A Poetic Fragment

I've wanted to post this, well, this collection of poetic fragments which congeal into a grotesque totality, for a month or so now. The word 'scherzo' would be apt if it was not quite so bleak. I once thought Spenserian stanzas pompous and bloated, but masterful works such as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Adonais and The Revolt of Islam have convinced me otherwise. It is a difficult verse form, and I have not wholly - or even mostly - succeeded in its application, but I lack the resolve to edit beyond a few words per stanza. This piece excepted, I have never written in Spenserian stanzas, and the experiment bears all the idiosyncrasy of a first attempt, but I will at least defend the subject matter (and the chronically indolent must resign themselves to a life of subject matter before implementation - the former requires curiosity and the latter requires a monstrous assiduity).

Put simply, the form consists of nine lines - eight in iambic pentameter, with a final line of iambic hexameter - and a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC, which actually works rather better than its complexity suggests it might. The real irritant is in fact the line of hexameter, which I have always found a particularly graceless beast. Strangely, though, iambic heptameter can work brilliantly, perhaps because it seems to naturally dissolve into two phrases rather than one enormous one. Pope was famously critical of hexametric - or alexandrine - lines, writing that:

'A needless alexandrine ends the song
That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.'

But enough arcane nonsense - the aim of poetry should be to free us of such factitious boundaries. This is the first poem of my own writing which I've added to the blog - I hate to stoop to the worst kind of nepotism, which is of course nepotism unto oneself. It is doubly selfish - somehow invoking charity and self-service simultaneously. Perhaps I will add more poems, but it will only be in the knowledge that nobody reads this blog regardless. 

I regret to say that no narrative will be found in the writing below. This does not grieve me too keenly - all narrative is illusion: a kebab of individual events pierced with the skewer of human vanity. It is in some way dismissive of the reader to provide a narrative. The reader should either construct his own narrative or deem such a construct beneath his intellect. 

*

I

Black monsters stalked the earth and stole the stars -

 They cleaved a sky that scarcely could contain

The anguish of the world - a sea of scars

 Which bled imagined agony as rain,

 A deathly venom, that it could retain

Its decomposing empire, for those who die

 Die in unfavourable framing, all in vain

Is life to him whom life gives no reply -

How foul the world when friendlier seems Eternity!

II

And first they'll take the breath from out your dreams,

 The sustenance which lends on life its wit,

By cruel gradation, till this planet seems

 A mechanism for destruction; it

 Welcomes only the obedient ones who fit,

Without resistance, in its sterile mould

 And leaves the rest to rankle in a pit

Alien to passion's grace, where chains of gold

Ensnare with lies the human heart which would be bold.

III

And then they'll take your mind, you're made to feel

 That love is mortal sickness, that distrust

And animosity are much more real -

 That lenity and kindness surely must

 Be aberrations in nature's disgust,

Things that avail us naught; if we embrace

 It is to gain mere favour; if we lust

We graft the mask of love upon its face -

Impunity of hatred! Man knows no disgrace!

IV

And last they'll take your heart, they'll cut it out

 With scrutiny's cold scalpel, not to kill

But to defame, to build a black redoubt

 Within the breast, immune to beauty's trill,

 A rock which recognises only ill

And smiles on misery, thinks how to sell

 Some potion of abatement, some foul pill

To keep man in despair, or to impel

Him to an occupation he deems living hell.

V

When spring returns, and flowers of tincture bloom -

 Roseate, purpureal, multifarious hues                                  

In fields of mounting elegance, scarce room

 For observation's glare, where to find use

 Is but to kill, is grossly to abuse,

The man of modern times will bring device,

 He'll clutch his iron breast and he will choose

To sell whate'er he can, to put a price

On myth, and all the while convert it to a vice.

VI

The pangs which cleave this heart cannot divide                          

 My soul from those of idiots - those who crush,

With brittle laughs and smiles, that which would hide                 

 For fear of seeming strange; this heart would blush

 And face the hordes unarmed sooner than gush

With its unbounded power - I have been blind

 In mortal life to spheres beaming and lush,

Free and benign, such as dwell in my mind -

And where I'm trapped I have not found one of my kind.

VII

A view of life which, if resigned, is full,

 And self-aware, unwilling to bring harm

Where'er its bearing falls, which would annul

 Gross malice with a brand of fierce alarm,

 Disgust for feeble tyrants who would charm

With nonsenses the men on whom they tread;

 An ideology with hopes to arm

Mankind against deception - in his head

'Tis better that the bud of love should bloom instead.

VIII

And know that in this world 'tis those who have

 That realise their purpose - who by power                   

Extraneous to their own can hope to save

 Their souls from that great force which would devour

 With an unfeeling vice - they tend a flower

Planted by someone else, centuries ago,

 In harsh injustice, at a dismal hour,

When conquerors forged currency from woe

And tyrants tore from hands the scraps they would bestow.                         

IX

Little has changed, but now we work for shades,

 Inconstant despots with no throne to claim,

Composed of greed, spanning perhaps decades,

 Passed on as some fell virus which would maim

 All hope of savour in this world - with shame

We chase material goods, as if they held

 Some truth beyond themselves, and in this game

There are no winners, everything is felled

And lost - by silent spectres to the grave impelled.

X

'Just one more hour, just one more thing to ask,

 This one last chore and freedom will be yours,'

A spirit speaks, and all take to the task,

 No thought for that utopia which implores

 To reason - that is silenced by the claws

Of an unwinding monster which defends

 This world from beauty. Fields of hellebores

Begird the soul of him whose thrall extends -

And though it's ending every day, it never ends.

XI

Authority is poison - we would take

 The virtue of the world and tread it down

For individual greed and gain - we make,

 When crushing fellow men, a world unknown

 To Death's domain, for even Death would own

That all men are born equal, and in Death

 There is at least equality - we're mown

In equal strikes, each man must sink beneath -

Where rich and poor, in common woe, give up their breath.

XII

How foul a world when men must go to die

 To gain what this our life could not provide -

An uncorrupted fairness: those who lie

 In fields beneath, 'tis they who have espied

 A shallow glimpse of justice; as they died

They must have wept to know that parity grows

 Precisely where it cannot be applied -

Then disobey, and heap disdain on those

Who would enslave us, seize the world that they oppose!

XIII

And of their pain nobody would dare speak

 For someone's always worse off, someone's died

Or lost an arm to bandits, or made weak

 By some unpleasant illness - we elide

 The choicest anguish of the heart to hide

From gross comparison, which might declare

 Our own be trifling hardship, we must bide

And nurture our negation till a bare

And soulless creature stumbles out of its despair.

XIV

Thus, like the hydra, many-headed woe

 Broods in each heart and chains it to its tune,

It blights us with its monody - we know

 But dare not speak of that which must lie strewn

 'Midst everything we look on, and the boon

Of ignorance is such a fragile thing

 Which plagues us here and there, and as the moon

Casts but a dim reflection of a being

Far greater than itself, so it would hide its sting.

XV

Then treat me as a churl, a serf, a knave -

 I have descended from the spring of life

And found the fountain brackish, and could save                

 No fragment of attention for the rife

 Contenders for our interests, but with strife

Have put each hope to rest that we could gain

 Something to fill the void which, like a knife,

Cleaves this heart into shards - I think again

On how we are as slaves who cannot break the chain.

XVI

Reality, that common thing we feel

 Yet cannot understand, then set to work

To found all reason on it - would we reel

 If we could view the spectres which must lurk

 Beyond the veil of life, the which we shirk

Not for dispassion but for want of power,

 Which, as a host of angels made berserk

With lashing fire and lightning, would devour

Philosophy in one embrace, and kill the hour.

XVII

Is madness knowledge? He who views the world

 In all its morbid hues, is he not wise?

It is as though the universe unfurled

 Its terrible laws and man sought to devise

 A contract with no hint of compromise,

Then took to his dull life without a thought

 Toward the spectral bars which would comprise              

The boundaries of his senses, such that naught                 

Of care for life's in him that he's not gone and bought.

XVIII

I have been mad at times, when massy gates                                     

 Which guard each heart from cauterising flame

And deathly knowledge (whose mere glance creates

 A sense of desolation naught can tame)

 Have felt themselves riven by reason's aim,                        

Crushed with a ghastly malady of spirit

 Akin to horror, dread or mortal shame,

Such that the fire of life raged, and to hear it

Bred the most monstrous fear, which no man should inherit.

XIX

It eats into itself as some strange beacon

 Which burns only that it might burn anew,

And fire is painful to behold - we weaken

 In its corrosive glare, yet know how few

 Have sat at its black monstrance - all that's true

Is there to witness, but the gates are hard,

 Colossal shields of the most sable hue

Whose surfaces most will not even regard -

Perhaps they are the wise, those who remain unmarred.

Weltschmerz

I ache. A suffused languor devours everything. This is not so novel, but an attendant physical lethargy, and sensation of decay and falling away, a weeping nausea, render the experience less than ordinarily enjoyable. I don't particularly know why I state all this - I don't expect anybody to care. The truth is that nobody does care, particularly when one is alive. When one dies, things become more ambiguous - people feign care in the knowledge that, morally, they ought to care. Their emulation takes on the mantle of verity. Their sententious averments of devotion are indivisible from the real thing. I think this explains much of the world's sense of submerged hostility - there is no punishment for inauthenticity. We can get away with pretense. How vile to live in a sphere of emotion which is entirely falsified, not because it is moral to falsify, but because it is expedient to do so. We are dead because our emotions pretend to be alive. We are more mechanical because we pretend to be less mechanical. Untruth corrupts everything. It is the negation of that which we fear which realises the fear more palpably. And that is the tragedy of life. Whatever we fear must consume us. 

I have been meditating on my time at this blasted university, and it occurred to me that I have not really given myself the best chance in academia. My mind would probably have been better suited to something abstract, like philosophy. I cannot stand the specific or the quotidian. I have realised in recent years that all external reality is illusion, and that seeking to analyse specifics is a complete waste of time. Things either are or are not, and to question things as they ideally are is far more rewarding than to question how they are made manifest in the world. Economics is so foul because it places tedious rules and models before morality.

Yet most people, I have found, do not think beyond the parochial scope of their immediate surroundings. They enjoy the Small Things. They love poring over facts and figures. They salivate at the little scraps of fiction which weave their reality. They take a salacious joy in the recognition that ten pence has gone astray in the Ponzi scheme of their mind. I cannot exactly claim that my pattern of thought is strictly better than this, but mine does at least distance me from reality, for which I am grateful. Moreover, I despise this notion that we are but cogs in an infinite machine, mobile atoms chipping away at the mine of economic growth, that all our material 'achievements' serve only to prepare the next generation for an identical life of drudgery and toil. I used the word mechanical earlier - it seems to me that there is something innately mechanical in human life itself. To perceive something beyond this - something which is, if not lasting, at least nourishing, a spring in a vast desert - must surely be the purpose.

The only essay for which I received a first at university was an essay on the Marxist conception of ideology, which I feel says a great deal of my academic inclinations. University has never interested me enough. Life is too fascinating to be condensed into these sterile tubes of thought, and I think that is why the world appears to be entirely bland. Rousseau was of course correct when he described the ills of society, but the destruction of reality and the abasement of knowledge are things he did not linger enough on. We know that the Greek system of knowledge was more pure, more sincere, more general than ours, yet I think we still feel ours to be superior - our system in which one must be an expert to have an opinion on the world, in which we must seek to validate the irrepressible phantasms which spring from the heart in moments of elevated innocence. Knowledge is received, not dictated. It is when we are most quiescent that we descry most clearly the vivid hues of life. It is for this reason that our strange modes of scientism are largely futile. The hollow structures we build on the marsh of life are invariably distantiations from truth, not apprehensions of it. Is it not enough to live?

Friendless Solitude, Groaning and Tears

Each pore and natural outlet shrivelled up

By ignorance and parching poverty,

His energies roll back upon his heart,

And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,

They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot;

Then we call in our pampered mountebanks -

And this is their best cure! uncomforted

And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,

And savage faces, at the clanking hour,

Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,

By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies

Circled with evil, till his very soul

Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed

By sights of ever more deformity!

          - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Dungeon

I can no longer tolerate the presence of the indestructible viper which winds through the chambers of my heart, breathing its pestilence without remission.

This morning I watched, for the first time since my childhood, the screen adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda, a film of which I was always terrified - and which I accordingly refused to watch - owing to the presence of the invidious Miss Trunchbull, who vaulted children through the air as if they were paper aeroplanes. I mention the film because today I was utterly rapt in it, a novel occurrence for one who cannot watch anything without becoming restless as Hell's denizens. For the first time in an age, I was able to consume an entire film offering in a gulp so insatiable that Bruce Bogtrotter would be proud - envious, even. I do not say this with hyperbole - I cannot bring myself to interest in anything, but revisiting this childhood film brought such a quietude to my soul, which sadly and inevitably gave way to the gross analysis which is about to follow.

I realised that the voracity with which I consumed this film resulted from the way I saw my own character in the character of Matilda - a connection I did not make as a child, probably because it is only recently that I have been able to claw at the rotten carapace which still largely obscures my true self. Matilda is a clear outsider, locked in a family for whom she has the best intentions but with whom she can share nothing of herself. She is the corporeal manifestation of all they oppose - introspection, thought, rebellion, intellect (though of course Matilda is a child of such precocity that here I can claim no similarity). And she is hideously tormented for her differences, even by her family (though I do not think this is active malice, rather a simple inability to comprehend her unique construction).

The difference between my story and Matilda's is that, whereas Matilda finds the understanding and intellectual stimulation of Miss Honey, and the subsequent sense that her spirit has been filtered through a prism of grace, that her inmost passions might blaze with unashamed ferocity, I have fuck all. Of course I can read the essays and such of people I admire, but there is something validating and viscerally real in a companion, which is lacking in words conveyed through the ages. Not to mention that reading is a one-way street - I cannot ever hope to write to Shelley or Byron or Wilde or Poe (not that they would respond if I could), a source of grief rather than consolation. I feel entirely as if my spirit died in the 1800s. Today our world is some sort of Enlightenment-Modernist malaise where verity is sought in nonsense, in which rationality is praised and emotion discouraged in some fundamental way, at an ideological level. It grieves me that we must always talk of efficiency and optimality - the human heart knows nothing of these hideous constructs, and the prevailing characteristic of our age is one of knowledgeable unknowledge - we know so much of our surroundings and yet nothing of ourselves. Man mistakenly conceives the external as sacrosanct, when in fact it is environmental noise. The human heart is a nest whose nutriment we must observe, lest it congeal to poison - the which we breathe, producing the froth of the ideology we build our lives upon. It is cause for universal sorrow, and this is the paradox - for the apparatus of our destruction is the very thing which precludes its own negation. Only a new Romanticism can save man, but how can this be pursued if the heart is considered worthless? I am attempting to explain this in the introduction to my nascent 'volume' of poetry, if it can thus be termed, but it is a Gordian knot of abstraction - Romanticism necessarily requires the deification of instinct, which makes arguing for instinct rather difficult. If instinct can be successfully argued for, is instinct then necessary? This all becomes entirely involuted as soon as it is prodded. All I can safely state is that I believe Romanticism would solve many problems in the world, which so often result from a lack of empathy or a lack of knowledge of what humans are, what the world is. Self-awareness is simultaneously beautiful and grim, inspiring both humility and dread. I tend to believe that people somehow disable their ability for self-awareness, or at least subdue it, because they know that it may take them down a road they dislike. Yet it is also a road whose span is verdant and essentially honest.

Men are expected not to show emotion - and so they do not. And therefore, in individuals such as myself who happen to be both endowed with a phallus and capable of great emotion, all anguish rankles in the breast, destroys its host. Hence the quoting of Coleridge - although he described life in a literal prison. Yet this is what our souls shall become when emotion is swept from the stage, empty receptacles through which experiences pass unapprehended, which eventually implode in a spiritual vacuum.

I think the ultimate aim is the realisation of the love Shelley describes:

'If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.'

I know secretly that the only way to break my chronic loneliness, emptiness, whatever one wishes to term it, is to put myself into the world, to try to find something. Yet I cannot venture into a world which does not value me, and herein lies the trap. It may be founded in misanthropy or world-weariness, of the type Byron described most eloquently - at the irritating age of 18 (anapestic tetrameter is commonly found in early Byron):

Dear Becher, you tell me to mix with mankind;

I cannot deny such a precept is wise;

But retirement accords with the tone of my mind:

I will not descend to a world I despise.

Yet it may be something else. I spoke earlier of humility, but perhaps I have been too humble. Certainly I see in myself the tendency to refrain from interaction with others because I know that I will only make an idiot of myself, ruining the convocation in the process. But then I wonder how others do it - however strongly I detest my own character, there must be others in the world who cannot cope. There must be others who never find those who genuinely give a shit about one's life. There must be others who, in place of a facile ease with people, heave around a paralysing nebula of alienation and despair. I will readily admit that I am boring if I am required to - but the most boring person in the world? This cannot be the case!

Reflections on Servitude

I have just been browsing my collection of notes, as if wishing to confirm my suspicion that I am slowly becoming worse - not better - at writing. It is not so much that my ability to string words together has been vitiated, though in my estimation it certainly has, but more noticeably it has been the absolute torpor of association which has set over everything I have written of late. It is as if I cannot bring myself to make connections, as if connections might be an acceptance of a world I largely detest. I feel more keenly than ever the harsh reality of Byron's words when he wrote: 'As I grow older, the indifference - not to life, for we love it by instinct - but to the stimuli of life, increases.'

I can no longer write as I could in the following piece, which was constructed, as I recall, on a bench somewhere in Bath, itself an unusual setting for me - I cannot usually write amongst humanity. It may have been posted here before, but I shan't go to the effort of actually checking this (I can conceive of few things more tedious than reading my own blog posts).

---

I look on these people, sliding along the ground before me, and experience some decoction of utter woe. There is no joy here. People move because it is necessary to their economic fetters. Nobody really gives a fuck about anything that is occurring outside their dull sphere. Indeed, they do not even give a fuck about what is occurring inside their dull sphere, but they pretend to. You can see, as these disposable faces drift past like grey souls on a twilit marsh, complete dejection in every countenance. Then observe the bearings of people's strides - straight lines, no curiosity, no interaction with anything. This is to say, no effort is made to explore or to enjoy. This blasted economic system has crushed the joy out of everything. People have Places To Be, people have Things To Do. It's all terribly austere. Freedom cannot exist under such circumstances. Freedom cannot exist when one is impelled to be in places one despises, to deign to stoop to actions one abominates. Of course, I think we all know this secretly. Yet we deny it at every turn!

Take the vilification of prostitutes. In this phenomenon we see the concentration of mankind's disenfranchisement. It is the offloading of personal despair upon an extraneous proxy. 'Ha, how degrading it is to feign love, to feign attraction, to feign life itself.' Yet this is our common woe! The fact that most of us do not sell sex is neither here nor there - the lion's share of our abilities, our ambitions, our talents, is siphoned off by a malevolent system. We hold the business of prostitution as some base, alien, humbling thing. It is in fact the occupational rarefaction of the condition of the soul under capitalism. We are all prostitutes. I say this with utterly solemnity. That we seem only to recognise physical subjugation, and not its pernicious coevals, says more of our narrowness of mind than the fact itself.

If we are, then, to hurl derision on those paphian entrepreneurs, it must only be in the following sense: it can only be, must only be, as part of a recognition of, and an assault on, our common subjection. If the profession is to be the victim of ridicule, it must only be so in the knowledge that we are not offloading our woe, but embracing it. It must be an exercise in common anguish.

This is a common theme in history. We have always adored the idea that our own insecurities, our own abject melancholia might be mollified by blaming another. Of course this is the whole point of the scapegoat. At present, we blame individual companies for tax evasion - Amazon, Starbucks, Vodafone, the list is too long for this infinite box to house. But what we do not do is question the system which sanctions such injustice. We do not question that our laziness, our ignorance, our own bumbling satisfaction in this economic system has led to this. It is the system which must change. To attack individual companies is brilliant for politicians - they can sit back and claim sanctity. Yet this does absolutely nothing to resolve the failings in the system. It is the annulment of responsibility.

I begin to think about my own childhood, and how I know my town exclusively because I trundled through it as a blithe youth. Were it not for this, I would only know the routes I explored by necessity. Who can make such an acknowledgement and escape without despair? We are born into this world, opportunity abounding at every turn, and freedom is stamped out of us wherever we roam. Wickedly, unnecessarily. I do not jest here - there is something worthy of colossal lamentation in this. 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,' declared Rousseau - the political philosopher subject to the most ridicule and pisstaking imaginable. Yet how is he wrong in his averment? The irony of the world today is that liberty is such an unquestionable axiom that nobody bothers to defend it.