Carpets, Curtains, Mental Health. A Short Fiction.

Out of nowhere the landlord told me that my tenancy would be terminated in October. He actually used the word “terminated”. This was clearly a petulant response to the ruined carpet. When I moved in, just over a year ago, there was a thick beige carpet on the floor. He made much of it, the landlord, and said that his “one ask” was that I try and keep the carpet clean. In the event of course he had many other asks, including feeding his cat when he was away and not using his favourite cup, even as my own favourite bowl was used for cat food. Of course, I tried to keep it clean, his carpet, as much as one can. But then Ubu, from the poetry class, asked if I could store some curtains in my room. He’d had to move out of his old flat into a new one with blinds. The curtains were beautiful curtains, he said, and belonged to his dying father. I was caught between the Scylla of a beautiful carpet and the Charybdis of some beautiful curtains. Reluctantly I agreed to store them but they were in fact crawling with moths. These curtains were effectively a trojan horse which I consented to store in my room. Gradually the moths bedded themselves into the carpet and destroyed it, creating little bald patches through which the ridged underlay became visible. The moths turned it into their wasteland. The landlord was “well pissed off”. I had to arrange for the council to collect it from outside the house. I forgot all about this until the very last minute and had to frantically pull up the carpet and move the furniture by myself on the appointed morning. There I was, dripping with sweat on my newly bare floorboards. It looked aesthetically pleasing to me, me who does not like carpets. I prefer minimalism in almost all things. Straight lines and an absence of clutter. The carpet signified for me fuzz, wooliness, the muffling of reality even. So in theory I should have welcomed the floorboards, which made available the principles of construction, so to speak. Carpets I in fact regard as a kind of ornamentation and concealment. An unconventional view I realise. I prefer the work of construction to be on display. Nonetheless, having said all of this, the bare floorboards turned into a nightmare. For the carpet was also the membrane separating me from the kitchen below. This kitchen was the activity centre of the house, where the landlord entertained his many guests. Where he drank and smoked and regaled them with anecdotes, where they talked and laughed and coughed in a phlegmy male way. All of this now took place as if in my own room and there was no real escape or separation. The membrane had been removed and my existence was made raw. In addition, the half-eaten carpet, and then the bare floor boards, departed from their literal presence and became a creeping metaphor which invaded my mind and body. That is to say, that the destroyed carpet could only appear to me as a kind of ulcerous skin, as a rectangle of diseased matter, as skin that had been picked at and opened up, a skin that was then removed to reveal the bare ugliness beneath, the boards, stained and scored with pencil markings, the warm and bland carapace removed and the boards exposed, the boards that would one day feature prominently – broken and splintered - when the house was demolished. All of this prevented me from seeing the literal carpet or the literal floorboards, for they were now heavy with what they signified, they were, in fact, themselves pure signs of these things which I was unable to escape and unable to escape also the invasion of a foreign form of life into my life, which is to say the landlord and his male friends in the kitchen below, like some infernal crucible of smoke, lager and banter.   

I discussed all this with Josephine, who I met by chance at Gastro’s. She had been through the mental health system. Of all the people who I have spoken to recently, Josephine is the most congenial. She argued, and quite convincingly, that it would in any case be impossible to perceive the literal floorboards or the literal carpet. The literal carpet would have to be stripped of the name “Carpet”, which overlays the actual carpet, and the literal floorboards, would likewise have divested themselves of the name “floorboards”. It is impossible, or only very rarely argued Josephine, to see things without their names - this is either a mystical or a psychotic experience. The only time or one of the few times we see things literally, Josephine asserts, is when for example we wake in a strange room, disorientated and momentarily unsure of time and place, and an aggressive brown triangle comes towards us and which, before it hits us between the eyes, we recognise as the corner of the bedside table. As soon as we have the word “table” it stops and returns to a stable form. This is the function of names, asserted Josephine, and asserted also that she once had this ability to see things without names and for this she was admitted to the mental health system, at which point we both began laughing, and filled the whole of Gastro's with our laughter. 

Ubu

I called him Ubu, and for no good reason. Perhaps I wished simply to negate his actual name, which was Adam, and maintain distance from him by insisting on my own nomenclature, and also by using a nonsense name, like a child’s scribble over his actual name. He first spoke to me after a poetry class in Covent Garden. I had read my Kafka poem. I was the only woman in the class.  “He came to Prague in a fragile boat, his hair was beetle black,” and so on. He loved the poem he said and suggested we go for a coffee. We talked about my poem. Kafka and his relationship with Felice Bauer. The breaking off of the engagement. The brutal honesty. But not long after that he began talking about his father who was dying of cancer. Thus was I immediately forced into a corner, ethically. It is not inaccurate to say that he weaponised his dying father in order to pre-emptively secure my companionship. As a short cut to friendship. For it’s true that from that point on it was difficult for me to refuse or refuse for very long the offer to go for coffee or even for a drink, as for example at that Egyptian place in Stockwell with its admittedly superlative falafel. All these meetings were in fact dominated by the figure of the father, hospitalised and dying. He was the subject but also, it seemed, the choreographer of our conversations. The father had a house on the coast near Bournemouth. Would I drive down with him to sort through his things in preparation for the inevitable? I could sleep in the spare room. On the day of the drive he turned up late. He’d walked into a lamppost and had a lump on his head. “Are you sure you’re ok to drive,” I’d asked. He insisted she was. Half way there he declared he needed some protein. “put your hand under the seat,” he asked. I found a piece of chicken wrapped in tin foil which I then passed to him. I said that this attitude to food – bypassing its flavours and textures and breaking it down into non-sensible scientific units such as Carbs, Protein, Fat. – was anathema to me. This way of relating to the world, in fact, was anathema to me, I added.

The traffic was so bad that it was nearly nightfall when we got to the house. He began to lay out photographs on the floor, each one accompanied by an almost inaudible commentary, as if each photograph was in fact a magical object drawing forth words from some previously impossible recess of his mind. His eyes were blue and full of grief. Nonetheless, I became more and more taciturn, more remote. I did not want to enter with him into this whirlpool. I was there on the bank, watching and wanting to be elsewhere. He found a bottle of wine in a cupboard. “We should have a poetry reading night”, he suggested, “to summon or placate the spirits, I’m not sure which”. He started reciting Dylan Thomas which he knew by heart. “when their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone.” I’m sorry, I said, I need to sleep. I took myself off to bed. Early next morning he was up making breakfast. I apologised and said that I had to return to London. I took a taxi to Bournemouth station. I reached London in time to get the tube down to Clapham and have morning coffee at Gastros. I entered the café like a boat coming into harbour. I was aware of my callousness but also relieved. Over the coming weeks, I refused all calls from Ubu until they stopped. It was the cruellest thing I have done. Until I saw him in a bookshop. Waterstones in Piccadilly, just after its grand opening. I saw him looking at me and I looked back as at a stranger, coldly, and turned away. I sensed his eyes trailing after me. It was a moment of brutality, sadism even, for I took a certain pleasure in it. Such a small pleasure, if indulged, or expanded and incorporated into politics, I thought, opens the door to monsters. In my relations with others I have tried to keep that door closed. But I never spoke to Ubu again.

Regret

My regrets are of an unusual kind. Unusual from the point of view of Others. Even pathological, from the point of view of their Normal. They are incidental, minor things. They are things that do not affect the great narrative of life, so-called. Perhaps the exact opposite. I will offer an example. A regret. But first there is a background. A background in two parts.

There used to be a bar at the corner of Greek and Bateman street. Perhaps it’s still there, I don’t know. But it opened very early in the morning for coffee and pastries. The barista was a surly stick-like Norwegian man and, in my view, one of the best in London. The coffee was superb. Outside was a bench. I would go there in the morning before work, or at the weekends with my wife. I would sit on the bench and gradually feel the coffee quickening my thoughts. Or we’d sit there at the weekends and the coffee would quicken our talk. It was a great place to sit and see the cast of characters that only Soho can offer. One morning, the comedian Arthur Smith, who’d been out all night on a “bender” popped in for a cappuccino. The manager of a local private members club was there every day before opening.

The second bit of background is that I was working in an office in North London, right at the top of the Northern line. I’d break the journey by going to the bar when it opened at 7.30 and then get the Northern Line from Tottenham Court Road. The office had a small kitchen for people to prepare their lunches, with two microwave ovens. Every lunch time I’d microwave a bag of quinoa as part of my lunch. One day both microwaves were out of order. One of them still continued cooking after the door was opened. And so the management placed tape over the door and instructed us not to use it. That lunch time everyone went out for lunch. Except me. I thought I could get away with turning the microwave off at the wall so as not to open the door. Whilst the quinoa was cooking I stood next to the microwave. And afterwards, not immediately but gradually, I began to feel ill. Dizzy and lightheaded. Unable to think. When the manager arrived, I told him that I was feeling unwell and needed to go home. I was sure that the radiation had entered my head. I was convinced that I had been fatally affected by radiation and that I must seek medical attention urgently. The only walk-in clinic I knew of was in Soho. So I got on the Northern line and went into town. The nurse at the clinic didn’t really know what to say. She said if I was concerned, I should go to A&E. And so I began walking down Bateman street towards Soho square and up to Tottenham Court Road on my way the UCL hospital.

You might think that my regret is to do with using the oven. But that is no part of it. Or only a part in the story. On my walk I passed the bar on the corner. It was a warm summer day and there was one or two people on the bench outside. The Norwegian barista was on his phone behind the Marzocco machine. I sped past, anxious and afraid on my way to the hospital. But how lovely it would have been to just stop, to pause, to order a coffee and sit on the bench. That is my regret. That I did not stop and have a coffee outside. That I did not stop and sit on the bench in the warm air and sip a coffee. It is not just the coffee of course. It is the unexpected pocket of freedom. Of time cut loose from the working day. Time somehow stolen and exceptional. There are moments, intensities, grace-notes and supernumerary events which we should always savour, which we should always embrace if they offer themselves to us. And the occasions when I have passed these by are the objects of my regret.  

Cal

Cal is here again. He’s returned from Australia with a bandana and a faux-antipodean accent. “Ye-ah” he keeps saying for no good reason. He’d taken a sabbatical from his consultancy job to go travelling. His high paid consultancy job with which he’d bought his flat in Clapham years ago. He’d rented it out at some exorbitant rate to help fund his travels. The smell of cigarette smoke rises through the floorboards. So does his voice.The floorboards are bare after the carpet was eaten by moths, but that’s another story. It means that the odours, meandering conversations and even tiny blades of light from the kitchen enter my room, which is intolerable. Cal’s got lots to say about the aborigines and various historical injustices. He’s been humbled by speaking to them. Their resilience and approach to life is amazing. Their wisdom, their sense of time. It’s elevated him but also deepened him. He’s talking about Western this and Western that. Western conceptions of past and future and so forth. Suddenly he’s outside the West seeing things from the point of view of the aborigines. Even though he lives in Clapham. He is perpetually “cheering himself up”, a manic form of self-persuasion in which everyone around him is willy-nilly enlisted. This manic behaviour is fuelled in part by a continuous chain of “rollies”, with which everyone is fumigated, a spontaneous metaphor also for the noxious “happiness” he spreads around, which is not in fact actual happiness but a concatenation of gestures and attitudes from which happiness is supposed to follow, just as Pascal held that faith would follow in the footsteps of prayer rather than the other way around. He – Cal that is, not Pascal obviously - has a fish’s head with oily smoked skin. I find it repulsive, even as I am aware that my dislike of Cal is disproportionate and doubtless symbolic, which is to say he represents something I find abhorrent. A certain middle-class.. actually, no, I can’t be bothered to even conceptualise it. But then, listening through the floorboards, my ear pressed to the floorboards, in my room directly above the kitchen, I learn that he was a consultant for the US government in Nicaragua at the time of the passage from the Sandinistas to the US backed regime, that is to say he was instrumental in assisting in some of the privatisation programmes. All of those programs presupposed the savagery of the US funded Contras, who picked up babies by the legs and cracked their heads against trees. All of this to terrorise the population so that Cal and his fuckwits could come in and prepare the transition to private industry and so forth. So there is it: Cal, for all his mind-wank about the aborigines, was in fact the unwitting – and therefore more repugnant – lacky of state sponsored terrorism, and instrumental in one of the great political tragedies of the last century. Imagine such a man sat underneath me, talking and smoking. Practically a monster. All this over the course of half an hour, with my ear pressed to the floor, perfectly still, listening, when I should be preparing my lesson for tomorrow

Father

If you had smelled my father’s fingers, they smelled of ash, but also a hint of musty sweetness. I smelled his fingers when he pinned me down and tried to squeeze blackheads from my cheek or nose. But long before that I was aware of this smell on his fingers and on his breath. I smelled his breath when he gave me a “chin pie”, which is when he rubbed his stubbly chin on my face and laughed. This smell was the smell of the world of Men. It was not simply a human smell but a smell of dirt, matter, compost, smoke, metal as well. Men in general and my father in particular are characterised by their commerce with such things. Harsh substances, I might call them. Men have ingested or besmeared themselves with such harsh substances in order to harden themselves. To ally themselves with what is harsh. They themselves become amalgams, party made from tobacco smoke, wood shavings, nails, oil and so forth. As they ingest more, as they smoke more, hammer more, as they place nails or tacks in their mouth whilst fitting a cupboard, or chew a match, so do they assume more and more the carapace of harshness.  As grey blue smoke exits their mouth and nostrils, as they scrub the dried paint off their arms, as the movements of chiselling and shovelling - brute, precise, relentless - become second nature, so are their bodies remade. So do they advertise their alliance with matter and poison. You must understand that each of these gestures has an affective lining, as I call it. A low-level brutal enjoyment, an indifferent violence, in hammering a nail, in splitting the earth with a spade, even if the earth or the wood are not sentient of course. There is still a cold pleasure in subduing, splitting, compressing, which potentially can be carried over onto flesh, so that these actions are always preparations for brutality.  

All of this was true of my father. One thing I do remember though is the smell of tobacco in the tobacco tin, dark and soft and loamy and almost edible, a smell that bore no resemblance to the smell of a cigarette, a smell that I would steal every now and then when he wasn’t looking even though he wouldn’t have minded perhaps.

My father placed maggots under his tongue to warm them up before using them as bait. Or I remember him placing a brandling worm on a fishhook and the worm writhing as yellow fluid came out of its side. Then he invited me to do it. I pricked my finger and it bled. “Never mind that”. This is how it’s passed on. Your body becomes a body capable of such gestures, and the indifference to pain, one’s own or the pain of others. A kind of discipline whereby the boy’s body with its softness and sensitivities is subdued and silenced and remade as an instrument, an accessory to hammers and chisels and spanners, honed or reduced to the mechanics of bone and muscle.

It is true I have refused all these things and more: cigarettes, nails, paint and plaster, fishhooks and WD40, pint glasses and greenhouses, beading and spirit levels. I have refused DIY and car engines, nor do I have a dank hut at the garden’s end full of tools and rust and an ashtray full of buts.

I stay with my glass of wine. I stay with the aroma of coffee that forever quells and suppresses the smell of strong tea and the sight of wet tea bags and tab-ends.

But I have in my pocket his unremarkable silver lighter. Which I always carry with me. There are still a few orange sparks left in it. It is the sole surviving remnant of him. The hard metal implacable remnant. And which I cannot throw away.

A Note on Creation

One day I had the impulse to write but every time I tried to put pen to paper (for me it is always this first scratch, this moment of contact, and to type is not writing) there was nothing. For me, I cannot speak for others, there is always this lag, that is to say that the impulse to write precedes the so-called subject matter. The impulse - which I prefer to call appetency, a word undeservedly sunk these days, fallen into disuse, but essential to understanding creation - this impulse seizes on the so-called subject matter as Picasso seized a bicycle seat and made it a bull.

The appetency is not a desire to externalise what is inside, to find appropriate flesh for what already exists in ghostly outline. It is a desire certainly but a desire to become something Other. An enlargement, but also a qualitative transformation into something else. And not just one but many something elses. A One becoming Multiple, a Simple becoming Complex..  

This appetency is not an intention with a Telos, a telos which only has to find its appropriate instrument. No. This appetency will enlarge and transform itself in several unanticipated directions. It will sprout and develop according to its own several momentums, and these momentums themselves arise only in contact with the so-called subject matter, and – if one is a writer- with the roots and branches of language. So for example, with Picasso, it was not that the intention to create a bull alighted on the bicycle seat. Rather did the intention to create encounter the bicycle seat and give birth to the bull. 

A Preposterous Day

It was a preposterous day, rain-soaked and sprung with mishap. I burnt the coffee, for example, and then, when I made another pot, someone came to the door. Cal it was, engaging me in pointless conversation, wanting to speak to my landlady. So I skipped coffee and headed out. My bike had a puncture so I had to get the bus. I bought a silk shirt, nonetheless, in Spittlefields market. That was perhaps the highlight of the day. There was no changing room so I was obliged to try on the shirt in front of the mirror, and in front of the woman running the stall. “It shows off your physique”, she said. Empty sales patter of course, but better than nothing. Sometimes the form of a complement is enough. Meanwhile, my intestines turned themselves into a fist lodged to the left of my stomach. Any understanding of me must start from the recognition that my body employs its resources against me. When I got back, Cal was still there in the kitchen, smoking with the landlady. I ran to my room without saying hello. I wore the shirt and tried to write. I heard her in the kitchen, the landlady: “He stays upstairs, rapt in secret studies. Insulating himself against the world.” “the world?” I mutter, "no only yours"; “secret” I mutter, "no only from you". I looked out over the back garden, and into the other back gardens. The rain had stopped to reveal a great silence. But then I could hear a noise from my stomach, a strange noise that I did not recognise. I regretted eating the croissants. Two large croissants I’d eaten for breakfast. I’d intended to soak them in the coffee but of course I had skipped coffee and so they had been dry, too dry for my stomach. A catastrophic error. You think I’m being melodramatic, but you do not understand my body which is not like other bodies and therefore translates only imperfectly into language. So, the croissant breakfast, a roller-skate under the feet of the day. That was it, I think. The intervention of Cal, resulting in the badly metabolised croissant and the petulant decision to begin the day without coffee. Cal was the culpable agent in all this, turning up on the doorstep at the wrong moment, asking me pointless questions about my teaching, then making some joke about the music I was playing, which was Bartok. “Bit high brow for a Sunday morning this, isn’t it?” Cal had quipped. Demanding my complicity in laughing at my own music, which is a subtle form of violence of course. Bartok is in no way “high-brow” in any case. Bartok with his piercing clear blue eyes and delicate frame, who translated so many wordless beautiful things into music. Like his eyes for example, the blue of this eyes. No, he did not translate them into music but continued them in music. He was able to continue his blue eyes in musical form, or what is incipient in his blue eyes was then completed in music. Fuck Cal anyway, who conspired with my own body to sabotage the day. At the desk now, the silk shirt, salmon pink, seems like a souvenir snatched from another world, a miraculous shining talisman from the Orient. I can still hear the noise in my stomach, it corresponds to no sensation. It is free floating and unattached to any sensation in the stomach. And this makes me wobble, this inability to source the noise. To attach it to the body. But then I realise, and this is the only laugh of the day, a laughter of relief, then I realise that it is not my stomach at all but the cooing of a pigeon in the tree outside.

Prague

A long evening at P’s flat. Exactly as he was at Oxford 15 years ago. Over-eager to display his knowledge. I tried to communicate my experience of Prague, the sepulchral gravity and dark magic of the buildings above and behind the tourist chatter, but he countered with various facts about Prague, the Czech Republic, the Velvet Revolution and so on. “Why do men always know things?” Alice once said to me. It’s true, although I have always prided myself on knowing very little in this sense. These men, who know things, always want to refer any disagreements to the judicial body of Facts, and thus close down interpretation. They want to shut down debate and also ally themselves with the cold indifference of the factual, as they perceive it. They are like the facts, they identify with the facts. This is their fantasy. P was precisely such a man. Weighing me down with endless facts and statistics, until I could take no more and was bent forward, like some pale and crooked caryatid, under the countless units of information. I tried to put forward my theory about Men and Knowledge, as briefly adumbrated above, but he of course was not interested in Theories, or in Theory with a big T. It was futile. All this was exactly as it had been at Oxford. As was his face. His face had not developed and matured, only cracked a little, and greyed at the sides, as if done by a make-up artist. There had been no deep aging, which is to say living, precisely because he had sought refuge in facts and information in retreat from the riddles and ambiguities of existence. That at least was my thought. Anyway, I wondered how he felt, at the end of the evening, P, after performing this role as dispenser of facts, as spokesperson for the Facts, but then remaining behind empty handed, starved of human contact. I was looking forward to thinking about this on the way home.

In order to facilitate this thinking, I decided to get a cab. For sometimes there is nothing better than giving oneself the unexpected gift of a cab ride home, and a prime box seat from which to watch the city and its nocturnal personality. This, I imagine, is what Iggy Pop did when he wrote The Passenger, which is exactly the soundtrack to be played whilst travelling by cab through the city late at night, somehow both a spectator of the city but also its very essence. He is right, Mr Iggy Pop, that the sky above the city is derealised or made “hollow” by the cupola of orange and red and silver lights from cars and buildings. You contemplate this great cupola from under glass, or of course you can slide the window down and hear the rush of the wind and the drunken voices it catches and discards like litter. None of this of course would mean anything to P, who would doubtless know Iggy Pop’s real name, and when and where the song was written.

In any case, I had prepared to contemplate P and the role of “facts” in the Male imagination. But as the cab journey began, all I could think of, suddenly, was that time in Prague, walking home along Karlova, after going to the Jazz club, when I was nearly knocked down by a man on a bicycle, skinny with a black cap and goggles. What he was doing, racing late at night along that bone-shaking cobbled street I have no idea. I hardly had time to register the near collision than he’d disappeared, and the receding whirr of the wheels died in the whorl of my ear. Silence closed in once more. I took this, at the time, this cyclist, to be some kind of herald of Death, some kind of minatory herald sent by bony and nocturnal Death. For our imagination seizes on phenomenon and turns them into metaphors almost before we have time to perceive them in their literal state. This was all I could think about for the cab journey home, and in fact I asked the driver to stop early, about half a mile from the flat, so that I could walk and get some cool air and clear my head of this demon from Prague. 

Gastro's

Today, Monday, I joined hands with a lost habit, afternoon coffee at Gastro’s. It must be two or three years. Parking the bike in Sainsbury’s car park, nodding to the old clock at Clapham station, 4.40pm. The same as before. The habit was there waiting for me and I too was suddenly the same as before. The table inside right by the window of course, as if slipping back into the contours of myself, when I used to be myself so perfectly and without thinking.

I catch my reflection in the window and, surprisingly, I look exactly as I would want myself to look. Dark and saturnine, curls falling over my face, the brow creased; the eyes downcast, serious but long-lashed and therefore almost boyish, innocent, protecting themselves. Like a little allegory of Contemplation, I think to myself, then laughing at the phrase.

A woman comes in with her girlfriend. The sunlight streams in through the open door, silhouetting her in brilliance at the same time as it darkens her already dark hair. She has eyes only for the girlfriend. She suggests the table outside, and so they sit together on the other side of the glass, right under my nose. The thick arc of her eyebrows. But then the sun goes behind a cloud and the face is suddenly different, scarcely the same person.  

An hour later and I’m still there. There’s now a man on the next table. Completely bald, short, with a large grey hat that he’s placed in front of him. His small blue eyes animated and vigilant behind round thick rimmed glasses. His voice is too loud, insensitive to context, and he himself, in his whole body, is awkward and keen to assert himself. “It’s a non-sequitur!” he’s yelling, “a complete non sequitur”! He’s with a younger nodding man. A few drinks later they’re laughing. They too leave in time.

This was always my little corner of France, right here in London. That was my fantasy, that I stepped through the magic portal into France, and drank café au lait and ate the sweet pain au raisin, and looked at my face in the window, with a stripe of sunlight running down it. And Cooka the waitress bringing me a second coffee without my asking. And the old snow-haired man always sat at the bar as he might do in Paris, and morning coffee served in bowls and the French onion soup and soft baguettes.

Everything real that we are most attached to, the reflected face in the window, the small French café, is simultaneously the furniture and habiliments of our inmost fantasies. Fantasies to which we are fastened even as - and because - time carries us off elsewhere

Desire, a short fiction

The other day, I can’t remember now where it was, unless it was Notting Hill Gate before or after teaching, I caught from a passer-by (although I was unable to identify exactly which person it was) the whiff of that perfume which S. used to wear, and I was suddenly back in those warm September days when desire was ripening slowly, too slowly, delicious in its pure potentiality, which was how I preferred it in those days of course, as also with L. Remember with L, you sat across from one another in her lounge, her sundry aristocratic paraphernalia of antique books and original sketches and woven scenes of country life, saying to her “seduction involves ostensibly talking about one thing when you both know that you’re talking about something else.” What a typically involuted, self-referential conversation it was, and me enjoying that painful circuit of suspended desire, as I always did until well into middle age. Remember also that time when you stayed in her London flat when she was on holiday. She’d left on her desk an open notebook and there I saw my name, raised and insistent, as it were, but deliberately avoided reading, feeling it had been lewdly left open for my attention - there was no other conclusion. Even though it was meant for me, I did not read it. I preferred the perverse refusal.  

Anyway, in Notting Hill, briefly, I was for an instant flushed with that feeling of approaching passion, the tremors of “something happening”, the signpost to somewhere unknown. I was there, for an instant. But that brief perfume did not return me to S. herself, as an object of former desire, it did not make her present to me once again. I was, as I said, returned not to her but to that state of blossoming, all the more tasteable and precious for having been divorced from S, to whom it had been temporarily fastened, back then. People are ultimately dispensable, and our nostalgia is only for the beauty of the waves or ripples they leave inside us, or the light as it plays on the waves or ripples they leave inside us.  

Calm

On Tuesday I helped G. move. He hired a van and at one point was panicking about manoeuvring the vehicle, which he was unaccustomed to driving. His cheeks were very red. I suggested he pull over. I talked to him about the time my father hired a van and we moved from that house opposite the fields to the estate, and how I sat in the back of the van with all our possessions. G was okay to drive the van after that. But he was puzzled that I was so unflustered.

Several people tell me that I have a calm and calming presence. This is, i take it, supposed to be a good thing. Perhaps it is for them. But it struck me last night that this calmness, this serenity even, may be a way of impeding or assuaging real life, the anxiety and energy that we feel when we are really involved in the world. I had felt this anxiety and energy early in the new year, partly under pressure of fear, financial fear. I was visited by the man from the benefits office, assessing my application. I was in fact up all night thinking about this visit, for I had been doing some undeclared cash in hand work at the college. “What have you been doing for the past 6 months?”, he asked, a man in his early twenties. I told him I’d been writing a novel, which was not entirely false, and living off savings, which was laughably false. The application went through and my calmness came back. 

Writing too, exists much of the time at least, to placate the spirits, to redistribute a focused energy and anxiety among manifold inscriptions. Yet sometime, but too rarely, the spirits themselves grasp the pen and drag me into ambushes of terror or exhilaration. If such occasions have become far rarer, then this is because the counter-force – habitual calm - has grown stronger and stronger. But it has only grown stronger to stop the spirits tearing me apart. This counter force, that claims to act on my behalf, does not see that I would rather be torn apart than assuaged and finally closed down by my calmness. 

The Copyist

At some point, quite recently, I realised that I had succeeded only as a copyist, that I owed my modest achievements to this fact. At university, it is true, I achieved the best degree in my year and was awarded a prize on that basis. But I now realise that my success was due to my facility, my flair, as a copyist. I do not mean that I copied, verbatim or in paraphrasis, other people’s work. Or even their ideas. No. My facility was in copying their style of thought. I have always found this a very easy thing to do. To imitate not the thoughts but the style of thinking, both the tone and the direction, the expected or unexpected turns, the characteristic rhythm.  All these things, of course, are meant to be the signature of a unique self, the syntax of a particular soul. But these souls, these selves, cannot have been that unique, for I was able to reproduce their styles almost without thinking, as some musicians are instantly able to compose something in the style of such and such a composer. I was able to do this without slipping into parody, or pastiche. I was able to stop just before this point, as it were, to exercise a certain discipline even in imitation. And this was the key to my success. For the tutors, when they read my work, met with something that agreed with their own thinking, certainly, but without simply reproducing its surface. I was able to reproduce its deeper movement, that which generated the surface. All my life, in fact, I have been involved in this copying. I remember, for example, how I would imitate the facial expressions of my parents in order to uncover the emotion underneath, to be the emotion underneath, to see what it felt like to make such a facial expression and thus to gain access to the angry or loving soul behind it. My mother for example, there was a smile she sometimes did, but also mixed with pain. In my room I would keep doing this smile and try to catch the feeling that went along with it. I could feel it for a second then it slipped away. But I think in the end I managed to get to it. I think it was what I’d now call compassion. She looked at me with compassion, an awareness of vulnerability and innocence. Of a child’s unreachable vulnerability. For the place from which a small child looks at an adult is finally an unreachable place. So this new thing, compassion, flickered through me when I did the face. Anyway, time and again I have unpicked the soul firstly though imitating the surface. I have gained access to the soul through the rebus of the surface, so that then I was able to adopt as my own the soul. I have been always a copyist. But it is only recently that I have come to realise this. And at first I imagined that this confiscated from me, in retrospect, everything that I had achieved, minimal as it is, tiny as it is. And perhaps it does. But what I also asked myself is: who is this that has done the copying, he who is not to be confused with any of the copies, and what is he like, this copyist. He is like nothing, he has no colour or inflexions, he stands apart from everything he copies, he survives all successive incarnations. He survives.  

Yeats, Autodidacticism and Ireland.

Dowden gave me some of the little poems of Yeats to read: it is twilight stuff, vague and unsubstantial. I couldn’t read them. Poor fellow! He is autodidaktos. He never worked under a master.”  (Mahaffy)

The concept of “cultural capital”, coined by Pierre Bourdieu, refers firstly to what is perceived as “legitimate culture” in any particular society, the possession of which confers status and worth. In England this might include: Shakespeare, Opera, a knowledge of wine…roughly synonymous with what’s called “high culture”. But also crucial for Bourdieu is the mode of its acquisition. It should ideally be imbibed, almost effortlessly, through the family, and through class, and incrementally over the course of one’s upbringing. Cultural capital ought to be part of the medium in which one lives and breathes – it should metamorphosise into “taste”. To betray any signs of having acquired it through too much labour, as the autodidact does, is to delegitimise it and oneself to some extent. To be too eager to display it is likewise an embarrassment to those who have picked it up through the legitimate channels.

There is a remarkable passage in Yeats’s Autobiographies which I think is most rewardingly read in these terms:

A young Irish poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, ‘You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters’, and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the same thing. I was full of  thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art schools instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and learned all the classical founda­tions of English literature and English culture, all that great erudition , which once accepted frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject-matter, or attempt to found a new tradi­tion. Lacking sufficient recognized prec_edent, I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born; and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born all. I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement and under a curse, as it were, like some race of birds compelled to spend the time needed for the making of the nest in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and lichen.

There is much to unpack in this passage. What might it mean, firstly, to ‘talk like a man of letters’? Presumably, one talks in a way that is ‘laboured’, awkward and clotted with abstraction. An absence of ‘grace’ or ‘naturalness’. This is the sure mark of the autodidact. A poet, by contrast, or the image of the poet in the popular imagination, has a certain spontaneous eloquence, a facility with language. ‘Poet’ is often used, still, to denote a category of person rather than a ‘profession’. The other members of the Rhymers club, Oxbridge educated, and with a different relation to culture, are closer to “poets” in this sense. They wear their learning lightly and without the clumsy introduction of “ideas”.

‘I must needs find out some reason for all I did..’

In other words, everything has to be justified; nothing is given. Again, the grace, spontaneity, taken-for-grantedness of one who insouciantly inhabits a culture, is absent. One cannot assume one’s values – they are objects of labour and consideration. And this ‘prolegomena of justifications’, the sense that everything must be thought-through, be first of all an object of choice, sought-out, this is a sure mark of an ‘awkward’, autodidactic relation to culture. The autodidact is the one who must first work to reach the point from which others have already started.

I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born;

‘not to be well born’ is not to have a reserve of cultural capital on which to rely, it’s having to create what others can assume (ie an inherited stock of capital). But this created stock will always bear the stain of labour. What legitimacy it has will derive not from the inherited, from tradition, but from the sheer performative power of the individual. Again, the sense is of not being able to get off the ground, having to expend effort constructing what others can take for granted.

I was full of  thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images

We see also here some of the specifics behind Yeats’s antipathy to the ‘abstract’. ‘Abstraction’, not untypically, is the name given to that which does not spontaneously agree with naturalised dispositions. Yeats sees abstraction as something that marks his own speech, his own relation to culture. He stands at an oblique and awkward relation to that which the other rhymers have properly ingested and made their own. Yeats therefore aspires to the image. The image is immediate, intuitive, and a spontaneous marriage of the ideal and the sensuous. Yeats’s desire for the image is therefore also a desire for a different relation to culture. A relation characterised by a certain aristocratic grace and ease. Thus, the ‘desire for the image’ is a desire for the “naturalness” that characterizes the legitimate carrier of culture. The effortless grace of the aristocrat etc, of those whose cultural acquisition has been through a kind of gradual and ‘careless’ osmosis.

‘Culture’ is for Yeats not simply the air one breathes, it is not bequeathed by birth and displayed in every habitual reflex and gesture. Culture is a problem and the object of labour.  And because its acquisition is a labour, because it is not an inheritance, so does this laboured mode of acquisition betrays itself ceaselessly in his demeanour, dispositions and manner of speaking – the abstractions, the ideas that have not yet dissolved into reflexes and feelings.

But Yeats’s next move, however, is key. Yeats, rather than regretting this ‘exclusion’ from official culture and from received routes of acquisition, sees that it is a positive condition of his ‘nationalism’. He has been diverted into alternative cultural fields etc, alternate taxonomies, canons, areas of research, hierarchies of taste. This, indeed, is characteristic of autodidacts in general. The crucial difference, however, is that in Yeats’s case it is able to rise from the level of a solitary pursuit to that of a collective project. That is to say, nationalism as a cultural project is in part necessarily ‘autodidactic’, it takes place outside the official institutions of cultural transmission and validation. It is autodidacticism raised to the status of an organised group enterprise.

What this also means, Yeats thinks, with some validity, is that there is a necessary connection  between his own position and that of the nation: both, equally, are ‘waiting to be born’; both do not yet inhere within a ‘tradition’, both, equally, await ‘definition’. But the relation is of course not simply one of analogy. The significant realization here is precisely that the labour of working though one level necessarily involves, is inextricable from, that whole other level – that the individual and collective projects cannot be sundered in reality.

Thus although Yeats is certainly an autodidact, and displays many of the traits of the autodidactic imagination as we find it in Blake and others, it also the case that in his situation the problem of autodidacticism is not an individual one and nor is the ‘solution’. That is, firstly, the sense of an awkward relation to culture, of being not quite at home in its ill-fitting clothes, of having to think about and justify what others simply assume: all this is also situation of the Irish as such. Yeats’s autodidacticism is part of a larger historical aggregate. That is, what might otherwise have been something marginal and eccentric, at the border of madness – as in Blake, has a larger space into which expand and develop.

For what happens in late nineteenth century Ireland is a kind of seismic shift in what counts as cultural capital, in what is perceived as value-conferring legitimate culture. The historian Roy Foster sees this shift made visible in a detail from Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. The principal character Gabriel, a guest at his aunt’s Christmas dinner party, speaks of his own “grade of culture”, by which he seems to mean Anglophone and European culture. But there is another guest at the party, Ms Ivors, who mocks Gabriel as a “West Briton”, that is someone with no knowledge of the Irish Language or indigenous culture.

Ivors is an Irish nationalist, and the category of “West Britonism” is one marker of the new “taste culture”, for which the Irish language and Irish songs and poetry are the legitimate currency and capital. The devaluation of what had been the currency of  “legitimate culture” and the promotion of a new (Irish) currency, is integral to the nationalist project. The exchange between Miss Ivors and Gabriel, Foster suggests, represents an ascendant “taste culture” becoming increasingly visible and confident.

Dubliners was published in 1914. In the 1890’s, this same taste culture was in an earlier and more emergent phase.

The Autodidactic Imagination: Yeats and Others

Dowden gave me some of the little poems of Yeats to read: it is twilight stuff, vague and unsubstantial. I couldn’t read them. Poor fellow! He is autodidaktos. He never worked under a master.”  (Mahaffy)

As ever, this great autodidact [Yeats] was immersed in those arcane magical studies which, for all their silliness, fed his imagination and his writings. "A poetic life in letters," Irish Times, October 11, 1997

There is at least a chapter and more probably a book to be written on W.B.Yeats and the autodidactic imagination. Yeats. Along with Blake, and a number of others is of course one of the great autodidacts of literature written in English.

What, though, is an autodidact, and how is autodidacticism a cast of mind, a structure of thinking and feeling, beyond rather than simply learning for oneself what others acquire from a master and institutionally?

The work of Pierre Bourdieu, albeit written in the very specific context of 20^th century French culture, is useful here. The autodidact is one with a peculiar and oblique relationship to “legitimate culture” and the official channels of its acquisition and transmission. The autodidact has either been excluded from that culture and its channels, or for some reason chosen alternative channels and contents. Bourdieu defines at least two kinds of autodidact: the figure totally excluded from cultural acquisition until a relatively late age, who then sets about learning with ardent and compensatory zeal. His respect for ‘canonical knowledge' is exaggerated – perhaps veering toward parody - and he is ‘given away’ by this over reverence. There is a second kind who, deterred or excluded from the echelons of “official knowledge,” is pushed into areas “disclaimed and abandoned by the official education system” – the occult for example, or various heretical and “secret” counternarratives to official knowledge. This typically involves clubs and institutions other than those legitimated by the state and not traditionally recognized as markers of class distinction.

The early Yeats is certainly closer to the second kind of autodidact. Having firstly been shut out from the Trinity College education re rigeur for a certain class of Anglo-Irish family, he pursues occult and hermetic “knowledge” in the “alternative university” of the secret society. On the other hand, he acquires his knowledge of literature and history through (at the time marginal) organizations such as the Young Ireland Societies, Fenian groups, the Bohemian Dublin of the Contemporary Club, the counter-nationalism of a William Morris, and, in general, the emergent debating forums of cultural nationalism.

Emerging cultural nationalism is crucial here. For whereas in another context, ‘areas disclaimed or abandoned by official culture’ could only mean the cranky and eccentric, marginal and lonely pursuits; in Ireland, there is a whole ‘counter-cultural movement’ based around neglected popular forms, and the resurrection of these as important and valid forms of knowledge.

It is from the point of view of these contexts of counter-cultural knowledge -nationalist cells and secret societies - that Yeats makes his attacks on official and authorized forms (eg Trinity College).

Because these counter-cultural forms – again, whether nationalist or hermetic - involve also the disavowal of official authority, of sanctioned forms, they are also characterized by the attempt to create new authority from scratch, or by the claim to discover ‘deeper’ or more ‘original’ authorities deep within the national or occult “traditions”. In this sense, two of the early Yeats’s most passionate attachments, nationalism and the occult, have a similar structure, a comparable set of concerns.

Symbolic Investiture and Modernity

 Eric Santner’s book My Own Private Germany, addresses and explores the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber. Schreber suffered a psychotic breakdown after being appointed to the role of High Court Judge, unable as it were to metabolise his new title, his mandate.

The ritual whereby someone is admitted to the High Court is an instance of what Santner calls “symbolic investiture”, which he defines thus:

by symbolic investiture I mean [..] those social acts, often involving a ritualized transferal of a title and mandate, whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and role within a shared symbolic universe.

Santner reads Schreber’s breakdown in the context of a wider “crisis of investiture” in modernity. Here is part of a synopsis of Santner’s book:

The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject’s self-understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some “other” who threatens our borders and our treasures.

Unable to “assume” the symbolic mantle, the title, Schreber experiences it as a kind of obscene and external injunction from an invasive and persecutory God.

What’s interesting to me is the suggestion that this suspension of symbolic investiture (ie the suspension of its self-evidence, of its digestibility) occurs at times of historical instability, and is readable as a historical symptom. A particular “symbolic universe” has disintegrated or been eroded, such that faced with a particular symbolic mandate, the subject does not salute it and say “Yes, that’s me, that’s my destination”, but instead confronts it as something external and disagreeable. I’m interested also in the space that this suspension or crisis opens up – whether it be a space of madness or a space of freedom.

Inevitably perhaps, my point of reference is Yeats. First of all, in fact, Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats. The Yeats family is fairly solidly of the Anglo-Irish ruling bloc. There are certain expectations that go along with that, certain educational and career destinations and trajectories that go unquestioned. Or they do until a certain historical point. That certain historical juncture is Yeats’s Father. John Butler Yeats embarks on the expected Protestant Ascendancy biography. He trains in the law at Trinity College with a view to becoming a barrister. He then abandons all this to become a portrait painter, and to exist in way that can accurately be named bohemian.

On the one level, this decision is attributable to John Butler Yeats’s “capricious personality.” But it is also the case that such a choice would have been inconceivable even a generation previously. The historical substance itself has altered. The social substance in which such a destiny could naturally and unproblematically be lived has hardened and cracked. Land Acts, Catholic emancipation and social advance, the imminence of Home Rule, all represent the ‘silent weaving of the spirit’ which leaves the Anglo-Irish groundless.

John Butler Yeats’s refusal of his social destiny, the mantle of barrister, is surely based on this recognition that the historical substance has changed. A space of freedom opens up wherein the social substance no longer exactly fixed, foreseen, predictable, prescribed. 

On W.B. Yeats’s birth certificate, “Father’s Profession” is listed as ‘barrister’, when the Father had already given up that title and the class trajectory that went with it. Susan Yeats, the Poet’s mother, who made this entry, was still wedded to the symbolic universe that the father had refused. AS the William Murphy the family’s biographer puts it

She entered on a game with one set of rules only to find them changed as soon as the game began.

Murphy (and WBY himself) says that Susan was often a silent presence in the Yeats household. And her subsequent silence can be interpreted as a ‘symptom’ not just of some personal malaise but of a kind of knot in history, whereby one person is still invested in the (disintegrating) symbolic “game” of a particular class, whilst the other refuses and negates it.

What I'd like to talk about in the next post is the secret societies that W.B. Yeats belongs to, which are all about acts and rituals of investiture, albeit often theatrical and even parodic. 

The Homeric and Peasant worlds in Modernism

This earlier post was about how the contrast of the Modern and traditional is internal to Modernism, the way in which Modernist thought and literature is defined by this contrast, and by the acute awareness of this contrast. 

There are at least two spectres or even fantasies of the pre-modern that Modernism conjures in order to then weigh and measure what Modernity has lost. On the one hand, there is, as in Heidegger, the peasant world of handing-down, of intuitively meaningful labour, of know-how and in-dwelling. On the other hand, there is the Homeric world.

In both cases, the peasant life-world, and the Homeric, there is not simply a world but corresponding artistic forms. The forms presuppose that world and cannot survive without it:

In the art works of a pre-industrialized, agricultural or tribal society, the artist's raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences, reinvents the same basic human situations as though for the first time. […] The works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. The writer uses them, but he does not need to demonstrate their meaning beforehand: in the language of Hegel, this raw material needs no mediation.

Thus, Fredric Jameson’s lucid paraphrase of Lukacs. Somesuch world is the lost object of desire for various Modern writers and thinkers. A world wherein the material “needs no mediation”, where there is a continuity between environment and expression. Here is Yeats on the peasanty of the West of Ireland:

Those poor peasants lived in a beautiful if somewhat inhospitable world, where little had changed since Adam delved and Eve span. Everything was so old that it was steeped in the heart, and every powerful emotion found at once noble types and symbols for its expression. […]. The soul then had but to stretch out its arms to fill them with beauty, but now all manner of heterogeneous ugliness has beset us. A peasant had then but to stand in his own door and think of his sweetheart and of his sorrow, and take from the scene about him and from the common events of his life types and symbols, and behold, if chance was a little kind, he had made a poem to humble generations of the proud.

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a community, bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of their own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action.

For Yeats, for Lukacs, or whomever, this world entails a certain form of art wherein there is no rift between the world and the required imaginative resources. Things have an “immediate meaning". It is obvious in Yeats that the image of the peasant world is also a reverse portrait of the Modern and its “heterogeneous ugliness”, and, more exactly, an outline of what is lacking to the Modern writer or artist: that taken-for-grantedness, that meaning immanent in the everyday.

Needless to say that this world frequently overlaps with the Homeric. In Yeats, the overlap is explicit. Reviewing Douglas Hyde’s collection of Irish folk tales, Y writes:

Here at last is a universe where all is large and intense enough to almost satisfy the emotions of man. Certainly, such stories are not a criticism of life but rather an extension, thereby much more closely resembling Homer than that last and most admirable phase [sic] of the “inspiring book,” a social drama by Henrik Ibsen. They are as existence and not a thought and make our world of tea tables seem but a shabby penumbra.

Elsewhere Yeats writes that “A description in the Illiad or the Odyssey […] is the swift and natural observation of a man as he is shaped by life.” Observation is not intercepted by problems of expression, choice of subject matter, problems of style and so on. The task of the poet is a given without being enforced. Freedom and necessity are not yet opposites. 

Here is Hegel on the world presupposed by the Homeric epic:  

everything is domestic, in everything the man has present before his eyes the power of his arm, the skill of his hand, the cleverness of his own spirit, or a result of his courage and bravery. In this way alone have the means of satisfaction not been degraded to a purely external matter; we see their living origin itself and the living consciousness of the value which man puts on them because in them he has things not dead or killed by custom, but his own closest productions.

Hegel offers us a compelling description of this lost world and its literary corollaries. In the world of Homer there exists an acute and graphic sense of how things work, are put together, come apart. Things are known, or reveal themselves, though and in their use. It is “A world where everything is living” (George Steiner), a world corresponding and attuned to a different human sensorium – Sight is not sovereign, touch and smell are equally, simultaneously present. There is no specifically 'psychological' lexicon. “Burn this into your brain” is not just ‘memorize’. The physical world is the best picture of the mental, as though what takes place (tangibly) in the world is the image and yardstick of mental events. The latter do not require their own autonomous language, the language of ‘psychology’ and of action are not, as in our world, dissimilar and differently structured. Epic language is one of simile and analogy rather than concept and abstract measure. A distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by an abstract plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours. Joy, or whatever emotion, is always embodied, implicated in some object, wedded to some event or person. It is not yet some abstract emotion which can fill out any random thing indiscriminately. “Joy.. warm as the joy that children feel/ When they see their father’s life dawn again./ One who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment./ Wasting away,/ Wasting away, slowly, under some angry power’s onslaught.” What the epic simile seems to do – as here- is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some thing, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.

This is the great “mirage” of the Homeric world as we find it in Hegel, at a time when “traditional” German society faced the incursions of industrial mechanisation:

Our present-day machinery and factories, together with the products they turn out and in general our means of satisfying our external needs would in this respect […] be out of tune with the background of life which the original epic requires

The question is not simply whether these invocations and depictions – of the peasant and Homeric worlds - are accurate, whether the Homeric world or the peasant world is indeed one of “immediate meaning”, of concrete comparison rather than abstract measure. Rather, what we should ask is how these invocations function within the discourse of Modernity and Modernism. Both the Homeric and the Peasant life-world are certainly images of what has been lost. In other words they are attempts to “figure out” everything that is absent from and in the Modern. The Modern is depicted in reverse, as it were, through its exact opposite.

Thus in Yeats, for example, the Peasant world – the bard has simply to “stretch out his hands” to find fit subject matter, and the means of expression are collective and handed down - is contrasted with the considerable labour and deliberation confronting the Modern artist, for whom the world has lost it’s taken-for-grantedness, both in terms of the content and means of expression. This loss, and the consequent affects of lamentation and melancholy are of course inherent in much Modernism.

But both the peasant world and the Homeric are also solutions for the modern artist. Again, the example of Synge, who comes to the ‘countryside’ from - in retreat from -the metropolis. He finds in “peasant dialect” a response to the question of literary language which confronts metropolitan writers. This is what T.S. Eliot says about Synge’s language – that he discovered in peasant ‘dialect’ a language that was already ‘literary’, that didn’t have to be made so by all kinds of estrangement techniques, refreshingly different from the modish present but having the stored energy of tradition. Of course, if we ask for whom was it literary, the answer is the Modern writer and his-her audience. Synge’s own formulation was that “style comes from the shock of new material”. Style – that very modern category, the signature of some unique subjectivity, the antithesis of the older collective forms – is now developed in the encounter with the older forms. Consciousness is “shocked” by some foreign material that impinges on and agitates it. But the foreign material is the Old rather than the contemporary.  The older life-worlds, the Homeric or the peasant environment, act as the spurs or catalysts to create style in its peculiarly modern sense.