What words do

To begin in a roundabout way — John Berger:

“Then, quite soon, the drawing reached its point of crisis.  Which is to say that what I had drawn began to interest me as much as what I could still discover.  There is a stage in every drawing when this happens.  And I call it a point of crisis because at that moment the success or failure of the drawing has really been decided.  One now begins to draw according to the demands, the needs, of the drawing.”

Berger is here describing looking. The kind of intense looking that occurs when drawing from life (in his case, a life model). It was an intensity that left him feeling as if he inhabited the body that he was drawing. I get this idea: psychologists call it ‘flow’. The self disappears for a moment — the conscious mind banished and we are in the zone. The point of crisis comes when we become aware of what we are doing. At that moment, we cease to feel. We think.

A dangerous moment. And so to words.

What Berger describes in respect to drawing holds true for poetry. There is a moment in writing a poem when we are fully inside the poem. It is an honest moment and curiously wordless — pictorial, almost. And then something jolts us. We step outside and begin to think about what we have written. And the danger when we step outside and become conscious is that we might think as a poet, or leastways as we think a poet thinks. We might do poetry.

A case in point.

I have been updating my website. I wanted to make more of my homepage — to give people more of a reason to delve deeper into my work. Images, definitely, but I also felt the need (don’t ask me why) to say something about my work. And I struggle to say things about my work. I become noble. Pompous. Untrue. The more I write, the more the untruths. Writing is labelling; writing about oneself and what one thinks is to write at best partial truth: to construct one narrative amongst many possible narratives. And as any author knows, characters (the I, you, they) have a habit of doing what they want to do.

The one constant is change

That phrase was as much as I could manage. It is how I see the sea, the sky, rock, stone, people, what we make, and what happens to what we leave behind. I think it captures, in part, what my work is about. I slept on it.

Come the morning, this happened:

The one constant is change
for a moment
I track its fleet feet

For a moment is a hinge. It emphasises the momentariness of any supposed constant and the momentariness of change; at the same time it feeds forward to the human action of the poem — the pursuit of change, the running after its fleet foot, the re-telling of it, the painting of it, all of which is itself momentary.

When I read what I had written, and that phrase ‘fleet feet’, I couldn’t help thinking of Aesacus and his fatal pursuit of the nymph Hesperia. Almost immediately, I changed ‘track’ to ‘pin’. Pin: to hold down — much as a lepidopterist might do to a moth. To fix something in position. To make it permanent. Is this what I aim at in my art I wonder? or is this in the end what words do?

Reference: John Berger, ‘The basis of all painting and sculpture is drawing’, in Permanent Red, Verso.