A place where I used to live

Now in another town
You lead another life

- A place where we used to live, Mark Knopfler

This August I returned to York to visit friends, walk the city, buy books and reminisce. It was almost one year since last time I had been there and about a year and a half since I concluded my studies there. Even though I lived in York for a space of three months only I became very attached to the place, an attachment due both to the atmosphere of the city and - perhaps chiefly - the good friends I made during my stay there.

During my two previous sojourns in York I had resided in Constantine House, a Grade-II-listed accommodation run by the University of York in St Mary's, a street branching into Bootham. It was here I had met and made friends with my fellow residents, it was here I had experienced some of my fondest memories from my days in York and it was here I became a Constantine, a part of a community comprised of people I deeply respect and whose company I enjoyed. We had bonded over mutual interests, a common place of residence and an evolving animosity towards the accommodation office in their arrogant treatment of the students.

This time around, however, I had to seek my lodgings elsewhere. I no longer knew anyone at Constantine House, a new generation of students had occupied the precinct and I was estranged from a house once the hub of my student days. However, since I am a nostalgic character I found it hard to accept this loss and one day I was strolling through the Yorkshire Museum gardens I made my way through Marygate Lane and walked past Constantine House to remember and to once again see the place that still means quite a lot to me.

Everything is gone
But my heart is hanging on 

-  A place where we used to live, Mark Knopfler

Piers Plowman

(...) til I gan awake

- The Vision of Piers Plowman, William Langland

Last week I finished reading The Vision of Piers Plowman, a 14th-century unrhymed alliterative poem in Middle English, written by a cleric of minor orders, William Langland (c.1330-c.1386), of whom little is known beyond his Worcestershire provenance and his career as a London psalter-clerk. The poem exists in four versions, Z, A, B and C, written within the timeframe c.1365-c.1386, although the authenticity of Z is still a matter of contention. It was Walter Skeat who gave the poem its title in the late 1800s while working on what came to be its standard edition for about a century, a task that took about 20 years to complete. The revision of the B text was conducted by A. V. C. Schmidt.

 
I no longer remember how I came to learn about Piers Plowman, but I suspect it was during a course on the Late Middle Ages in the spring of 2009 and the work caught my interest fairly quickly. Shortly afterwards I ordered the Oxford World Classics edition, but became repulsed when I discovered this was a Modern English prose rendition. Fortunately I came upon the Everyman edition by chance during my first visit to York the autumn of that year. It did, however, take me quite a while to find time for the read itself, and after years of waiting, aborted beginnings and other preoccupations I finished the prologue one day I was waiting for my supervisor to get back to me on a thesis draft. By that time I had taken a course in Middle English romance at the University of York and thus become better acquainted with the language, and I believe this gave me the courage I so far had lacked to undertake the enterprise.

The Vision of Piers Plowman. or Piers Plowman for short, is a magnificent and challenging read. The narrator of the poem speaks of himself accordingly: "'I have lyved in londe,' quod I, 'my name is Longe Wille.'" and through a succession of dreams he conducts a search for the elusive Piers Plowman and the figures Dowel, Dobet and Dobest who will lead the Christians away from their irreligion and to the true Christian Church. This dreamwalk (and here be spoilers) brings Longe Wille to a wide range of allegories depicting his contemporary England, Biblical episodes, virtues and vices in a manner that spoke to the common man and highborn alike through a range of similes and a vocabulary echoing the life a 14th-century Englishman was familiar with. Christ is spoken of in chivalric terms who is jousting in Jerusalem to die on the rood, the titular character, Piers Plowman, is Simon Peter, the head of the true Church, Unitee, while Dowel, Dobet and Dobest are personifications signifying the three stages of Christ's life on earth, Dobest being his ultimate sacrifice on the cross. These things are not properly revealed until passus XIX and from the Prologue onwards the reader is kept in the dark as to the true nature of these particular allegories. I found this quest surprisingly suspenseful, despite the fact that the intervals between each time they are mentioned are both tangential and prolix, but William Langland - the author, as distinguished from Longe Wille the narrator - masterfully makes their names pop up with sufficient frequency to keep the reader alert to the true goal of his protagonist.

The poem is first of all an exploration of and an elegy over how Christians have failed to follow the teachings of Christ, and how mankind is punished for their sundry sins. William Langland is adamant that the plagues and dearths of the 14th century owed their occurrences to the wickedness of mankind, and he is equally adamant that the chief cause of these failings are the haughty clergy - more preoccupied with philosophy than pastoral work - and the shortcomings of the king and his advisors. It is stated that the most true Christians are the plowmen, the shepherds and the common labourers who conduct their business faithfully and do not sink into vice. However, although the author (and narrator, no distinction between them are needed on this level) are eager to have the Church and society undergo a reform, they do not want to abolish the institutions. The king is a necessity, it is stated, whose absence would be catastrophic. Similarly the forces of true Christianity - Conscience, Contricion and Cardynale Vertues to name just a few - are not bent on destroying the Church but to replace it with the true Holy Church, that of Unitee, a place where all Christians should unite. This is made especially clear in the concluding episode - passus XX - where the various Christian personifications are fighting against the forces of Antichrist led by Coveitise besieging the Church of Unitee. At this juncture Coveitise and his ally Symonye have already chased Good Feith flee from the halls of Westminster, illustrating the state of the secular rulership very poignantly. The state of the clergy proves equally detrimental for at the height of battle Conscience calls:

'Help, Clergie, or ellis I falle

Thorugh inparfite preestes and prelates of holy Chirche!'

Freres herden hym crye, and comen hym to helpe -

Ac for thei kouthe noght wel hir craft, Conscience forsook hem.

- Passus XX, lines 228-31

In other words not even the monks who followed Conscience into the newly established Unitee are sufficiently schooled in the craft of Christian love, the craft Conscience asks for in this passage. Inevitably Unitee falls, a fall brought about by Frere Flaterere (Flattery) who in the guise of a surgeon is allowed into the church to help Contricion who is badly wounded. This illustrates perfectly how the medieval mind perceived the role of the clergy: as spiritual doctors. Frere Flaterere, however, proves to be a bad doctor and fails - deliberately - in his task. After the fall of Unitee Conscience goes wide in the world in search of Piers Plowman and then Longe Wille wakes up.

From the 14th-century Luttrell psalter.

William Langland has in this poem created a very powerful social and religious critique whose allegories are deeply human and whose narrator is painfully aware of the human condition. Towards the end of the poem, after Longe Wille wakes up from one of his dreams, he describes how he is troubled with gout and impotence, and how aging afflicts him after the personification of old age - Elde - has ridden over his skull and left its imprint in the waning of his hair:

And Elde anoon after hym, and over myn heed yede,

And made me balled bifore and bare on the croune:
So harde he yede over myn heed it wole be sene evere.

- Passus XX, lines 183-85

Although aware of human frailty William is also concerned with mankind as a being wrought by a divine Creator:

For be a man fair or foul, it falleth noght for to lakke

The shap ne the shaft that God shoop hymselve

-Passus XI, lines 394-95

For man was maad of swich a matere he may noght wel asterte [escape]

-Passus XI, line 400

Mankind's divine provenance makes it holy, but this also calls for humility. "Although men made bokes, God was the maister" (Passus XII, line 101) William states and it is in part lack of such humility that has caused the current detrimental state, that and the workings of poorly schooled priests:

Right so out of Holy Chirche alle yveles spredeth

There inparfit preesthode is, prechours and techeris.

- Passus XV, lines 92-95

or:

Grammer, the ground of al, bigileth now childre:
For is noon of thise newe clerkes - whoso nymeth hede -

That kan versifie faire ne formaliche enditen,

Ne naught oon among an hundred that an auctor can construwe,

Ne rede a lettre in any language but in Latyn or in Englissh.

- Passus XV, lines 371-75

Piers Plowman is, in sum, a powerful call for reform of a failing and dilapidated society. This struck a chord in William Langland's contemporaneity as can be witnessed by a letter from John Ball, a leading figure in the 1381 rebellion, to the peasants of Essex, in which he alluded to the figure of Piers Plowman. The poem was very popular and has survived in more than sixty manuscripts. It is tempting to say that this popularity can be ascribed to Langland's message being very apt for his time and succeeding times, but this is conjecture on my part. For any medievalist and any Christian this text is a fascinating window into ages past and a thought-provoking search to the original state of Christianity, presented with a timeless vitriol and occasional humour. It may not cause an awakening - and should perhaps not either - but it is well worth the time spent reading.

A place of one's own

A little lowly Hermitage it was
Downe in a dale, hard by a forests side,
- The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser

A short while back I read an article in the Huffington post about the retreats of famous writers and I was thrilled to see a selection of the various nooks and cells to which people repaired for the sake of literary production. I have myself for quite some time been fascinated by the idea of leaving the world and humanity behind for a brief space of time and dedicate oneself to the task of writing, thinking and reading.

Since I am currently overdue on my MA thesis I needed to do some editing this summer. This can be very difficult to get done when there are duties to take into consideration at home, when your days are not entirely your own and when things move a bit too fast when they shouldn't move fast at all. Consequently I took two Sundays off, installed myself in my late paternal grandparents' house and brought with me food and other material I needed for the work.

I established my tryst by the window in my boyhood room and placed my books within reach, put the kettle (or rather a pan with water in it) on in the kitchen and started working. It was delightful to get back to my thesis after weeks of non-academic labour and I found an immense serenity in the task, letting the hours pass by only to break my work flow whenever tea or food was needed.

Late in the evening of the first Sunday I finished after I had edited the second and third chapters, leaving the fourth and fifth to the next day when I realised I was no longer paying proper attention to my own words. The rest of the evening was spent reading Joseph Brodsky's Rome Elegies while dabbling a bit with poetry of my own while listening to a deluge hammering down at the world outside.

The next session was this Sunday and lasted only the afternoon since the task at hand was less daunting and I had already managed to get some of it done earlier in the day. Again I found my room to be a perfect anchorite cell for this purpose, and I found the house very well situated for a writer at work since I could - when needed - step out on the verandah and stare idly at the water, smell the summer and observe my native community at a small distance.

When today's alloted load was done I retreated to my bed briefly and relaxed with the words of Pablo Neruda. I always find poetry to be a good diversion after time spent reading things demanding more focus and there is a particular joy in reading 20th century verse in a house where the 20th century still lingers in every wall and corner, and where nostalgia makes it easier to absorb the sense of longing one so often find in poets of that period.

In response to Titian

The London National Gallery is currently housing an exhibition called MetamorphosisTitian 2012, launched this very day (July 11) and celebrating the 16th-century Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio known by his nicknames Belluno or, more famously, Titian (1488/90-1576). The exhibition features commissioned works by contemporary artists and poets responding to three of Titian's paintings after Ovid's Metamorphoses, three paintings that occupy the exhibition's centrestage. Being an admirer of Titian's work myself I became very enthusiastic to learn about this and I have just begun to immerse myself in the project, which is a part of the Cultural Olympiad's London 2012 Festival and features poets like Simon Armitage, George Szirtes, Frances Leviston and numerous others. Personally I was most excited by the inclusion of Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney, whose chilling poem "Actaeon" can be heard here.

Inspired by this exhibition I decided to put up one of my own responses to one of Titian's works, albeit a paiting very different from the dramatic and mythological illustrations of Ovid's poetry. The work in question is the famous Venus of Urbino from 1538, commissioned two years earlier by the duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo della Rovere.

Venus Couchant

After Titian's Venus of Urbino

I notice how she eyed you from the start,

Her playful eyes fast fixed in your direction,

But this you noticed only for the art,

It was included merely for perfection;
You just percieved her looks, not her affection.

Imagine then, Belluno, for a girl

Of her estate to show herself like this,

For one short while the centre of your world

Beholding how you worked, then think: "this is

A handsome man, oh would he dared to kiss!"

And you? You eyed her maidens and her house,

Her little lapdog sleeping on the bed;
Perhaps this negligence was what aroused

Her smile and that coy tilting of the head,

While you were painting furniture instead.

Perchance she thought that you were such a man

Her maids would whisper of in nightly hours,

A man to kiss her lips and take her hand

And lead her to a dark secluded tower

Or let some fragrant grove serve as a bower.

She would not know the full depths of her dream,

Her being only young and innocent,

Almost a child, not more than seventeen,

Yet with a stare so yearning, reverent

Which your stern silence seemed but to augment.

And so she blushed, ah, yes, you caught that, too,

Yet failed to see her passion was that strong;
You were the world to her, Belluno, you,

A man of fifty years and her so young;
You noticed but her tresses, how they hung.

She loved you, dear Belluno, verily,

She loved you for your movements and your grace,

She studied both, you see, quite avidly

And mapped your features with her dreaming gaze,

So dreaming she might conjure up your face.

These were her thoughts, you see them plainly there

Made manifest in blushes and her eyes;
To all but you, of course, they seem so clear,

But you did never heed them, and likewise

Will never she heed any husband's eyes.

- November 01-02 2010

Reading Jane Griffiths - Part I

A couple of months back I decided to explore the works of female poets, having realised that the vast majority of poets in my library are men. This led me to the works of Jane Griffiths, a poet born in 1970 and perhaps most famous for her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and Poetic Authority. I purchased her first collection, A Grip on Thin Air, and read it with great anticipation after I had browsed through the tantalising titles in the index. I realised, from the titles alone, that Jane Griffiths is the sort of poet I very much want to like and admire. After having read her first collection, however, I could not make up my mind what I thought of her poetry and I decided to dedicate two blogpost to how I read Jane Griffiths so as to elucidate the matter for myself. I have decided to make this an opus germinatum, a twin-work with a prose component and a poetic component, in the manner of Sedulius Scotus and Aldhelm of Malmesbury. This blogpost is the poetic part and it treats my reaction to A Grip on Thin Air. The poem is not exhaustive in this regard, it does not explore all the motley particulars of my reaction to this collection, but it sums up the general idea. Once I have read her second collection, Icarus on Earth, I will compose the prose part.

Middle-Worlds

For Jane Griffiths

He, when thinking of her poetry, imagines fields

that playfully stretch towards the horizon,

the artificially divided landscapes

and skylines begging travellers to play catch.

He imagines the middle-worlds of airports

whose transient inhabitants are reduced

to numbers and last names, whose faces

are by the edifice made faceless, mute and blank.

He imagines the kingdoms that the airports make:

realms of their own reality whose strange laws

dictate their own geography and claim

that Schiphol is not really a part of Holland.

He imagines the armadas of aeroplanes,

quaint homeless things on whom they all depend:

the kingdoms and their rulers and their denizens

whose gyrovague existences come and go.

He imagines the sun through windows. Behind glass

the sun reflects in metals and the fleeting clouds

and sometimes, almost taunting, can be seen

singeing the horizon in its constant calm.

He imagines this and more of these conjured kingdoms

when her versed pages pass beneath his gaze,

perfunctorily and well beyond his scrutiny,

drifting but leaving imprinted memories.

- May 27 2012

Author or Anonymity

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

- Emily Dickinson

In 1967 Roland Barthes claimed that to give a text an author was an imposition to that text. This view was presented in his essay The Death of the Author in which he argued that it was the reader, not the writer, who gave the text its unity and that the writer was a thing of literatures past. Barthes also parenthetically reprimanded the earlier school of New Criticism for not having done away with the author, despire the school's focus on studying the text itself. This idea of a divorce between author and text has recently become very pertinent due to a relatively new literary trend, the autobiographical novel, or - should you prefer - the fictionalised autobiography. The emergence of such novels have caused reviewers and critics to prophesise that the border between fiction and non-fiction will not just be blurred but eventually completely erased.

My personal go-to figurehead of this trend is John Maxwell Coetzee whose autobiographical trilogy - comprising Boyhood, Youth and Summer - chronicles the life of John Maxwell Coetzee told through the voices of a handful of narrators. Although the books are autobiographical in the sense that they are written by the (living) author John Maxwell Coetzee, none of the narrators are Coetzee himself despite John Maxwell Coetzee being the protagonist of all the three novels, although he, interestingly, is dead in the last novel, Summer. In the first two books the narrator is an impersonal, third-person presence that reduces the protagonist to "him", while the last book features a range of narrators, most importantly fictionalised versions of persons who have been important figures in John Maxwell Coetzee's life.

Lately I have become increasingly fascinated with this particulary literary fiction: the creation of an eponymous protagonist who remains separate from the author. This in itself is of course not new. Marcel Proust's Remeberance of Things Past (or, should you prefer, In Search of Lost Time), is perhaps the most monumental work in the umbrella category under which "autobiography", "memoir", "pseudo-autobiography" and "fictionalised autobiography" all may be heaped, and naturally Proust has served as a point of comparison for this recent surge of fictionalised autobiography.

In this genre the author is proved to be very much alive, for the author lends not only his hand but also his name to the narrator or the protagonist. Consequently, however, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the author/writer and the narrator/protagonist as his or her persona, and despite the expressed independence between the two figures the exact nature of this independence remains elusive.

In addition to the resurrection of the author there is also another interesting consequence to be found in the wake of the fictionalised autobiography, namely that all pretension of anonymity - which is a natural consequence of the author's death - has been utterly abandoned. By writing books whose protagonists are eponymous the author can be more certain of being remembered by readers, reviewers and literary canonists, and their fame may have a greater duration than had their protagonists had more inventive names. It is not to say that this is the desired consequence of the authors - the reasons for writing such novels are as diverse as the novels themselves - but it is nonetheless a natural, if not sought after, consequence. To ensure one's fame in this very public manner is emblematic of our day and age when various forms of social media allows an individual to expose him- or herself to the chosen extent and claim a small spotlight somewhere in cyberspace, not entirely unlike Emily Dickinson's poetic frogs.

There is, however, another kind of fame, a kind of fame that has not taken up arms against the mutability of the world and the inexorable passing of the flesh, a kind of fame that requires dead authors and that to some minds is the preferable alternative. This is the anonymous fame. It may at first sound like a contradiction in terms but anonymity does not preclude a person from becoming famous, sometimes perhaps quite the opposite. To be anonymous means that you present your work and your work alone to be judged, leaving no embarrassing details from one's personal life to hamper the praise of peers contemporary or of ages hence. Anonymity also lends an air of venerability and age to a work since it can not be traced, and this is summed up very beautifully in a poem by Manuel Machado (1874-1947), translated by J. M. Cohen for Penguin Book of Spanish Verse:

Tal es la gloria, Guillén,                     Such is the glory, Guillén,

de los que escriben cantares:           Of those who write songs:

oír decir a la gente                           To hear the people say

que no los ha escrito nadie.              That no one wrote these.

- Coplas by Manuel Machado

There is a glory to be found in anonymity, perhaps a satisfaction derived from the fact that your work has endured without your name to aid it along, or that your work endures without you, that your shadow extends further than yourself. This line of thought is perhaps alien to our times where a name means quite a lot, whether it is your original name or one you have assumed. Interestingly enough, however, we find the same line of thought pursued by Machado in the dedication of a well-known Medieval historiography, namely Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain finished in 1136. In his dedication to the Earl of Gloucester, Henry I's illegitimate son, Geoffrey asks him to correct and embellish the work to the effect that "it must no longer be considered as the product of Geoffrey of Monmouth's small talent" (translated by Lewis Thorpe). Here, too, we see that what Geoffrey considers crucial is the fruit of his labours, not his own personal glory (at least that's what he states). For the benefit of his work Geoffrey is more than happy to relinquish the claim of authorship and recede into oblivion. As history turned out this did not happen, but it is nonetheless interesting to see that an author's zeal makes him willing to do away with himself as author, an end much in the vein of Roland Barthes' dictum.

What, then, is the favourable, most honourable course of action? To retain one's name or to pursue one's own oblivion? It is of course very tempting to praise the idea of receding "into the common being", to paraphrase Sir Thomas Browne, but as a historian I prefer very much to have a name - if only a fake one - to attach to a literary corpus. Personally I feel that a writer, artist, architect, musician or any other craftsman has an obligation to posterity to reveal his name, but in this day of self-exposure I would not mind if people were at least somewhat more conscious of anonymity as an alternative.

The Deep and Thorny Way: Going Twitter

For just at that moment the light came over the hill, and there was a mighty twitter in the branches.
- The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien

After about a week of considering pros and cons I have at last decided to join twitter, at least for a trial arrangement. For quite some time I found twitter to be an unattractive form of social exhibitionism, a place where people spew out mundane details of their very mundane lives for all to see. It was predominantly this notion that kept me away for so long, for my life is as mundane as most other people's and I was satisfied with a weekly status update and the odd album on Facebook as my exhibitionist outlet (and this blog, of course). Then I realised two things that slowly made me change perspective. First of all Facebook is not an apt forum for the various things I would actually like to share with my friends, that is quotes and various finds from my journeys through books, details about my research and discoveries from the material world at large. Secondly I was reminded that although people have a tendency to litter the cyberspace with personal details of little or no interest to anyone but themselves, I did not have to do that and nor did I have to follow people who do that.

Twitter appears to me a great forum for keeping in touch with the academic world and friends whose updates you find interesting or care about sufficiently to enjoy even the mundane aspect from their lives. I have not yet decided all the things I want to do with my twitter account, but at this preliminary stage I find it to be a nice venue for sharing quotes from various books, articles and poems I've read, constellations of words I would like other people to know about. I will also use it as a means to promote my blog. Aside from this, however, I do not know where the tweets will take me, but stay tuned for developments.

For those who would like to have their lives potentially enriched by quotes and discoveries, my twitter account can be found here: https://twitter.com/#!/HopeSteffen. Followers or suggestions are all welcome.