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Writing and Existence
Let’s keep our minds free of culture! Culture begins when people have some time to fill in, and look for something big and glossy to fill it in with. So they buy themselves a radiogram. And a radiogram without records is no good to them. So they get a couple of long-playing records of Dylan Thomas reading his own poems. And then they invite their friends over for a couple of hours of culture, and everyone sits around and says nothing for a couple of hours while the needle scratches and the voice booms on and the record-changer makes a clanking noise. It was this kind of thing that drove Thomas up the wall in America.
If poetry is related to existence, then a great deal of Thomas should be listened to when you’ve got a hangover. If you never have hangovers, it might be better to buy some records of John Donne. But why listen at all, if you’re not absolutely in the mood for it? That’s the curse at the verse readings in a varsity theatre, where people come along for a bit of culture, because they can’t find anything better to do. They don’t understand the poems, because the poems are about things they have never begun to understand in themselves.
Setting aside culture, there are several good reasons for listening to poetry. Because one’s wife or husband has gone away for an indefinite holiday, and one wants to get a bit of courage to go on living with. I’d recommend the old Scots ballads at such a time:
This ae night, this ae night,
This ae night and all,
Fire and fleet and candlelight,
And Christ receive thy soul . . . [‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’]
Or else you might want to listen because you’ve just committed a murder. Don’t tell me that’s impossible. We all commit murders from time to time, though the blood is not always visible. Then you can listen to the voice of Mary Hamilton, after she had killed her new-born child:
For I rolled him in my apron
And I cast him on the sea,
Saying, ‘Sink ye, swim ye, bonny wee babe,
Ye’se get nae mair o’ me.’
Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
Tonight she’ll have but three.
There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton
And Mary Carmichael and me . . . [‘Mary Hamilton’]
Myself, I listen to Thomas’s ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ for the big magic when things are falling apart:
I know not whether
Adam or Eve
The adorned holy bullock
The white ewe lamb
Or the chosen virgin
Laid in her snow
On the altar of London
Was the first to die
In the cinder of the little skull . . .
Among other things, a good poem is a charm, a piece of magic, to be used for a purpose. When I was a younger man, Auden’s ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love’ was a charm used frequently for purposes of seduction by young men at mixed parties. There is always a judgment, though, on people who use charms for an ignoble purpose. They turn into ladder-climbing civil servants or university lecturers quarrelling over somebody else’s interpretation of the bad quarto of Romeo and Juliet; and their wives run away with people who own horses.
By a charm I mean, at the very least, a pattern of words that restores a dislocated contact between the conscious and the sub-conscious mind. It is anti-educational. It has nothing to do with culture. You have to know the poem by heart – it has to be part of your soul and brain and guts for the charm to be really effective.
I remember helping a young friend up a steep street in Dunedin. He was drunk of course. But the main trouble was that he was feeling the pinch of our loveless, ugly, mechanical society. And so he was bellowing loudly in the grip of the octopus. The charm I used on this occasion was the poem of Yeats called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:
This is no country for old men; the young
In one another’s arms; birds in the trees,
Those dying generations, at their song;
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas –
Fish, flesh and fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born or dies;
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Caught in that sensual music, all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect . . .
And so on, to the part of the poem where Yeats applies his rock-drill to the human heart itself:
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall –
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul –
Consume my heart away! Sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal,
It knows not what it is! And gather me
Into the artifice of eternity . . .
The charm worked, of course, because it was part of his being and part of mine. Even more part of his being, because he was younger than me. A young man feels the pinch in a different way – ‘Sick with desire. And fastened to a dying animal’ – that is not an old man’s statement, but a young man’s statement. Old men don’t worry much about dying, I think – more about their bank balance or their grandchildren. It was the young man in the old Yeats who said it, the one who believed that life was, or could be, a matter of holiness and fertility.
I can remember other poems I have used as charms. A year or two back, when I was going through a wide flat desert, I used often to chant a poem by Lawrence Durrell:
Song for the brides of Argos
Combing the swarms of golden hair:
Quite quiet, quiet there.
Under the rolling comb of grass
The sword outrusts the golden helm.
Agamemnon under tumulus serene
Outsmiles the jury of skeletons:
Cool under cumulus the lion queen:
Only the drum can celebrate,
Only the adjective outlive them . . . [‘Nemea’]
I remember chanting it as I swam in the big baths at Ardmore Training- College. It was a great relief. The point was that Durrell had constructedpage 614 the poem in the same desert that I was then passing through. It has the wideness of the desert in it, the glitter of the mirages, and all the resignation a man needs to keep his identity among the scorpions and the whispering devils.
Well, I have given you a few notions about the use of poems as charms. Not to blur the intelligence, but to set it in order. Not to put the heart to sleep, but to give it courage to survive. This, I think, is the true relation of any good poem to the existence of the reader. But its relation to the man who writes it is something rather different.
Men are sleepwalkers by nature. It is part of the result of the Fall of Adam and Eve. We can live for years without knowing we are alive. We can imagine we are secure on a ledge three inches wide on the face of a 1,000 ft. precipice. I think a poet is concerned to record for himself mainly, but also for others, those rare moments when he is alive and awake.
It is the business of a poet, I think, to be destitute as well as honest. He may have money; but he should recognise that it is dirt. He may have prestige; but let him hate it and wear it like an old filthy coat. Then he may be able to stay awake a little better. Love will not harm him, though. It will slice him open like a fish, and hang him up by the heels, and let the sun into his private bag of dreams and idiot ambitions. He will think he is dying when he is just beginning to wake up.
Of course this applies, if it is true, just as much to a cabinetmaker as to a poet. I set aside the accountants and the bureaucrats, because they belong to Caesar, and have chosen to live inside the social machine. It is not really my business to blame or praise the social machine. But I do not think a man can become an accountant or a bureaucrat, handling money or words in the interests of Caesar, and remain a poet. I am a bureaucrat.
Writing, good writing, is a function of a man’s existence, like eating or working or praying or making love. If writing becomes something else, a function of money or prestige or education or culture, I think it begins to fossilise or fall apart – because the man who writes is beginning to fossilise or fall apart. The best poems are like threads of light or dark cloth pulled from the frayed sleeve of the coat which is the existence of one particular man.
To write well, one does not have to talk about writing at all, or think about it much, except at the moment when one is actually writing. A short while ago I met R.A.K. Mason in Dunedin. We did not talk about his verse or my verse. We talked about the faults of the New Zealand police force and the troubles of certain friends whom we cared for. And later on, with another man who is also a poet, we walked through the town without saying anything at all. That is the way it should be, I think.
Here is a poem that I wrote recently, which comes very close, I think, to my existence. It concerns to some extent my fellow-clansmen, the alcoholics who use the Bolton Street cemetery as a private bedroom. And the cypresspage 615 tree at the end of the poem is the macrocarpa which flourishes in Otago, where I was born and grew up:
Thoughts in my Thirty-sixth Year
Some of the living lie down in Bolton Street
With a bottle of blue meths
To wake with frost like fur on their overcoats
In the grip of the second death.
The dead already below the concrete slabs
Have a rainproof house.
Consider, Lord God, that under the cage of ribs
Is a monster without eyes.
My black bag of lies is not yet empty,
I lug it on downhill
To die no doubt with the rags of ten or twenty
Poems in my skull.
The wind blew from the South with rain to follow
The hour I woke unfree
And three old women put beside my pillow
The nuts of the cypress tree. (Uncollected)
Which means, I suppose – ‘as I get older, I don’t get any younger’. It is a gloomy poem; and it cheered me up to write it. But it has nothing to do with money, or prestige, or education, or culture. And here is another poem, which I wrote to my wife:
She Who is Like the Moon
I do not know another beauty
Like what your face has shown
Silently, silently,
Pure as the moon in fences of torn cloud
Who floods the earth and sky and troubled water
With light like music for one man alone:
Beauty you possess, time’s daughter,
Lamp of my life, O hidden one,
You who are the song you sing,
Silently, silently,
From faithful pillows on a night of love
Pouring in my heart’s gulf
Your light, your song, your cataract of beauty. (CP 223)
They are as honest as I can make them. And I do not know whether these poems are very good, or not. But I know that they refer to important moments in my existence, moments of knowledge which do not occur often. They may be helpful as charms for other people, such as yourselves, who also go sleep-walking along a dangerous track between an unremembered birth and a death which has not yet happened to us.
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