Drinking tea, spilling tea

Today was a day of tea. Me, drinking it, and reading Susan Howe spilling it on an old ham who wrote a bitchy and unworthy sketch of her very accomplished mother, finally giving him a sketch of his own in which he does not surface again with honour. It was fun to read Perloff taking up the fight by continuing to call the bitchy and unworthy sketcher Mac Liammóir by his real name, Willmore.

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Another term for the artists’ book might be ‘memory cradle.’ Susan Howe uses this in the ‘Kidnapped’ section of The Midnight. Perloff points out in her essay that Yeats ‘supplies the memory cradle for the entire book’ (224) [if I’m reading her correctly here].

A question I’m asking is will my artist’s book (as a portrait of an eighteenth-century manuscript) be comprised of ambiguous evidence? Which is what memory is. The pages of the manuscript show evidence of those turns in thought that a writer takes as they write, cross-outs that look like they might be, like the inscriptions in Mary Manning’s address book (image on page 119), ‘the error prone penmanship of an old person’ (Perloff, 224). Those moments of correction are evidence of turns in thought. The writer stopping to notice the hand had automatically made a move to make one letter when the mind meant another. Or they thought of a more exact, more correct word than the one they started to write. Sous rature. Both versions then continue to exist at once.

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I’m not familiar with WB Yeats beyond knowing his name and following a bot on twitter that posts fragments of his work in 2 or 3 tweets a day. I presume these could come from any type of material, perhaps letters, certainly poems, maybe the plays. The bot is called wb_yeatz based in Sandymount, Ireland, and they follow me back! They tweet things like; ‘All empty souls tend towards extreme opinions’ and ‘All women dote on an idle man,/ Although their children need a rich estate./No man has ever lived that had enough/Of children’s gratitude or women’s love’ (from ‘Vacillation’, The Winding Stair and other poems, 1933). I couldn’t help myself when I saw that quote come across my screen last December and replied (yes, I know! I replied to a bot!) something like: ‘This is the worst quote. Stand down soldier!’ I think I was trying to interact with the bot (as opposed to Yeats himself) since it, the bot, was mindlessly repeating old drivel, and amplifying it without comment. Like humans do.

Indeed, Yeats believed that an unwomanly absorption in politics and public life makes a woman’s voice shrill (Perloff, 212). O yes, he did. Hoo, boy. 

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I’m agitated today and forced myself to focus on the slow reading. It worked and suddenly I’m at the end of the day with only 15 % of Perloff’s 'Statistical Traffic' left to read. And I should be finished by tomorrow. Then next week, I’ll turn back to Susan Howe’s The Midnight. This brings me full circle to where I started, in wanting to use The Midnight as a model for a long work of portraiture that can be built from ‘constatation of fact’ (Pound’s term, which spellcheck hates), basic assumption of fact, a work which at its heart stands archival documentation. Would Dziga Vertov allow: a storm of facts? In any case, the form is very much in the mode of poetic documentary. 

I cannot compete with Lady Mary’s ‘fortune to have a more exact knowledge both of the persons and facts that have made the greatest figure in England in this age, than is common’. But, like Lady Mary, I ‘take pleasure in putting together what I know, with an impartiality that is altogether unusual’. (1 Oct 1758, Letters II, 1837: 338). 

Remember though, my portrait is of this object, a commonplace book, in image and text in parataxis. Tell me, a strange leap? The conversations between image and text will be acting out the very thing they stand for, such as the ways that we’ve outsourced our memories, or the way objects of memory outlast us, and so on.

But for now, Void, you and I are here. And I’m glad for it,

Jx

Howe, Susan. The Midnight. New York: New Directions Books, 2003.

Perloff, Marjorie. “‘The Rattle of Statistical Traffic’: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe’s The Midnight.” Boundary 2 36, no. 3 (2009): 205–228.