How Pasternak contributed to the completion of 'Essays in island logic'

In 2008 I was struggling to complete a sequence of poems called 'Essays in island Logic' in which I took the three central figures of The Odyssey and placed them on a modern Ithaca, by now a popular holiday destination. On reflection, I was suffering from the desire to exert too much authorial control over a piece that wanted to be set free. What follows derives from notes I made at the time in response to some of Boris Pasternak's ideas about poetry which influenced my approach to those poems, now published in the collection Hurt (Enitharmon, 2010).

1.

There is apparently an early - now lost - paper by Boris Pasternak called 'Symbolism and Immortality' which argues that our impressions are subjective. However, he also argues that these subjective impressions are capable of being 'the common property of man'. Pasternak is recalling this lost essay in his 'Essay in Autobiography' written in 1956, and he goes on, 'I assumed that every human being leaves behind him when he dies his own share of this undying, racial subjectivity - the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul, art finds its . . . field of action and its main content'. He then remembers concluding that 'the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience' (Pasternak, Poems 1955-1959 and The Essay in Autobiography, Collins Harvill, 1990).

In Pasternak's work these ideas emerge in poetic form in moments such as 'I want the heart of the matter / Always in work, / The chaos of feelings' ('I want the heart of the matter') and 'Success is not your aim / Nor noise, but gift of self' ('Fame's not a pretty sight'). In struggling to complete 'Essays in Island Logic' I feel I have been blocked because I have been too anxious to ascertain or assert its meaning. Returning to the sequence again after a few months I feel more sanguine about this - chilled and allowing. As Pasternak is saying, all my work argues my own matrix of experience - it's not me but mine. The objective world (though unknowable still) is processed through my own particular mesh - my set of harmonies and disharmonies - and must emerge coloured, spun, almost texturised according to my personal self. As Pasternak seems to argue though, each individual self has enough in common with all mankind to almost guarantee that only the extremely eccentric individual will be unrecognisable to anybody else. Hence experiences are both unique and common. If this was not the case, then art would be either excruciatingly dull or utterly alien to us.

It strikes me this is not far from Keats' valley of pain. We begin with the fundamental matrix of any human being - a body, drives, senses, loneliness, seeking love and companionship - and this is grown on through the hornbook of our individual experiences, becoming, as Keats says, the more unique the more we experience. These days I feel the truth of this more, and try to understand it less - the accumulated complexity and richness of even my relatively narrow life. This is the root of my railing against fundamentalism (of any kind): that it denies access to mature experience. It shortcuts the truth - at least the only one we can get to. It may seem attractive in times (of trouble) but it is always in error. Odysseus learns this, I think, in the 'Essays' sequence since his earlier self was a fundamentalist soldier (almost tautologous - the perceiver of vivid contrasts of necessity, ours and theirs). His previous egotism, eloquence and persuasiveness suggest this. In the past he has always employed language as persuasion, and I remember how Auden became so wary of the persuasive powers of language around 1939. In my poem, the aging Odysseus no longer wishes to divide and persuade, but rather to devour life whole.

By contrast, his son Telemachus remains locked into his search for a form of fundamentalism - what he regards as a cause, a purpose. He has yet to (may never) grow into the more complex jacket that he needs to wear. Poor Penelope has led the restricted life of a conventional woman (her tending the geese as a child, her long waiting, her role in the house, etc.) and she quietly envies male mobility and their encounters with the world. I have not been radical in any way with her portrayal - yet she too is best seen as seeking the complexity of truth. So there are three souls in the poems, all variously encountering the world. The tourists are equally in search of a rather simplistic remedy to their lives elsewhere: vainly seeking in the wrong places, the beach, consumerism, sex, geographical escape. The solution - if we can speak in such terms - is an openness of soul. There: I've said it. This is the first occasion on which it does not feel pompous or laughable for me to talk in such terms. It is the goal of the wholeness of our awareness that suggests the holiness of self.

So we process our own experience. We find a locale, a niche for it within ourselves, thus adding it to ourselves, to our growing uniqueness. This has long been my model of the educative process, and ought to find its way more often from my daily business into poems. And death? As Pasternak suggests, the artist leaves behind something of their own 'take' on their life experience - a poem, a piece of music, a painting. Did M. leave something when she died in January 2006? Of course - her words, her way of life, her perception of things such as food, children, gardens, her husband. She contributed and still contributes to our ongoing life and thought processes. She remains one of a counterpoint of voices, part of the collaborative nature of life, incorporated (though bodiless) into our matrix, into our souls. Of course, we are aware of blind-spots in her individual perception of the world - these are part of her individual nature, her character. But this merely suggests that it is the most powerful personalities who are capable of incorporating most. Shakespeare - oh, Bill! - and Keats' concept of negative capability. Then the driving force behind this emergence from the shell of the self into the world is surely what we call love. We are all artists of differing abilities in our everyday lives. What marks the 'real' artists? Surely only the choice of medium as a particular, recognisable form of expression. I have always been drawn to Virginia Woolf's idea of the dinner-party as an art form as in Mrs Dalloway- perfectly valid but seldom recognised. And my beef with work is the way it demands and delivers the narrowing of experience. So 'Essays' is a meaningless sequence - merely three souls engaged at differing points on the common work of the creation of their own selves. It does not need to be pushed towards meaning.

And so, more generally, to write a poem? It is the slow uncovering of these forged connections in our own minds. This is why it happens. It begins, unbidden so often. But the process of recovery itself, with the intention of bringing it into the public sphere so that it can be taken up and experienced by others, that is a process toward self-knowledge and is never (should never be) a representation of the already familiarly known. Writing a poem resembles the process of self-justification, but is not that. It is a process of analysis, discovery, comprehension of the negotiated ground between self and other.

The poetry is in the paying attention. The poet must attend to the world about him - to what Blake calls 'Minute particulars' - so that we do not employ old forms and clichés. It goes without saying that the world perceived is not merely the outer, physical one but also the inner world and its weathers. We are never likely to achieve the bestial/natural mode of living unconsciously, so our second best must be as truthful an awareness of what passes before us - those minute particulars. So that we are less deceived. But poets also must concern themselves with language when they try to articulate experience. In this way the poet lies at the cross-hairs of language and things. Only occasionally do we get this tension right, though even then what we articulate is not an empirical objectivity. Perception and understanding occur when we lay up experience - like a maturing wine - amongst the matrix, the mesh, created by earlier experience. This is what makes it ours by subtly altering it. Yet this is also what makes it uniquely ours, relevant to us, at the risk of making it wholly private.

In Dr Zhivago, Pasternak attacks two types of journalists. The first has a pre-prepared construct, an agenda about the 'people' and, claiming to be an observer, in reality only collects supporting evidence of his own views. The second (and more recognisably modern type), is all clipped speech, sketches and scenes of reality, scepticism and misanthropy. But Pasternak argues again that facts do not truly exist for us until man puts into them something of his own, some measure of his own wilful, human genius, of fairy tale and myth. As before, this seeming rampant individualism is counter-balanced by Pasternak's unshakable belief that - for the most part (it is this vague) - there remains sufficient commonality for art to speak.

 

 

Three poems from 'Essays in island logic'

 

'Same sea, same dangers waiting for him

As though he had got nowhere but older'

W.S. Merwin - 'Odysseus'

 

 

his wife remembers the High Centre

 

in the Crater Zone

curves like highways giant magma slicks

the cone's last eruption

 

earth's seismic sneezing

 

black peppercorns the size of footballs

the shape of human heads

 

the size of black refuse sacks

big as overturned cars --

 

the last thing old men remember

that there were years before this darkness

 

this turning inside-out

 

these older oxidised rust-red levels

that begin to wrap themselves

 

in pine and stonecrop

the age for which all subsequent ages

pay unwilling price --

 

yet what she saw was more like eternity

grown short-lived

and what she witnessed

 

everything getting ready to dissolve

where old men cry out

watch that mountain watch that mountain

 

the bravado

of youngsters sneering shrugging up

fuck this shaking my fucking feet

 

her understanding how this must be

and that she can lay claim to neither

 

having waited too long

 

*

 

he considers what the young have to teach

 

to stand up invisible

as a forked child squalls in the whip

and withdrawal of waves

 

black sand thrown at shins and toes

sensing

the slither of ground beneath

 

and surely love this thrill of it

knifing him ecstatic

 

establishing its open wound

 

its soul-shaping progress the young know

yet unaware of --

 

trying to re-learn this

in part the effort not to flinch

 

as the dog he trained when young

coursing wild goat and deer and hare

 

like its master

no quarry able to slip away --

 

yet when he returned

almost unrecognisably changed infested

with ticks

 

half-dead from twenty years of neglect

an old rug

lay in the agave shade

 

dog and master thumping in recognition

 

barely able to drag themselves together

each as unpalatable

no finer test

 

the unlovable other

 

*

 

his son finds himself looking at the moon

 

obscured by the flashing Bar Promo sign

the crescent moon

 

the night they met

 

the boy then with no thought of light

only gravity

her beauty as it drew him

 

across the dull universe of Tuesday night

the Place of Our Sacred Lady --

 

her glance across the tables

full of milky

outspokenness the whites of her eyes

 

the glossy black reserve in her pupil

those pale perfect breasts

his goal

 

in the ease of which he would find time

to reflect

on the nature the allure of such goals --

 

until the following Sunday evening

when they have outstripped

a whole series of unremarkable love songs

 

once more he walks

far out beyond the marina lights

 

once more to wrestle

with whether it's the moon must envy

his agitation and immobility

 

or whether

it is he who must envy the moon's

serenity

 

and slow movement