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Notes to stanzas 45 to 5245.2 Fat Bob’s own surveillance videos:* Videos is no doubt projected US and/or Birmingham jargon for ‘films’. The phrase provides as good evidence as one could ask for in support of my theory, outlined above (see 42.2 Closed-circuit cameras*), that this is supposed to be a society in which private individuals (even ones as common as Fat Bob) have the technological means, the inclination and the license to carry out intimate surveillance of each another.
45.4 footage:* An indeterminate short sequence of cinematic images (usually a single scene or event) couched metonymically in terms of the literal, physical length of film (in feet) on which they are printed. The pun on ‘metric footage’ (as it were), combining the same synecdoche of metrical units standing for the scene they contain, is obviously intended. 45.5 mise-en-scène:* If the colon which follows this term is supposed to mark the next clause as appositive, then it is misapplied. The mise-en-scène is the background or setting of a scene, not its events. If we bear in mind the previous metonymic play on footage, however, we might assume this is intended to suggest a blurring of the distinction between the ‘backdrop’ and the ‘action’, serving either to flatten the scene into a shoddy two-dimensional tableau, or else to insinuate a demonic animation of the background and the props. Either (or, indeed, both) would be perfectly in keeping with the mimetic qualities of the satire (and, in fact, the whole concept of the moving image.) 45.7 phoney:* Another Americanism meaning ‘fake’. A possible etymological link to phone and phonic seems to imply the word has something to do with the dud sound of a counterfeit. The fact that Fat Bob (actually a complete dullard) ‘knows [one] when he sees one’ is therefore a typically ironic switch of the senses. The obvious solution to the problem was to light my pipe. It is one of the immutable pleasures of the cinema, invariably more enjoyable than the dreary features themselves these days, to watch unfurling fronds of smoke emerging from the undergrowth of heads to describe the animated cone of light that beams out of the projector. I had been to see a film called ‘The Man in the White Suit’ the previous Wednesday and had noted how the play of brightness and dark in the photography had mimicked the experience of the cinema itself: the luminescent suit like the ‘silver screen’; the dingy railway arches and back lanes through which its doomed designer was pursued by crowds like the darkened hall full of fidgeting spectators; there was even a scene in which Alec Guinness hid in a blacked-out booth of his laboratory, underlit by a single bulb like a demonic projectionist changing the reel.
My fascination with this correspondence led me, inevitably perhaps, to spend a lot more time watching the illuminated faces of my neighbours than looking at the screen. I distinctly remember my gaze travelling down from the thick-lipped husband nibbling his untrimmed moustache for the want of rationed humbugs, to his daughter’s thighs squeezing together under her woollen skirt like gristly sausages sweating beneath their thick, brown butcher’s paper, and then quickly back aloft to watch the smoke from my pipe fleshing out the flickering two-dimensional image of a fluorescent liquid in a large round-bottomed flask. If I had not remembered this moment of idle pleasure as I pondered my next move, I think I would have tentatively beaten a retreat. I might never, that is, have made it to this room. I did remember though. I turned and sat in the doorway with my feet on the top brass step, my back towards the pool of light, and stuffed my pipe with St Bruno. When I was finished, I dropped the tobacco pouch back in the sagging inside pocket of my sports jacket and lit the pipe with a match that needed some persuasion to ignite against the pinkened strip of sand paper on the side of a tatty box of England’s Glory. I puffed at the mouthpiece to get it going properly, then twisted back, blowing sweet cheekfuls through pursed lips to fill the space with smoke. The skewed hexahedron of light protruding into the hall from 666 appeared in the fug. I took my jacket off and rolled up my shirtsleeves. On my side of the light there was little enough room to reach over its top plane at anything like the necessary angle to get purchase on the door-handle: not even on tiptoes. So instead of trying to reach over I pressed my back flat against the adjacent wall, biting hard on the nozzle of my pipe so that it stuck out purposefully like a tug boat captain’s in the Solent, and stretched my left arm out parallel to the door. I ran the back of my hand down the wooden panels, horripilation spreading in the direction of my elbow, and grabbed the broad round door handle. I attempted to twist it back towards myself. I could not turn to look at what I was doing for fear the bowl of my pipe might break the swirling surface of the sunbeam. There was very little give. Often these old doors can warp if regularly exposed to sunlight; consequently the mechanism of the latch can become rather rigidly ensconced. I was used to this. I changed to an overhand grip, the proud hairs on my forearm trying to dip themselves in the glow. The smell of burning hair has always held a fascination for me. I turned my wrist. This time the handle’s mechanism sprang. I had not really expected it to be unlocked; it was something of a surprise to hear the door extract itself with juddering relief from the narrow frame and swing out into the room. I unpocketed my pipe and turned my face to examine the results. The door was half open, mirroring the one to 666. It had stopped against a stack of foolscap suspension files. The darkness it revealed was coolly inviting. Wielding my pipe behind me for balance like a scorpion’s sting, I sidled along the wall until my shoulder touched the flat edge of the jamb. In order to negotiate this obstacle I would have to risk the illumination of the rim of my rather prominent right ear. Alternatively, if I were to turn my head back, the end of my nose might be exposed. I was convinced this would carry the direst of consequences. I still am.  46.2 soapy:* The texture of counterfeit coins is sometimes described by numismatists as ‘soapy.’ One can often feel a fake before one sees it. Whether this is to do with a slight difference in the metals used or some inconsistency of the annealing process I can not be sure, but the effect is quite noticeable.
46.7 moonwalk:* Perhaps this is supposed, via an adaptation of ‘mooning about’, to suggest the slow and transfixed movement of someone mesmerized. We must not forget he is moving backwards, though: something which, if done for any protracted period in the normal world, would appear a watertight case for a diagnosis of lunacy. This reminds me of a mime artist I once saw beneath the Eiffel Tower, walking on the spot, sliding his feet backwards on the park’s yellow gravel, whilst holding out a cardboard moon on a stick in front of him and gazing longingly towards it, as if he were strolling in the evening and ruing with each step his inability to get any closer to the moon. It struck me that anyone displaying such disturbingly deluded behaviour in England would probably (quite justifiably) be escorted politely to a hospital by a policeman. I paused, wishing I could suck my pipe again as I contemplated my dilemma. I certainly had nowhere near the kind of patience required to wait for the rotation of the Earth to change the angle at which the sunlight fell across the hall. Besides, I was rather disoriented in this Hawksmoorish annexe of the college and could not be sure in which direction the sun would move. I decided to risk it. I pressed my cheek hard against the jamb and slipped around it. I have no idea whether the sunlight touched my ear. I felt no increase in its temperature so, in my more fantastically optimistic moments, I still like to pretend I managed it.
Squeezing through the space between the door and the stack of files, I was forced to climb on a precarious hillock of the paperwork to close the door. It would require a firm push to force its relaxing shape back inside the frame. Teetering, I gave it an exaggerated shove. The overstuffed card folders planed against one another underneath my shoes. I adjusted my weight backwards to compensate, but too quickly and too far. My feet shot forwards with startling rapidity. I grabbed the pipe with both hands as if it were the banister of a loosely carpeted staircase in a miserly widow’s guest house. Obviously this achieved nothing. My body creased and I crumpled back against the papers, causing two or three folders to slide off the summit and thud contemptuously into my lap. 47* The idiom graduates here into that of a Police press conference about the movements of a missing suspect. The appeal for information at the end is clearly ironic. It makes the gaping fictional divide between the world of the reader and that of the parodied voice seem all the more unbridgeable. Or perhaps it does the opposite; perhaps it actually holds out the possibility of telephone communication between one generation and another, and thereby shows just how close to this dreadful future we have come.
47.6 Transit:* Intended, I think, as a futuristic generic term for a motor vehicle. 47.7 To somehow perfectly repair:* The infinitive is split, not just once, but twice in this phrase. This is very ugly. When we consider what it means (even outside its pointedly illogical context), we can see just how self-conscious the bad writing in this poem has become. Repair means not only ‘fix’ but also ‘revert’ and ‘go back’. To do this somehow perfectly (or should I say: ‘to somehow perfectly do this’) is to damage the phrase in a quite deliberate ‘accident’ of reparation (‘making over’ and ‘going back’). To somehow perfectly repair might therefore be cast as a semi-permanent ironic new coinage: a convoluted phrasal verb meaning something like ‘to damage a thing by attempting to fix it with one blow of a Birmingham screwdriver’ (ie. ‘a hammer’). 47.8 ring:* ‘A telephone call’. This derives from the ‘resonance’ sense of the word rather than ‘circlet’. There is a clear possibility, however, that the telephone network could be referred to as a ring in the circular sense. The two meanings seem to coalesce within a phrase from American business jargon ring round, which means to call a number of connected people on the telephone in order to organize an event. We can also add to the senses of ring already discussed above passim (see esp. 38.2 nickel-brass*) the phrasal versions which crop up as important in this poem: ring-road, ring of spies, etc. 47.8* There is a deliberate attempt made here to hint that readers are not only capable of acting as witnesses to this event (pictures of which we are paradoxically being told we can not see because the persona has lost track of Sloggy at this point, despite his tracksuit), but also that we might ourselves be seen, and therefore (as they say) be placed at the scene. 48.4 drag-race:* Obviously, this pre-empts the ‘screeching’ appearance of the ‘racial drag-queen’. Cinema is a self-conscious influence upon this scene. Perhaps we are to take it that the medium has become so degraded in the future that the only films available to view are in the mode of those awful American ‘B-Movies’ about illegal hot-rodding and races between criminal gangs of motorcyclists, with names like Hot Rod Gang, Thunder Road and Devil on Wheels. 48.5 Bellevue:* An obviously invented street name with a typically American feel: note how pretentious is the absence of a descriptive headword like road, street, lane, close, or crescent. Considering how dreary the city is, the name (from French ‘beautiful view’) is almost certainly a joke. 48.8 stumbles forwards:* Sloggy is therefore obviously going backwards at this point, just as he is in the following stanza where he ‘faces front and trudges to the door.’ Note the habitual monosyllabic rendition of forwards, to pun on ‘fords’, as Sloggy once more crosses a stream as he crosses the street. I sat and breathed steadily until my heartrate slowed again. The darkness in the room appeared to banish not only the light of the outside world but also its noise and atmosphere. I could barely hear or feel even the workings of my own body. I struck a match — as much for the reassuring scratch and whiff of phosphorous as anything — and relit my pipe. I had just enough time in its faint glow to see there was still a bulb in a brass fitting hanging from a plaited brown electric cable next to an access hatch in the middle of the ceiling. It was only from the ceiling in fact that the hectagonal shape of the room was at all discernible. I counted the sides: one two d d d d… seven. Apart from that I knew only that I was sitting at the bottom of a bank of dusty papers. I could see no light-switch. Instinctively, I shook out the match as it began to burn my fingers.
Considering my present predicament this childlike reflex playing itself over in my memory seems touchingly irrelevant. As I write, my body is beginning to curl down towards the paper like the stamens of an amaryllis, the pungent corolla of fiery petals opening out around me.
Over the next few days I took up the task of reorganising the room. I began by shifting the papers away from the window and piling them in the shallow triangle formed by the two walls to the left of the door as one entered. I wanted to get the job finished before the new intake arrived and the more adventurous amongst them took it upon themselves to investigate the college passageways. It required a considerable effort of will to resist reading any of the documents. I had to think of it all as so much paper, rather than an archive. In order to fit it into the space available I built tall stacks all the way up to the ceiling. I found it necessary to take one of the stepladders from the college library: a theft for which I am suddenly, strangely, very ashamed.
The paperwork was now arranged in such a way that the door was able to open fully perpendicularly to the frame. This provided just enough space to manoeuvre furniture. From 666 I took a small writing table that would not be missed and placed it in front of the window; and from my old room I took the only item I really cared about: a rotating, high-backed wooden armchair, cushioned in green leather, which my ex-wife had given me as a ploy to keep me out of her hair by improving the comfort of my workplace. The joints in my previous chair, you see, had taken to producing a particularly irritating creak every time I changed position and I had become so exasperated one morning that I returned home at an unexpected hour only to hear, as I unlatched the garden gate, precisely the same sound coming from our bedroom window… accompanied by my wife’s unmistakably unconvincing rhythmic whinnying. Her response, as practical as ever, was to have a new chair made by the local master carpenter (one of the area’s gratuitous air-raid wardens) so that I was not reminded of that archetypal little tableau every time I sat down to work. (Our son, Phillip had yet to leave for London.) She also oiled the bedsprings. 50.5 streetlamp digi-cam:* I take this to refer to a tiny film camera the size of a finger (digi(t)) which is concealed inside the streetlamp somewhere: presumably not at the point of radiation because this would surely pose a rather severe technological challenge. None the less, the idea of the thing which is supposed to give light becoming something which is supposed to receive light as images is another reversal of the transitivity of gaze of which this poem seems so fond. I am reminded of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’: ‘Half-past one, / The streetlamp sputtered, / The streetlamp muttered,…’
50.7 tracksuit top:* See 42.3 tracksuit.* The rather vague monosyllable top may be used instead of ‘jacket’ simply for reasons of prosody. There is a possibility however, if we revive the theory that this is an encoded hand of cards—recalling games in ‘The Rape of the Lock’, Eugene Onegin, Alice in Wonderland—it could be something like ‘the ace of trumps’: top being ‘the card of highest value’ and tracksuit ‘the suit you need to follow.’ The next job on my list would have to be the rehousing of my own books and papers. I had already come to the conclusion that this was an important historical archive and in order to extinguish my curiosity I would have to take the time to catalogue and reorganize the contents of the room before even contemplating a return to Poetry and Prophesy. I therefore took the decision to explore the access hatch in the ceiling to see if it concealed a possible alternative storage space for my books.
It did. There was an attic approximately a third of the volume of the room in the form of a domical vault. Needless to say, there was no such feature visible from the exterior. Instead the oriel window seemed to be topped with a tiled semi-dome. At the time I could conceive of no reason why an architect would want to build a complex turret beneath the roof of a building and yet disguise it from the outside world. I realize now that it was meant to form a focus for the flames.
51.4 As up she rises:* This swells rather sickeningly with nautical undertones, recalling the Royal Yacht Britannia which has just been launched. It comes from the bawdy sea-shanty about so-called brewer’s droop: ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ The finest drunken sailor in modern poetry is perhaps Wallace Stevens’s from ‘Disillusionment of 10 o’clock’ who ‘Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches tigers / In red weather.’ It seems hard to say those last two lines without slurring your words and retching.
There is a comparable effect here. Though the underlying tone is almost the opposite. The bitter ironies involved in the reversal of direction hit home more forcefully than anything we have previously been witness to. Sloggy’s girlfriend slides up (to use the prurient terms thinly veiled in the song) from limp to erect: a cruelly sardonic effect which serves both to emphasize the acute belittling of this poor girl in the mind of her abuser and the terrible image one is forced to reconstruct in one’s own mind of her sliding down the wall like Stevens’s drunken sailor after a vicious attack has left her badly wounded. 51.5 Her nose again, remoulding it:* This reconstruction of the nose, couched in terms of therapeutic plastic surgery, is obviously the opposite. Sloggy’s aggression towards the protrusion in the middle of the woman’s face prefigures his desire to castrate the drag-queen (or perhaps it is an echo, one can never be quite certain of the order of events). The nose is an obvious phallic symbol. Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac makes extensive use of the commonplace correspondence. He is unusual in making his hero have a long nose, however; it is usually shorthand in the lower forms of theatre for villainy. Though perhaps these pantomime villains need also to appear Semitic in order to access those wells of racial memory that hold the key to frightening the uneducated. 51.6 His nails:* Another insinuation of Sloggy’s private effeminacy, marked by a carving diæresis. If Sloggy is capable of using his fingernails as weapons, we have to assume them to be unusually long. Scratching (along with hair-pulling) is the characteristic effeminate attack: something homosexuals might threaten in order to appear particularly womanly. 51.8 closure:* The poet is playing on two senses: one derived from a piece of jargon in Gestalt psychology, introduced into New Criticism by I. A. Richards, meaning the completion of an incomplete process specifically via the subjective input of a viewer (or reader); the other being the literal formation of a fist by closing the fingers into a ball of knuckles. Obviously this event, rather like the canto as a whole, is actually quite the opposite of a closure: it is the overture of an unfinished fragment of action. Its closure, in Richards’s sense, can only be brought about via a clear understanding of the ironic antinomy of this usage of the word. 51.8 therapeutic: era 8 The night I first ventured into the roof, a persistent rainstorm was drumming its fingers on the windowpanes. Somehow the vague impatience of the weather had begun to infect me and I felt the need to do something callisthenic to alleviate the boredom. This whole scene of bizarre confinement in which I had found myself began to feel portentously contrived. It was one of those occasions on which you stop believing in the random flux of events which turns the millwheel of mental liberty and feel yourself coerced by some invisible presence to perform in a more or less predictable fashion in response to stimuli: like a rat in a behaviourist’s maze… or more like Eve in Milton’s Eden. On these pivotal moments in life (one example in particular sticks in the memory from childhood in which I inflicted a crippling illness on a cabhorse by feeding it a jar of mustard piccalilli) one sees oneself as in a vivid memory, as if the act of playing out the unfolding scene is merely one of physically remembering what one has already (spiritually) done
It was the fear of recapitulations of this effect in my life which kept me from working on Poetry and Prophesy. This book, of course, will never now be written. Its content might however have been quite relevant to the present work. It was intended to explore attempts by poets – the Metaphysicals primarily, but also their more recent imitators like Manley Hopkins, Eliot and Pound – to invoke this very feeling in their readers: to remind them of their own futures, not so much by transmitting personal visions of the poets’, but by recreating the prophetic experience in the reader with their incantatory words. 52.8 kick it:* The poet probably decided not just to employ the conventional rhyme of wicket with cricket so as to recall the deterioration in both the game and the language used to describe it that seems to have been heralded by the series defeat suffered by England at the hands of The West Indies three years ago. The awful triumphalist calypsos that followed have precisely the same kinds of shoddy rhymes employed here (and indeed throughout the poem). A fact which insinuates a creolization of British culture in this dystopia under the influence of the Guyanese Britannia of the piece, and everything for which she stands. England recently took their revenge on tour in the Caribbean, and it seems unlikely that they will ever lose to such inelegant cricketers as those spawned in the Americas again. We shall probably never be allowed to forget this defeat of 1950, however; unashamedly Marxist journalists from the region like C. L. R. James have latched onto the bastardization of this quintessential English sport (born in the rituals of the Ancient Druids, I believe) as a way of undermining everything their parent country stands for.
It was not my intention to hawk a version of Pythagorean metempsychosis—certainly not to dally at the margins of theosophy like Yeats—instead I wanted to explore the nature of that Socratic stroke of genius that casts learning as a process of reminding oneself of latent truths: provable truths specifically because they are provably latent in the mind. My desire had been to take this notion beyond the fields of pure reason and social ethics into the deeper psychological and spiritual remit of great literature.
Just as the logic of Socrates cannot be denied, and the reason for the impossibility of denial lies in the impact of his measured words upon a human reason that exists solely as the ability to receive such an impact, the spiritual salience of certain forms of metaphysical poetry is unavoidable precisely because its musical and semantic qualities are those that both pre-empt and result from the activities of mind capable of revealing to us the spiritual (rather than the logical or physical) truths of our existence. We are not ‘reincarnated’, neither need we aspire to the cheap gypsy fairground trick of ‘predicting the future’, but each human child is born containing the entire temporal, logical and spiritual ‘truth’ of their nature: truth that can be accessed via certain activities of mind and body—logic, reasoning, mathematics; athletic exercise and dance; the most important of which, I would go on to contend, was poetry. ‘Prophesy’, in this vision, becomes not the prescience of things to come so much as that kind of speech which derives from and brings about the apprehension of a reality beyond such quotidian notions as the present and the future. In such a state, a man discovers the innocence of a new-born child on his death-bed and the wisdom of a dying man inside the womb. It is in order to give to others such an apprehension that he works, and this is why he works in strange, beguiling metaphors and the spiralling music of his words. One cannot bring on states of mind in those to whom they have become alien by reporting what one have discovered for oneself, or simply by saying ‘you should think like this’ or ‘go forth and see the truth.’ Instead one must use one’s materials in such a way as to instigate the effect in one’s participating audience. Such minor forms as meditative lyric, the pastoral and even love poetry become, in this way of thinking, much more important than the longer dramatic or narrative forms to which they are traditionally believed to be the mere apprentice-pieces. It is via these distilled forms, these atemporal whisperings, rather than the professional outpourings of the tradesman writer, that the eternal verities are glimpsed. Of course, no-one seriously believes Murder in the Cathedral to be more important than The Four Quartets, but who to date has called ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ the greatest of the works ascribed to Shakespeare? The crux of this project was a single curious, disturbing thought. I could not believe the book did not exist already. I spent years—it is no exaggeration—it was literally a number of years, during which I should have been occupying myself with something more practical, looking for this book amongst library catalogues and notebooks and the commentaries of the great works of literature. I asked colleagues for their help. They invariably suggested something fascinating to peruse, but it was never the book that I was trying to remember. The point was, I was sure that I had read it before. It had been amongst a large pile of monographs I had borrowed as an undergraduate when writing an essay on a subject I could no longer recall. Eventually I submitted to the inevitable fact that if it did not exist already then I would have to be the one to bring it to the world. Perhaps, I mused, this was the way a good idea always struck: as something one finds it inconceivable that nobody has ever done before. I was consequently quite terrified of this book before it had even been written. By the time I climbed into the attic and set in motion the train of events which would prove to me that I could never avoid the truth, I had been working on it for more than fourteen years and had put into finished prose only the first sentence of what I conceived nevertheless to be a work secure in imaginative completion: “Poetry reminds us we have lived our lives before,” it read. Whenever venturing to write a second sentence, I could do nothing but inwardly pronounce the echoes of the first… until the reading of it became itself a prophetic incantation of the kind I wanted to describe: ║: “Poetry reminds us we have lived our lives before.” :║
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