‘Coacervavi omne quod inveni’. ‘I have made a heap of all I have found’.
This is from the preface to the Historia Brittonum, once ascribed to one ‘Nennius’, an attribution now disputed. [Footnote: this, it may be said in passing, is an example of an entirely academic, acculturated dispute of no importance whatsoever. It has not been a vital element in anyone’s life – their health, their spirituality, their deep joy or grief – for a thousand years, since ‘Nennius’ himself in fact. Lots of studies and disputes are like that, once you start looking. Thousands of lives and millions of pounds are spent trying to make discoveries and assertions about things of no importance whatsoever to anyone at all. If substantiated, the Nine Realisations rather thrillingly suggest that there are, after all, important things to think about instead.] That I especially noted this quotation many years ago when I was a history student suggests that even then I had problems with creative resolution, because this is a joker to be played by any writer alarmed by a superfluity of content seeking a form, and honest enough to admit it. David Jones deftly deployed it as the opening of his Anathemata – it perfectly suited both his subject and his method.
Any work like this composed in part of borrowed fragments will look knobbly and lack ‘finish’. The different voices preclude a smooth unity. The Waste Land makes a virtue of this. Eliot leaves all the loose ends sticking out, and then intones ‘Shantih shantih shantih’. All shall be well. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine – resolution is not for this life. The priest consumes all the leftover bread and wine – this is the Body and Blood of Christ and must not be discarded.
These fragments I have shored against my ruin
Which is the ultimate sanctification of the Nennian process. Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines are less sacerdotal examples.
These are some of my favourite books. I admire their gutsy determination to be inclusive. Such works leave us something to do, not because they are too short of ideas themselves (like a lazy art student writing on a little card next to his half-baked exhibit ‘I want the viewer to bring their own meaning to the piece’) but because the ideas are too prolific and multifarious for one artist, vainly trying to encase them all in one form without damaging or distorting them, like shrink-wrapping Jack’s beanstalk. Herding cats into a pint-pot.
One Spring, re-reading Dickens, Virginia Woolf jotted in her diary: ‘Rather monotonous, yet so abundant, so creative: yes; but not highly creative; not suggestive. Everything laid on the table. Nothing to engender in solitude. That’s why it’s so rapid and attractive: nothing to make one put down the book and think.’ [Footnote: for her, the blurb-writer’s staple ‘unputdownable’ is clearly no commendation.] It is, of course, thrilling to read a work by an author who has complete mastery of his material but, some exceptional examples aside, there is often a lingering sense that he may have limited that material, exploring only a narrow range of possibilities, namely those he knows will best suit his talents. Dickens has such a capacious sympathy that he can pluck wonderful novels out of his head, and never feels the need to venture further afield. Melville, by contrast, sought to tell Leviathan and even if, to borrow my granny’s phrase, his eyes were bigger than his tummy, he produced an aptly gargantuan book – the great Nennian novel, Moby-Dick.
An artist’s admission of material beyond his reach endears him to us. He is faithfully, if vainly, trying to expand himself to the size of the work, rather than cutting it down until it is handily portable. It entreats us to help take the work forward, beyond the artist’s limited reach. In life completeness is death. Incompleteness leaves room for change, for growth, for hope, for more life. There is a place for icons – the high road to the transcendent – whose radiance engenders (‘the last perfection to supervene upon a thing is its becoming the cause of other things,’ as Aquinas says), but a place too for these unfinished, sometimes unfinishable, works which beseech our humanity and face us with the physical world again – the low, rocky, pot-holed road which may perhaps take us to the same destination if we saunter along it attentively and appreciatively, neither nodding off by the roadside nor striding past the signposts with headphones blaring.
So, Coacervabo omne quod inveni. I will make a heap of all I have found.
Some months ago, on a train to London, trying to work out what to do with all I had found, I wrote in my notebook, ‘I don’t want to write a bloody novel, I want to write . . .’ (and the sentence was left as blank as I was until we pulled past a stately oak alone in a field in Oxfordshire) ‘. . . a tree’.
And yet, we all ramify and radicate. Our cousin trees merely do so more overtly and explicitly than we. A tree absorbs the world around it – the air, the light, the water, the minerals. It grows by inclusion, transmutation and division, making itself a heap of what it finds.
And so do we. Each of us takes our nutrition, builds our body, from the universe. We may, if we are in a chirpy mood, borrow post-Impressionist theory and say, I am the universe under the form of me. (That’s a good reason to take ourselves seriously.) So are we all. (That’s a good reason to take everything seriously, and ourselves, perhaps, not too seriously.)
The arts follow the same pattern. The architect Christopher Alexander writes: ‘each individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process of addition in which pre-formed parts are combined to create a whole, but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes its parts, and actually gives birth to them by splitting.’ A baby starts, from the moment of its conception, as a whole; likewise plants are whole in the seed. We cannot create life any more than we can create space; we grow by differentiation – by division of cells within the body, by splitting off from the parent body. [Footnote: a female embryo will already have all its eggs in place – in other words, a woman pregnant with her daughter has half of her grandchild already present in her womb. This fact, doubtless common knowledge among women, is utterly astonishing to me.]
And my mind as I write and yours as you read behave in the same way. As space is differentiated in architecture and garden design, experience and imagined experience are differentiated here. I write ‘leaping’, which differentiates the image from others in our minds; I write ‘black’, I write ‘unicorn’ and out of the field of billions of possible memory-elements and imaginings, a particular image emerges in our minds – your image in your mind, depending on who you are; mine in me. The image must already be latent in our minds to be comprehended by us. It is summoned by the words but not created by them.
And if everything unfolds, does that imply that everything that has ever lived was latent in that first cell which miraculously sparked into life billions of years ago? – that cell from which we are not merely ‘descended’ but ‘differentiated’. We are ramifications late in time; most of the abilities latent in that first cell have been refined away – we cannot fly, breathe underwater, withstand extremes of cold and heat. We have instead realized the unique possibility of becoming ourselves. But who knows what dormant capacities that may yet include?
So perhaps a book that attempts to consider life should mirror it in form as well as content, developing organically with a loose, discursive, ramifying growth. (After all, Richard Fortey suggests that ‘a lack of crisp definition is somehow a proof of metabolism in action, life blurring the edges.’) Less a matter of writing about the subject, than of remaking it in words. Like a tree it would be limited by its essential nature – a sycamore spreads and ramifies but it knows what it is, and attempts neither oakness nor elmness. It would have no pre-determined size; it would just keep growing and growing and growing until it became diseased and died.
But that would not be the end of it either. It is a misconception to suppose that a tree grows, and continues to grow (Success! smileyface) until it declines and dies (Disaster! – gloomyface). All the stages are a continuum – the ‘decline’, even the rot and decomposition and the dispersal of its constituent elements in the guts of worms and woodlice, are an equal part of the process with the burgeoning. Success and failure are human, cultural notions. A tree doesn’t cease to ramify when it dies and rots. All that happens is that eventually humans stop calling it a tree. [Footnote: and is this because it ceases to be a tree? Is a tree just a collection of atoms or is it really a tree with its own haecceity? and if so at what point does that haecceity cease to exist? when it ceases to metabolise? or, if a dead tree is still a tree, when its last atoms are dispersed? or never? I have no idea and suspect that any answer we might give would be a piece of logic-chopping showing off our intellectual muscle rather than a solid wooden truth.
The picture above is part of a five thousand year-old submerged forest exposed at low tide on the sands at Borth. ‘There is no such thing as a dead bird,’ says W. H. Hudson. ‘The life is the bird.’ But is this, though dead, a tree?
A footnote about footnotes. This book is riddled with footnotes. Usually footnotes are badges of tedious academicism. This is different. Here they are twigs. They are of equal importance (or unimportance) with the main text. Where an argument has ramified, like the bough of a tree, in two directions, I follow the ‘leader’, which is likely to ramify further, in the main text, and place the twig in a footnote, simply to avoid clogging the pages with confusing digressions (and I have, after all, left them in the body of the text rather than at the foot). The main text can be read coherently without them, but ideally they will offer some enrichment, if you bother with them. Digressions, speculations, acknowledgements of other possibilities, anekantavada and neverthelesses, are importantly unassertive. Trees are unassertive – they are too busy being themselves to bother boasting about it. By contrast, telegraph-poles are very assertive but, in spite of all the messages floating round their heads, telegraph-poles know nothing. Perhaps metaphors can be extended too far. I think I will need to keep my loppers handy.]
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