(no subject)

[proximoception]

Read Babel's Red Cavalry this week simultaneously with John Clare, and was bemused at their improbable resemblance. Then came on a remark in Ashbery's Clare lecture tonight where he speaks of his poems as "reports from the front." Which kind of made me wonder if he was thinking of Babel too because in isolation that's untrue of Clare, for whom nature was in no sense a battleground. But for Babel war was a sort of natural phenomenon. I don't mean he felt the causes necessarily recurred, but for whatever reason there they were - an innocent evil was born. This is bizarrely yoked to relentless, if opaque, satire, too. As though causes and blame had mattered shortly before and might come to again, but in the meantime were just the cracks through which the tide of madness broke that had since flooded the air. It's a disturbingly unique tone, to some extent based on Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches but stranger - in part because reporting these particular sights is so dangerous that it itself feels like a reckless sally at night among minefields and fire, in part because Babel is clearly viewing the whole experience as revelation. While as clearly having no idea of just what or from whom. There's a true guilelessness behind the designs beneath his surface naivete.

Is there any similar slyness to Clare's innocence? I'm not at my best in holy fool territory, but it does seem that in Clare's last poems a plank gives way and we're suddenly behind nature. And you look back at the earlier work, those thousands of pages of minutely followed birds and fields and step-altering weather, and wonder if we somehow were back then as well, and how that could be.

***

I'd picked Babel for how far he seemed from the Anglo-American texts I've been exclusively buried in, ironically. And because I'd read no short stories in months. Babel's effect on some of Calvino's early, WW2-centered writings becomes evident in retrospect. But The Kingdom of This World, and Blood Meridian? I'm wondering.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Maybe a different kind of report from the front? What's the context for that phrase? I'm thinking of the last line of his poem "For John Clare."

Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting
in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think the point was that Clare's writing what he saw without really reflecting on it handles nature with the same mixture of respect and maybe concealed disdain at something beyond control or intelligibility as laconic, Hemingwayan type war reporting. But it's Ashbery (and maybe all Clare's other readers, to be fair) who finds Clare's nature uncontrolled and tedious. Clare didn't - all his complaints are directed against people, whereas nature is somehow one with poetry, rapture, healing solitude. Till the end, anyway.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I think you nail Babel. This is great.