Not Watching The News

I can't watch the news. Oh, I can see most of it, headlines on the net & any article I think I can stand to read. But the talk-show analysis I have not been able to stand, not since the day after Robert Mueller’s Congressional testimony — the ghoulish, triumphant ways the press, even the non-trumpian parts of it, characterized what they saw as his failures. Which were, of course, their own. I pitied his obvious, unexpected, frailty.

And so I have watched other things.

Among the latest other things has been a large part of the Prime Suspect series, the ones I remember less well, the later ones. Which I remember less well because they are less good, seasons 4-7. They are less granular, less cross-textured; the thinness of the plot line leaves spots where Mirren has to carry the whole show forward with refusal – silence, wordless ambiguity or submissions, head tilting, angle of neck, eyes lowered, eyes turned away. She has a repertoire of these pauses, but they are not enough.

I decided against Season 5 because I couldn't take the savage dog scenes again – the empty swimming pool, the murder. We're in an age of naked savagery: police shootings the new lynching, the new de facto Jim Crow, the government, this hyena regime, attacking women, children, migrants, the homeless, animals, trees, wildlife reserves, anything and everything that is not a particular section of itself.

So I decided on seasons 3, 4, 6, & 7. 3, because it was so intense, because it so deeply concerned police corruption. I'd forgotten David Thewliss and Ciaran Hinds and was glad to see them again, and to find that Vern/Vera is Peter Capaldi. That season also originated the trope of the soprano children's choir, the mystère des voix Bulgares-type threnody for the innocent.

Knowing how it all ends, though I've forgotten the details of the journey, I'm watching these seasons for Helen Mirren, for the sake of watching a very good artist at work. An artist working; somebody, something working. And Prime Suspect is the longest single arc of Helen Mirren's work that we have.

After season 3 there are no women writers. Meredith Oakes has story credit for the first of the three 1995 movie-length episodes of what is not called Prime Suspect 4. The rest are written by men,

The final season is a study in cruelty – Tennison as old & unfuckable, childless, butch-ish, on the verge of dotage; burnt out, alcoholic, quasi-incompetent; alienated, orphaned, futureless. Her face is flat-lit and pale, her blonde hair fading and wispy, her grey skirt the colour of the office curtains and chairs and carpet and corridors. There's nothing left but the occasional white flash of anger in the depths of her blue, blue eyes.

At the end she's slumped on the floor of the interrogation room, next to the just-confessed murderer, a 14 year old girl. The OIC and others enter, having watched the interrogation from behind one-way glass. Mirren says, looking down, "You've got what you wanted," and it seems that one of the meanings of that line is: the complete humiliation and defeat of Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison who, through her own fault, her own impossible refusals and demands, is now so alone and lonely a murderous child sucked her in.

Somehow I do not think that is quite what Lynda La Plante would have done to or with that character.

Yes, the final scene of the episode is of Jane Tennison giving her horrible retirement party the slip (with male stripper in police costume), striding along the footpath into a probably alcohol-free unknown. She is gathered and determined; she refuses to take any part in the kind of party she specifically asked not to have, which features and celebrates the bullying, blokey police culture she was never prepared to join nor able to defeat.

Forsaken, almost human, she sank not beneath their wisdom.

I can see how the concept plays on the page, but that's not the effect of watching The Final Act. One striding-away scene after 3 hours of alcoholic failure as a cop, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, to mother or be a mother, a girlfriend or wife – after three hours of that kind of lighting, the effect is to leave you feeling there is nothing left, that there was never any point to any of it. The bullying, blokey culture would have pinned the tail on the wrong donkey or on none at all; the victims are still dead, their families are still bereft, and there's nothing to say thank you for, or to. Justice is a long way away.

In 2006, the nadir of Bush 2, when Final Act was made, the only hopeful scene on screen was the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in V for Vendetta.

In 2019, watching the sterilization of Tennison's gesture towards legacy, her gift of art to the young girl artist – that is, watching the destruction of the autonomous feminine of two generations, and seeing the hard light and concrete of what's shown to remain – leaves me wretched.

And then suddenly that extraordinary shot flashes into my mind: the shot at the end of the scene in the café where, following the steps of AA, Bill Otley apologizes to Tennison for trying to ruin her career. The last sequence in the café scene shows Tennison walking away. Then the camera goes back to Otley. He looks upward, to his left, mouth hanging open as though gasping for air; the lighting illuminates his head as though he has just been endowed with salvation.

That is the other thing Tennison is walking away from, bless her: the enduring sanctimoniousness of the conventional answer.

If Tennison isn’t some kind of role model, if a life’s work like hers is nothing but failure, then the whole value-system deserves to be walked away from: supposed virtue as well as certifiable vice.

Stained Windows & Xfixes

Mark Mordue reminded me of staring at stained glass windows out of boredom.

What you absorb staring at stained glass out of boredom! At stone or brick walls, through windows, at gardens, statues, sky! (Newtonian gravity slowing the brick's ascending arc, muscles and the sun rippling on the brickie's labourer's back.)

Those Stations of the Cross in so many parish churches: cream bas-relief, the figures so exaggeratedly moulded they seemed about to fall off the wall, Mary & Veronica minor-key harmonics of the anguished Holy Face… rounded calves & thighs, strained & cabled tendons, gaping spear-wounded flesh…

There was a slightly self-conscious modernization in the illustration style of a lot of ecclesiastical art & devotional artefacts & ephemera from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s, of catechisms, prayer-books, rosary beads, saints’ medals, holy pictures, gospel study handouts. The very streamlined illustrations in paper media seemed to emanate from the U.S.

The crucifixes of South Australian Catholic churches & cathedrals from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s were often designed & executed by Middle-European artists who came to Australia after World War II. These were noticeably more symbolic than those of the old style derived from the southern (mostly Italian) renaissance art & its C16-C19th descendants.

I suspect this was symptomatic of new confidence, consumerism, money and medicine: a not necessarily consciously-formulated perception that life was no longer itself a kind of crucifix, no longer had to be "offered up," was no longer predominantly made of or for or by constant difficulty and unrelieved suffering.

From Fairest Creatures

(i)

Elaine Scarry says we now know the name of the young man Shakespeare wrote the first 123 sonnets for and about. (1)

The traditional explanation for the sequence is that Shakespeare was hired by the Earl of Southampton to persuade his son to marry. The sequence begins with witty and formal arguments to that effect.

From fairest creatures we desire increase
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die – [Sonnet 1]

Look in the glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another – [Sonnet 3]

Though the arguments are propositions, formal and abstract, so abstract they feel the way Elizabethan scrollwork looks, lines wound around themselves in air, continuing, unanchored and centreless, there are phrases so sound they are still striking. "The world’s fresh ornament" – structured like a cliché but still singular; "thy youth's proud livery" – so simultaneously abstract & concrete it could never become the pedestrian clothed in youth; perfume, "a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" – so exact you can see the glint on the edge of the bottle. Wit and argument condense to single lines: "Oh change thy thought that I may change my mind." "You had a father – let your son say so."

The first 17 sonnets can be difficult or abstruse. It's the syntax, it's the language changing: 400 years of empire and social and scientific revolution. But even as Euclydian as they are, as apparently supportive of the old tale as they seem, the first 17 of these poems also document, 1 step forward, & a step back, the social and personal distance between the poet and the young man diminishing. Shakespeare is coming closer.

Any overview of the sonnets will always group the first 17 together. This is because 18 breaks style and subject completely: neither distanced nor impersonal nor general nor abstract; not designed to be harmless if overheard or presented in public, it's intimate, unguarded, direct, electric.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer's lease hath all too short a date
But thy eternal summer shall not fade...
Nor shall Death brag thou wandr'st in his shade.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

After number 17, there's no more talk of sons.

(ii)

Part I
December, 2016

Tuesday, Dec. 13, '16
Today I picked Naming Thy Name: Crosstalk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets off the truck I was "cataloging" – i.e., copy-cataloging, in the new, streamlined, do-nothing way: pick record, Dewey/category, initials, no duplicate call numbers please.

("You can correct it if it’s just plain wrong.")
(How wrong are we allowed to know it is?)
("Your job is to choose a record and assign a call number – Dewey/category, initials, no duplicates.")

Scarry says she knows who Shakespeare's sonnets were written to & about: the name of the guy. (The name of the guy!? The name of the guy. I'm avid.)

I have to read the sonnets before I read the book. I've been meaning to read them for yonks. Now I'll read them for the goss.

First impressions: They start all strained and ho hum, and I'm finding that I don't like the editor’s glosses, they're too literal and nailed down (which is what you have to do as an editor, I see that). I like the word to float over all its applicable semantic areas; you lose the sense of richness otherwise. So I only look at the glosses when I really am puzzled & have no hope of etymologizing my way out – as in misprision for fault. But anyway:

By sonnet 13 Shake's hooked, the sonnets start to get substantial, the language gets less... twisted around almost nothing like wire on air or the loops in an Elizabethan signature (1 & 3, e.g.) and they go on and on about the guy’s beauty and grace and how he'll live forever in these lines (18) and how he's the best thing ever (sonnet 33) and Shake's not old, only as old as the guy because they're one spirit (sonnet 22) and his heart lives in the guy's (and the guy will live forever in these poems). This goes on for quite a while and it gets a bit tedious, but there's a tidbit about not being able to acknowledge each other publicly (sonnet 36), which makes me wonder how Marlowe managed. (By being flamboyant, like Guy Burgess? There's a long tail of hiring the Queen’s eisenspies atte Cambrigge.)

And then Shake's wittily talking himself out of jealousy because the guy's boffing a woman Shake's also ditto, (sonnet 42). Then Shake gets miserable because the guy's gone away, or he's gone away (sonnets 50, 51), and the guy's out doing godknowswhat (sonnets 57-58), & Shake spends his nights trying to sleep & imagining the guy under the ceiling & under his eyelids (sonnet 61) and then the guy is writing a book (sonnet 77), and then other poets are writing to and about the guy (sonnets 78, 80) and Shake is all jealous again, and I keep reading because I have to know what happens next.

The love/affair's been going on for three years (sonnet 104). (This isn't Michael Wood’s safe-for-fambly-viewing Saint Shake. (2) And Shake starts condemning himself & asking for forgiveness because he's been off bonking other people (sonnet 110) – now I really know you're the best, but the others gave me a new lease on life.

My mouth was still gaping after the word outrageous passed through it, but managed to close when the word shameless arrived. This jaunty Act of Cocktrition! But the flattery combined with the unbreakable bond, the mixture of condescension and erotic connoisseurship and helpless helplessness

Mine appetite I will never more grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend
A god in love, to whom I am confined.

save the poem as well as Shake. He gets forgiven & taken back (sonnets 119-120).

Then there's the farewell (sonnet 126), which is really interesting. The original editor put 2 blank lines in square brackets where lines 13 & 14 "should" be, on the assumption that this was also a sonnet. But I don't think it's a sonnet at all, & was never meant to be. The affair is over for some reason, the union is broken, and so the form is broken: the 14 sonnet lines (3 quatrains abab, etc., and the last rhyming couplet) have become 6 rhyming couplets ending in mid-air. And these couplets are like the couplets that end all the sonnets, little knots tying up the thought, or reiterating it, or making a moral point, or all 3; they speak of Nature being the one to render (the guy) down as it has & will have rendered everyone else.

The next sonnets are the "Dark Lady" sequence, and these are immediately less interesting, initially more mere wit as there was in the first twelve, satirizing the tired panoply of tropes of woman as Other… Although Shake does move almost immediately to the psychology of the relationship – fear that she’ll mock his age in front of her other suitors, or openly prefer them in front of him.

In among all of them, the entire 174, are the old warhorses, the technically perfect, the taken-out-of-context-bland, safe-for-teen-anthology-pieces (e.g., 18, 29, 30, 33, 65, & 73), so general in subject as to scarcely register, guaranteed to make the rest sound uninteresting another hundred and sixty-odd times. Sonnet 20 is mos def NSFW.

Among the first hundred and twelve some of the others are nearly as perfect, and they're electric – the sense of – I can't quite put my finger on it. It is obsession, but it seems benign, there's no sense of threat or domination or wheedling – it's a mutual bond/obsession – it's ongoing, it's praise of virtue, it's identification and merging, it's about being equally bound by the bond (to whom I am confined).

Well, perhaps that's the atmosphere, feeling... Almost. Perhaps it's more subtle than I can grasp. I don't know. But there's more of a sense of relationship with an equal, something different about his poems to the guy: there’s no obvious gender hierarchy, even one being wittily or sincerely ignored or satirized.

One of the things about contemporary gay love poems, I've noticed: no animal, vegetable, or mineral metaphors. Because it is at best an underground tradition, or, more often, thought of as unique by the sufferers, no publication of this kind of material ever having been allowed; because everything has to be reinvented from scratch, described exactly? Is that it? That this material hasn't accreted metaphor yet, let alone the distancing objectification & condemnation of the object which the possession of a womb seems to provoke... 

(iii)

At the event level: things that really happened

Sonnets:
50-51 – Shake did leave London on occasion: the Puritans or the plague closed the theatres, or the company was taking the show on the road (the circuit of major coaching inns), or all three (2)
57-58, 99 – Henry Constable also left London on occasion, and sometimes for significant periods of time. A very skilled diplomat, he was sent on missions to various parts of Europe from a very young age (Scarry, p. 36) and later exiled for his Catholicism (Scarry, p. 42)
78, 80 – Other poets were writing to and about Henry Constable (who was widely known beloved, and admired) and imitating his poetry. He published a book of sonnets in 1592 and a second edition, containing his Shakespeare sonnets, in 1594 (Scarry, p. 52)

(iv)

With personal or factual tangents.

Thursday, Dec. 22, '16
Have finished reading the sonnets. Not very well, I know: I find it so hard to get even a basic prose-level sense out of Shakespeare, and always have, that I have to admit that I'm not a very good reader at all.

I've always been afraid of Shakespeare, by reputation beforehand (he's hard), and then doing Henry V in 2nd year. I was 13. I knew immediately that the St. Crispin's Day speech was a very good motivational speech, and the wooing scenes were remarkable for their bad French; but beyond that I didn't understand any of it – who was who, why any of it was done in the first place or was important now, hundreds of years and thousands of miles later, where, if I turned my eyes from the page to the window I could see the grass yellowed and strawed and dying on the nearby hill, where we sniggered because England declared a drought if it didn't rain for ten days straight.

I wondered why the Bishop of Ely was important, where the cathedral was and why that seemed to be important. I wondered why about the whole thing. Looking Ely up in the encyclopedia gave factual answers about the town and cathedral, but made nothing clear.

Of course the answers to those questions are that the presence of the bishop confirms the approval of the Church (the other great power in the land) for the war, and the justification for the war is at the end of Henry IV Pt II. But you have to have seen shaky coalitions abase themselves & sign up to foreign adventures more than once to understand the deep and cynical realpolitik of that answer.

My brother had Julius Caesar. At least that had a plot.

Hearing lectures this year on Sappho and Ezra Pound; seeing glosses on Japanese prints intermixed with translations of Horace and Catullus; (3) seeing little-known Renaissance voices translated and re-imagined in relation to each other; (4) seeing translations of Cavafy, (5) and Ritsos; (6-7) reading a dual biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald, (8) I find myself revelling in a level of education we could never have imagined and understanding how thin our education really was. We actually were expected to become shop assistants & car mechanics, bank tellers & kindy teachers, faithful mothers and fathers and Mass attenders, well-bearing & well-fleeced sheep. (Plasma physicist came later, and then by accident.)

So I'm a recognizer of superior quality, by and large, but not of all the multiple levels & layers of meaning, which Scarry and so many other critics are.

Have started the Scarry book. I've clearly misread a lot of the sonnets, missed some of the kink and fury and most of the meaning – but I did get some of it right, and now, at least, the chronology is settled. Shake published them 20 years after writing them, perhaps to cheer HC up because he was in prison. Oh, and the bit about Marlowe: Elizabeth I condemned homosexuality; the punishment was imprisonment or execution. (Scarry, p. 23). So "public shame" was the least of it. (Which makes Marlowe's situation all the more...interesting. What was the deal there?)

Did Kit Marlowe Guy Burgess it? – Yes and no.

Marlowe was smeared as an atheist & seditionist for political reasons. (9) When the Church and the State are combined in the same monarch, religious dissent becomes heresy becomes sedition becomes secessionist plot. His homosexuality was both real and a smear.

The unknown margin-writer of the county facility's copy of this book (plucked off a re-cataloging truck) – faded blue fountain-pen ink, fascinating hand, half artist, half academic – has seen through the layers of evidence and the contradictory first and last halves of the closing paragraphs of Nicholl's final argument. "Oh the English!" he writes, "They will never examine the Cecils."

The evidence Nicholl has unearthed and pieced together, and the point he makes and draws back from, is that Marlowe was very likely slated for disposal, if need be, by Robert Cecil. Marlowe's defence in court against false accusations of seditious poster-making and pamphleteering would have revealed his years of provocateuring, in an Elizabethan street-sleaze way, for, ultimately (up, up, up through the layers), that same Robert Cecil and the Queen’s Privy Council, whose chief business had always been managing the succession. (10)

Along the way Nicholl's book is a how-to of scams for and by Elizabethan grifters, who, once London was teeming and frothing with religious change and the nascent possibility of and lust for wealth, byproducts of its defence of itself against serial European rivals, enemies and powers, set to and invented most modern cons.


Part II
July-August 2017

Seventeen is a lot of sonnets.
There is a photo I saw on the intertubes and squirreled away at the time – saw it somewhere in The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, I think, in 2002, according to the file-date my computer gives it – of a painting of an unknown man who might be Shakespeare.

Slightly scruffy; retreating hairline; sweet smile; deep-sharp observant eyes, I've-got-your-number eyes. (11)

 
So why is someone who looks approximately like this writing these sonnets, and sending them to the young man if the traditional story isn't true?

Scarry thinks they were all known to each other, a circle of young people, young artists, actors, musicians.

There are some people so beautiful their arrival sends everyone into a tizz. If there were a circle of people which included Shake, if all these people knew each other, there might have been a consensus about this recently arrived young man, this beautiful and kind and intellectual and irresistible young man – and a sort of good-natured and semi-subliminal desire to be part of his extraordinary sweetness and beauty, to be included in the sunlight of his goodwill by giving him gifts. Recognition of your gift could make you a minor sun, for a moment.

A pretty penniless young man like Shakespeare, already in the theatre, in the speaking & writing biz, could send a sonnet. On some general theme, or the theme the communal joking with the young man took. "The world's fresh ornament" (sonnet 1) does suggest someone new to the scene, and strikingly beautiful.

The picture in my mind is strange. It's from the first story... an image of a man in a field, cartoonish castle in the background. The man has a quill pen and a modern writing-pad. This is Shakespeare, persuading the young man in the castle to marry.

But with the old story wrong the field and castle vanish. But the sonnets still continue in a vacuum. My mind supplies a drawing-room of sorts – or maybe a tavern – a small group of teasing bohemians and young aristocrats or the aristocratically-connected. Pleasantries, wit, non-specific. It seems slightly feasible that jokes and gifts and gossip and poems might all be exchanged here.

Shake's first 9 sonnets are full of almost abstract argument. Some parts are so compressed the syntax gives out –

Then were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was – [sonnet 5]

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for the world enjoys it – [sonnet 9]

– but mostly it does not. The arguments are beautifully made, but the first sonnets of the sequence aren’t engaged.

(Even so, there are 9 of them so far... Was Shake writing them that fast? Was that another part of the joke, if at this stage the whole thing were still a joke, a game, a pastime in and for the group?)

But there is a gradual change throughout this whole (what I think of as preliminary) sequence. In sonnet 10, Shake says:

Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

... for love of me. ?! This is a bit personal for a trope or joke even in a small and habitually meeting group. I'm not sure now that a group setting for these is plausible.

Sonnet 13, line 1, addresses the young man as "love": Oh that you were yourself, but love you are and line 13 says "dear my love." Something is happening; the distance between the speaker and the subject has lessened drastically. This is really beginning to sound like a private conversation, not a public one. It begins to cast doubt on whether any part of the sequence had ever been read or extemporized or conducted in the company of the group.

In Sonnet 15 Shake declares:
And, all in war with Time for love of you
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

There’s scarcely any distance between speaker and subject now. It is much easier to see this as a private matter of Shake sending poems to the young man privately.

But still – this is still a lot of poems. It's the vacuum around them from my first understanding of the old story that always... Made me afraid of them, because they were incomprehensible, difficult in themselves but also suspended in a contextual void – Michael Wood (2) says that after the opening sonnets Shakespeare then fell in love with the young man, possibly in his grief over the death of his son, Hamnet. The quill pen scribbling on the modern notepad a good furlong from the castle returned to my mind. I think the absurdity of the image meant that, unconsciously, I thought the explanation unlikely, but that, consciously, I didn't want to disrespect anyone's grief. And so, for me, the sonnets continued to swirl along in their difficulty and conceptual mistiness, another bit of Shakespeare I didn't dare advert to.

Sonnet 16 draws back a bit (a better war against Time, you having a son), but 17 says a son would prove Shake's descriptions no exaggeration, and that the young man would live twice, in his son and in Shake's verse.

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, as heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
and in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, "this poet lies -
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces."
So should my papers yellowed with their age
Be scorned like old men of less truth than tongue
And your true rights be termed a poet's rage
And stretchèd metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time
You should live twice - in it and in my rhyme.

This is the first time Shake says this.

It's almost like ownership, this new boldness, boast, decision, policy, procedure. The premise/promise affects two people, not one. This formulation of the position of the speaker with regard to the person spoken to, this new claiming of one by the other (What are you doing with my life in your poems? Even thinking of somehow putting my life in your poems?) would be presumptuous, suffocating, intolerable.

Unless the young man were amenable.

Unless the young man had also been speaking.

As Scarry has discovered, writing. Back. (12)

Seen as one man writing in privacy and isolation, even with the clear movement of the writer towards the subject, there's no situational sense in this many sonnets except as some kind of ... bizarre exercise? Fantasy? Delusion? Astonishing and pointless creation of air and glass? A young man, this extraordinary young man replying explains the seventeen, the eighteen, most of the many.

This may be one of his replies. If the English ever existed, it is lost. This is a literal transcription of the Latin, published in the Netherlands in 1591:

I send, Light, this narcissus to you by gift of a warm spring, and I send our poems joined to the narcissus. I do this so that in return for the book you may give back to me moistened lips, and in return for my flower you may give your flower to me. (12-13) 

(v)

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate

This old anthology-piece –

This strangeness out of nowhere on the page of the book I've covered in thick plastic because everyone covers their textbooks to sell to next year's class, with the ink of my red-biro'd name already blurred and spread and reduced to vivid pink in the plastic texture, and I'm sitting here, thousands of miles and hundreds of years away, spending my eyes trying to make my name sharp again while wondering how much the blurring matters – bored and uncomprehending because I can read the poem and it makes sense (but why does it signify?) – reading it with a sigh because this week is the week they've decided to teach poetry again –

This sonnet's full of praise, syntactically sturdy & forthright, the language rich rather than frilled, tender as well as rich; and Shake's verse has declared itself the young man's immortality even before we understand what Scarry has said: that all the letters of Henry Constable's name are contained in the last line, and that reading the line aloud does cause his name to be said by the reader, does cause the young man to live beyond death.

Translating the first two lines into modern English… leaves me shaken, imagining this being said.

Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
You are more lovely and more temperate.

More lovely. Lovely – the word accurate and intimate, speaking of the experience of another person; more lovely, the speaker like someone overcome, speaking close, at whisper distance, the reaction pulled straight out of him – Not lovelier, its consecutive unstressed syllables creating a fading blur of the reader’s attention, the apprehension of the loveliness. More lovely: the person spoken to being wholly seen.

The intimacy and gentleness and appreciation strike me, lightning, and I see the sepulchre that contains me.

And now I see the sequence. Sonnet 18, this old war-horse of a sonnet, this electric, witty, joyful, tender, this shattering declaration in language so utterly refreshed, is an aubade.

==

1. Scarry, Elaine, Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2016.
2. Wood, Michael, In Search of Shakespeare, Maya International Vision, Distributed by PBS Home Video: PBS DVD Video, 2003.
3. Merchant, Paul, Bread and Caviar, Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 2016.
4. Merchant, Paul, Some Business of Affinity, Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 2016.
5. Cavafy, Constantine, Poems 1904, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2016.
6. Ritsos, Yannis, Twelve Poems About Cavafy, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2010.
7. Ritsos, Yannis, Monochords, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2015.
8. Richardson, Robert D., Nearer the heart's desire: poets of the Rubaiyat: a dual biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald, New York, Bloomsbury, 2016.
9. Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning, the Murder of Christopher Marlowe, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1992.
10. See also Gregory, Philippa, The Last Tudor, New York, Touchstone, 2017.
11. See also https://news.canadianshakespeares.ca/2006/04/25/controversial-shakespeare-portrait-coming-to/
12. Scarry, pp. 243-244. The original of this poem may be the Latin quoted on p. 243; at St. John’s College Constable would have written in Latin as often as English. (The collection of fifteen of Constable’s poems in which this poem, Carmen xx, appears, was printed in the Netherlands in 1591; five poems were translated into Dutch, then into Latin.)

13. Light, this early narcissus bloom I send thee
     Our songs bound at its open bell and tips.
     In return give me thy moistened lips,
     My flower make thine. Give thine to me.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Yesterday, for reasons unknown to God or man, I wanted to look at the weather forecast. I was waiting for a phone call so I tapped the weather app on my phone.

When I got there, there were text boxes. Essentially: we want access to your location & other material on your phone/in your cloud storage. (This app had come with the phone, I’m pretty sure. Yes, it did. I’ve been using it occasionally for going on for two years.)
Read our privacy policy
I understand / Uninstall

The app said I could alter things later in my settings. (I’m not so late to the party as to believe anything I want to do will be in the settings.)

Standover tactics have always got my back up. I Uninstalled and the thing went away. Presumably.

This meant that I needed a new weather app. Looked online, and each one I was considering wanted access to my photographs in storage “beyond [my] device,” my location, or other collections / clutches & records of information on my phone. One of them, whose name is lost to infamy by my swift decision to move on to the next possibility – also wanted access to my text messages and browsing history.

By this time I was ready to scream: why do you want access to my photos, texts, contacts, phone messages, and browsing history? You’re telling me the weather! And I pay for your app by suffering your ads to occupy part of my screen!

Why do you want access to my location? I want weather information about a particular place. Where I am is not necessarily related to my search! GET OUT OF MY STUFF!

Long story short, though I did download one of these horrors I found out how to uninstall it. I’ll get my weather information somewhere else, thank you.

I PAID FOR THIS PHONE. And it wasn’t cheap.
I OWN IT. And it wasn’t cheap.

In the world of Amazon’s self-publishing, “unpublish” does not mean “delete,” even though we might want it to. On Facebook “delete” means “unpublish,” even though we press a button or link that specifically says: Delete. Amazon and Facebook both retain our files not matter what we, the alleged owners, might have wanted or even explicitly asked them to do with them.

Even though Amazon and Facebook have long worked & traded on the difference between ownership and control: I DO NOT AGREE THAT CONTROL TRUMPS OWNERSHIP.

I know every remaining app on my phone does much the same thing, and there’s somewhere between little and nothing I can do about it.

And so we come to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, New York, 2019).

The basic situation that Zuboff describes is this: there are two sets of activity on the internet for every single thing we do. The first, the one we are aware of, consists of the searches we make & the results we get, the pictures we put on Facebook or Instagram, the things we say on Twitter, and so on. These are the trails we are aware of, and this trail was the thing there was public concern about when website cookies were new. The concern with cookies was that our fondly imaged to be anonymous jaunts across the web could be tracked and we, money-having creatures, could be advertised to on the basis of our cyber-tracks, and persuaded to buy, or, at greater jeopardy, tracked for political or law-enforcement reasons.

However, for each of our overt and intended actions there is an unacknowledged second stream of data created simply because the net works the way it does. This data is pretty much the source of Google’s fortune: it is extremely granular, recording our behaviour in such detail that highly accurate predictions can be made about it. Selling these predictions to advertisers is what Google began doing very early on – it ceased not being evil about 2002. Selling these predictions to advertisers is Google’s core business.

Internet surveillance was ignored as a civil rights issue in the U.S. particularly because of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. At that moment preventing another attack became the new Department of Homeland Security's highest priority, and was made highest priority of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Before the Spaniards invaded Mexico they first laid claim to it. They did this by means of declarations, written in charters which were kept in chests on the ships to be conveyed back to the king. They were written in a language the Indians did not understand; they made the Indians subjects of the king, subject to the king’s punishments for disobedience. “Disobedience” covered everything from existing to resisting.

Those declarations removed the land and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, minerals and other contents, from inchoate social space into private space owned and ruled by a single identifiable entity. Those declarations were the written foundation/justification for the crimes of invasion and colonialism.

Before attacking villages, as sufficient notice, the invaders whispered these declarations into their cuffs.

Zuboff points out that Google and other corporations have laid claim to the second stream of data our internet activity creates, which originated in and was also part of common, inchoate social space. Like the land and people of the Americas.

(When a declaration is made about common space that was barely conceptualized before, it is named and defined and identified, and identified as now being under the rule of a particular and foreign and other entity. In the matter of "Netiquette," I've always wondered who declared, who had the right to declare, on behalf of everyone, and despite the labels on 16mm documentary film cans everywhere, that "all caps is shouting." I have shouted above. Oh, why not. The whole thing is to scream.)

Google and later others, such as Microsoft, and lately our friendly, corporate ISPs, were never forthcoming about the second stream/set of data that everyones’s internet activity generates. They have acted at all times to obscure its existence.

Zuboff maintains that this data, created by the users of the internet, should belong to the users. That is, it should belong to us, to be used as we see fit, not as large, secretive, profit-driven companies see fit. The fact that this stream of data is not being treated as belonging to the people who create it constitutes an unimaginably large, new kind of theft.

Zuboff sees ongoing research into more ways to use this data to manipulate users through apps for commercial gain, particularly at this scale, as a new form of colonialism. Oh, says the screen you're not supposed to watch while you're driving, you’ve been to this restaurant before. How about now, since you're driving past...

But these commercial applications of highly accurate behavioural predictions are just the beginning. The next obvious application is political, surveillance of all of us and our political activity via the COINTELPRO boxes in our pockets, the face recognition technology in CCTV cameras in public spaces interior and exterior, the fridges and personal digital assistants which listen to more than our commands, the smart TVs that watch us as we watch them. An Internet of Things constantly detecting and reporting... All the dystopias anyone’s ever nightmared about, everywhere, all the time.

Nowhere will be unmonitored. Sanctuary will cease to exist.

Industrial capitalism came to terms with labour and ultimately supported the workers it employed, Zuboff says; this was a social contract that was explicitly negotiated. (Though it did take bloody battles from the Luddites to the New Deal for labour to accomplish that.)

Surveillance capitalism has made no such agreement: the sheer speed of the tech firms in seizing this data leaves the deliberative processes of democracy far behind. If lawmakers don’t know what’s being done they cannot gather information about it, debate it, legislate.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a complex and lucid book, a formidable accomplishment. However, I do think its predictions for the future may rest on a fact not often alluded to in overviews like this: most of us have less and less money.

Google & its pards can poke us all they like, point us at any point of sale they like, but we have less and less money. They can advertise what they like using all the data since the Big Bang; but without money, we just ain’t buyin’. Google, etc., are getting so rich, determined as they are to force us back into the dust from which we came, I can see them collapsing for lack of users/used to throw to their actual customers, the vendors who pay for super-reliable predictive sales data.

And so it seems to me that our general financial impoverishment will make political surveillance and ever-nastier law enforcement the enduring purposes of the net. (And Google and FB will join law enforcement to keep themselves relevant and solvent.)

A note on author photos:

Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a formidable intellect, complex, comprehensive, and lucid:

While I was reading this I did what I always do when I’m greatly taken with a book: I gaze at the author photo wondering where and how, under the skin, between muscle and bone, the writer stores the magic that’s in the writing.

Zuboff’s both is and is not a very female photo. There are 4 circles close to its centre: the lenses in her glasses & the hoops of her earrings, a small, cheerful, symmetrical path through the picture, echoed by the curls at the end of her hair and the round pendant below her neckline. There are counter-currents creating tension, too: short hair brushed to her right but long hair falling over her left shoulder; her straight gaze.

And yet it’s a puzzling photo. Two of the fingers of her right hand are bent. I finally realized my question actually was: why is the author’s right hand in this photo at all?

Her gaze is direct. Without her hand the photo is still interesting: her hand has not been placed on her right cheek quest to enliven an otherwise boringly symmetrical composition. Without her hand cradling her right cheek, we are left with Zuboff’s very direct gaze and her perfectly symmetrical face and eyes. Perfectly matching eyes are unusual and arresting in themselves.

In Anglo culture, at least, a direct and unwavering gaze is a challenge. It’s “staring,” it’s “rude,” particularly if it’s coming from a woman.

Placed along her cheek, cradling or supporting her cheek, Zuboff’s hand is a much larger element in the image than her eyes and their remarkable gaze. The angle between her hand and her wrist is awkward and sharp; it directs the viewer’s eyes to her neck and throat, vulnerable areas, showing age, indicating fragility and mortality. Zuboff’s right hand de-emphasizes her gaze. Its positioning directs the portrait into the semantic area of I'm just a girl, works to lessen or remove any sense of challenge the reader might feel in the face of either her eyes or intellect.

And yet it also works against its intended distraction.

By stretching the skin on her cheek, her hand stretches her smile. The left side of Zuboff’s mouth seems to be smiling (the upturned end of her lips), but the right side does not. The smile has become a grimace. Her lips can still be read as smiling if the viewer isn’t paying much attention. That the positioning of her hand may not have been the original concept of the portrait seems indicated by her two bent fingers. They suggest that she isn’t committed to this placement, isn’t “authorizing” it, isn’t anxious to smooth over the subversion of the image its inclusion has led to.

A direct and close-up gaze is generally avoided in women’s author pix. After a short and informal survey of author pix on a local literary website, this is the range of poses I find:

Medium shots:
the writer’s body faces the camera/viewer but her gaze does not
the writer’s gaze is directed towards the camera/viewer but her body is not

Close-ups:
the writer’s face is turned towards the camera/viewer but her gaze is directed above the camera/viewer
the writer’s face looks upward to the camera/viewer
the writer’s body and face both fully face the camera/viewer, but her head is tilted

There are lots of smiles.

By not aligning the writers’ faces/gazes with their bodies, all these poses lessen authorial assertion, conviction, or challenge.

These conventions are so enduring and so well understood they are gleefully parodied in this portrait:

But, delightful as it is, this photo was taken a long time ago.

If parody is the best or all we can do in the face of these imperatives / conventions / imperatives, then we're already in a panopticon beyond the dreams of glass, a digital debtors' Bedlam and prison which no-frill phones won't be enough to dismantle.

The Wheel of Fortune

We were launching Golems Waiting Redux at Publication Studio in 2011. Friends came, bringing an old friend who has bicycled all over the world. This friend mentioned that he worked near the Houses of Parliament in London; the Millennium Wheel is been built where he used to park his bicycle.

I don’t know why this remark struck me so forcefully, even though quietly, that it stayed with me ever since, but it did, and it has. I’ve looked at photos of the wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, understood at a gut level that the location of the Wheel was the announcement of a new world, a new regime, an insult to old physical and organizational structures; its sheer size a trumping, trouncing shout that former gravities have been overthrown.

But despite all this I couldn’t quite grasp why it was a giant Ferris wheel that said so.

The thought would nag at me from time to time, or rather, my lack of understanding would.

Sometime late in 2017 the faithful dinner companion and I were watchingAgnes Varda's Faces places – blu-ray from our local county facility – and, as always, disappointed that the dream has ended, needing to be less brutally ejected into the word we live in, we watched the bonus material.

There was a group photo of all the European directors present at that year’s Cannes. We watched it being set up, and then captured by a thousand points of light / flash-assisted, wild-game long-lenses.

At that moment something very strange happened to me.

The faithful and I, watching bonus material all our lives, have always felt an unspoken fellowship with the directors, cinematographers and other creators of the flick. Being writers we always felt that we were engaged in the same activity: creating something that did not exist before, seeing it, hammering like Hephaestus until the words fitted like gold to airy thinness beat. Feeling that lighting, blocking, acting, directing are cognate activities, talking about the deleted scenes - should have been included, trimmed or deleted altogether - looking at this nuance, that implication, marvelling, examining, talking shop.

But this photo at the 2017 Cannes was different. The day was grey and the colouring was odd, a kind of grey sepia. The people standing on the stage there looked alien to me, when they never would have before. The thought crossed my mind: these are the people in charge of what we see. They seemed to belong to a completely different sphere or species, to have stepped in from another universe.

The Wheel by Parliament is the ancient & mediaeval Wheel of Fortune. That was an undercurrent of my original take on it. But I didn't understand its sudden, loud, declarative appearance, or its shout of victory.

Its appearance now is relevant because of precisely this: the vast gap between those who have wealth / power / cultural capital / achievement / fame, and the rest of us.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Moving from our sofa into the photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival would create such a radical transformation of our income, housing, healthcare, clothing, diet, location, mobility, choices and liberties that it is literally unimaginable.

So radical and swift and complete… It would feel as though it could be explained only by the intervention of Fortuna (or that bastard derivation, Destiny), whose deeds have long been represented by the Wheel.

And lest we forget… The Wheel rotates through the whole 360 – losing a job / healthcare / housing, becoming ill and homeless would be such a radical transformation downwards as to be the kind of horror in prospect that keeps you working, head down, lips buttoned, silent, for years or decades. This part’s not inconceivable or unimaginable at all. It’s a street away, a block away, a supervisor away.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Our Signature Activity

Some books of contemporary essay leave me muttering, “I’m not your therapist.”

Porn is essentially voyeurism. Surveillance – all those drone-shots in all those military & espionage movies, security cameras, speed cameras – is essentially voyeurism. When information is currency, voyeurism becomes the culture's signature attitude & activity. Memoir becomes voyeurism…