Themes which arose in the discussion include:
collective nouns | concreteness
| melodrama | tightness
| the title | physics of
refraction | comparison with Hardy | numbering
of stanzas
Chris: I really like it. I've got a problem with a 'flock of metaphors,' 'a congregation of phrases' and 'a lineation of new line breaks.'
Chris: I think it's just a bit laboured.
Kim: I’d rather go from 'a flock' to 'a congestion 'or something like that. I just want a bit more play with the image rather than play with the word because 'flocked ' 'congregations' is too obvious a link
Chris: {AGREEING WITH KIM] Yeah, it doesn't have the subtlety of the way the poem's going. That's what I think.
Cahal: Isn't the problem really with lineation because the idea of moving from a flock into a congregation is quite interesting in itself. A 'flock' is an undisciplined crowd who are willing to follow you and be controlled by you and a 'congregation 'is something that is ordered, it's got a sort of complex dynamic and then there's rules and all that sort of stuff. And it seemed to me that that conjunction was good. The lineation of line breaks didn't seem to either follow the idea or oppose it enough.
Leona: Where I come from a congregation is called a flock.
Cahal: Oh I think that’s common, but ... But isn’t 'a flock' a fonder and less disciplined word? A pastor will talk about his flock.
Hugh: A flock is not necessarily in the church. The congregation is in the church.
Kim: It's colloquial. A minister's 'flock' is a reference back to sheep.
Cahal: It’s softer and more general. You know, these are all my flocks, sinners and all. The congregations are the ones who turn up and behave themselves and are key members of the congregation, important members of the congregation and all that stuff.
Elizabeth: And it's a kind of grand word. It's a wonderfully grand word.
Cahal: Yeah. I think there's a difference and I think the idea works. I think the lineation of new line breaks implies that the earlier two were just two of those collective nouns that one has to learn ... you know, pride of lions and all those things. The lineation of new line breaks is invented, unless there is such a thing as a lineation of starlings or something but ...
Elizabeth: Is it not a bit too ... oh yes ... if they were a real lineation of something, but otherwise a lineation of line breaks is too close isn't it?
Cahal: It's repetitive anyway. But, yeah, the other two work in the shift from their rather nebular thing to the very precise and self-important.
Kim: Mmm. Well that's exactly what didn't work for me. I didn't like that shift into the self important.
Cahal: Although I think that all of the danger in our writing is this shift from a flock of amiable words that you're responsible for into a congregation of self important dignitaries who try and run the poem. It works doesn't it?
Leona: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Yes it does.
Duncan: There's another thing too. It's funny that the context in which people have objected too is where it becomes cerebral because the power of the poem lies in what's concrete. I mean there's not much in writing that really is concrete. You know, presumably if you’re writing about a painting there's a whole studio that you could describe ... But writing is a very difficult thing to actually substantiate as having any thing particularly visible or tangible to it. What I think is quite remarkable about this poem is the way in which it has been able to find a way, a real graphic way, of being able to represent writing as something concrete. It's as if every now and then he just sort of goes into these long parenthesises. There's one in the first: 'From now rearranged and ... ' and the parenthesises is not really important, you know. I think the reference to The Prophet is tremendously important. I'm not absolutely sure why. But I assume it's a politically relevent one. But then again, you see, the first two stanzas of the second half, wonderfully concrete… and then the language becomes much more dense, much more convoluted at that stage because again it's a long parenthesis which in fact is not concrete, it's much more an abstract ...
Elizabeth: I love 'the nib of writing itself.'
Cahal: That's great.
Duncan: The description of the insect is a remarkable phrase: 'a small spring insect' immediately relates it to a place. A spring insect, it doesn't matter what it is. It's an insect that you'd find around at spring and to me that's concrete enough.
Leona: In the condition it's in, you wouldn't know what kind of insect it is.
Duncan: You don't need to know.
Leona: It’s mangled, you can’t know; and you know it’s a spring insect because it’s there from when you did that spring work.
Duncan: Yes, that's good, yes. And a final point is do you really have to ... It's the old, I mean I just find at the end a drawing out of the implications, and I think they're already implicit in the poem. You don't need stanza three.
Kim: I loved that last stanza. I liked it because the phrase 'I too lie' is ambiguous. You could be lying. That
Elizabeth: I find it not as melodramatic as it kind of ought to be or as I would have expected to find it.
Duncan: You think you find it less melodramatic than you expected to find it given that it is melodramatic. If you expect to find something being something, then obviously it must be that thing. If all your expectations are ...
Elizabeth: Yes. I can't argue against that. I recognise what you say and I'm surprised to find that ...
Kim: When you glance at it looks like it should be melodrama but when you hear it it somehow turns into drama.
Elizabeth: I think it's the opposite. I think when I look at it it doesn't look melodramatic. I don't actually mind what those words say because I just really love the picture of it. And it repeats, so in a sense that detracts, you know, that removes melodrama, because it's almost like a little piece of litany. It isn't really saying I'm lying dead bloodied. It isn't saying hardly anything actually. It's just placing those words. But maybe that's to denigrate it, maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's humorous. In fact I think it is humorous. I think it's kind of self conscious actually.
Leona: Well it's not really really ironic, it's just ironic enough to be OK.
Kim: I don't think the 'resurrected' – 'half-dead' image works, that seems a bit laboured as well.
Elizabeth: I disagree with that, I really like that.
Kim : Well then it should be tightened up.
Elizabeth: This is quite a tight, you know.
Kim: [DISAGREEING] It tightly rambles everywhere. I mean it looks like it should be tight but in fact it’s not. 'Refraction '....
Cahal: It moves on to the idea of refraction as been seen through the resurfacing. To move on to resurrect, the idea of refract, resurface and resurrect and then the sort of rhyme between resurrect and reverence, I think it sounds good.
Elizabeth: Yes, that is true.
Kim: I loved that line. I loved the 'stops that defy ' line break and then into 'even the physics of refraction. ' It’s such a direct first line and then you pause ....
Cahal I think there’s a kind of a visual around the ... physics as well.
Elizabeth: [TO CAHAL] You’ve been reading Tom Paulin’s review of Helen Vendler’s 'Shakespeare Sonnets.'
Cahal: I hadn't thought about it.
Elizabeth: It's wonderful. I'm going to rush out and buy the book.
Chris: 'The physics of refraction' ... being bleached by the suns’ rays presumably.
Cahal: Arrange in congregation, you know.
Elizabeth: Yeah, it's lovely isn't it actually, it's beautiful.
Chris: Well the sun is being refracted through the attic window.
Elizabeth: For me it's just that physics of refraction is such a kind of now, you know, anybody is likely to write that in their poem, the physics of refraction ...
Duncan: The angle of refraction.
Elizabeth : It’s just a kind of nouny sort of, it feels a bit bandwagonny. I think this is quite precise. I think it means refraction in the way that we learnt at school.
Duncan: There's a poem by Hardy where he's writing at midnight and all these insects start coming onto his plate and he feels really threatened by them and I think in the end he literally ...
Chris: Stabs them.
Duncan: He refrains from that. I definitely get the feel of Hardy about these poems, that sensual ... imminence. When you're writing, you know, it’s almost as if there were a kind of competing imminent colour in a lot of these creatures. And that's what I feel in this poem, a definite sense of imminence, the idea that there's some power to be ...
Cahal: The central conceit is the damage that the words, the paper, did casually when I wasn't even thinking about, so it's not something about the power of the thing that's been killed. It is about the idea that in doing this we casually kill the insect and where do I get from there. Not to say that oh gosh, words are dangerous and one has to be careful with what one does with them, but in fact that you're as wiped out as an insect.
Leona: I think it's something about the actual working of them, and mashing them about on the page, destroying the fresh creative spring.
Duncan: It's about baptising.
Cahal: It's 'yourself ' that's been hurt rather than some other party isn't it?
Elizabeth: It relates back to the flocks and congregations doesn't it?
Kim: OK so you can keep congregation I guess.
Duncan: No, no, forget the congregation. The flock’s fine.
Kim: No, no, no. You’ve got to have a 'congregation '...
Leona: No, the thing is, what's happening is: the flock/congregation thing is like, the flock is like the alive, original, joy-spring stuff, and the congregation is where it's gotten mashed about.
Cahal: And tidied up and drilled.
Leona: Tidied up. So it's still part of that. Yeah, umhum.
Hugh: I think the last three have got to stay. I can see it because it's one of the few times that I really like the sort of break: 'Dead-still' and 'still, blanched'
Cahal: It works three or four different ways doesn’t it? And there is still life but I’m still blanched and bloodied, and I’m dead still and I lie dead and I lie if I say I’m dead and I lie dead still and all that stuff.
Hugh: That works very very well and I can’t say I’m intellectualising that it shouldn’t be there, but I actually ...
Duncan: I had the same pained reservations with being dead at the end ...
Elizabeth: I more I look at it the more I’m kind of delighted and amused by it. It’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful poem actually. And it is all that sort of patterning of sounds, principally because of the patterning of words in it, you know, that’s it’s beauty, and then it’s kind of actually got an argument that runs all the way through it as well and it’s kind of self reflective in a sort of sternly humorous without smiling way.
Cahal: [AGREEING] The 'hoarse-drone' in the second stanza.
Elizabeth: And the blue blaze makes the pages of my book flip over gently.
Duncan: But don’t the 'blue blaze' and the 'hoarse drone' imply blue bottles, horseflies and drones?
Elizabeth: Insects, yes, yes.
Cahal: It’s all coming. It hasn’t come yet but it’s all coming, the whole thing, you know.
PAUSE
Elizabeth: Ah yes, 'I' am not baptised, I’m outside actually the kind of ritual or the religious or, you know. But I'm blanched.
Cahal: Innocence has been baptised.
Duncan: You baptise anything that’s innocent logically.
Elizabeth : 'Blanched' is whitened.
Cahal Well now it’s sort of sun-blanched of course.
Elizabeth: Well we have 'bleached pulp.'
Cahal: Drained, you know, there’s that sense of being ...
Hugh: I’m not sure about the title because when you go back to it when you’ve come to the end of the poem, it delivers too much of it I think doesn’t it?
Kim/Chris: Yeah.
Leona: I’d forgotten about the title.
Hugh: I’d forgotten about the title and I suddenly looked up at the page and I saw it there and I was unhappy to see it.
Elizabeth: I don’t agree with that.... I think it’s too weird, yes. It’s like what? Blood, but sun-blanched blood, and, you know, it’s like it’s faded ink and stuff, but it doesn’t explain what it is at all.
Hugh: It doesn’t but the word 'blanched' is so beautiful in the poem that I don’t want it to be before the last line, even though you don’t understand it.
Leona: {TO HUGH] But you’ve got it here, in the third line of the poem.
Hugh: [TO LEONA] Sorry, you're right. It says 'that lies blanched.' Well that’s all right....
Chris: [TO THE GROUP] We’re over twenty minutes.
Elizabeth :[TO CHRIS] Thank you. This is the last poem, though.
[GENERAL AGREEMENT TO CARRY ON THE DISCUSSION]
Elizabeth: 'Gold-tipped' sounds like an insect to me.
Chris: [ DISAGREEING] ... That’s the pen ...
Elizabeth: 'Words appear , and then more /words.' That’s like Hardy isn’t it, things appearing, more and more of them.
Chris: I’m still having problems with the four bits at the beginning of the first stanza. I think it’s just, as it unfolds, you know, I’m more and more convinced by it, it’s just that I’m having a real problem with those four lines ... I’m getting hung up on the 'physics of refraction 'at the moment.
Cahal: Well I mean isn’t the overall sense of it, first of all , that, the first idea is the idea of a group of things for which one was responsible, actually forming themselves up into some kind of dragooned and drilled and organised, ordered, unity and that is probably firstly. And the second one is the idea that the way in which they break themselves up defies the physics of refraction allows them to come out and look differently from what you know they should look like when you put them down. The physics of refraction being about some kind of distortion and that something else comes out of these words.
Leona: The thing is the liquid that you’re looking at it through is only that one couplet because, you know, the resurfacing is coming up out of the water.
Kim: It’s about beauty coming out of fragmentation and that’s how the line breaks work... it’s like pure light.
Leona: [DISAGREEING] Refraction and fragmentation are not the same.
Kim: To refract light is to break it into the bands of colour isn’t it?
Chris: It’s the idea of the sun bleaching the page.
Cahal: It sounds good but it isn’t what I though were the physics of refraction.
Duncan: ... It’s not what you can see whereas so much else in the poem is about what you can see. A very abrupt transition.
Cahal: No, but the idea of a boundary distorting the way in which you look at that that you’re seeing through that boundary, and the light breaks it up just as the surface of water is about to break, and something comes out of it. I don’t say it’s right, nor that I know what the pattern of reverence coming out of the poems of Gibran's The Prophet are, but the idea that these thoughts that were put down and put into a certain confining medium like the surface of water, that surface or line break has the effect of making one look at them differently or see them differently so that different things come back to you out of something that you put into line breaks and the idea that flowed without that boundary.
Duncan: Yeah, but the point is this is a simile. What we’ve got to say is basically that the people who revere Gibran, all right, there’s that relationship. In other words there’s a relationship between the phrases, right, and the innovation.
Cahal: [DISAGREEING] They don’t revere him.
Leona: No. I don’t think the reverence for Gibran 's The Prophet is about reverence for Gibran.
Cahal: Part of the reverence came out of the work.
Duncan: Just, you know, be specific about it. Something is being compared to something in the prophet, right. It’s the passion and the reverence with which people regard that book.
Leona: No, no. No, it’s not.
Cahal: No. But there’s no suggestion that there’s a price in reverence, that people review that book.
Duncan: A is to B as is C to D. There’s four separate elements.
Cahal: No. The thing that is being talked about in that sentence is the notion, wherever it comes from, whether the poet himself, Gibran said it or not, is that passion and reverence resurrected themselves, revealed themselves through the folds of that book. In other words in writing that book the writer discovered something other happening, passion and reverence, say, that he didn’t necessarily put in there. This is about finding something coming out that you didn’t know you’d put in there, because you put it within the constraints of a different medium which has a boundary and the physics of refraction is a metaphor for that. Not that I might by putting things into line breaks write a poem so great that people might revere that poem or revere me, but that by putting things into line breaks, say form, putting things into poetry at all, I might see something coming out, a reverence or an enthusiasm for whatever I hold important that I didn’t actually know I’d put in there.
Duncan: It's much much simpler than that. ...
Cahal: That was as simple as it gets.
Kim: A equals B.
Duncan: It’s very very simple what he’s saying and that is that thought is to reality as is the passion of a believer to a particular creed. That’s what it is.
Cahal: No, no. Rejected totally. [JOKING] Is that on the record?
Kim: [JOKING] Exclusion Rule 61: Contradicting Cahal.
Hugh [TO CAHAL] They are wrong. You are right.
Duncan: [TO HUGH] Wait a minute. Would you give me your grounds for saying that.
Hugh: Well yes, because the words don't mean what you thought.... Just take it from the bit: 'thoughts that now resurface' Whatever I did, these thoughts 'resurface/ and resurrect just as /passion and reverence did /' – stayed 'within the folds of,' – and there follows the title of a piece of work. So passion and reverence resurfaced within the folds of that work ...
Duncan: Can we just go back to where you started. 'Thoughts that now resurface and resurrect. ' That is a metaphor embedded within the whole of this analogy, right. When we say that 'thoughts resurrect' we mean that whatever is dead in the thought, right, must therefore come alive. Because the only meaning of the word 'resurrect ' is something that was dead and now comes alive, right.
Caha: Or was lying down and now stands up.
Duncan: OK. I mean what's lying down isn't asleep necessarily when you resurrect. It's a bit melodramatic, OK. So all I'm saying is the thought basically is that something abstract, something cerebral, can therefore become a reality in the way that all writers want to make their raciocinations into something that's concrete, vibrant and immediately lifts the senses of the reader. So in other words, the thought is to reality as ... now it's here we're dealing with a simile and not a metaphor ...
Kim: [AGREEING] We're dealing with the equals sign, it just means 'equals.'
Duncan: ... as passion and reverence, in other words someone coming to Gibran and saying I believe in this, right. Gibran is no more than any other creed might be. In other words a believer comes to a creed in the same way as a writer's thoughts try and seek reality.
Hugh: [DISAGREEING] I think you're going beyond....
Elizabeth: [TO HUGH] Let him get to the end of this, otherwise we'll never be able to go home.
Cahal There are several mistakes. First of all passion and reverence were the actors in that. They surfaced within the folds. They surfaced or resurrected, whichever word you want.
Duncan: The word 'resurrect' only refers to thoughts.
Elizabeth: [DISAGREEING WITH DUNCAN] No, 'did.' 'Did' means it 'did' refer ...
Cahal: Thoughts resurface and resurrect and passion and reverence resurface and resurrect within the something of a text, right –
Duncan : But it’s not ... That's what's common, the idea of coming from dead into life.
Cahal : Or from stasis into anastasis, yeah.
Kim : It foreshadows a religious explanation using resurrect and passion.
Cahal: It's very relevant.
Duncan: It’s a relationship between thought and reality ... and the creed.
Cahal: No. It’s not about the relationship between thought and reality, and The Prophet is not a creed. It is a book of poetry, and this is about how something about this act of writing. And the physics of refraction is being harnessed to say that things that I write down in a certain medium, things that I put into a certain medium, are seen differently, resurface and resurrect differently, as passion and reverence did within the folds of another piece of writing, and therefore somebody has to have said at some point in the past, although it's not in the poem, that passion and reverence surface in that book, whether it’s the writer ...
Duncan: I'm really interested, but I don't think The Prophet is here being quoted as an example of writing. It may be here in writing ... I’ve already said that I regard the whole thing as being a parenthesis ...
Poet (Sudeep): I just have two questions. [DISCUSSING THE NUMBERING OF THE SECTIONS] Whether I actually need the numbers, one, two and three.
Cahal/Kim: Yeah.
Poet (Sudeep): Yeah, I do, OK. It's not too ...
Hugh: It's not redundant.
Poet (Sudeep): And 'bloodied' coming too close to each other at the end of section 2 and 3. Is that OK?
Kim : That's lovely.
Elizabeth: That's fine. I think that's fine.
Cahal: Section 3 starts and ends like section 2 does, but squeezes it all up into three lines; whereas the other one had the long long long story about the insects... [JOKING] it's been squashed.
Elizabeth : Yes.
Cahal: The three sections avoid the fact that if you didn't, we would hit 'it is mid afternoon' three times in the one poem. As it is we find three different poems that all start off with the same idea, say ...
Poet (Sudeep) : Well we could just have sort of like three dots ...
Cahal: Well you could do that but 1, 2, and 3, you see, these are three different poems under one heading.
Poet (Sudeep): So it's OK?
Cahal: And they all start off with the same thing but go in different directions I think.
Elizabeth: Yes, I think so too.
Leona: It’s also the three: the three is a good thing in the context with congregations and so on .
Kim: Mmm.
Poet (Sudeep): Thanks.
Chris: It’s great.
Cahal: [LAUGHING] 'Bloodied but unbowed' I should say.
Elizabeth : [LAUGHING, TO CAHAL] Try not to say that.