Author Diaries/Notebooks: Search/destroy/bothered AT ALL!

Anais Nin's are terrific I think, really consistent and interesting and characteristic.

She worked hard on those diaries. She kept a "lie box" to keep her stories straight.

Larkin's companion burned all his journals at his request, but his letters are fun. A great moment in literature was when Anthony Powell reviewed Larkin's collected letters, in which Larkin and Amis both referred to Powell as "Horse-Faced Dwarf." I'm not sure, but I think a later edition of the letters came out with certain bits removed.

Amis's early letters to Larkin are also AMAZING. Seriously funny. Have them side by side - there's an argument for saying that Amis didn't write anything funnier, certainly never anything as experimental, so to speak. Playful's a better word obviously.

I can believe it. The title character of Lucky Jim is said to be based on Larkin.

Christopher Isherwood's Diaries: 1939–1960 is about the best of the best of the best. It includes his meeting of Don Bacardy, and friendships with Chaplin, Stravinsky, Garbo (dumb!), Gish, Fairbanks & Pickford, Marxes, Huxley, Vidal, Auden, Laughton, Maugham, Bowles, and a billion of others. If read w/ his earlier semi-fictional stuff, it can form a continuous narrative from his childhood at boarding school until near his death. It's never less then thrilling, brilliantly written, wry, and hilarious. A+++++

Peter Handke's The Weight Of The World pwns this thread.

Musil's diaries are pretty worthwile

tennessee williams notebooks are a giant pretty mess

What is the content of Musil's diaries like? Does he jot any further ideas to the Man Without Qualities?

I'll try and get a 'Letters' thread going later (if anyone wants to do it be my guest). To me that's a seaparate category.

Brecht's Journals 1934-55 are pretty great, probably my favourite thing in this line. He's thinking about Nazism and the War, getting his head round America in particular, meeting and talking to the other German exiles, and staging and writing stuff all the time. So busy. Also lots of pictures he's pasted in and captioned.

Though they're not really authors (I mean they are, but who cares) the Goncourt journals are pretty great for an account of literary life in mid-c.19th Paris. Everyone turns up to the party!

The Isherwood sounds v good, I will take a look at that.

Has anyone read the Cheever diaries? He's not someone who's ever interested me, but the big Colm Tóibín article in the LRB made them sound interesting (though maybe the article told me everything I need to know. Can't see myself reading them I guess.)

Oh, there's also Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella, which is something between a journal and letters. It's dense, but a great account of Swift's life in London for a couple of years. (But if you want Swift with his guard down, his marginalia are great - just him scribbling 'lies lies lies' and 'scotch dog' and 'scotch liar' over books that make him angry.)

from what I remember musil lays a lot of ideas out that build the foundation of the man without qualities, if indirectly. Not that man without qualities really needs any more content. The diaries have great accounts of little day to day moments plus thoughts on writing in general. Also it's really interesting to see what war does to his head.

hunter thompson's letters/job applications/etc. are as anything else he wrote

D.J. Enright's Injury Time: a Memoir. He wrote it while dying of cancer, but that comes in only in occasional satiric hospital anecdotes. Incredibly calm and sane. With respect to dying, the anti-Larkin.

Completely forgot Gerard Manley Hopkins' Journals. One of the best records of a poet looking at the world and trying to stretch language to the looking.

And Kafka. Given that Musil stirs interest here, Kafka's diaries are a big omission. I'm going back to them tonight. Thanks for making me think of them thread.

I'd forgotten about 'Injury Time'--that was a great book.

Has anyone read the Cheever diaries? He's not someone who's ever interested me, but the big Colm Tóibín article in the LRB made them sound interesting (though maybe the article told me everything I need to know. Can't see myself reading them I guess.)

The 'Colm Tóibín treatment', as I call it, is often so satisfying and fulfilling that I doubt I could ever buy a book that he is reviewing. Can't see myself getting hold of Beckett's letters (which I see you talk about on the Letters thread), although he doesn't consider Beckett to have been a great letter writer. Cheever's diaries do sound great.

cortazar's Around the Day in 80 Worlds isn't really a diary/notebook, but more of an odds and ends collection of his fiction/non-fiction stuff and I really liked that.

I remember really enjoying Katherine Mansfield's journals, too.

They were the unexpurgated version, rather than the cleaned-up version her husband edited.

I wish this http://www.borgesdebioycasares.com.ar./ would come out in English. Anybody heard anything?

I'm reading TE Lawrence's 'The Mint', which definitely falls into this group, and is good and very strange: basically, Lawrence of Arabia finds normal life too difficult in the early 1920s, and joins the RAF at the lowest level under an assumed name, has an appalling time, keeps secret notebook, and is then outed by the press. Three years later, he does it all over again.

Having read a few since 2009 I thought I'd update. What prompts the update was finishing Pla's The Gray Notebook a couple of weeks ago. Its like a cross between Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Kafka's Dairies. Pla doesn't provoke as much as Pessoa, and he just isn't Kafka (then again who is?) but it strikes me that the quality I love of a writer's notebook is that you can often see their working the page and learning some kind of craft, whereas in their fictional or poetic work they are letting the words work them in turn, and us. All the reading and craft they internalized pouring out of them.

In Pla this is complicated. He is very much learning - you see a sketch, a description, a character is built, that piece of art is thought over. Its funny because his one bit of fiction I picked up just washed right past me. And his Notebooks are considered his best work - he first compiled them in his late teens early 20s then went back to them he was a novelist he wanted to be.

From the recommends in the thread over the years I picked Welch, Musil (wrt his Notebooks its something stranger still because in MwQ there are passages that are vey notebook-like, its more cut-and-paste w/out any sort of collage effect), The Goncourt Journals.

Love to read Manley Hopkins but anything seems really out-of-print and expensive.

This is a good thread. Wanting to read the Journals of Kierkegaard trans Dru rn.

The drafts of FINNEGANS WAKE can be very informative for understanding sentences and passages in FINNEGANS WAKE.

I suppose drafts are different from 'notebooks', but JJ's notebooks are mainly full of phrases that he added the drafts, then crossed out.

This thread revive had me going to Gerard Manley Hopkins' Journals today. HIs attempt to delineate, describe, materially and spiritually understand the world around him causes his sentences and word order to bend and stress under that desire. I know in it a sense that shouldn't be surprising, as it's GMH, but seeing it in prose and see him take such pains in a journal gives a sense of the spiritual, linguistic and mental efforts required. Sensory as well - light, size, atmospheric conditions, shape, strange analogies of image and material (water like slack fruit nets, flocks of sheep going through a hedgerow like water droplets on a leaf, inscape, outscape, instress. It's interesting to see how someone of his calibre approaches it, and it also produces a sense of possibility in yourself as you read it. The resources available. The richness of the world.

On a slightly different note, this entire passage, for many several reasons, gave me much amused enjoyment.

The abbot's passage so called is remarkable for the curious astragalus moulding of the interlaced wall-tracery. There is a little Saxon work, like rude turning carpentry, merely barbarous. The building is mostly of tiles taken from the Roman walls of Verulam. It is perhaps worth noticing that the little curled ends of some corbels in the nave are freakishly turned each a different way.
Aug. 25. Fine; cold wind.
Bridges came up and Rover bit him. After this we went down to town together and talked in Hyde Park. And in Oxford Street saw an Irish lad and woman and *he* had the national light tail coat, knee-breeches, hat, and shillelagh.
Aug. 26. Dull.
Aug. 27. Fine.
Aug. 28. Dull.
Aug 29. Fine, I think.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/018/012/this_is_fine.jpg

lol

This run is great

Sept. 8. Dull, thick, and with East wind.
Sept. 9. Fine.
Sept. 10. Fine but dim, as several days about this time.
Sept. 11. And so this day.
Sept. 12. Dull.
Sept. 13. Fine, I think.
Sept. 14. Fine.
Sept. 15. Blighty.– One of these days there was a solar halo. Remember the solar halo as an illustration.
The cedars at the bottom have their flakes so modulated from the horizontal and so taking one another up all along the row that they look like the swaling or *give* of water in a river when you look across it and moonlight, say, picks out the different faces with light and dark.
Sept. 16. Blighty, turning to fine.
The Long Retreat began.*
Sept. 17. Fine. –Chestnuts as bright as coals or spots of vermillion.
Sept. 18. Thunderstorm and rain but not all day.
Henceforth I keep no regular weather-journal but only notes.
Sept. 27. The (clouded) sky at dawn was, I noticed, quite purple. There followed a thunderstorm: I saw one flash of lightning rose-colour. Afterwards wind, rain, and graceful changing clouds.
Very early on some of these days the morning mist looked like water quite still and clouded by milk or soda.

*30 day retreat when novices first work through the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius.

A++

My excerpts from GMH upthread were slightly flippant, but its fascinating reading how he's trying to configure the world around him:

I found one morning the ground in one corner of the garden full of small pieces of potsherd from which there rose up (and not dropped off) long icicles carried on in some way each like a forepitch of the shape of the piece of potsherd it grew on, like a tooth to its root for instance, and most of them bended over and curled like so many tusks or horns or/ best of all and what they looked likest when they first caught my eye/ the first soft root-spurs thrown out from a sprouting chestnut. This bending of the icicle seemed so far as I could see not merely a resultant, where the smaller spars of which it was made were still straight, but to have flushed them too.

There are other excerpts where you can see more easily the violence that his attempt to fix an observation in detail does to language and word order/cognitive expression. I noted this excerpt because of his desire and ability to reach all round the natural world to find the analogy he needs. I don't know enough about GMH, certainly not enough to know the basics of how his exploration of metaphor, image and the poetic imagination generally relates to God, but it's clear his microscopic examination of the world in image and language is in some way undertaken and part of understanding the workings of God. As such it is an extraodinary exploratory fusion of language, image and God (and the nexus of belief, the moral universe and one's own soul that brings with it).

By extension this reminded me of something over which I periodically muse: the nature of the metaphorical universe in a digital age. The natural world has provided the material clothing and analogue for spirit, imaginings and metaphysics for millennia. the richness of that world, its capability of offering up instruments for highly potent self-realisation (both of our inner lives and the cosmos itself) is intrinsic to the arts and especially I would say poetry, where it is realised in logos. This isn't confined to the natural world, though reading hopkins you realise the benefits of a rich knowledge of that world - the different colour blues of different flowers, the names the have, the sensory experience offered up at different times of the day and season and in different atmospheric conditions. After all modernism was in part built out of understanding how new conceptions of the material world had been fashioned by western society might illuminate in the same way as 'Nature'* (with a concurrent drift to spiritual explorations from the East of time and spiritual experience).

In the digital age the presence of sensory analogues for self-realisation seems very complicated. The sensory world of the digital world we explore is increasingly large warehouses of servers in freezing or even submarine spaces, surrounded by pine and padding startled deer. It is the huge piles of broken down consumer electronics in a Japan slum, being picked over for valuable metals by human scavengers slowly poisoning themselves. However, this is only the material constitution of those digital spaces. What is the material sensory aesthetic of those digital spaces? Is it even meaningful to have one? It's why I liked Lockwood's essay-lecture in the LRB. The language of this new space, the minute exploration of it, is not constituted out of that rich sensory world that has afforded all our tools for understanding our entire cosmos historically.

While I recognise this, I also fear it. This may be generational only - the whimper of the old pre-internet guard as as all that is solid melts into digital air. For the moment, reading Hopkins is spiritual and imaginatively enriching. the deep spiritual and imaginative exploration of a momentary cloud seen in the evening, the mechanics of its interplay with the sunset, its inscape as an object, meticulously recorded revivifies the engagement with the 'natural' world (this time natural in its widest sense - not purely fotherington-tomas - there is a question of whether the digital world can be properly understood to be part of nature. i think it must be, but it's complicated).

*Always worth reading CS Lewis' brilliant essay on the history of the word Nature, its variants and its meaning, in his book Studies on Words:

This does not mean that all the poets are talking nonsense. They are expressing a way of looking at things which must arise when towns become very large and the urban way of life very different from the rural. When this happens most people (not all) feel a sense of relief and restoration on getting out to the country; it is a serious emotion and a recurrent one, a proper theme for high poetry. Philosophically, no doubt, it is superficial to say that we have escaped from the works of man to those of *Nature* when in fact, smoking a man-made pipe and swinging a man-made stick, wearing our man-made boots and clothes, we pause on a man-made bridge to look down on the banked, narrowed, and deepened river which man has made out of the original wide, shallow, and swampy mess, and across it, at a landscape which has only its larger geological features in common with that which would have existed if man had never interfered. But we are expressing something we really feel. The wider range of vision has something to do with it; we are seeing *more* of *nature* (in a good many senses) than we could in a street. Again, the *natural* forces which keep the buildings of a town together (all the stresses) are only inferred; the *natural* action of weather and vegetation is visible. And there are fewer men about; therefore, by one of our habitual contrasts, more *nature*. We also feel (most of us) that we are, for the moment, in conditions suited to our own *nature* – to our lungs, nostrils, ears and eyes.

But I need not labour the point. Romantic *nature*, like the popular use of *supernatural*, is not an idle term because it seems at first to stand up badly to logical criticism. People know pretty well what they mean by it and sometimes use it to communicate what would not easily be communicable in other ways. To be sure, they may also use it to say vaguely and flatly (or even ridiculously) what might have been said precisely and freshly if they had had no such tool ready. I once saw a railway poster which advertised Kent as 'Nature's home' ..

I guess the question is whether digital stands in the same relation to irl as the town does to the country here. there is perhaps some reason to suggest it does, but again the separation of the 'natural forces' that holds the internet (undersea cables, nordic datacentres in granite cliffs) together, to its *digital* underpinning presents complications.

An argument I feel fairly strongly from time to time is that the Romantic age has now come substantially to an end (largely a good thing I feel), with concomitant breakdowns of the notions of Self (effectively now highly commoditised and sliced), attachments to deep traditions of inner meaning, "Nature" (religious, Romantic philopsophy, rather than Romantic poetic) as a fundamental concept. As all apocalypses are only predictive descriptions of how the current state of affairs comes to an end, this may be described as an apocalypse, but not necessarily a bad one.

Otoh it may be preferable to describe it in terms of conceptual continuity - analogues with the printing press, data processing/information explosions etc.

I haven't thought about this nearly as deeply as you have but a few things strike me:

One, that it's impossible to think of Nature and apocalypse without considering the ecological collapse we're currently on the verge of/immersed in and how this affects our relationship to it. Is this move to a digital landscape indicative of this, a product of it, a contingency or all/none of these?

Two: I'm in an ongoing tussle with the validity or not of the idea of the eerie. I find it simultaneously a load of wooly old bollocks and genuinely productive as a nexus of a bunch of ideas around the occlusion of Nature and the disruption of our relationship to the land and the wild. Your post has me idly wondering if it can be applied here, too - in all its wooly glory.

As for GMH, I think there's a kind of terror in him, a terror of feeling (feeling led him places he simply couldn't face going), a product of which is his invention of the idea of inscape as a way of avoiding the fact that we impute meaning to things through subjective affect. Inscape reintroduces God as if Nature is meaningfully the way it is. In this light, his obsession with detail *is* partly an act of devotion, but could be considered an avoidance tactic.

I wonder if a useful comparison would be RF Langley's journals? They have a similar obsessive 'watching narrowly' aesthetic but Langley's obsessiveness seems Other and in the service of something else. I need to think some about what that is.

Thanks so much re Hopkins Journals, greatly encouraging me to more sensory and other brain exercise (function, even). Long ago, There was a long Voice piece about a virtual reality conference, ending with Brian Eno saying that when he finally got his head out of the most advanced gear, he found that even a (think it was) dead leaf was almost unbearably beautiful. The older I get, the more I value/depend on finally pushing myself away from the screens, going out and walking around---the town is no longer so small, but still has hills and bridges and some deep wooded lots between buildings---but it takes awhile to get away from thinking about what I was thinking about or in a drone about while I was nearer the screens--and sometimes I don't get far enough away, or I go into another (?) drone and later have to dredge for a few details of where I've just walked, poking into cache memory maybe. Still, wouldn't trade these walks for anything, so to speak.

xp
Yes - Langley feels right comparison to Hopkins. Something uncertain or uncomfortable in Langley's focus - belated or reduced in comparison to Hopkins. More post-scientific maybe (see his descriptions of spiders, maybe, working with and against a precise anatomical vocabulary and textbook-checking), certainly doesn't have a stable Divine to underwrite the observation. Looking becomes an end in itself - there's some anxiety in that. Why is the observer observing?
(Is Langley a bit more accommodating to the human? Seems to record rooms, buildings, sculpture, figures in a landscape. But been a little while since I looked at Hopkins' journals)

Just to be clear that's all praise

I just got a fair bit of the way through a long response to Chinaski, and then read it through and thought 'what utter garbage', so have put it somewhere for safe keeping and further thought and revision at a later date.

One day I want to read Pepys. Seems to be great but I'm hesitant.

I don’t think I’ve ever managed one of these cover to cover. I recently picked up orton’s diaries tho so might give that a go, looks good

Picked up and was flicking through Langley's Journals. Very good call – have liked what I've read very much. Haven't reached into Chinaski's questions yet, partly because I think the exploration of them will be somewhat complicated.

This, though, from April 1977, is very much my sort of shit:

What am I expecting to see at dusk, out past where the houses stop, where the human goat might walk? New categories. Sudden understandings, over the verge and under the scrub oak.

They were very vague questions! Glad you're enjoying Langley. This is very much by the by, and once a compliment but now I'm not entirely sure, but the cadence and syntax of that short section of the journals, in isolation, is pure Sinclair.

There was an In Our Time about Hopkins last week. It was vaguely unsatisfying, as most In Our Times, but it did bring into focus just how peripatetic he was. I'm cautious of falling into folksy biography but unlike Clare, who was surely a huge influence, Hopkins was emphatically not 'homeless at home and half gratified to feel I can be happy anywhere.’ I love that phrase from woof about everything being underwritten by the divine yet even with this bulwark, Hopkins remained rootless and underwritten himself.

and more by the by. yes the GMH IOT was vaguely unsatisfying, and as you say that’s fairly standard, but *by god* the one on “Authenticity” was pure, solid manure from end to end. So, an improvement. As usual i enjoy the science ones more - the one on pheromones was good - though i recognise this may only be an expression of the law that says we see the error in treatments of things we know, but do not assume the same for treatments of subjects foreign to us.

anyway, thought i’d posted the link but i enjoyed Geoffrey Hill on GMH here. I came across the title of the lecture - “what you look hard at seems to look hard at you” - in the journals, and it’s been reverberating round my head, especially on a spare day off yesterday when i went out to see the countryside at its Larkin “like something almost being said” tipping point. still not shrugged off its dead winter grass but just budding.

http://a68.tinypic.com/11aidxl.jpg


http://a65.tinypic.com/t5loo8.jpg

attempting to “do a hopkins”, looking v closely at the incipient spring in order to get into the words “what you look hard at seems to look hard at you”. but of course no one looked harder than hopkins - i read an LRB article today which contained the useful phrases “fastidious aesthete” and “painstaking sense-perceptions” - and my exercise in hopkins spidey-senses was very much like the blindfolded analysis of the elephant.

http://a65.tinypic.com/t5loo8.jpg
http://a68.tinypic.com/11aidxl.jpg

http://a65.tinypic.com/t5loo8.jpg
http://a68.tinypic.com/11aidxl.jpg

ah fuck it.

Hah - I am convinced these images contain the secret to life itself.

I've been out watching narrowly today to (Gilbert White's phrase). Beautiful out there in spring's great thickening.

And, aye, it's Clive James but this is great on GMH: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69093/little-low-heavens

*too, ffs.

Not seeing affordable editions of entire Journals on Amazon US (most are over a hundred bucks). Maybe excerpts in various Hopkins anthologies---any recommendations?

I'm afraid not. Mine's a library copy – it does look like there are some excerpts in the Penguin Classics ed of his poems. I'm sure that would provide a decent flavour.

Separately, thinking about Hopkins' antipathy for Browning as not a real poet and even quite vulgar in his prosody and choice of subject matter, it occurred to me that both were substantially bending or even breaking the language of poetry, one with his need to depict the instress and inscape in an underpopulated world, and the other the language of speech, in a highly populated world. These here are antipathetic modes. Not sure what I do with that, but I put it down here as not belonging anywhere else.

William Blake maybe the crossroads of both?
I will check the Penguin Classics, thanks, also maybe The Major Works, from Qxford World Classics: all of the poems, with excerpts of journals, diary, and letters, letters, letters.

The Oxford one I think has the larger selection

I looked it up! I can totally see how Langley is a kind of mystic, reading nature as a holy text (without the attendant naffness that that implies - eg like Iain Sinclair at his worst).

― Good cop, Babcock (Chinaski), Sunday, 16 June 2019 09:34 (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Cross-posting from the running ILB thread. I'm more tentative about the mystic assessment, which was in part why I felt 'midrash' was a bad word to use*.

A basic assertion I feel comfortable making is that, in some respects like Hopkins, Langley wants to use language to depict the world accurately, in particular the world of nature, that is to say flora and fauna. That's basic enough to be banal. For Hopkins you might want to say 'depict the world *faithfully*', for Langley I think you have to say 'accurately'. And in fact (and sorry about this rambling), by 'faithfully' wrt Hopkins, I don't mean 'depicting the world accurately, where inventive language is entirely subservient to the inscape of things, is an act of faith, but that doing so allows one to perceive nature, creation, more clearly, with more wonder and interest, and that is the act of faith.

To move on; it's in the relation of language to the world – a Romantic problem – that Langley seems to have some interesting attitudes. I wouldn't want to claim a particular mysticism about this general approach.

So I already quoted the part on the insect traversing the wall of a railway bridge on a late afternoon in October 2002:

Where is this insect going, and for what? It will take an hour to cross the rest of this bridge and make it to the hedge, and by then it will be dusk. It cannot ever have been over there before, or have any sort of home or destination over there. If it rains it will be knocked off. When it is dark ... will it still walk on? It is the end of the season. There is nothing for it to look forward to. It will never be seen by anyone who has words again.

Those last two sentences: the reason it has nothing for it to look forward to is because it will never be seen by anyone who has words again. Those writings are more than just interpretations, but create the knowable world, interpret it in terms of desires, pain, sorrows, and plainer emotions, industriousness, making-do, or notions such as 'looking forward to', or depictions of the autumnal, late afternoon of life in the autumnal late afternoon of October 2008.

That is not to say that the world is absent outwith our articulation of it. On cleaning up the house in Suffolk, Langley assiduously notates the sounds and details of the house being cleaned:

The rag rugs, on which the Hoover chokes and bangs. The pamment floor in the hall, where it clatters, and the two loose mats there, carpet pieces, dark red and blue, loose so they woof up as the Hoover crosses their edges. The individual press and click as you switch on the lamps at the wall plugs, or fumble up underneath their shades to find the switches there. The green, plastic plate rack we bought years ago, on the draining board, its slots shallow, so the plates set in it tilt weightily, only just held up, sloping forwards or back, with the wedge and pinch on their bottom edges just about nipping them, a tentative engagement.

He then follows up:

Enough of this. The place has accumulated routines, touches on objects, their manipulation, sequences of movements done repeatedly with resultant noises, collisions, clunks, knacks. They are so specific when you remember them that the world seems impossibly full, a miracle of containment. Or does it leak?

Impossibly full, and we have the language, and crucially the observational capacity, the capacity for *feeling*, to express it. That's not just written language either. One of my favourite entries is one of the regular church bibbing ones, at the Abbey of St Philibert in Tournus. He is looking at the people coming in to the Abbey.

People do it in different ways. Folded arms, looking up. With a spring. Turning to prop themselves against the nearest pillar. Or heads down, thinking or reading. Instantly many are dominated by the word. They go round reading everything that can be read, screwing up their eyes, coming half way along a pew to see a plaque. An elderly man with his arms at his sides, head lifted a bit, eyes hooded. Then he helps his wife out from the pew, by her elbow, and on they go, not looking up until they reach the notices by the door, where they halt again.

...

To read the notices. Because they speak of the self, the familiar codifications, not of the other, as do the pillars and walls and vaults and apertures. These are body talk, not explanations of the sort the inscriptions articulate. Gesture. The open beak of the dying fledgling, wide and silent. The body screwed up at the moment of its being given up, or taken away. The head stretched up at the last active point. St Philibert's takes the opening and reaching and holds it permanently, and without the agony and self-reference and pain. A calm, complete going. The gesture of the fledgling, and that of anything else like that, in here, contained and assimilated, lifted and opened and held. The opposite of the fall, unfledged, from the roof into the gutter. The snag of my broken fingernail, consolidated. The closeness and speed of the lizard's body, simultaneous, all over, gathered.

This section where the architectural, sculptural and pictorial language of gesture is the opening to nature's language - gesture once again providing the articulation into human emotion, religious feeling - leads into that line I quoted in the other thread...

That poetry should be like that. To fetch out the sudden, shining fish in your bill. Riskily.

Back on that insect, he asks:

How much is there to understand? Is this taking place in a sort of sub-zone, where there is nothing to know about function, purpose, the end of journeying, the getting of food, warmth, the arrival at a crevice to have a home in?

Langley works at the point where nature is turned into expression (like the grotesque, the foliage is twined round and imperceptibly changes into a face - this is not a hard boundary).

One additional note:

(Is Langley a bit more accommodating to the human? Seems to record rooms, buildings, sculpture, figures in a landscape

Yes, and i think because of the above - the human is functionally important in his understanding of nature in a way that isn't the case with Hopkins - but also the journals are generally devoid of anything other than phatic human interaction, even his communication with his close companions taking place through something of a veil.