Modernism, John Millington Synge, and The Playboy of the Western World.

“Rapid social change at the dawn of the twentieth century demanded new literary forms” 

Concerning the above proposition, it seems rather over-focused historicism to decontextualise early 20^th century modernist literature – and the ongoing social change it accompanied – as though it was some dislocated event suddenly “demanded” by history, rather than an (admittedly explosive) link in a developmental concatenation. By 1900, modernising forms of literature had been engaging with the wholesale social and cultural transformation of a newly-industrialising Europe for half a century, and both progressive experimentation in writing (and other arts) and social change were far advanced long before the “rapid social change at the dawn of the twentieth century.” “Around 1850,” writes Roland Barthes, “classical writing […] disintegrated, and the whole of literature, from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of language” (Barthes, in Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991, p. 21). And by 1863 Charles Baudelaire had identified “that indefinable something we may be allowed to call ‘modernity’” (1863, p. 6), naming simultaneously a highly engaged (if somewhat fazed) observational/artistic state – “loftier than that of a mere flâneur” (1863, p. 12) – and the arrival of mass (and spectacular, in Guy Debord's sense of the word) population in burgeoning urban areas, as the former assemblages of villages and churches known as 'cities' became industrialised centres of unprecedented change: the “fourmillante cité, cité pleine du rêves [swarming city, city filled with dreams]” (Baudelaire, 1970/1857, p. 88).

“Modernity,” writes Baudelaire, anticipating modernist preoccupations with the mythopoeic and the the semi-conscious, “is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent“ (Baudelaire, 1863, p. 7) – and these (whatever their classical antecedents in Homer etc) were now new concepts of human experience for societies which, before industrialisation, had remained predominantly rural, slow-moving, socialised into retrogressive narratives of fixity and certainty, and resistant to change – occasional revolutions notwithstanding – for a millennium. Mainstream literature – for much of the 19^th century a stylistically entangled bricolage of post-Romanticism and the vestiges of Neoclassicism – was variously ornate, moralistic, domestic, religious-based, romantic-adventurous, or Gothic, or various combinations thereof; and much of it, despite the exponential and transformative arrival of the novel, scarcely represented the uncertainties and anxieties of societies in flux. In France, Baudelaire, symbolist-harbinger of the modern, would soon be joined by writers like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé etc; and by the late 1880s and the 1890s a complex fin de siècle philosophical and literary package of decadence, pessimism, nihilism, anarchism (interpreted from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc), and literary avant gardism would tentatively begin to surface in Britain, perhaps most importantly through Oscar Wilde (though also through such writers as Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen etc), and would contribute in attitude, volition and perspective to Modernism. (Perhaps we might credibly include the much earlier Laurence Sterne – as a major influence on, for instance, Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists, as well as British/Irish writers including James Joyce, John Millington Synge and Virginia Woolf – in the proto-modernist canon, and, by extension, François Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes.)

A new conversation was in development, but it had as much to do with reaction against (and critique of) earlier literary artefacts such as the realist novel as with wider social concerns, and writers would hardly avoid engaging. This was still an age of empire, and of social, racial and sexual inequality, and we find early modernistic critique in, for instance, Stevenson's The Beach of Falesá (1892): a radical blend of romance, adventure, Gothicism, satire, travel story, realism, and the 'novel of manners,' with even an unusually modern variant of the domestic outcome: a mixed race family, and a satirical deconstruction of the perverse assumptives of empire – an anticipation of postcolonialism (which we can regard as one of the formulations of Modernism), also operating as a potent subtext in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World [hereafter, Playboy].

Synge, “specifically attracted to the discontinuities created when Irish and English cultures intersected” (Cusack, in Gömceli and James, 2015, p. 108), controversially deploys Hiberno-English (with its unfamiliar Gallic lexicon, its unbound reflexive pronouns, and its 'let imperatives') in Playboy, “to demonstrate the continuing power of the radical Gaelic past to disrupt […] the colonial identity projected onto Ireland” (Kiberd, in Gömceli and James, 2015, p. 108). So a hybrid language becomes itself a politicised proposition for reasoned Irish autonomy, and Christy Mahon's (and perhaps his nation's) almost Jungian journey of self-discovery is planted in the constructedly inviolate western counties, amongst the ideologically and linguistically totemic and politically charged “people of the Irish peripheries” (Kojima, 1998, p. 53), where – through the deconstructing and reversal of his own narrative (“what Aristotle would call a triple peripety” (Davy, 2000, p. 122)) – he symbolically frees himself from a delusionally heroic misidentification with murder, and from the paralysing political-hierarchical protocols represented by his father. He becomes “a character who constructs an identity for himself through language, and thus reaches a state of liberation from the repressive forces in his own community” (Gömceli and James, 2015, p. 112). Having twice failed to kill his father, he finally transcends the physical dimension of this need, and achieves some level of individuation and a reconstituted identity, eschewing both subordination and spurious heroism. 

Christy refuses also to be wedded to the 'West' (the east coast of Ireland projected as the west of England) and its paralysis (which Joyce identifies – in Dubliners – in a book-length parallelism, as the central Irish malaise of the time) and its credulous unreality, embarking upon (in theory, at least, though one has to suspect it still rests on a fragile narrative of self) a new and self-defining life: “a likely gaffer […] I will go romancing through a romping lifetime” (Synge, 1992, p. 110). This moving away from the language of oppression without the self-defeating and irrational need for a total rejection of all influence from the oppressor, is, in actuality, a sophisticated postcolonial application, using language itself both as metaphor and as medium, superpositioning a number of the recognised and unrecognised, formative, defining discourses (of a people) over each other.

In attempting to understand Modernism as a “new literary form,” we might note that what Modernism actually does is address, examine and represent the semi-conscious, semi-participant mythologising of the human psyche by constructing characters as larger-than-life-but-stunted, humanised myth-figures, unknowingly enacting ritual behaviours almost typical of Greek theatrical heroes manipulated unawares by the godlike powers of internalised socialisation, performing blind rites of belonging or duty, which, theoretically, constitute the psychological imperatives of human lives. 

Much early Modernism utilises – and can be distinguished by – something like this perspective. We see this in Synge's Rabelaisian, bathetic character constructions: nothing is reliably to human scale, and the characters are entirely capable of believing in the grandiose giantism of themselves or others, and the inflated significance of their actions and speech, while simultaneously remaining tiny, absurdist humans hiding behind tables in a world somehow still peopled by legendary giants, in whose stories they locate and define themselves. Here is the liminal gulf of Modernism, the tension between this world and that: the “disjunction between subject and objective world find[ing[ a natural point of focus in an oft-quoted line” (Davy, 2000, p.116) : "There's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed," (Synge, 1992, pp. 107-108). We will find it again in Joyce's Odyssey-in-a-day of Ulysses, or in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway – a related twenty-four hour descent into the mythic temporal distortions proposed by Proust and Henri Bergson, in which time telescopes or inverts in images reminiscent of the spacetime illustrations of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity (1905). And we find it in Eliot's stopping of time altogether: “one end, which is always present […] At the still point of the turning world” (Eliot, 1983, pp. 190-191); and in Katherine Mansfield's even more relativistic transmutation of the temporal into a vertiginous spatial realm (brought on by gazing at a pear tree) in Bliss: “where the notion of chronological time as logic sequence and linear succession is [...] disrupted [...] replaced by spatialisation: the subject [...] perceived as object, as non-self” (Casertano, 2001, pp. 100-101). These are not the regular powers and events of human lives dealt with in 'realist' literature; they are the mythic in Modernism, enabling an entirely other view of the human transaction.

Irish dissent – considered as “rapid social change” – was also hardly new, as Joyce illustrates with his transmogrified litany of the names of the dead nationalist heroes in The Dead (written at approximately the same time as Playboy), incarnate in street names, statues, parks, city squares – the undead deceased of the Irish struggle emanating their mystic influence from some spectral other-Ireland, with the dead Michael Furey (a deconstructive motif of the chthonic Furies / Erinyes of Greek myth) operating as the western taxiarch archangel and rebel-spirit of the Irish periphery – and it is this otherworld, this in-between place, this 'gap,' that Modernism asks us to enter, and whose Irish discourse we find ourselves inhabiting in Playboy (another temporally compressed descent into the underworld of the psyche). So in Playboy we find both linguistic and generic hybridity, almost a postmodernist montage of old and new literary forms – from the Rabelaisian and hyperbolic characterisations of “the mad Mulrannies were driven from California and they lost in their wits […] Daneen Sullivan knocked the eye from a peeler, or Marcus Quinn, God rest him, got six months for maiming ewes” (Synge, 1992, p. 43), to the “lexical chaining [and] extreme parallelism” (Gömceli and James, 2015, p 119) of the word “lonesome” (Synge, 1992, pp. 73-75) repeated by Christy and Pegeen nine times to the point of absurdism. The very syncretism and advancement of all this, alongside postcolonial imperatives and the presentation of female characters as rather more animated, intelligent and spirited than most of the males, qualifies Playboy as a playful, modernistic, politicised, theatrical foray into “new literary forms,” even Modernism itself, though the reasons for its appearance in that form at that time may have their origins considerably earlier than “the dawn of the twentieth century.”

Reference List:

Aristotle. (1997) Poetics, Mineola, Dover Thrift Editions.

Baudelaire, C. (nd/1863) The Painter of Modern Life [Online]. Available at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Baudelaire_Painter-of-Modern-Life_1863.pdf (Accessed 15 February 2018).

Baudelaire, C. (1970/1857) Les Fleurs du Mal, Oxford, Basil Blackwood & Mote Ltd.

Bradbury, M. McFarlane, J. (eds) (1991) Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, London, New York, Victoria, Penguin Books.

Casertano, R. (2001) Katherine Mansfield: Distance, Irony, and the Vertigo Perception [Online]. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/20112326?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents  (Accessed 22 February 2018).

Collins, C. (2016) J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the western World, Oxford, New York, Routledge.

Davy, D. (2000) “Isn't It a Great Wonder?": The Quantum Mechanical Structure of "The Playboy of the Western World [Online]. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/20646345?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents  (Accessed 10 February 2018).

Doloughan, F. (2016) Synge's Playboy of the Western World: Contexts and Reception, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Eliot, T.S. (1983) Collected Poems 1909-1962, London, Faber & Faber.

Gömceli, N. James, A. (2015) Hiberno-English and beyond in J.M. Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World": A Literary Linguistic Analysis of its Dramatic Significance [Online]. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24722042?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents  (Accessed 21 February 2018).

Gribbin, J. (1991) In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality, London, Black Swan.

James Joyce Centre, Dublin: Will Self & John Banville Discuss 'Dubliners' (2014) Youtube Video, added by The James Joyce Centre, Dublin [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egE8kDHGUYo (Accessed 12 February 2018).

Joyce, J. (2008) Dubliners, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press.

Kiberd, D. (2011) 'The Riotous History of The Playboy of the Western World', Guardian, 23 September [Online]. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/sep/23/playboy-western-world-old-vic   (Accessed 22 February 2018).

Kojima, C. (1998) J. M. Synge and Nationalism: Concerning "The Playboy of the Western World" [Online]. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/20533387?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents (Accessed 23 February 2018).

Mansfield, K. (2008) Selected Stories, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press.

Marx, K. in Eiland, H. Jennings, M.W. (eds) (1996) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1938-40, Cambridge Ma, Harvard University Press.

Mayne, J. (trans, ed) (nd) The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire [Online]. Available at https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-218-fall2010/files/Baudelaire.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2018).

Roche, A. (2015) The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899-1939, London, New York, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

Sandison, A. (1996) Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism , Houndmills, New York, Palgrave.  

Shieff, S. (2014) Katherine Mansfield's Fairytale Food [Online]. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/43198604?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents  (Acessed 22 February 2018).

Synge, J.M. (1981) Synge: The Complete Plays, London, Methuen.

Synge, J.M. (1992/1907) The Playboy of the Western World, London, Auckland, Methuen.

Taunton, M. (2016) Modernism, time and consciousness: the influence of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust [Online]. Available at https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/modernism-time-and-consciousness-the-influence-of-henri-bergson-and-marcel-proust (Accessed 22 February 2018).

Webster, N. (2013) The French Revolution [Online]. Available at https://tinyurl.com/y7jmeolc   (Accessed 20 February 2018).

Maggie Tulliver, The Mill on the Floss, and George Eliot.

(Note: where only page numbers are given as references, all citations are from the 2015 Oxford World's Classics edition of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.)

One wonders if George Eliot – student and critic of Goethe, cohabiting with Goethe's biographer – initially considered the Bildungsroman (the ‘development novel’) as a model for The Mill on the Floss, found it to be insufficient for a story about the complex, multifarious effects of a community upon the lives of its natives, so adapted instead to illustrating its shortcomings. Perhaps we can regard The Mill on the Floss as a thought experiment, in which “a small mistake of nature” (p. 13), a “too 'cute” (p. 13) girl, is born into a family and a community governed by ancient and exacting codes of interaction, dress, and hierarchy, which obtrude into every detail of life, however trivial, like so many layers of codified hypocrisy. It is a straightforward development from that semi-autobiographical documenting of early life to following an alternative narrative to see what becomes of that proxy-girl as “an over 'cute woman” (p. 13), who cannot help rebelling against the unnatural strictures placed upon her, but ultimately remains too constrained to become a truly self-determining, identity-performative George Eliot. One wonders also what exactly Eliot was weeping for in that quote from George Lewes: “Mrs Lewes is getting her eyes redder and swollener every morning as she lives through her tragic story” (Guardian, 2010). Was she perhaps weeping for her younger self as Maggie, as she directed her mythic tragedy towards what may have been a liberating and cathartic – if painful – closure, as Eliot killed off her younger, more vulnerable proxy, having already disabled her through a series of crippling emotional transactions with all those around her? Is The Mill on the Floss actually a sort of enabling and therapeutic myth of constructed other-memory? What is certain is that Maggie's fatal dramatic arc is almost discernible from the outset, as her character is undermined by pathologically traumatic – often bafflingly trivial – emotional assaults, almost amounting to de facto curses.

Our first encounter with Maggie tells us that “she's twice as 'cute [clever] as Tom” (p. 12), but we are quickly disabused of any notion that cleverness might be an asset, and really she is, “ 'Too 'cute for a woman, I'm afraid' “ (p. 12). So from the outset Maggie's qualities are made worthless, dangerous and undesirable – her currency simply has little value. In short order we learn from her mother that young Maggie is naughty, dirty, and wayward, “like a wild thing that will tumble in the water one day […] half an idiot [...] like a Bedlam creatur' [...] like a mulatter […[ so comical … [and] ... franzy“ (pp. 12-13). Her father – despite his generalised dismissal on the grounds of excessive intelligence – is  often more benign and protective with Maggie: “ 'she's a straight, black-eyed wench as anybody need wish to see … [who] … can read almost as well as the parson' ” (p. 12). “ 'But her hair won't curl all I can do with it' ” (p. 13), is Mrs Tulliver's response, on another level entirely, which gives some estimation of the stultified level of debate and censure – as well as the routine dissonance – maddeningly at work in the Tulliver household. Mrs Tulliver's obsessive fault-finding is typical of the community generally, as exemplified by the Tullivers' extended family: the Dodsons, for instance, who “did not shrink from uttering the most disagreeable truths” (p. 43), and whose own complex set of codes and evaluations – comically satirised by Eliot – is enforced rigorously by what resembles a hissing gaggle of merciless, self-appointed, and profoundly hypocritical geese in the form of Maggie's aunts. “ 'Little gells as cut their own hair should be whipped and fed on bread and water' ” (p. 64), pronounces the spiteful and caustic aunt Glegg. " 'Little gells mustn't come to see me if they behave in that way' " (p. 89), says the preening and preposterous aunt Pullet, speaking for the entire clucking collective.

Given such unnavigable and oppressive familial protocols, however we may anachronistically admire Maggie's irrepressible animal spirits, the depressing – perhaps defeatist, perhaps realistic – possibility remains that a better social outcome might have resulted had Mr Tulliver spent his money having Maggie schooled in ladylike comportment and self-restraint. For – to look from the other side –  Maggie is an uncontrolled blunderer of slapstick proportions, and from the first she makes herself unpopular by her inability to control herself. Susan Fraiman offers a (truncated) resumé: “Maggie kills rabbits, spills wine, crushes cake, mutilates dolls, drops books, dashes cardhouses, and hangs on Tom in 'a strangling fashion' “ (2003, p. 33), attracting the “general disapprobation” (p. 89) of those present. And Maggie will attract such disapprobation for the rest of her life, albeit that her blundering will elevate itself from slapstick childhood farce to social suicide, perpetrated in various states of consciousness, with her ultimate transgression – her quasi-elopement with Stephen Guest on the river – experienced in an “enchanted haze […] only dimly conscious of the banks […] at all times […] liable to fits of absence”  (p. 430). Given this tendency to act (or not act) in apparent fugue states of near-unconsciousness, swept along by the tides of the moment, considering herself safe only in states of asceticism, Tom – as Maggie recognises – utters “a terrible cutting truth” (p. 362) when he says, “I never feel certain about anything with you. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong” (p. 363). But of course the dynamics here are complex, and Tom's tyranny is only of the benign variety when offered submission: “you think you know best, and will not submit to be guided” (p. 362).

We are also shown tender, poetic images of Tom and Maggie's sad intimacy, and their almost spiritual entanglement: “the brother and sister for whom youth and sorrow had begun together […] gone forth together into their life of sorrow […]  the golden gates of their childhood [...] forever closed behind them” (pp. 179-80). It is difficult to relate to this golden childhood, as we only witness brief moments of it, interspersed with protracted periods of Maggie needing Tom's affection, and Tom generally withholding it, offering ridicule and disapproval instead. In fact it is difficult to relate at all to Maggie's almost slavish need for Tom's love; Eliot tells us that “the need of being loved would always subdue her” (p. 362), but while this may be understandable as a generalism, it hardly explains Maggie's devotion to a brother who is so consistently and brutally disapproving and unloving. Of course, there are passages of kindness and love in Maggie's life too – with the rather vapid Lucy; with Bob Jakin; with her constant lover, Philip Wakem; with her rather scheming other lover, Stephen Guest; and occasionally with her parents: “ 'Come, come, my wench' […] father'll take your part' " (p. 65), says Mr Tulliver, protecting Maggie against an onslaught of Dodsons: which “delicious words of tenderness” (p. 65) Maggie “kept in her heart … [thinking] … of them long years afterwards” (p. 65). And even Mrs Tulliver – with her hypercritical Dodson DNA – is described as “getting fond of her tall, brown girl” (p. 273).

The tender and supportive and intellectual Philip Wakem is the lover most championed by critics and readers, with Stephen Guest reduced to, “in simple biological terms […] a better mate” (Haight, in Fraiman, 2003, p. 32). But whatever Philip's kindliness, patience and indulgence – which Tom, naturally, proscribes, on the grounds of Philip's patrimony – it is Stephen who catalyses the primary existential challenge in Maggie's life. And whatever we think about her decision to return rather than marry her ardent and attractive lover, her thought processes are sophisticated, and we inevitably sympathise with her courage, and integrity, even if we regard her reasoning as fundamentally fractured by an overweening sense of self-negating duty. These things are fundamental to Maggie's identity, which, unlike the self-creating identity foregrounded by the Bildungsroman, is intimately connected and responsive to those around her. Maggie is a product of her relationships, and ultimately she cannot bring herself to sacrifice her perceived responsibilities to those relationships, even to those she expects to lose as a result of her transgressive episode with Stephen Guest.

Confronted finally with the stark reality of choosing between her own happiness and her faithfulness to the trust of others, Maggie has to choose the latter: “ 'We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that […] for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. [...] this belief […] has slipped away from me again and again; but [...] if I let it go forever, I should have no light through the darkness of this life' ” (p. 442). And here we have a key to Maggie's dealings with others throughout: it has been the existential struggle to locate herself between two poles, and – knowing finally that the balance will always elude her, and that she cannot live with choosing her own happiness – she must choose the side of renunciation or no longer be true to herself. The question remains: why could she not choose Philip Wakem – who perhaps understood and loved her better than anyone – and rescue herself? And the answer, no doubt including all of the answers about passion and simple animal attraction, may well be found in this inability to find balance, to position herself on her own spectrum, and perhaps this outcome is already immanent in Maggie from her story's inception.

Reference List:

Beer, G. (1986) George Eliot, Brighton, Harvester Press Ltd.

Boes, T. (2006) Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends [Online].  Available at http://www.tobiasboes.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Boes_Modernist.pdf (Accessed 26 January 2018).

Eliot, G. (2015) The Mill on the Floss, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press.

Fraiman, S. (2018) Email to Steve Parker, 02 February.

Fraiman, S. (2002) 'The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman', in Yousaf, N. and Maunder, A. (eds): The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner: Contemporary Critical Essays, Houndmills, New York, Palgrave, pp. 31-56.

Fraiman, S. (1993) The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman [Online]. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/462858?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents (Accessed 25 January 2018).

Fraiman, S. (1993) Abstract of 'The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman' [Online]. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271784399_The_Mill_on_the_Floss_the_Critics_and_the_Bildungsroman (Accessed 26 January 2018).

Hardy, B. quoted in Newton, JL. (ed) (2018) Women, Power and Subversion [Online].

Available at  https://tinyurl.com/yde7u45e  (Accessed 5 February 2018).

Hardy, B. (ed) (1970) Critical Essays on George Eliot, New York, Barnes & Noble.

Hughes, K. (2010) Rereading: George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, in The Guardian [Online]. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/27/eliot-mill-floss-biography-tulliver (Accessed 5 February 2018).

Reyes, M.A. (2014) The Beautiful Soul in the Confessional: Crafting the Moral Self in Friederike Helene Unger's 'Confessions of a Beautiful Soul written by Herself' [Online]. Available at http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=abo (Accessed 04 January 2018).

Sol Sistere

it's been lovely getting to know you
feeling your warmth increase
feeling your light spreading

growing inside
but we are fickle things

and already now, at our moment
of greatest intimacy
we begin to feel the faint pull
of our other love from afar

and every day now
we will leave a little bit more

happy-sad Solstice

.

Fake News

you see what he thinks is in those hands could be has been
in those hands those hands that reach out to pat
in front of Andrew Jackson patpat you see

the need when they shout you see the discolouration
of the air between them shout or shoot they like both
with equal dislike the trail of tears the codetalkers

the crowd the loud lewd crowd and crew in the sense
of crowed oh how they crew how crude they are
pussy my love my beautiful pee-green shove my hat

my red hat you see how all is pink and gold make it make it
great again the greatest generation they keep saying that
how many of the greatest came home and beat up black

and blue what's so damn great about racism even
one's soul is off centre now but see the wayward air
between them see the air like a car full of fumes

in a red barn a thrusting heaving gagged in an alleyway
left for dead swinging blackfaced at dawn for your children
to find your tongue that has snaked out across the land

the land which is not yours yes Pocahontas what a laugh
barely any DNA to show not thoroughbred like the thing
with hands that have grasped at all out of reach all

unwanted merely to defile no love no something else
do you feel the evil fucking in the air the air
you want fake news look there right there

Alopecia

then are we never to sit calling
as the sea brims through the grass
when your hair has all gone
and the clouds swoop so low
that we can no longer see
each other
in all of this world
when I even wanted to love
your absent hair and wonder
where it might be now perhaps
running downstream at night
all of it, every filament
to a bay which brims again
where the wind does not cease
where the tides that flow through us
make us dance and choke
where our boats and our hearts
seem so disturbed as the dawn
rushes away on winds of trouble?

This is the difference:
She doesn't want them to die
but
I want them
to live.

Magical Elements in Wuthering Heights.

There are three potentially magical or supernatural episodes in Wuthering Heights, in which mirrors or windows – possibly even eyes – act as some sort of lenses, and perhaps portals, through which time seems to slip. The first is when Mr Lockwood breaks the window in Catherine's old bed-chamber and encounters her ghost wailing to get back in, telling him that "it's been twenty years" (which is accurate, but which Lockwood can't yet have known). Entering the room, Heathcliff quickly reads the situation, and, banishing Lockwood, attempts to call Catherine back through the window — to no avail at this point, though it may be through a window that she later comes to join him.

The second event seems to mirror this scene, as though the two are connected across time; it occurs just before Catherine dies at Thrushcross Grange, tended by Nelly Dean. She looks into a mirror and sees a greatly aged Nelly, but sees also her old room at the Heights, with a "black press" to confirm the location. There is no black press in her room at the Grange, but there IS such a black clothes press in Cathy's old bedroom at the Heights (a 'press' or 'clothes press' is an old-fashioned clothes cupboard).
“The black press,” says Nelly, “where is that?” “It's against the wall, as it always is,” says Cathy. But she also sees another face there, which she does not recognise: “Don't you see that face? […] Oh! Nelly, the room is haunted!”

Could this be Lockwood's face, twenty years in the future, peering out from Cathy's old room? No one else in the entire novel looks out of Cathy's room and sees her out there, so if not then whose face? It has no coherent function in the narrative otherwise. Is this the moment when Lockwood and Cathy see each other through the window of Cathy's old bedroom across a gulf of twenty years? Just prior to this episode we are signalled that we have entered some magical space and time when Catherine says that her bed is at this moment the "fairy cave beneath Penistone Crag" – presumably a place with preternatural possibilities.

The third magical event comes when Heathcliff dies: Nelly notices his bedroom window is wide open, with the rain blowing in, and then finds him dead in bed, smiling, with his eyes also wide open, as if to echo these open glassy channels across death and time. What else could have enabled Heathcliff to die smiling like that, unless Catherine has somehow bridged an impossible divide and they have been reunited? Of course Emily Brontë leaves us with the suggestion that their ghosts are indeed now united, and have even been seen walking together, but has this been accomplished by this through-lined literary device of the windows and the mirror, and even the eyes?

Emily clearly devises and constructs these episodes to suggest that the supernatural elements might possibly be real rather than imaginary – for how else would Lockwood know of the twenty years gulf; why would Heathcliff be smiling, even in death; and why would his window (recalling the previous windows and the mirror) be open to the rain?

And – if we are not supposed to consider these supernatural intrusions as real – why would the sheep at the end of the book refuse to walk past "t' nab" after the shepherd boy has sighted the two ghosts there? The boy's weeping and fear might be explicable by superstition and ghostly gossip, but how is one to explain the behaviour of those sheep? Yes, sheep could be influenced by the behaviour and responses of the human shepherding them, but that really is not what Emily meant. She wanted us at least to consider the possibility that Cathy and Heathcliff had genuinely made it, and were together again at last.

(Publication forthcoming in the Brontë Society magazine.)

limerick

my date from an online location
just died without much explanation
face down in the soup
she glooped one last gloop
which rather fucked THAT expectation

Blow

I've had it with Brexit, with Trump's fucking wall, with Marine Le Pen, with troll-farms, with children drowning every day crossing the Mediterranean, with isolationist anti-immigration Alt-right neo-Fascism in all of its forms. The world is facing the biggest refugee crisis in history, due to runaway Anthropogenic Global Warming. The war in Darfur was caused entirely by global warming making traditional tribal lands unviable, causing mass migration into other territories, and consequently—warfare.

If I was a member of IS, I wouldn't bother filming myself in a black Batman outfit waving a flag from a tank turret, I'd be driving around the now-just-marginally-habitable Muslim areas of Africa explaining how global warming had been caused by the Kuffar in the industrialised areas of the world: those places that now—having totally fucked your eco-systems—are refusing to let you in. I would expect a few angry and committed recruits.

So I've had it with anything that looks like not allowing drowning people into 'our' lifeboats, just because we happened to find them first. I disagree with nationalism and nationhood in all of their forms.

So pretty soon now I am just gonna blow. I'm gonna find me a mad partner on a dating site, steal a car, and take off to France. In fact, I'm doing it today. I figure if we set off at twelve we can be in Paris by midnight, drinking Green Fairy and talking about art and revolution. In the small hours of the morning we will curl together drunkenly in a cheap hotel with the shutters open, to the strains of a distant accordion. Tomorrow we will write wild poems about throwing policemen into the Seine. Then we'll hit the road south to Marseilles, where we will become romantic dockland gangsters into leather jackets and Braquo.

Qui vient? 

Samboo's Grave at Sunderland Point (revizh 2019)

Samboo's Grave at Sunderland Point

Let us not arrive on our deathbeds knowing

that we should have done more, that we

should have listened more closely

to our hearts—Madeleine Shine

On our deathbeds we will cry to have it back,

this wasted time—Alice Aforethought

creeps of sunlight over the salt-marsh
there in the wind from over without
Barrow and Overton, from here to there
up the Irish Sea the overfalls sing
then all out southward freaks of wind

curving in eastward on the intent, the raptor
look of it (in 3D—look again, Samboo

(bells everywhere—what bells?
nothing left below only a tiny skeleta)
your mother dead on the beaches, the bone-beaches

of the endless western Afrique; far-off the sluff and slough
the gold and the kohl the markets of Cathay and Shendy
for this for this, you here, you here—why here?
all of it, ten thousand years in the marram the cow-heads narrow ring
and no homecoming—just this loneliness
just this violation of the co-opting into everyone's dream
everyone who came here to stamp (and steam)

like cattle about your little garden of squashes
pumpkin-head boy from the meridian lands
sleeping soft and lonely beneath below and black
of beyond—and how was it done, Samboo, was it just a wheelbarrow
some seaman's cart; no gymkhana plumage, no funeral cortège
only the function, the deposition, the sediment
the geology of the placement of a little black heart, deceased
there at the wind's wild edge where it mattered most and least

dislocked now from his beach-heart and heave-head 
trampled a thousand over, Samboo universal Samboo
weeps soft over the haunted bay
whirls thrice through the cockles
lingers a moment like a ghostly Susan
then thinks again, then is gone
here, spirit, here … we have caught your soul and you

are forever our little semantic boy
all in pieces and scatters underground
squashed and overarching—how little and lost and longing, all of it
how tiny and lost and ferocious
down there Samboo, down there in the warm and endless cold
where your mother gulfs across all of time
some great universal choke

where is my mind?

across all of this, swooping bells, worlds of light

.(Published in Burning Gorgeous Anthology, 2010
Published in the Triggerfish Critical Review, 2009)

as clouds traverse and clamour

What a thicket what a mix-up
all my
thatches caught in one
attempt at love
all now as we see stretched forever
into the dead sands of what
Marythorpe?
Grimsby?
Dead starfish?
Myths of ice trawlers?

Wow you have to be joking.

My terrorism goes deep.

Mwah.

Go unconscious and replicate

fatherhood is all those bad memories but
that's too simple it is instead, revived
a series of emails about the Beatles
a set of dead flowers an almanac about rain
in none of which is mentioned the beatings
the times when some giant stood over me saying
you are worthless, or asking, one remembers the asking
most of all, are you a piece of shit? -- note, please, this
is not in quotation marks. Perhaps
it is free indirect fucking discourse
for perhaps that is all that I can remember
assuming, of course, that no real human
could have stood above anyone spewing such
endless fields over which curlews tremor and trill.
In which case, as Epicurus said,
fuck off.

perhaps the strangest lachrymosity
accompanied by elephants with blue
crackling about them

one marvels but can hardly feel
in the field they create

.

Six young men and a woman. Sixteen line sonnet.

With some discomfort travailing down the mechanism
of framing not failing to notice in passing how the bilberry
fronds (vb) at the wayside one has concern for—engineering
for the human armature which carries with some instability

to a place slightly—hallowed where she now stands
slightly—awkward in the presence of at least six ghosts
for more are evident in her [country ways] and about her. These
spirit things walk with her in her harrowed life, and one

would reach out quivering across all of time, with urgency
to touch her somehow, to brush them away, to say at last
that this (here, now, again) is what there is, and it must be enough
to sustain her, to lift her from that deep place, to allow her

to feel the waterfalls which flood softly here. This then
is the compact made flesh of negative ions, of potential,
finally, sanctified in this watery and electric place, of love.

I understand and I wish to continue.

.

Keeping love and its deep monster as pets.

In some areas like breath or sex or design
once achieved like the Estwing hammer
the wheel or the loaf, originality has little virtue
now, and one should celebrate the very fact
of being an ancient cliché in one's feelings
in one's ardour and behaviour, of being hugely
referenced in a million pre-emptive poetries
able to find oneself in the old and the very old
and the not very old, and to know

that you didn't invent this, neither the feelings
nor the manifestation. You got it from all
of history, from something that gathered
like a god in the escalating momentum
of what it is to be human. When the current
is right, you go with it, and you don't make a fuss
or wish for a new current. Every day is new.

An ancient miracle is a miracle each time it happens
to crack the ice around you, monster.

.

America: it's like watching
a brain-damaged child
punching its own face
again and again

.

the night's travel

in and now out the same door
like all knives whirling
our utter politics in collisions
of limestone pavements

across all this she travailed
with sepia sandbags
of County Clare

all sailroads to traverse
and only 8 O-clock
by the whale's chime

this big hand by the night's wild travel
points to 12
the little hand
flickers and stops

iris of heart attack hope
—love of small things
and wild places

be certain now be sure

it's that time
in between
where the hands don't count

it's okay to be scared here
to lie down and breathe
to lie a little
before waking



(Published in PoetrySZ 2009)

all up the road
me and my boys
overarched by great snows

sastrugi, I mean

I mean like watch out
a huge sculpture might fall on you as
you walk
All we will know is your silly little legs
kicking next Spring
when we come looking

Jesus we might eat you by mistake
thinking of which
all along this path have been witches
throwing care to the wind
and it seems unlikely now
that the wind
ever caught it

we shouldn't ever walk on this dark path again
oh God let's right now retrace our steps
and make this right

dumbass, we're stuck here forever
don't you see?

and look how big the sky
with its face full of crying