Reading the Runes

When he read at the University of Edinburgh last week, poet and author John Burnside made some illuminating points about his own work. First, while he appreciates the problems that are inherent in using a “fallen” language, Burnside also likes to explore the conjuring capacities of that language, best represented by the figure of Orpheus, who is able to sing creatures into being. Second, he can identify only a few moments in his life when he has been able to “step outside” of this problematic medium of language: when taking LSD, and when experiencing certain states of mind brought about by phases of mental ill health. In relation to this second point, Burnside attributes his poetry’s repeated attempts to gesture towards meaning or pattern in the universe, without recourse to a named deity, to his status as a sufferer of apophenia – the tendency to assign meaning to randomly occurring events. Habitually reading the runes of the meaningless informational “noise” of the everyday, the apophenic can drift towards paranoia, but also towards elation (depending on the way the signs appear to tend).

Apophenia is one state among several connected to “magical thinking,” a form of thinking that can produce anomalous beliefs of causality, apparently supported by experience, but having no necessary basis in truth. This is not, of course, so very far from religion, which haunts the work of lapsed Catholic Burnside (who claimed last week to have “a crush on Presbyterianism”). The phrase “magical thinking” is perhaps most familiar not from the field of psychiatry but from the title of Joan Didion’s grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. In the latter, it is understood in its anthropological sense, as a belief that a series of rituals or behaviours can put off a terrible event, or alter what has already occurred. It is a kind of fantasy of control in an unresponsive universe. This anthropological interpretation of the phrase is of course also relevant to Burnside’s work, which contains many small, ritualistic gestures of tribute or hope.

Last week, the writer read in part from a work-in-progress, a novel set in the Arctic Circle. Given the notes above, it will be interesting to see how Burnside tackles the far North, these days more heavily freighted than ever with ideas of a sacred space under threat, carefully watched for signs of the planet’s fate.

Ecopoetics Rule 1: A Good Workman Always Blames His Tools

In searching for a new springcoppice “Poem of the Month,” I have been reminded of Andy Brown and John Burnside’s poetry collection Goose Music (Salt, 2008). Here the poets set out explicitly to address the question of how human beings might dwell ethically on the earth. An ecologically engaged collection, it explores the capacities of an ecopoetic mode to analyse and explicate relationships between human beings and the wider natural world. One poem, “The Other Brother – Part III: My Brother Audubon,” describes the undertakings of the great ornithological illustrator:

“The bird he sees and the bird he draws

are one. Which begs an inner silence,

shifting from the world of words

to the language of tone and line. 

He must forget the names he knows – 

neither ‘tail’ nor ‘wing’, nor ‘beak’ nor ‘claw’ – 

and simply more along the edge of each, 

with his eye set in his pencil-tip,   

thinking of no sound at all – save that of ink

on paper – to catch the truth

of their existence, out there, in the world.”

[…]

   

Throughout his career, Burnside has demonstrated a particular interest in the notion of language as a Fall from a direct relationship with the natural world. His work incorporates a fascination with Adamic naming, and the implication that the poet himself must always work with broken tools. Yet one of the most distinctive features of Burnside’s poetry is his rhythmic listing of plants, animals and features of the landscape. He appears torn between poetic cataloguing that is a kind of hymning, or perhaps incantation, and the notion that naming succeeds only in letting the described world escape.

In the poem “Taxonomy I: Flora,” Burnside notes that “looking always worked towards a word: / trading the limits of speech / for the unsaid presence.” In this reading, any act of articulation has an elegiac quality, since language displaces this presence of what remains unsaid. (The elegiac note is an appropriate one for the work of Audubon, who famously killed vast numbers of birds in order to accurately record their appearance.) Further, in “Taxonomy 2: Fauna,” Burnside reports that “Once we are close enough to give them names / we cannot help but treat them as our own,” one of the poet’s more explicit statements about the consequences of knowledge, inevitably framed in language, and its links to the use of the natural world as resource. The latter claim suggests that an ecopoetic work would necessarily acknowledge the faultiness of language, its displacement of the real and, most importantly, its unfair claims to environmental ownership.

In “My Brother Audubon” the problem of interceding language is side-stepped by the illustrator as he creates a link between his direct experience of the sight of a bird, and the picture he captures on the page. The closing down of the language gap – in which the witnessed bird is described in the mind, before being transcribed on the page – is indicated by the transfer of the eye to the tip of the pencil. Looking and touching / drawing “are one.” The pencil-point eye becomes an organ of touch and trace – it is epidermic, a particular modification of the skin. Yet while language must be removed from Audubon’s endeavours in order for accuracy of depiction to be enabled, such a practice is described through the medium of just this faulty, fallible language. The artist may be able to side-step words, but the poet(s) of course cannot.

In Nature Cure (Chatto & Windus, 2005) Richard Mabey delivers a credo: “I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it.” Ecopoetics must, then, continue to work with the only tools available, the broken ones of a language that claims false ownership, intercedes and ill describes. In doing so it must acknowledge this problematic toolkit. A good ecopoetic workman must always blame his tools.

"A Certain Just Quality"

I somehow missed John Burnside's "Jura Diary" when it was originally published in The Scotsman at the end of last year. The Scottish Book Trust, who funded the writers' retreat which Burnside recounts, have now posted the diary here. It includes the following musings on sound, a recent preoccupation of springcoppice (here; here):
"The writer's first concern is attention to sound. Not to marks on the page, and - for the poet at least - not to questions of meaning. It might seem mystical to say so, but I do think meaning emerges from the sound. [...] And what of the word 'sound' itself? It's one of my favourite notions: a magical, immensely rich feature of coastal waters, the word for what my trade is all about, and one of the aptest ways of talking about things being right, about a certain just quality to a thing, or a person or an event. She's sound. This boat is sound. All the joy of using language can be summed up in that use of the word."

Nature Writing Manifesto Draft 1

"If it was really Shelley who stood and listened to the skylark, it was not Shelley in any important sense; he did not mean for me, reading the poem, to be thinking about him listening to the bird; he was entirely willing to vanish, and to let me become the 'I'.” Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures. Listed among “John Burnside’s Favourite Poetry Sayings” at Poetry Archive (link here).