Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 45

Cursed in Return

"Damn your imprecations and your eyes!
They dare to squint at mine, as if the lights
Of simple virtue that confront you there,
Were more than you could muster.

"Damn your tongue,
Tear it from the root within your skull
That channels venom from your tapster's brain,
Your tavern stocked with poisons and with purges
Fit only to bring foulness to your lips.

"May all the rubied leeches of your brood,
Steeped in the septic fluids of their sire,
Blacken in the hot light, and corrode
Like metals in a mudstorm. Let them rot,
And sprout forth toadstools worthy of their wits,
Pale and rank with pustulence, as fine
And fit as any epitaph deserved
By such a tub of maggots.

"And for you,
In final recognition of your worth,
I pile this monument of honest words
Upon the reeking compost of your days --
That mildew-spotted calendar of clots,
The tainted trailings of your toxic pit."

Monsters of Elegance

I've been revisiting Jacobean drama -- John Webster, John Ford, The Revenger's Tragedy -- and all of this blank verse has coloured my thoughts.

Here's one result. Any criticism would be welcomed!

As dreamers in a Gatineau demesne
Await an autumn sunset, or the frost
That forms in crystal winding-sheets below
The ever-falling moon, they understand
That life's fragility is beautiful,
If only for the poignancy of time
And all things time has taken.

If our dooms
Can lead our thoughts to beauty, then the dreads
And non-existent symbols of our deaths
Can also bear the weight of beauty's charm.
Show me, then, in words or painted guise
The monsters that are beautiful, alive.

Show me fiends with beaks of beaten gold,
With feathers black as mica or the grave.
Line the hills with reptant forms that rise
To possibilities of light and sky.
Women, jeweled with serpent scale and glass,
With eyes of midnight intricacy, burn
At every glance. Let predatory grace
Gleam out from every stalking crouch and leap
Of white-furred nemesis or bodied fear.

Monsters in their elegance, as pure,
As lively as the dancers of the day,
Are heralds of deep happiness, inverted,
As in the mirror's depths, as in our dreams.
Make them beings of beauty, jewelry, silk,
Pendants for the light of idle minds;
Make them signposts on the trails of life
And delectations for the killer, Time.

Intentions Count For Nothing

Intentions count for nothing in the end;
Not even toil and sweat can navigate
A channel through the odds. You hesitate,
You poke the callus where your fingers bend,
And give up digging burdock now, to mend;
But as you heal, the blind clay shall instate
A thousand burrs and hooks to lacerate
The eyes of horses. Now you comprehend.

Intentions count for nothing, yet you wade
Uphill, as if the roots could be constrained,
As if a sonnet mattered, or a tale.
And so you scoop tomorrow in a spade,
Where future burrs and needles are contained,
As clear eyes of a horse enclose a vale.

Acephalous

Listen. This will matter in the end.

Stepwise from the hill, the gulley curved,
Serpentine, between the fields and trees.
One step brought it up against a fence;
Shattered sticks collected there like bones.
Water spread behind them in a marsh,
Walled in by the fortress of the spruce,
Cedared on the other slope. Concealed.

Winter afternoons pulled shadows out,
Lay them, blue, upon the snow to fade.
One spot near the bones collected light,
Sprayed it back in spectral powder hues.
Timed correctly, visiting revealed
Galaxies of colour on the snow.

Spring will take the snow and bring the flood.
Water drains away; then you can see,
Buried to the rim beside the creek,
Built with all the care of any house,
Coffin-like, a box of water: clean,
Clear down to the floor where day reveals
White sand smuggled from the mountainside,
Spread upon the clay by piercing rain.
Box of water? Box of sand? A door?

Step aside a pace or two: a tree,
Dead and naked, shorter than a man.
Wedged today between one bough and branch,
Open to the air: a tiny jar,
Grey with greasy foulness. Right above,
Hanging upside down with wings outspread
(Death could not remove its urge to glide),
Strung up by its feet, a heron.

Why
Have I told this tale without a key,
Kept you from catharsis? My regrets.
Be assured, these images from life
Beckon me to think about the past
Sealed up in my skull. When I am dead,
When my head is gone, my past will die.
Here: a glimpse, ephemeral, for you.

She Loved The Night And She Might Love It Still

The stain of evening spreads in shivered light
Outwards from the waning gibbous moon
To Jupiter and Regulus beyond.
Soon the night is tremulous with ice.

She loved the night, and she might love it still,
But she is far from Gatineau: the pines,
The cedar marshes cupped by aspen groves,
The granite fortress hills of ancient birth,
Are far away from her. And where am I?
Not here. Not shaking in my winter coat,
Not kicking at the powder. No.

I run
And I could howl, if howling meant "Alive,
But not right now." The stubbled, crusted fields,
Lined with limits by the leaning fences
But otherwise an infinite expanse
For any howling course below the moon,
Have called me in their silence. Far away.
The broken barns, forgotten toys in hills
Where every human structure falls apart
At the bursting of the frost, if given time,
Echo mindless howling. Far away.
The roads, now routes for culminating weeds,
For dead grey stalks of alien mullein,
For seedpods of milkweed, for Queen Anne's lace
Left over like medieval torture tools,
Are winding sheets for every pointless tread
That carries me to no place. Far away.

And where am I? Not here. Not now. Not I.
She loved the night, and she might love it still;
I wish the night could love her in return.

This Heritage Of Ice And Autumn Glass

"I see more when I'm with you." So she said
One year before she left me. Ask it, now:
What can I give a woman, that might last?
Money? Social status? These are not mine.
No perks of property, no fame, no heights
To conquer for the public eye, no star
Potential or prerequisite achieved.
I never was a man the people saw;
Instead, I was a fool with staring eyes.

I could show you moonlight in the wind
When cold star crystals leap above the snow.
And even as the autumn leaves reflect
The lava flows of sunset, new leaves burn
Red as marsh lights, for a single noon
Before the green appears. The moon, you see,
That egg within a shattered nest of mist?
The heron striding on its own reflection?
The raisin-scented torches of the sumac
That draw the chickadees in hornet crowds?

This heritage of ice and autumn glass
Is all I have to offer. If you see
These minor joys already as you pass,
Then you will find no further use for me.

Hoarded Life And Beauty

Both H. E. Bates and Seán Ó Faoláin have argued that modern short stories are closer in impact and scope to lyric poetry than to plays or novels. I concede their point, and I would call it even more true for horror stories, where causes are often unclear, where effects can be vivid but inexplicable, and where consequences are often left to implication.

Because of their kinship with poems, horror stories can be hard to describe, and their impact can be hard to understand. Why do they often work so powerfully? One might as well ask why a poem works. We can study their techniques, their metaphors, their imagery, and gain insight into the craft of writing; but by the time the sun has gone down, what we have is a story that cannot be paraphrased. The only way to grasp its effect is to read it from beginning to end.

One of the fascinations of Walter de la Mare's short fiction is that it relies even more than most on these elusive "poetic" qualities. Yes, the plots can be taken apart, the prose can be analyzed, but the lingering effect is more akin to the ripples of a dream. This makes it easy to enjoy, but hard to describe and even harder to recommend.

A case in point: "The Tree," from 1922.

I have read the story four times, now, and each reading has made it more disturbing. I believe I understand its meaning, or at least one of its meanings; these are for you to find on your own. But the power of the story goes beyond this rational awareness of what (in part) it seems to imply.

If a story like this cannot be paraphrased, then how can it be reviewed? One solution would be to describe the plot:

"A wealthy fruit merchant pays an angry visit to his half-brother, an artist whom he considers a lazy good-for-nothing parasite. But the merchant is uneasy about seeing, once again, the almost-alien tree that has become an obsession for the artist."

What would this tell you? Not much. Would it compel you to read the story? Most likely not, because it fails to give you any sense of how the story might actually feel as you read it.

But if I were to quote from it, at length?

...This old man, shrunken and hideous in his frame of abject poverty, his arms drawn close up to his fallen body, worked sedulously on and on. And behind and around him showed the fruit of his labours. Pinned to the scaling walls, propped on the ramshackle shelf above his fireless hearthstone, and even against the stale remnant of a loaf of bread on the cracked blue dish beside him, was a litter of pictures. And everywhere, lovely and marvellous in all its guises -- the tree. The tree in May’s showering loveliness, in summer’s quiet wonder, in autumn’s decline, in naked slumbering wintry grace. The colours glowed from the fine old rough paper like lamps and gems.

There were drawings of birds too, birds of dazzling plumage, of flowers and butterflies, their crimson and emerald, rose and saffron seemingly shimmering and astir; their every mealy and feathery and pollened boss and petal and plume on fire with hoarded life and beauty. And there a viper with its sinuous molten scales; and there a face and a shape looking out of its nothingness such as would awake even a dreamer in a dream....

And at that moment, as if an angry and helpless thought could make itself audible even above the hungry racketing of mice and the melancholic whistling of a paraffin lamp -- at that moment the corpse-like countenance, almost within finger-touch on the other side of the table, slowly raised itself from the labour of its regard, and appeared to be searching through the shutter’s cranny as if into the Fruit Merchant’s brain. The glance swept through him like an avalanche. No, no. But one instantaneous confrontation, and he had pushed himself back from the impious walls as softly as an immense sack of hay.

These were not eyes -- in that abominable countenance. Speck-pupilled, greenish-grey, unfocused, under their protuberant mat of eyebrow, they remained still as a salt and stagnant sea. And in their uplifted depths, stretching out into endless distances, the Fruit Merchant had seen regions of a country whence neither for love nor money he could ever harvest one fruit, one pip, one cankered bud. And blossoming there beside a glassy stream in the mid-distance of far-mountained sward -- a tree.

We can break a story into pieces, scan it with a microscope, and learn a lot about the craft of writing. What we cannot describe, what we can only experience in privacy, is the effect of a story as a whole, because, again, like a poem, a story can be impossible to paraphrase.

And so, for my part, I would rather avoid many details of plot; I would rather let people see a long and characteristic section of prose, because this, at least, would give people some idea of how reading the story might feel.

If you have any thoughts on this, I would love to hear them!

Blockes For Their Pillowes

F. L. Lucas on the technique of John Webster.

Really dead metaphors, like really dead nettles, cannot sting; but often the metaphors are only half dead; and these need careful handling. It may, of course, be argued that some mixed metaphors bother none but readers with too vivid imaginations. Yet I doubt if readers can have too vivid imaginations. At all events you will find, I think, that you lose esteem with many readers if they come to feel that you have a less vivid imagination than they have themselves. A main purpose of imagery is to make a style more concrete and definite; and it is interesting to note how much that imagery itself may gain by being made still more concrete and still more definite, as when Webster borrows images from Sidney or Montaigne.

She was like them that could not sleepe, when they were softly layd. -- Sidney, Arcadia.

You are like some, cannot sleepe in feather-beds, But must have blockes for their pillowes. -- Duchess of Malfi.

See whether any cage can please a bird. Or whether a dogge grow not fiercer with tying. -- Sidney, Arcadia.

Like English Mastiffes, that grow fierce with tying. -- Duchess of Malfi.

The opinion of wisedome is the plague of man. -- Montaigne.

Oh Sir, the opinion of wisedome is a foule tettor, that runs all over a mans body. -- Duchess of Malfi.

Never, it seems to me, was theft better justified -- the plagiarist here is far more praiseworthy than his victims; simply because in each case the picture becomes much more precisely visualized. ‘A dogge’ is vague beside ‘English Mastiffes’; a ‘plague’ is feeble compared to ‘a foule tettor’. Here, as with other kinds of clarity, preferences may indeed differ according to taste and temperament; there are doubtless times when, here too, writing gains by half-lights, mists, and shadows; but I own that I love particularly in prose, keen vision; sharp focus; and clearest air.

From
Style , by F. L. Lucas.
Cassell, London, 1955.
Harriman House Ltd, 2012.

The Most Frightening Thing About Blank Verse --

-- Is that it can write itself.

As any temple deity can deem,
The world is not an oyster, but a pearl:
A pendant seed, tormented by the tides
And false alarums of the tyrant, Time.
Five billion years of battering have creased
And cratered all the faces of this globe,
And as the seedling wavers on its pole,
The seasons and the sufferings go on.
Pain is every earthquake; every flood,
Shame to us who cower in the night
While human brethren gambol in the day.
And yet we plead for knowledge of this place,
As we might plead for serpents of Saigon
And wish to end all writhing in the dust;
Let learning lend them legs. And so to us,
Non-reptiles, yet as worthy of up-rise
And elevated locomotion's prize.

I wrote that in less than five minutes, but don't worry: the ambulance is on its way.

Everything I Need Right Now, to Live

She said, "You should be writing," and I thought --

I hear the red-winged blackbird in the marsh;
His weight can hardly sway a cattail stem,
And yet his voice can reel away the years
And show me cedars from my childhood's hills.
Above its purple rim, the eastern sky
Has bubbled up the moon; no steel-blue lake
Is here to catch reflections of its red,
But still, that face had watched me in the past,
And watches me again as I watch you.
Your every step beside me sings. Your hand,
As cool in mine as bedsheets on the skin,
Is everything I need right now, to live.

-- Absent in their southern fields, the birds
Are now too far away to lend a song.
The moon has burst and lies, a broken leer,
Hollow on the rooftops. And your hand
You tore away from mine. The years are gone.
I turn my back on evening, and I write.