Prynne week: Hands and Biting the Air.

After today I’m going to leave BTA and move on to the work on George Herbert’s Love III because I’m conscious that there’s only four days left and many things that I want to pay attention to. First, a few thoughts on ‘meaning’. I’m of the view that, as with Celan, we shouldn’t expect an an all-encompassing overview of what’s going on. I’m also mindful of Prynne’s Mental Ears and Poetic Work essay where he writes “I am rather frequently accused of more or less altogether taken leave of discernible sense. In fact I believe this accusation to be more of less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because for what so long has seemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry (“what does it mean”) seems less and less an unavoidably necessary precondition for successful reading”. So, in these pieces I may be trying to unpick a number of threads that appear to make a kind of ‘sense’to me but I also recognise that there’s too many ambiguities and intertwined subjects for complete sense to be made. So far I have armed conflict alongside Big Pharma but these are both still provisional and may indicate completely different subjects altogether.

Today, instead of working out ‘what’ I’m going to have a go at ‘why’. By this I mean attending to the repeated use of the word ‘hand’ and things closely related to hands and what hands do. I’m an enormous fan of repetition and recognise it, in any form, to be a particularly strong means of expression. Those that read Monday’s piece on BTA may have noticed that the word crops up three times in the first eight lines of the poem. It then reappears with unusual frequency throughout the rest of the sequence. I’d like to start by highlight the third of these: Enough out of one hand / to grasp another and the last two line of this poem: a country prosperous and blue and bright over / and blindness forever in hand on hand proverb. These appear to be connected especially if I take the proverb to be a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush It seems to my small brain that any process of negotiation involves letting go of some of what you’ve got in order to get more of what you want. In the good old days when we had effective strikes, workers may have closed down a number of factories and have these standing idle so they can get management to either agree terms or reach a beneficial compromise. In Ulster, the situation was a bit more complex- this was a three-sided civil war with all three parties having a different set of objectives. Paramilitaries on both sides of the community could have carried on their murderous campaigns against each other and the British army but (for different reasons) chose to give that campaign up in favour of a political settlement. In order to achieve this both sides had to disarm- ie give up what strength they had in return for that much fatter bird in the bush. Of course, this might be too ‘neat’ but it might tie in with yesterday’s ‘thread’ especially if the eternal blindness refers to the ongoing inability of either side to understand the other’s point of view and aspirations.

This mutual obduracy might also occur if we take ‘rag’ as a ragstone (i.e a hard sedimentary rock that can be broken up and fashioned into paving stones) and for ‘pacify’ to have the same connotations as ‘mollify’ in the second poem that I wrote about yesterday. Would it be too easy to read ‘hand attachment in’ as both giving in an attachment and that hand attachment being a firearm? It probably would.

Before we go any further, it might be useful to consider the why question. Apart from the possible linkage of a thread of sense, is there any other reason to use repetition to this extent? The reiteration of a phrase or image or melody serves to give emphasis, to perhaps signal up this element for greater attention than what surrounds it. In songs a chorus can contain the main theme and give structure to the whole by establishing a kind of rhythm. There’s also Prynne’s strong interest in work songs which rely on a degree of repetition in the chorus. It may be an exploration of using the same word in different ways. Or, it may be none of these.

The word ‘same’ has even more repetition in Prynne’s later Streak~Willing~Entourage~Artesian and some of that may be an echo of the Spanish equivalent in Goya’s notebooks during the Peninsular War. Here it seems less obscure but more complex. These are form the second poem that I wrote about on Tuesday:

......................................Hold one

before leasing forage behaviour; wash the novice
wrist, finger tight. Do you already know this or yet
allocate sufficiency.

and this:

..................................A forever dulcet 

hesitation in the mouth long-dated ostensible tap,
stare in daylight, one hand washes the other.

Both of these throw down a number of challenges, the first doesn’t use ‘hand’ but has two verbs that normally need a hand to be carried out. The preceding sentence ends with “got a banner” so it may be this that someone is being told to hold. As in most civil ways, the flying and display of flags and the respective flag colours was a wearily regular feature throughout the Ulster conflict(s). This ties in with “leasing forage behaviour”. The OED defines the verb to forage as: “To collect forage from; to overrun (a country) for the purpose of obtaining or destroying supplies; to lay under contribution for forage. Also in wider sense, to plunder, pillage, ravage”. To lease something is (in my improbably broad sense) is to allow something to be used for a specific length of time in return for a payment. So, the waving of the flag on marches and demonstrations may be seen as a precursor for plunder and pillage- this can perhaps be more starkly seen in the atrocities that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia.

It might also be that this ‘leasing’ refers to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) approves drugs for prescription use in the UK- the high price of some of these could be said to be plundering the country’s finances.

‘Wash the novice wrist’ would seem to be fairly clear but not make a huge amount of sense in this context. Slightly more of a sense-thread is to be found if the verb is taken as an adjective to mean washy or weak or tender. So what we might infer is that this novice or new recruit has a weak wrist and is only capable of making things with screws and bolts so that they can be easily undone. This is probably an example of chronic overreading but it’s nevertheless worth some further thought.

The second hand (weak and almost accidental play on words) in the poem might refer to blessing bestowed or absolution (washing) that is given by the clergy. There has yet to be a thorough and independent examination of the role of elements of the Catholic and Presbyterian churches in terms of tacit support given to the respective armed factions. We speak of the guilty as having ‘blood on their hands’ and, according to the tenets of Catholicism this blood can be cleaned of by means of confession and penance. The equivalent in Protestant terms it to identify yourself as a sinner before the eyes of God although there is some disagreement as to what this might result in.

In both Ulster and the Balkans it is possible to see some of the main protagonists as proclaiming and undertaking a religious cause or duty- in this way the respective clergy can be seen as the religious ‘arm’ of the struggle on of whose roles is to provided a kind of moral justification for the violence.

Even as I write this I have doubts as to whether things can be this straightforward, especially as “in the mouth long-dated” seems better suited to a medical reading. This is further complicated if ‘dulcet’ is taken as an equivalent to a doucet which is a kind of musical pipe or flute, which brings us the the Orange marching season and how a cessation of the most provocative of these was seen as an important element of the peace process.

So, many more things to think about and I haven’t begun to look at the economic and financial terms that crop up through the sequence, which might help with the threads that seem to be present.

That’s enough of BTA for now, next I want to give some more attention to Prynne’s remarkable work on Herbert’s Love III which may demonstrate how much thought we need to put into our reading.

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