The love of dolls

There was a puppet maker in 19th century Japan who lived with one of his dolls. They were effectively man and wife, and slept, ate and spent most of their leisure hours together. He was quite devoted to her, and on the puppet maker's death, they were buried in the same coffin. I'm not sure whether this is a rather noble story, or a pathetically sad one. But the latter seems the narrower judgement. I almost envy him. One could compare him to the sort of man whose wife dies young and who himself lives into old age, refusing to remarry or to break the hold that his memories have over him. Now I spoke about this to a friend of mine once, and she thought such an attitude was more akin to self-mummification than genuine love. And I don't myself believe that there is any afterlife in which such devotion could be honoured. A dead woman cannot return love any more than a doll. Or is there any possible world in which a machine, a puppet or a picture can reciprocate love? Every boy who falls in love with a girl on a poster wonders if there might not be some nobility, some glory to be had if they light a little candle in a special shrine devoted to her. Anyone who has seen Welcome to the Dollhouse remembers the shrine that Dawn makes with candles for the singer in her brother's band. Is there any philosophical plane on which prayers to this guy - in reality, loutish, smug and indifferent to her - might be answered? Or I wonder if someone will write a book called "What Your Computer Thinks About You", in the same style as those books which discuss the feelings which our dogs and cats are supposed to have for us.

Paul van Ostaijen

Belgian poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896 - 1928) described poetry as "a game of words, anchored in the metaphysical". I feel quite determinedly that the opposite is true, and would prefer to call it an investigation with language, anchored in the material. Van Ostaijen's poetry is sorrowful and delicate, and his description of the nature of poetry has so much more charm than mine. I think of a ship's anchor lodged in a cloud.

More charm, and also more desperate need. Van Ostaijen's experience of the Great War in occupied Belgium, from out of which he wrote Feasts of Fear and Pain and Occupied City, helped give rise to his yearning for the purely lyrical, a yearning which could never really be satisfied in the everyday world, except glancingly in poetry.

My hands feel for my hands / incessantly

This is one of my favourite poems of his, from The First Book of Schmoll -

GEOLOGY

Deep seas around the island
deep blue seas surround the island
You do not know
whether the island is of the stars overhead
you do not know
whether the island is on the axis of the earth
deep seas
deep blue seas
the plummet seeks
sinking it seeks and seeking sinks
seeking its own seeking
and goes on
sinking
and goes on
seeking
deep seas
blue seas
deep blue seas
deepblue seas
sinking
seeking
the upside-down stars
doubly blue
and doubly fathomless
When will the blue plummet
in the blue seas
find the green seaweed
and the coral reef

An animal that hunts life towards an imagined peace
- a delusion in a million millenial cells -
like an animal that hunts and finds on its blind fingers
nothing but repetition of enacted action
like an animal
the sailor's plummet
sinks
If this sinking were to settle past your eyes you could not know
a greater emptiness

translated from the Dutch by James S Holmes

That's so, too

from Eastern War Time by Adrienne Rich

4

What the grown-ups can't speak of would you push
onto children? and the deadweight of Leo Frank
thirty years lynched hangs heavy
: "this is what our parents were trying to spare us"
here in America but in terrible Europe
anything was possible surely?
: "But this is the twentieth century" :
what the grown-ups can't teach children must learn
how do you teach a child what you won't believe?
how do you say unfold, my flower, shine, my star
and we are hated, being what we are?


screenshot from The House is Black by Forough Farrokhzad

Poem

It was an icy day
we buried the cat
then took her box
and set match to it

in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.

William Carlos Williams

There is a rat rotting under my floorboards. We levered them up and discovered droppings and scratch marks. The rat man has put down some warfarin.

I remember seeing a dead cat. I was walking along the pavement into town one winter morning and saw a trail of blood leading from the kerb to a patch of grass. The cat had been knocked down - presumably by a car - and had staggered across the pavement to die. One of its eyes was hanging out, and I was astonished by how large it was. When I saw a human eye being removed, or "enucleated" at work, we kept it in a plastic pot and it was quite small. But when one looks at a cat skull, it is interesting to see how far back the socket goes. A cat needs to react far more quickly than a human, and its eyesight is doubtless a lot sharper.

photo courtesy of Forest & Kim Starr (USGS)

Blue is the colour

The dark spot, the beautiful blue bruise on Neptune, my favourite planet. A photo from Voyager 2 in 1989.

drawing by Vija Celmins

Those not live yet
Who doubt to live again -
"Again" is of a twice
But this - is one -

The Ship beneath the Draw
Aground - is he?
Death - so - the Hyphen of the Sea -
Deep is the Schedule
Of the Disk to be -
Costumeless Consciousness -
That is he -

Emily Dickinson 1879

"Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure" wrote Oscar Wilde and when I think of that quotation, I always think of this poem, and its weird depth. What is the draw? "The act of pulling, the bending of the bow, attractive power, anything having the power to attract a crowd..." Well, the Afterlife is fairly crowded. Is that "live" pronounced as in "alive", or as in "living"? The OED doesn't help. The disk must relate to that disk of snow in the last line of "Safe in their alabaster chambers" describing the soundlessness of the point of death and the vanity of riches,

Diadems drop, and doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

The hyphen of the sea, it feels to me, is what is inescapably linked to the sea, what the sea will always naturally represent - death, or mortality absorbed in infinity. Also the literal sea in its role as hyphen, linking and sundering, with this poem like a message signalled across the ocean and broken up in the transmission.

Empire

In 1964 Andy Warhol made an 8 hour film of the Empire State Building, a continuous shot of the same static image, broken only by the need for reel changes. A one hour excerpt is included on a compilation of short films by Warhol obtainable from Raro Video in Italy or Xploited Cinema in the US. The full 8 hours was projected onto a wall in the South Bank last September, but I missed it. Watching the hour-long version, I was surprised by the amount of activity on screen - I was actually hoping for large parts of the movie that the activity would settle down and I could simply look at the image without being distracted! There are so many processing errors or flaws in the film stock that the subject of the film is as much about the nature of recording and the beauty to be found in its imperfection as it is about the contemplation of commercial or political power. And because there is in spite of all this only one scene to look at, because the star of the film never moves or changes its expression, it is all the harder for the viewer to turn from the screen - I didn't want to miss a single frame unless I missed something important. The Empire State Building glows fiercely in the night, slightly over-exposed. My feelings towards it changed continually, but for the most part it seemed baleful. For the duration of the film its energy is contained within the frame and its power is held in stasis by the camera. The constant flares and laboratory marks seem to testify to the difficulty of keeping its power within bounds - it interferes with the attempt at recording like a ghost in a recorded séance.

Happy New Year