John Bland on learning Chinese

There is nothing in Chinese literature, ancient or modern, likely to compensate any normal individual for the vast amount of labour involved in studying it.

Keats justifying his preface to Endymion

This is not written with the last atom of purpose to forestall criticism of course, but from the desire I have to conciliate men who are competent to look, and who do look with a zealous eye, to the honour of English literature.

From the lost papers of Dr.Cornelius Mucus (Vienna), eminent Sinologist, preserved for posterity by the astonishing memory of Murr

Notes on Chinese history

Chinese history is full of interesting parallels and strange symbolic echoes…

1644, end of the Ming Dynasty. The Emperor, isolated from his people, a virtual prisoner to etiquette and tradition inside the Forbidden City, is prey to the machinations of the hordes of eunuchs who run the country and the court, basically for their own ends. Meanwhile, the war-like Manchus are pouring in over the passes, and the warlords from the provinces encroach on the city…

1911, end of the Ching Dynasty. The Dowager Empress and her crew, virtual prisoners to etiquette and tradition inside the Forbidden City, are prey to the machinations of the hordes of eunuchs who run the country and the court, basically for their own ends. Meanwhile, the European and Japanese Imperial powers make more and more outrageous demands for concessions, and the Young Chinese are agitating for revolution…

1975, end of Mao’s rule. The Chairman, isolated from his people inside the Forbidden City, a virtual prisoner to the climate of fear created by his own purges, is prey to the machinations of his bodyguards, medical teams and the two uber bitches: Jiang Ching and Zhang Yu Feng. Meanwhile, party dignitaries jostle for the succession, and the securing of Mao’s legacy…

1912 one George Morrison, an Australian chancer who cannot speak or read
Chinese, is the political advisor to the new ruler of the country, President Yuan Shi Kai, who cannot speak or read English…

1933 one William Donald, an Australian chancer who cannot speak or read
Chinese, is the political advisor to the new ruler of the country, President Chiang Kai Shek, who cannot speak or read English…

Lu Xun on the aftermath of the First World War

Three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to nothing but four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption.

Fragment 128

Britten's approach to harmony and melody has always struck me as vastly strange and highly original, and oftentimes exquisitely beautiful. Listening to his magisterial setting of Keats’s sonnet To Sleep, from the 1943 Serenade for tenor, horn and strings , it strikes me how very disparate are the various elements which make up the forces of the piece: tenor voice, horn, and string orchestra.

The Serenade is the most marvelous aural depiction of an English evening, setting canonical texts to music which is at once steeped in the English pastoral tradition, and at once modern and ground breaking, and intrinsically Brittenesque. The texts include:
The Evening Quatrains by Charles Cotton
Blow, bugle, blow Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Sick Rose by William Blake
The Lyke Wake Dirge 5th century anonymous
Ode To Cynthia by Ben Jonson
To Sleep by John Keats
It starts with shadows lengthening, and the last rays of the sun striking in a blaze of glory the castle walls, and ends in the darkest recesses of sleep, and ultimately death. The whole piece is preceded and closed by a horn solo, in which the natural harmonics of the instrument are used, causing a kind of ethereal splitty sound, with eerie overtones casting a mysterious mood, at once Last Post and Last Trumpet.

Musically, the setting of Keats’s great sonnet is structured in four sections, or mini movements, corresponding to the three quatrains and the final couplet in the sonnet. Each musical movement has its own melodic structure, with its own tonescape and mood, in which the three forces interact in various ways.

On the one hand, there is the voice. The melody is sinuous, full of melisma and mysterious falsetto, long strings of repeated notes (over a slow progression of quite different chords, a very emotive technique that Britten learnt from Puccini and the Italian verissimo school), descending minor fourths, minor thirds, and two enormous, slow descending glissandi in intervals of diminished and augmented tenths, (I take no responsibility for the accuracy of these intervals: I’ve lost my score, and my music theory is rather rusty) on the words gloom and between deftly and in, separating the phrases Turn the key deftly and in the oiled wards. There is no orchestral prelude, and the singer has to pluck the very first note out of the air, guiding the correct pitching of the note on just a split second anticipatory utterance from the strings, a high risk business for the singer.

Sung on its own, the melody is quite conventional, rather reminiscent of English folksong, or the Vaughan Williams school of English music). However the limits of any conventionality in the melodic structure are always pushed, are always explored, with sections of melody in one key (snatches of song) interrupted by the next section starting in quite a different place, and proceeding in quite a different key from where the previous one ended. This presents a real challenge for the singer in pitching the intervals correctly. In terms of key structure, the melody is not all over the place as this description perhaps suggests: there is an overall, very loose guiding key to which everything does fit, giving the melody in its entirety a distinct character and mood.

Although the full scope of the voice is used, the tessitura is very high, at the top of the voice, past the break; and there is a wide range of dynamic and voice colour. Performance allows the singer to bring out the dramatic force in the words. Britten’s especial gift to singers is the way melody always reveals meanings lying dormant in the poem. Here, the melody with its languid fragmentation of romantic folksongs reveals the darker depths to Keats’s desperate, tubercular, plea for sleep .

Any Britten setting is always a reading of the poem, a reading that can change in performance. Britten was a highly erudite lover of English poetry, choosing and organising the selections for his song suits with great care and artistry.

And then on the other hand, there is the horn. Its wonderful timbre, capable of blaring jollity and tragic solemnity both, adds a bright highlight to the world of the strings and voice, the last rays of the burning sun striking through the gathering mists of a very English twilight. Throughout the Serenade, the horn has an obligato to the voice, following a form perhaps taken from Bach’s two mighty Passions (of which Britten was a fervid admirer), of a voice and obligato instrument over a basso continuo, in this case the strings. In the Sonnet, however, its role is limited to a few well placed and carefully chosen moments, to change the tone colour, to add strength to a general fortissimo in the other forces, or to sound a far distant echo on one note. In the last two sections, the horn is silent, allowing time for the player to discretely leave the stage for the off-stage solo with which the Serenade closes.

The third force, is the string orchestra. The piece belongs really to the strings and the voice, with the horn too far distant at this point in the Serenade. Here Britten uses his orchestrating skills to marvellous effect, creating pastoral sonorities and colours which transcend Debussy.
The strings have their own melody and key structure, which listened to separately without the voice, seem to be completely at odds with the melody and key structure of the vocal melody. The writing is characterised also by strange intervals and wide jumps creating a kind of sliding world, where the voice roams, doing its own thing. The main responsibility besides colour and support for the voice, is the creation of harmony. However, unlike more conventional combinations of accompaniment and soloist, the melody and harmonic structures set up by the strings are often completely at variance with the ones ‘heard’ by singer, enveloped as he in his separate soundworld set up by his own melody.

And this is where I think Britten’s musical genius lies: creating two separate worlds, and combining them. It’s a characteristic stance of his vocal writing, from the St Nicholas Cantata, to Albert Herring and Peter Grimes. As he wrote mainly for Pears, his lover and life partner, this combining of two disparate sound worlds into one organic and harmonious whole seems to express something of their relationship.

Inadvertent Obscenity #6

The face of this fair creature had a pure oval, and her clear, brown eye a quiet warmth ...the young man stood facing her, slowly scratching his thigh, and shifting from one foot to the other. He had honest, stupid, blue eyes, and a simple smile that showed his handsome teeth. He was very well dressed. ‘I suppose it’s pretty big,’ said the beautiful young girl. ‘Yes, it’s pretty big,’ said the handsome young man. ‘It’s nicer when they are big,’ said his interlocutress, and for some time no further remark was made.

Henry James Portraits of Places

The Emperor Ching Kangxi on the personal cost of leadership

I am querulous and forgetful, and terrified of muddling right with wrong, and leaving my work in chaos. I exhaust my mind for the country's sake, and fragment my spirit for the world.

Fragment 12307

On my current reading...

I know I should focus on China, but Keats - oh immortal Keats! - always beckons.

Perhaps it's just age, or maudlin sentimentality, but tell me, is it totally naff to weep for Keats?

Joseph Conrad on the inadequacy of language

Life knows us not and we do not know life - we don't even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.

"The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower" Dylan Thomas

In many ways, Dylan Thomas is the inheritor of John Keats. Via Hopkins. Dylan Thomas has Keats’s same auditory richness, the same passion and hallucinatory linguistic response to the experience of life. His poetic sensibility, like Keats’s, is based on the traditional forms of English poetry, and deeply rooted in the rhythmic power of Shakespearian iambic.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks 

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams 

Turns mine to wax. 

And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool 

Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind 

Hauls my shroud sail. 

And I am dumb to tell the hanging man 

How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;

Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood 

Shall calm her sores. 

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind

How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb 

How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

I have been learning this poem and contemplating its deep, fabulous beauty. What does this wonderful poem mean? It is almost abstract in its distortions of image and causality. Once one gets past the dazzling power of the language, its driving rhythm, what does it mean? Does it mean anything? Perhaps it’s just a kind of auditory intoxication, brought about by the increased oxygen in one’s blood as a result of drawing enough breath to read the poem aloud.

The poem works in a series of lexical fields, all of which suggest some Great Idea. These Platonic Forms, as it were, in themselves are always absent from the poem; they are only ghostly presences that pervade the poem, but which are never clearly articulated, so that one is never sure whether they are really there, what they might be, and whether one has understood them correctly; hovering mirages of ideas.

These lexical fields, composed of simple words describing simple natural things, create a metaphysical landscape in the mind.

Here are the word groups:
1. force, drives, youth, red, blood, water, green, age, sucks, hauls, whirls, stirs
2. rocks, water, blowing, wind, flower, rose, worm, winter, veins, drips, gathers, heaven, stars, time
3. rope, sail, fountainhead, sheet, wax, ticked,
4. shroud, hanging man, clay, lime, blasts, destroyer, tomb, sheet, hangman, crooked

There is considerable overlap, with many words appearing in one or more group, like this:
1. force, drives, youth, blowing, wind, red, blood, water, green, age, sucks, hauls, whirls, stirs
2. rocks, water, blowing, wind, flower, rose, blowing wind, winter, veins, drips, gathers, heaven, stars, time, destroyer
3. rope, sail, fountainhead, sheet, wax, ticked, tomb
4. shroud, hanging man, clay, lime, blasts, destroyer, tomb, sheet, hangman, crooked, blowing, wind

The first word group is associated with images of energy, perhaps the energy of youth, of different forms and directions of energy, the colours of energy. To my mind they suggest the power of the natural life force which all living things share, the Great Idea of Power, Life Force.
The second group is associated with images which suggest the Great Idea of Nature, nature as distinct from the products and culture of Humanity’s Industry, which forms the Great Idea of the third group. Thus we have two Great Ideas embodying one contrast: Nature versus Humanity’s Industry.
The words in the fourth group are associated with images of death and decay, suggesting another Great Idea, set up in contrast to the Life Force of the first group - Death.
So we have four Great Ideas set up in contrast to each other, overlapping pairs of spectra: Death - Life Force; Nature - Industry.
What does the movement of these four Great Ideas and their shifting relationship to each other suggest to me?
(Paraphrasing the meaning of a poem, as opposed to the technical description of how the verbal contraption works, is always the part where the discourse of the literary analysis of poetry steps dangerously over an invisible border into the land of kitsch. As Steve Martin says about music, explaining music in language is about as useful as dancing architecture.)

Paraphrase part 1
There is an immanent unity and an opposition between nature and humanity’s industry, a unity born of the fact that they both possess the same opposing forces of life and death. All things pass. All things develop, change and die; youth becomes age, blood becomes wax, and although time can be captured in a clock, it nonetheless always ticks away. We, and our industry and culture, with our human body and nature, share with nature our impermanence.

This reading is highly personal, I must stress. There is nothing in the poem's logic of expression, its succession of images and indeed even in its syntax, which points clearly to this meaning.
Any notion of diachronic casuality, for example, one of the main signs of a constructed meaning on which a poem -or any work of language- is based, is problematized in the poem. The images and words in each of the four fields do not necessarily appear in any causational relationship to each other in the poem, but rather echo or prefigure each other in a synchronic relationship. Rope comes before sail, hanging man comes before hangman, shroud suggests (winding) sheet. It is this shifting relationship of words that both evokes and hides the spectral presence of the four Great Ideas, and their slowly revolving pattern.

And I am dumb to tell, is the one image and constant word group that occurs in every verse of the poem, sounding like a mantra through the mist. And this, I take to be the central meaning of the poem:

Paraphrase part 2
It is impossible to convey a great idea, a deep truth, in language that does not restrict this truth.

Any philosophic, scientific, technical or expository description of a truth must necessarily and involuntarily restrict that truth through the pattern imposed by the syntax, vocabulary and breath of that language, not to speak of situating that truth in a tradition of other attempts to describe it, the canon. It is therefore impossible to convey through paraphrase the meaning of the poem as I have attempted above. We do not have the power to express these truths without the contamination of language, and all that it brings. (Language is a virus William Burroughs)And I am dumb to tell. The only way for language to express such an Idea, such a truth, is through poetry like this: abstract, incantatory, centred on the breath and the physical body, the energy of song itself.

The miracle of the poem is that it does, at least for this reader, tell. It is Dylan Thomas, perhaps more than any other 20th century poet in English, who most fulfils Keats's theory of negative capability: ...capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. This can be clearly seen in The force that through the green fuse drives the flower but is by no means restricted to this poem alone. It is Dylan Thomas's characteristic stance when his writing is being most truthful to its nature. (This leaves out Under Milkwood, which while his most popular work, and one of my favourites, usually steers away from the metaphysical intensity of his best poetry.)

Dylan Thomas was yet a greater poet, a more mighty magus of language than even he was aware.

Fragment 122

Ode to Iris Murdoch
(Notes towards a theory of morality in art)

I
The relationship between the auteur and his characters
Is an analogy of the relationship between God and us
As Sophocles was the first to realise
As you dear dame understate as
Your entire project.

This entails a two-fold responsibility.
Because his characters are his creation
The auteur has a responsibility towards them
Not to act with gratuitous cruelty.

To show his
Audience
That it is possible and necessary

For man
To act with greater morality
Towards his creations than
God does
Towards his.

To show in art
At least
That man can be better than God.

To shame God
Into a sense of responsibility
Towards his children

And to shame man
Into aiming for loving sincerity
With his fellows.

The problem is of course
That God has long since absconded.
Deus absconditus.
And man has lost interest
In fellowship.

I I
In Dancer in the Dark,
The hanging of the Bjork
Character
At the end of the movie
Is one of those examples
Of where the auteur fails
In this test of morality.

The gratuitous cruelty of this act
Both for the character
And for the audience
Is too true to life, too exact
A reflection of how in the real world innocence
Is punished
And wickedness allowed to go free.

Not that every story should have a happy ending
But that the seeds of each character’s fate
Should be sown throughout his life
Throughout his story

So that his end
Becomes a culmination
Of his life and story
And not a gratuitous outrage against it.

Art is not life.
And while it should reflect life
It should improve upon it
Imposing a pattern on events
By giving those events
Meaning.

Correspondence #5

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

T.S.Eliot
The Wasteland