1 00:00:00,240 --> 00:00:05,250 Thank you so much, Marion, and thank you all for coming out this misty afternoon. 2 00:00:05,430 --> 00:00:10,140 And I apologise that this lecture is a week late. 3 00:00:10,350 --> 00:00:13,800 I wanted to support the members of the university who were on strike last week. 4 00:00:18,240 --> 00:00:21,780 And I think it's important that their complaint is listened to. 5 00:00:23,610 --> 00:00:34,110 So here I am a week later and my lecture is called Meandering Fortune Graphs, and it is a conversation between the Book of Jove and in parenthesis. 6 00:00:34,980 --> 00:00:40,230 And I'm going to attend the Book of Joe, but as a poet, not a theologian, 7 00:00:41,280 --> 00:00:51,760 and I hope that I won't offend anyone because poetry requires a little bit of a wandering from the conventional approach to things. 8 00:00:53,220 --> 00:00:56,550 So I hope you will bear with me. 9 00:00:59,880 --> 00:01:07,200 Saint Jerome, the fourth century mystic who translated the book of Jobe into Latin, said it was a slippery thing, 10 00:01:08,310 --> 00:01:15,750 as if you would hold tightly an eel or a little marine fish when you press harder, he said. 11 00:01:16,020 --> 00:01:21,370 The sooner it escapes. Inspired by this field. 12 00:01:21,790 --> 00:01:31,080 I thought I would use this lecture to apply some pressure to the Book of Job, since it seems to me that its nature is most revealed in its escaping. 13 00:01:32,790 --> 00:01:37,500 Having caught and released and recorded the swimming away of the Book of Joe, 14 00:01:37,740 --> 00:01:42,840 I thought I would then calmly turn my attention to In Parentheses by David Jones. 15 00:01:44,850 --> 00:01:51,120 I wish I'd never come up with such a scheme. A lecture ought to be a fit of close reading. 16 00:01:51,450 --> 00:01:58,540 But I've chosen to poems, both of which invoke some mysterious force of the earth that flings you backwards. 17 00:01:58,740 --> 00:02:04,440 The closer you read them. I haven't slept and I haven't really finished this lecture. 18 00:02:04,890 --> 00:02:10,110 So all I can do today is bring you several times towards confusion. 19 00:02:13,770 --> 00:02:18,240 A man. There was the Book of Job Begins like The Odyssey. 20 00:02:18,570 --> 00:02:24,360 It begins as a folk tale about a human in a faraway place, much suffering. 21 00:02:25,320 --> 00:02:35,040 But it begins in prose. A man that was in the Land of Oz and his name was Jobe, and he fell into misfortune. 22 00:02:36,180 --> 00:02:43,290 Or perhaps it was misfortune since the story says that God assaulted Joe with bad luck in order to win a bet. 23 00:02:45,080 --> 00:02:50,300 First his flocks, then his servants. Then his children were destroyed. 24 00:02:51,390 --> 00:02:54,660 And you would think that was his whole identity undone. 25 00:02:55,170 --> 00:03:01,360 But Jope made no complaint. A man springs to mind. 26 00:03:01,480 --> 00:03:06,940 There are always these figures and the poet will have known someone somewhere. 27 00:03:08,080 --> 00:03:13,630 A man that was at the station who asked to be bought a milkshake and a pint of cream. 28 00:03:14,410 --> 00:03:19,480 He explained that he had lost his son and now he could only travel from one city to another. 29 00:03:19,750 --> 00:03:25,670 Moving on whenever he felt violent. He stood there repelling comprehension. 30 00:03:26,980 --> 00:03:35,110 Sucking milkshake through a straw, filling up with blankness, whitewashing all the darkness in his mouth, making no complaint. 31 00:03:37,660 --> 00:03:42,310 Then his flesh was afflicted with sores. He suffered it for seven days and nights. 32 00:03:42,520 --> 00:03:46,150 Then he opened his mouth and cursed the day he was born. 33 00:03:50,490 --> 00:03:55,020 It is a shock when Joe opens his mouth and speaks poetry. 34 00:03:56,490 --> 00:04:04,380 There is a lurch from the completed past to the open unfolding present from the third person to the first person. 35 00:04:05,310 --> 00:04:10,440 It's like witnessing Agamemnon step out of the Odyssey into the Oresteia. 36 00:04:11,160 --> 00:04:20,940 The language has dropped its protection and there is the man himself in all his mystery, speaking his complaint and speaking in poetry. 37 00:04:24,570 --> 00:04:33,720 Hebrew poetry works by intensifying. It pairs or reverses one phrase upon another so that the sounds in the mind get stuck. 38 00:04:34,200 --> 00:04:35,520 There's too much tinnitus. 39 00:04:36,510 --> 00:04:45,750 Jerome, who paid for Hebrew lessons, mistook this to throw pattern for epic six feet first, although he added this caution in the preface. 40 00:04:46,200 --> 00:04:53,250 Sometimes, he said, by breaking the law of metrical numbers, the rhythm itself is found sweet and ringing. 41 00:04:55,280 --> 00:05:02,270 So the composers of the King James version, although their verses appeared in a black ish black letter typeface, 42 00:05:02,840 --> 00:05:06,500 nevertheless, they gave it a sweet and ringing sound. 43 00:05:09,090 --> 00:05:15,420 Let the day perish wherein I was born and the night wherein it was said there is a man child conceived 44 00:05:16,080 --> 00:05:22,650 Let that day be darkness Let not God regard it from above neither let the light shine upon it. 45 00:05:26,450 --> 00:05:31,790 It is a double shock when you read these words in the new translation by Robert Alter, 46 00:05:32,240 --> 00:05:38,900 whose sharp amateurs bring the story closer and closer until its darkness takes you over. 47 00:05:41,800 --> 00:05:45,250 Luca said. All that has dark sands has to end. 48 00:05:45,910 --> 00:05:50,620 He said that the end is not in the throat, that when they surges up from the soles of the feet. 49 00:05:51,190 --> 00:06:00,070 This mysterious force which everyone feels and no philosopher has explained, he said It is in some the spirit of the earth. 50 00:06:02,390 --> 00:06:05,750 Well, jokes curse contains 16 dark suns. 51 00:06:06,200 --> 00:06:09,830 I have counted them all, but I'm none the wiser about the spirit. 52 00:06:12,020 --> 00:06:15,169 And now, on the day that I was born. And the night that said. 53 00:06:15,170 --> 00:06:19,100 A man is conceived that day. Let it be darkness. 54 00:06:19,550 --> 00:06:23,390 Let God above not seek it out, nor brightness shine upon it. 55 00:06:23,960 --> 00:06:28,490 Let darkness, death's shadow foul it. Let a cloud mass rest upon it. 56 00:06:28,700 --> 00:06:31,970 Let daily gloom overtake it that night. 57 00:06:32,300 --> 00:06:36,710 Let murk overtake it. Let it not join in the days of the year. 58 00:06:37,280 --> 00:06:40,490 Let it not enter the number of the months. 59 00:06:42,320 --> 00:06:51,900 And so on. This is curse poetry, which blots out the world through empty language and milkshake. 60 00:06:52,590 --> 00:06:58,320 And if the preacher speaks it authentically, not from the throat, but from the souls of the feet, 61 00:06:59,040 --> 00:07:08,420 he is in danger of disappearing altogether, realising just too late that he has surrendered his authority to the spirit of the language, 62 00:07:08,430 --> 00:07:20,250 a mad, punning, rhyming, stamping, repetitive, paradoxical leaping and meandering spirit whose first act is to plunge the auditorium into blackened. 63 00:07:22,690 --> 00:07:30,670 Oh, let that day the baron that I have no song of joy Let the day curses hex it those ready to fight Leviathan 64 00:07:31,480 --> 00:07:38,860 Let its twilight stars go dark Let it hope for a day in vain and let it not see the eyelids of dawn. 65 00:07:45,350 --> 00:07:50,120 Fortunately for his congregation, cliché comes quickly to the rescue. 66 00:07:52,410 --> 00:07:56,850 A group of proverb makers appears in jokes courtyard. 67 00:07:57,830 --> 00:08:04,010 Bill dead elephants. And so far they too have learnt the discipline of poetry. 68 00:08:04,190 --> 00:08:08,330 But their enthusiasm is all for previous ways of speaking. 69 00:08:09,730 --> 00:08:18,820 Cool now if that the any that will answer the. And to which of the saints will their turn for wrath kill the foolish man and and the slave. 70 00:08:18,880 --> 00:08:26,310 The silly one. Like a group of children, poets breaking into the courtyard of a modernist. 71 00:08:26,490 --> 00:08:34,560 These rule keepers think they have come to offer sympathy, but they quickly find themselves infuriated by jokes, intensity. 72 00:08:35,370 --> 00:08:39,960 They begin to grow bored. Pious, point scoring. 73 00:08:40,530 --> 00:08:44,360 Furious. Surely it can't be that bad. 74 00:08:44,600 --> 00:08:53,210 If it is that bad. You must have deserved it. The more Jobe insists he's blameless, the more scared and smug and aggressive they grow. 75 00:08:54,020 --> 00:08:57,340 How long will you jabber such things? The words of your mouth. 76 00:08:57,350 --> 00:09:00,890 One huge wind. Would God pervert justice? 77 00:09:01,250 --> 00:09:07,990 Would shadow pervert. What is right? The argument goes on and on. 78 00:09:08,840 --> 00:09:14,360 Days and nights. It grows dark. It grows light and dark again. 79 00:09:14,690 --> 00:09:15,890 And they are still shouting. 80 00:09:16,760 --> 00:09:25,370 If you stood just behind the wall in Blake's illustration, in that inky world with an owl staring back at you from the border, 81 00:09:26,030 --> 00:09:30,980 you would be surprised at how viciously poets defend their belief systems. 82 00:09:31,930 --> 00:09:38,710 You might peer over and see an old man on his knees, psychotic with trauma, calling out to an invisible opponent. 83 00:09:39,010 --> 00:09:46,510 Thou hast filled me with wrinkles, which is a witness against me and my leanness rising up in me, bearing witness to my face. 84 00:09:46,780 --> 00:09:49,990 My breath is corrupt. My days are extinct. 85 00:09:50,260 --> 00:10:00,950 The graves are ready for me. While he speaks, elephants is drumming his fingers on the table, wondering when it will be his turn. 86 00:10:01,850 --> 00:10:04,130 He can't stand this kind of verse. 87 00:10:04,640 --> 00:10:13,490 At last, he loses patience, shakes the old man by the neck and says, Will a wise man speak hotter and fill his belly with the east wind? 88 00:10:14,060 --> 00:10:19,790 And Jobe snaps back. I have heard much of this sort wretched console as it will. 89 00:10:19,940 --> 00:10:23,960 Is there any end to hot air? What compelled you to speak up? 90 00:10:28,110 --> 00:10:37,680 As the narrative escapes from a folktale into a drama, it lets its voice make different voices and each voice make a different world. 91 00:10:39,010 --> 00:10:44,110 And in case you are thinking me flippant, reading the Book of Jobe as an argument between poets. 92 00:10:44,590 --> 00:10:52,299 Let me assure you, there is no more serious task than to choose your options for imagining the world and 93 00:10:52,300 --> 00:10:57,250 to realise that the options for imagining have already been designed by language. 94 00:10:58,940 --> 00:11:04,550 That's why the Irish colloquy of the two sages recorded in the book of Leinster in the 12th century, 95 00:11:04,850 --> 00:11:13,100 describes an argument between an old poet and a young poet who are not just disputing the latest literary award, 96 00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:23,120 although they are admittedly quite exercised about that, but they are also deeply concerned about whose description of the world is the right one. 97 00:11:24,810 --> 00:11:29,490 Is it, as the old poet insists, a finite and worsening world? 98 00:11:30,240 --> 00:11:35,190 Or is it, as the young poet insists, an infinite and improving one? 99 00:11:37,530 --> 00:11:42,569 You can imagine what kind of politics and therefore what kind of society and 100 00:11:42,570 --> 00:11:48,140 therefore what kind of world depends on the choice between those opposing poetry's. 101 00:11:51,830 --> 00:11:58,700 The irony in the Book of Joke is that it is written by a poet who already favours a particular style. 102 00:12:00,280 --> 00:12:08,140 He knows where the poem is heading and his own writing practice or composing practice affects the place he conjures up. 103 00:12:08,770 --> 00:12:12,100 He is a scrutinise, a plant's man. 104 00:12:13,090 --> 00:12:26,260 A watcher of tradesmen. An admirer of animals, expert in whether trained in philosophy, a mystic, a night walker, a phenomenal or just a storyteller? 105 00:12:28,480 --> 00:12:35,530 A man that was, he says, in the land of us. And the land comes vividly into focus in the poems which follow. 106 00:12:36,770 --> 00:12:42,920 Sort word and gorse grow the thorn trees, olives and vines. 107 00:12:43,640 --> 00:12:47,120 There are dried up rivers where the homeless fall asleep on stones. 108 00:12:47,720 --> 00:12:52,430 Wild asses, locusts, goats on a circuit of endurance. 109 00:12:53,360 --> 00:12:58,700 And at the edge of this desolate place. A city where thieves and murderers creep about. 110 00:12:58,850 --> 00:13:03,580 And people cry out in their sleep. And the dawn brings all this into relief. 111 00:13:04,250 --> 00:13:07,880 Like a man lifting a printing seal from wet clay. 112 00:13:09,350 --> 00:13:13,730 Or as Claudius. Dip garments into dye and draw them up crimson. 113 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:28,160 Like the sun being lifted from the sea. Jokes world is populated and particular because it responds to the poem inside it, a wisdom poem they call it. 114 00:13:28,550 --> 00:13:33,740 But this is not like Plato's wisdom, which surrounds itself with weak stammers. 115 00:13:34,790 --> 00:13:38,960 All the speakers in the Book of Job speak vigorously. 116 00:13:39,470 --> 00:13:46,280 They can't help it because the poem's textual is to a firm existence over understanding. 117 00:13:47,380 --> 00:13:52,540 So that even pious advice draws images to itself which outgrow their meanings. 118 00:13:53,470 --> 00:13:56,770 It is not so much a wisdom poem as a thing. 119 00:13:56,770 --> 00:14:02,380 Poem. Listen to build that the shoe out, trying to prove his thesis that even as he speaks, 120 00:14:02,650 --> 00:14:07,870 he seems to get distracted by actualities, as if he set out to describe a symbol. 121 00:14:08,140 --> 00:14:11,740 But then he felt the life of it from inside. Listen. 122 00:14:11,740 --> 00:14:16,780 As he cleared his throat, crouches, gets into character and recites. 123 00:14:18,780 --> 00:14:21,960 Yes. The light at the of the wicked will gutter. 124 00:14:22,860 --> 00:14:31,380 And the spark of his flame will not shine. Light goes dark and his tent and his lamp gutters before him. 125 00:14:32,130 --> 00:14:39,660 His vigorous strides are straightened. His own counsel flings him down his feet, caught in a net. 126 00:14:39,870 --> 00:14:48,090 He treads on a tangle of line. The trap grips his heel, the trip cord seizes him and a rope is hidden for him on the ground. 127 00:14:50,950 --> 00:14:57,290 Everyone is listening. It's as if Francis Poles has joined the argument, Bill, 128 00:14:57,290 --> 00:15:03,920 that has the mad conviction of someone who has often nipped out of his tent at night and tripped on a tightrope. 129 00:15:04,490 --> 00:15:12,140 He must make his case. He's probably pointing at an imaginary rope, gesticulating, miming, even falling, 130 00:15:12,740 --> 00:15:20,150 discovering for himself the mighty yes, of solidity, which is always more persuasive than opinion. 131 00:15:22,550 --> 00:15:28,040 And then Joe says the opposite, placing his words with equally forceful exactness. 132 00:15:28,340 --> 00:15:32,210 And the tree he describes gestures back at him and beyond him. 133 00:15:34,750 --> 00:15:40,750 For a tree has hope, though cut down, it can still be renewed and its shoots will not cease. 134 00:15:41,080 --> 00:15:49,030 Though its fruit go old in the dust from the scent of water, it flowers and puts forth branches like a sapling. 135 00:15:49,810 --> 00:15:54,400 But a strong man dies. Defeated man breathes his last. 136 00:15:54,640 --> 00:16:01,560 And where is he? Please notice that phrase from the centre of water. 137 00:16:01,650 --> 00:16:09,140 It flowers. Brilliant, micro sensitive sketch of the outward inwardness of trees. 138 00:16:10,980 --> 00:16:19,680 You hardly notice as you read that you've had to climb right into the heartwood and inhale from there the stony smell of water before it rains. 139 00:16:21,250 --> 00:16:30,230 And you will have to have leaves, you will have to be possessed of some kind of vegetal coarseness to register the rustling of a tree. 140 00:16:30,250 --> 00:16:33,390 Has hope. Tikva. 141 00:16:33,630 --> 00:16:37,200 The Hebrew for Hope means a cord or lifeline. 142 00:16:38,040 --> 00:16:44,600 It refers to the ribbon hung in a prostitute's window before the battle of Jericho, assigned to the soldiers that she shouldn't be killed. 143 00:16:45,850 --> 00:16:50,350 What a metaphor. The tree's mind moves swiftly through you as you read. 144 00:16:50,800 --> 00:16:57,490 There is no great effort of imagining. Simply in a verse you are printed with a tree's exuberance. 145 00:16:57,790 --> 00:17:02,800 And then out the other side again, as if the poet hadn't noticed her achievement. 146 00:17:06,020 --> 00:17:09,170 Her achievement, his achievement or theirs. 147 00:17:09,920 --> 00:17:14,180 Nobody knows, of course, who gathered or composed these poems. 148 00:17:14,630 --> 00:17:23,840 And I'm sure the slippery energy of the Book of Jobe derives partly from its oral beginnings and its many myths rememberings and reflections. 149 00:17:26,110 --> 00:17:29,740 The first Hebrew version was recorded in about the seventh century B.C., 150 00:17:30,040 --> 00:17:34,240 but its complaint will have been around for a long as about as long as humans have been around. 151 00:17:34,870 --> 00:17:37,960 Look, I scream outrage, and I am not answered. 152 00:17:38,260 --> 00:17:50,070 I shout and there is no justice. There had already been an Egyptian dispute against suicide and a Babylonian dialogue about misery. 153 00:17:50,370 --> 00:17:54,690 There is a joke in the Koran. There is a joke played by Archibald MacLeish. 154 00:17:54,930 --> 00:18:04,320 And there are countless translations, countless versions, each with its own flavour, including the brilliant new volume by Robert Alter. 155 00:18:07,160 --> 00:18:12,470 As with any ancient poem, especially a so-called religious poem, 156 00:18:13,130 --> 00:18:20,690 there is plenty of anxiety about which version is the right version and which section might be an interpolation. 157 00:18:22,310 --> 00:18:27,260 11. The Fourth of Dopes companions is believed by some scholars to be a later addition, 158 00:18:27,530 --> 00:18:32,120 since his language is altogether swifter and plainer than everyone else's. 159 00:18:33,200 --> 00:18:38,030 I am young in use, he says. I'm young in years and you are aged. 160 00:18:38,420 --> 00:18:41,930 Therefore, was I awed and feared to speak my mind with you? 161 00:18:42,350 --> 00:18:47,000 I thought that years speak and let great age make wisdom known. 162 00:18:50,770 --> 00:18:58,630 I say let him speak and let his interpellation be praised since the language has no other way of escaping from its stalemate. 163 00:19:00,100 --> 00:19:06,940 What Elihu does. Entering like an upward glance is to summon a vision of the weather. 164 00:19:08,220 --> 00:19:16,920 Not the climate which can be plotted on graphs and made sense of, but the weather that chaotic out breath of the earth. 165 00:19:18,660 --> 00:19:22,620 Look to the heavens and see and the sky that is high above you. 166 00:19:23,970 --> 00:19:30,000 From the sky chamber comes the tempest and winds dispersal of the cold from God's breath. 167 00:19:30,210 --> 00:19:35,730 The ice is made and wide waters turn solid with heavy moisture. 168 00:19:35,880 --> 00:19:43,320 He loads the cloud, the thunderhead scatters his lightning and round about it spins in its designs. 169 00:19:46,680 --> 00:19:49,680 It is Ella Hughes amazement at the sky. 170 00:19:50,040 --> 00:19:57,840 And his mad, unfocused, weather ish way of speaking that invokes the whirlwind and from the whirlwind. 171 00:19:58,350 --> 00:20:01,830 God speaks in verse and in judgement. 172 00:20:06,210 --> 00:20:16,170 In other words, what takes place, framed by a folktale and concealed among proverbs, is a kind of ancient poetry slam. 173 00:20:16,890 --> 00:20:22,440 Six poets, including God, competing to describe the nature of reality. 174 00:20:23,970 --> 00:20:33,720 And it's clear as you sink a gust through the multicoloured layers of their language, it's clear suddenly that good poetry matters. 175 00:20:34,860 --> 00:20:43,380 Not just because it is the liveliest way of speaking, but because the liveliest speech best reveals what life is. 176 00:20:45,380 --> 00:20:50,480 There is a loop of nourishment between what exists and how it is articulated. 177 00:20:51,790 --> 00:20:58,120 A poet is amazed and tries to say so, but articulation demands close scrutiny. 178 00:20:58,450 --> 00:21:06,700 Scrutiny provokes more amazement, which demands more scrutiny, more memory, more wisdom, more science, more amazement. 179 00:21:07,330 --> 00:21:12,340 And so the world seems livelier and livelier the more it is described. 180 00:21:13,730 --> 00:21:17,750 That is how God in the Book of Job wins a competition. 181 00:21:21,030 --> 00:21:30,360 God's performance is deft. He enters in a whirlwind and speaks a poem, which is both the reverse and the fulfilment of Job's curse. 182 00:21:31,020 --> 00:21:39,120 Beginning by turning on the light. Then by snowing, hailing, blowing, raining, and in the sound of the rain. 183 00:21:39,330 --> 00:21:46,590 Removing the human altogether. Have you come into the storehouse of snow? 184 00:21:47,660 --> 00:21:56,860 The storehouse of [INAUDIBLE]. Have you seen? Which way is the storm fuse lit when the east wind flashes over the earth? 185 00:21:57,070 --> 00:22:06,820 And who cut a passage for water and a crack for the thunder to rain on the ground when no one lives in a wasteland of mankind? 186 00:22:09,890 --> 00:22:14,870 The shift here. Is from a lyric to an epic universe. 187 00:22:16,350 --> 00:22:22,710 From a personal how to an open, many centred unmeasurable unfolding form. 188 00:22:24,220 --> 00:22:28,810 As if to say, listen, the best poem has already been written. 189 00:22:29,380 --> 00:22:36,520 It is here and it is existence itself. Whose script is the earth and whose rhythm is the seasons? 190 00:22:39,160 --> 00:22:42,250 Who ready is the ravens prey when it's young? 191 00:22:42,250 --> 00:22:47,770 Cry out to go out and stray deprived of food. Do you know the mountain goats birth time? 192 00:22:48,250 --> 00:22:54,460 Do you mark the carving of the gazelles? Do you number the months till they come to term and know that birthing time? 193 00:22:55,770 --> 00:22:59,720 They crouch. They split open with effort. They're young. 194 00:22:59,730 --> 00:23:03,690 They push out to the world. Their offspring bat and grow big in the wild. 195 00:23:03,840 --> 00:23:08,810 They go out and do not return. Who set the world us free. 196 00:23:09,590 --> 00:23:13,550 And the honour goes. Rains. Who loosed. Whose home I made in the steps. 197 00:23:13,790 --> 00:23:18,770 His dwelling place. Flats of salt. He scoffs at the bustling city. 198 00:23:19,400 --> 00:23:26,510 The drivers shout. He does not here. He roams mountains for his forage and every green thing he seeks. 199 00:23:30,550 --> 00:23:34,630 God reads out the earth like a rhapsody of pictograms. 200 00:23:35,230 --> 00:23:39,040 The raven. The Goat. The ass. Onaga. 201 00:23:39,400 --> 00:23:42,850 Ox. Ostrich. Hawks. Hawk. 202 00:23:43,940 --> 00:23:54,270 Each animal revealed in an act of freedom, which is at the same time a terrifying looseness, as if in scrutinising the Onaga, 203 00:23:54,530 --> 00:24:01,820 he noticed it most itself outside the city, eating whatever it can find while the driver shouts and shouts. 204 00:24:02,960 --> 00:24:10,490 Life, according to God, is a poem about things escaping animals with loose reins, driverless. 205 00:24:10,820 --> 00:24:19,410 Roaming the wilderness, not listening. And one could be forgiven for thinking he or she is obliquely describing themselves. 206 00:24:24,620 --> 00:24:28,280 There are not many poems written on the scale of the Book of Joe. 207 00:24:30,510 --> 00:24:40,950 Paradise Lost, which professes to justify the ways of God to man Wordsworth's prelude, which claims the divine sufficiency of the human mind. 208 00:24:42,150 --> 00:24:46,620 Eliot's wasteland, which never escapes from the death wish phase of jokes. 209 00:24:46,620 --> 00:24:50,850 Curse. These poems all have epic reputations. 210 00:24:51,780 --> 00:24:56,400 But none of them risks the inhuman energy of the Book of Job. 211 00:24:59,080 --> 00:25:07,000 In parentheses. David Jones. His long poem about his experience in the First World War is, I think, an exception. 212 00:25:10,060 --> 00:25:18,910 David Jones was a painter, not a poet. And I guess that is one of the reasons he never strikes a true knowing note, he writes. 213 00:25:19,180 --> 00:25:26,290 As an infantry man, one of many in his preface to the poem, Jones mentions that throughout the war, 214 00:25:26,470 --> 00:25:30,730 he felt himself in the presence of all the soldiers of the past, 215 00:25:31,510 --> 00:25:38,890 in particular the 300 men who died at the Battle of Katrice, commemorated in the seventh century poem The Golden. 216 00:25:40,880 --> 00:25:45,740 These men can be heard marching at the beginning of each section of in parentheses. 217 00:25:46,370 --> 00:25:53,600 The poem surges up not from the throat of David Jones, but from the souls of these soldiers feet. 218 00:25:54,870 --> 00:25:59,850 Men marched. They kept equal. Step men marched. 219 00:26:00,120 --> 00:26:01,620 They had been nurtured together. 220 00:26:04,810 --> 00:26:15,490 Plenty of people can research or imagine the past, but this experience of the past being bodily present gives a pressure to Jones's language, 221 00:26:15,610 --> 00:26:19,360 which keeps making it leap from prose into poetry. 222 00:26:20,520 --> 00:26:24,990 And what the poetry does is to make it convincing for a divinity to appear. 223 00:26:26,300 --> 00:26:31,640 Here is a thing. Divinities never appear in the past, present or future. 224 00:26:32,330 --> 00:26:37,160 They only appear in the resonant combination of all three, which constitutes poetry. 225 00:26:38,990 --> 00:26:46,070 To open away into this triple time, which the Welsh call a New Haven is where confusion starts up again. 226 00:26:47,570 --> 00:26:55,280 It does not open at the behest of the poet. Only at the whim of fortune or misfortune or misfortune. 227 00:26:56,430 --> 00:27:03,030 That is something in parentheses appears to take for granted. Its form is the form of what happens to happen. 228 00:27:05,510 --> 00:27:11,810 Truly the unseen wind had little but your nice body for its teeth and oh to weevil snuffle would depress anyone. 229 00:27:11,930 --> 00:27:16,460 But what was the matter with that quite ordinary tree? That's a very usual looking farmhouse. 230 00:27:16,670 --> 00:27:21,830 The road was as Napoleon had left it. The day itself was what you'd expect of December. 231 00:27:25,020 --> 00:27:32,849 In his later poems, The Anathema to and the Sleeping Lord Jones could never quite recover this improvising, 232 00:27:32,850 --> 00:27:40,350 chance constrained style in which each phrase seems astonished by the last and no one has hold of the reins. 233 00:27:41,610 --> 00:27:47,669 But his first poem, which he wrote, or so he claimed by accident in a kind of space between, 234 00:27:47,670 --> 00:27:52,230 as you turn aside to do something, this poem is a response to war. 235 00:27:52,800 --> 00:28:00,510 And perhaps for that reason it values life with a hand-painted capital l above very. 236 00:28:05,650 --> 00:28:15,070 On the 10th of July 1916, David Jones and 600 members of the Welsh Regiment were moving across open ground when the man next to him was shot, 237 00:28:15,940 --> 00:28:22,300 slumped backwards and they, smiling in the sun, relieved that he could now avoid the fighting. 238 00:28:24,120 --> 00:28:31,920 But it isn't like that for the common run, he says. And you have no menstruation year to plot meandering fortune growth? 239 00:28:32,310 --> 00:28:36,300 No. No. Whether she with a dart or the fare left to the grinding. 240 00:28:38,210 --> 00:28:45,350 It isn't like that for the common run. You have no menstruation gear to plot meandering fortune growth? 241 00:28:45,860 --> 00:28:50,360 No. No. Whether she with a dock or the fair left to the grinding. 242 00:28:52,780 --> 00:28:59,470 As the line advanced, he had already watched two others, not so lucky, throw up their arms and die screaming. 243 00:29:01,540 --> 00:29:09,340 He was 18 at the time. About the same age as those brothers in the Iliad who rode that horses hard against Diomedes. 244 00:29:09,580 --> 00:29:13,900 But a spear went straight through the chest of one of them, and the other was so horrified. 245 00:29:14,080 --> 00:29:19,120 He leapt, shaking out of the chariot, and a God wrapped him in mist and whisked him away home. 246 00:29:20,990 --> 00:29:24,430 All I can is watching Pandora drop dead beside him. 247 00:29:24,830 --> 00:29:27,980 And Aeneas jumped down, stunned to stand over the body. 248 00:29:29,300 --> 00:29:33,290 Or like the father of Palin walking next to his son weeping. 249 00:29:34,810 --> 00:29:44,320 Although Calcutta was so shocked by the bodies falling all around him that he stood paralysed on the battlefield as a pillar for a leafy tree, 250 00:29:44,620 --> 00:29:49,480 unable to move backwards or forwards until a spear hit him in the heart. 251 00:29:49,960 --> 00:29:54,550 Merciless bronze, going straight through the source of a man's meaning. 252 00:29:57,050 --> 00:30:05,270 So it goes on. The Battle of Troy becomes the Battle of Jericho, the battle for Wales, the battle of Ash and Call, the Battle of Mamet's Word. 253 00:30:05,540 --> 00:30:12,530 And there, among those shattered trees, the fortune graph draws its line through David Jones. 254 00:30:13,960 --> 00:30:21,250 He was shot in the leg. His lament, written ten years later, carries the structure, 255 00:30:21,370 --> 00:30:26,920 the deep structure of that moment when the world of things slams into the world of thoughts. 256 00:30:28,500 --> 00:30:39,480 The more it is scrutinised, the less it is understood, the more it demands more scrutiny, more memory, more contradiction, more amazement. 257 00:30:40,350 --> 00:30:44,249 Until the poem comes into being in praise of everything. 258 00:30:44,250 --> 00:30:48,750 Baffling. Excessive. Savage. Sudden, erratic. 259 00:30:49,500 --> 00:30:54,510 A 200 page inventory of touched and two solid things. 260 00:30:56,550 --> 00:31:02,160 Nails and hooks on which to hang back gear. Improvised jam tunes. 261 00:31:02,700 --> 00:31:06,150 The stub end of a pencil rolled mattresses. 262 00:31:06,450 --> 00:31:09,950 Neatly piled bed boards. Long lines, urine. 263 00:31:09,980 --> 00:31:13,260 Urinal, concrete. Corrugated iron. Some like tight belts. 264 00:31:13,260 --> 00:31:22,469 Some like loose spouts, trussed up pockets, rifle bolts, webbing and buckles, great government socks, texture of rope, pieces of straw, 265 00:31:22,470 --> 00:31:30,880 circular table, some painted green or blue now great and spotted with rust, jagged, twisted tins and litter of all kinds. 266 00:31:31,290 --> 00:31:34,950 P Lions and butter lions. Tiny hay stalks. 267 00:31:35,280 --> 00:31:39,780 The code on absolute rifles. Very new clean deal planking. 268 00:31:40,260 --> 00:31:50,760 Steaks of pine stacked neatly are wooden frames, bales of wire netting, a flexible green canvas bucket, one flattened candle and a latchkey. 269 00:31:51,540 --> 00:31:54,420 It's no use here so far from its complying lock. 270 00:31:54,930 --> 00:32:04,590 And finally, the German label on a hand grenade looked at and admired and thrown into the weeds a few moments before that bullet hit him in the leg, 271 00:32:05,100 --> 00:32:09,900 as if to pledge by touch the actuality of everything else. 272 00:32:11,440 --> 00:32:19,000 Art said. David Jones is adamant about one thing She compels you to do an infantry man's job. 273 00:32:19,330 --> 00:32:28,690 She insists on the tactile. In an interview broadcast in 1965. 274 00:32:29,760 --> 00:32:33,000 There seem to be two poets of in parentheses. 275 00:32:33,900 --> 00:32:42,150 One who keeps faith with the bullet, claiming, by the way, as if in brackets that everything in his life happened to him by accident, 276 00:32:42,420 --> 00:32:47,370 including that poem which he began after about a flu when he was too exhausted to paint. 277 00:32:49,320 --> 00:32:55,230 The other poet is an elf, as invoked by the interview as questions. 278 00:32:56,220 --> 00:33:04,830 He claims to know certain truths from the far side of the poem that art is a sacrament, that Wales is part of the Roman Empire. 279 00:33:05,100 --> 00:33:10,530 That Modernism has broken the surface of form. That a portrait must have meaning. 280 00:33:13,900 --> 00:33:18,639 Stanley Spencer, he says, had this gift of an incredible draughtsmanship I mean, 281 00:33:18,640 --> 00:33:22,490 he could paint any number of portraits, but me, I can't do them at all. 282 00:33:22,510 --> 00:33:26,440 I mean, I suppose I could, if I could find out what the person meant. 283 00:33:27,820 --> 00:33:38,470 Don't believe it. The temptation where modern poetry is concerned is to inhale all the information available to replace amazement with retrospect 284 00:33:38,770 --> 00:33:46,270 and replace the poem with the biography that makes sense for a lyric poem which remains inside the vortex of its maker. 285 00:33:47,380 --> 00:33:54,430 But an epic poem because it works by centring the self deserves a different kind of criticism. 286 00:33:55,590 --> 00:33:59,940 All epic poems are anonymous, no matter who seems to have written them. 287 00:34:00,420 --> 00:34:08,580 And whatever David Jones might think about in parenthesis, the triumph of the poem is that its characters don't belong to him. 288 00:34:09,330 --> 00:34:14,850 Fleeting, mysterious portraits. Their value lies entirely in their offguard. 289 00:34:15,060 --> 00:34:24,240 Disregard of meaning. There is the man who lectures the cadets about rifles while he brushes a haystack from his britches. 290 00:34:25,110 --> 00:34:30,180 Or the wireless operators who bend lo intently whistling low like a mechanic's mate. 291 00:34:31,020 --> 00:34:35,940 Or the warden of the stores. A man seemingly native to the place. 292 00:34:35,940 --> 00:34:43,650 A little sick man swathed with sucking a limp, saturated bandolier thrown over one shoulder and with no other accoutrements. 293 00:34:44,240 --> 00:34:51,000 Go get it. Cogitate and not sure how to say that in a woollen balaclava groped out from between corrugated uprights, 294 00:34:51,180 --> 00:34:55,050 his great moustaches beaded with condensation under his nose, 295 00:34:56,010 --> 00:35:02,940 thickly grieved with mud so that his boots and patties and sandbag towns will become one hole of trickling ochre. 296 00:35:03,600 --> 00:35:07,950 His mine pipe had its smoking bowl turned inversely. He spoke slowly. 297 00:35:08,340 --> 00:35:12,480 He told the corporal that this was where the shovels we usually draw and for any fatigue in the support. 298 00:35:12,750 --> 00:35:19,110 He slipped back quickly with a certain animal caution into his hole to almost immediately poke out his will 299 00:35:19,110 --> 00:35:24,900 work head as if to ask if anyone had the time of day or could spare him some dark shack or a picture paper. 300 00:35:25,500 --> 00:35:28,500 Further, should they meet a white dog in the trench? 301 00:35:28,800 --> 00:35:33,600 Her name was Belle and he would like to catch any [INAUDIBLE] giving this bell the boot. 302 00:35:36,430 --> 00:35:44,770 The later poems have none of this vitality. They seem to have listened to the interview and know already how people like themselves ought to speak. 303 00:35:45,580 --> 00:35:51,370 Characters in the Sleeping Lord conform to a theory, whereas the miracle of in parentheses, 304 00:35:51,580 --> 00:36:00,370 the reason it would do well in Jones Poetry Slam is that it catches humans just as they throw off the reins and become freely themselves. 305 00:36:00,700 --> 00:36:08,030 Scoffing at the poet like an Onaga. In this same interview, 306 00:36:08,810 --> 00:36:19,850 while Jones conversed with Saunders Lewis I think I saw the anonymous author of In Parenthesis Rise Once or twice Out of Darkness. 307 00:36:21,210 --> 00:36:30,240 In the space between a question and an answer. Jones bowed his head and seemed bored of his own theorising, and a sigh escaped him. 308 00:36:31,520 --> 00:36:35,180 As if not Jones, but Joep himself was sitting there. 309 00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:41,260 For my saying. Come before I eat and my roaring is poured out upon the waters. 310 00:36:43,090 --> 00:36:49,600 Or it might be it or alcazares or the Egyptian suicide saying to whom can I speak today? 311 00:36:50,320 --> 00:36:55,390 Faces have disappeared. Every man has a downcast face towards his fellows. 312 00:36:56,020 --> 00:37:00,070 There are no righteous. The land is left to those who do wrong. 313 00:37:02,590 --> 00:37:08,590 The layout of in parentheses marks the presence of this anonymous site as a white space. 314 00:37:11,260 --> 00:37:15,310 When a soldier looks at trees, for example, he begins to breathe more deeply. 315 00:37:15,670 --> 00:37:20,530 He begins to speak and stop. And his words resonate in the pools. 316 00:37:22,390 --> 00:37:25,960 In the inner ear in a tinnitus of repetitions. 317 00:37:26,170 --> 00:37:30,850 He loses track of time. He goes into shock. He goes into a dream. 318 00:37:31,180 --> 00:37:33,130 He starts thinking of Welsh trees. 319 00:37:33,310 --> 00:37:39,280 The woods round Cape Harrison, where the Virgin Mary appeared once in the misty fields and was chased by local boys. 320 00:37:39,760 --> 00:37:42,970 Or the woods at door where the last Welsh prince was murdered. 321 00:37:43,630 --> 00:37:47,650 When he looks at these woods, he seems to stand in the future, 322 00:37:48,010 --> 00:37:56,860 looking back through shattered branches to moments with which he can see through a periscope, lifting his vision over a no man's land of barbed wire. 323 00:37:57,010 --> 00:38:02,829 Dead bodies and artillery fire. No wonder he begins to speak with pauses in half. 324 00:38:02,830 --> 00:38:09,840 Hexed, amateurs and sighs. Two groves, always. 325 00:38:09,840 --> 00:38:13,680 Men come both to their joys and to their undoing. 326 00:38:15,360 --> 00:38:18,120 Come Lightfoot in Heart Season School three. 327 00:38:19,770 --> 00:38:29,280 Walk on a leafy holiday with kindred and kind, come perplexed, be with first loves to tread the tangle of frustrated striking bruising the green. 328 00:38:30,740 --> 00:38:37,070 Come on knights fall for amber skied find harbour with a remnant share with the prescribe that unleavened cake. 329 00:38:37,670 --> 00:38:41,450 Come for sweet princes by malignant interests deprived. 330 00:38:42,620 --> 00:38:52,100 Wait, wait long for with the broken man nest with the badger and the mountain cat until such time as he'd come again crying the waste for his chosen. 331 00:38:53,350 --> 00:39:01,270 Or come in gathering nuts and may or run one in a shirt for the Queen's Unreason, beat boys Bush for Robin and Bob, 332 00:39:01,270 --> 00:39:08,560 and come with Merlyn in his madness for the pity of it for young men rich like Green Party for the folly of it. 333 00:39:12,290 --> 00:39:15,950 Here is the same word described in prose by Allen Davis. 334 00:39:17,520 --> 00:39:28,560 Glorious scenes met our gaze, mangled corpses in khaki and field grey dismembered bodies, severed heads and limbs, lumps of torn flesh. 335 00:39:28,680 --> 00:39:38,400 Halfway up the tree trunks, shells of all calibres burst in plenty as continuance furies a flying machine gun bullets swept from three directions. 336 00:39:40,070 --> 00:39:47,730 It is all too exact. Only in the compression of tenses and physical confusions of poetry. 337 00:39:48,270 --> 00:39:57,510 In its combination of luck and speechless, this kind of goddess convincingly appear as she does in Section seven, 338 00:39:57,990 --> 00:40:01,530 wandering through the trees, putting crowns on the dead soldiers. 339 00:40:06,310 --> 00:40:14,900 Poetry is, of course, an art of speech looseness. By leaving gaps in the language, it gives voice to the structure of voice. 340 00:40:15,670 --> 00:40:19,150 And David Jones speaks briefly about the question of spacing. 341 00:40:19,300 --> 00:40:25,520 In the preface to In Parentheses. He says it may be well to say something about punctuation. 342 00:40:25,700 --> 00:40:33,319 I frequently rely on a pause at the end of a line to aid the sentence and form a new line which the typography would not otherwise. 343 00:40:33,320 --> 00:40:38,150 Demand is used to indicate some change, inflection or emphasis. 344 00:40:39,310 --> 00:40:47,830 I've only tried to make a shape in words using as data the complex sights, sounds, fears, hopes, 345 00:40:48,010 --> 00:40:55,900 apprehensions, smells, things exterior and interior, the landscape and paraphernalia of that singular time. 346 00:40:56,200 --> 00:41:06,190 And those particular men. He does not mention here how he had studied the art of word shaping with Eric. 347 00:41:07,960 --> 00:41:10,990 And later developed his own discipline of painted lettering. 348 00:41:12,490 --> 00:41:15,910 If ever there was a meandering fortune graph. 349 00:41:17,150 --> 00:41:23,000 It must surely be this inscription, which he gave in 1958 to T.S. Eliot. 350 00:41:23,930 --> 00:41:29,810 It quotes the Latin epigraph to the wasteland. Letting the words jostle together as if they were still alive. 351 00:41:30,560 --> 00:41:34,400 No menstruation gear dictates the layout. 352 00:41:35,060 --> 00:41:40,940 It was written freehand. Each letter shape in dialogue with the shrinking space that surrounds it. 353 00:41:41,600 --> 00:41:46,730 I particularly love the percussion of dots with the suggestion of a musical score. 354 00:41:47,090 --> 00:41:50,930 So that one sees in a flash. How every art form is connected. 355 00:41:52,320 --> 00:42:02,060 And here. Is a flying fortune growth to sea boats costing Latin shadows as they skim over the surface of the paper. 356 00:42:02,960 --> 00:42:11,090 It was painted in 1968 for Rupert Revelstoke, and a letter from Revelstoke describes Jones lying on his bed when he'd just finished the work. 357 00:42:12,180 --> 00:42:16,380 He was on his bed polishing it off by scratching the black and yellow lettering 358 00:42:16,530 --> 00:42:21,510 with a blunt a blunt razor blade in order to break the solidity in this fashion. 359 00:42:22,260 --> 00:42:30,750 And the one thing that gave him huge enjoyment was his drawing of the A in razor blade and the closeness of the U.S. and Columbus. 360 00:42:32,720 --> 00:42:37,250 Yes. This is the kind of poetry El Shadow would have loved. 361 00:42:37,970 --> 00:42:42,350 Razor, Bill and Guillemot coming to life in the shapes of their sounds. 362 00:42:42,650 --> 00:42:45,920 Using their sounds to escape the earth altogether. 363 00:42:48,930 --> 00:42:55,260 It is sad that in parentheses, like all mainstream poetry was printed with menstruation gear, 364 00:42:56,190 --> 00:43:01,500 Faber would not allow Jones to lay out he wanted too long columns and plenty of white space, 365 00:43:01,890 --> 00:43:05,400 and in consequence the poem suffered by being marketed as prose. 366 00:43:06,570 --> 00:43:10,770 One can only imagine how it might read if Jones had hand-painted the whole poem 367 00:43:11,130 --> 00:43:15,900 so that the sigh might be seen as a constant somatic pressure on the language. 368 00:43:16,170 --> 00:43:25,410 The trees, the wireless operators, the warden of the stores, the white dog and the bullet all brought to life and the spacing of their sounds. 369 00:43:28,700 --> 00:43:33,950 And it happened after the Lord had spoken these words to Jove that the Lord said to Elif, has the terminate. 370 00:43:34,250 --> 00:43:42,020 My wrath has flared against you and your two companions because you have not spoken rightly of me, as did my servant Joe. 371 00:43:44,660 --> 00:43:50,720 To speak greatly about this poet judge is to get the chance in as right as David Jones does. 372 00:43:51,500 --> 00:43:57,530 After all, this is not allowing the God of Genesis or your way the God of Moses. 373 00:43:57,890 --> 00:44:07,010 It is El Shadow, an old Canaanite God of the wasteland, a wild or whether God, a spirit of excess, 374 00:44:07,310 --> 00:44:12,770 as well as a spirit who set limits to access a northern tutelage record of place, 375 00:44:13,460 --> 00:44:21,860 a mountain God, a breasted God, a female or androgynous God of growth, or goddess of the uncultivated fields. 376 00:44:22,580 --> 00:44:28,640 It is Lorca's Earth spirit, the God with loose reins who scoffs at the bustling city. 377 00:44:29,300 --> 00:44:38,570 And it's good to bear all those characters in mind as you read this ancient argument between five humans, now six humans and a storm. 378 00:44:40,210 --> 00:44:42,910 Because, of course, the competition is not over. 379 00:44:44,750 --> 00:44:57,110 El Shadow's poem, The Wasteland or Wilderness Poem, is still performing its freewheeling rhythms of migrations and extinctions rain, fire, frost, war. 380 00:44:57,830 --> 00:45:04,969 The wind turns round, a city is destroyed, the aphid drift between fields and spring and trees. 381 00:45:04,970 --> 00:45:08,810 In autumn the grass gets up blossoms and is flattened. 382 00:45:09,260 --> 00:45:14,630 Hornets make a house in a barn, someone poisons them and the owl comes back and nobody listens. 383 00:45:15,140 --> 00:45:20,930 The mountain goat gives birth. The moth makes an arc from Africa to Europe and back again. 384 00:45:21,200 --> 00:45:28,970 Just as geese land in a long line on the shores of the Arctic, after leaving a field of dung and feathers on the shores of the Torridge. 385 00:45:29,330 --> 00:45:36,200 We're up and out and down in different lake levels, different flowers, open and close. 386 00:45:37,840 --> 00:45:42,640 In other words, there is order, but it is not a human order. 387 00:45:43,030 --> 00:45:50,260 It is not a graspable order. And now I come to think of it, to compare the book of Joe to an eel, 388 00:45:50,770 --> 00:45:59,440 to a little marina fish is a strange understatement when you think of the poem's scale and its final uncatchable image. 389 00:46:02,100 --> 00:46:06,720 Could you draw Leviathan with a hook and with a cord pressed down his tongue? 390 00:46:08,050 --> 00:46:13,060 Could you put a red line in his nose and with a fishhook pierced his cheek? 391 00:46:14,080 --> 00:46:18,370 Would he urgently entreat you? Would he speak to you gentle words? 392 00:46:18,970 --> 00:46:22,600 Would he seal a pact with you that you take him as a lifelong slave? 393 00:46:23,500 --> 00:46:27,310 Could you play with him like a bird and listen for your young women? 394 00:46:28,310 --> 00:46:31,910 Could hucksters haggle over him? Divide him among the traitors. 395 00:46:32,690 --> 00:46:36,740 Could you fill his skin with darts and a fisherman's net with his head? 396 00:46:37,610 --> 00:46:42,170 Just put your hand upon him. You will no more recall how to battle. 397 00:46:43,550 --> 00:46:48,980 Just put your hand upon him. You will no more recall how to battle. 398 00:46:50,230 --> 00:46:55,930 Which is, I think, an accurate description of my struggle and surrender with this lecture. 399 00:46:57,330 --> 00:46:58,200 Thank you very much.