The emphasis falls on 'the'

The early 80s? Sunday evening 'tea', The South Bank Show, vague memories of a programme on David Jones. Black and white? Sequence of him working on a page of calligraphy. Slate? Overall impression of mess, dust and shabbiness. Next ... a corridor in Oxford, a pencil and watercolour 'original', seen every morning and every evening on the way to the dining hall. Recurrent ... those Faber covers ... . A couple of years ago finding 'Epoch and Artist' in a secondhand bookshop in York.

This Sunday afternoon - the first in September - while Lara & Emma sleep and the rain patters on the Velux, I read 'The Preface to The Anathemata' (the emphasis falls on 'the') ...

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I have made a heap of all that I could find

(citing Nennius – or “whoever”)

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Part of my task has been to allow myself to be directed by motifs gathered together from such sources as have by accident been available to me and to make a work out of those mixed data.

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If one is making a painting of daffodils what is not (italics) instantly involved?

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The ‘grave problems’ referred to a few paragraphs back have mostly arisen over questions of this sort. It must be understood that it is not a question of ‘translation’ or even of ‘finding an equivalent word’, it is something much more complex.

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The times are late and get later, not by decades but by years and months.

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But the particular quarry that the mind of the poet seeks to capture is a very elusive beast indeed. Perhaps we can say that the country to be hunted, the habitat of that quarry, where the ‘forms’ lurk that he’s after, will be found to be part of vast, densely wooded, inherited and entailed domains. It is in that ‘sacred wood’ that the spoor of those ‘forms’ is to be tracked. The ‘specific factor’ to be captured will be pungent with the smell of, asperged with the dew of, those thickets. The venator poeta (italics) cannot escape that tangled brake. It is within such a topography that he will feel forward, from a find to a check, from a check to a view, from a view to a possible kill: in the morning certainly, but also in the lengthening shadows.

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The means or agent is a veritable torcular, squeezing every drain of evocation from the word-forms of that language or languages. And that involves a bagful of mythus before you’ve said Jack Robinson – or immediately after.

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Poetry is to be diagnosed as ‘dangerous’ because it evokes and recalls, is a kind of anamnesis (italics) of ... something loved.

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What for us is (italics) patient of being ‘actually loved and known’, where for us is ‘this place’, where do we seek or find what is ‘ours’, what is (italics) available, what is (italics) valid as material for our effective signs?

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In a sense the fragments that compose this book are about, or around and about, matters of all sorts which, by a kind of quasi-free association, are apt to stir in my mind at any time and as often as not ‘in the time of the Mass’. The mental associations, liaisons, meanderings to and fro, ‘ambivalences’, asides, sprawl of the pattern, if pattern there is – these thought trains (or some might reasonably say, trains of distractions and inadvertence) have been as often as not initially set in motion, shunted or buffered into near sidings or off to far destinations, by some action or word, something seen or heard, during the liturgy...

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That mote of dust or small insect seen for an instant in a bend of pale light, may remind us of the bird that winged swiftly through the lughted mote-hall, and that I suppose cannot but remind us of ...

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You use the things that are yours to use because they happen to be lying about the place or site or lying within the orbit of your ‘tradition’...

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You can’t get the intended meaning unless you hear the sound and you can’t get the sound unless you observe the score: and the pause marks on a score are of particular importance. Lastly, it is meant to be said with deliberation – slowly as opposed to quickly – but ‘with deliberation’ is the best rubric for each page, each sentence, each word.

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Each word is meant to do its own work, but each word cannot do its work unless it is given due attention.

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There are, however, many others to whom I may be as, or more, indebted. Who should say how much may be owing to a small textbook on botany; a manual of seamanship ...

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For names linger, especially when associated with some sort of disciplina ludi (italics). They go into your word-hoard, whether or not you ever attempted to unlock it.

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I'm thinking of Martin Corless-Smith (a professed admirer of David Jones), Susan Howe (whose 'The Midnight' I found by chance in Sterling Books), and - for some reason - my godfather 'Uncle' John who turned 80 last week.

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("... with a name like Jones you got to be Welsh ...")