Because you asked about the line between prose and poetry
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
Now, like a little snake, it curls into a ball,
Bewitching your heart,
Then for days it will coo like a dove
On the little white windowsill.
Or it will flash as bright frost,
Drowse like a gillyflower…
But surely and stealthily it will lead you away
From joy and from tranquility.
It knows how to sob so sweetly
In the prayer of a yearning violin,
And how fearful to divine it
In a still unfamiliar smile.
November 24, 1911
Tsarskoye Selo
So who’s that pretty boy, soaked in cologne,
grinding against you in the rose bushes
near that pleasant grotto, Pyrrha?
Is it for him that you do up your blonde hair,
stylishly simple? Ah, how often
he will be in anguish over fickle faith
and fate, and be caught off guard – astounded –
as if at the sea abruptly churned up by a dark gale.
He may be enjoying you now – your radiance –
always believing in your easy-going love, unaware
of the deceptive way the wind blows.
Miserable are they who’ve never basked in your glow.
As for me – see my dripping clothes hanging on the holy temple wall as an offering
for the powerful god of the sea? Well, they show that I’ve survived that particular storm.
It’s because I’m the same then that I’m writing this
I mean now and if we go out for a ride in the 50’s car
it’s our Chevy
And I’m the one who already knows what I learn
The minute I’m shown the words—clock, hat, Bill, Susan,
“A Flaming Meteor Hits the Earth”
We ride out towards Topock I lie in the backseat
Night, somewhere after the Five-Mile Station
Against hills flowing they cry out, “Did you see that? It
lit up the whole sky”
I’m afraid to look when I do it’s gone
A week later they have Life magazine
“That’s what we saw”: on the cover a fireball
With caption “A Flaming Meteor Hits the Earth”
So I read those words, ‘49 or ‘50.I didn’t read a couple of years before, wasn’t doing that
I talked when the words came but first the world
Was my recognition my just-prior knowledge of it
I’m still here in the backseat
“A Flaming Meteor Hits the Earth” contains no car or terror
How did I get to be born. And recognize the events
of my life
Some of them were always going to be
But I don’t want any events—I have, even early, revulsion
for their names:
Graduation, marriage, childbirth
The meteor’s named by science
We name us and then we are lost, tamed
I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness.I remember everything it isn’t past it’s wild
I’m so constant and have nearly lost myself only seldom, later,
But I would have lost it, lost me
Flaming Meteor I was scared of you first
I love this alley, love is recognition
Born in love.— Alice Notley
Those Graves in Rome, Larry Levis
The child died there, twenty years ago,
Of malaria. It was so common then—
The children crying to the doctors for quinine.
It was so common you did not expect an aria,
And not much on a gravestone, either—although
His name is on it, & weathered stone still wears
His name—not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.
Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, by Gregory Orr
Resurrection of the body of the beloved,
Which is the world.
Which is the poem
Of the world, the poem of the body.
Mortal ourselves and filled with awe,
We gather the scattered limbs
Of Osiris.
That he should live again.
That death not be oblivion.
•
The beloved is dead. Limbs
And all the body’s
Miraculous parts
Scattered across Egypt,
Stained with dark mud.
We must find them, gather
Them together, bring them
Into a single place
As an anthologist might collect
All the poems that matter
Into a single book, a book
Which is the body of the beloved,
Which is the world.
Who wants to lose the world,
For all its tumult and suffering?
Who wants to leave the world,
For all its sorrow?
Not I.
And so I come to the Book,
Which is also the body
Of the beloved. And so
I come to the poem.
The poem is the world
Scattered by passion, then
Gathered together again
So that we may have hope.
The shape of the Book
Is the door to the grave,
Is the shape of the stone
Closed over us, so that
We may know terror
Is what we pass through
To reach hope, and courage
Is our necessary companion.
The shape of the Book
Is dark as death, and every page
Is lit with hope, glows
With the light of the vital body.
When I open the Book
I hear the poets whisper and weep,
Laugh and lament.
In a thousand languages
They say the same thing:
“We lived. The secret of life
Is love, which casts its wing
Over all suffering, which takes
In its arms the hurt child,
Which rises green from the fallen seed.”
It’s not magic; it isn’t a trick.
Every breath is a resurrection.
And when we hear the poem
Which is the world, when our eyes
Gaze at the beloved’s body,
We’re reborn in all the sacred parts
Of our own bodies:
the heart
Contracts, the brain
Releases its shower
Of sparks,
and the tear
Embarks on its pilgrimage
Down the cheek to meet
The smiling mouth.
Sadness is there, too.
All the sadness in the world.
Because the tide ebbs,
Because wild waves
Punish the shore
And the small lives lived there.
Because the body is scattered.
Because death is real
And sometimes death is not
Even the worst of it.
If sadness did not run
Like a river through the Book,
Why would we go there?
What would we drink?
Isis kneels on the banks
Of the Nile. She is assembling
The limbs of Osiris.
Her live limbs moving
Above his dead, moving
As if in a dance, her torso
Swaying, her long arms
Reaching out in a quiet
Constant motion.
And the river below her
Making its own motions,
Eddies and swirls, a burbling
Sound the current makes
As if a throat was being cleared,
As if the world was about to speak.
The poem is written on the body,
And the body is written on the poem.
The Book is written in the world,
And the world is written in the Book.
This is the reciprocity of love
That outwits death. Death looks
In one place and we’re in the other.
Death looks there, but we are here.
“What is life?”
When you first
Hear that question
It echoes in your skull
As if someone shouted
In an empty cave.
The same answer each time:
The resurrection of the body
Of the beloved, which is
The world.
Every poem different but
Telling the same story.
And we’ve been gathering
Them in a book
Since writing began
And before that as songs
Or poems people memorized
And recited aloud
When someone asked: “What is life?”
The things that die
Do not die,
Or they die briefly
To be born again
In the Book.
Did you think
You would see
The loved one again
In this world
Or in some other?
No, that cannot happen.
But we have been
Gathering, all of us,
The scattered remnants
Of the loved one
Since the beginning.
In Egypt, the loved
One is not in the pyramids
But in the poem
Carved in stone
About the lover’s lips
And eyes.
In the igloo
The poem gathers
The dark hair of the beloved.
All the poems of the world
Have been gathering the beloved’s
Body against your loss.
Read in the Book. Open
Your eyes and your heart;
Open your voice.
The beloved
Is there and was never lost.
Intermitent rain, by Roo Borson
Claude Debussy – Arabesque n°1
with Alberto Neuman
Rain hitting the shovel
leaned against the house,
rain eating the edges
of the metal in tiny bites,
bloating the handle,
cracking it.
The rain quits and starts again.
There are people who go into that room in the house
where the piano is and close the door.
They play to get at that thing
on the tip of the tongue,
the thing they think of first and never say.
They would leave it out in the rain if they could.
The heart is a shovel leaning against a house somewhere
among the other forgotten tools.
The heart, it’s always digging up old ground,
always wanting to give things a decent burial.
But so much stays fugitive,
inside,
where it can’t be reached.
the piano is a way of practising
speech when you have no mouth.
When the heart is a shovel that would bury itself.
Still we can go up casually to a piano
and sit down and start playing
the way the rain felt in someone else’s bones
a hundred years ago,
before we were born,
before we were even one cell,
when the world was clean,
when there were no hearts or people,
the way it sounded
a billion years ago, pattering
into unknown ground. Rain
hitting the shovel leaned against the house,
eating the edges of the metal.
It quits,
and starts again.
from Sudden Miracles: Eight Women Poets
edited by Rhea Tregebov (Second Story Press, 1991)
LETTERS
Between 1946 and 1975, Iris Murdoch corresponded with the French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau, a successful author sixteen years her senior. Published for the first time, the letters here are part of a collection recently acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, London.
It is likely that Murdoch destroyed all of Queneau’s letters to her.
14 July 1946
4 Eastbourne Road
Chiswick
London W4
Well now (your letter of 10 July) – I am truly very sorry to have been, even for a moment, a further problem & embarrassment for you. Thank you however for writing frankly. Please don’t think that I ‘expect’ anything of you – beyond, I hope, your continued friendship. We have expressed to each other our sincere ‘sympathie’ – that remains, I think? For the rest, our ways lie pretty far apart and I see no reason why our relationship should be a problem for either. Please, please don’t distress yourself about it. I well realize that your moral and emotional situation must be most unhappy – I sympathise very profoundly. I will not be a complicating factor. You know that I care about all this; I have become very attached to you & shall certainly remain so, but I don’t think there is any cause for agitation in that.
I am trying to work, but London is more nerve rending than ever. I have finished ‘Etre et le Néant’, thank God, with much admiration & some flutters of criticism. It stops just where I want to begin; I suppose I shall now have to do some thinking for myself. (Or shall I just wait till Sartre publishes his Ethics?) MacKinnon at Oxford seems to be going through some sort of spiritual crisis & can’t see me. A bunch of goddamn neurotics I have for friends. I have continued a little with Pierrot & find this the one soothing occupation in a somewhat ragged world.
Thank you very much for ‘Les Ziaux’, which I have not yet had time to read. Work well at Avignon & don’t worry yourself to death. I wish you most heartily the strength to solve your problems.
Now & always I remain your calm tender devoted reader & friend.
Iris
PS My surname ends with an H not a K. Pax tecum –
24 April 1947
4 Eastbourne Road
Chiswick
London W4
[…]
I was most glad to have your news, or rather lack of news, abstention from news. How bloody of Dial Press to have second thoughts now – still, I imagine it means only delay? I hope Lehmann hurries up with his project for our island. I feel most impatient to see you in English. I hope your play is going down well? But most of all I long for Gueule de Pierre III. (If the devil were bargaining with me for my soul, I think what could tempt me most would be the ability to write as well as you. Tho’ when I reflect, in my past encounters with that character he has not lacked other good bargaining points –).
For the rest – I am glad that you have reasons for being happier, even if you don’t yet fully profit by them. Confidences – yes, I know, I too would like to ‘talk’ – but perhaps I’d better not, for the moment anyway. Also there are some things which it is almost impossible to explain, to expose, however violently one wishes to. (Another language problem.) Spoken of they seem … melodrama, or an attempt to trip the other into complicity. Yet for all that I’d like to talk with you frankly one day (about my own histories, I mean). You are important to me in all sorts of ways. As a symbol, yes – one distant undiscovered magnetic pole of my own uncertain mind. But as yourself too – a voice in my life, and more, yourself, with your curious laugh and nervous ways. Perhaps I behaved foolishly in Paris (forgive me) but my affection for you was then and is now most most sincere and tender.
After much indecision about jobs, I’ve decided to apply for two next month – one a year-long studentship at Cambridge, & the other a lecturership in philosophy at Liverpool university. I don’t know what my chances are for either. The Cambridge thing is to be applied for by June 1st – rather late in the year, so that hanging on for that means letting go various jobs which I might chase after now. But I yearn for Cambridge. (Oxford is intolerable to me now – I can’t help tho’ wanting to ‘start again’ in another city which is exactly like Oxford but all different.) – This thing is competitive however, & I daresay I shan’t get it. So – Liverpool, or else Bradford Technical Institute – or God knows what yet more frightful hack task in some red brick town in some marsh in the midlands. On verra.
[…] I’d like to talk with you – this afternoon, say – enormously at leisure, sitting outside some café in the Boulevard something-or-other, with the sparrows hopping on the table, & the people passing. And discuss Universal History and Human Destiny and our history & our destiny, and politics and language – I need so much to talk & talk – but the chances so rarely come.
I hope that, truly, life goes better with you. I wish you very well. Pardon me if I say things amiss. I am deeply concerned that you should be happy & solve your problems. Write if you’ve time, but never mind if you haven’t. More news from me later. Fiat pax in virtute tua.
Devotedly, yours
I
21 Sep 1947
4 Eastbourne Road
Chiswick, W4
My dear, I am back in London, God help me. There is the usual collection of nerve rending letters waiting, inter alia, a ms of mine (a novel written in ’44) politely rejected by a publisher – & a request from a learned body that I should lecture on existentialism in London in the autumn. […] I feel alarm at this – sometimes I think my playing the philosopher is a great hoax & one day someone will denounce me. You see already I’m fretting about these trifles. But not all trifles – some distressing letters too from sad friends.
You said that love between a man & a woman made always some sort of basis for life. Yes. Yet how rarely it occurs without hurt to one or both parties – or rather both, for if one is hurt both are hurt. Yet I don’t know – I can’t tell for other people really, only for myself.
I meant all I said last night – but don’t be distressed – very simply & loyally. I hope & pray we won’t ever harm each other. I’m very tired at the moment – sort of drunk with tiredness & nothing to eat, you know the way one can be. My parents are out playing cards. It’s late. I can’t help wishing for simple things, simple solutions. I wish I could see you often & get to know you. Maybe I will get to know you better in time.
I’ll write again in a few days when I’m feeling less feverish. Thank you, for very many things. I’m happy that I know you and happy that I love you.
I’m so glad you like Prince Myshkin.
I hope all goes very well with all your projects.
Most tenderly
I am yours
I
24 August 1952
I’m sorry about the scene on the bridge – or rather, I’m sorry in the sense that I ought either to have said nothing or to have said something sooner. I was in extreme pain when I came to see you chez Gallimard on Friday – but what with English habitual reticence, and your cool way of keeping me at a distance I could say nothing altho’ I wanted desperately to take you in my arms.
On the other hand, if I had started to talk sooner I might have spent the rest of the time (such as it was) in tears, & that was to be avoided. I’m glad I said at least one word to you however. I can’t tell you what extravagance I have uttered in my heart & you have been spared. I write this now partly (for once) to relieve my feelings – and partly because you were (or affected to be?) surprised at what I said.
Listen – I love you in the most absolute sense possible. I would do anything for you, be anything you wished me, come to you at any time or place if you wished it even for a moment. I should like to state this categorically since the moment for repeating it may not recur soon. If I thought I stood the faintest chance, vis à vis de toi, I would fight and struggle savagely. As it is – there are not only the barriers between us of marriage, language, la Manche and doubtless others – there is also the fact that you don’t need me in the way in which I need you – which is proved by the amount of time you are prepared to devote to me while I am in Paris. As far as I am concerned this is, d’ailleurs, an old story – when you said to me once, recommençons un peu plus haut, it was already too late for me to do anything of the kind.
(I wrote thus far in a somewhat proletarian joint in the Rue du Four, when a drunken female put her arm round me et me demandait si j’ecrivais à maman. J’ai dit que non. Alors elle m’a demandé à qui? and I didn’t know how to reply.)
I don’t want to trouble you with this – or rather, not often! I know how painful it is to receive this sort of letter, how one says to oneself oh my God! And turns over the page. I can certainly live without you – it’s necessary, and what is necessary is possible, which is just as well. But what I write now expresses no momentary Parisian mood but simply where I stand. You know yourself what it is for one person to represent for another an absolute – and so you do for me. I don’t think about you all the time. But I know that there is nothing I wouldn’t give up for you if you wanted me. I’m glad to say this (remember it) in case you should ever feel in need of an absolute devotion. (Tho’ I know, again, from my own experience, how in a moment of need one is just as likely to rely on someone one met yesterday.)
Don’t be distressed. To say these things takes a weight from my heart. The tone dictated to me by your letters depuis des années me convient peu. I don’t know you quite well enough to know if this is voulu or not. Just as I wasn’t sure about your ‘surprise’ on the bridge.
To see you in this impersonal way in Paris, sitting in cafés & knowing you will be gone in an hour, is a supplice. But I well understand & am (I suppose) prepared to digest it, that there is no alternative. If I thought that you would be pleased to see me in Sienna I should come. But (especially after writing to you like this) there is very little possibility of my being able to discover whether you would be pleased or not.
[…]
It’s happened to me once, twice, perhaps three times in my life to feel an unconditional devotion to someone. The other recipients have gone on their way. You remain. There is no substitute for this sort of sentiment & no mistaking it when it occurs. If it does nothing else, it shows up the inferior imitations.
I wish I could give you something. If anything comes of this novel (or its successor), it’s all yours – as is everything else I have if you would. I love you, I love you absolutely and unconditionally – thank God for being able to say this with the whole heart.
I feel reluctant to close this letter because I know that I shan’t feel so frank later on. Not that my feelings will have altered, ça ne change pas, but I shall feel more acutely the futility at these sort of exclamations. At this moment I am, même malgré toi, in communication with you in a way which may not be repeated. If your letters to me could be slightly less impersonal I should be glad. Mais ça ne se choisit pas. I have become used to writing impersonally too, & this was a mistake. My dear. It happens to me so rarely to be able to write a letter so wholeheartedly – almost the last but one was a letter I wrote to you in 1946. I love you as much as then. More, because of the passage of time.
Forgive what in this letter is purely ‘tiresome’. Accept what you can. If there is anything here which can give you pleasure or could in any bad moment give you comfort I should be very happy. I love you so deeply that I can’t help feeling that it must ‘touch’ you somehow, even without your knowing it. Again, don’t be distressed. There is so much I should like to have said to you, & may one day. I don’t want to stop writing – I feel I’m leaving you again. My very very dear Queneau –
I
Trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. The profound disruption in basic trust, the common feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, and the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that might be found in social life, all foster withdrawal from close relationships. But the terror of the traumatic event intensifies the need for protective attachments. The traumatized person therefore frequently alternates between isolation and anxious clinging to others. […] It results in the formation of intense, unstable relationships that fluctuate between extremes.
These are fantastic pictures – these are figments, these visions of friends in absence, grotesque, dropsical, vanishing at the first touch of the toe of a real boot.
‘Six Winters,’ Tomas Tranströmer
1
In the black hotel a child is asleep.
And outside: the winter night
where the wide-eyed dice roll.2
An élite of the dead became stone
in Katarina Churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.3
One wartime winter when I lay sick
a huge icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, unexplained memory.4
Ice hangs down from the roof edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.5
On a side-track, an empty railway-carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.6
Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself
is floating before us. Our smiles
on the way home. Bewitched avenue.(trans. Robin Fulton)
The spectral possibility that gives lyric its urgency is not that the beloved isn’t listening, but that the beloved doesn’t exist. Prayer takes place at the edge of a similar abyss.
Little Bristling Soul 