"For there is in fact no direct communication with God, the Creator God. One cannot speak to Him, that is pray to Him. 'The pot doesn't know the woman who made it. The field of millet doesn't know the sower. The cloth forgets its weaver'." Jack Goody, The Interface Between Written and the Oral (CUP: Cambridge, 1987), 153. (Goody is apparently quoting Alfred Erbs, Approche de la religion des Birifior (Paris, 1975), 9.)

This remark struck me with great precision. Here, well in advance of Richards or Barthes, an African tribe announced the death of the author. But in truth, if we were to research this matter carefully there can be few cultures in which this point would not be found to be a truism; but one that cohabits with the strictest intentionalism, since in regard to speech we must presume a living, thinking, person like ourselves (it is only courteous to do so), otherwise one slides into solipsism. With writing, of course, it is different, and there is a choice to be made:

a) This is a stand-in for the face to face speech, so it is essential, again out of politeness, to invoke the intention of the writer. Of this kind are most letters, bills, and such similar documents; but it should benoted that with time such documents may, as far as a reader is concerned, be allowed to slip into the second category,

b) Writings which are cast in the written form, and are meant to be read. Just as one might write someone a poem, although they live in the room above you. Here writer has implicitly accepted the possible drift.– The poet who writes for posterity must be resigned to the irrelevance of his intention.

All the fuss about intent is due to an oddity of reader response. When we go through a poem, or any text, we are very likely to think of it as a substitute for speech; it is a form of arrogance, as if Shakespeare were speaking to me, hard something particular to tell you. But when the audience is unpredictable (in name, or merely in mood) no intention can be broad enough to circumscribe the flux, even when we are able, via historical research to discover something of the wishes of the author, and in such a case it is important to to see that evidence of that kind is only adequate to expand the reference, not constrict it. I can show that author A's text a was alluding to author B's b to make the point Ac, but I cannot with the same material rule out the possibility that a also makes the point 'Ac (not Ac). – Ambiguity, then, can be seen as a feature of writing, especially, though present in speech, but controlled there by tone, pitch, gesture, facial expression, each of which exerts a truly enormous semantic pressure; so great in fact that it is not even necessary to know the language of an angry or an unhappy man. Writing is, by comparison, quite undetermined, except in those cases when, out of politeness, as I have already noted, we pretend that many of the contextual clues are present. The truth is that poems are valuable, if they are, because of their elusive profundity, suggesting but never delivering extreme significance. It is only the timid who try to turn them into business letters.

There is a sense in which the writer has something to say, but by putting it into written form, with so indefinite an application, he has committed it to the logic of written language. A potter may design an orange glaze, but there is a tint of green as a result of an irregularity in the kiln, or, even more clearly, what comes out as he planned, ages unexpectedly and uncontrollably to an even more pleasing colour. (To proceed with their work, what faith the cleaners of the Sistine Chapel must have had.) So the writer, like the sower of millett, resigns control. – But it is essential to add that for every reader there are limits: it is almost as if the intention of the author must be replaced by that of the poem or the drift becomes intolerable. When we read we must be honest and say that it produced in us, unambiguously (though containing many ambiguous precessions), an affective response, and not some other response.

Then how is it that some poets more reliably turn out work that we value? – Some play into the hands of the ambiguity. They start their poems off in a state of rolling amnesia, they sense productive avenues of development in the words just written and push their poems in that direction. This produces texts that seem strangely impersonal. It is not the only means of production. Time also works. It may take a thousand years to clean a poem that is not scoured before birth, and by then there may be nobody to read it. Many of the most beautiful things in English are fragments of popular and even nursery verse that are now sinking into and on the verge of oblivion. The pot, the millett, the cloth are themselves sometimes completely forgotten.

The "common reader" is not so common now; we are all horrifically and self-consciously academic. Here and there small groups of people talk about books in the pagan manner, just as if the Gospel had never been; but even such quaint and isolated populations are somehow touched by the suspicion that to read is to sin.

Invocation of the supernatural is emphatically not an attempt to anticipate and prepare ourselves for ideas beyond our day to day experience, but rather an attempt to neutralize the horrors of the natural and the commonplace by casting the aspersion of non-reality upon them. Elements in the manifest world that disturb us are undermined by the invention of a supernatural correlate or substitute, which much less worrying to us, because it is supernatural and implausible, even if we still find it very frightening. Indeed the process of being frightened may be an important part of the reassurance it gives.

Ghosts, for example, do not address the question of survival, but rather the fear of the near approach of individuals whom we have failed to detect. By suggesting that the only way we can be approached in the security of our locked rooms is by walking supernaturally through a wall we are somehow reassured, even if we think we believe in the possibility. Similarly, the vampire may be a way of suggesting that human predation is not a normal but a supernatural event, whereas in fact it is all too commonplace. Indeed, in tales of the supernatural the everyday world is unusually benevolent, whereas the supernatural is usually very hostile to man. The function of the supernatural, then, is to make the natural seem by comparison at worst indifferent and at best positively charitable.

How we love those books which are radical, revolutionary, iconoclastic, but don't require us to lift a finger. How we hate much more traditional writings which ask us to do something, however tentative. Which of the two is more subversive?

If it is said that religion, or its successor the cult of the autonomous man, is necessary to prevent our being cruel to each other, we have only to point at the events of the historical record, asking: "Is it these that you wish to protect from the sceptical view?"

A child hums or sings some favoured tune
To blot the hissing wings of the dark
From the orange moon's pastel surface.

Senescence has evolved, some say, because genes that benefit the body during youth but have deleterious effects in age are not selected against until well after reproduction and the support of offspring. One wonders whether something similar has occurred in relation to the structures relating to our reasoning and our intuitions, our intuitions of transcedence for example. Our reason has evolved to solve problems in securing reproduction, and errors irrelevant to reproduction, because disconnected or so far subsequent in time, are simply not selected against or, at least, not until it is too late to matter. 

Is it not odd that the population never requires the modern, post-monarchical State to demonstrate its virtue through self-denial? On the contrary, it is always members of the population that must provide proof, by the suppression of their wishes and by evident sacrifices, often enough sacrifices to the state. This would appear to result from the fact that the current form of State has no personal reality in the minds of population; we do not see the people composing the State, as we once did in the persons of the King or Queen and their Court. We may even naively think that the State is ourselves, an error not limited to democracies but probably more frequent within such systems than in others.

But was it really much different under a Monarch? Perhaps not, for even then the people might see themselves in the Crown, as Hobbes suggested was possible. But obviously in the 17th Century this was not always so, and sometimes the state seemed to be a competing person that the citizen must resist and even execute. In our time the opacity of the state all but completely conceals its personnel, an effect deepened by the way in which the civil service hides behind the politicians who struggle to control them.

The state is not a person, in our eyes, and is therefore excused the need to demonstrate its virtue. The virtue that we undoubtedly attribute to the state is nothing more than a reflection of our own sacrifice. It has become in many respects like a God, with the self-seeking of the priesthood screened from view, and though intermittently suspected and sometimes glimpsed, it is never at present long enough before our eyes for it to become evidently a permanent and systemic characteristic. The historical record tells us that this can and does change, sometimes very quickly.

The introduction of new thought into poetry violates the principle of externality and observability, whereby a poet is limited to what can be seen, and what can be observed introspectively. This, oddly behaviouristic position (we might call it “subjective behaviourism”) is perfectly tenable, but a great deal of literature has been written in this mode, and we perhaps have enough. More to the point, this material was written sincerely, whereas contemporary writers have to “feign anaesthesia”, to use that nice phrase of Ogden and Richards, in order to frame their work. (Craig Raine’s Martian poems would be a prime example of this.) And in any case, much of the writing of the past which seems to be objective is not so, and many parts of so-called objective poems in the present conceal weak scientific hypotheses, or ideologies. – William Carlos Williams’ soppy poem about a tree ("Trees") relies on the idea of a universe created for the glory of man. But simple immersion in a science in general is not a sufficient corrective, and some sciences are better than others. Biology forces an introduction of new material, whereas physics is so abstract that the cosmic grandeur already present in the literature of religion can easily accomodate it without transformation. In principle, a very conscientious writer might be able to get something new from physics without falling prey to miltonics, the grand style, but I am not aware of any that escape that trap. It would, I think, require a truly heroic effort and be well worth the hardship, but it is not for all individuals to attempt. I shrink from it myself. A really comprehensive knowledge of physics would be necessary, and might not be enought to prevent error. Even Peter Atkins, in his very unusual Creation Revisited, falls a prey to the poisonous romantic heritage of Wordsworth and Paradise Lost. What hope for others?

The literature of the past, particularly that of the seventeenth, often impresses us, at least in English, because it is a poetry in touch with the main body of human thought, scientific and philsophic current at the time. Literature gradually, through the 18th and 19th centuries, and right into our own time has been losing contact with the network of propositions that constitutes human science, extending, as Quine says, from mathematics on the one hand to history on the other. It is not that there are no connections, but rather that it is has fewer connections than other areas; it is relatively isolated and now it stands gradually emptying of intellectual content, or infused with a trivial philosophy designed to inflate the status of the empty-headed writer. The writer has failed the reader, not the other way around as is so often said. Poets today resemble clergymen of the Anglican order, transforming their cloisters into coffee-shops to tempt the ordinary person back into the arms of the Holy. But, and in exactly the same way, it was never the masses who were important to the church; they supported it because they were compelled by circumstance. The church has failed because it has lost the support of the intellectuals, who gave it prestige and created the compelling circumstance that made it a powerful societal phenomena. Something very similar has happened to literary poetry. The priests of both are now in the process of replacing that loss by recruiting amongst those who were never deeply interested, and amongst the muddled and the wounded. Poetry is attempting pastoral outreach, and by doing so it further degrades itself in the eyes of intellectuals. Since such people are not interested anyway it may not seem worth poetry’s while to avoid deeper contempt. However, to think this would be a mistake. The more abject the art becomes the less likely it is that any recovery can be made. The point can be brought out by contrast with lyric verse, which needs neither help nor apology; it thrives as never before in the popular song, where demanding forms and self-advertising wit earn their living from the mating habits of the young. It is not a very interesting form of life, to those looking on, but it is definitely alive and growing. Literary poetry on the other hand is in decay, and proof of this can be found in the diction of contemporary poetry, which is impoverished, and not simply because it is restricted in size, but rather because it draws its novelties from two or three sources only: from colloquial speech, from slang, and from local or provincial factual detail. I have separated colloquialism from slang since it seems to me that there may be a useful distinction between colloquial uses of items from the formal lexicon, and slang neologisms. By slang I do not, of course, mean “uneducated slang”, but that of all groups, though it will be found that poets are somewhat unadventurous in their choice of sources, generally sticking to the slang of poets and the slang of the currently fashionable underdog. Local detail is a category including product names, place names, personal names even, phrases from advertisements, and signs.

It will be immediately noticed that all these sources of novelty are what we might term casual. Reasoning that it is their duty to remain in touch with the common world, poets restrict themselves to what they think of as ordinary or non-elitist diction. This is a very strange way of going about it. Slang, in plain intention, and colloquialism accidentally, are exclusive, elitist. That's the point. The same may be said of provincial detail.

In addition I should want to say that these sources of diction are rich in quantity, but contain a great deal of redundancy, and in many cases are categorically poor; distinctions and grades are lost. Terms of approval in slang coalesce and tend to hyperbole. By trying to meet the common man, by rather inefficient means and in a place where he is not to be found, the literary poetry has turned its back on the subtleties of language, subtleties that are in fact thriving, however ephemerally, the popular lyric.

Forego speech,
And other patterns of facile mimicry.
Find satisfaction and resource in things,
Not people.

Allow the light to pass, nor hope to stop it.

                                13 January 1991
                                Blythburgh