"... The musk ox
has no musk and it is not an ox"
- Marianne Moore
Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote: it is a lie that the sum of human knowledge has
outrun the individual consciousness till only a small part of it is available
to any one person. No it isn't. It's not a lie. True, I need not be overwhelmed
by this now digital universe, but true also it will not be mastered by me. Isn't
it odd that, in the attempt to control the world, we have created a parallel
one of fax and info which, too, is beyond our control. Just like a poem, a golem.
Consider the surgeon, whose scalpel opens the senseless body to the corpus of
medical literature - neither of which that surgeon will ever fathom. Now there's
an informationist for you.
André Leroi-Gourhan had a neat way of measuring progress, in the making
of tools: cutting edge per kilogram. For a million years or so, there was the
pebble tool (10cm /kg). The next million years managed to improve that to 40cm,
with biface tools. The volume of the hominid brain doubled in the same period.
So tools got lighter and heads got heavier until suddenly, 100,000 years ago,
people started decorating their bodies and burying their dead - behaviour that
gets termed progressive only by association with prodigious advances in cutlery.
Odd, I know, but let's go along with it for another 95 millennia, till they
start using those sharp points to make signs on wax tablets. Almost immediately,
they hit upon the method of communication which, in terms of cutting edge per
kilogram, manoeuvrability and density, has yet to be surpassed: verse. Ah, but
what about the digital universe? How many reams and quires of Rilke's angels
can jig on the head of a pin-sized chip? That's your cutting edge, like the
laser: all cut and no crush.
True in part: it may have no weight, or all the weight of the means of its production,
which, once again, is too much for one to handle. In any case, as I hinted in
the last paragraph, I am sceptical of progress as applied to art and religion,
and advocate a tool that suits me. It isn't the ancient, oral poetry that lives
by society, it isn't a modern medium that depends on technology; it was a fair
age by canto ten of the Paradiso, where Dante says all right, that was a tough
passage: go back and read it again before we press on. It's written verse.
It's small, capacious, tough, patient; not, in my domestic experience, fickle:
just difficult and demanding (I prefer difficulty to danger, though there isn't
always a choice).
I am an informationist inasmuch as a butcher is a chickenist. Essentially I
am neither a dictioneer nor an encyclopaedist. Sure, there are odd words and
facts in my poems but, like the things in W.N. Herbert's "Some things found
in sharks" their value derives from their astounding surroundings. I don't
want New World or other eclecticism. Kenneth White asks for Pascal without the
anguish. Pascal without the anguish? After the Nth plane crash of the year someone
wrote to a newspaper suggesting they build aircraft as tough as the black boxes
that protect the flight recorders. Of course it can be done, but then the planes
don't get off the ground. And what is Pascal without the anguish? The Marquis
de Sade? There's been one already. (Faut-il brûler Sade? Faut-il noyer
Beauvoir?) On the other hand, the proposition "I am doing absolutely nothing
therefore I am a Zen master" is fine by me: there's nothing like the sound
of one name dropping - except perhaps the sound of a brand name hitting the
glass of a TV screen. I'll have no virtual reality or other forms of sensory
deprivation for me or my children. Not till Oor Wullie installs a video game
in his bucket and sticks it on his heid, Ned Kelly style. Who'd need bread and
circuses? Here's a plastic bag, son: away and play at spacemen.
So how do I tell you what? The good, simple words hold only nostalgia. If the
people I live with intimate older meanings, I'll not convey them in wooden toys
with iambic feet and sonnet form. I'd rather use a tax return, a set of instructions,
a copyright warning - starting from scratch every time, because
Tradition is a civil service. This
is politics. Politics of the im-
possible.