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

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.

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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.

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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.