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As its title suggests,
the underlying metaphor in this collection is water. In the first of the five
sequences making up the book, 'Aquatics Of', water is the primal source, is
flux. It is also the mind as flux, the mind that can see without knowing,
that can only name but not explain. It is the inadequacy of language. The
first of the ten sections states the case:
The mind
trips over
the eye's
event
Watching breathes
Brain coral
spins on its names
And this is further elaborated with quotes from Aristotle and Husserl, among
others, into an exploration - using language - of language's inability to
explain phenomena, certainly not in their entirety ("bits of
intelligence float"), merely rendering phenomena not
Fixed, nor
answered,
but seen,
averted
and using words, which are 'hallucinogenic errors' to name, since
each of us
before, each
after
nouns
lodging in
a slot in the
coral
relations
without verb
Do things have names only because we are here to name them?
as in,
imagine a planet
without us
We have the power to name and unname, even though our means for doing so are
so unstable.
The second sequence, 'Cretan Monologues', comprises ten prose poems that
resemble, at first glance, holiday postcards. The sentences leap from
impression to impression, idea to idea, often by association or disjunction
rather than any narrative thread, and conscious thought has become a burden:
Thinking is
heavy around. More in everything than it used to be.
The language is often disjointed, almost surrealistic:
Can we
imagine your relief when the sky finally did get re-papered?
This Crete is a place of coasts and water and horizons, where the horizon is
important because 'people need to believe in a horizon, unexplored waters'
and yet where 'the horizon fades
forever and forever when we move.'
At the same time, this Crete is an island where mythology is part of daily
life, sometimes surprisingly so:
I met
Cerberus unexpectedly this morning.
Yet that same mythology is really born of our own expectations:
... but then
what do we ever expect but our own reflection, with slight deviations,
improvements,
aversions.
The sea as primal source of mythology is tapped again in the third sequence,
'mˇduse', for which, as Riggs says in her Acknowledgements, she has assembled
a collage of lines which "overlap with, and alter, lines found in my
notebooks, encountered first" in a wide and eclectic range of writers
from Charles Darwin to Michel Foucault, George Eliot to George Oppen, and
many others. Here,
an
inanimate laugh
tickles
the
seabed:
corals and
jellies
click round
what is trips
anthropo-
morphic
names, for a
lost mind
Recalling the "moon jelly" in 'Aquatics Of', this "lost
mind" is at the same time medusa, the jellyfish, and Medusa, the
(much-maligned) gorgon of myth, here just 'M'. Like the "bits of
intelligence" in the previous sequence, she pervades the sea, an
amorphous presence, like the sea without structure or end. But these names also
seem inanimate:
whether they
were stones or alive was hard to know
and they are elusive:
eyes drift
out there
as if separate
from names
Again, as in 'Aquatics Of', there is the discrepancy between seeing and
knowing/naming, but this time involving the mirror-imaging of being and
seeing:
as if emotion was
names unnamed
as if emotion
saw
Emotion is thus primal, too, like mind, like M, and resists experience:
looking she
experiences the refusal of experience
but without experience words are devoid of a meaning to attach to (as in
Hofmannsthal's 'Chandos Letter' or Rilke's 'First Elegy'):
she only knew
this is red without knowing what the word meant
But words can be made to mean:
but M is
present
petrifies the
out-there
if she looks
first,
the words
eye-to eye
words for what won't
It is only the gorgon's gaze that gives language the chance to become stable
enough, petrified, to be able to mean at all. The eroticism of Medusa and of
Perseus' encounter with her, which is also the engagement with language, is
alluded to:
disengaged
slant corals
to flower wet
dreams
reptiles, seaweeds, crabs
sticky sex
And, although 'each snake is a sentence',
to swim
is to attempt writing a line in a medium that doesn't recognize lines
That this is writing about the process of writing and its inherent near
impossibility is overt:
to hyphenate
error -
writing
but a
dangling
line
held to a
thread
But even M cannot hold words to a single meaning for long and so (echoing 'a
life sentence sways and curls' from 'Aquatics Of'),
each name for
a thing seems intent to curl from its shelled meaning
Language, being fluid and plural, is unable to mean unambiguously and words
are coloured by their previous use by others, as Riggs shows here by
refracting language through the prism of a range of other writers. To this
extent, writing cannot be original; yet it is the job of poetry to rename, to
recreate the precalcified state of coral, to cleanse language.
Auden observed that poetry makes nothing happen. Sartre, in 'The
Responsibility of the Writer', as quoted by Riggs
in the epigraph to the next sequence, 'Responsibilities of the Champagne
Flutes' goes further by pointing out that by naming a glass a glass, the
writer does not make the glass move or transform it, so that, 'if truly to
speak is not to change things, the writer can speak in utter irresponsibility.'
The writer is thus freed to explore the nature of the very medium of language
itself and its fluidity, its relation - or of lack of relation - to
"reality". 'Responsibilities of the Champagne Flutes' is a sequence
of prose poems, again, like 'Cretan Monologues', employing leaps and
dissociations such as 'a kerosene lip, and three whales in a plastic bag', or
'Nearly neon outline of a chin' or 'The glass is pregnant.' Language, like
water, is a medium in which things, we and our relationships, can grow; and
perhaps promoting rather than hindering that growth, by freeing language from
the depredations of the propaganda of political and economic interests, is
the real responsibility of the writer.
The final sequence, 'Pigments' was written for an art book collaboration with
the French painter, Anne Slacik, and links in with Riggs' own work as a
visual artist - her installation (in Paris, where she lives), 'Underwritten
- Chambre d'illisibilitˇ' explores language
plurality. 'Pigments', too, explores this plurality by implicitly associating
words, with their multiple resonances, as the fundament of language:
Where were
the words going, and worse, would one have to follow? Characters
inscribed on
the cloaks may not follow the folds.
with pigments as the fundament of painting:
Warning: a
letter, or inscription,
an inability
to blue
with all the multiple emotional resonances and mixes of colour, and beyond
painting, skin pigments, the plurality of humanity.
The frames of reference are wide, including geopolitical concerns such as
Kosovo, Afghanistan and Rwanda, and culture, high, low and pop:
How to explain the
difference
between Beckett and
Cage? Madonna
and B.
Spears?
Even though words are second-hand and writing therefore cannot be original,
the way of putting them together can, indeed, be original, and Sarah Riggs
has achieved this. An impressive collection.
© Catherine Hales 2008
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