Introduction to the Notes to the four: “Songs of Nocence”
Don’t feel obliged to read this just because it’s
here (as if you would feel such obligation)
If you’ve been lucky enough
to have come across William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and
Experience”
[1]
, you’ll realise why there is actually some sense in calling
this volume “Songs of Nocence”
[2]
. Of course, if
you’ve not stumbled across Blake’s beautiful little songs &/or had
the luck to take a degree in English Literature, then you may not mind me
mentioning a few things that could help you get beneath the surfaces of
Fox’s songs. With this in mind, as Fox’s editor, I’ve put some notes
about each song and illustration here at the back of the book which I hope
you’ll find useful; but please do not think of them as ‘explanations’
of the Songs. They are simply
hints about the way Fox works, indicating what basic poetic ‘machinery’
he is using. These hints are
just a start, and not necessary for the straightforward pleasure the songs
can give as you meet, say, just the sound of them in passing.
In saying this, I do not overlook William Empson’s 1930s “The
main argument for Pure Sound is the extreme oddity of the way poetry acts;
the way lines seem beautiful without reason;”
[3]
; nor his cautionary words (which, if you know them already are
not required – by you – at this juncture):
In a sense it [poetic meaning] cannot be explained in
language, because to a person who does not understand it any statement of it
is as difficult as the original one, while to a person who does understand
it a statement of it has no meaning because no purpose.
[4]
Of course, neither Fox nor I agree exactly with this,
neat and plausible though it is. There
is the paradoxical and probably unintended consequence to this line of
thought that poetry is uniquely inexplicable, and that there is no help
for this condition.
I hope these hints, the
notes, will be of interest in themselves.
As for me, I’ve always felt when reading a book of bare poems
presented to me out of the blue, straight off the shelf as it were, that a
few considerate facts and hints from the poet or editor would have been a
great help, would have saved me a lot of time I hadn’t got, or saved me
from skipping the whole thing at who knows what loss.
Such hints needed only to be just enough to put me on the track of
what the poet was up to, to give me confidence that I could trust my own
observation and consequent feelings. Once
started I could make up the rest for myself and go on as far as I wanted, or
could get to. Of course, you
may find reading the whole of each note a bit of a pain, if so just glean
what’s a help to you and skip the rest.
It’s probably a wise approach in general as there is so much
information about almost anything available nowadays that no normal person
can possibly take it all in, nor should try.
We must all continue to edit ‘life’ as we go, or be crushed by
the weight of its infinite feather.
In Fox’s view poetry is no
less or more explicable than, say, mathematics.
One can ask is (are) “Four Quartets”
[5]
no more or less explicable than “E = m.c2 ”
[6]
; both being, as it were, meaningful objects in the phenomenal
world; while being, in any case, in their own ways, bombshells reverberating
in the collective human psyche. The
relationship between “Four Quartets” and such Einsteinian mathematics is
profound (according Fox) at their points of mutual ambiguity which reside in
the interstices between the linguistics (‘machinery’) of their arts and
the substance (‘poetry’) of their meanings; both try to address the
stillness whereof human movement, time and space are in abeyance,
de-conceived, unfleshed, dis-communicated with Mars
[7]
, forming their meaning between the quanta and waves of
humansense wherein nothing is shaped, but whereof the whole of space
[8]
accommodates.
Whether the poetry is
inexplicable in itself, the stuff that skates unwittingly over meaningless
but attractive surfaces, or is actually about (as Eliot and Einstein) the
inexplicable, it often seems remote to the ordinary mortal. Such a mere mortal is probably part of a ‘market’
constructed by an elite that defines, or declares, as it were, some poetry
good, great or genuine literature and therefore worth buying.
Such construction relies on some sort of consensus among university
literature departments and publishers’ prize committees, or that other,
though overlapping, poetry typified by “Poetry Please” type programs
[9]
, or the cosy ‘Motionesque’
[10]
chat when contemporary ‘in’ poets groom each other nicely
for an audience already ‘in-the-know’.
Thus, ‘Poetry’ is often presented on the basis that readers
(participants
[11]
) are assumed either to be members of the graduate-in-literature
establishment with loads of relevant education and with, as it were, a
special sensitivity to help them work out what the poet is up to, &/or
they have the time, background and inclination to spend yards of their lives
re-searching the stuff of the poem and the who of the poet in order to get
into it; and, of course, to have the naiveté that allows them to assume
such effort will be rewarded and the deviousness to ensure that it must.
Or that readers are already well informed adherents.
Thus, much wretched poetry is encased with assumption &/or
commentary cleverer by far than itself.
This often means that even buying a book or two (or more) written by
one of the graduate-in-literature establishment promoting themselves through
the work, sometimes on an industrial scale, and in spite of their best
intentions, may in any case lead nowhere, or to that uncommon and shifting
ground cultivated only by their fellow specialists intent on feeding with
them on the fodder of disputation.
The diversity of our lives
and experiences is now so great that it is unwise to assume that readers
have natural common ground (even share a common English language
[12]
), that they naturally have loads of time to spare, and naturally
have not been brought up in a video environment, do not have attention spans
for the particular of more than a few seconds, and live (perceive) in a
world lately dazzlingly ‘enhanced’ by fictionalising storylines through
the medium of computer softened games imagery that leave the medium as the
message
[13]
, and that readers have naturally remained especially sensitive
to written poetic language, its forms and diction, and can cope with
sentences more than five words strung.
The notes herein are merely stepping stones to help avoid the
treatise that waits patiently to engulf us all.
The stones are for stepping on and not to be picked up and used to
build a facade behind which the songs could be safely disguised as if they
were mediocre poetry. They are
to help you get to the other side where the poet is and the songs sing
without getting bogged down in the mire of busyness that divides you.
Thus, to get close to the
“Songs” it’s probably helpful to know that Fox is deeply involved with
the new cyberspatial media (in the jargon, Information & Communication
Technologies, new ICTs, all that stuff
[14]
). His view of such
‘stuff’ is very close to Gibson’s
[15]
, although less optimistic.
His early consciousnesses, like mine, were fundamentally formed by
the wireless, comics (Beano etc), science fiction, war books, and the
Saturday morning cinema of 1950s England; yes he is English, much traveled,
and from Wessex where he now lives (2002).
So, it has been a short step into cyberspace for both of us without
an intervening video phase; seemingly his work demands longer attention
spans than are currently the mode for coping with the video-song culture
dumbfounding us now. Fox is
certainly up to plots and layerings, but his techniques (that poetic
machinery) allows his poetry to be attacked in short accumulative bursts,
frenzies of engagement. Each
burst can break through to an image of his poem’s meaning.
Each image imagined forms in the psyche (memory?) until it be-comes
an ingredient forming an ever more existent shape coherent with a meaningful
hole wherein the space of its meaning is contained.
Thus, the idea of longer attention spans is perhaps misleading;
rather the attentions need to be numerous if short or if long.
In this regard Empson’s caution while interesting (he is always
interesting) is redundant. And the consideration that the young having apparently short
attention spans which is necessarily a bad thing may turn out to be deeply
misleading. It may not be the
span of the attention, but, as always, what it is that is attended to that
is the problematic for written poetry as we enter the 21st
century.
The “Songs” herein, and
this introduction, and the notes, are obviously presented through a
conventional book form medium, in which written words predominate among the
pictures which subserve. In any
case, Gibson’s ‘cyberspace’
[16]
although a new word is only apparently a new sphere of unreality
in which the human imagination can subsist.
The impression that cyberspace is new is that it seems to hide in the
face of new technology. Thus,
it seems screened from the past as if the thought of it is itself newly
originated. Of course, this is
mere fallacy, it has taken the ‘place’ of thought-to-be-found through
the-imagination, suspension-of-disbelief,
suspension-of-convenient-habits-of-mind, a door-to-perception behind which
it was possible for ‘you’ to get and operate your verb-to-BE with
impunity, as if reality was (is) some-where else.
Reality was always and ever ineluctably ‘somewhere’ else; reality
cannot ever be ‘here’. The
song “Home Sweet Home” is a good example of Fox’s ‘cybennialism’
and in this respect is conversant with Albert Smith’s “utterance of the
true thing of it that is”
[17]
.
Well, there’s loads of this
kind of philosophical stuff on the justWords website http://www.justwords.demon.co.uk (which
seems the right space for it). If
you’d like to find out more, go and have a look, it’s not that bad
actually (actually?). Here (or
there) was where my coinage of “cybennialism” was originally coined to
describe, as it were, a new age of post~post-modernism.
The site houses, among other work, including Alfred Smith’s and
Albert Monostone’s, the Thomas Albert Fox Library and lays out all Fox’s
works to date by index and provides a good range of the actual texts as they
stood at the last update. As
Fox’s editor, I maintain the site within the limited resources available.
Fox, of course, is a peculiarly isolated individual who works alone,
almost secretively, without help or encouragement from anyone; except me, of
course, although I cannot say I am always sure what exactly he is up to.
Anyway, it is because I’ve
the benefit of suffering a close relationship with Tom Fox, that I’ve
taken the trouble to save you a bit of time in a busy world by, as I’ve
said, providing notes at the end of the book about each of the songs in the
hope that this will help to draw out the nuances of the sometimes very tough
poetic logic lying behind the simple beauty of each song.
Therefore, once again, please do not treat the notes as explanations,
but as helpful “openers”, although they do perhaps appear as rather
extensive critical apparatus. Anyone
will tell you that poetry cannot be explained as such. Fox is a bit defensive on his use of poetic machinery
[18]
. Machinery seems
somewhat an artificial term to conjoin with the word poetry, although Fox
has said to me on more than one occasion that there is nothing more
artificial than poetry. Of
course, his concern is not that poets don’t use well established and
sometimes novel techniques, but that the machinery he has chosen to use is
poetically ‘incorrect’. Poetical
correctness has led the way until poetry has reserved for itself a minute
and somewhat breathless place in an outer space over populated by members of
Arts Councils, Culture Officials, PR manipulators with their ‘mediaevil’
[19]
cabals, publishers with reviewers and prize committees up their
sleeves and erstwhile worthies of the poetry establishment consorting with
the banal, and conflating novelty with originality, in which process heat
confuses light (wow hot news).
In regard to 'voice', Fox
persists in the use and over-use of rhyme and pun, ambiguity and picture, in
conjunction with all the other 'bits' of poetic machinery. He is keen on
machinery, especially the ghost of it, the ghost-in-the-machine
[20]
. It is to
this ghost or spirit of the poem that he looks, that which is beyond the
machinery, but inextricably and inexplicably of it, that which elides into
the explanatory elusiveness challenged, perhaps unsuccessfully, by Empson
all those years ago. A poem's
spirit is its meaning, is the right spirit, the gestaltist sum of the parts
conundrum and Gottdiener's
[21]
, Saussurian post-modernist machinery, that of language's
diachronic and synchronic double articulation etc.
The spirit transcends the parts and their articulation.
The words and their relations, who are the poem, wait in play for a
host, a reader, to take in the spirit of their meanings.
Such readers bring their own strange counsel to such guestly poems,
and as readers may imagine, even see, ghosts.
Fox uses the machinery of
rhyme extensively and intensively in some poems, so let me at least get the
old Miltonic chestnut out of the way. Yes,
Fox does know that rhyme has been given up, apparently because it led poor
poets into unoriginal sin. One
might suppose them captives, or at least dependents, of the heuristic powers
of rhyme, or of the mere ornament, the mechanical convenience
[22]
. Yes, and what
Milton wrote is as true today as it was then (how true).
It is well worth setting out what he actually wrote fairly, so we can
avoid using his rejection of "the troublesome and modern bondage of
Riming" as a cunning excuse for floating around on a lazy stream of
consciousness, or the stuff of ‘deadlinitus’ &/or the
‘inexplicability’ of ‘true’ poetry, indeed that a key characteristic
of true poetry is ‘inexplicableness’.
Not that Fox thinks Milton would subscribe to such daftness, had he
the opportunity now, though the implication of his subscription to Cromwell
is confusing, and not necessarily, perhaps, a recommendation as such. However, the use of Rhyme among Roundheads might in, any
case, have seemed somewhat unnecessary ornamentation, an unnecessary
embellishment, when the purer diction of heroic blank verse made it not only
easier to write down the grandiose stuff of his Paradise, but also had all
the benefits of appearing (paradoxically) splendidly politically correct,
flawed though that ultimately must turn out to be.
...; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of
Poem or good Verse, in longer works especially, But the Invention of a
barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed
since by the use of some modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to
their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint, to express many things
otherwise, and for the most part worse, then else they would have exprest
them.
[23]
Even though Milton admits to
rhyme being acceptable (to him) perhaps in shorter works, this is not the
point. He sees rhyme as a
constraint rather than an opportunity, he saw (in his own mind), of course,
that he could not possibly apply rhyme to any advantage, political or
poetic, in giving voice to Paradise Lost.
Indeed, the work involved in using rhyme well in such a grandiose
project would have slowed his progress massively, weighing heavily as it
inevitably would on both his intellect and his blind dependence on the
facility of his memory. Of
course, it may have been that his methodology of dictating and hearing
instantly the living words ‘played back’ by (the technology) his
daughter could have proved a powerful stimulant to his imagination, while
the cohesiveness of the poetic progression in Paradise Lost and Regained
cannot but have been strengthened by such a method of ‘writing’ adjunct
to his blindness. So, what of
the impact of the word processor?
[24]
The capability to
craft poetry or to cook its goose, perhaps both, seems at once created by
such technology. Is there some
truth in the argument that the methodology is the message?
However, rhyme in Fox's poems
are intentionally sound marriages of words and meanings. The rhyme of sound always has concomitance of meaning, as in
his poem about rhyme in time; such concomitance is often complex and not
always obvious; for example the internal (core) rhyming of
"grammar", "clamour" and "glamour"
[25]
, may begin to tell more
when the derivation of glamour with grammar is imbued with all the other
aspects of the poem and its soundings out.
Now isn't this world a perfect place
In which to make that special case
With words that fleet without a trace
Beyond the glitter of pure disgrace
Surfacing over its slippery face
Where you feel them grin and grimace
A moving grammar of empty space
And in the clamour of their
embrace
Confusing glamour with signs of grace
Casting light upon a human race
That ever circles at its daily pace
The pointless point that is its base.
[26]
Fox's “Gerry Adams” poem
is a good case in point, even to the internal rhyme "huddled" with
"muddled"
[27]
.
To the huddled masses who watch your lips conspire
And with muddled eyes can see your skin perspire
The meanness of your means toward the deadest end
The bomb, the bullet and the iron bars their sinful message send;
And we within our heart selves know the truth unfeigned
That murder is what murder is whatever else is gained.
But now a new colossus has broken free with arms upraised
Above the killed who in their price his peace with deathly silence
praised.
[28]
There is a certain telling justice in rhyming
"conspire" with "perspire" (the effect on tv);
"deadest end" with "message send"; "unfeigned"
with "is gained", and the internal literality of the lines,
referenced as they are to the true meaning of Sinn Fein
[29]
; and then there is the ghastly justice of liberty with her
"arms upraised" with "silence praised". Of course, Fox cannot publish "Inscriptions" as
such (or "English Wounds") without at least completing a number of
other poems. To do so would be
to invite the usual paltry accusations of bias against poor, hard done by
terrorists; generating even more misunderstanding than will follow any
publication of poems which go to the empty heart of these murderous fascists
[30]
, murderers who typify the inevitable fascist tendency inhabiting
or milking the murky fringes of all human societies past, present and
future. The poem’s use of the
completely crude and apparently spurious clash of meanings, of surfaces,
between the Irish ‘sinn fein’ and the meanings implicative of ‘sin’
and ‘feign’ in English are absolute depositories of the crass difference
exploited by the politically and economically self-interested who so crudely
divide and manipulate the communities.
Even the apparently silly
rhymes in the Jimmy
Carter poem are literally apt.
You were our boy blue eyed
We knew you never lied,
So what could we think
When you seemed to blink
With each nod and wink,
And throughout your trail
All we saw was your smile.
[31]
To "think" too much while you are on your
feet will cause you to "blink" giving away your real position
amongst each "nod and wink" of practical negotiations. Hear how
the rhymes in the Nixon poem lead to another kind of justice:
Wizard politician
Almost a magician
Practically ending the war,
Opening China’s door;
But, until the day you died
All you had done had lied:
So it was all very trickie
To get the dead Dickie
To lie still in state
Along with the rest of the great.
[32]
Mostly Fox’s rhymes are very simple and clear in what
they are up to; but don't overlook his apparent wrenching of "war"
to "door" when you consider why this rhyme has much more to do
with the complex and violent trade off between Vietnam, China and the USA
for a world statesman, or even if not a world statesman, but just a tricky
bastard.
Fox has told me that he
admires some of Norman MacCaig’s poems where rhymes, that at first sight
have seemed incongruous, have turned out to be otherwise, to be quite
precise observation. An example
Fox mentioned is:
Long Islands at their cables ride
The double talk of the split tide
And a low black rock
pokes out
From caves of green
its dripping snout.
[33]
This poem, like many of MacCaig’s poems, is tinged
with the flaws that make a good rather than great poet, one whose sly
succumbing to temptations tie the ankle of his mind to the words like rocks
that wreck thought that would float among earthly wonders until comfortably
bedded by the coasts of lands on the brink, forever about to irretrievably
enter the sea. Yet, I can agree
with Fox that, although close to being wrecked by such rocks, the
onomatopoeic push of the repetitive stresses in the third line do ‘push’
“out” the monstrous “snout”. The
justice of the rhyme is hard to deny, albeit the meaning of snout and its
connotations may not be quite ‘monstrous’; but then MacCaig may have
wanted (or been tempted) to precisely such a more endearing, otterish,
animality to the rock(s) that populate the coasts and caves of his Orkneys. However, according to Fox, in the context of the whole of
“Clachtoll” such confidence in the poet’s control cannot be fully
sustained, although I wouldn’t let it detract from being taken in by
MacCaig, why not?
So much for ‘explaining’
rhyme. I'm leaving aside
reference to half rhyme or pararhyme which I like a lot. Well, perhaps I
could just say that when mimicking a definite form, for example ottava rima
[34]
, there is a natural pressure to solve the ‘hindrance’ of
rhyme in such or similar circumstances by resorting to pararhyme; but very
great care is needed to ensure that the natural general effect of such
incompletion, such frustration in the marriage is the required ambient
feeling
[35]
. Fox's sonnet “(Fax For Bitzan)” is a good example of
what I regard as a precise and appropriate use of "half completed
rhyme" (eg time and tome), leaving aside the play on "facts"
for Bitzan and the idea of an electronic "world",
perhaps consummated in Fox’s “Home Sweet Home” song herein; there is
also reference to Bitzan as Solomon
[36]
and the dividing of the child which refers to his work on the
biblical Song of Solomon, and, in a broader context, to his treatment of
book-as-object.
(Fax For Bitzan)
Dearest Ion, from your place to mine
Seemed only a matter of space and time,
Mere coordinates one has to have in mind
To send such facts between two worlds so oddly cleft
Where one and one make three with nothing left,
And every note cannot be seen, but line by line
They lay their fatal strain wherein I heard a wise man sing,
And undivided like a child I looked and saw his sign
Which showed the end of words was like a half completed rhyme
That echoes on and on until the end of time
To find its final home in some god or other's mighty tome
Wherein it sits bereft in mime;
Just brought to book a shape of purest truth
Whose thoughts escape like kisses from his mouth.
[37]
I'm leaving out reference to Fox's use of ‘front
rhyme’, his use of alliteration throughout his work; which is an
essential, nay quintessential, device for any poet writing in English who is
English. And it is the way back
to the oral world when the poet's voice was the mnemonic word of mouth, or
should I say a mouth of words? Thus
Fox conspires with end rhyme, front rhyme, and internal rhyme in all their
forms, but generally in of simplest homophonic character, to express in the
quintessential ether, that ghost in the machine, the poetic meaning that is
meant to haunt your nerve ends.
What about Tom Fox himself?
As you can tell, he is able to work closely with friends like me, his
editor. We’ve known each
other for nearly sixty years. He can also work closely with people like his charming and
beautiful illustrators, Khun Siriluck, Katie Aria and Sarah Arunee.
Yet, for all that, he is a loner.
No one really knows what he is up to, what he truly has in mind.
I’ve managed to get him to direct himself toward the songs, some of
which are new and specially written for this volume, others can be as much
as forty years old. He’s also
been keen to show that his songs, like much of his other poetry, sings. So he has found tunes to illustrate their singability, and
you can hear them in preliminary form on the compact disk.
Fox finds tunes, sometimes by taking a traditional tune, but mainly
by simply singing the notes to the words outright as they are.
Although the artists are all
beautiful women linked personally to Fox in various ways, what is relevant
here is that their works are exceptionally fine and fitting.
Sometimes, Fox has written his songs with a picture in mind, but
sometimes a picture has been suited to a song already completed.
“Hebrides Song” is a case in point.
The picture, looking out across the Minch from Sutherland in Scotland
just turned out to be a serendipitous match to the song written some forty
years ago. “Hebrides Song”
is dedicated to his long standing friend Alexander Macleod of Stornoway,
1924-2001, a fine singer in both Gaelic and English.
The pictures and the songs
work together simply. There is
either a blending of thought or a reaction of thought. The song is either carried through in the picture, or into
conflict with it. In either
case there is global music, a melody of mind that transcends the merely
mundane, lifts the spirit from the clutches of the culture of the ‘giant
strawberry milkshake”
[38]
oozing from the mouth of America and sliding across the planet;
a shake that is, according to Polly Toynbee:
…sweet, sickly, homogenous, full of ‘E’ numbers,
stabilisers and monosodium glutamate, tasting the same from Samoa to
Siberia to Somalia.
Songs of Nocence can be sung by you, just sing the
songs one by one, and as you pick up each tune and sing, so that
“strawberry milkshake” has to be put aside, has to become deferred
consumption, the mere subject of your individual refusal to swallow any
more. Not that either of us is suggesting that we are providing a
moral steer in a world where fathoming human morality makes as much sense as
trying to ascertain the moral propensities of bacteria; upon which
bacteriological note the danger of further consumption of that “giant
strawberry milkshake” becomes obvious.
However, it has not been easy
to bring Fox to the simplicity of form that most of the songs take.
Nevertheless, with his usual subtlety, he seems to have found ways of
making the simplest looking song reach deep into the philosophical, logical
and emotional complexities of our existence here,
Where no man a god
Is, and no god a man is
, And no god God is
Yes, the commas are in the right place, and yes this is
a poem of Fox’s
[39]
which has another longer form, equally cryptic, and yes you’ll
find one version or other in his volume “Inscriptions”, and in the
volume “Insistence” and also in “The Charred Lord”.
The lines in the various forms, are an attempt by Fox from time to
time to express not only the complexity of his atheism, but its nature as a
belief. Yes, Fox recognises
that his state of, as it were, disbelief in Theo
[40]
is merely the converse, or perhaps the contrary state, of the
state of belief in Theo. He
chooses to disbelieve because he both dislikes being a subservient and he
considers it self-evident that religions as social systems create divisions
and hatreds amongst humankind of such a destructive nature that it makes no
sense to subserve in any. He is
aware of the importance of distinguishing between that which is revealed and
the psychological condition of belief in God, ie any Theo figure wherefrom
revelatory rules are attributed, which being the ‘from-on-high’ words of
god(s) are absolutely binding on that section of humankind subservient to
the earthly power structure associated to this one or that.
Bondi’s concise expression of this distinction is helpful:
I think in this country [Britain] we are too impressed by
the concept of God. Many
religions, like Buddhism and Confucianism, don’t have a God at all.
On the other hand, Communism in its heyday had a ‘sacred text’
which were the writings of Marx and Lenin, and you justified an argument
by referring to these writings. So it seems to me that the important thing is not the concept
of God, - indeed we cannot quarrel with an undefined God, for how can we
disagree with a concept that is undefined. No, what makes a religion is a ‘revelation’.
And it is the belief in a revealed truth that is the source of
religious problems - that the Koran is the word of God, or the Holy Bible
is the judge of everything.
[41]
By the way, for practical
purposes Fox takes ‘power’ to be of a manifold nature such as described
by Charles Handy with his simple typology for sources of individual power to
be derived as physical power; resource power; position power; expert power;
personal power; and negative power attached to each of the foregoing as a
kind of supernumery power
[42]
. Thus, religions
can be seen to employ all these forms of power, though mainly in the guise
of position power whereby a revealed “Morality” is duly interpreted and
administered by the officiants of the religion involved who are in a
position to know the ‘truth’ of it and communicate it widely and
authoritatively. Fox has a somewhat Nietchean
[43]
view of such absolutist ‘Moralities’ seeing them much more
in the terms of being instruments of self-interest to which his ‘Self Help
Interest Test’
[44]
should always be applied.
There is seems to be a
convention whereby those whose lives are riddled with a religious interest
say they ‘respect’ other religions, even that they respect Fox’s
atheism; though I very much doubt such ‘respect’ is truly widespread
among the religious. If
challenged to be clear as to whether they actually mean they hold Fox’s
views in deference and esteem (ie respect
[45]
), then those that persist in their ‘respect’ are likely to
be lying for some political consideration or they are merely completely
muddle headed, or both. Fox,
certainly does not ‘respect’ religions.
He considers all religions to be the consequence of weak-mindedness
in the face of death &/or a sheeplike subservience to authority. Thus, while Fox cannot ‘respect’ religions he is
certainly in favour of a toleration
[46]
, and expects, perhaps hopes, his atheism will be tolerated
rather than respected by those who are not like-minded.
Fox, has made clear to me that his atheism does not leave him
suspended in an hellish abyss, in some kind of moral vacuum, without
reference to any moral standards to govern his conduct among humankind while
he lives. For practical,
day-to-day moral purposes, he has adopted the general principles of humanism
as from time to time expressed by the British Humanist Association
[47]
, of which he is a member.
Fox sees religions as
schemes of beliefs that depend on irrational belief in the supernatural
nature of Theo(s), who are promoted fundamentally as first-movers,
explaining-it-all, and as fixers-of-death by providing a psychological way
out of ‘the-final-end’ by offering some form of after-existence
resembling life on earth but better by far.
Such Theos become the revelatory mouthpieces of through which the
rules of human conduct emanate. Hitch-hiking
on such dreadful rules are the officiators, celebrants and other such
self-appointed intermediaries who live comfortably, &/or in some other
self-gratificatory way, on the lift such processes generate for them; the
Self Help Interest Test is required to expose the motive of such
‘theocrassy’. Ultimately,
as per the strawberry milkshake, Fox places the muddled and hopelessly
confused mores of human-kind on a par with the moral propensities of
bacteria, a world of contagion in which rightnesses are infections bred by
survivors.
He is deeply opposed to the
perversion of the English language to accommodate the insidious corrosion,
or, more accurately perhaps, corruption of
present day freedoms in Britain by the seemingly involuntary
propagation of endless religious and racial casuistry, the ‘political
correctness’, that in fact respects nothing but its own petty
self-interest and, like ‘poetical correctness’, is a useless constraint
on the freedom of words. To
Fox, the present balkanisation of Britain, the lemming like rush to the
precipice, seems an inevitable consequence of the bulk importation and
entrenchment of new religious divisions and gross cultural and
socio-economic disparities into a society already deeply historically
divided along class and religious lines, between the haves and have-nots,
the catholics and protestants and the other dozens of christian sects, all
muddled up with the endless petty nationalists, the little Irishers, the
little Scottishers, the little Englanders, the little Cornishers, the little
Welshers, all blindly fuelling internicine advantage by whatever version
(perversion) of ‘history’ they can cook up to prove their cases; while
the denizens of the media pit, wherein perpetrators of the arts huddle
playing with matches, conflate polemic with passion.
Of course, it might be asked
with some justice ‘what’s new?’; presuming faith in a beneficent
multi-cultural almalgam prevails. As
there is no other civilised way but socio-cultural synthesis through
toleration and concession, then the problem of popular clamour redolent with
the proliferation of the expert victim must be kept and contained far from
the levers of power in our society. We
must never lose sight of the Nazi phenomenon as depicted so chillingly in
Fox’s inscription to Hitler, which opens with the paradox:
Just who is whose
When the populace choose
To set the weak
Above the meek
And
[48]
As you must surely have
gathered by now, Fox has points of view and, unlike a poet such as Seamus
Heaney, he does not feel he should or could exclude them from his work so as
to achieve a condition of undiagrammatic inoffense.
I take Heaney because he seems to typify the nature of a major strand
of the poetry written in English in the last twenty years.
Such ‘inoffense’ avoids the dangers Heaney is clearly sensitive
to, and these are not merely to the character of his poetry, but to his own
life and way of life, Ireland was and is a dangerous place for anyone
publicly taking any kind of stand. Michael Molino, in his chapter “Flying by the Nets”,
provides an interesting quotation from Heaney from which I have developed
the idea of giving ‘inoffense’. Molino
says that Heaney himself wrote,
We live in critical times ourselves, when the idea of
poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry
as a diagram of political attitudes.
Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from
the ministry of truth ... if a poet must turn his resistance into an
offensive, he should go for a kill and be prepared, in his life and with
his work, for the consequences.
[49]
Certainly, anyone can sympathise with a fence sitting
position and the firing of words too complicated to be widely understood or
feelable by extremists as targeted on them, who might react with an
exemplary murder of a poet now and then, to reinforce the murders of the odd
human rights lawyer, policeman, soldier, man in the pub, man on the Clapham
omnibus, and whoever else is an easy, ready-to-hand target, to be a useful
tactic in their dirty war where the freedom of words is certainly instant
collateral damage if not the first casualty.
Should poetry be dangerous, should it allow passion to expose its
freedoms, should it risk being denounced as mere polemic?
Difficult, in a world where the deadliest weapon is the bloody mouth.
Of course, in regard to
Heaney it may be fairer to say that his beautiful and well studied poetry is
deliberately pointless, seeming to always
end up sat a fine shell upon a stonewall of imponderability disguised, in
his own words perhaps, as a fiction
[50]
. Here we find only
the cult of the secret code, the hermetically sealed poem that requires
loads of inside knowledge, endless subtle and extensive and sustained
application of hermeneutics to steam it open, only to reveal the
imponderable inside poetically expressed, unpuzzled
[51]
out. Here the
untargeted poet is able to sit damply envisioning a cold arse on a stone
wall erected to protect poetry as art from poetry as polemic, as if poetry
was intrinsically binary in character, a mere coinage of the two that is
barred from the common economy of poetry as words at work to express
passionate meaning. Heaney,
hidden among his own words, green passport in his back pocket, seems to hold
his fire as if waiting for the ambush to present itself that will prove
decisive. Could it be that Heaney is simply stuck with the idea that a
spade should be called a pen, as if writing were on a par with work?
In all Fox has seven volumes
of poetry nearing completion, he will not allow any to be published at this
time, except this volume of songs. The
poems incorporated in the volumes are finished, but the volumes themselves
as whole works are not. He says
that certain further poems have yet to be written and these are essential to
make each volume a complete work in itself.
He is also working on an extraordinary new form ‘prose’ work,
written under the name Albert Smith, and a perhaps never-to-be-completed
study on the nature of space, written under the name Albert Monostone
[52]
. Who knows if he
will ever decide any of this stuff is complete to his satisfaction; he seems
singularly disinterested in publication at this time.
But, at least he has agreed to let the “Songs” go out.
The Thomas Albert Fox Library
[53]
has been set up by justWords limited, a small company registered
in England that owns the copyrights of all the literary works of Thomas
Albert Fox. Fox's
moral rights to authorship are asserted, but the copyrights, as understood
under the Berne Convention, and as per copyright law prevailing in the
United Kingdom, are held by justWords limited. Decisions to publish any of Fox's work, once release from
draft by Fox, are wholly determined by justWords limited.
Fox agreed to wholly relinquish his control to justWords limited
because justWords is founded on a non-profit principle. We are all in agreement with William Blake that in
general,
…there can be no Art in a Nation but such is
Subservient to the interest of the Monopolising Trader….
[54]
But subservience is not a natural state for Tom Fox, or
me. Hence the formation of
justWords as a vehicle to carry his work into the wider yonder, bypassing
the global reaches of today’s monopolising traders.
The library exists in
electronic form, although some parts are published in book and compact disk
form. When
justWords limited published Fox’s “A Suspicion of Sun”
[55]
in 1996, as an experimental utility edition of a small selection
of his poetry, it met with little interest, but was valuable in
demonstrating that Fox’s work is highly unlikely to find its way in the
wide world either commercially, or onto the agenda of the poetry
establishment. Thus, with William Blake in mind, the matter of future
publication and the expenditures involved was put on a simple loss making
basis. In other words,
justWords limited had to have sufficient funds to cover the likely loss
incurred by a Fox publication. The
use of a numbered and signed limited edition is intended to ameliorate the
loss to some extent, if supporters can be found.
We at justWords limited felt that if we could forgo acquiring, say, a
new strawberry toned car of global distinction we could use the saving to
support Tom Fox’s beautiful songs and their lovely illustrations. After some agonising we felt that we should stand the loss of
the strawberry car and stick with our somewhat ancient Xiantia diesel.
Leaving aside the
competition of a strawberry world car against Tom Fox’s songs, there
remains the intrinsic curiosity of the songs themselves.
Seemingly nice words to nice little tunes, their underlying edge is
not always obvious except, for example, in songs like the “Mary Bell Child
Killer Song” or “Infection Song” which seem, conversely, all edge.
But, don’t worry, if you’re not into poetry and stuff of that
ilk, there are the notes to each song at the back of the book after this
that will help you get behind face of the work if you want to.
Yet, you may find listening to the simply and beautifully sung songs
on the CD enough to open up the poetry without the explanatory notes.
After the singing of the songs, at the end of the CD, you can hear
Fox’s unique and extraordinary readings of each and every one of the
songs. As I’ve already said,
you might just find the explanatory notes a pain and give them a miss;
indeed, this is why this introduction is placed at the end of the book in
front of the explanatory notes; it is not in fact an introduction to the
Songs, but to the Notes.
Well, that’s enough of all
that. What it means is that
Fox’s songs can be appreciated in many ways.
As time goes by, may I suggest, you’ll find you will get more and
more from them. Like a good
friend you may not quite agree with much of the time, the “Songs” will
stand by you in time of need, revealing an ever deeper and truer personality
both in them and in you.
Terry
Edwards, editor, at Keynsham, Somerset, England, 2002.
[1]
The simplest way to get to Blake’s Songs is to get hold of
the paperback edition of: “SONGS of INNOCENCE and of EXPERIENCE Shewing
the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul 1789 - 1794
[by] The Author & Printer W Blake”, first published as a
single volume by Blake in 1794, but now available in paperback by Oxford
University Press with an Introduction and Commentary by Sir Geoffrey
Keynes (printed in Hong Kong).
Of course, a simple search on the internet produces loads of stuff,
good and guff. Blake’s “Songs” are wonderfully flawed, according to
Fox, and have been over-egged by the literary ‘industrialists’ intent
on manufacturing their expositions into a viable market. Nevertheless, he does not allow such intent to obscure the
usefulness of Blake to him, nor of the help Blake’s expositors can in
fact provide (keeping the salt to hand).
[2]
Nocence is defined according to the Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary as a condition the opposite (contrary, the idea of opposite,
according to Empson op cit, being a new development) to innocent, ie
guilty of hurt. Fox has used (perhaps coined) the word “Nocence”
(pronounced No Sense, yes a pun) to reflect Blake’s use of the contrary
states “Innocence and Experience”.
Thus, among other things, “Nocence” reflects the condition that
in not being innocent then guilt prevails, while the pun, inter alia,
curtails such prevalence of guilt as nonsensical.
This marries with the ideas once pursued by Blake: that contrary
states are not opposites and therefore negatives of each other, but are
different states that seemingly cannot subsist in the same being although
innocence can only be perceived through experience, by loss; thus they are
contrary or opposed states rather than opposites, in which contrast or
comparison is called for. It could seem from the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) that
“contrary” and “opposite” are seemingly synonymous, but then there
is no such thing.
[3]
Empson William, “Seven Types of Ambiguity”, p 26 Pelican
edition 1973, first published 1930
[4]
Empson William, “Seven Types of Ambiguity”, p 22 Pelican
edition 1973, first published 1930
[5]
Eliot Thomas Stearns, “Four Quartets”, Faber & Faber
1930.
[6]
See Gullberg Jan, “Mathematics From the Birth of Numbers”,
p 904-6, W W Norton & Company NY & London 1997, here is a very
useful help to all kinds of Math, Einstein’s work 1905 is briefed with
subsequent amendments; the “now” is only “here” idea is simply
put, of course the idea that no velocity in a vacuum can be faster than
the speed of light is such obvious nonsense (unless it only means that it
is the fastest velocity detectable, which would be, in effect, a suitably
tautological statement) that its necessity indicates the utter
artificiality of the math as a way in to knowing about ourselves, just as
the ‘machinery’ of poetry is an obvious nonsense that we cannot do
without any more than Einstein can do without such bits of similar
machinery to keep his theory, ie way of looking, viable.
[7]
Eliot Thomas Stearns, “Four Quartets”, “The Dry Salvages
V”, 1941, Faber and Faber, “The Complete Poems and Plays of T S
Eliot”,1969, inter alia lines 194-212:
To
communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors -
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or on the Edgware Road.
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But
to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint -
[8]
This is to treat to ‘space’ as ‘nothing’, in
accordance with the general drift of Albert Monostone’s work on
‘nothing’.
[9]
In the UK BBC Radio 4 provides a few quite popular poetry
programmes including a request half hour from time to time.
These seem very popular among existing poetry adherents and the
fellowship of poets themselves, and provide a light and gentle
entertainment of some relief from the flatulent cacophony that comprises
most of the output from the self-appointed media shepherds and their dogs
controlling the sheep.
[10]
Motion Andrew, Poet Laureate succeeding Ted Hughes, wow!
[11]
Editor. I have
used the term “readers” throughout to refer to those who participate
in poetry through the reading of it.
The qualification that this means only silently reading and not out
loud is not intended, nor does ‘reading’ when using the word
‘reader’ exclude the activity of participating in the poetry by simply
listening to another person reading; indeed ‘reading’ in this wider
sense not only includes all these, but also includes the activity of
remembering the words and speaking them.
Thus orality and aurality as well as the pure vision of words as
shapes disturbing the ‘noise’ of minds are all included within the
active scope of the word ‘read’. Thus, my use of the word ‘reader’ and its forms refers to
any participant, ie to anyone involved with a poem. A poem is always taken to be something made of words, not
purely sounds &/or visions.
[12]
See, for example, Ricks Christopher and Michaels Leonard, Eds,
“The State of the Language”, Faber and Faber 1990 GB, University of
California, 1990 USA.
[13]
McCluhen Marshall, “The Gutenburg Galaxy”, It is certainly the case that the medium is now more
interesting than the message, if there is one.
However, Fox is sensitive to the fact that to say the medium is the
message implies there is no message, but this cannot be so, as it is to
the medium itself we must look to ‘read’ the message. In this we have the interesting idea that the message
(content of the medium) is merely part of an aspect of ‘the’ message;
rather like the idea of “poetic machinery” I espouse herein on Fox’s
behalf.
[14]
See my “WorldTel” and related refereed journal work with
which Fox involved himself when considering in particular the poetic
implications of the phenomenal alteration of human spatialities forced by
the advent of the internet and related developments and exploitations of
its facilities. Thus, for
example, “World Thai Expert Link: a proposal in progress”, Terry
Edwards and Siriluck Kedseemake, Internet Research, Vol 7 No 1 1997, ISSN
1066-2243. The abstract for this particular piece, is a useful summary
of Fox’s perspective on the new technologies:
“Proposes
World Thai Expert Link (WorldTel), to exploit new Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs), or telematics, as a main means of
creating social groups and thus task-oriented workgroups in terms of
motivational advantage and in a context of the psychology of interpersonal
relations in a new geography of virtual space.
Introduces the concept of ‘diaspora’ communications in terms of
the widespread distribution of special interest groups (eg experts,
managers), highlighting related corporate communications issues, while
concentrating on the Thai expert diaspora.
Touches on the critical philosophical issues and introduces a new
relativity of space arising from the idea that, already, ICTs can enable
space to move and people stay.
[15]
Gibson William, in a well known interview (Stockholm, 23rd
November 1994), published by the interviewer Dan Joseffsson on the
internet points out that,
“I
sometimes suspect that we’re seeing something in the Internet as
significant as the growth of cities.
It’s something that profound and with that sort of infinite
possibilities. It’s really
something new, it’s a new kind of civilisation.
And, of course, the thing I love about it is that it’s
transnational, non profit - it isn’t owned by anyone - and it’s shape
is completely user driven. What
it is, is determined by the needs of millions and millions of users.
So cyberspace is evolving to meet the needs of individuals all over
the world. The American so
called “Information Highway”, or the “Infobahn” (laughs) which I
have always like very much, is an attempt to create a commercial version. I think that very, very large interests are looking at the
Internet, not really understanding what it is, but thinking ‘We can make
a fortune if we have one of those!’.
You know, they want to get in there, it’ll be broadcast
television all over again. But,
of course, that’s not going to be it, and I think that the highway
metaphor is particularly suspect. A
highway is something you can go two ways on, it implies real traffic. Really what they’re offering you is a mall.
They want to give you an infomall where you pay for every bit of
information you download, and you’ll download from a menu that some
corporation has assembled.”
Albeit
Fox is less optimistic about the continuing ‘freedom’ of the internet,
the demise of many ‘dot coms’ since this interview bears out
Gibson’s view of, as it were commercialism’s general incompetence (Fox
certainly recognises that success in business is normally achieved
monkey-like by randomly pressing the board of available keys to get your
equivalent to a Shakespeare volume).
Fox, however, does not underrate the determination of politicians
through their naturally acquisitive instincts to get hold of the global
levers that can control the Internet, viz the ISPs (Internet Service
Providers). Fortunately, the
politicians with the ‘pull’ to do this would be Americans, but they
are constrained by the First Amendment of the Constitution; perhaps
‘democracy can win out after all, at least while the USA is in charge of
the world as it were. Yet,
Fox is pessimistic. Politicians
are that worst kind of monkey, cunning as the bags over people’s heads.
The full Gibson interview can be found at http://www.josefsson.net/gibson
[16]
Gibson William, “Neuromancer”, Phantasia Press, Spring
1986, West Bloomfield USA.
[17]
Utterance is a post~post-modern narrative, a cybennial
narrative about the English 4-5th century preoccupation and
occupation of the tribal land around here [Wessex] res nullius
(empty of Romans, unfull of the Romano-British, wilderness and aboriginal
Britons only). Like
cyberspace 5th century ‘Wessex’ can be regarded as empty,
which John Locke’s second Treatise on Property
maintains with the Romans that all ‘empty things’ remained the
common property of all mankind until they were put to some use.
Smith has chosen this period because of it is a relatively unknown
quantity historically. There
is little concrete “evidence” to bring easily to bear, he is trying to
avoid his approach being quickly and misleadingly confounded on
“normal” historical grounds. It
creates a strategic breathing space to give his work a chance to air
itself. Smith writes in a
form antecedent to modernism, but superceding post-modernism.
He writes in a new cultural form I term cybennialism; it is
surely time to take the black bags of post-modernism to the rubbish dump. Smith’s words in “utterance” are not post
modernistically representatives of “reality”, but are themselves real
mirages living in the air:
. . .
staring
in sight of its reality
really seeing
on the face of it
nothing less than the lip of a word, a quench of glass at a pool’s edge,
lapping,
a miracle oasis
fragile
fragrant
clenching in reality
a real mirage,
[closing lines of “oasis” , from Selected Poems of T A Fox, Volume
seven “The Charred Lord” and Volume five “Presence”, page 31,
Voice ref 1B180]
In regard to “Utterance”, Smith makes the
work take on the shape of beaten space where the three forked tongue of
tribes curls into being words empty of voices seeking to vent their
meanings upon the breathing air that lives around us.
In regard to the concept of res nullius, which is highly
relevant to the evolution of ‘cyberspace’ see: “The Oxford History
of the British Empire, Volume 1 ‘The Origin of Empire’”, OUP 1998,
p42 & passim Chapter 2 “The Struggle For Legitimacy”, by Anthony
Pagden. This chapter was a great help to Fox, and me, in
understanding more fully and subtly the nature and issues of owning of
‘space as extension in the form of land’ and of ‘space as mere
extension”.
[18]
This is Fox’s poem “In defence of poetic machinery
uncovered”, Vol 4 “Intercourse”, p38, Voice ref 1B232:
]my works[
are in constant danger
that
their machinery,
the way-in to where
unaware ideas
are there-less voices
airless
unawhere
that is their uni-verse,
makes the intellectual
-ish (poetic) gatekeepers
to fields of serious con-text
and allegation of clamourous intelligence
etcetera
skid
-off the cover of the machine,
slipping and sliding over the material surface of the works,
no way-in,
no entrancing
through de-composition
making-up
with the maddening rhymes
taken to their uttermost extremes
tabloidal puns dis-comfited
stretching out to their un-sensible ends
excruciatingly entangled in pursuit
of linguistic
and
imaginary ambiguity
twisted end-lessly out of meaning-less words
contradicting their semantic role
becoming only
wisps
of emotional scents
in-deference to feeling knowledge
by
imaginary fragrance of an image dimension-less
envisaged un-extracted
without ecstasy
by me
hung
un-observed
a mere semiotic strung
a final hoarding
unbelievably
dangling idiotically
between an interstice of significant sense
pointing out]
[19]
‘mediaevil’ is a Fox coinage to represent the translation
of the repressive role of the medævil church that mis-led Christendom
then, and the media’s evil tendency to mis-lead present day sheepdom.
[20]
We have this phrase "the ghost in the machine" from
Gilbert Ryle, who describes it derisively as: 'the dogma of the Ghost in
the machine', in his book "The Concept of Mind", Hutchinson
1949. Fox has chosen to
de-reify the ghost as simply another relational among others observable in
the human phenomenal world, to retrieve it from Ryle's afterworld. Fox is a follower of Monostone,
who advocates that the material world is only apparently solid.
That 'solidity' (materialness) is as it were merely a psychological
way of thinking, a form of the human psyche that fails to realise that
material cannot mean 'solid', ie substantial, but merely relational as is
mind (spirit/geist etc), that the natural psychological gestaltism
convenient to humanmind (the anthropic principle) misleads so that it is
'natural' for humankind not to conflate mind with body, but to 'see' them
as different as if they are different categories of 'things'.
Ryle's mistake was to believe that logical discourse was an
adequate instrument to explain, ie to demonstrate, his belief that mind
and body were both (in a, or any, sense) material, solid rather than both
being relational merely, ie entities without solidity, a 'material'
category intrinsically empty, amounting to nothing, the apparency of things thought of as
material, which is rather a cover, a skin to provide intellectual
visibility for relationalities that are characterised as by
humanmindedness as being necessarily (to the anthropic principle)
specifically solids. Fox
is operating in a converse universe to that invented by Ryle, except Ryle
quite paradoxically simply reverses Descartes and seems to walk away from
the relational 'reality' of meaning as if a Magritte figure receding.
[21]
Gottdiener M , “Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and
the Forms of Postmodern Life”, (Blackwell, 1995). Chapter 1 considers
Saussure's view of the sign as a "bifacial unity of signifier and
signified", and that unity is "effected by culture.", and
the discovery that language is "doubly articulated" in
structure. Gottdiener explains this as:
That
is, there were two distinct ways meaning was conveyed via structure. On
the one hand, any utterance consists of a chain of words which unfolds
over time or diachronically, according to the syntagmatic
axis. Each of the words conveys the meaning of the sentence by existing
within a context of other words. The set of rules governing the placement
of words is known as syntax, and the meaning that emerges from the
juxtaposition of each word in the sentence occurs metonymically,
which is another way of referring to the relations of the syntagmatic
axis. The collection of words: boy, dog, the, the, fed, possesses meaning
when we arrange them metonymically, as "The boy fed the dog,"
for example, according to the socially prescribed rules of syntax.
In
addition to the syntagmatic axis, each use of a word is an occasion to
choose from a string of associated words. The presence of any given word,
such as "boy", implies the existence of many absent words that
could similarly have been deployed, such as "youth,"
"male," "tike" and so on. The absent but associated
words are governed by the rules of semantics. Furthermore, because the
meaning of words arises in part by contrast to what is absent as well as
present, by what each word calls forth according to its associations, this
axis is also know as the metaphorical dimension, or the synchronic
aspect, i.e. it involves distinctions frozen in time.
ibid,
pp 6 & 7.
[22]
Shapiro Karl and Beum Robert, “A Prosody Handbook, Harper
& Row1965; puts this nicely: “If the rhyme words are completely
effective - completely flawless in terms of meaning, logically and
imaginatively right - then they are also integral parts of the poem’s
vitality, and not simply a mechanical convenience; they are not then
ornaments, but part of the very tissue.” (p96).
[23]
Milton John, Preface to Paradise Lost 1669 edition.
[24]
Rogers Michael, “Computers and Language: An Optimistic
View”, p295, “The State of the Language”. ed Ricks Christopher and
Michaels Leonard, Faber and Faber 1990, is an interesting example of a way
of thinking about the impact of methodology on the message.
[25]
J Ayto, 'Dictionary of Word Origins',(Colombia Marketing
1990), p. 256. Ayto says, " Unlikely as it may seem, glamour is
ultimately the same word as grammar."
He goes on to explicate the connection, and this is interesting
especially in regard to the way the poem is working.
"Glamour, 18th century. ... This seems to have been used in
the Middle Ages for 'learning' in general, and hence, by superstitious
association, for 'magic' (there is no actual record of this, but the
related gramarye was employed in that sense). Scottish English had
the form glamour for grammar (l is phonetically close
to r, and the two are liable to change places), used for
'enchantment,' or a 'spell,' for whose introduction to general English Sir
Walter Scott was largely responsible. The literal sense 'enchantment' has
now slipped into disuse, gradually replaced since the early 19th Century
by 'delusive charm,' and latterly 'fashionableness.' "
Clamour derives in 'claim', which, according to Ayto, ultimately
derives in the Indo-European onomatopoeic base kla which also
produced low, 'to make the characteristic noise of cattle'.
Their? Who are they? Words themselves.
Meanings like Fox's are a difficult chase when the lair and the
liar are easily confused with the sweet notes of the lyre.
[26]
Fox Thomas Albert, Vol 4 “Intercourse” p22, Voice ref
1A590, “A Rhyme in Time is not a Crime”.
[27]
The reference is to Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet “A New
Colossus” inscribed on the base of the American Statue of Liberty; thus
integrating the ambiguity with “arms upraised”, and so on, with the
brutal paradox of the Provisional IRA’s notion of freedom as the
terrorist arm of Sinn Fein; although the Provisional IRA is clear that
Sinn Fein is its political arm and not vice versa.
Give
me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
[28]
Fox, Thomas Albert, Vol 2 “Inscriptions”, p2 Voice ref
1A078, “Adams Gerald 1948- (Conspirator)”.
[29]
Sinn Fein, see Brewer’s Dictionary of Names, Room Adrian,
Helicon Publishing 1995, p 506: “The Irish republican political movement
was founded in 1905 by Irish journalist and politician Arthur Griffith
(1872-1922) with the aim of effecting the independence of Ireland from
Britain and the revival of Irish culture.
Its present goal is to win the political unification of Northern
Ireland and the republic. The
name is Irish for ‘we ourselves’.
The Irish expression ‘sinn fein! sinn fein!’ is traditionally
used by a Irish speaker to pacifying an argument, implying ‘we’re all
one here’.
[30]
From Brewer’s, Dictionary of Names, Room Adrian, Helicon
1995, p183: “Fascist: The reactionary political movement associated with
Mussolini in Italy takes its name from the Italian fascio,
‘political group’ itself from the Latin fascis, ‘bundle’.
In ancient Rome the fasces (‘bundles’) were a symbol of penal
power in the form of a bundle of birch rods containing an axe with its
head projecting. The same
symbol was adopted by the Fascists in 1919.”
This tendency is tribal in character and leads to secretive
groupings that depend for their power on the exemplary use of violence and
other forms of intimidation to gain disproportionate influence over
political and socio-economic benefits otherwise not available to them
through normal peaceful effort in society.
[31]
Fox, Thomas Albert, Vol 2 “Inscriptions”, p2 Voice ref
1A053, “Carter James Earl 1924-
(Jimmy)”.
[32]
Fox, Thomas Albert, Vol 2, “Inscriptions”, p3 Voice ref
1A119, “Nixon, Richard Milhous 1913-1994 (A Politician)”.
[33]
MacCaig, Norman “Collected Poems, Chatto & Windus 1993,
p 40 “Clachtoll”.
[34]
“ottava rima”, a useful summary of the issues involved in
the use of this form is given by Shapiro, Karl & Beum, Robert,
pp123-25 “A Prosody Handbook”, Harper & Row, 1965.
They conclude, p125, that this form of the common octave is not
widely used in English because of the difficulties of finding rhymes,
unlike in Italian.
[35]
A wonderful example of this is Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem
“Strange Meeting”, p35-6 “The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen,
Edited C Day Lewis, with Edward Blunden’s memoir, Chatto & Windus,
1963.
[36]
Bitzan, Ion, 1924-97, Romanian artist admired by Fox for his
treatment of ‘book’ as object, as the “end of words”.
The sonnet refers to Bitzan’s work “The Cabinet” and “The
Song of Songs” that Fox saw exhibited in 1994 when he arranged and help
fund an exhibition of his work at Bath.
[37]
Fox, Thomas Albert, Vol 2 p6 Voice ref 1A238
“Inscriptions”, “Bitzan, Ion 1924-1997, (Solomon)”.
[38]
Toynbee, Polly “Who’s Afraid of Global Culture?”, p 191
Eds Hutton W & Giddens A “On The Edge”, Jonathan Cape, London,
2000.
[39]
This is taken from The Library, unpublished “Insistence”.
[40]
The word ‘Theo’ is used here to avoid or to neutralise the
use of the word ‘God’. Theo(s)
is widely used in words to do with religions in English eg theocracy,
theology and it is Greek for a god, a being of superhuman powers, yet
nevertheless of admitted human character as required in practise by
worshippers of God. However,
the word God carries all the superfluous baggage of the absolutists, by
substituting the word ‘Theos’ for the word ‘God’ such baggage is
dumped and the concept ‘God’ is left to stand alone (not wordless, but
neutralised), unaided as it were, or de-confused of generations of
accreted mumbo jumbo. ‘God’
seems to derive from Indo-European Ghut ultimately meaning
‘call’ and thus ‘that which is invoked’; (I take this from Ayto
John, “Dictionary of Word Origins”, 1990, p259).
[41]
Bondi Hermann, “”The Sir Hermann Bondi Interview”,
Humanist News Spring 2002, p 7, reported by the editor Madeline Pym.
Bondi goes on to say that, “So in arguments with Christians, when
you come to the word God you have already lost the battle.”
[42]
Handy Charles B, “Understanding Organisations”, Penguin
1976, p111ff on power as a source of influence.
[43]
Nietzsche Frederick, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’, translated
by Francis Golffing, (Doubleday Anchor 1956), passim wherein Nietzsche
maps the basis for moral relevativism and consigns absolute moral rules to
the wastebin, or is it the Recycle Bin, of human history.
[44]
Self Help Interest Test, in other words SHIT. Fox, and I, are broadly convinced that the judicious
application of SHIT will reveal that self-interest is at the bottom of
most moral advocates. The
test is often difficult to apply, but when done so assiduously the
position of the advocates can be seen to be pragmatic rather than ideal,
and thus only in appearance or style being absolute.
Absolutism then is merely a style of self-service or self-help for
its advocates; of course whether this is sufficient to logically deny this
or that absolute position in particular need not trouble either of us as
the absolute, to be absolute, must prove singular rather than plural in a
world where the proliferation of contradictory absolute positions seems
only to grow ever more cacophonous.
[45]
Ayto John, “Dictionary of Word Origins”, Columbia
Marketing 1994, p442: “respect [14th Century] Respect
and respite [13th century] are ultimately the same word.
Both go back to respectus, the past participle of Latin respicere
‘look back at’ , hence ‘look at, regard, consider.’ This was a compound verb formed from the prefix re-
‘back’ and specere ‘look’ (source of English spectacle,
speculate, etc). Respectus
passed into English, perhaps via Old French respect, as respect,
in the sense ‘regard, relation’ (as in with respect to); the
key modern meaning ‘deference, esteem’ developed toward the end of the
16th century. An
earlier borrowing of respectus into Old French produced respit,
which preserved another meaning of the Latin word, ‘refuge.’
This was the source of English respite.”
Certainly the key modern meaning given here by Ayto is born out by
the main concise English dictionaries.
[46]
“tolerate: v.t. to suffer, to endure, to permit by
not preventing or forbidding; to abstain from judging harshly or
condemning (persons, religions, votes, opinions, etc); to sustain, to
endure (pain, toil etc); (Med) to sustain (a drug, etc) with
impunity. toleration, n.
The act of tolerating; the spirit of tolerance; recognition of the
right of private judgment in religious matters and of freedom to exercise
any forms of worship.” This
1968 definition is taken from “The Concise English Dictionary”,
Hayward Arthur L and Sparkes John J, Omega Books 1984; and is still widely
shared.
[47]
BHA, The British Humanists Association is a registered charity
and exists to support and represent people who seek to live ethical and
responsible lives without religious or superstitious beliefs, it is based
at 47 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8SP.
[48]
Fox Thomas Albert, “Hitler, Adolf 1889-1945 (Who Whose)”,
from Vol 2 “Inscriptions”, p16, Voice ref 1A554.
[49]
Molino Michael R, “Questioning Tradition, Language, and
Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney”, The Catholic University of America
Press, 1994, p 54.
[50]
Heaney’s comment on Paul Muldoon’s 1977 poems “Mules”
is apposite perhaps, “What he [Muldoon] has to say is constantly in
disguise, and what is disguised is some conviction like this: the
imagination is arbitrary and contrary, it delights in its own fictions and
has a right to them; or we might quote Wallace Stevens: ‘Poetry creates
a fictitious existence on an exquisite plane’. …/
The hermetic tendency has its drawbacks, however, and leads him
into puzzles rather than poems - at least, that’s my response to some of
his work here …” (p213, Seamus Heaney: Preoccupations, Selected Prose
1968-1978, faber & faber 1980). One
might wonder whether such rights to fiction are open doors for poets in
need of quick exits from plays with parts too difficult to risk learning.
[51]
An example of Seamus Heaney’s “covert skill” (Tamplin
Ronald “Open Guides to Literature: Seamus Heaney”, OUP 1989, p76),
‘Now You’re supposed to be/ an educated man’,/ I hear him say.
‘Puzzle me/ The right answer to that one.’ (Field Work, Faber
and Faber 1979, p12).
[52]
Monostone Albert, “Dear Zeno, about God’s Sensorium, or:
The Demise of Time and Place: Paradoxically, Taking Our Time, Copernicus,
You, Me, Another And Zeno Meet At A Virtual Premise Looking Out Of Place
For Space …”, draft.
[53]
The Thomas Albert Fox Library is the collection of all the
literary work Fox wishes to keep and has asked justwords limited to
administer. A full summary of
the current state of the Library can be found at http://www.justwords.demon.co.uk
which is updated at least annually.
[54]
I have taken this quote from Mona Wilson’s Biography of
William Blake, page 238 (3rd Edition 1971).
Wilson is illustrating Blake’s contention, in an 1809 prospectus,
that all great art is of the independent imagination and cannot be
subsumed to commercial aims. He believed that art was enslaved by the
monopolising trader. He
believed this because of his own personal experience of the poisonous,
manipulative nature of commercial affairs, and his years of failure not
only to find acceptance for his art, but also for what we can also see now
were his considerable technical design and craft skills in the then new
technology of engraving.
[55]
Fox, Thomas Albert, “A Suspicion of Sun”, 1996, justWords
limited, ISBN
1-901382-00-1.