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Note
on
Dragonfly
This
came to me when I was watching a dragonfly during the Finnish holiday
described in the note on Leaving.
Later it became the title poem in a collection published by Ian
Robinson’s Oasis Press in 1972. For
once I don’t centre on the female, though the opening, ‘I am a
god’, tells you this is mythical / symbolist / surrealist country
again. So long as there are
threads of sorts, however disconnected, I’m happy with this mode.
It has its detractors, whose chief beef is that surrealist images
are arbitrary. Well, it’s just not true that any old phrase from a
hardware catalogue can replace the phrases of a surrealist poem.
Try it and see.
A
god whose origin is the Nile doesn’t have to refer to Osiris, Horus et
al. The Nile is ancient,
exotic. This insect god
gets around: ‘I am a foe of the land-logged.’
Its vivid life is short, its rebirth as an adult unspectacular
(‘in ridiculous drag’).
The
idea of an effectual, metallic object resembling a space capsule was
powerful to me then. It
must have to do with armour. All
the magic of this creature derives from powers which the earth-bound
writer does not possess. But
the Dragonfly is not totally impregnable: ‘I am purposeful search and
explorer in need of supplies.’
This
god is arty. ‘Carnivorous
and predacious…’: almost
parasitic. Not bourgeois:
I
zoom in like an ancient biplane laden with bombs to accrete like stately
vol-au-vents in the leprous drawing rooms, in the concentrations of
death.
The
‘stately vol-au-vents’ is like a hallmark.
I have a penchant for a highish style which I’ll call a dialect
of Mandarin if you like, ‘Mandarin’ in lit-crit meaning
‘affectedly ornate or complex’.
‘Ornate’ is unfashionable, ‘affected’ reprehensible.
Baroque and gothic are out too, but to me nothing is terribly is
wrong with the decorous. Elaborate
décor can be healthily ambiguous, content-critical.
I never wanted part of that plain-Jane trad-mode of ‘The
Movement’. As for ‘affected’, let’s explain, somewhat wearily:
from the cradle we affect (copy) the manners of others, until we acquire
a crop that suits us. If
anyone’s affectations in writing or behaviour are not ‘natural’,
there are steam-ironed souls, who think they are completely natural
themselves, who won’t like them and won’t like Dragonfly.
So be it. To move
on.
I
tease the highbrow, too. The
Dragonfly is no grim critic when it comes to ‘value’.
About what is ‘cheap’ he can surreptitiously alter your
judgment:
I
can change your mind at a moment’s notice. I am the funny
wizard. You need not beware.
Indeed,
the ‘lighthouse island approachable
only by hydroplane’ is an allusion to the Modesty Blaise movie.
The Dragonfly mates with the heroines of popular myth, Cleopatra,
Florence Nightingale....
Does
the fact that he mates with these fantasy ladies actually mean anything?
Only, I suppose, that he is on a par with them, a persuasive
creature of imagination, even if some of them started out as real
people.
The
‘nymphs [which] will take three years to moult to size in the ooze’
are his offspring. The dragonfly is hemimetabolous, with no pupal stage in the
transition from larva to adult. The
name for such a larva is ‘nymph’.
My
knowledge is a mosaic of light and movement.
All
knowledge is a mosaic.
The Dragonfly’s is instinctual, yet not irrational, and if
categories mean anything:
I
look in the dish of each flower that is busily recording pulsars and
electrical storms on the sun ... and my categories are
enlarged.
As
for being ‘an analogy fighting analogy’, he knows, creature of myth
and merchant of metaphors, that he can bring us only so far closer to
reality, not right up against it. He
would like not to reason by analogy but knows there is no other way.
Whether
his death is like that of the Hero Who Does Not Return, or whether he
resurrects all the time in anyone who imagines him, is up to the reader.
That he intends to ‘dispatch to die very soon in the ice at the
pole’ can suggest either. Depends on how you do your believing.
Alan
Marshfield
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