Author: Notes Magazine
Springboard #4: Hill and Derrida
Springboards“… the structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent “in the flesh”, neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet’s father, thanks to the possibility of a visor”. – Jacques Derrida (Archive Fever)
***
Two Formal Elegies
By Geoffrey Hill
For the Jews in Europe
1
Knowing the dead, and how some are disposed:
Subdued under rubble, water, in sand graves.
In clenched cinders not yielding their abused
Bodies and bonds to those whom war’s chance saves
Without the law: we grasp, roughly, the song.
Arrogant acceptance from which song derives
Is bedded with their blood, makes flourish young
Roots in ashes. The wilderness revives,
Deceives with sweetness harshness. Still beneath
Live skin stone breathes, about which fires but play,
Fierce heart that is the iced brain’s to command
To judgment—studied reflex, contained breath—
Their best of worlds since, on the ordained day,
This world went spinning from Jehovah’s hand.
2
For all that must be gone through, their long death
Documented and safe, we have enough
Witnesses (our world being witness-proof),
The sea flickers, roars, in its wide hearth.
Here, yearly, the pushing midlanders stand
To warm themselves; men brawny with life,
Women who expect life. They relieve
Their thickening bodies, settle on scraped sand.
Is it good to remind them, on a brief screen,
Of what they have witnessed and not seen?
(Deaths of the city that persistently dies…?)
To put up stones ensures some sacrifice,
Sufficient men confer, carry their weight.
(At whose door does the sacrifice stand or start?)
Crazy Flowers
Issuesthe crazy flowers bloom there too (Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957)
flowers on the hillside blooming crazy (Bob Dylan, ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’, 1975)
The influence of the Beat movement on Dylan is clear to see. The surreal imagery of Another Side onwards gestures towards Ginsberg, while the restless spirit of Kerouac deeply marks all Dylan’s work. Here, Dylan echoes Kerouac at the same time as he moves away from Kerouac’s world. Kerouac’s image anticipates some of the significance of the flower in the decade to come. The flowers are ‘crazy’, the movement’s complex relationship with madness finely condensed. Kerouac transforms the city, New York, with an image of nature. Dylan exploits Kerouac’s phonic sensitivity – the way /bl/ responds to /fl/ and the way /aʊ/ moves into /u:/, each reaching in Dylan for the /oʊ/ of ‘lonesome’. And the madness remains. But Dylan has retreated to nature more fully. He echoes Kerouac’s words at the very moment he withdraws from the underlying vision of a community of urban madmen. The ‘flowers’ are no longer crazy companions but the backdrop for one relationship: ‘I could stay with you forever and never realise the time’. The more personal vision of Dylan’s mid-‘70s work is evident here. Of course, the flowers are also more than a setting. They distil a sense of abundance, the abundance of the relationship, blooming in its own way. But as the refrain makes clear that relationship is painfully fragile. The implicit transience of the flowers also reflects the fragility of the relationship. While the prospect of a transcendence of time is raised – of blooming without decay – time painfully reasserts itself in the ringing ‘when’ of the refrain.
Springboard #3: The Crazy Singing Woman
SpringboardsSpringboard #2: Voyeurism
Springboards“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.” – Slavoj Zizek
If you’ve an opinion on either or both of these things, deadline: 12.10.12.
Notes Magazine 