James Keery‘Schönheit Apocalyptica’:An Approach to The White Stones by J.H. Prynne
This piece is 28,000 words or about sixty printed pages long. |
The invocation of a sealed significance, to be disclosed to those with ears to hear, and only to them, is as explicit as in Revelation, in which Prynne’s poetry is steeped. The ‘promise recalled’ suggests another collocation of bread and stone (Psalm 105:40-42): The people asked, and he brought quails, and satisfied them with the bread of heaven. He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out; they ran in the dry places like a river. For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant.
The phrase ‘unlocks the white stone’ is grammatically as well as symbolically ambiguous: the stone might be interpreted either as contents or container. In the Psalm (as in Exodus 17:6), the water is locked within the rock until released by divine intervention. The same collocation of bread and stone occurs in ‘Die a Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’ (Kitchen Poems, Cape Goliard, 1968; Poems, pp13-16), together with ‘the water of life’ (Revelation 22:17: ‘whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely’): ... society is ‘predictably’ as we know ‘in
The ‘bread’ of ‘heaven’ is directly from Psalm 105. The ‘springs’ and the ‘well’ allude to the source of the Apocalyptic ‘water of life’ in the gospel of St John the Evangelist: ‘the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life’ (J4:14); and the ‘garment’ is the bardic or ‘priestly robe’ (‘He that overcometh shall thus be arrayed in white garments; and I will in no wise blot his name out of the book of life’, R3:5), in which Wordsworth is ‘cloth’d’ at a prophetic moment in The Prelude (Book I 52-67): to the open fields I told
The same collocation of bread and stone occurs in the climactic lyric of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (XXXIII 6-12): Here is the bread of time to come,
Bloom makes reference throughout his study to the ‘apocalyptic quality’ of Stevens’s poetry (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell University Press, 1977, p286), interpreting ‘Saint John and the Backache’ as a watershed (p298): Saint John is the Transcendental element in Stevens himself, the apocalyptic impulse that he has dismissed for so long but that will begin to break in upon his reveries in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven and The Rock and then will dominate the poems composed from 1952 through 1955.
However, he makes no mention of Revelation in the context of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (p135): Introjecting the bread of time to come, the poet surrenders the present with the sombre knowledge of an absence in reality: ‘Here is its actual stone’, which is also the necessity of forgetting by day, except in the making of poetry. But this is no longer the playing of the guitar that opened the poem. No shearsman, no patcher can will those negative moments which give us the green of the imagined pine, the blue of the imagined jay. ‘Imagined’ here has a transumptive freshness. We are very near to the ‘ever-early candour’ of Notes and to the celebration of that candor as ‘an elixir, an excitation, a pure power’.
So ‘the bread of time to come’ and ‘the actual stone’ do not partake of the ‘transumptive freshness’ of ‘pure power’. In delimiting them as antithetical tropes to the pine and blue-jay, Bloom might have cited Steven’s explicit option for the ‘the lion in the lute/ Before the lion locked in stone’; and the ‘wrangling of two dreams’, which recalls his beautiful rhetorical question, clear in its preference for the waking dream: ‘Of the two dreams, who would prefer/ The one obscured by sleep?’ Bloom’s elliptical sentence appears either to introject ‘bread’ out of the equation or to equate bread and stone as images of ‘absence’, of benighted ‘day’ and ‘actual... night’, as opposed to their ‘imagined’ antitheses. Similarly, in response to Satan’s first temptation, ‘If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread’ (Matthew 4:3), Christ declines to differentiate, introducing instead a contrast between material image and spiritual ‘word’: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’. Sleep realised
‘Sleep realised’ is a beautiful image of the dream which is not ‘Obscured by sleep’; and, in Prynne’s poetry, the many allotropes of ‘the white stone’ include crystals, sapphires, pearls and diamonds. In St John the Divine’s transumption of Satan’s imagery, ‘bread’ and ‘stones’ become tropes of the ‘word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God’, ‘the bread of time to come’, ‘its actual stone’. The heavens declare the glory of God ... In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
In Jacket No. 20, following Veronica Forrest-Thomson, I read ‘Of Sanguine Fire’ (Brass, 1971; Poems, pp175-179) in terms of the mysterious entities who appear in an italicised but unattributed quotation, itself derived from Psalm 19: ... always Fresh,
If Christ has fulfilled these ancient tropes of the sun, he has won the race as well as the bride, and St John has lost both. ‘Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize?’ (1 Corinthians 9:24). It is, then, hard to read the phrase ‘he that hath the bride’ (J3:29) with a sense of unmitigated ‘joy’. As an expression of generous jealousy, however, it is both beautiful and psychologically acute; as true to Bloom’s ‘family romance’ (p8) as any of his own ‘darker truths’ (p6). I know you find great joy in the great
The analogy between the tuition of the eighteenth-century flautist and the relationship between poets is made explicit at the outset (‘The First Lesson’, p222): It is best I sit
The ambiguous phrases ‘on the other side’ and ‘in your own time’ imply the atemporality and uncanniness of poetic influence, yet Graham’s most revered contemporary was also a close friend and drinking companion. In The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham (Carcanet, 1999, p9), Michael and Margaret Snow make the point that Graham ‘always freely acknowledged the influence’ of Dylan Thomas; and in an interview with John Haffenden, dating from 1979, he goes even farther: ‘I’m not claiming the same magnitude. I’d met my match’ (‘I Would Say I Was a Happy Man’, Poetry Review Vol. 76 No. 1/2, 1986, p70). According to Sven Berlin, Graham exulted in Thomas’s poetry. Two consecutive letters to John Minton, about ‘Listen. Put on Morning’ (Collected Poems, pp48-49), convey the quality of Graham’s elation (24/4/45 and ‘30/4/45?’, The Nightfisherman, pp37-41): I’ve just finished the loveliest poem to me I’ve made. It begins like this [transcribes all 45 lines!]... Well there you are I seem to have typed it all...
In the words of the following poem, Graham presents a ‘constellation/ Of united hearts... Crowded in a gesture/ Of homesickness’ (‘The Hill of Intrusion’, p50). In context, ‘W.B.’ is clearly Blake, but both the initials and ‘Willie’ suggest Yeats, whose symbolic herons rival his swans; whilst ‘Loneheron’ recalls The Idylls of the King, in which ‘the lone hern forgets his melancholy,/ Lets down his other leg, and stretching dreams/ Of goodly supper in the distant pool’ (‘Gareth and Lynette’; Tennyson, like Yeats, uses the obsolete word ‘hern[e]’) and The Lady of the Lake (‘She hovers o’er the hollow way,/ And flutters wide her mantle gray,/ As the lone heron spreads his wing,/ By twilight, o’er a haunted spring’). For ‘Dylant’, who was so devoted to herons that they still came looking for him after his death, it is invariably a ‘Loneheron’ on the ‘heron/ Priested shore’ (‘Poem in October’, Collected Poems 1934-1952, p102). Yet the hieratic trope has another dimension. Margaret Snow suggests, convincingly, that it might be an image of the poet himself, bringing the folk-musical round of family and fellow-artists full circle (letter to J.K.; it is doubtful whether Graham would have known either Patrick Heron or Peter Lanyon at this date). ‘Bill Brewer’ of ‘Widecombe Fair’ is another analogue of ‘Graham’; and as ‘Willie’, a name by which he was known to friends, he is in the middle, too. Other references are to ‘the two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, Peggy Jean Epstein, Nessie Dunsmuir and two of her brothers, Willie and Davie, who appear, alongside their ‘sister Mary’, in ‘Listen. Put on Morning’: And hear the playropes caa
The poet’s unique ‘voice’ is a distillation of those of his ‘listeners’, who include his friends and family (‘my father and mother’ appear in the previous poem, ‘Since All My Steps Taken’, p47), as well as those whose voices he has ‘inherited’ from ‘books’. Of all his contemporaries, Graham is one of the least afflicted by Oedipal anxiety, itself allegedly the hallmark of the ‘strong’ poet. Insistent on the need for originality, he is also exemplary in his ecstatic response, his loyalty and his generosity to his precursors. His informal composite self-image as, simultaneously, an artist known by his surname, a son and companion known by his Christian name, a correspondent known by a single initial, an heir to the folk tradition and an isolated, predatory bird, in the midst of an extended family of influences, makes a beautiful and significant rejoinder to Bloom (p30): Where generosity is involved, the poets influenced are minor or weaker; the more generosity, and the more mutual it is, the poorer the poets involved.
Divested of its patrilineal connotations, the elation of influence has been given classic expression by Gerry and the Pacemakers (‘How Do You Do It?’, M. Murray, Columbia, 1963; cited by Denise Riley, ‘Introduction’ to Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970-91, Macmillan, 1992, p4): How do you do what you do to me?
Graham’s delight in having produced something which sounds ‘like someone else’s good poem’ — Yesss! I can do it! I can do what they do to me! — is unchronicled in Bloom’s genealogies. Whilst the joyful infatuation of the lover remains one-sided, it cannot be ‘fulfilled’, yet elation is not conditional on fulfilment. Like the sun, the ephebe ‘rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race’. There may be rivalry even in mutual love, as between citizens and within families, but Bloom’s de-idealisation denies reciprocity: ‘Poets as poets... fight to the end to have their initial chance alone’ (p8). For Bloom, ‘healthy rivalry’ is an oxymoron. This intense lyricism... may well promote in the viewer a profound admiring satisfaction – and perhaps also a sense, in certain busy minds, of anguish: that is to say, are we going to be allowed to enjoy an intensely lyricised satisfaction in this manner, at this already late stage in the history of paint, without being made to pay for it in some hidden way that is actually extremely costly?
Prynne’s explicit invocation of the anxiety of the ‘latecomer’ (Anxiety of Influence, p8) is balanced by the sense of ‘a fulfilled connection’ with the artistic precursor, expressed in startlingly textual terms: And yet this glowing image, even despite such potential anxiety in the viewer, offers to us at first glance a clear authority, intensely pleasurable and strong with the presence of its own controlled pleasure; the authority is so extremely different from much other of de Kooning’s work, even at this period, because of the extraordinarily powerful lacuna in the central part of the picture; that vacancy is composed and partly overwritten by the cadastral framing and shaping which surrounds it, so stationed in order to allow the contemplative mind to write itself into a plenitude and to feel some connection, perhaps a fulfilled connection, there.
According to Bloom, ‘strong poets make [poetic] history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves’ (p5). Prynne experiences the ‘imaginative space’ at the heart of the ‘strong’ precursor’s own work as an ‘extraordinarily powerful lacuna’, even, potentially, as repressive (‘authority’) and ruinous (‘cadastral’), yet its paradoxical taxation is such as ‘to allow the contemplative mind to write itself into a plenitude’. Far from being a ‘solitude that asks and promises nothing’, such self-fulfilment is at the same time a ‘fulfilled connection’ with the precursor (‘this my joy is therefore fulfilled’, J3:29), a ‘plenitude’ which the later poet can ‘enter and be there as well’. |
3: ‘A White Stone’
According to Scott, the ‘white stone’ of Revelation is ‘not a common stone, but a pebble such as was used for counting or for voting by ballot’, with ‘a surface large and flat enough to receive an inscription’ (p144). He interprets the ‘symbol’ as essentially parodic, in the spirit of the sarcastic ‘counsel’, in the letter to Laodicea, ‘renowned for the beautiful glossy black wool of its sheep’ (p155), to ‘buy of me... white garments... that the shame of thy nakedness be not made manifest’ (R3:18). The intended target of the ‘white stone’ is the ‘popular superstition’ of Gnosticism, in which, ‘early in the second century’, ‘Jewish and Hellenic thought were mingling’ (pp144-145): That explanation seems the best which finds the origin of the symbol in the sphere of popular superstition. Among the later Jews, especially, great and mysterious power had for long been ascribed to secret names, the knowledge or pronouncement of which secured the opening of closed portals, the discovery of hid treasure, or the co-operation of supernatural powers. One special application of such names of power was to obtain entrance for the ascending soul through the successive gates which were supposed to bar its way to the highest heaven... To one holding such ideas, a white stone with a secret name upon it would signify an amulet inscribed with a formula or name of power by which he could secure salvation or entrance into heaven. To this... the Apocalypse gives a Christian interpretation. The white stone is just the pebble or tile or plaque on which a name could conveniently be inscribed. The promised gift of Christ is the new name, which here, as elsewhere in the Bible, stands for a new character... Our Lord once more clothes his own great gift in the forms ‘understanded of the people’, thereby contrasting the false with the true. Did others speak of symbols giving them a right to enter heaven? He would give to him that overcometh a surer symbol for a truer heaven.
I appreciate the dig at Laodicean wool, very much in the spirit of Kitchen Poems (compare ‘the water of life/ is all in bottles & ready for invoice’, ‘Die a Millionaire’; R22:17), but it seems to me reductive to interpret the ‘white stone’ in the same fashion. Its prospective recipients, the members of ‘the church of Pergamum’, had already been exposed to ‘peculiar difficulty and danger’ (p142): ‘thou holdest fast my name, and didst not deny my faith, even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed amongst you’ (R2:13). The steadfastness of ‘him that overcometh’ in the face of martyrdom would be curiously — and superfluously — rewarded by ‘a new character’. What they claimed to ‘know’ consisted of a myth about the creation of the world as the result of a pre-cosmic disaster which accounted for the present misery of man’s lot, and about the way in which the elect may be redeemed. In the elect, they believed, there was a divine spark that had become imprisoned in matter and had lost its memory of its true, heavenly home... The present material world the Gnostics regarded as utterly alien to God and to goodness, and as therefore the creation of inferior powers... The world was in the iron control of evil powers... and after death the elect soul would be faced by a perilous journey through the planetary spheres back to its heavenly home. Much time was therefore devoted to learning the correct magic passwords and the most potent amulets...
‘The Numbers’, in which the word ‘elect’ occurs no less than six times, and ‘Star Damage at Home’, which features ‘the white stone’ in a context of ‘cosmic disaster’, are amongst the poems I intend to read in this light in a later instalment of this essay. And I saw the heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.
There is an obvious parallel between R2:17 and this vision of the ‘Logos’, ‘the specifically Johannine description of Him that was “from the beginning”, used in reference to a person only here and in John 1’ (Scott, p276), in which the evangelist’s use of the language of Gnosticism has been illustrated by Bultmann. White is the colour of purity, but also of victory and triumph, appropriate to ‘him that overcometh’ — this phrase does not occur in R19, but reinforces the analogy with the victorious white horseman. In this context, however, Scott is at pains to refute the implied identity between the ‘new name’ and the ‘Logos’, ignoring the implications of ‘many crowns’ and making a brave attempt to distinguish between the two occurrences, in consecutive verses, of the word ‘name’ in R19:12-13 (p276): The first passage illustrates the importance and significance of the ‘name’, the second its belonging to Christ. This name, therefore, is not that to be mentioned in the next verse, but another, a ‘name of power’, which is indeed ‘not known’...
Thus Scott finds himself arguing for a Gnostic interpretation of the ‘new name’, in order to argue against the imputation of heresy in the identification of the recipient of the ‘white stone’ with the ‘Logos’. I find this special-pleading difficult to credit. Despite its immediate disclosure, it seems entirely reasonable to identify the unknown ‘name’, in both contexts, with the ‘Logos’, the ultimate amulet. Was it connected with (1) the white stone or pebble used by jurors to signify acquittal; (2) a stone tablet which served as a pass to secure entry into an assembly or a banquet; (3) precious stones which were said by tradition to have been gathered by the Israelites along with the manna; or (4) the Urim and Thummim, the stones of which were also inscribed with names?
The first is also considered by Wheale, who cites a commentary on the text and glosses the white stones of Prynne’s title as ‘tokens of chosenness, the poems held as signs of decision, with as little as possible of what is sanctimonious attaching to them’ (p104). The judicial interpretation is supported by The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Living Bible Vol. 14: Epistles; Revelation, edited by Edward P. Blair (San Francisco Productions, 1967, p76): The mystic ‘white stone’ enumerated among the other objects passed on to the church at Pergamon is a sign of acquittal. A stone (psephos in Greek, also used for mosaic stones) was used for voting by the judges of the Athenian courts... To vote with a white stone meant acquittal, while a black stone stood for condemnation. The legendary origin of the trial goes back to Orestes... in the Areopagus... As the votes were evenly divided, Pallas-Athene, who favoured him, threw in a white stone (the calculus Minervae) and thus got him acquitted.
Hence ‘psephology’, etymologically ‘the study of stones’. This interpretation seems more compatible with Scott’s own than he concedes: in both Revelation and Greek myth, a token of favour is given by an immortal figure to a courageous mortal in imminent danger of condemnation by his own community. These two words usually occur together... Although both are plural in form, they seem to refer to single objects that functioned as sacred lots and may have had the form of dice, pebbles or sticks. Another possibility is that they were two stones, one white and the other black... What is clear is that they were associated with the priestly office and were used when people came to seek divine consultation. Apparently, therefore, it was thought possible for the high priest and the Levites to give a divine oracle with the help of the Urim and Thummim... these lots fell into disuse when the monarchy was established.
In the First Temple, the holy of holies ‘contained the ark of the covenant and two winged figures (cherubim)’; in the Second Temple, however, the holy of holies was ‘empty except for a sacred stone’ and separated from the nave by a ‘veil of Babylonian tapestry’ (‘Temple’, William Sanford LaSor, The Oxford Companion, pp731-734). It is this ‘veil’ which is ‘rent’ at the climax of the crucifixion (Luke 23:45: ‘And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst’). Strong were our Syres; and as they Fought they Writ,
Dryden’s stanzas are the cornerstone of The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Harvard, 1970) by Walter Jackson Bate, whose seminal study of ‘the anxiety of influence’ is acknowledged as such by Bloom (p8). The third line cited is a memorable conflation of Genesis 6:4 (‘There were giants in the earth in those days’) and Matthew 24:38 (‘the days that were before the flood’). If John Donne is any sample, however, the ‘Gyant Race’ was itself prey to the anxiety of influence: ‘We’are scarce our Fathers shadowes cast at noone’ (‘An Anatomie of the World: The First Anniversary’, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, edited by John Hayward, Nonesuch, 1929, p200). Now day arose, the Golden Sun his mighty Race began, Refreshing the Cold earth with beaming Joy.
The poet’s premises are those of abject mortality: weakness, fear and impotent desire. The ephebe aspires to emulate the ‘Sun’, but suffers instead the torments of ‘Envy’ (p668): Envy hath a serpent’s head of fearful bulk, hissing with hundred tongues; her pois’nous breath breeds Satire, foul contagion, from which none are free... Most Black and loathsom through the land it Runs, Rolling with furious Noise; but at the last it settles in a lake called Oblivion. ’Tis at this River’s fount where ev’ry mortal’s Cup is Mix’t. My cup is fill’d with Envy’s Rankest Draught... However sweet, ’tis Envy that Inspires my Song. Prickt by the fame of others how I mount, and my complaints are Sweeter than their Joys; but O, could I at Envy Shake my hands, my notes should Rise to meet the New born Day.
Blake’s ‘cup runneth over’ (Psalm 23), but only with ‘Envy’ of ‘the fame of others’, in particular that of Milton, from whose might he shelters in Ossianic prose-poetry (which is nevertheless over-reliant on trotting pentameters: ‘Most Black and loathsom through the land it runs’). By imaginative logic, ‘Oblivion’ is both the cause and the effect of ‘Envy’: ‘Envy’ breeds ‘Oblivion’, since it predisposes the poet towards Augustan ‘Satire’, which does not, in Blake’s view, make for immortality; whilst ‘Oblivion’, the state in which the ephebe finds himself at the outset, as well as his all-too-probable destiny, breeds ‘Envy’ of the true — immortal — poets. This is as powerful an expression of the anxiety of influence as any adduced by Bloom. Yet Milton, Blake’s greatest poem, is the quintessential expression of the elation of influence. The ‘urim’ contained in Aaron’s breastplate (Exodus 28:30)... identified by many alchemical theorists... with the philosopher’s stone itself. The (lunar) thummim could transform base metals to silver, but the (solar) urim could transform them to gold... In the Christian alchemical tradition, the philosopher’s stone was regarded as a symbol of Christ’s regenerating grace...
Christ appears later ‘in celestial panoply all armed/ Of radiant urim, work divinely wrought’ (VI 760-761): ‘The one true alchemist, he wears the stone that in Fludd’s philosophy mediates between God and the material world’ (Fowler, p347). For Donne, by contrast, the ‘oraculous gems’ symbolise the law as a lottery, and as a fount of pernicious mystification: ‘Thou had’st much, and lawes Urim and Thummim trie/ Thou wouldst for more’ (‘Satyre V’, p137). The ‘hidden manna’ and the ‘white stone’ are united as both representing high-priestly privileges... If any should eat of ‘the hidden manna’, who but the High Priest, who alone had entrance into the Holy Place where it was laid up? If any should have knowledge of what was graven upon the Urim, who but the same High Priest, in whose keeping it was, and who was bound by his very office to consult it? The mystery of what was written there, shut to every other, would be open to him.
As further evidence that Prynne’s imagination actually works along these lines, consider his response to Blood Flow by Anthony Barnett, in a letter dated 11/9/72 (The Poetry of Anthony Barnett, edited by Michael Grant, Allardyce Book/ Grille, 1993, p157): Many sentiments stirred just below the threshold of acknowledgement, and how much the word is loved. Your tender regard is more celestial and abandoned than mine, but I recognise the fellow-feeling and I salute it... I think that you begin to Speak with Tongues... there is a steady note of being-there (Dasein) in each perfected token of speech. It is restorative, and has converted the mania of my own present exhaustion into another thing... Please excuse the paper*... not that Chance does not sometimes speak to those who listen. [*The verso is a photographic copy of ‘The Unquiet Grave’...]
The combination of liminality (‘threshold’), Johannine piety (‘the word is loved’), eschatology (‘celestial and abandoned’), pentecostal enthusiasm (‘Speak with Tongues’, Acts 10:46), deference to Heidegger (‘being-there (Dasein)’), Gnosticism (‘each perfected token’), extremity (‘mania’), divination (‘Chance’), allusion to Revelation (‘those who listen’ = ‘they that hear’, R1:3) and intimations of (im)mortality (‘The Unquiet Grave’) is a revealing cross-section of Prynne’s Weltanschauung. Apocalyptic is the successor of prophecy... at once the continuation of prophecy, and sharply distinguished from it. The prophet speaks directly to the people; the apocalyptist writes in solitude what men may read in public... The prophet speaks what God the Lord has spoken; what he speaks is afterwards committed to writing. The apocalyptist writes, describing what God the Lord has given him to see. The prophet is a speaker, an orator, a preacher. The apocalyptist is a seer, a ponderer of what he has seen, a student of what those before him have written.
Prynne’s erudition — the density and range of allusion to ‘what those before him have written’ — and his constant preoccupation with the medium and practice of writing are manifest. Borrowing a phrase from ‘To Helen Keller’ by Donald Davie (‘Los Angeles Poems’, 1968-9, Collected Poems 1950-70, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p217), Steve Clark has described Prynne as ‘the most/ literary person ever was’ (‘Prynne and the Movement’, Jacket No. 23). Davie himself once described him, according to Porter, as ‘the cleverest man in Cambridge’ (Observer). In ‘First Notes on Daylight’ (p69), Prynne acknowledges his own inveterate literariness with a sardonic image of a shamanistic ‘student’ (or librarian) in Projective dreamtime: ‘The open/ fields we cross, we carry ourselves by ritual/ observance, even sleeping in the library’ (compare the ‘open fields’ to which Wordsworth ‘told/ A prophecy’, ‘cloth’d in priestly robe’). Similarly, in ‘The Kirghiz Disasters’, [Jeremy] Prynne is disguised as (St) ‘Jerome’ (c340-420), compiler of the Vulgate, ‘usually represented as an aged man in a cardinal’s dress, writing or studying’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Centenary Edition, E Cobham Brewer, revised by Ivor H. Evans, Cassell, 1970, p586). The Stumbling Block has made itself of carbon paper, sucking the increasingly obsolescent material from offices at the centre of the city. It is compressed to become a pivot; diamond-hard. The compacted density smoulders in the deep night blue of its waxy, slippery layers... In this manifestation the block is almost organic, a writhing tank of cellular activity, straining between two poles:/ The expansion of its darkness, winged by the buzzing particles, wants to unfold into the voracious speed of the stars; an explosive gleaming tracery to re-map the heavens, to disappear through power into silence.
The idea of a ‘banquet’ is compatible with Melville’s assertion that ‘whiteness has been made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day’ (Moby Dick, Chapter 42, Everyman’s Millenium Library, p207; noted by Dorward). Prynne is almost certain to have been aware of this passage from Olson’s great book, and an ecstatic sense of The White Stones complements the sense of victory. ‘The Wound, Day and Night’ (p64) celebrates a ‘supremely happy’ intuition of ‘the whole order set in this, the/ proper guise, of a song’ — an intuition happily expressed in an allusion to Lucretius. The collocation of ‘the day’ with ‘the white stone’ in ‘Star Damage at Home’ suggests an allusion, on one level, to the Latin tag which Melville may have had in mind, though, like Prynne, he is also likely to have known his Pliny at first hand: ‘O diem — repetam enim — laetum notandumque mihi candidissimo calculo’ (internet; cf. the Vulgate: ‘calculum candidum’, R2:17). Betty Radice uses an equivalent idiom: ‘This has been a happy day for me... a real red-letter day’ (‘To Maximus’ [of all names!], The Letters of the Younger Pliny, Penguin, 1963, pp163-164), but William Melmoth’s less idiomatic phrase is nearer the original trope: ‘It was a day... which I shall ever distinguish with the fairest mark’. Coincidence extends to a generous expression of the elation of influencing (p164): What could be happier for our country than for two such distinguished young men to make their name and reputation in eloquence? What more could I desire than to be chosen to lead them on the right road? I pray the gods that I shall always be so happy, and you can bear me witness that I hope all who think me worth imitating may prove better men than I.
An explanation of a variant idiom, ‘albo lapillo notare diem’ (‘to mark the day with a white stone’), links Scott’s first and second (rejected) interpretations (Nil Desperandum: A Dictionary of Latin Tags and Useful Phrases, Eugene Ehrlich, BCA, 1992, p35): For the Romans, white was the symbol of happiness, black of misfortune. Thus, in a trial a vote for acquittal was cast with a white stone, for condemnation a black one; a happy day was marked with a white stone, an unhappy day with a black one. The latter procedure was this: at the end of each day, a Roman — according to Pliny the Younger, this superstitious practice dated back to the Thracians — would judge whether the day had been happy or unhappy. Once decided, the Roman would drop a pebble of the appropriate colour into an urn, so at the end of the month he could empty the urn and be able to look back over the month past.
The ‘superstitious’ Roman or Thracian may have intended not only ‘to look back over the month past’, but also, perhaps, to resurrect its most auspicious days, a suggestion of beneficent magic reinforced by the connotations of the ‘urn’ in which the stones were placed. The pain and difficulty of Prynne’s Apocalyptic modernism has borne the weight of commentary, and rightly so, but the ecstatic intensity of his inspiration should not be lost to sight. It would be hard to overstate the contrast between the Apocalypticism of early Christianity and the contented stoicism of one of its persecutors, in ‘Rome at the turn of the first century, when the uneasy years of Domitian were followed by what Gibbon called “the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”‘ (‘Introduction’, The Letters of the Younger Pliny, p26, footnote reference to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 3). Pliny, for his part, explicitly denies the premise of the laudator temporis acti: ‘It is not true that the world is too tired and exhausted to produce anything worth praising’ (p28). His preoccupation with immortality is equally robust: ‘Since we are denied a long life, let us leave something to bear witness that at least we have lived... “Rivalry is good” when friends stimulate each other by mutual encouragement to desire immortal fame’ (‘To Caninius Rufus’, p92; quotation from Hesiod’s Works and Days). It would be too much to expect Prynne to endorse the view that early-twenty-first-century England deserves Gibbon’s praise of Rome under the Antonines, but The White Stones — unlike the ‘white stone’ of Revelation or of ‘Star Damage at Home’ — is, after all, a plural. The primary referent of Prynne’s title may well be the white stones of happiness pouring out of a Roman urn at the end of a particularly happy month. |
Jacket 24 — November 2003
Contents page This material is copyright © James Keery
and Jacket magazine 2003 |