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Notes
on Elektra sequence
This
is an intricate though not specially confusing sequence. It was the
lynchpin of a volume (The Elektra Poems) published by Peter
Jay’s Anvil Press in 1982. Peter let me choose from what I’d written
to that date. A portion was about the anima, the feminine component of
the personality, according to Jung, with whose writings I was
preoccupied, if selectively. I dedicated the sequence to the singer Kate
Bush. She was on Top of the Pops and was anima enough for many up
to my age and beyond. I wrote to her asking if she’d accept the
dedication and she sent me a pretty letter with a flower pressed in it.
The scope of this Elektra sequence is vast, yet I must try to
explain how simple it is as well.
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Note
on Time’s steady state
Paraphrase:
I’ve seen how nature works. Leaves appear on the trees when they have
to. Honesty makes us tell it like it is, though fashion and chance
decide what happens, such as suicides. People stop in wonder when they
see this archetypal female, Elektra. She is restless, for even summer,
the best of seasons, makes her feel trapped.
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Note
on
Grand’mère
Elektra does not wish to live in the cage of marriage, where a husband
is like a doctor looking after a psychotic patient. She (a myth,
remember) lives in a fairytale castle (schloss—I do not
capitalise German nouns) and listens to an old-fashioned gramophone. She
is not happy. She lets her princely lover lead her into his baroque
garden, pleasing him sweetly amid his correct studies. But her
acquiescence makes her wither into a crone in a wheelchair. Her daughter
or reincarnation will ‘squash them [Elektra herself and her prince]
flat’. Change will occur. Baldacchino: (pillared) canopy.
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Note
on
The
god of the woods
A
reference, of course, to Freud, who falsified his data and made us think
we needed psychoanalysis, that women needed a male guru, a
doctor-as-husband, or husband-as-doctor. This is a little horror-song,
the doctor figure pushing Elektra down in her chair as he changes into a
hairy Mr Hyde. Because he has a hundred masks he insists that she has
too, and that he must peel her down to her core. In my mythology one
manifestation of the changeable Elektra is not duplicitous; the male
enemy is.
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Note
on
Her
fashion now
This is an
image of Elektra getting the upper hand, sexually using the male as a
conductor of her feelings, her electric energy. Phallic penetration had
not, at the time I wrote the poem, become a metaphor for the
reprehensible, as it did later, but I seem to have got a whiff of such
nonsense. Without nonsense, where would any metaphor be?
‘Her
right-hand rule’ is a reference to a physics textbook diagram of a
right hand with extended index finger and a circular arrow rotating the
hand. It illustrates the direction of the magnetic field lines around a
wire carrying an electric current. Elektra won’t worship the male any
more, whatever his guise, whether as silly Stephano in
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, made by Caliban to think he is lord
of ‘every fertile inch o’ the island’ (T.II.ii), or as the
Aztec rain god Tlaloc ‘that they cooked babies for’. Male
remedies are poisons. The last image is of vaginal ejaculation, and on
the volcanic slopes of the female eruption oranges grow. His dernier
cri is ambiguous: ‘the last word in fashion’ is its usual
meaning, but here it’s more like his last gasp. Rivelled:
wrinkled or puckered up.
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Note
on
Elektra
This picture of the goddess, fey and unoriginal, a houri from the Yellow
Book who chooses as lover an effete stroller with a black Malacca cane,
might not be every man or woman’s ideal, but she was a facet of mine.
I’d built up a picture of Elektra, in control of her own life,
modelled on various people, arty and tarty and some not too clever, but
then neither was I. She is exotic and all that, ‘her navel the white
spot that roves on Jupiter’, but come the dawn and after the party she
is in her seedy bedsit or flat, waiting for the milkman. She is the
secretary in Eliot’s The Waste Land, but I like her a
lot more than he does.
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Note
on
Who
goes
Again I associate
her with electricity, the kind that makes your hair stand on end. In
surrealist mood, I was thinking of Max Ernst again. My Elektra may seem
to be everything and anything; that’s almost true. We invent our own
Isis and Osiris, Mary and Jesus, or choose to discard them. The
catalogue of attributes are in keeping with the feel of this sequence:
who
has UFO eyes and a black halo,
who
gave the saint his incredible eyes,
who
enters the acid, covers the plate with silver.
Café
chantant:
a café with live musical entertainment; sandpipers: a group of
birds which includes curlews, snipe and woodcock, most species are found
on cold northern seashores; ‘who enters the acid, covers the plate
with silver’: a reference to the method of depositing precious
metals on base metal plates by passing a current through an electrolytic
solution, which here is an acid.
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Note
on
She
flies
A bit of density
here, but it does tie together. He and she might be Oedipus and Elektra
(Agamemnon’s daughter who adored her father). She has a different take
on reality. In my mythology, as it was when I wrote this, she is freer
than the dogged Oedipal male. She is a deeper creation of the
imagination, and it doesn’t matter whether in the mind of a man or a
woman. Elektra ‘sees no reason why she should not leave’—that is,
she’s free to flutter transcendentally outside existence. That idea is
meaningless to me now, since transcendence implies infinite regress and
as a logical concept is useless. But words can get lucky.
The
padlocked atom, the domestic core
was
murdered from her at birth: she flies
to
outswim all the tadpole galaxies…
As
myth, she tries to escape from physics. She wants to be solely of the
mind, as if that condition would put her outside Nature, which it would
not. She would like to be where ‘her force will not exist’. But her
ultimate reality, and its intrusion into his world of mere appearance,
is the cause of things, like leaves falling. We sense reality through
appearance (‘his tree’); we sense the thing, whatever it is, behind
appearance (‘her dark’). I was using the female archetype from a
male point of view. But Elektra is more than the Jungian Anima; she is
the ‘deep down [in] things’ of G.M.Hopkins. In good old Romantic
terms, the she is l’au delà, the beyond, the godhead. Having
touched her hem, one is ready to die, says the poem.
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Note
on
Isis
It was deeply unfashionable in the Modernist and post-Modernist phases
of the 20th century, that is throughout nearly all of it, to
echo Pater’s notion that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the
condition of music’. Edith Sitwell assumed it, and much good it did
her. Wallace Stevens, too, in practice, without saying so: doing much
else non-paraphrasable, like aspiring to the condition of painting and
streams of consciousness, whilst also being metaphysical. My Elektra
is, I suppose, pretty close to the (also demoted) Swinburnian creed of
‘music before everything’, though Verlaine, so far as I know, has
never been castigated for actually saying it. Does my sequence need more
explaining? I can throw in a few other thoughts.
Rain
is another symbol for Elektra, Isis, Jung’s Anima, Graves’ Triple
Goddess, The Feminine.
‘She
is in love still’: consider the older meaning of
‘still’—‘always’.
But
if Love is personified by Woman, because of her intimacy with children,
we must remember that the lioness can be terrible: ‘she can rip down
trees’.
How
can I explain:
Her
moon burns by the twig in the pool,
like
an eye’s burning, hard, honest... ?
She
is, symbolically, the moon as well as the rain, because of the menstrual
cycle. But why she ‘burns’ beside a twig, and why she is ‘hard,
honest’, I feel almost not competent to say any more. Perhaps I meant
that our feminine side is as rational as the so-called male side. She
is, after all, many-faceted and everywhere.
The
hills are, like horizon hills,
a
country we may never come to.
If
we must have a paraphrase!—Even the near hills of reality manifest
within appearance, when illuminated by the muse, look unreachable—and
indeed they are! The transmuted (by sensation, fancy or drugs) is still
not the thing-in-itself.
Her
rain is measuring itself against us.
... [T]he
shaken water
... [fits]
our shape exactly
Like
Isis and Apollo and Christ, she is a human invention and therefore fits
‘our shape exactly’. If she is musical and hints at the beyond, that
is no more than we expect. We invented her for it. As for
The
gods can hurt. When they do not we are grateful,
well,
she and the other gods personify many things, including destruction.
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Note
on
The
moonstone
In jewellery
a moonstone is a milky, opalescent semi-precious stone, but
it’s the symbolism of moon and stone which is important here. The moon
is feminine; stone is monumental. The male voice from the opening speaks
again, determined to be honest about the ‘female’ nature of things.
He lists, in terms which are far from literalistically clear, just what
this ‘She’ is like. His statements are supposed to have an
ineffable, symbolic shimmer. One main point is that, as an adjunct to
Nature, as ‘being’s bride and non-being’s, i.e. death’s,
[bride]’, she is something we can commune with, an intercessor. She is
therefore not really explicable, but one must try.
She
is, in us, that part of the mind or psyche which transmutes what it
sees, like William Blake’s visionary (here ‘hermetic’) eye of the
imagination that ‘alters all’. For more on ‘hermetic’ see
the note for Night Walk.
Now
what are the lies about reality that the speaker is tired of? Well, the
poem says, this She-Nature or God is not ‘good’ in the nursery-book
sense, for as well as being the visionary power that Nature has grown in
us, she is destructive also. She is ‘the bot-fly that grubs in my
vitals’. The male voice is inevitably part of Nature too; the
bot-fly’s parasitic larvae are not as a rule found in the vital organs
of ordinary, living humans. As well as being creation’s
destructiveness, Elektra is, as Fortune or Nature’s randomness,
terrifyingly changeable.
Then
we have disgust at ‘creation’s deceits’, in the male voice’s
annoyance at such claims that things have colour and can be beyond us.
What is being touched on here is that blood is red only because of the
wavelength of the light that reflect from it; nothing, except the
wavelengths of visible light, in itself has colour. We might also be
tired of being told that the true nature of things is beyond us. One
side of us needs poetic, quasi-religious ways of understanding, and
these amount to saying, ‘Damn your rationalism!’—damn the pop-sci,
Stephen-Hawking hubris that says we could, in theory, ‘know the mind
of God’.1
There
is only one thing. It is she.
The
hermetic eye. I plunge my arm
into
the water. I grip my side.
Knowledge
depends on our faith in perception, and on our trust in mental models
based on approximate data. He grips his side, exasperated.
Alan
Marshfield
=========================================================
1
‘However, if we do discover a complete theory
[of everything, via physics], it should in time be understandable in
broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall
all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take
part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If
we find an answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human
reason—for then we would know the mind of God’. (Hawking: A Brief
History of Time, p. 175, Bantam 1988).
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Note
on
Where
are the girls of yesteryear. (Also called
Envoi)
To
me the female is as much ‘other’ as the world itself is, but I
can’t see what, to her, is so hot about the pedestal position, which
she occupies in this sequence. However, where I stood when I wrote this,
feminism was a light-hearted dinner-party topic, not the wary and angry
one, slippery and political, it has since become. When I now look at Envoi
I’m struck by the feel of James Bond women, poster types, 1960s
Carnaby Street white lipstick and leather, and by the fact that much of
my vision of women comes from fiction, magazines, advertising. There’s
also a leaning towards the fetishistic and lubricious, perhaps. But,
but. The piece is humorous. The mind is part of the real world, and
humour derives from good nature as well as ill. It should be obvious
which names here, like Dol Dare, are from fiction and which, like the
wife of Dickens (Catherine Hogarth, 1815–79) and Never-Titty
(Nefertiti, 14th century BC queen of Egypt), once belonged to real
people. The real people have dates.
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