection – or, as Hollander titles it ‘Swan and Shadow’. That’s fairly interesting in the first place because what we expect is not shadow, the blocking out of light, but – and this is what the poem seems to describe – the reflection of it. It mimics the shape of another thing, much in the same way that our 1980’s building seems to. Both have a recognisable outline, but this is not all; they have a discernable form unique to themselves. If we look at the poem, what we find is that it is not simply the outward shape of the poem that is reflected in the middle line, but indeed the metre – the number of syllables in each line is mirrored in its reflected counterpart.

Though we view the poem initially as a whole; our reading experience undertakes it in parts. Reading is a progression. When we begin a book or poem we cannot know what it is about until we have reached the end. Seeing, however, fools us into believing we can understand the whole in an instant. This is the fundamental error that we make in our dismissal of buildings, art, poetry of this kind, that we assume we can understand in a moment. We must take time to read the visual in the same way that we do with the literature that we take time to study. This is in a way what the poem is exploring.

As we read, we encounter the poem in stages allowing it to ‘take shape in the dark air’ of the page, to produce ‘ripples of recognition’ as we begin to see the thing we are really reading about. This is true of all reading not only Hollander’s ‘Swan and Shadow’, yet it is a common mistake particularly amongst English undergraduates to arrive at a text with a preconception of what it is saying. Indeed it is the error that Wordsworth has already befallen in picturing his Yarrow – knowing it, owning it – before he has visited the place for himself.

When we begin ‘Swan and Shadow’ we are not reading about a swan at all:

                              Dusk
                           Above the
                      water hang the
                                loud
                               flies

This is dusk; we are placed in the poem ‘above the water’ hanging in the air with the flies. This description of what is above the water ‘hangs’ there over the main body of the piece itself. Throughout the poem we find this. The ‘object bares its image’ only when the text has reached a point when it can begin to be recognised as a swan. Similarly it is ‘already passing out of sight’ at the point when the image has passed and is now becoming a reflection. The fulcrum to all of this is the final line of the water: ‘now’. It is the last moment at which we are able to look at the swan and not at the memory of it, but it is urgent because it is only in that moment, only when the swan is fully visible to us that we are really able to see it at all.

The poem is without punctuation. New sentences are implied by capital letters, and pauses occasionally seem to come at line endings. In other cases the poem’s enjambment encourages us to a continuous reading pattern. This uninterrupted movement creates for the reader both the impression of an image being assembled from ‘scattered bits of light’ or scattered words, but also the sense of the passing moment, the juncture in which something might be seen.

What Hollander’s poem explores is the process of seeing before an object is in sight, the moment at which it is seen, and the passing of it

                                              out of mind into what
                           vast
                             pale
                              hush
                               of a
                               place
                                past
                      sudden dark

The ‘pale hush [...] past sudden dark’ is strikingly beautiful. It is both the entry of it into memory and also death, a notion instilled by the final image of the bird’s swansong. Whereas the first half of the poem opens in the physical space of dusk above the water; its ending is in the mind:

                                  as
                           if a swan
                              sang

This movement from the physical to the mental image is much like that of Wordsworth’s trilogy of Yarrow poems. As discussed earlier, the first of these ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ (1803) concerns the mental expectation of sight, much like the first half of ‘Swan and Shadow’. The second, ‘Yarrow Visited’ (1814) is engaged with the moment of seeing first-hand ‘Thy genuine image, Yarrow’ much like the central part of Hollander’s poem. In the last of these, ‘Yarrow Revisited’ (1831) concerns the remembered image of the day.

I have not seen this noted elsewhere but Hollander’s poem surely relates to the Yarrow poems, its title being taken from ‘Yarrow Unvisited’:

Let Beeves and home-bred Kine partake
The sweets of Burn-mill meadow;
The Swan on still St. Mary’s Lake
Float double, Swan and Shadow!
We will not see them; will not go,
Today, nor yet tomorrow;
Enough if in our hearts we know,
There’s such a place as Yarrow.

Though Wordsworth states that ‘We will not see them; will not go’ in the poem, the bird and its double are already seen. Both the poet and the reader picture them floating on the lake, as the swan in ‘Swan and Shadow’ is imagined from its outline before we begin reading it. “I see–” Wordsworth writes in ‘Yarrow Visited’, “but not by sight alone, / Loved Yarrow” and this is the crucial point here, our experience of “seeing” and “loving” must exist beyond “sight alone” or else we deliver false reactions like: “It’s just shaped like a swan.”

It’s with that in mind that I want us to reconsider our 1980’s high street building, or indeed anything that we have dismissed as being unworthy of our attention. The student’s stumbling block with ‘Swan and Shadow’ was that they immediately saw the ‘object’ of the poem, and decided it was frippery; yet the outline form of it is crucial to what the poem is attempting to deliver. What we are looking at is not swan at all, but a collection of black marks that reflect the outline of the bird. Most artifice is a kind of reflection; a painting of a swan replicates its physical appearance, the 1930’s post office building attempts to mirror the architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Some reflections are more accurate than others, and here there is a distinction to be drawn between reflection and echo. Here in Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus’s fate of reflection is depicted with quite staggering detail:

He feedes a hope without cause why. For like a foolishe noddie
He thinkes the shadow that he sees, to be a liuely boddie.
Astraughted like an ymage made of Marble stone he lyes,
There gazing on his shadowe still with fixed staring eyes.
Stretcht all along vpon the ground, it doth him good to see
His ardant eyes which like two starres full bright and shyning bee.
And eke his fingars, fingars such as Bacchus might beseeme,
And haire that one might worthely Apollos haire it deeme.
His beardlesse chinne and yuorie necke, and eke the perfect grace
Of white and red indifferently bepainted in his face.
All these he woondreth to beholde, for which (as I doe gather)
Himselfe was to be woondred at, or to be pitied rather.
He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede.

The emphasis is placed upon the body parts, the ‘ardant eyes [...] like stars’, the ‘beardlesse chinne and yvorie necke’ produce in the poem a potently erotic image of the boy. Reflection is about detail, in the way that the post office copies accurately the Georgian fanlights it admires. Echo’s fate is different, she suffers because she is robbed of bodily form reduced to just a voice that resembles that which she admires:

Ay readie with attentiue eare she harkens for some sounde,
Whereto she might replie hir wordes, from which she is not bounde.
By chaunce the stripling being strayde from all his companie,
Sayde: is there any body nie? straight Echo answerde: I.
Amazde he castes his eye aside, and looketh round about,
And come (that all the Forrest roong) aloud he calleth out.
And come (sayth she:) he looketh backe, and seeing no man followe,
Why fliste, he cryeth once againe: and she the same doth hallowe,
He still persistes and wondring much what kinde of thing it was
From which that answering voyce by turne so duely seemde to passe,
Said: let vs ioyne. She (by hir will desirous to haue said,
In fayth with none more willingly at any time or stead)
Said: let vs ioyne.

Echo is without detail. What we read of her is only her responses to the words spoken by Narcissus. She is reduced to simple resemblance that we might mistake at first for something else, and as such is defined by her lack, the thing that she is not. In a sense this is the fate of our 1980’s building – it is a shape that resembles something, so we do not care to look at its detail. We think we already know it. Hollander in writing about Echo, notes that:

In the association of Echo with Narcissus, the profoundest relations between light and sound, emptiness and fullness of self, absorption and reflection, are established. Ovid’s story of Echo’s hopeless love for the autoleptic youth follows the spurned nymph into the woods and, finally, into what will be thenceforth her canonical doom [...] Within such hollow spaces she withers away into a voice speaking out of bones; then the bones petrify in time, and the voice speaking out of the woodland caves.

These petrified bones have built the architecture of our modern cities. Buildings, which we dismiss as mere echoes, deserve listening to; deserve perhaps even our pity. We refuse to love this building because we define it by what we perceive to be its lack – it isn’t ‘as good’ as the Neo-Georgian post office, and do not consider what it is beyond this assumption. The slavish replication of lavish reflection is not, I suspect, so different from the echoed forms of these ignored buildings. We should at least try to see if not love them.

June—

June— and the bodies swell together in the gloaming, swell together in the chestnut drunk dark passageway, swell upwards in the foam dark mild and Anaglypta to part before the spark before the spark-bright swing-door to the gentlemen’s lavatory. June— and the CD in the jukebox skips kiss you're giving me is ae is me is me is…n my crown, and the gas needs changing in the pump room downstairs. June— and leaves scuttle upwards, crisp and pale as sackcloth against the pitch blue of the dressing-gowned sky; rising in the first of the autumn’s great breezes, hurdling with the crisp packets about the legs of the beer-garden’s benches where smokers huddle in the light from the back door—June—a queequeen in all her majesty stutters Helen Shapiro—Is it? June?

And he drops another coin into the payphone. June— I can’t quite— It’s very noisy here you’ll have to speak up— June? Are you there? Pressing one finger into his free ear hole he asks June— June— Are you there? I’ll call back, June. I’ll call back when it’s less noisy.

She catches him later. Joe, she says.

His eyes are red like flecks of bacon.

Joe, she says, you use the payphone here don’t you?

He fumbles in his palm for some pence. I phone my June, he says.

It is you then, she says.

I just phone my June, he says.

It’s about that, she says, I had a call. A complaint.

Oh, he says.

That’s not your June, she says, that’s not her number. It’s a club, she says, a club in town. And the man, the man who runs it like, he’s phoned me. He says it’s always this number, the pub number, and messages on his answer phone. You’ve been filling up his answer phone, she says, every night he says it is, with messages for your June.

Oh, he says.

It has to stop, she says.

He nods, he mostly ever nods.

It’s unpleasant for her, you see, having to tell him this. It’s unpleasant and it’s not really her job to. It should be George by rights, only George has the night off and so it’s her telling him this as she gathers beer-downy glasses, and it sets her wondering: who is this June? A wife? A daughter? A friend? Some woman perhaps who gave him the wrong number on purpose, who gave him the number to get him off her back know I’d die for you, now y now y now ygone that’s What’ll it be, love? She asks and the bodies swell in the passageway; leaves stirred up beneath the hand-drier.

And he drops another coin into the payphone. June— he says, June—

Counties made easy

Preparation M

Last week I took my guitar to Soho. Not that anyone asked me to play, but I do prefer it if they don’t. I have played guitar with varying degrees of success for almost twenty years now, but I rarely play in public. Lately, in fact, I rarely play at all.

I went to Soho because I had arranged to meet M. I had rushed from work to the train platform with the guitar strapped across one shoulder - still livid from hauling a gun bag across Liverpool the weekend before, but that shoulder knows how to hunch and the other one has never acquired the knack - climbed on to the train and bought my ticket from the conductor as soon as she appeared.

I love these early August evenings, they’re like sneak previews of the next world.

There are two connections on the way to London and the first one was over an hour late. I found something to lean on there in the platform and watched people in jackets and shirtsleeves work their pagers and cellphones. Not to sound pious - I had mine, of course, and was even tapping away at it to tell M that I’d been delayed, but wary of battery life, I kept it stuck in my pocket most of the time and drummed out rhythms on my thighs while trying not to let my eyes rest on a well-groomed sort in a black jacket with the sort of saturnine countenance that fairly frails the heart-strings, while naturally contriving to steal enough glances for to daydream on the journey home later that night.

There’s a peculiar sense of, well, not community, but spiritedness of some sort that occasionally visits people sharing a train carriage. Such it was at Maidenhead where we were told that the previous hour or so delay was to be blamed on ‘trespassers on the tracks’. Just like a congregation settling in their seats after a hymn, this muted wake of sound rippled through the assembled, the sound of seventy-eighty people all saying ‘tch’ at the same time. You get the distinct and immediate sense in a moment like that that each and every one of ‘em would happily sign a warrant for the driver to full speed ahead and the hell with the consequences, and start imagining what else they’d sign away to get to work on time, or to get home from work on time. I sat back and looked out the window at the passing suburbs to set my mind at ease.

We don’t really do the concept of suburbs justice in England, we haven’t got the space for it. Foreigners often take our popular culture to be defined by its limits, cramped to the point of being impacted. They like it, of course, for the most part, Fawlty Towers and that, like receiving visits from a funny uncle whose paranoia never quite amounts to frothing at the lips, or any other course of action an uncomfortable expenditure of effort away from a wounded slouch, for that matter. A scale model of an English town would make it clear. "Imagine living in a road this far across. Imagine driving to work every day." The model village at Beaconsfield might do it. There should be a replica in the grounds of every foreign embassy to lend the appropriate perspective.

So I watched as green fields gave way to brown roofs and grey pebbledash, as that bright blue sky paled to a softer hue, telephone cable and power lines spanning the view, and thought, what a glorious view, from anywhere in England, you just have to look directly up. Blinkers might be helpful. A lad took the seat next to me, bleached bristles of a no. 1 crop, basketball vest and shorts, gym bag in his lap, skin where visible that exact Gold Blend hue that seems to come from a wardrobe mostly comprising sportswear. Blinkers. Yes, might be helpful.

The last time I saw M had been a little over a week before. One of those long sensual summer afternoons where the air starts to soften in the heat and settles comfortably against you like an old friend. We sat out on the grass counting the bugs. There were things like viridian oblongs and crimson hexagons with mandibles and pinions that I swore I’d never seen before in my life. It is another way that time is stealing away from me, from where I’ve been all this time: there are new bugs now. Upgrades have been made. It’s the kind of experience that makes you grateful to see a ladybird. Not that you shouldn’t be, anyhow.

I found myself hauling upward through the murk at Piccadilly Circus at around a quarter past eight. It was swarmed with glittering crowds as only Piccadilly Circus ever is. You get a different kind of swarm in Oxford Street, or Leicester Square. Those are hordes; governed by common minds, common instincts, recognisable. Piccadilly is different. These are swarms; if they can be said to have minds, purposes, they are pre-mammalian, insectile. Not to say, again, that that is worse. I rather prefer it. And a few well-chosen paces put you beyond the fug of it, in the end of Soho the tourists rarely traipse, curtained storefronts and bored touts, DANCING LADIES and HOT SALT BEEF strobing out in pink-purple neon, stage doors and roads cobbled in old grey muscle.

Again I thought that I could be at home here if I wasn’t so fat, or underdressed, or tired, and kept on, not altogether certain I was where I was supposed to be. It’s an unthreatening place, certainly: the windows might be boarded with haunted sigils of commodified sex as if warding off truthful daylight, but the desperation, such as it is, is comfortably abstract. Everyone here is made for the course of the production, if not strictly made for life. They are the real actors. They can leave at any time.

The guitar was beginning to feel every ounce of its thirty years of age. I shifted it into my left hand. Hungrily I stepped at last into Old Compton Street, crossed to the pavement outside Balan’s, looked around me. In all directions it thrived. Bars didn’t so much spill out onto the pavement as exhale. As circulatory systems go, I’ve seen worse.

I had walked most of the length of the street before I realised that I was holding my breath. M had sent a message ahead to say that he would be at least half an hour late. Not far from here, he had been obliged to stay on at work while my train was delayed, and had now been asked to provide timesheets for the last three weeks, which he was industriously fabricating now, and he was very sorry.

I didn’t want to eat alone, and I didn’t want a drink, couldn’t have one anyway: when all this fiasco was over I had to drive from the train station back to my place. So I found a post to lean against at the foot of the street where it divides into two, and stood for what felt like a very long time. Twice the same person wandered hopefully my way, in a Hi-Viz jacket, no shirt, and asked if I wanted a licensed cab. At least, that’s what I think he said. By the third time of enquiry his skin had turned green, his eyes were bioluminescent, and I was beginning to feel upset. Yes, I could have said, yes I do. This is all a bit immediate and lively for my liking, do you have a place in mind that’s a little more stifling and dejected?

So it was good, in all sorts of ways, when M appeared dressed as though he’d spent the evening playing squash with a werewolf, animated by a earnest sort of apology that I had to closely control myself not to punish. My stomach gnawed at me like a cheap suit. Oh shit, M said, you’re pissed off. I’m alright, I said, trying not to sound too mechanical, wanting not to, and failing. I believe the word is 'grating'.

— Let’s have something to eat, M said. At least let me buy you dinner.

By now it was a quarter past nine. I was thinking of the journey home from here, which would take at least two hours. I danced around the point in as gainly a fashion as I could manage before getting impatient, I realised, with myself, and said Fine, let’s find somewhere.

Somewhere was the café on the ground floor of the Curzon. I took a bottle of mineral water, a sandwich and, underestimating the sandwich, a sausage roll. We ate slowly, talking. On our last meeting I had been obliged to tell M the troubling story of my furthest education, finding then that I couldn’t tell it terribly well, finding myself stumbling to recall details and specifics. (I had established from this that my long-cherished plans to turn the experience into some kind of a memoir that would rightfully come to dominate the misery-memoir market while earning grudging respect from the literary establishment and, in due course, earning me bewilderingly rewards for all the acute suffering involved had, in fact, been rightly shelved for the foreseeable future.) M was troubled by my countenance, which the exchange of my guitar and his money had not greatly elated, and asked a few guarded questions which I don’t recall with sufficient clarity to relate to you.

— All I can say is that I’m still here, I said, that it hasn’t done for me yet.

I drank the water. Cool, clear water, in a tall glass with ice and lemon besides, perfect enough an image to be used in an advert for the stuff. I’d meant to ask for sparkling at the counter, but was distracted when her colleague, bending down, had risen back up and soundly smacked the back of her head into an opened something-or-other. Counters in any sort of coffee shop make me feel bad as I have an unfortunate tendency to fall in immediate and unstintingly painful love with the people who work behind them, so I’ll always get someone else to order for me if I can manage it, and answer without looking up if I’ve forgotten to mention whether I want the regular or the grande. “The one in a cup.” I’m a terrible creature.

M was musing that it’d be a lot of fun to live with a terrible creature like me. He has housemate trouble, that much I knew, but I hadn’t realised it was that bad. It was touching. I thought of the stack of pots on the stove at home waiting to have poaching-froth and burned oil scrubbed out of them for the last two nights, and kept my thoughts to myself. To tell you the truth, I had steadily warmed.

— An X-Box would be fun, I said. Or something like that. To play games together.

— Yes, he said with relief, and described other possibilities that I can’t remember.

Both of us knowing there was little chance of it happening. Before long we were talking about leaving London, as always, again. Both of us knowing that the future opens out beyond the North Circular into a great darkening sea. Neither of us, I should stress, particularly unhappy.

In the street outside, M wanted cigarettes and I needed to catch my train, the first place to buy them being a So-and-so’s Food & Wine across three lanes of taxis, buses and 4WDs. When we put our arms around each other to say goodbye I made a grab at him and held him tight. It had darkened above, where the buildings gave way. I wished him a safe flight.

I was on the train back home an hour or so later, with the capital crossed and the lights of north London passing me by. The harboured thoughts of leisure and sensuality were forgotten, only two or three hundred brain-cells still lighting up at all.

I had been steadily gathering discarded newspapers since the early evening, toting them around in a polythene Waitrose carry-bag. One Sudoku puzzle I’d completed already, but I had another two papers with me, one of which had four. I was very careful. Before the train left Paddington I had copied down the sequence of stops into the margin of my paper, and checked it each time we came to a halt, peering out into the sodium murk. I have taken this train many times, but I also knew how tired I was. The saturnine man of the early evening was very far from my thoughts, where he belonged.

Sudoku is a curious game. Watching someone confronted with one of these devious little boxes is endlessly interesting, if you get the chance. There are many who discard a puzzle as soon as they discover they have made a mistake, at that horrible moment where one goes to enter a final ‘2’ in confident strokes only to realise that a ‘2’ is already present and, by dint of having been printed there, entirely accounted for. Suddenly, everything has not worked out exactly as planned. “Oh well, so much for that. It’s too much trouble.”

Perhaps I am egregiously old-fashioned, but this, to my mind, is not playing the game; it's just following the rules. It is rather easier than unpicking stitches from knitting to find the original fault in a Sudoku puzzle, and still not so difficult to fix the original error.

Mostly. Of course, not all mistakes are easily rectified, knitting notwithstanding. I had some sort of a moral in mind when I began to write this, for instance, except I’m damned if I can remember where I put the thing.

Useful vocab