Negative Capability

Last week I crossed a space between the territories of architectural criticism and creative writing at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, and the re-vamped State Library. I enjoyed hearing about psychoanalytic interpretations of home and art from Katarina Wadstein Macleod, and it was very cool to meet Katja Grillner from Stockholm who spoke about shifting place perceptions. Howard Raggatt’s “Not Songs” carved out urban madrigals from the chaos of sound, while Niki Kalms brought us raunch culture from King St, Melbourne with its after hours strip clubs and lap pole dancing venues.

These low res pics are taken from Kirilpa Bridge.

Another bridge I’ve walked recently has been Michele Leggott’s Home and Away, a Trans-Tasman digital link connecting poets from New Zealand, Australia, Asia and the States. This is a diverse digital poetry experience of an exceptional standard, and you should check it out. You might like to contribute to the poems and conversations…

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/home&away/sydney.asp

While walking a bridge, one may experience its steel geometries, the sway and oscillations of suspension, the panorama of rivers, harbours, the modernist or brutalist facades of skyscrapers, restaurants and boatsheds. One of my favourite bridges is the Glebe Island Bridge, quite mesmeric to drive across, particularly at night, when there’s not much traffic. I like too, the Brooklyn Bridge, its spun wire ropes over East river connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn. Hart Crane described its “swift/Unfractioned idiom” in a praise poem.

There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

from TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton, Four Quartets.

In this passage Eliot affirms the experience of something abstract, that is deeply and near-flawlessly realised, the intersection between time and eternity, the point at which memory and imagination reconfigure the present moment, renewing time. Barry Spur remarks in an essay how positive the perspective of this narrator is in comparison to the disillusioned and despairing middle-aged Prufrock, for whom time is repetitive, a monotony, and the instrument of a social facade that cannot be reversed. In Four Quartets, Eliot’s quest for meaning, the still point in the turning world takes place in language, which is both the source and the substance, the image and the voice, casting and uttering itself into being. The poem is a not merely a literary, but a philosophical, an aesthetic act.

(By way of aside, I read a beautiful sequence of poems yesterday in the latest PN Review by Jee Leong Koh. “What the River Says,” in particular, shares some of these themes.)

Eliot was influenced deeply by Eastern spirituality although he was a theologically committed Anglican. There are exoticised traces of Hinduism in The Wasteland, and a Buddhist sympathy that is evident in his expressions of spiritual truth, as acceptance of death in life, and of what exists beyond the spatio-temporal order. Time is crucial here. Eliot is saying that although we are liberated from consciousness in the present moment, which is space, when we enter consciousness we enter time, we rely on memory and delay and therefore language to reconstruct and appraise our experience of what it is to be human in this world. Something new from something old is the quintessential modernist project, and there is only so much of the real which we can endure. Under this mutability, language cracks.

It’s interesting to observe this tension between the Buddhist recognition of impermanent mental states and the writer’s compulsion to explore them. The act of writing is liberating, freeing us from reality, when it should dare to say beauty or to say truth; as moments in meditation when Logos, or thoughts are abandoned, and the experience of light enters the body. The body feels lighter, cooler, as if a sea breeze were passing through the bones. This is not a power, but the reverse of a power, a spiritual happiness, without the contamination of thought, which I would chose over writing, if the work of writing wasn’t somehow asking me to be responsible.

Four Quartets contains patterns, repetitions and contrary motion, which are the juxtapositions of music, the apposition of words, forming cycles rather than straight lines of meaning, invoking waves, rather than forces. It’s worth noting the simplicity of the adverbs and adjectives, their abstractions: “empty”, “dry”, “vibrant”, and the repetition of nouns, objects like “pool,” “bird,” “flowers.” How skilful then, that the poem sequence is so dreamlike, incantatory, a dissonant, intense music, which feels more polished than his earlier work, lacking the irresolute conflict of The Wasteland.

Written in the late 1930′s, Four Quartets seems far removed from much contemporary verse that is dripping with diction, materiality, the excesses and fetishes of language. We live in times when we are consumed by language, by text, as if consumption were our god, our blog, our necessary angel. But today, I have no need for plinky prompts. I have Eliot’s roses @—>—>

Assoc Professor Barry Spur” The Centre of Meaning in Eliot’s Four Quartets“

(Photograph: From the Arts Mildura website)

This week the 16th Mildura Writers’ Festival opens. Located in the charming township of Mildura by the Murray river in ambient café venues and the lecture halls of La Trobe campus, the festival brings together some of the country’s finest writers and thinkers, yet has an international trace, being directed by Paul Kane, eminent poet and academic from New York. This year’s guests include Morag Fraser, Nobel Prize runner, Les Murray, the inspirational Kate Jennings, whose memoir, Trouble has recently been published by Black Inc, as well as some wonderful poets: LK Holt, Lisa Gorton, Peter Goldsworthy, Robert Gray. The poet/translator Stephen Sartarelli, known for his translations of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels and for his translations of classic French and Italian poetry is another guest.

The festival has a cult following; several of my friends are attending this year, though gatecrashers may be bounced. This is a sophisticated, witty and warm literary event not to be missed.

Book Online
http://www.artsmildura.com.au/writers/writers_packages.asp

Pastiche and irony, structure and fragility, decadence and utility, are the contrary themes of Lorna Murray’s conceptual designs. Her images explore and interrogate the personae of woman as cultural product, as fetish commodity, as mirror selves in the absence of what is real. In these costumes, fantasy offers the opportunity to confront and renegotiate socially structured identities. Dressed in manipulated orange satin, the curvaceous female body adopts conventional postures to embolden her subversive gestures against backdrops of linear corrugations and symmetrical urban surfaces. Or dressed in tin, rivets, pink silk and fur, she becomes a cyborg accessorised with recycled objects: taps, clocks, spools, purchase tags.

At a symbolic level, there is an interplay between the patriarchal order, the material and the anima. The feminine instinct, which is supple and vulnerable is expressed by the use of decadent fabrics: feathers, luxuriant velvets, lush, embroidered surfaces. Yet the designs are exaggerated in their layering. The manipulation of fabrics evokes memory and cultural boundaries, which stereotype and frame the female form into a sexualised object, a product to be used and exchanged for the pleasure of men. Found objects of everyday use resonate with the anxieties of consumption and sustainability.

Murray’s work wears its sophistication lightly, with fluid referencing of the historical and cultural styles by which women have been shaped. Victorian flourishes of bloomers, lingerie and corsets mash with 80’s fluoros, with 50’s classique, with hints of tartan, and New York sunglasses. Colour becomes iconic. Red is the colour of paradoxes, suggesting danger, vitality, passion, and prostitution. Yellow evokes the intellectual, the stimulant; while orange is at once the shock absorber, the subdued and the seductive, the spectacle of celebrity and the immortality of peach. Pink is chidlike; the woman drowning in fairy floss, in disproportionately sized hats and flouncy fabrics as she critiques and exploits the likeness of herself. Through her work Murray unfixes the codes of female subjectivity as her heroines venture beyond the fetish to a space of semantic indeterminacy.

Adorned in vintage cotton hand-embroidered apron, with suitcase in hand, this contemporary heroine is historically framed in quiet defiance of a domesticity that no longer tethers her.