Living with the Truth Stranger than Fiction This Is Not About What You Think Milligan and Murphy Making Sense

Sunday 30 October 2016

#683



William's Cage



“You're full of holes,” he said.

I thought he was trying to shock
so I asked if that was bad.

He closed his eyes
and covered his ears,
and he said.

“They can get at you
through the holes
but if you block them up
‘the real you’ can't get out.

“And if you poke your finger in –
I'll bite!”


19 August 1989
 
 
The last ‘Sweet William’ poem was Cinders’ (#634). I don’t specify who he’s talking to here but in my head it’s the lady doctor who we first met in #620. I can see it would be easy to assume a sexual undercurrent here and, of course, that’s what the psychiatrist (assuming that’s what she is) thinks. Although it’s true that we all have holes in our bodies that can be penetrated I really was thinking in a broader sense—the eyes see, the ears hear, the nose smells, the mouth tastes—and it really is impossible to switch all of this stimuli off. My mother towards the end of her life became very fond of the expression ‘You are what you eat’ and it’s a good expression. We are, however, not simply what we ingest. All day long and every day we absorb stuff from daylight to germs. We’re never the same from one moment to the next. We’re perpetually in flux and so it’s impossible to pin down the ‘real’ us. Is ‘the real me’ writing this? Did ‘the real me’ write that poem?

Wednesday 26 October 2016

#682



What I Never Meant to Say



No, I really love you:
it's gone beyond words.
I just use them
because they're all I have.
They don't say anything anymore.

There was never really anything to say.


19 August 1989
 
 
This is an odd poem to write at a time when I was at my most prolific. I was on a poetic high most days and when that dipped my next fix wasn’t hard to find. And I loved that side of it. If you’ll pardon my crudity: the shit was flowing.

I’ve spent a long time looking at this poem. What’s interesting to me is how I chose to open it. With a ‘no.’ The whole poem is therefore a response. What I never meant to say was said someplace else, before the poem. I never recorded (and can’t remember) what I said or to whom. Perhaps I slipped up with B., mumbled something I shouldn’t have. I could get away with saying I loved her easily enough because she knew I loved her and she loved me. Everyone loved everyone. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord. That was how I could get so close to her because I was shielded by brotherly love. What I did and how I felt behind that shield was another matter. Mostly wrote poems and felt like crap.

Sunday 23 October 2016

#681



Dreamer



There was no hole in my youth
for "the real me" to crawl out,
only flaws to put pressure on
and finally rip apart.

I sometimes still sleep
in the empty shell at night.


19 August 1989


Getting to know the real you, being in touch with your true self, just be yourself, be the best you you can be—God, I hate expressions like that. If I’m not me who am I? Good question. Identity’s a complex thing. Here’s a new word for you—if it’s not take a gold star and stop looking so smug—eudaimonia. It’s a word that would love to be itself but people keep redefining it. According to one source eudaimonia refers to a state of well-being and full functioning that derives from a sense of living in accordance with one's deeply held values—in other words, from a sense of authenticity. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone described as authentic. Real, yes: he was the realest person I’ve ever met; get real, man. 

Am I, to use Maslow’s expression, a self-actualised individual? What does that even mean? The Wikipedia article on ‘Self-actualisation’ contains the following sentence: “Self-actualisation can be seen as similar to words and concepts such as self-discovery, self-reflection, self-realisation and self-exploration.” Every one of them’s a can of worms. When did I realise who I was? Not in 1989 I can tell you that. Or does it mean realise as in fulfil? Well I wasn’t that either. 

Actually in later years Maslow explored a further dimension of needs, while criticizing his own vision on self-actualisation and added another level to his famous Hierarchy of Needs: self-transcendence. The only expression I can think of to go with that is: this is bigger than you or me. I’m a fixed container 5' 7" tall and a little over 13st. That is the totality of my parts. I am what I eat—one of my mother’s favourite expressions—or at least I’ve become what I’ve eaten. I don’t want to make too much of myself but I’d also like to think that I’m more than the sum of my constituent parts. Something was yet to emerge, something was going to crawl from the wreckage that my life was about to become (well, we’re still a few years off and a good few poems bridge the gap) but I’m not sure if he was any more real than the guy who wrote this poem. He was different though.

Wednesday 19 October 2016

#680



Life Course



No, I couldn't say
how my life's
got into this mess.

All I know is that
there's no reverse gear on this thing,
and the steering’s off too.

And they took my licence away years ago
so don't ask who's doing the driving.


19 August 1989
 
 
The soundtrack to my life’s been an interesting one. In the seventies I used to religiously listen to the pop charts and write down the top twenty records and I honestly remember thinking at the time what a great time it was for new music. But then I started to notice that after two or three hits people started vanishing.
Very few seemed to have any staying power or so it seemed but then I was judging everyone by the singles charts and that’s a very poor measure or a man or a woman. 

The seventies ended in a blaze of glory or went up in flames depending on your point of view and it was all change come 1980. But it wasn’t all bad. Far from it. David Bowie released ‘Ashes to Ashes’, The Jam brought out ‘Going Underground’ and who could forget the masterpiece that was ‘There's No One Quite Like Grandma’ by St Winifred's School Choir? The one that sticks in my mind, however, is the second single release from the Metamatic album by John Foxx, ‘No-One Driving’. It wasn’t much of a hit—the record entered the UK Singles Chart at no. 32, remained at the same position for a further week before dropping down—and we never heard anything more from him. I’d kind of hoped he was going to be another Gary Numan but, sadly, no. Of course if you look at Foxx’s Wikipedia page you can see he’s still on the go. 

I’ve never really understood how that thing we call for convenience ‘inspiration’ works. I do remember how much ‘No-One Driving’ struck me at the time but here’s the thing: he’s saying nothing new, nothing I hadn’t heard before and yet the song buzzed around in my head for years and I have little doubt that it had something to do with this poem. There’s not much new in art but what it does is present it anew; maybe that’s Nature’s answer to the cliché.

Sunday 16 October 2016

His Current Woman

I don’t drive a car; I don’t own a boat; I don’t use a computer and the only complex device I’m familiar with is a woman – Jerzy Pilch, His Current Woman


 
 

Although it’s often frustrating how long we Anglophones have to wait for books by our favourite (or at least new and interesting) authors to appear in English translations—and not all do—it’s still a good time to be reading if you’re at all interested in something other than an Anglo-American take on the world. The problem is that, although the world is in many ways shrinking, our understanding of it has not expanded to meet it halfway. Subtleties often fly over our heads or scurry between our feet. Case in point: the protagonist in Jerzy Pilch’s novel His Current Woman, Paweł Kohoutek. Kohoutek means “little rooster” in Czech and once you realise he’s a lothario it’s not hard to see why the name’s appropriate—little cock, or as we Scots would put it (and it’s an expression rarely voiced without being laced with anything from disdain to out and out contempt): wee prick. And he is. He’s a wee prick. Of course if you’re not Scottish you won’t know how we use the expression—it can even be a term of affection—and so none of this is especially helpful other than underlining my initial point: you’re not always going to get the joke. I didn’t. And it wasn’t’ until I read Joanna Diane Caytas’s article Strong and Weak Forces of Otherness in Struggles for Social Control as Reflected in Jerzy Pilch’s Inne rozkosze (His Current Woman) I started to see there was more to this book than I’d first realised. Even the title. Inne rozkosze doesn’t mean “his current woman”; it translates as Other Pleasures. I can see why they would change it—Kohoutek’s love interest is only once referred to by her real name (Justyna Kotkowska); the rest of the time she’s simply his “current woman”—but there was a reason why Pilch chose that original title. It is, I assume, either a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 2:8—

I also accumulated silver, gold, and the wealth of kings and their kingdoms. I gathered around me both male and female singers, along with what delights a man—all sorts of mistresses. (International Standard Version)

—or a direct translation from one of the numerous Czech Bibles out there. It doesn’t really matter. In the book the verse is rendered as, “You have got your men singers and women singers … and other pleasures of the sons of men…” Actually it says “gat you” which I’m assuming is a typo.

Young's Literal Translation is worth a mention here because it doesn’t use the word “mistresses” or “concubines”: it says “a wife and wives”. My wife and I have recently started watching a show called Hand of God. Brief summary: A morally-corrupt judge suffers a breakdown and believes God is compelling him onto a path of vigilante justice. Following his epiphany he finds he can no longer have sex with the hooker who calls on him once a week and yet he can’t give her up, so, at the end of the last episode we watched, he persuades his minister—who also has issues—to “marry” him and the hooker so he can have sex with her with a clean conscience. Yeah, I know. In His Current Mistress Kohoutek, who is not a well-read man, similarly deludes himself. He explains his reasoning to his mentor Dr Oyerma:

“I accept that I’m just a common philanderer, the most ordinary kind of adulterer. A low grade Casanova, a second-rate Don Juan. Fine, so be it: That’s all that interests me; it’s all I think about; I accept it, though that’s an oversimplified and ugly way of stating the truth, because after all it’s not the case that I bring myself down to my own genitalia, that I reduce my current women to their erogenous zones; quite the opposite, it’s precisely at such times that infinity opens up before me; at such times God is close, for in the Gospel according to Matthew the Lord Jesus saith,‘Where two come together, I am between them....’”

The doctor, after giving the matter some thought, responds thusly:

“There’s just one thing I have to make clear to you right away, since as you know I’m fond of precision. Though reading books tires you and bores you, Kohoutek, when you do it, at least do it attentively, especially when you’re reading the book entitled the Holy Scriptures. In the Gospel according to Matthew, the Lord Jesus does not say, ‘Where two come together, I am between them’; He says, ‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them,’ and that means something rather different.”

For years Kohoutek has been chasing women. He’s now forty but showing no signs of slowing down. How, exactly, he’s been as successful as he has is something of a wonder. He’s not exactly what you’d call a catch. He’s a vet. And I don’t mean war veteran. I mean horse doctor. But he clearly has the gift of the gab or whatever the Polish equivalent is. And that’s what’s got him into his current predicament. Let me explain:

When it came to seduction, Kohoutek was a natural. He thoroughly believed what he was saying. At the time of the telling, he really did want to spend the rest of his life with the woman he was talking to. He really did imagine to himself all those details and episodes. This was the source of his credibility and his narrative proficiency. […] He would wake up in the morning at the side of a woman with whom the previous evening he had been planning a life together, and he would say to himself, Good grief, what a load of nonsense I came out with yesterday, and he would flee in absolute panic.

And, up until now, he’s got away with it. Up until now. But that wouldn’t make much of a story, would it? The book opens as follows:

When in the year of our Lord 1990 Paweł Kohoutek, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, looked out of the window and beheld his current woman crossing the lawn, with his usual conceited fatalism he imagined that an adventure had befallen him which ought to serve as a warning for all. Kohoutek’s current woman was wearing a navy blue overcoat; her divine skull was covered with a funky little hat, while the colossal suitcase she was dragging behind her left a dark trail of final defeat in the pale November grass.

This is clearly going to be a problem. Actually, no. The following group of eccentrics is going to be the problem:

Kohoutek’s current woman might have been spotted by Kohoutek’s mother. She might have been spotted by Kohoutek’s father. She might have been spotted by the pastor’s wife or by the pastor. She might have been spotted by Miss Wandzia or by Miss Wandzia’s mother. She might have been spotted by Oma, Kohoutek’s grandmother. The postmaster, Kohoutek’s grandfather, as he took some fresh air, might also have come to the conclusion that someone closely associated with Kohoutek was on the lawn. Kohoutek’s current woman might also have been seen by Kohoutek’s child, and she might have been noticed by Kohoutek’s wife. Anyone might have spotted her

Apart from living in the same house together—it’s a very big house—the collective have one other thing in common: they’re all Lutherans. Some 87% of Poles are deemed to be Roman Catholics but the number of Protestants is not exactly small. The Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland has—depending on which Wikipedia article you trust—between 60 and 80,000 members. Pilch was brought up as a Lutheran in Wisła in the Beskid region in Cieszyn Silesia, Southern Poland and close to the border with the Czech Republic and this is where the action takes place; it’s the only town in Poland with a majority Protestant population. The characters in the novel come across as isolationists, more than keen to protect and preserve their way of life. Think Amish or Mennonite and you have the right idea. Of the 81,000 German-speaking immigrants to colonial Pennsylvania almost all were affiliated with Lutheran or German Reformed churches. To this day they speak Pennsylvania Dutch which is a form of German (the “Dutch” being probably a mistranslation of Deutch). Likewise in Wisła German language use is part of cherished local tradition going back centuries. The distinct local dialect is based on the Polish language, but major German and Czech influences have remained strong, and the vernacular differs markedly from the Silesian dialect spoken in Upper Silesia.

The point is they’re old-fashioned, God-fearing people who tend to frown on things like lying and adultery. So when Kohoutek’s current woman abandons life in Kraków and appears out the blue—“[s]he may have been brought here by a mad feminine love, or perhaps feminine cruelty”—expecting him to make good on his promises the scene is set for a jolly good farce. Kohoutek secretes his madwoman in the attic of the old slaughterhouse (fairly obvious nod to Jane Eyre) but that’s understandably only going to buy him so much time. She would be found sooner rather than later especially since the family was busy hunting down a “a two-litre jar of beef meatballs that Oma, Kohoutek’s grandmother, had hidden somewhere” and it was only a matter of time before one of them climbed the stairs to see; obviously because of Oma’s age and the difficulty she has walking this would not be their first choice but that doesn’t mean it was off the list completely.

Over the next nineteen chapters—and a chapter-long epilogue—we watch Kohoutek struggle not only with the practicalities of having his mistress so close to hand but also himself; things have come to a head and certain truths have to be faced and dealt with. What adds a nice touch is who Pilch has as his omniscient narrators, the ghosts of old Lutherans who come out with things like:

We old Lutherans, who are at the same time the real narrators of this story, cannot refrain from mentioning that in the Cieszyn region of Silesia spring has all the abruptness of a reformation—sudden heat waves sweep the length and breadth of the land like heretical fires.

or

We old libertines, laughing as we observe this scene, yet filled with dread from a peculiar kind of sympathy, might add that Kohoutek’s anger and desperation were undergirded by a rational cunning.

It’s a nice touch.

Where this book rises above farce is in its presentation of Kohoutek. There’s an innocence to him and an ignorance; despite years of experience he really doesn’t understand women. He certainly doesn’t understand his wife although she understands him far better than he ever could understand himself. (So often the case.) Or his mother. Or his grandmother if it comes to that. And he certainly doesn’t understand his current lover. On one level, certainly at the start, this looks like a light read—how is he going to get out of the current mess he’s in and how soon before another crisis arises?—but, as Caytas puts it, “it also raises essential questions of identity, tolerance, and personal integrity.”

The whole “madwoman in the attic” trope is worth dwelling on for a moment because it’s a little too easy to reduce Justyna to “the other woman”—and there have been plenty of bunny boilers, stalkers, jilted lovers and the like—simply because of the way the text insists on always referring to her in relation to her lover. (If you wish to wallow then Anna Szawara’s paper Jerzy Pilch’s Madwoman in the Attic: An Inquiry into the Modern Woman In Pilch’s Inne Rozkosze (His Current Woman), and the Significance of Her Sexual and Textual Influence is worth a read.) In the same episode of Hand of God I talked about earlier there is a scene where Crystal is asked how much she hates always being defined by Pernell, her husband. Her response:

I love my husband, but... [chuckles] I did not get my ass into Stanford and build my business from scratch so I could be called “the judge's wife.”

The wife in His Current Woman is a lot like Crystal. She’s intelligent and perceptive and Justyna is painted like a young her. In Szawara’s essay she notes:

I argue that although this woman was written by a man, her function in the plot is parallel and perhaps supreme to the function of the protagonist within the novel. She is leading the action from the first line of the novel, a constant presence and concern of the protagonist throughout…

There’s truth there but not only her. I would argue that all the major female characters in the book are the ones with the real power. Justyna isn’t mad when she arrives. As Dr Oyermah suggests rather than being led to Kohoutek by a demon she might simply have decided to pay him a visit because she’s “just an ordinary unpredictable young lady.” That doesn’t mean she doesn’t become mad—in the broadest sense and including angry—because of the way she’s manhandled and mishandled. And the culmination of that is her face appearing at the window during Oma’s birthday resulting in a chapter that PG Wodehouse would not have been ashamed at writing.

This is a delightful book. What may dissatisfy some is that most of the characters are pencil sketches rather than oil paintings. To be fair most everyone gets their five minutes in the spotlight but it’s hard not to want to know just a wee bit more. Things are tied up at the end but a part of me would’ve like a twentieth chapter rather than jumping straight to the epilogue but I can’t gripe; I’ve done the same myself, skipped all the stuff I couldn’t be bothered writing about and given the readers just enough dots to join. We do get to find out what happens to Paweł and Justyna—or at least where they’re heading—but I guess it’s up to each reader to decide how happy the ending is.

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

***

Only four books by Jerzy Pilch are available in English at the moment:

  • His Current Woman trans. Bill Johnston: Hydra Books/Northwestern Univ. Press, 2002
  • The Mighty Angel trans. Bill Johnston: Open Letter (University of Rochester) 2009
  • A Thousand Peaceful Cities trans. by David Frick: Open Letter (University of Rochester) 2010
  • My First Suicide trans. David Frick: Open Letter (University of Rochester) 2012

I would be keen to read more by him. This bio certainly makes me curious to read more.

Wednesday 12 October 2016

#679



Cynicism for Under-Fives



There should be books on the subject.
Then again, I had to learn the hard way.

Anyhow, I might still write one
so long as no one cramps my style:

It's more of an art than a science.
And since when did you teach great art?


19 August 1989
 
 
My dad taught me many things growing up. Some of the things he set out to teach me stuck but not all, however, all the thing he would rather I’d never learned did. If you’ve never been a parent you’ll not appreciate how scrutinous young children are. And they’re fly with it. They learn early on to blend into the background and listen. It doesn’t matter if you spell out words: they know when something’s awry or afoot. They may not have the words yet but that doesn’t stop the relentless assimilation of raw data. The precious wee things don’t even realise they’re doing it. And things said can never be unsaid. Things seen can never be unseen. And damage done can never be undone. 

I wonder what my first cynical thought was. I, of course, won’t have realised I was being a cynic—I doubt the word was included in my Courtis Watters Illustrated Golden Dictionary for Young Readers—but that’s mostly the case with kids: we hate, we love, we covet—my mother was always telling me not to be covetous (whatever the hell that was)—and have no idea what it is we’re doing. The one thing I remember about later dictionaries was how inadequate most of the definitions were; they never really explained what words meant. I remember asking my dad about the word nihilism and his response was, “You don’t want to have anything to do with that.” I just wanted to know how it was possible to believe in nothing.

Sunday 9 October 2016

#678



Anticlimax



She thought to read me
like an open book
the last page of which
was missing.


19 August 1989
 
 
“I’m an open book.” Not sure I’ve ever said that. I like to think of myself as an honest person and even an open person but not predictable. Of course everyone’s predictable to a degree. Give me a choice of four meals and I’ll almost definitely go for the Indian. Ask me what kind of film I’d like to watch and it’ll likely be science fiction. When we know enough things like this about a person we could be forgiven if we thought we knew them. One thing I remember F. saying during the early days—in fact the early months—of our relationship was how I constantly managed to surprise her and it was true; every day it seemed I would reveal something or other—or usually something or nothing—new about myself and she was delighted by this. But she didn’t know me. There was stuff we never talked about or I’d tried and given it up as a bad job. Poetry was one such topic. She knew I wrote poetry and she read whatever I showed her for as long as I could be bothered showing her but she really had no idea how important it was to me. How do you explain to someone who isn’t a writer the need to write?

Wednesday 5 October 2016

#677



Praxis



Put away your words, dear.
Fold them neatly if you have to
or strew them across the carpet –
it's much the same –
but come to me now.

They'll all be there later.


18 August 1989
 
 
This is not a record of an actual conversation but it does record an attitude that I’m sure some of you will have encountered before, having your writing pooh-poohed. My father did it. By the time I’d written my first novel he was registered as blind although he did have some peripheral vision but not enough to read anything longer or smaller than the heading on a newspaper. I did persuade him to let me read the book to him and this took place in his small study upstairs. I don’t know if it was the first time but one time Mum wanted to know where we were going and he said, “Upstairs to listen to our Jimmy’s story.” Story. Not novel. Story. He didn’t mean any harm—that’s what he was listening to as far as he was concerned—but I can’t say it didn’t rankle me; I’d written a novel and my ego was undergoing a major growth spurt. That said had he used the word ‘novel’ it quite likely would’ve been the first time I’d ever heard him utter the word. Neither of my parents read any fiction and the only novels in the house were mine. The word really was meaningless to him. 

I’m not sure why I went for the title ‘Praxis’ here though. Broadly speaking praxis means a cyclical process of experiential learning, a term that originates with the philosopher Aristotle who held that there were three basic activities of man: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing). In that respect I think the title is actually referring to what the woman—in my head it’s a wife speaking—is asking for. To put it crudely: do me. Put aside your thinking and your poetry. It can wait; I can’t.

Sunday 2 October 2016

#676



Funny Peculiar



         True love has to be proved.
It is an exclusive club,

         True love requires sacrifice.
with its own initiation ceremonies.

         It's funny really –
The membership fee was quite reasonable.

         but I'm not laughing.


18 August 1989
 
 
This is a peculiar poem. You can see that from the layout. There're two voices alternating but I've never thought of them as separate individuals, rather two voices within one mind. I think the reason for this is I have mixed feelings about love especially “true love” so called. I like the idea of it and for some it might seem as if it's real because they've never found themselves in a position where their love—specifically its trueness—was called into question. Did I love F.? Yes. I thought I did. And yet I became (or allowed myself to become) obsessed by B. whom I did not love and whom I knew I a) did not love and b) had no future with. Who in love does that? You hear men boast, “I've never looked at another woman.” Well bully for them. I doubt it's true. They looked. There's no crime in looking. So some say (most peeping Toms I expect) but it's not true. Or if it is it's still a sin. 

Do atheists sin I wonder. They probably use the word because it’s a convenient word and we all get the idea: you did something morally reprehensible. I wasn’t an atheist in 1989 and it’s a word I still shy away from if I’m honest. In 1989 I wanted to believe even though I knew within myself I was a very poor fit. So how did I feel about my feelings for B.? Because I was supposed to I went through the motions of feeling guilty but deep inside I struggled to see what was wrong with what I felt. I’m not actually sure feelings can be wrong; they just are; you feel what you feel. Other people may not like that you feel a certain way and it may well be inconvenient that you do and cause problems if you act on those feelings but what was I doing that was so wrong? Milking the poetry out of the experience. I was fulfilling my function. Or was that all rationalisation? Hard to say now. All I knew was I was so damn mixed up, confused as hell on so many levels.
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