this is part 3 of an unpublished book on poetry in the 90s
Myths of restitution: between Jung and Object Relations
Barnett, Langley, Haslam, Vaughan
(All the Year Round; Twelve Poems; 4 Poems; The Mummery Preserver)
The Jungian ideas first, I think, entered the British poetic world with Christopher Caudwell; his Illusion and Reality(1936) is as much Jungian as Marxist; their big boom at the end of the sixties does not mean that they ever disappeared. (There was an even earlier book, in 1934, by Maud Bodkin.) These ideas have influenced Edwin Muir, Kathleen Raine, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, Penelope Shuttle, David Black, Michael Haslam, Maggie O'Sullivan, Tom Lowenstein, Norman Jope, and Elisabeth Bletsoe, amongst others. My guess (after reading Henry Treece's magazine of the 1940s, Transformation) is that Jung represents the natural ideology of British poets steeped in poetry, and that these ideas creep back everywhere that the university English faculties fall silent for a moment. Emotional projection onto natural objects is something which all university-based groups reject, whether they are from the New Criticism or formalist and neo-marxists, which may point to common principles. Maurice Denis said in 1890 that a picture was, before it was anything else, a surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order; it may be that the primary level of poetry is a set of cellular acts of imitation, integration, repair, and growth, with logical processing occurring on a kind of periphery. Autonomous affect in poetry would then be the equivalent of abstraction in painting: a level which exists in all patterned surfaces.
In the work of David Barnett (1942-; Bent in Water, ?; Fretwork, n.d., 1992?; All the Year Round, 1994) we find attachment and affection as the central topics, as well as the central goods. His expression of their value is influenced by Jung, so that the process of feeling is also the process of healing, and the experience of poetic truth is also a process of right living.
The central problem is that of damage and healing of parts of the self, visualised poetically by living things which go through cycles of growth and decay; contemplating them externalises the profound processes of the soul, allows us to look at the anxiety and so rise above it, and reassures us by showing life to be eternal and self-renewing. Eliade tells us that the men of the Palaeolithic era saw time as a bear, an animal which grows fat, goes to sleep in the winter, grows thin and lean as it sleeps, and then rises again. It was associated with the moon, which waxes and wanes, and with the Pole Star, which governed the year. Barnett, who has recorded that he sees time as cyclic rather than linear, likes to write about bears.
The motives for composing and writing down poetry frequently have to do with a frantic feeling about transience, a lack of belief that the mind is going to be around from minute to minute. Poets dig all ten fingernails into the experience because they are afraid of it disappearing. Barnett's reflection on transience, and his response in massive acts of appeasement (of the Goddess "who continues to be the inspiration for all the poetry I write") have evidently made him very calm about this issue; his work moves very fast, in a swift wind of di- and monosyllables which is his special rhythmic virtuosity, because he is relaxed about time. Everything will disappear, but everything will come back. The aesthetic attitude starts only once one has accepted this.
The cover assertion (All the Year Round) that "'Now living in an isolated farmhouse on the moors", he says 'I have plenty of time to dream, circle-dance and to connect with the land(.)'" brings to mind the word hippy. He ran "a community wholefood shop in Carmarthen for sixteen years." The westward drift of hippy and other dissident anti-materialist factions is notorious and apparently unstoppable. The eminence of hippies (and the counter-culture in general) in modern poetry is due partly to the soundness of the idea-set, partly to the sustenance it gives to a soul writing poetry which nobody much wants to buy: somebody with a success ideology would have given up and gone into advertising long since. Giving up the struggle for status by attaining impersonality may be linked to decentralisation; the renunciation of social power allows one to concentrate on the very small scale, aiming at transformation by better eating, for example, or by improving the fabric of verse. It could also fit in with the Anglican divine who studies at a great centre of learning and then goes to a remote parish; the works of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan are simply two versions of this among many. Reading about Edward Calvert reminded me of Barnett.
Barnett began publishing poetry in the late eighties; one pamphlet came out through Chris Bendon's Spectrum imprint. The repeating images of All the Year Round are the growth cycles of animals and the seasonal cycle of the year, represented through the ceremonies of the Celtic ritual round; funding a rich repertoire of seasonal time cycles, acquisition and increase, stability spread over a cycle of successive phases, the surrender of identity to change, the diverse living species of an idealised North European landscape.
When they put on their masks
of lion and hawk, the dance
draws them down into
their kivas where they mix
with those who in the coded
otherness of their moods,
crop their place, chyle it,
yet mark the gong for flight
or a drum-roll from winter
quarters. The dancers mime
the route-march of ants, a moon-
doe's strokes, glut
of herb and fur and praise.
They pull the lettuces,
of course, angle, poach.
But that's to rack her. So
they're sparing. In a beck
trout flounce. A forest
whickers. A sky budges.
Hornets bluster. It's
a cow earth these mummers
graze in their steps
upon her droppings, the trills
she ribbons across the gardens
of their fancy, gritty
with orc and a griffin's
prints, and goosy with frost.
Underfoot she fetches
combs of roe from
the waters in her breasts,
for, beside gannet
and weevil, the chimes
from her women move
her, scuff her stone
shins in the cwms
she dykes, tills, grooms.
('The dancers move her with their mime', from Memes 9)
However much one dislikes this at the outset, the movement of the verse is so neat and unpredictable that one ends up being charmed. The "her" is presumably some earth goddess, and the plan of miming something to her (hence the masks) hints that the poetry may be a form of piety, bringing reconciliation and propitiating possibly malevolent forces. The Mummers' Play is a seasonal drama, drawing such exotic things into the English scene; Barnett simultaneously naturalises himself, as a rustic eccentric pondering beauty, and projects himself into exotic scenes, as a shadowy initiate at the kiva. The goddess is the land, so that the combs of roe (fish eggs) literally come from inside her. Tearing things out of her hurts her: that's to rack her. She dykes the valleys (cwms) to protect them, tills them, grooms them as if they were favoured animals, or part of her own green and grey body. The figures who do the ant-dance are evidently shamans; kiva is the 'sweat lodge' of certain Indians in the south-west USA, used for rituals. The shaman has a map of the cosmos on his drum, to guide him during magical flights. The gong implies metallurgy, and sounds more like southeast Asia; Barnett's first book, many years ago, was about a journey in Siam. The figures in this underworld (halfway between the sunlit world and the depths of the earth) are evidently dead, but I suppose also control the fertility of the land of which they are the tutelar spirits: they crop and chyle it, where chyle (a digestive fluid) dramatically equates the life of the soil with the inner processes of the human body. Inner and outer follow each other, the one standing for the other. Barnett's projection of the line of the poem, of us in fact, into other bodies, of the gannet and weevil, breaks the stale identity of everyday, to enact a mystery which we are well capable of following.
A sequence of three poems from Fretwork deals with the shaman. The first one, 'Changeling', deals with crisis and initiation:
When he's harried out from
his own thorp a lad has
to snout up grubs. Fits trim
him to a changeling who will
tap for the bell eyes
of a guild that can unpick
the runes from storms. Without jeers
at a club-foot or a hare-lip
men bare him against the fire
they stoked to cauterize his soul
before they peel off to leave him
in the stoup of a hovel
where a wind's a musk-ox
and sleet slaps. From here he won't
hobble over to the flux
of gruel or rear his haunches for
leap-frog, hop-scotch, five-stones.
On an ermine flock, gorged
by the tics from his dreams,
he must stay until his makers
daub him with their nubs of grease
and clay so he may meddle
where it's his claim alone to unlace
ribs and pluck the pox of death.
The future priest is a misfit, driven out to experience hunger which makes him hallucinate and so opens the way to spiritual power. This ordeal of isolation, recorded in all the books on the subject, reminds us that the solitude I have posited for modern poetry has very ancient roots. Purged, he waits for the other shamans to initiate him, through a ceremony of mock death and rebirth. He lies on a coverlet of fur. Once graduate in this craft, he has the power to do spirit surgery, going inside people's bodies to destroy their illnesses (the "pox of death") and make them whole.
These miraculous transformations take place in a miniature world in which resolution can be attained, not the vast real world with its historic frustrations. Abstract knowledge takes the form of symbolic miniature worlds. The interest then is what scenarios we stage in these symbolic arenas, and whether their final colour is benevolence and integration.
R.F. Langley (1937-) comes from Wolverhampton, did English at Cambridge in the 1950s, at the same time as Prynne, and went on to become an English teacher in Wolverhampton. His friendship with Prynne is presumably the social link by which he came to publish poems in Equofinality, in 1984. He began publishing in 1978: Hem, a pamphlet from infernal methods, run by his former pupil, the poet Nigel Wheale. His output is mostly in the book Twelve Poems, published in 1994. A pamphlet, Jack, followed from Equipage. These are enigmatic but compelling works:
Silver moon; thatch; owl on the gable
and twelve silver instruments on the desk
for surgery. Silver moon on the desk.
Twelve silver instruments constellate
behind clouds. Ready for the straw
bird in the house of feathers. Mild
fingers set twelve silver straws on
the shining wood. There is a soft
interjection, stroboscopic starlight
and the powers realign. In another
box there are two gold rings.
(...)
White hedonism cut on blue
intelligence and laced
with silver anxiety. Bravo.
It braces milady's cortical
layer to take what could
have been trauma but now snugs
a bee in a comfort. While ants
silkily fidget and moderate
men press on, juddering,
grinning, being temperate
because of the price of beer.
(from 'The Ecstasy Inventories')
He likes to choose an ambiguous subject which remains outside exact definition while he is describing numerous features belonging to it; 'Man Jack', as he explained at a reading I attended, is about a man, or imp, reflected in a train window, who runs alongside a train at exactly the speed of the train, along banks, over bridges, along rivers, etc. Langley's interest in neurological agents, the separate persons that act, sometimes, within the brain, was developed in Jack; he is more persuaded by these separate selves than by kleinianism, I suspect. The poem remains poised between mystery and literal accuracy; but any detail we look at is clear and fluent. However careful the explanations, he seems to have little faith in the truth of things finally emerging; the senses are confused, and when understanding is reached it is with a delay, so that the understood is clear but no longer the case. 'Arbor Low' describes a Neolithic stone circle on a hill in Derbyshire without any mention of prehistory, entirely in terms of the birds around it. 'Saxon Landings' is apparently an account of the state-founding invasions in terms of the hammered reliefs of Classical gods on silver vessels found in treasures deposited (and never recovered) by rich fleeing Romano-Britons:
Once they believed it but since it
is diction, the pipes in the wood
or limber vine and the bland
country where Bacchus and Pan
defeat Hercules.
The poem is an engagement with the mystery of English culture: the absorption by a periphery of central cultural goods, in this case Graeco-Latin ones. The treasure was deposited in the 5th century by rich members of a society which was disintegrating and being overrun; but fifteen centuries later, when the treasure is dug up, we can "read" all the themes, because we were brought up on the same Graeco-Latin stories and laws of representation. Several of the poems are incomprehensible without contextual information, helpfully published in an interview (in Angel Exhaust Thirteen and Fourteen). We learn from the interview that he is much attached to Adrian Stokes as an art critic; I would hazard that his poetry is inspired by the description of containment, where two forces balance out and leave something stable; and of suspension, where a subject in poetry is floated and expends its energies within the poem, without breaking out and destroying the grounds of discourse. This all seems to relate to a kleinian ideal of maturity, where archaic drives are bound in a cycle of desire and appeasement, repeatedly lived out where excess is tuned out and prevented from creating a build-up of frustration and aggression which wipe out the gratification. Klein wrote of partial objects, which are the parts of the outside world (originally, the feeding breast) internalised as the population of the mental world, turned into aggressive and hated things in the rage states caused, originally by hunger, but also by the frustration of more developed appetites. They are partial because they are mutilated by fantasized acts of aggression; and because they are unsatisfying, i.e. incomplete. This corresponds, in modern terms, to a state where a man sees women either as objects of gratification or as terrifying, conspiratorial, and misshapen; whereas calm makes women emerge as autonomous beings, with complex characteristics which are independent of a man's projections. Creating a work of art involves manipulating inner objects and the parts of the outside world, together; the work is also an object in the outside world, itself. In this system, portraying nude women is a great test of a male painter; the hours or days of work offer the possibility of relapse into primitive states of lust and terror; the calm of the finished work, with its promise of a stable and capacious external space, is what calms us. Langley's poems are full of calm objects, in this sense. Not only does emotional balance allow us to perceive other people in their intact complexity, beauty, and directedness; it has this as its inevitable result, almost as a free gift. Once they are revealed as lovable, it is possible to love them. This theory may also explain what Sacheverell Sitwell was trying to do; his books are catalogues of calm objects, in this sense. The attentiveness of the artist is more important than the shape of the object being examined; and this attentiveness arises partly from calm, from the absence of intrusive fantasies and projections. Art enters a different kind of time, floating on rhythms of attention which are slowed, co-ordinated, and stabilised; it is directed at its objects, but is at the same time autonomous from these. The movement of Langley's verse rigorously draws us away from each individual sensation, offering us a model of separation and transience which mimics the most painful experiences but robs them of their power to hurt. Imagism was minimally capable of any such imitation of time, which however is the medium in which everything else forms and is destroyed. Langley's resort to elaborate sentence structures, pointing away from the fragmentary individual chunk of meaning or rhythm, resembles Prynne and Crozier and shows how the English response to Objectivism threw away the obvious characteristics of the model. Langley could I think be compared to Terence Tiller in this development of a continued sentence structure to hold extremes in a dialectical balance; Tiller's work of the 1940s could be considered as the foundation of the Cambridge School. This high level movement could I think be an explosion of the paradox, as a low-level structure, which would recall originally Metaphysical or Mannerist roots. It differs considerably from the modernist style of unmediated juxtaposition and stacking up of small self-contained units. The point of mediation between two forces or vectors is like engineering, the world of measurement and real quantities, where the figures are of course limits, and the real is seized, and controlled only by acknowledging its limitedness and resistance. This seems appropriate for a poet from the manufacturing town of Wolverhampton, although Langley was very unhappy when I suggested this to him.
Starry-eyed and laughing: Michael Haslam, Four Poems (Equipage, 1994)
Indigo floats and flashes on the green
show spectral scales of snake-shadow
left in a slack the ebb had sunk below
and in the thunderflash, again Indigo
Four Poems is a unity, as the subtitle 'Something's Recrudescence Through To Its Effulgence', implies. (Another subtitle runs 'Three of my chasms (songs) and the bridge that sings'; and the Chasms are subtitled 'Simultaneous Poems'.) It is about a period of gloom and despair induced by domestic discord, Baby's got some new rules, baby says she's had it with me; about recovery; followed by elation and romantic love with another woman (named):
Three springs I've breathed with something's recrudescence
through to its effulgence. Now I finish off this formal
immaterial event, just shuddering this side of the
acceptance of the fence of full hawthorn effulgence
and the scent, Mayblossom on my heart, the
woodland cloughs' and the adjoining fields' luxuriance.
I don't think Angel Exhaust has ever reviewed a love poem before. The bridge that sings runs between life and death.
The first Chasm is called 'Sothfastness', which means sticking to the truth. The speaker was saved from psychic ruin by a belief in love and poetry even when their manifestations were ruinous. Fantasy cannot be durably consoling, so the different elements appear in the poem because they coincided momentarily with each other and with Mike Haslam. So
The Cuckoo-Thunder broke on Spring Bank Brink
and scattered urinaceous droppings of a sudden
coming green. The zephyr
caught into a meteoric shape
here culminates, brings these, and leaves
a spectral virid trail
of amber glass and greenish vitrine.
must be a real woodpecker darting around after a real thunderstorm on Calderdale. This preoccupation with truth doesn't match up with a psychedelic aesthetic, the intrication of shimmering sensory patterns until reason fails and the reader slides into a hypersuggestible state. If what you imagine is true, what does it represent? Nor am I convinced about the merits of realism. When Leslie Gore sings 'He turned around/ Walked out the door/ Out of my life/ For ever more/ And I died inside', I don't suppose she's talking about a real incident but it's still a great record. Further, the starting up of a series of birds, representing the revival of the poet's Anima, i.e. the female side of his personality which is also the faculty which is able to love women, puts us firmly in the neverland of Jung, who was by no means a fan of realism. So the great fault of poems 2, 3 and 4 is that their ideas are plucked from a book; sothfastnesse is let down by credulity. Also, the symbols of happiness are more arbitrary than those of misery in poem 1; still, it's very agreeable to watch these light, fantastic, flickering, flakes, whirl past, intending healing and happiness.
'Father, why is that green star hovering over that old Cabin out on the Moor?' 'Be glad, my Child, for it means that Mr Haslam is about to write another Poem.' If everything around composes with emotional events, this asks for cosmic coordination; and it is this which reminds me of saints' lives. Effulgens must be one of the more common adjectives in saints' lives, glitter as they do with celestial lighting effects. The Western interest in individual experience is surely inherited from this genre of biography. Haslam is fascinated by the machinery of previous eras of literature. I suppose that using only recent devices would be a simplified, almost behaviourist, version of consciousness. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Bunyan, but also Traherne and all the more mystical end of Metaphysical lyric, dominate Four Poems.
A repeated word which I've failed to decode is spectre, spectral. Just possibly, this may relate to arcane lore; if you flick through sheets of white paper and see a colour spectrum, you know you're tripping. It would be curious to relate this use of pure colour to Denise Riley's high colour tones. You polish something originally grey and matte until its effulgence.
Like the pop records of 1967, Haslam believes in experience full of nowness and naturalness and yet transcending. Someone with a very intense inner life cannot be fashionable: internality as slow reaction time. What he records, though, is moments when senses and imagination coincide:
On offer is an instance of
encompassing phenomena:
I play the prime, the native and exemplum
witness to the song of ringing spirit
endlessness again: Cloud Wonder!
Any eggborn infant's had its head in.
Scents! the welling out blue float, blue lilac flight,
the halcyonic something on the water brights
the heart and both the heart's adjacent
blood-lymphatic swellings wing and fan
upon the gasp of laughing.
A refusal to be in separate parts gives us simultaneity. Being divided also means being incomplete in emotional relationships. Although it's overoptimistic to hold that a poet lost in poetry is given wholeheartedly to his or her lovers. The opposite applies. Breaking with romantic tradition, he also plays the fool: 'she does Quince, I may say,/ exquisitely researched upon my local self'. Robust good sense breaks up any pose. Haslam has claimed the Lancashire comedians Ken Platt and Al Read as his greatest influences. The giddy goat encompasses. The book ends with 'to find refreshment in the wind and find/ the spring's again a tonic. Mine's an F(.)' where the F is the psycho-acoustic symbol for laughter in the fourth poem, and so the 'tonic' of his tune, and of his spirits. This description within the poem of the poem's form is typical; as is the pun (My Chasm= Mike Haslam). His persona reminds me of Susan Howe's lines 'To the glass house by water/ hurried elf/ and bedlam beggar/lonely hellward nursery tale manner'. (The glass house is Merlin's Ty Gwydr, cf. amber glass and greenish vitrine.) Howe also refers to Quince.
Another reason why he isn't interested in modern methods is the alienation which underlies them. In a state of devastation and depression, the outside world is meaningless; so outer and inner cannot be bound together. Haslam is only really interested in elation.
He's also interested in cynghanedd. An opposite of depressive inertness is hyperassociation this dislodging of normal functional patterns might signify re-integration. His phonetic keying, associations at subrational level, gradually builds up multiple, flickering, simultaneous patterns of events. Compare this to zaum' and to a very frequent practice of recent Russian poets, of phonetically based sequence. It is an extension of rhyme. The transition from acoustics to semantics is made difficult, delayed, by multiple competing shapes; in the momentary universe of discourse, connections linger, as their irresolubility gives rise to hyperassociation. Refusing separation, all levels of neurological control of speech are engaged but not released, to flood the mind in indigo floats and flashes. (Compare Green to Grey by Out To Lunch, another Yorkshire sage and foe of reason.) The transience of those sound complexes brings urgency and lightness. Simultaneity also animates his syntactic design, using an endlessly branching and running-on clause structure to bind elements together and keep them spinning in the air. Echoing, too, are a number of semantic-acoustic themes repeated throughout the book, as a basic compositional device. The delay-effect of these patterns that refuse to resolve is like reverb, every new line as blurred and lagged as the sounds on a 1968 LP produced by Dave Mason. How is this psychedelic interfusion compatible with representationalism? what is the difference between a soothfast poem about a fantasy state and a fanciful poem? MH knows, but then he's a dizzy daddy.
Vittoria Vaughan, The Mummery Preserver (1996; 61pp.)
Vaughan (1970-), who began publishing poems around 1992, is steeped in Jungian ideas which may have come from anywhere in the landscape: the New Age culture has made these units of design universally available. They represent, of course, a popular stratum of taste, unacceptable to the poet to the extent that they have accepted the university culture, sceptical and legitimate. The poems seem to be adventures of the body image; unstably projected onto manifold forms of the natural world, in an exchange of parts. This is perhaps a phase which precedes abstract thought, and abstract thought may in fact be a specialisation of this faculty. My caution about this tumult of expressivity, captivating as it undoubtedly is, has to do with the isolation of the central figure: the poems are the product of fantasy and introspection, not of a dialogic principle. The fascination with trees imports the fact, mythic as well as biological, that trees don't have a social life. This situation is brought out in the first poem in the book, the eponymous one; where we find out that a mummery preserver is a kind of mummy (picked up in the picture of a mummy on the jacket). Mummery, an old English word, is dressing up, for example among mummers (old word for actors), or mummed up (snugly, against the winter). This bizarre crossover is on a good footing; mummies are mummed in rather tight windings ('long linen swathes', the poet says), and these preserve them against the virtual "cold" of death. The mummy, unresolved in ambiguities like a good dream image, is also a dustless home, a woman's body growing older (looking like your mummy, in the other sense), the perfect body which is preserved in some internal imagery, and the other perfect body which make-up and adornment realise. The linen bands have something important to do with the poet's mother and grandmother. The daughter is perhaps a precious internalised image (certainly internalised, certainly "the image of you") of the mother. The mummery is a disguise, an ornamental face and bearing inside which the real self sits. Pulling at this imagery tangles me in dozens of yards of linen all covered in hieroglyphs. It has a certain affinity to Tsvetayeva's "Poloterskaya", which must be the greatest poem ever written about housework; (the name is the form used for names of dances, like the polonaise, and so means "Floor Polisher's Dance", and indeed there is a lot about floor polishing being a gliding motion like dancing); it contains the words for "grandmother" and "mummer", although the latter only in disguised form (mummers, in the disorderly days around Christmas, are ryazhonnye, and the poem has only the compound form naryadit'sya, which means to dress up in finery, from Lamanova's, possibly a couturier in pre-war Saint Petersburg). The poem is full of the kind of dream doubling and coupling of words which makes mummy into mummery: Kolotery-molotery,/Polotyery-polodyeri,/Kumashniy stan,/Bakhromchatiy shtan. This quatrain is pure dream, but we could say something like:
Ripple-skimmers-moth-skinners/ Flashwipers-floorwhippers/ Red cotton flock/ frilled trousers.
I am not quite sure about the frills, but perhaps we could say Red cotton-rag strips / Gleam stripes-flounced bottom.
The tree poems go on for about 400 lines; for example
to start at the tip,
the cypress is the final tree
of life, the pre-elysium
maze circular an unending
corpses can't escape, its dark forest
of velvet-lined incubation chambers the wheal without a common thread.
the cypress is an evergreen robot factory,
its resurrection wires clung to by the dead
as if they were bole of last breath
holding procreation, as if pinnacles
of a golden, visionary gate.
the cypress is a monumental deception,
its stricta columns of historical stereotype
avenue continents, a swathing proliferation
of axe wielders, a maniac of barbarians
that carry brandons rising from the flames.
for the cypress is a burnished forum,
is a black market, is an unofficial rule of law.
The hypothesis we enter, entering the poem, is an anatomy; and is a temporary self. (Wheal, a Cornish word, is a mine-shaft; brandon is a burning brand from a fire.) The use of an external symbol gives a voice to parts of the self which are usually dumb; the temporary occupation of this astonishing verbal toy can say something about more permanent seizures, and the pure plasticity which lies behind all the captured objects. The shape of an anatomy, imaginatively wrapped round as a mummery, is not serial like a poem, and it is the sequencing of sense which causes problems; these poems would rather be overall than have a line structure. The recitation of analogies and attributes can resemble the more baffling passages of Aboriginal myth, or of the Old Testament, where the mass of esoteric theological-taxonomic detail defies us.
The poet, who thanks Norman (undoubtedly Norman Jope) at the front of the book, is in some kind of a dioscuran pair, dictated by birth and mythological partiality, with Elisabeth Bletsoe; the kind that continues throughout life. Bletsoe wrote a series about angels, Vaughan one about trees; both have gone in for nature study in a hard and intense way; Bletsoe writes about organisms on the beach at Whitby, Vaughan about similar on the beach at Brighton.
The trees are a single self, and the Jungian attitude presupposes a healing situation, where the individual is isolated, self-attentive, temporarily not functioning except to work on themselves. This withdrawal inside the borders of the body is seen, sometimes, as privatisation, and as part of the depoliticisation which followed the political disillusion of the mid 1970s. What is most introspective and medically, physiologically, oriented, is also popular culture, something saleable in the way that political poetry just isn't. Poetry, though, is about intense attention, and this is always likely to be self-attention, without any distortion of eternal rules. Politics, moreover, is not just about facts and figures, but also about shared symbolism which is esoteric and arbitrary.
The Jungians look at the poem as a dynamic process in which the relations of the parts of the field to each other shift between the beginning of the poem and the end. The hurling of the poet into the poem involves a drive, a realisation of psychological goals through the material being perceived, and through the verbal material of the poem. Poetry which does not realise psychological goals, and does not transform the perceiver via the process of perception, is not aesthetic, although it may be documentary. We can compare the Jungian and the Christian teleologies as they appear in poetry; the Jungian one is based on the isolated individual, isolated because they are sick: the healing process takes place inside one organism (mind/body) and does not involve a transformation of social relations. The Christian plan was originally a-social and apocalyptic, but the version available in England, where the parish and the State church are so prominent, obliges the pilgrim to look at social relations, and not just at their soul. Poetry without teleology may either be the expression of liberty, or of having your soul in the deep-freeze. We can further compare psychoanalysis of the Object Relations school, which also involves a teleological drive towards integrated relations with other people; this social model is projected onto relationships with objects, which is convenient for art, where according to the folklore objects are necessary in order to create an external equivalent for the feeling. "Object Relations" treats subjects through the objects of their actions, and deals first of all with their objects of attachment, i.e. people, and does not stray far from these; but the line of interest in toys (analysing children through their play behaviour) and in painting and sculpture (Marion Milner, Adrian Stokes, Peter Fuller) has imported dead but symbolic objects into the field of attention. In all of the poets discussed, the handling of words is a sign of freedom from rage and frustration, the infantile negative affects, and this freedom is a gage of the aesthetic; and we can describe what is perceived, in England, as aesthetic, in terms of this freedom: shining through benignity, the possession of calm objects, finesse, absence of haste, recognition of the reality of other people, calm memories as the result of forgiveness, a sense of security distributed over space, the ability to transform the negative, the sense of being inside something much larger which is also safe and benign.