Category Archives: What is the Language Using Us For?

When I started learning my ‘abridged’ version of WITLUUF, one of Mr Porter‘s comments stuck with me through all of last week:

I’d be really interested to hear about the parts of the poem that you are not sold on, too.

I read here a very useful query. If you’re decimating a poem, like a chicken, into parts you “favour” (a drumstick) and those you don’t (wings), shouldn’t you think as much about why not wings, as much as why drumsticks? Perhaps more so.

Dwelling, if you’re honest with yourself, your prejudices get revealed. In the case of WITLUUF, I think I wanted to stay away from all the Malcolm Mooney-isming (even the name slightly annoys me: a character in a children’s book). Similarly, all the sailing and walking about in the poem and ambling around Greenock like a Scottish Leopold Bloom, engaging in scraps of craic with all and sundry.

I met a man in Cartsburn Street
Thrown out of The Cartsburn Vaults.
He shouted Willie and I crossed the street

And met him at the mouth of the close.
And this was double-breasted Sam,
A far relation on my mother’s

West-Irish side. Hello Sam how
Was it you knew me and says he
I heard your voice on The Sweet Brown Knowe.

O was I now I said and Sam said
Maggie would have liked to see you.
I’ll see you again I said and said

Sam I’ll not keep you and turned
Away over the short cut across
The midnight railway sidings.

I didn’t want to spend days learning this flotsam and jetsam by heart so that it might swill around in my head until death or dementia do us part.

I just wanted the philosophical-emotional backbone of the poem, its language-ruffled quintessence, and none of its peopled debris.

It took me a week to realise that the language-ruffled quintessence cannot, should not be separated from all the domestic detritus Graham scrapes it away from.

Without all the “hello Sams” and “Sam, I’ll not keep you” and “O was I now”, the poem and possibly my learning of it, is just a piece of dismembered fowl, not really a live, squawking chicken.

Thank you Mr Porter for leading me to this realisation.

So I think I’m going to spend another week with this poem, the whole poem. Which means I’m already ‘behind’ on my poem-a-week goal (you see how pressure mounts^[1], even self-imposed pressure?).

Graham (1918 - 1986) probably never experienced flashing cursors, those pixelated staves pulsing at the start of every sentence to the rhythm of feed-me, feed-me, feed-me.

Yet this is what I see at the beginning of this poem: an animated cursor (curser?) called Malcolm Mooney, who is also the poet (“he is only going to be/Myself”) and us (“slightly you/Wanting to be another”) - trudging through “the white language” with its associations of snow, fear of the blank page (or mind), the paradoxical plenitude and emptiness of existence.

Everything is Waiting For You (interesting experiences, sentences, relationships) versus Nothing Is Waiting For You (loss, abandonment, despair).

I watch the cursor/curser on my screen at the beginning of this poem, moving before and after language as it spools out behind him like the spume of a speedboat. Mooney clomps across the page, but so did the pen before he ever existed to bring him into existence.

What is the language using us for?
Said Malcolm Mooney moving away
Slowly over the white language.
Where am I going said Malcolm Mooney.

I was curious why Mooney might be moving “away” rather than towards us. Perhaps this is the feeling as we wade through language that the very things we are trying to encapsulate in lettered permutations called ‘words’, slip out of our linguistic grasp the more we wrestle with them. So rather than staying here, just saying what we need to say with a vocabulary more or less attuned to our feelings and thoughts, we find ourselves over there, wrestling with something or someone, not quite sure what brought us to this place, and where to next.

Where am I going said Malcolm Mooney.

There’s no question mark. All questioning is ultimately rhetorical when the existential pickle jar gets opened and the full or half-sour dill gets yanked out once again for us to gnaw on.

Certain experiences seem to not
Want to go into language maybe
Because of shame or the reader’s shame.

I have a theory, although I’m sure someone’s said it somewhere before, that all fiction (the stuff we make up) is really just a shame-driven reaction to non-fiction (the “real” stuff, the stuff we find uncomfortable to talk about). Poetry is closer to the “real” in that there is usually less of a story being woven around the feeling nub.

It’s a very human paradox that the things we most want to talk about, most need to talk about, have no outlet for expression, believing we can’t “go there” with others, unless we put it into some sort of story, sugar the pill, tell it about someone else (“you/Wanting to be another”).

“Reader, it doesn’t matter,” Graham tries to console us. And of course in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t. Whatever floats your shame-dodging boat. But in some ways it does.

It matters only in
So far as we want to be telling

Each other alive about each other
Alive.

At the beginning of the poem, the writer is disconnected from that “flow” of telling, “stuck” in the “freezing prisms” of language (“I am in a telephoneless, blue/Green crevasse^[1] and I can’t get out”). Maybe just stuck in the sentence he’s working on, which is a bad enough stuckness. But maybe part of the immobilization is due to the fact that he feels no-one, apart from himself, would find his inertia of much interest, having so much of their own to contend with:

would you ever want
To be here down on the freezing line

Reading the words that steam out
Against the ice?

In some way, other people’s stuckness feel like “suburbs” to our own experience. Let us go then, you and I, or maybe not. I live in a suburb. It’s dull at times. Everyone wants their show to be on in the West End, their exertions to be cheered on in the Olympic stadium. Most of us don’t get what we want.

In order to make us appreciate his feelings, Graham (we) have to translate or move this stuckness onto others. I’m not stuck, it’s Mooney: “deep down in[to] a glass jail”.

This realisation that “truth” is less palatable than fiction starts in childhood. Parents are not “allowed” (although they often break the rule) to tell children of their fears and desires, but they are allowed to tell them stories. The stories they tell them are sometimes deeply troubled ones. Children, for a while, are allowed (or expected) to tell parents exactly how they’re feeling. For a while they are all, feeling, only feeling. And then they learn how to think and lie, learn that the parent is more comfortable with thoughts (even lies, and are not all thoughts lies of a kind?) than with feelings. And so the fatal switch is made.

I wander into the staffroom and catch the tail-end of a conversation:

“…and then it’s gone. You just don’t seem to be carrying that emotional pain with you anymore.”

“Gone? Like…completely?”

“Yeah, as if it’s been dissolved in some sort of chemical substance.”

I don’t ask what they’re talking about, it could be any therapeutic procedure: biofeedback, rolfing, holotropic breathwork, chromotherapy, reiki, reflexology, focusing, feldenkreis, cupping, counselling, or even goold old psychotherapy. It doesn’t really matter as long as it “works”.

This “working” seems to be connected to a sense of uncoupling from maladaptive pain. Not pain that tells you to drop the hot potato before it sears the flesh, but pain that rides a razorblade-studded surfboard on a whatever wave of self-defeating entropy and negativity you’re able to churn up inside yourself.

Learning poetry can be as powerful as all the other therapies for this kind of grievance. Particularly when some of the lines that you’re in the process of learning (internalizing) start drawing towards them, like a poultice, the aches and pains of your emotional life. You don’t have to do anything to make this happen (other than learn the poem) it just occurs, as if by magic.

Let me give you an example. I am learning these stanzas from the poem:

I am in a telephoneless, blue
Green crevasse and I can’t get out.
I pay well for my messages
Being hoisted up when you are about.

I suppose you open them under the light
Of midnight of The Dancing Men.
The point is would you ever want
To be here down on the freezing line

Reading the words that steam out
Against the ice? Anyhow draw
This folded message up between
The leaning prisms from me below.

As I take them in, I try on this “I” for size and find it fitting. I too pay well for my messages (about £40 a month to Virgin Media, to be mundanely precise) and indeed am “hoisted up”, given succor when “you” are about.

But what if this “you” is no longer there? What if “you” is one who, in my embittered fantasy, now opens these emotionally costly messages not when they arrive, but at some delayed last-moment, “under the light of midnight of the Dancing Men”.

I don’t know who the Dancing Men are, but for this accusatorial scene (“Would you ever want to be…” etc.), they could be anything from a bunch of Chippendales to whatever drek “you” happens to be watching on television as they hive off five percent of their attention to my “messages” (emails, blog-posts, letters, whatever).

Allowing these three stanzas to become very personal to us allows for a kind of alchemy to occur very similar to that which my colleagues were talking about. Being able to give new words to the pain in a ritualised, almost formal way feels intensely healing.

I don’t really subscribe to this gone-completely notion though. I think about a conversation Howard Cutler once had with the Dalai Lama about regret ^[1], which might be applied to any thoughts or emotions that haunts us. But maybe we’re not really looking for “gone-completely”, which would be a form of dementia or amnesia. What we’re looking for is:

A place for language in our lives

Which we want to be a real place
Seeing we have to put up with it
Anyhow.

Slowly over the white language
Comes Malcolm Mooney the saviour.
My left leg has no feeling.
What is the language using us for?

Even after saying these lines about a hundred times, I’m still thrown by the leg. You too would be thrown by a leg that had no feeling. You’d put your weight on it, get no feedback from the nerves and muscles, and topple. As does Mooney (“He fell./He falls”).

I google ‘Leg Numbness’. Might be circulatory (deep vein thrombosis), orthopedic (a degenerative disk disease), or even neurological (alcoholism, MS, a stroke). I am tempted to see what Graham died of, but then I would spend the next hour swimming in porridge^[1] rather than thinking about the poem^[2].

My initial hypothesis is that it is Graham’s way of saying that he feels unaffiliated within himself. Some parts of him profoundly alive (speaking, singing, soul-occuring) others not. We all have those numb, unincorporated, disconnected, dead parts in us, don’t we?

This disconnection is connected to feedback, or lack of, I realise only now having written so far. One sends out an intention, a communication to the body (and/or another) by “doing”, moving in this direction rather than that. Hopefully, if everything’s working well, the “folded message” (for your eyes only, even anonymised eyes behind computer screens) gets a response.

The nerve endings feel the brain’s bulletin and pass it onto the muscles which begin moving seemingly under your control. If your left leg, or any other part of you has no feeling then presumably communication has broken down.

Or maybe there’s just too much “porridge” in your life obscuring the sensations you need to feel, hiving off attention in ways that leave you no resources for focusing on the messages you need to read.

As I get up from the computer to make my morning porridge (of the cereal variety), I have playing, earworm-like in my head, John Cale’s Fear (is a man’s best friend).

I wonder what the language is trying to tell me with this?