This piece was written as my dissertation for the Royal College M.A. 1979
It came back to me with a note from the Head of Department saying it was impossible to mark because it was so personal. Nevertheless I passed and was awarded the Penguin Book Prize.
Like a lot of my stuff, now, I find it a bit turgid, self indulgent, with some good lines.
Re. crisis of making,
having nothing left or yet to say,
still believing in the possible,
come what may.
the constant beads of nights,
when nothing much is done,
the constant round of friends,
well, perhaps just one.
................................................................................
A bee stings, a star falls,
making a moment.
Like the centre of a stain, (bright blood on the sheets)
the present fades out in all directions, (concentric memories)
with no feeling of linear development,
or careering
down a rough road.
This point, now, just appears,
and if I try and place it in context,
what I remember, incidents, this happened and then this happened,
all my stacked stories appear like parables,
without the ordinariness of the everyday.
A see-saw of past and present tenses,
gives no feeling of motion.
Men and women give us shape,
their touch allows us to mould ourselves.
With no thought to be an artist, I met a teacher.
Max, the artist, the friend of artists,
with his stories of Dali and Picasso,
the Spanish village that adopted him,
and kept him alive for six months, while he painted,
and the mayor of that place who got him drunk for three days,
and gave him a pair of trousers, to wear home.
Max, THE artist, monosyllabic, pidgin phrases of criticism,
ready to grab your brush and carve your canvas with his knowledge.
Max, bent kneed and white moustache, tall, round shouldered,
thin, fibrous, married to a silent girl, pregnant forever,
trying to teach me a straight line, hour after hour,
how to move my body, and eye, and hand,
from one point to another,
until the blackboard was covered in crosses joined by curves,
erratic lines not knowing themselves,
twitching lines, frightened lines, pompous lines,
none of them decisions,
and eventually, in our defeat, drinking and talking of poetry,
resting in the word world,
me too young, and him older than sight.
I thought, and think, I see,
my eyes stacking light and shapes into phrases and rhythms,
my hand producing lines of tiny graphs,
like a seismograph, like an encephalograph,
meaningful lines, mathematical in their intention.
But the drawings,
the laborious, deliberate drawings,
with ruler and rubber engraved in the paper,
revealed the truth,
with their reverse perspective,
with their feeling of giantism.
All their lines pointed towards me,
converging, crowding into place in front of the paper,
consistently ego-centric,
adolescent in their bias.
I was desperate for a memory of making.
I wanted to be reborn with talent not wit.
I wanted my arms to be strong,
my head to be straight and simple.
I searched for a personal baptism,
one to take me into belief.
When it was objects I bent and strung,
wood cut, glued, screwed joints, weldings and pressed clay,
I thought I constructed out of the real world,
and tried to display my humour and sensuality.
The mechanics of making engaged in an erotic wrestle
soon distorted into pointless, amateur things.
Dilettante, pretending cynicism.
I have watched myself
chattering and showing my teeth in mock anger,
and I was the bars and cage and keeper.
The first time I fucked I didn't make it.
The enormity of the thing passed by in fumbling.
I don't know how, or why it stopped,
no orgasm or interruption,
just a casual disconnection.
Each time the same memory, and like Borges,
the memory of all the times remembered.
A hall of mirrors where nothing is distorted or changed,
for all the wishing.
Systematically I defend myself with pleas of spontaneity,
quote Jung and Hegel from paperbacks,
and imagine I am a dancer.
Building monuments between tides,
wanting and not wanting
the dissolution of my fortresses.
Half blind, half deaf, half dumb,
having sustained what can only be described as
fair wear and tear,
my half interests become a patchwork quilt.
One night I sat up in my sleep and spoke Gaelic.
My brother has told me of the nights I spoke Latin,
not from the Mass, not from school.
If these hot and cold languages blow through me,
then I am angry at a part of me hidden to myself,
the same part of me exposed.
Each slow object is now a cheap thriller,
a who done it,
a who done it before.
What am I giving and withholding?
will a Kalagari come and, with contempt,
pronounce me sane? loo
With what I make I make myself,
but discharge is not creation,
systems produce a gelded speed and beauty,
organic displays, like the sea-anemone,
cannot be touched.
The floor is a lattice of steel wires,
to fall is to be sliced into definitions,
but beneath this web is heard a muffled promise.
The difference between jumping and falling
is debated in transit,
when there is a need to change categories.
See-saw, see-saw.
I caught myself as a comic king,
passing off riddles as personal truth,
master of all I could sit upon.
When the philosopher told the story of the hare and the tortoise,
it was my arrow that froze,
held by the conundrum of eternity and choice.
Nothing changes in this fog.
After the staggering and groping, the silence,
depressions like bomb craters,
I am almost content to be blind.
Like Beckets' geriatric patient,
I can ponder on whether it is dark, or I am blind,
or both.
I try and notice the shape and feel of the world,
look for patterns and metaphors.
Always back to the labyrinth.
I pretend to forget the way,
deliberately trying to loose myself,
like a child on familiar ground.
The confusion and dead-ends and certainties expand.
I make puzzles, and find everything puzzling,
games of catch-as-catch-can,
barking at the punters to convince them of the jeopardy,
as I juggle with invisible knives.
There's nobody here but us chickens,
and the roost is ruled with lies.
and always,
when a light flashes out a new blindness,
and a confidential voice murmurs
'Quo Vadis?' with a smile,
'I don't know, but nearly', is all I can reply.
When I fuck it is still furtive,
like the man of the house is away.
In the studio I know I am only there
while the genius is at the circus.
Wanting to prove myself in his absence,
I fumble with my erection.
To those who carry tales of the world
I offer a string full of knots, a cordillera.
Knowing enough not to bring excuses to the banquet,
I make an instrument out of partly filled glasses of wine,
drinking till I have them in tune.
too drunk to make music, I present the possibility.
I found myself leaving objects,
stopped playing with toys and building things,
to turn and study the wall at my back all these years,
covered in marks only some of which
I remember being placed.
Most scars are made before thought.
The beast, inertia, coils round my heels,
a serpent without hunger or satiety.
Its sibilant voice engages me in a miasma of contradictions.
Each trick towards inaction is played and replayed like a ritual,
like a sigh from the tired before a useless final effort.
When at last, with prodding or cajoling, or caught off gaurd,
my gaze is fascinated,
what a proud erection, what nervous energy approaching fever.
But the fever never breaks to a higher calm,
and aspirations on a long spring snap back to nothing doing,
leaving only obscure souvenirs.
meaningless tat found at the back of a drawer
in someone else’s' house.
Treading water in a sea of intrigue, self-centred, I hear whispers,
my paranoia invents news of new conspiracies,
dark plots hatched just out of sight.
As a child I felt adult eyes all around me,
willing me to understand some intricate truth,
not allowed to explain.
Their patience made me angry and frustrated.
I now know what a pathetic battlefield I inherit.
Still there is the nothingness were the climax should be.
A series of casual disconnections link every piece,
image on image, superimpositions building up and up,
each altering the perception of all before.
Trying to look through at the right angle,
so that the layers achieve meaning is futile.
there are bits missing
or there is no knowing viewpoint.
Again and again there is only immanence.
Less anxious about motives,
any leit-motive is safe from scrutiny for awhile.
Settling for a limited freedom I may still conquer something.
Whether people care, are cautious or conspire is an imponderable.
Ambition is dragging my lack of faith further.
I can't find a new hero, and am already almost too old
to make friends.
It is difficult not to keep taking, and offering, myself as I want to be.
The lines between knowledge, and the desire for it,
between faith and hope,
between the looking and the finding,
fade and appear with a will not mine.
I seem to know, now, that when I think I've learnt something,
I've merely become accustomed to it.
For the future, what great gesture I have planned,
what stupendous applauses and understandings.
But I go into the desert, cherishing my sainthood,
knowing I won’t last a day.
I call on the Devil to tempt me.
He is too busy to offer what we both know I'll accept.
There are no new martyrdoms around the corner,
but I continue to be available.
I will sashay through libraries of knowledge,
never saying no,
never saying yes,
but demanding my disquiet stays in the room,
a black cat with its hackles raised, crouched on the dresser.
What I make will confuse like a still from a film of dancers.
The see-saw moves with the weight
of knowledge that hides experience.
Objects are both diagnosis and malady,
and the confusion between the poison and the cure,
is entangled in tales of moderation for effect.
A facility for survival is expected,
also that capability in others.
We limp along, though the fellowship of beggars is no consolation,
the hurters and seducers have multiple disguises,
and every stab or stroke becomes punctuation in the past.
In the pit-fall future I will continue to rehearse
for the perfect audience.
It will not materialise and I will never be good enough.
Forms, content, context and timing will cavort and wrestle.
Sowing seeds of discontent, I become part of the assault course,
another rock, enigma, another manifestation.
Not blazing a trail,
just obscuring the tracks between one clearing and the next,
letting the darks and lights make messages,
a Morse-code morality, confused couplings.
I have been asked whose' side am I on.
who knows.
The Devil appears, sometimes, as a socialist.
I confuse categories,
and feel old-fashioned,
dread the thought of being victim or product.
The gauntlet I see in every idea, finds me in the night.
I fear cowardice,
yet never believe strongly enough in anything,
to betray it.
Even infamy will not mark and separate me.
No Genet or Nietzsche or Sartre will seek me out.
In the Winter I burn my books,
and the Summer will always call me from my poetry.
Any new pieces will be black and simple,
with insubstantial pedigrees, they will neither call nor ignore,
but offer a suitable case for enquiry,
with all evidence being vital and all judgement suspended.