Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

LINGUA FRANCA*

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
George Orwell

Ever since the acquisition of words provided me with a receptacle for memory, I have loved language.  Its music, its power to evoke, its absurd variety delighted me as a child and my joy in it flourished into my adolescence and youth.

My love of language took me into teaching – English first, then, for the greater part of my career, Drama.  As during my time in teaching time passed and experience accumulated, goals shifted, routes changed and strategies altered. But one constant remained at the heart of whatever version of whatever syllabus I followed. It was contained within a small but perfectly formed lecture that I would deliver, not particularly original in content but imparted with a messianic zeal undiminished by time and repetition.  

In it I would urge my students to take every opportunity they could to broaden their vocabularies and to recognise in language the key to knowledge, understanding, independence of mind and, ultimately, a degree of real personal autonomy. A keypoint of the address was reference to George Orwell’s 1984 and the mighty and potent weapon of Newspeak.  I would ask them to examine their own speech forms – the unquestioning reliance that some may have had on deliberately vague, oblique or discursive vocabulary or on acquired slang forms whose terms of reference, however linguistically rich in their own way, were meaningless within the cultural territory that these middle class students occupied.  

I would proselytise further about language as a universal resource whose capacity for articulating beauty and truth as we understand them need not be limited or constrained by social or cultural circumstances.  I used as exemplars of this certain Gypsies I have known whose illiteracy, far from being an impediment to the development of language, actually provoked the need for an enhanced flexibility and richness of expression because of reliance on the purely oral form.  I asked them to see that there need be no conflict of interests between their acquisition of linguistic skills and nominal subscription to a resolutely anti-intellectual culture. Indeed, such skills would provide an opportunity for agile movement across cultural territories. I would insist that the objective must be always to avoid being trapped within one register of language usage, unable to move with ease and grace from level to level.  

I would conclude by telling them to read, to read anything and everything. To make it a habit; to regard every unfamiliar word, phrase, term and figure of speech as a challenge to understanding that must be met.  Master language and ultimately you need never be manipulated, exploited, controlled, owned by anyone.  

And they would listen politely, only glazing over if I ventured too far past the 10-minute mark.  Occasionally, very occasionally, long after the event, the odd ex-student has made reference to the sermon and expressed gratitude for having been nudged towards a greater respect for language at just the right moment.  

:::

For all that I can sometimes add to a well-turned sentence a word too far, only to have it collapse in on itself like some poorly constructed architectural folly, I loathe promiscuous language.  Listening to cornered politicians turning on the tap and shamelessly letting it flow unchecked has me barracking from the sofa.  Hysterical Oscar winners in verbal free fall, pretentious artists endeavouring to translate piles of house bricks into meaningful messages, pop stars who read a book once and now imagine themselves to be sages – all who sling words around like frisbees – have me grinding my teeth down to stumps.  This is not language in search of light; it’s language whose sole context is sound!

But what really brings down the red mist is the use of language as a means to exclude all but the cognoscenti. When language becomes so abstruse, so convoluted, so comprehensively up its own arse, I know that I’m dealing with a man (almost invariably) who, were he not wielding a big fat pen, would be dealing with his sense of personal inadequacy by driving a very fast car very fast.  These professional intellectuals – almost all of them inhabiting the worlds of recherché philosophy, arts theory or, God help us, linguistics – have no interest whatsoever either in language’s capacity to communicate complex concepts with absolute clarity or in its intrinsic beauty in utterance or on the page.  The wielding of language is for them a kind of aristocratic sport by whose obscurantist rules and protocols they may celebrate their membership of an exclusive higher order of being.

Meanwhile, out in the bearpit a similar, if less refined game is being played. Consider the out-of-control IT jargoneer, the estate agent (realtor) describing a property and those drones who compose the letters that banks send you when you’re overdrawn. Each mangles and distorts language into something convoluted and grotesque, seeking to establish through it only the aggrandisement of his or her particular agency.  

These are the true perpetrators of Word Crimes, not those whose earnest attempts to communicate are hampered because their command of classical grammar may be faulty and their non-colloquial vocabulary sparse.  The latter struggles for meaning and truth; the former intends obfuscation and obscurity.

:::

Now, how about this document.  I stumbled across it whilst doing some Internet research and as I read it I searched in vain for irony. I present it as evidence for the prosecution, item 1. It comes from a PhD dissertation entitled Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances : A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms. Okay, I might be accused of emulating Hermann Goering and reaching for my revolver at the utterance of the word ‘culture’, but please – is this an authentic statement about an area of art theory and practice so arcane that it can’t communicate its specifics without the exclusive use of entirely specialist language - or is it simply check-this-out bollocks?

A lacunae world of incessant transmutation has emerged in art and established a seemingly unrestricted area of prodigality which I identify as viractuality. With the increased augmentation of the self via micro-electronics feasible today, the real co-exists with the virtual and the organic fuses with the computer-robotic. Consequently, I am interested in a new interlaced sense of artistic viractuality which couples the biological with the technological and the static with the malleable. As such, viractualism strives for an understanding and depiction of an anti-essentiality of the techno-body so as to allow for no privileged logos. Here images of the flesh are undone by machinic viral disturbances they cannot contain. Here thought detaches itself from the order and authority of the old signs and topples down into the realm of viractual reverie.

Thank you for your attention. Any questions?

:::

A final reflection on language and meaning. In 1962 the late Harold Pinter made a statement about his perception of the real function of much the speech that we utter, ostensibly for the purposes of communication.  It’s a difficult statement that requires careful reading and subsequent reflection. But there’s a world of difference between the narcissistic game playing of the writer just quoted and the elegant and painstaking proposition that is now seen as informing at the deepest level Pinter’s extraordinary work.

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished, or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

:::

In conclusion, I must acknowledge that much of the above may be seen to achieve little more than to prove through example the author’s claims. If that is the case then I’ll just have to try harder to pursue Samuel Beckett’s paradoxical aim of trying to pare language back to the bone through the use of language. Now, for a brief while, I shall stop talking…

*An earlier version of this post appeared on the Patteran Pages in February 2007.

A rare visit to a once-thriving blog, now dwindled to little more than a hanging gallery for new poems...

This one snuck out of nowhere in particular and it's shared with the excellent Imaginary Gardens prompt site.

Reflections on language - who owns it, how it grows. A first draft, shared with Imaginary Gardens...

PALIMPSEST

Words were licked
into life by tongues
stirring in their
bone and water beds.

Ullulation into utterance,
one day, one night
when sudden light
or no light at all

twisted noise into
a loop of syllables;
or something was born
by breath in the heat

of loving after the fire
had died; or something
out of grief or joy
congregated in a mouth

a drift of stones that
rattled into meaning and
spat sense that all could
speak again and again.

Then the scribes tugged
our pictograms from walls
and with those tongues
pushing out a bottom lip,

they penned them slowly,
rush-lit night and day,
across the calfskin, line
upon line. Golden ciphers,

language wrapped in
arabesques, concealed in
foliate compartments,
locked into floral curlicues

and stalked by beasts
fantastical across the vellum.
All our words licked now
by gall and gum, by

iron salts and lampblack –
a cultivation so sublime
that each word sits
in the mouth like a fig

plucked from the highest
branch. Princes and priests
turn the juices on
their tongues and tell

the kneeling penitents
how good they taste. O believe,
have faith. You only need
to hear our words rolling

under a vaulted ceiling
and transaction, intercession
are assured. Your hollow
syllables turned into

a fall of bells, all your
raw vernacular stacked
like bricks inside
the architecture of a hymn.
 

A first draft, shared with Imaginary Gardens...

PETANQUE ET LA JEU DE LA VIE

There are two men,
this square of ground,
the sun, the cypress tree.
The men unpack
their boules. The man
in the blue shirt
clacks a pair together.
The man in the
red shirt arcs
the coche into
the dust, steps back
and lights a cigarette.
The blue shirt
throws his three.
One hugs the coche
and two lie close.
The red shirt bowls.
His final boule
scatters the group.
The two advance.
They contemplate
the spread of boules
and coche, the disposition
of them all, then stoop
to gather and cast
the coche, the boules
again. Inside the
cypress shade the
blue shirt cups
his boule and lifts
it high. At the point
of release his fingers
tip it back, reverse
its spin. At the point
of its contact with
the coche he says:
“Your sister. Is
she well?” The red
shirt draws deep on
his cigarette.
“Quite well”, he says.
“She’s been home
three weeks now.
She’s walking. She
can cook. She walks
the dogs down by
the canal. She manages”.
The blue shirt listens,
two boules held
between his fingers.
The red shirt drops
his cigarette, grinds
it into the dust.
“Go on”, he says,
nodding to the splay
of boules and coche..
And from out of
the shade of
the cypress, the blue
shirt drops each boule
behind the coche,
completing a triangular
wall. “Once”, he says,
still stooping, his hands
on his knees. “There was
a time once”. The red
shirt lights a second
cigarette, shakes out
the match, steps up
to throw. “There’s always
a time once”, he says
and he looses a boule.
The blue shirt watches
the arc and fall, the
puff of dust where
it lands behind the
triangle. “Celine and I”,
he says. “On the beach
at St Enogart. Down
by the rocks”. The
red shirt straightens.
“Enough”, he says.
“And then”, the
blue shirt says,
“you and I, we might
have been brothers”.
The red shirt works
the cigarette to the
corner of his mouth.
“Brothers enough without”,
he says.
    

 

 

A first draft, shared with The Mag.

WILLIAM H BONNEY.

Wanted. An ambiguous
term to say the least.
The State, in all
its stern impartiality,

wants him. Indeed,
so much so that
his condition of
mortality is of

no account. Such
is the value placed
upon his body and
his soul: that,

even without
the richness of
the latter, the former –
holed and bloody,

stained with dust –
will be acceptable.
Such longing, such
desire. A passion

even as he passes
from this world.
So sad he came
unwanted to it.

A third draft. (The audio version music is 'Les Chansons des Roses no. 5' from Morten Laurisden's 'O Magnum Mysterium').  Shared with Imaginary Garden...



OFFLEY COPSE IN SPRING

(Aubers Ridge, May 9th 1915)

Your path leads you between great-headed trees –
the beeches, muscle-bound and wearing their may
like burly brides; the ash, rattling his blades;

horse chestnut burning stacked candles in the face
of day. The bright rain tricks the air into long
strings of light whose lattice tracks you up

to the treeline. Deeper in the copse blue smoke blows:
dim fumes in a bright season, a rush of bluebells
whispering, where you walk, ankle-high. Trodden down,

the early ferns, rise again behind you. Bramble gateways
tugged apart re-form, slow-motion twisting back
in toothy coils. And now, here, where midnight moss

made a bed for the two of you in May last year,
you lie alone and listen for the guns that boomed
a week ago somewhere north of Aubers Ridge

OFFLEY COPSE IN SPRING [mixed]

 

A second draft. Shared with The Mag.

FIRST LOVE

Awake and paralysed
in the fast-congealing amber
of a dream:

I know only of your
sweet breath, your flesh
within the bright convulsion

of the moment. Eyes open,
but there remains a musk
that charges the world.

Several of my poems take place in, or at least make reference to, hospitals. But this is the first one that deals directly with my own experience of a procedure - in this instance, radiotherapy following a recurrence of cell activity a couple of years after surgery. I had to attend treatment on five days a week for a month. A major inconvenience - but how swift the development of a sense of proportion!

Shared with Imaginary Gardens...



MICROWAVES

I’m still waiting for my fifteen minutes
in the tube,  bladder blooming from
the water that they make you drink. Not
to quench the thirst or quell the nerves,

but to lift it clear and give those busy
microwaves some room to glow. Unless
I’m in there sharpish, trousers down
and motionless, my nose a whisker’s

breadth from the tunnel’s roof, I’ll piss
this lot away and have to start again.
What are the odds that every team
has hit its coffee break in tandem?

Or that once again they’re a linac down
and Technology are busy, busy somewhere
up another level, down another corridor,
white coats flapping, laptops on overload.

Thirty miles across two counties, thirty
back again and a working day gone tits up,
just the drift and glide of fields and hedges
green with hope this side of summer.

Then the doors of number three bump back.
A bed afloat on wheels, a freighter turning
in its own length, tugboat nurses at each corner,
pilot doctor waving the channels clear.

And its cargo, hidden at first amongst
the twist and fall of cables, drip-fed and
motionless, a huddled, shaven child.
They pass us, navigating by our seats

to disappear in traffic up a corridor.
“40 minutes head and neck they give him”,
says a woman in a dodgy wig. “God love him”.
And she licks a thumb and turns a page.

My 15 minutes done, I’m driving home between
those famous fields and hedges. Every leaf
and bloom glows green and gold and, like them,
my face is turned towards the midday sun.

linac = linear accelerator radiotherapy machine.
 

The poem below is a narrative development of the old Anglo-Irish 'broken token' folk song, The Dark-Eyed Sailor. I recommend listening first to Al O'Donnell singing the song in all its classic folksong formality and then read the poem as a more naturalistic treatment of the events described. (Shared with Imaginary Garden...)

 

Al O'Donnell - The Dark Eyed Sailor

THE DARK-EYED SAILOR

Four doves rising
from the water tower,
silver on the face of night. 
Wings applauding, down drifting.
Butter yellow, the new moon
riding high
with the old moon in her hair.

In the valley,
through thin light like mist,
the maiden returning through the water meadow,
lantern swinging.
All tears are dried to dust;
her gaze is fixed on the dim hedge line;
her heart is shut tight as a beech nut.

But she fingers the chain around her neck;
always her fingers stray to the chain and its burden,
the half-ring, the broken silver band,
plain but for William’s name engraved within.
Tonight the moon will touch it too.

And William, near the lane’s end,
slips the kitbag down.
An owl quavers in the churchyard yew.
This far inland no seagulls wheeling,
no salt to season the breeze,
no slow breathing tides to lift
or still the heart.

William’s head is cocked,
reading the currents.
His dark eyes catch the moon’s gold splinters,
and his fingers read the silver chain
like a rosary, walking the links
to the beat of her name
within the half-ring hanging.

Her feet on cinders and pebbles.
The cough of the five-bar gate
as she steps into the lane.
Grey eyes unfocussed now:
sixty downhill paces yet,
the scent of honeysuckle,
four bean rows and then the cottage door.

Her hand to her throat:
a piece of the night becomes smoke, twists
and becomes a man.
Even in the moon’s thin honey-light,
his eyes are dark and his jacket’s blue.
And his voice is as quiet as leaf on leaf:

“Why do you roam so late, my maid? Day’s done,
night’s on”.
And he smiles, a white sickle blade
trimming back time.
Her hand to her throat, Seven years blooming
like a poisoned flower, hot, bright and blood-red.

Glancing, then looking down, she murmurs
her catechism: “So young and stout and bold,
 my sailor, his dark eyes, the ring he took from his hand,
this half I wear between my breasts
while the other rolls at the bottom of the sea”.

The reaphook moon that harvests the stars;
the sickle smile that cuts to the heart.
He seems to say in a voice out a dream:
“Oh, drive him from your heart.
Young men abound and love freezes hard with time”.
She whispers, “I’ll never forsake my dear”
and half-turns to go.

The reaphook moon that cradles the stars;
the sickle smile that speaks to the heart;
the half-ring he pinches towards her between
finger and thumb, that carries its own light;
the circle seven years broken,
sealed in the joining now.

:::

The honeysuckle all but blocks the gateway,
but for memory’s sake he won’t have it trimmed.
And he lifts the hanging beans
and lets them fall, and says into the thin rain:
“Seven years, but still a cloudy morning
brings in a sunny day”.

Shared with The Mag.

FLIGHTPATHS - 1913

The strangest of times: a skein of geese
crossing the bedroom window, heading west
and no body of water within seven miles.
I am playing the pagan - sleeping late amongst
the Sunday morning bells.
Heaven is a cloudless sky
in late September, harvest past,
leaves on the turn. 

At first I think I hear the binder,
wheels beating, turning at the headrow,
but the fields are bare.
Such a beating, a clattering.
More geese searching for a lake
in this land of furrows?  Or
the rector in his Wolsely
come to seek me out?

And then my window darkens
into the shape of wings, jagged wings –
Weston mill uprooted, reeling across the fields? 
Certainly a hurricane of sorts
in the throat of this beast
squatting low over the beeches,
dabbling its feet in leaves, roaring
in a black updraft of rooks.

An aeroplane, fearful in the untried air –
nothing like the rising bird
it mocks,  This is a man,
dressed in wire and canvas,
climbing out of the clover.
This is a godless man ascending,
out of the dust, towards the light.