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Note
on
Hard Cheese
Gentle
surrealism. The flavour is not the kind that comes of striking the rock
for wine from the subconscious, though there’s a time for that.
If I’m aware of others who have written in this way, they are
the French Jacques Prévert, the Serbian Vasko Popa, the Polish Zbigniew
Herbert. Am I thus being
forced to use the word ‘influence’?—I have as many influences as
styles. Some styles may
even be my own.
In
at least one note I’ve made free with the self-deprecatory label
‘pastiche’. I suppose
there are two kinds. One is
good, called ‘influence’, and one not so good, being nigh on
forgery.
I don’t in truth particularly
like the term ‘influence’, apart from conceding that we all learn
from other styles and traditions. The
word suggests that someone else had all the originality. Critics who catalogue influences and can’t recognise new
twists are just lazy.
Surrealism comes naturally when the
subject is the metaphysical, the human lot, the political scene,
especially when oppressive. When
life is doing your head in you have to open your head up.
So this poem is another of my
metaphysicals, and it’s a change for me to apply the surrealist touch
to the genre, instead of such strained conceits as in De Rerum Natura.
Whilst the conceit runs the risk of appearing too
sincere—because of the difficulty in tying the figure (image, metaphor
etc) to its referent—there is the opposite risk in surrealism of
appearing not serious enough. Heaven
forbid that I should be in both camps at once, in a superimposition of
states! But I might be.
This poem is another take on the
view of things I’ve expressed already.
(1) ‘God’ is a useful term for all of Nature. (2) The notion of existence (‘is-ness’) isn’t simple.
I like the tale about J.L.Austin: asked why he’d spent so much
time studying Aristotle’s doctrine of ten categories, he replied,
‘Dreadfully important, ten senses of the word “is”.’
I don’t go into which sense of
‘is’ applies here. Allusions
to being there; to time (erratic, even frozen); to conjuring trickery,
miraculous transformation (torn shirt into whole, coin into egg); to
unseeing eyes, logic and contradiction: these are all part of a big
question and do not occur here promiscuously and in totally unlawful
intercourse. It’s my
intuition that there can be no grand unified theory.
I believe that reality, at all levels, does not add up; that at
the deepest level there is not tautology (‘I am that I am’) but
contradiction (‘I am what I’m not’).
Lest anyone think that, in my
fictive mode, I ‘believe in’ miracles, UFOs, shape-changing, let me
disabuse them. Though it
hardly matters which asylum we’re in.
I
should have said that when accepting the normal consensus, I don’t
believe in miracles. But privately, in poetic submission, I can indeed give
credence to magic—when I sink into myths, for instance, in order
partially to see.
If
two of the aims of life is not to go mad and to be as glad as chance
allows, it’s no wonder we daydream.
If we can daydream about sex, which is not always present or
possible, then why not daydream that those stories in stained glass are
true too?
Alan
Marshfield
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