Pentti Saarikoski, The Edge of Europe
reviewed by Michael Peverett
Someone has written on the back of it, "Pentti Saarikoski's The Edge of Europe is one of those novels often imagined but rarely realized: a novel that is as moving as it is funny etc." During the months of absorbedly living with this book I've read this back cover quite a few times, the way you do when you live with a book, and I've idly speculated about what ideological point is being made by the word "novel" since The Edge of Europe isn't fiction and most people would just call it a travel book or personal reflections or something of that sort; and (secondly) what is the genealogy of this ideological point, and does it have anything to do with B. S. Johnson, who used to call his autobiographical books novels? and (thirdly) who decided to call the book a novel, was it editor Göransson or editor McSweeney or translator Hollo or was it perhaps even Saarikoski? But none of this really matters; what I do like is the next part of the sentence, "often imagined but rarely realized" - for many are the books like this, undertaken by poets in particular, perhaps they start off as notes towards unwritten poems, and often these days they take the form of blogs, and anyway the idea is to write a sort of daybook of rambling thoughts that will somehow cohere into something wonderful, but it must take a special kind of talent to make it do that, and it seems to be a talent not often granted to poets, but Saarikoski has it from the off. The fluency of his prose, honed by all the newpaper columnism and by the incredible labour of his seventy book-length translations into Finnish (which included such not insignificant items as Ulysses, the Odyssey, St Matthew's Gospel, Tender is the Night, Calvino, Bellow, etc) - well, here it is (Hollo has to take responsibility for the wobbly "that" after the sixth comma):
First there were hopes and expectations, then came orders and restrictions, after those, requests and demands, they were attached to one's earlobes and buttocks, and characteristics were distributed at the same time, so that was when one learned to lie, to obey and to lie, to eat what was served, to go to church, to the theater, to the cafe, to smoke tobacco and to drink liquor, one learned all kinds of things, the names of birds and flowers and emperors, but then, one day, the birds stopped singing, the flowers stopped flowering, and the emperors stopped ruling, evolution had rolled back tens of millions of years, and you were a shrew. You did not know that you would become a human being who would be fruitful and multiply and build navies and great cities. After thinking that as well as something else I went to buy some fish. I waited in the cafe because the boats hadn't returned yet, but then they arrived, and I hurried down to the pier. I saw a garfish in one of the boxes, the fisherman was old, I helped him push the wheelbarrow up a concrete ramp to a small shack where villagers stood around waiting, and I got the only garfish caught that day. Then I sat in the cafe with the fishermen, in a mood of rare happiness, looked out the window and saw two seagulls sitting on a rock surrounded by water, and thought well, here it all is, Spengler's Abendland and Odysseus' final homestead, tall stones raised up, the pillars of the world. Now I was walking down a street in Tregunc. In the wetland, a frog sat under a bush and looked, or pretended to be looking, it was not engaged in any particular perceptions or so-called plans for the future, it was just looking around.
Among so much else to wonder at, just notice the sentence near the end, "Now I was walking down a street in Tregunc." This sentence looks like it's specifying the occasion when something else happened, but it turns out that there is no something else, both the preceding and the following sentences take place elsewhere. What's really happening here is an evocation of the spaces that compose a town, both inside and outside, their repetitive shapes, the simultaneity of communal existence, and the way that thoughts don't have an occasion confined to a specific locale but linger on as you pass from one urban spot to another, because in a town they're all so close together. It isn't quite a realistic evocation, this little port whose verticals all spring into life from a single image, pushing a barrow up a concrete ramp. It is cross-infected by the imaginary vastnesses of great empires, navies, cities, civilizations. Yet Tregunc, one reflects, is quite a small town! But then this leads on to a secondary theme, the emphasis on small creatures: a shrew, a garfish, a frog. The image of the author is partly connected with these small things. It is he, as well as the frog, who is only pretending to look. The Edge of Europe is in part a philosophical examination of civilization, in part a philosophical argument for the author's drifting, drink-fuelled, unconstructive way of life. The unconstructiveness is, as the book proves, highly constructive. "I sat on the bench, thinking about something, or not really thinking, just trying to think of something to think about." The relationship of Saarikoski to Heraclitus is elusive: the best way I can say it is that he constantly recalls Heraclitus.
Pinecones make great kindling. Fire is a miraculous thing, somehow it seems to exist by itself, as it licks those pinecones, even though one knows it's only the pinecones that are burning, becoming fire. The world becomes books.
Or the whole passage beginning: "In his poem 'Beginning My Studies' Whitman says that one should never pursue studies past their beginning..."
Saarikoski pointedly and repeatedly denies being a scholar. Often he lets us see him thinking as idly and ignorantly as a Leopold Bloom. In Brittany, while he's studying Le Breton sans peine, he finds himself wondering "why words are gendered, where did that come from, or the two articles en and ett in Swedish, surely they haven't been around all that long since many words are en in Swedish but ett in Norwegian, en människa but eet menneske, this seems completely random, but I'm sure the scholars have some explanation..."
Yet I've felt the temptation to assert here that Saarikoski was one of the most learned poets of his century. He was, as the same passage continues, "a victim of linguistic satyriasis, every time I encounter a new language I want to penetrate it", he published translations from at least six languages (English, Classical Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, German and Italian). There was also the political poems of Ho Chi Minh, but I doubt if he worked from the Vietnamese. So I felt this temptation, but Saarikoski's writing deflates learnedness as a value. Who is to say that certain information should be blessed with the name of learning while other information has no such status? And what really impresses me most in the list of Saarikoski's translations is not the books with classical status but the more ephemeral bulk of the others, a sort of core-sample of what was on the shelves of reasonably literate people in the 60s and 70s: J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey), J.P. Donleavy (The Ginger Man), Roald Dahl (Someone like you), Oscar Lewis, Eric Ambler, Hubert Selby Jr, Philip Roth, Christy Moore (My Left Foot), David Lytton (The Goddamn White Man), Edna O'Brien (August is a Wicked Month), Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, John Lennon, Dalton Trumbo, James Thurber, Jerzy Kosinski (Steps), Malcolm Bradbury (The History Man), Arnold Wesker and John Osborne. That's just some of the translations from English - the Swedish ones included poets such as Göran Sonnevi, Gunnar Ekelöf, Werner Aspenström as well as Finland-Swedish prose texts by Christer Kihlman, Anders Cleve, Antti Jalava. The point I'm struggling to make is that Saarikoski's vast unspecialized knowledge was not "learning", it was a heap, the by-product of someone capaciously absorbed in his own times. The Edge of Europe is not, in a scholarly way, an exposition of the owner's heap, but a piece of engineering that declines to explain how it was made or what it's for, in the Heraclitean manner.
*
"Well," said Bothwell, "in that case these yellow rascals must serve to ballast my purse a little longer. I always make it a rule never to quit the tavern (unless ordered on duty) while my purse is so weighty that I can chuck it over the signpost. When it is so light that the wind blows it back, then, boot and saddle,―we must fall on some way of replenishing.―But what tower is that before us, rising so high upon the steep bank, out of the woods that surround it on every side?" (Old Mortality, Chapter IX)
Thus Serjeant Bothwell interrupts his natter with a coarsely-handled narrative signal ; his war-party, of course, can see what he's pointing at just as clearly as he; he would really have said: What's that place over there? But Scott festoons the question in definitive description for the reader's benefit.
Saarikoski might, less objectionably, have gifted us many such definitive descriptions; it is supposed to be quite in order in a travel book to "set the scene", to explain something about Valsäng in Sweden, Stavanger in Norway, or Kerlin in Brittany (the main locales of The Edge of Europe). Instead, outside the section headings he is reluctant even to name them; explanations (like paragraph divisions) are withheld; we hear the prose taking its own course spontaneously, the sound of someone thinking in situ, and are left to infer what we can about the text's surroundings from what it betrays. The text declines to shape, instead it is offered as shaped, that is, as evidence; just the way someone would say it in real life.
Getting off the plane in Oslo, I dropped my shoulder bag on the tarmac, my liquor bottle broke, then I slept all the way to Stavanger, the breaking of the bottle pissed me off, but for some other reason I was happy, I felt as if this trip made some sense, that I wasn't just travelling but really going somewhere.
This is, naturally, part of what distinguishes it from scholarship, and it's in this context that I interpret Saarikoski's remark about Linnaeus:
On the path by the shoreI met the snake again, but when I looked closer, there were two of them, lying across each other, had they fucked, were they now resting, exhausted, in the heat of the sun? Nature is my psychopharmakon, but I know very little about it, now I don't know if snakes fuck or how they procreate, but neither do librium users know how librium is manufactured. The names of plants and animals and stars are not their true names, they have been given to them by people. It seems to me that Linnaeus must have hated nature, how else would he have been able to organize it to his liking, labelling and archiving it.
This was partly a wind-up, Linnaeus being greatly reverenced in Scandinavia, for them Darwin is only a footnote, and this is quite true, once you have genera then the fact of interspecific relationship stares you in the face, it is just a matter of digging up a mechanism. Patently, I am annoyed by Saarikoski's remark, much he knows about it, he who cannot even tell one snake from two! And perhaps I am taking a commonplace remark of the time rather too seriously. But why would the satyriast of language have this aversion to so monumental an enhancement of the capacities of human language? And yet I have to admit Saarikoski is right. For Linnaeus to accomplish what he did, required if not a hatred certainly a willingness to junk a certain awareness of nature, the experience of fellowship; to render certain routes forever inaccessible in order to lay open an enormous highway. Linnaeus, demythologizing and in a sense deanthropomorphizing Mickel the fox and his companions, in another sense anthropomorphized them, not as individuals but as sociological units in a population, an anthropomorphic metaphor so ingrained in our thinking now that we hardly recognize it as metaphorical. Perhaps it is relevant to note that Linnaeus' names had started as definitive descriptions. When these became too unwieldy, the abbreviated (binomial) name came into use for ease of reference; these names, whose impact was so explosive, were a by-product, almost an accident.
Saarikoski's method of skipping definitive description means readers can be as attentive as they choose to be. Rarely knowing, as he cheerfully admits, what day of the week it is, the calendar of this travel-diary is nevertheless there to be inferred, though it gives no certain date until the last page: you can plot it from the Falklands conflict or such stray playful references as "only a week to St Benedict's Day". But it's up to you. Where or how the book catches the light depends also on shared knowledge. I did not know anything, for example, about what a garfish is or what it looks like, though I do now.
(Garfish, taken from http://thighlinescork.com)
Of garfish, I also learnt that "they are very tasty to eat, but the green bones makes them an unpopular option on the menu."
The point about the inferred calendar is that it sharpens the brilliantly under-described evocation here:
Like hundreds of millions of others I have passed through the Lenin mausoleum, his face is handsome and young, not at all the face you see in the last photographs, and yet it is he, it is Vladimir Illich, a holy relic, and worship makes relics real, makes them part of reality. They are not forgeries. Musing on that I set out for a walk, a different way this time, so I saw a lot I hadn't seen before. It was so warm that I scanned the edges of ditches for coltsfoot, water was burbling out of a pipe into the ditch, rippling down its sandy bottom, splashing onto the gravel, then quietly dispersing in the wetland. I walked through the woods and looked at the trees. To my mind, the spruce is the most beautiful tree. It is the only tree that seems to know what it is.
This is Sweden in late March, too early for coltsfoot whose flowers there are the first for many months and eagerly looked out for. What Saarikoski refers to (scarcely describes) about the Norway Spruce is also something quite instantly obvious, not recondite or paradoxical at all, but only if you know the tree in that part of the world; a search of the Internet suggests that, like some other very common experiences of nature, it's difficult to photograph (the best I could come up with is below); knowing the tree as it grows in Britain, always dully and often miserably, is extremely unhelpful. Thus The Edge of Europe tends to work in regions of the mind that lie outside the community of scholarship. It reminds us that such regions exist.
(Norway spruce, taken from Den virtuella floran, photo by Anna-Lena Anderberg.)
*
This was one of Saarikoski's last books. In 1983, a year after its publication, his much-abused liver finally gave out during a visit to Finland. He was 45, had been married four times and had several long spells in hospital. In addition to the 70 translations there were 22 poetry collections, 6 volumes of essays, etc. Let's be honest, there are plateaux of writing that a part-time author, even an academic, can never get close to. It helps to be driven by enormous debts. Väinö Kirstinä (Note 1) wrote, "if you read Saarikoski for ten minutes / your breath starts to smell of liquor". It's true that The Edge of Europe is a drinker's diary, very preoccupied with getting hold of alcohol, the joy of being bought it and the despair of losing it; and seeing the world with a drinker's eyes, Saarikoski has a very sharp eye for noticing other drunks. It's also true that the elimination of a definitive-descriptive-presentational layer tends to create an uncertainty about who thought what, was that my idea or Saarikoski's...
Anselm Hollo has now produced at least four book-length translations from Saarikoski. From what I have seen of Saarikoski's poetry (in Herbert Lomas' 1991 anthology for Bloodaxe, Contemporary Finnish Poetry), it's less finished than the prose, it resists finish and says, look, I stopped it right here, in a strange place. This is one of the poems that made him into a celebrity ("the blond Beatle of the north"), from What's going on, really? (1962):
This began two years before the wars
in a village that now belongs to the Soviet Union
my sole recollection of the war is the fires they were great
they don't come like that nowadays
I run to the window at the wail of the fire engine
I was on the move all my childhood
I turned communist
I went into the cemetery and studied the angels
they don't come like that nowadays -
sella in curuli struma Nonius sedet
I burned books in Alexandria
I played the part of a stone and a flower and built a church
I wrote poems to myself myself the chair went up and down
high-backed ones like that don't come nowadays
high poetry there is I'm expecting a cheque
Which is the mistake, the wrong way, or the right, not the Way
it's ±2
I live the future times
I read tomorrow's newspapers
I support Khrushchev carry the owl from room to room
I'm looking for the right place for it, This began
"This" was Saarikoski's birth in Impilahti in Ladoga Karelia, now part of the Republic of Karelia, which is part of the Russian Federation, but in 1937 still part of Finland (note 2). (The quotation is from Catullus LII; Catullus feels like dying when he contemplates current politicians such as "the tumour Nonius".) The wars fought around Karelia were brutal; a quarter of a million Russians died in the Winter War campaign. Where Saarikoski stood on the "Karelian question" I don't know, but he certainly went on carrying the owl until his death. Even after arriving (as we eventually make out) in Brittany he says:
I walked down a bumpy cow track to the shore. The sun had set, soon it would be dark. I picked flowers whose names I didn't know. I watched out for cowpies. Then I reached the shore. It felt as if I had learned to walk and talk by this shore. Then the sea's name was Ladoga, or the Yoldian Sea, but when I learned to walk and talk, seas had not been named yet. I became a refugee. Through Närke Sound I arrived here, the Danish Straits did not yet exist. I have always lived by the Yoldian Sea.
Saarikoski's mother was Karelian (note 3) and his grave is at the new monastery of Valamo in Heinävesi, centre of the Karelian Orthodox faith (note 4). In The Edge of Europe this background mostly manifests itself as a feeling of being permanently an exile, and in his acute interest in Russian affairs and in Communism. Saarikoski had been a serious Communist for a while, but by now he was through with all political leaders. The amusement (e.g. in his fantasy of Reagan and Brezhnev slugging it out in the ring, or his comments on media coverage of the unfolding Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher "wearing some sort of diarrhetic cowpie on her head") conceals a desperate sadness which itself probably conceals a more desperate anger.
Wasn't there a time when we had wishes and dreams? Did we not believe we would make the world easier to inhabit for human beings? Here we are now, your name is Jean-Pierre, my name is Pentti, you have very thick eyeglasses, you say you were in the Resistance but don't care for politics anymore, it's all the same to you who sits in the palace in Paris, and I agree, my stomach or the world's gut, there are no doctors able to cure them, we're just sitting here talking. Not that we have anything to say to each other, who has anything to say to another, the world has come to an end, and this is heaven, or hell, whichever way you want to look at it, as we're sitting here like this in the back room of the alimentation, picking small bits of snot out of our nostrils and talking, passing the time. But there are times when even an old pine tree's roots twitch. It's a passing feeling, as if something were about to happen, it's just a memory, Jean-Pierre, that's all it is.
If I had found out about it earlier, I could usefully have bought Hollo's translation of Saarikoski's final trilogy of poetry collections (La Alameda Press, 2003), but that'll have to wait for another day. The late poems were being written at the same time as The Edge of Europe and sometimes the texts cross-illuminate each other, though no illumination is really needed.
No, Quetzalcoatl, don't come back
we adore other gods here now
your feathers are on special offer
in the supermarkets
your lakes are ice
the island-to-island bridges
are exhaust pipes of human distress
from the apartment windows
dud eyes look out
on People's Square
gone red with innocent blood
no don't come back, Quetzalcoatl
stay with the faith of your ancestors
As the ending underlines, this is Quetzalcoatl not only as creator-god but as Aztec ruler (they tended to take his name) and also as Cortez (claimed by European sources to have been mistaken for the god). People's Square refers I suppose to the 1949 purging of Shanghai. In The Edge of Europe, Saarikoski tells us, "There is a charming Aztec glyph for speech: small birds flying out of a person's mouth. In 1521, Cortez put an end to the Aztec empire, but he was not able to kill those little birds, there are no weapons one can use against them". In a later passage, Saarikoski is musing less politically, you would suppose: "Aztecs knew the wheel but didn't use it for vehicles, only for children's toys, toy horses with wheels instead of hooves. Quetzalcoatl, I wish you were sitting right there on the other side of the table, we'd eat a little, some bread and onions, and you could tell me things." Putting the three texts together just confirms that, whatever else this poem is about, it's certainly part of Saarikoski's continuing dialogue with Lenin, with whom Saarikoski shared a taste for mushrooming. How fellow-human beings with their warm kitchen tables and their conversation and brilliant insights could dole out human misery by the ten thousand, that was something he could never quite put to bed, only endlessly drink it and write it.
NOTES
1. Väinö Kirstinä, Saarikoski's contemporary and similarly engagé. Here's one his poems, translated (like the Saarikoski poems) by Herbert Lomas:
I is a lyrical I
I has an electric typewriter
I is professionally I
I's task is to be I
I gets grants if it's I
but if it's not I it doesn't
2. Large parts of what is known as Karelia, including the areas where most of the Kalevala oral poems were collected, have never formed part of an independent (or any other) Finland, though they were sometimes wistfully claimed by Nationalist believers in a "Greater Finland". But Saarikoski's birthplace in Western Karelia was confirmed as part of Finland by the Treaty of Tartu, 1920, which largely kept to the traditional border between the Grand Duchy of Finland and Imperial Russia. It was invaded by the Soviet Union in the Winter War, 1939; ceded by Finland in the Moscow Peace Treaty, 1940; recaptured by combined Finnish and German forces in the Continuation War, 1941; recaptured by Russian forces, 1944, and finally ceded to the Soviet Union in the Paris Peace Treaty, 1947.
3. That is, she spoke Karelian, a Finno-Ugric language, sometimes considered a dialect of Finnish, still spoken by around 70,000 people in Finland and the Russian Federation.
4. The historic Valamo monastery is on an island in Lake Ladoga not far from Saarikoski's birthplace. The new monastery came into being when the monks, like Saarikoski's family, fled westwards to modern Finland during the Winter War.
Pentti Saarikoski, The Edge of Europe: A Kinetic Image, translated by Anselm Hollo, is published by Action Books (ISBN 978-0-9765692-6-8).
Being Seen for Seeing: a tribute to R F Langley's Journals
Peter Larkin
'Unless the Humming of a Gnat is as the Music of the Spheres
& the music of the spheres is as the humming
of a gnat - ' (Ronald Johnson, after Thoreau)
These Journals are among the most fascinating prose texts I know, which I'm happy to have swallowed whole, whatever palpable design might be lurking within the sheer virtuosity of the writing. My response consists in a few discrete pellets of digestion from what was absorbed far more vicariously, with some predatory compression perhaps of a grateful nurture─given this supplement. The writing stands comparison with the astute annotations of poetic perception from Dorothy Wordsworth through Ruskin and Hopkins to Jefferies and Edward Thomas. The only postwar writing which runs it close is J A Baker's Peregrine, an extraordinary tour de force of self-transformingly naturalistic simile which Langley could well be familiar with. Peregrines appear in his own text on pp. 104-5. There is a practical continuity with Romantic and post-Romantic particularism, but it's one which gropes its way to disavowal as well as oblique sequel. Although the Journals read well enough alone, the cross-referencing with Langley's poetry is impossible to ignore, and allows the latter a ghostly but sustaining ballast his verse otherwise shies away from.
Wordsworth's "light of common day" was in itself a way of trying to make Romantic sensibility sustainable, and for Langley the ordinary is both a discipline and a critique:
In his poem "Mariana" Langley invokes "Not things, / but seeing things" which means acknowledging things that see as much as seeing into them, seeing the self back to itself as around itself. The Journals confess that though "everything is so evident, there seems an awkwardness in adjusting to your contact with it." A figure in mourning in a church bas-relief composes herself against this awkwardness and so "does not suit the prickliness and jumps and stiff surprises of the world outside" (p. 72). By contrast, insects, spiders, and birds draw out from the perceiving subject a sense of shock which skews but recomposes self-recognition: "Into each go foreigners from myself, all couth, all uncouth…[t]ogether they seethe together to make up some of a man" (p. 94). The world which must be got true out of very surprise (p. 103) allows, like shadows interacting with the outlines of retreating frost, "an overlap, not a match" (p. 71). As Langley puts it in a recently published entry: "Nothing is less than particular. And, indeed, nothing is less than particular." (PN Review, 173). The iteration insinuates that the slightness of particulars is not negation but minute instantiation, unexampled as grounding but free of any further indebtedness. Langley's de-privileging of perception isn't as such deterministic; on the contrary, the very groundlessness is moved toward the participatory. When a specimen of Sitticus rupicola is noted as seen on June 3rd, the Journals as quickly record the spider "saw us on the same day, its head tilting up, staring with its black, frontal pair of eyes…" (p. 93). Earlier, Langley had been even more courtly towards an Evarcha: "I in my straw hat, he in his dance mask, interested in each other, and parting as equals, without, I trust, a cloud of distress left behind the hedge" (p. 59). Does such reciprocity hanker for a theopoetic tinge? There is a hint when Langley finds himself outside Autun Cathedral beneath a Christ in Majesty amid swirling, shrieking swifts. The Christ seems to ignore them but the relation is more like the master conjuror before a troupe of acrobats: "He has long seen it all and now grants it a showing without having to look…He comes to the unmediated 'This' and 'Thus,' and has thrown out both hands" (p. 89). This fantasy is tightly delineated. To be granted a showing seems epiphanic enough, but the giver must first Himself have been a looker-on. Here, where Langley seems to be skirting the radiant Christology of a Hopkins, any generosity of response must itself be a "given", otherwise no seeing can participate in being seen. Within this gesture of seeing being seeable, perception itself is placed on an ontological cusp, though with such frugality that all percepts are recomposed in their found order, are owed a root in the ordinary, however grateful the writing is for their initial strangeness (which signals a speculative alert). Of course, such particulars are interpretable but they refuse to allegorise or speculate anything in excess of themselves, they are highlights in the moving light of the ordinary. This is not to stare back at the surdities of nature without refracting them onward in a particular play of referring and offering nonetheless, albeit with those leaky hands which scatter content as much as irradiate it. If any granular detail attracts an aura round itself, that glow is weaker than the abrasiveness of the grain itself, but it remains a plea for the grit's co-visibility. Such perceptions flirt with a repristination, a world seen clear into its perfusion, lingering before horizons of ontological generosity but remaining unviolated by the intrusive excursions of praise.
Some of Langley's most vivid entries ("because I was there, and because they have often played a part in my further thinking" (p. 8)) focus on insects or spiders. Flies, centipedes, gnats wasps and beetles populate these Journals, together with some minutely identified and entubed spiders. It is at this level that the writer's itch to be seen alongside, a seeing to be seen towards, is acute. Is there an implicit biosemiosis here, or what Wendy Wheeler calls the "biocommunicative repertoire of all living things" ("Postscript on Biosemiotics: Reading beyond Words─and Ecocriticism" New Formations, 64 (2008), 137-154; 143). Biosemiotics renaturalises human cultures, seeing them not only as emergent from, but to some extent shared by, the non-human, a condition of our being able to recognize any natural existence at all (149). Living things, Wheeler argues, don't have a mechanistic relation to their world but constitute it by recognizing and interpreting it. In the Journals a sand wasp is observed to unseal its burrow, check and tidy it before dragging in a caterpillar after itself, then plug the hole by fanning its wings: "during the last few times we hear it, the sound does open up, as if it were emerging" (p. 51). The skill of reading for insect signs is also emergent. Earlier, an orange male Oonops domesticus spider is recognized by its "smooth, groping progress without pausing or changing direction" (p. 41).
One entry stands out in these Journals and begs a response, though itself an effort to live without it, or without imposing it where it has no place. Edmund Hardy was quite right to focus on it in his review of the Journals as it is a stunning scenario (Hardy quotes it in full). It's one in which Langley appears to invert Kantian aesthetics by sketching a purpose without purposiveness. This time the insect is not fully greetable, possibly a "mirid bug" but otherwise nominalization fails before the intrepidity of the creature itself. Long and slow-moving with hair-thin legs, it walks unflinchingly along the brick parapet of a railway bridge, catching the writer's attention only because it moves so deliberately. It follows an absolutely straight line wherever it can, perhaps in parody of Newtonian mechanics, but its motion is otherwise oblivious of any intentional framework. It takes it 5 minutes to traverse 4 bricks and the diesel loco which passes underneath is "in an altogether different world of sound, speed, size, purpose and agitation" (p. 99). The insect's receptive failure attracts Langley's own bemused interpretation: where is this insect going and for what? It will take another hour to cross the bridge to a hedge, by which time it will be dusk. The attempt at hopeless encounter is Beckettian in its intricate puzzlement: "When it is dark…will it still walk on?" (elision in text). This creature for whom there "is nothing for it to look forward to" will "never be seen by anyone who has words again" (p. 99). Probing this far is bleak, and inevitably calls up a the chimera of a possible ontological salvation, as if words could be implicitly offered in some engagement out-distancing description. In another entry, Langley notes that it is "[n]atural facts in their reality that I reach for" but also confesses "I am not entirely present as the person fingering it" (p. 76). This chasm is confronted more sheerly in the poems, where the "surd" element of the natural world can induce a near-surreal fictional disjunction, though one offered as a recursive feedback to that etiolated origin. Langley remains true to the micro-intensity of his dilemma and never grandly decontextualises or swerves away─even more the case in the Journals than the poems (which rarely feed-in their actual starting points). Such mini-events are moving nothings out of nowhere, but nudged to the (often disconsolate) somewhere of what is a co-attention, a reception on behalf of the mysterious visibility of what remains enigmatically but irreducibly there. This is no symmetry enjoined on the insect, but an itch for a more asymmetric offering-on, in what is a celebration of the ordinary in all its unrelievedness but alerted by an initial weirdness difficult to repackage without remainder. There seems a surplus of "describing forward" even where the text is committed to wrapping the ordinary back over itself. As if a contemplative excess which nests not in the ineffable but in the unspeaking moment (after a sudden jerk of scintillation) must involve a flash of sympathetic inclusion flaring out without resolution but no longer, as such, totally reclusive or opaque.
The Journals discretely contend that the real deals itself out in ontological imperfection, in iridescent flaws that coincide with averted gift. Reflecting on the leaf-carving in Southwell Minster, Langley ruminates that the pursuit of accuracy and detail "may be just so many more observed facts. That loneliness of all the facts" (p. 109). Naturalism isn't quite what he is after then, but a chance of participating in a recognition not merely formal or even aesthetic. What this "something more, a development, another angle" (p. 109) could be remains undisclosed, perhaps because this more-than could never be just another describable aspect of the world. Langley's scrupulosity wards off the threat of false universals, though a hunger for an ontological wealth "deep down things" seems to persist, however pared down to perduring surfaces. But at such close range these things mimic the manner if not the substance of givens. A desert of exact particulars rhymes a gamut of soulful attention, one in itself painstakingly frugal in outline, but still in excess of the events it self-effacingly traces. Might something like a modal scarcity of the given appear here, no longer wholly minimal in its economy but opening to a plenitude of gift as the condition of its sparingly obstinate actuality?
"May be, when something feels close in the way I am looking for, one feels that some heed has been taken of it, to hold it and keep it" (p. 122). One expects this to be subverted but it is not, though it does refer in part to a bag of rubbish, and without heed "things are loose"; and once they "had just come" there is "no closer to come" (p. 123). A sacral sense declares itself unequal to coping with the likely perceptual interference of its own acceptation, but for Langley this is how it repairs itself. In another entry, he is less scrupulous over his joy at arriving at a looked-forward-to holiday home: "And step inside this unexpectedly generous sameness, perfect to an astonishment, a gratitude. The house here becomes, in a moment, something to count on," (p. 79). Surprise arises from a wealth of sameness here, but it is more likely that an "ipse" (in Ricoeur's terms) is being invoked to suspend the rivalry of idem and alter. There is certainly faith in the possibilities of co-perception rather than in any forced subversion of appearances. Such things do drop away in Langley's world but they were not previously dismissed.
At another moment, when robins slip beyond writerly narration "[t]here was some triumph in the mineral tang of their calls, taps urgently delivered on the here and now, their own warning of themselves, and us, so situated in the scrub, and nothing more" (p. 45). Langley's "nothing more" can be something of a litany─it certainly marks the suspension of any purely descriptive motif. John Milbank in his provocative essay "Glissando: Life, Gift and the Between" reminds us of a radically non-Darwinian moment in A Thousand Plateaus where a bird singing is not primarily defending a territory but continuously establishing it, removing a haeccity from the organized flux to restore and release energy endemic to life as such. For Deleuze and Guattari a territory was a sacred space established by animal art before it became an assurance of security, since these things need not be sought through any process of individuation, it simply happens that they are. Could Langley have something like this in mind when he extols intense attention to the particular as a way of eliminating "the incongruities between objective depersonalised transcendent views of the state of things and the subjective self-absorbed view which they belittle, but which you need to keep close to hand". "Transcendent" precisely isn't rubbishing the sacral here, but universal frameworks of explanation (of which description itself might be a second cousin). How could the transcendent in its divine tenor as radical gift ever come close? Is there no giftedness of an intimate congruity, or an asymmetric participation of the horizontal in the vertical which allows the "glissando" of a relational between, as John Milbank argues for? For him the glissando of continuous variation is vital rather than mechanistic, and auto-poetic shifts in internal animal constitution are positive elaborative adaptations rather than a struggle over scarce resources (though the latter is not absent). Living organisms, in a sort of "goal beyond a goal", participate in a drive towards fulfillment and flourishing. What is the ontological character of the living unit? Milbank demands of us. The glissando of organic variation is mysteriously interrupted by preferential selections which make "revelatory" moments possible as when a human composer of music selects from an infinite myriad of possible combinations. The "revelation," one could say, is not a new deus ex machina but an ontological wealth which declares relation and offers to interpret the gift of itself as dependence. For Milbank, to realize a work of art out of this selection is to offer delight and so extend the gift, not just as a work of instruction. If this sort of relationality is "gifted," the world itself must consist purely of relation, a reception of itself as gift which it must then award itself.
This sense of relationality, though not erased, is extremely hard-pressed in Langley, duress being both a delineation and obstructive resistance, but a reader can find uncensored moments of exultation also: "as if there were miles of available dappling below…[t]he sense of an inexhaustible resource of excited, various availability…ready for the contentment of an enormous sigh of acceptance" (p. 81). With such truth to a moment which ignores any counter-truth pushing in from another moment, simply because that was not its time, Langley's notation utters what his poems are too highly crafted to be able to say, though their gnomic and cellular-like qualities suggest an ascesis which keeps this in mind or has to come from here, however losably. There is no easy road in the Journals between the given and the granted, what there is for the latter to be taken for. If gift is a difficult secret it is not intruded on, but maintains a quietude of endurance always reverting to itself without privileged remainder. But the writing is excessful enough to be a reminder of these dynamics of scarce fulfillment in the unhoped-for. Given the compelling precision and delicacy of what Langley achieves in this writing, a last word must be left with his (tenacious) ontological diffidence:
'Unless the Humming of a Gnat is as the Music of the Spheres
& the music of the spheres is as the humming
of a gnat - ' (Ronald Johnson, after Thoreau)
I
These Journals are among the most fascinating prose texts I know, which I'm happy to have swallowed whole, whatever palpable design might be lurking within the sheer virtuosity of the writing. My response consists in a few discrete pellets of digestion from what was absorbed far more vicariously, with some predatory compression perhaps of a grateful nurture─given this supplement. The writing stands comparison with the astute annotations of poetic perception from Dorothy Wordsworth through Ruskin and Hopkins to Jefferies and Edward Thomas. The only postwar writing which runs it close is J A Baker's Peregrine, an extraordinary tour de force of self-transformingly naturalistic simile which Langley could well be familiar with. Peregrines appear in his own text on pp. 104-5. There is a practical continuity with Romantic and post-Romantic particularism, but it's one which gropes its way to disavowal as well as oblique sequel. Although the Journals read well enough alone, the cross-referencing with Langley's poetry is impossible to ignore, and allows the latter a ghostly but sustaining ballast his verse otherwise shies away from.
Wordsworth's "light of common day" was in itself a way of trying to make Romantic sensibility sustainable, and for Langley the ordinary is both a discipline and a critique:
NothingThat's how the second poem in the "Juan Fernandez" sequence ends, and the Journals will assemble sounds with shards of light until they become the workings of seeing a rabbit: "Did I make a rabbit by expecting it? Not so, I was not so primed." (p. 22). No observer could be that primary in Langley's world but must struggle to put together, or be apprised by, a facet of weirdness refusing to be alienated from its object, electing contextual surprise rather than disjunctive fantasy. But this doesn't conform to a Wordsworthian fitting of mind to world or world to mind. In the poem "No Great Shakes" inner and outer spheres seem mutually intrusive. Where pine-cones are "rows of turbines set into / the wind" the mind within "expects a blow". When each cone screws into the wind "up to its head" the retort is "In here, / there is no thread." Where the outer is knowable for "twirling / pollen" having the "best shape for / the flow" there is a terse non-correspondence: "Inside─none." Another poem ("The Upshot") announces that "Things / stand further off." Not that this is simple alienation, since "We find / peace in the room and don't / ask what won't be answered." Resentment commutes to tact, or the not-asking ghosts a sufficient relation, but such pre-emptive quietism can also confront repose as impasse. We are reminded that, however dedicated, perceptual attention is at best an ambivalent secular pastime in which something (satisfied) nonetheless (the lesser insistently more than nothing) stays on hand for more. The Journals offer a brittle epiphany, a crunchy thinginess of intimacy against hope. The force of detail launches a never-failing surprise, but the writing seems acutely aware that this is what must be failed if any compassionate correlation is to be found at the heart of attentiveness itself. There is an active "unself-sufficing" here for all the verve of the diurnal nonchalance. The Journals put it more delicately themselves: "Some entity which mattered in its not, probably, mattering too much" (p. 108). The frisson of primordial negation (entities mattering as what they are not) is diverted by the frugality of the "probably" which negotiates between pure negation and any over-determined meaningfulness. Though chastening any knock-on from vision to visionary, Langley's sparseness remains properly ontological: some entity persists as the matter of mattering. The purgation is exemplary, but an excess of meaning (as the very receptiveness of a particulate materiality) may already have occurred. The writer wakes up in the early hours recalling Hamlet's "The rest is silence" which sets off an image-stream which includes an aardvark's nose and a 60's pop song, all micro-specifics "devoid of any consequences, each just itself, for no purpose" (p. 100). Here is a perfected singularity, but it lacks any "given-to" by which to participate in it, or what Jean Luc Marion dubs the "adonné" of our existence in a conscious revision of Heidegger's Dasein. Nihilism doesn't seem Langley's real object, however, but a desire to plot seeing across a being seen in a way closer to the sensibility of a Merleau-Ponty, however much this is schooled to the bleak equality of noting each other's nothingness with no value addition. The world remains fully in touch but also spans itself as empty-handed.
is clearer and more simple than a row of
rabbits caught outright in common light
II
In his poem "Mariana" Langley invokes "Not things, / but seeing things" which means acknowledging things that see as much as seeing into them, seeing the self back to itself as around itself. The Journals confess that though "everything is so evident, there seems an awkwardness in adjusting to your contact with it." A figure in mourning in a church bas-relief composes herself against this awkwardness and so "does not suit the prickliness and jumps and stiff surprises of the world outside" (p. 72). By contrast, insects, spiders, and birds draw out from the perceiving subject a sense of shock which skews but recomposes self-recognition: "Into each go foreigners from myself, all couth, all uncouth…[t]ogether they seethe together to make up some of a man" (p. 94). The world which must be got true out of very surprise (p. 103) allows, like shadows interacting with the outlines of retreating frost, "an overlap, not a match" (p. 71). As Langley puts it in a recently published entry: "Nothing is less than particular. And, indeed, nothing is less than particular." (PN Review, 173). The iteration insinuates that the slightness of particulars is not negation but minute instantiation, unexampled as grounding but free of any further indebtedness. Langley's de-privileging of perception isn't as such deterministic; on the contrary, the very groundlessness is moved toward the participatory. When a specimen of Sitticus rupicola is noted as seen on June 3rd, the Journals as quickly record the spider "saw us on the same day, its head tilting up, staring with its black, frontal pair of eyes…" (p. 93). Earlier, Langley had been even more courtly towards an Evarcha: "I in my straw hat, he in his dance mask, interested in each other, and parting as equals, without, I trust, a cloud of distress left behind the hedge" (p. 59). Does such reciprocity hanker for a theopoetic tinge? There is a hint when Langley finds himself outside Autun Cathedral beneath a Christ in Majesty amid swirling, shrieking swifts. The Christ seems to ignore them but the relation is more like the master conjuror before a troupe of acrobats: "He has long seen it all and now grants it a showing without having to look…He comes to the unmediated 'This' and 'Thus,' and has thrown out both hands" (p. 89). This fantasy is tightly delineated. To be granted a showing seems epiphanic enough, but the giver must first Himself have been a looker-on. Here, where Langley seems to be skirting the radiant Christology of a Hopkins, any generosity of response must itself be a "given", otherwise no seeing can participate in being seen. Within this gesture of seeing being seeable, perception itself is placed on an ontological cusp, though with such frugality that all percepts are recomposed in their found order, are owed a root in the ordinary, however grateful the writing is for their initial strangeness (which signals a speculative alert). Of course, such particulars are interpretable but they refuse to allegorise or speculate anything in excess of themselves, they are highlights in the moving light of the ordinary. This is not to stare back at the surdities of nature without refracting them onward in a particular play of referring and offering nonetheless, albeit with those leaky hands which scatter content as much as irradiate it. If any granular detail attracts an aura round itself, that glow is weaker than the abrasiveness of the grain itself, but it remains a plea for the grit's co-visibility. Such perceptions flirt with a repristination, a world seen clear into its perfusion, lingering before horizons of ontological generosity but remaining unviolated by the intrusive excursions of praise.
III
Some of Langley's most vivid entries ("because I was there, and because they have often played a part in my further thinking" (p. 8)) focus on insects or spiders. Flies, centipedes, gnats wasps and beetles populate these Journals, together with some minutely identified and entubed spiders. It is at this level that the writer's itch to be seen alongside, a seeing to be seen towards, is acute. Is there an implicit biosemiosis here, or what Wendy Wheeler calls the "biocommunicative repertoire of all living things" ("Postscript on Biosemiotics: Reading beyond Words─and Ecocriticism" New Formations, 64 (2008), 137-154; 143). Biosemiotics renaturalises human cultures, seeing them not only as emergent from, but to some extent shared by, the non-human, a condition of our being able to recognize any natural existence at all (149). Living things, Wheeler argues, don't have a mechanistic relation to their world but constitute it by recognizing and interpreting it. In the Journals a sand wasp is observed to unseal its burrow, check and tidy it before dragging in a caterpillar after itself, then plug the hole by fanning its wings: "during the last few times we hear it, the sound does open up, as if it were emerging" (p. 51). The skill of reading for insect signs is also emergent. Earlier, an orange male Oonops domesticus spider is recognized by its "smooth, groping progress without pausing or changing direction" (p. 41).
One entry stands out in these Journals and begs a response, though itself an effort to live without it, or without imposing it where it has no place. Edmund Hardy was quite right to focus on it in his review of the Journals as it is a stunning scenario (Hardy quotes it in full). It's one in which Langley appears to invert Kantian aesthetics by sketching a purpose without purposiveness. This time the insect is not fully greetable, possibly a "mirid bug" but otherwise nominalization fails before the intrepidity of the creature itself. Long and slow-moving with hair-thin legs, it walks unflinchingly along the brick parapet of a railway bridge, catching the writer's attention only because it moves so deliberately. It follows an absolutely straight line wherever it can, perhaps in parody of Newtonian mechanics, but its motion is otherwise oblivious of any intentional framework. It takes it 5 minutes to traverse 4 bricks and the diesel loco which passes underneath is "in an altogether different world of sound, speed, size, purpose and agitation" (p. 99). The insect's receptive failure attracts Langley's own bemused interpretation: where is this insect going and for what? It will take another hour to cross the bridge to a hedge, by which time it will be dusk. The attempt at hopeless encounter is Beckettian in its intricate puzzlement: "When it is dark…will it still walk on?" (elision in text). This creature for whom there "is nothing for it to look forward to" will "never be seen by anyone who has words again" (p. 99). Probing this far is bleak, and inevitably calls up a the chimera of a possible ontological salvation, as if words could be implicitly offered in some engagement out-distancing description. In another entry, Langley notes that it is "[n]atural facts in their reality that I reach for" but also confesses "I am not entirely present as the person fingering it" (p. 76). This chasm is confronted more sheerly in the poems, where the "surd" element of the natural world can induce a near-surreal fictional disjunction, though one offered as a recursive feedback to that etiolated origin. Langley remains true to the micro-intensity of his dilemma and never grandly decontextualises or swerves away─even more the case in the Journals than the poems (which rarely feed-in their actual starting points). Such mini-events are moving nothings out of nowhere, but nudged to the (often disconsolate) somewhere of what is a co-attention, a reception on behalf of the mysterious visibility of what remains enigmatically but irreducibly there. This is no symmetry enjoined on the insect, but an itch for a more asymmetric offering-on, in what is a celebration of the ordinary in all its unrelievedness but alerted by an initial weirdness difficult to repackage without remainder. There seems a surplus of "describing forward" even where the text is committed to wrapping the ordinary back over itself. As if a contemplative excess which nests not in the ineffable but in the unspeaking moment (after a sudden jerk of scintillation) must involve a flash of sympathetic inclusion flaring out without resolution but no longer, as such, totally reclusive or opaque.
IV
The Journals discretely contend that the real deals itself out in ontological imperfection, in iridescent flaws that coincide with averted gift. Reflecting on the leaf-carving in Southwell Minster, Langley ruminates that the pursuit of accuracy and detail "may be just so many more observed facts. That loneliness of all the facts" (p. 109). Naturalism isn't quite what he is after then, but a chance of participating in a recognition not merely formal or even aesthetic. What this "something more, a development, another angle" (p. 109) could be remains undisclosed, perhaps because this more-than could never be just another describable aspect of the world. Langley's scrupulosity wards off the threat of false universals, though a hunger for an ontological wealth "deep down things" seems to persist, however pared down to perduring surfaces. But at such close range these things mimic the manner if not the substance of givens. A desert of exact particulars rhymes a gamut of soulful attention, one in itself painstakingly frugal in outline, but still in excess of the events it self-effacingly traces. Might something like a modal scarcity of the given appear here, no longer wholly minimal in its economy but opening to a plenitude of gift as the condition of its sparingly obstinate actuality?
"May be, when something feels close in the way I am looking for, one feels that some heed has been taken of it, to hold it and keep it" (p. 122). One expects this to be subverted but it is not, though it does refer in part to a bag of rubbish, and without heed "things are loose"; and once they "had just come" there is "no closer to come" (p. 123). A sacral sense declares itself unequal to coping with the likely perceptual interference of its own acceptation, but for Langley this is how it repairs itself. In another entry, he is less scrupulous over his joy at arriving at a looked-forward-to holiday home: "And step inside this unexpectedly generous sameness, perfect to an astonishment, a gratitude. The house here becomes, in a moment, something to count on," (p. 79). Surprise arises from a wealth of sameness here, but it is more likely that an "ipse" (in Ricoeur's terms) is being invoked to suspend the rivalry of idem and alter. There is certainly faith in the possibilities of co-perception rather than in any forced subversion of appearances. Such things do drop away in Langley's world but they were not previously dismissed.
At another moment, when robins slip beyond writerly narration "[t]here was some triumph in the mineral tang of their calls, taps urgently delivered on the here and now, their own warning of themselves, and us, so situated in the scrub, and nothing more" (p. 45). Langley's "nothing more" can be something of a litany─it certainly marks the suspension of any purely descriptive motif. John Milbank in his provocative essay "Glissando: Life, Gift and the Between" reminds us of a radically non-Darwinian moment in A Thousand Plateaus where a bird singing is not primarily defending a territory but continuously establishing it, removing a haeccity from the organized flux to restore and release energy endemic to life as such. For Deleuze and Guattari a territory was a sacred space established by animal art before it became an assurance of security, since these things need not be sought through any process of individuation, it simply happens that they are. Could Langley have something like this in mind when he extols intense attention to the particular as a way of eliminating "the incongruities between objective depersonalised transcendent views of the state of things and the subjective self-absorbed view which they belittle, but which you need to keep close to hand". "Transcendent" precisely isn't rubbishing the sacral here, but universal frameworks of explanation (of which description itself might be a second cousin). How could the transcendent in its divine tenor as radical gift ever come close? Is there no giftedness of an intimate congruity, or an asymmetric participation of the horizontal in the vertical which allows the "glissando" of a relational between, as John Milbank argues for? For him the glissando of continuous variation is vital rather than mechanistic, and auto-poetic shifts in internal animal constitution are positive elaborative adaptations rather than a struggle over scarce resources (though the latter is not absent). Living organisms, in a sort of "goal beyond a goal", participate in a drive towards fulfillment and flourishing. What is the ontological character of the living unit? Milbank demands of us. The glissando of organic variation is mysteriously interrupted by preferential selections which make "revelatory" moments possible as when a human composer of music selects from an infinite myriad of possible combinations. The "revelation," one could say, is not a new deus ex machina but an ontological wealth which declares relation and offers to interpret the gift of itself as dependence. For Milbank, to realize a work of art out of this selection is to offer delight and so extend the gift, not just as a work of instruction. If this sort of relationality is "gifted," the world itself must consist purely of relation, a reception of itself as gift which it must then award itself.
This sense of relationality, though not erased, is extremely hard-pressed in Langley, duress being both a delineation and obstructive resistance, but a reader can find uncensored moments of exultation also: "as if there were miles of available dappling below…[t]he sense of an inexhaustible resource of excited, various availability…ready for the contentment of an enormous sigh of acceptance" (p. 81). With such truth to a moment which ignores any counter-truth pushing in from another moment, simply because that was not its time, Langley's notation utters what his poems are too highly crafted to be able to say, though their gnomic and cellular-like qualities suggest an ascesis which keeps this in mind or has to come from here, however losably. There is no easy road in the Journals between the given and the granted, what there is for the latter to be taken for. If gift is a difficult secret it is not intruded on, but maintains a quietude of endurance always reverting to itself without privileged remainder. But the writing is excessful enough to be a reminder of these dynamics of scarce fulfillment in the unhoped-for. Given the compelling precision and delicacy of what Langley achieves in this writing, a last word must be left with his (tenacious) ontological diffidence:
Enough of this. The place has accumulated routines, touches on objects, their manipulation, sequences of movement done repeatedly with resultant noises, collisions, clunks, knacks. They are so specific when you remember them that the world seems impossibly full, a miracle of containment. Or does it leak? (p. 85).