THE BEHELD
by Jim Murdoch
(for B.)
She took several stones
from the mosaic
and gave them to me.
“But now they are meaningless,”
I said.
“No,” she smiled,
“their meaning has changed.
“Why do you look through
and not at?”
And she drew a figure eight
and turned it on its side
and asked me if I could see
forever.
[From Reader Please Supply Meaning]
* * *
Jim Murdoch, a Scottish writer living just outside Glasgow, claims to be the character Beckett never got around to writing. His poetry appeared regularly in small press magazines during the seventies and eighties. In the nineties he turned to prose-writing and has since completed four novels, two plays, and a collection of short stories. In his blog, The Truth About Lies, he discusses the art and science of writing, his own and that of other authors (including my own), and muses at length about his lifelong fascination with what he calls “the perversity of language.” Among the many things I love about Murdoch’s poetry is its aphoristic directness: one can enjoy it without having gone to grad school or spent time kissing the feet of some dead French or Russian textual theorist. What a relief!
Myself, I have to be careful about tinkering a pure poem into purée. But that’s because I don’t often write prose fiction, and my other prose is ad hoc stuff….
I dislike the Romantic notion of a muse but I do get where Borges is coming from. After that three years of writing nothing I literally sat down to write an anything, a something-that-wasn’t-a-poem just to feel what it was like to make up sentences. What I ended up producing were two novels back to back. The poetry returned shortly thereafter but it was a while before I became my old self. I’ve been writing poetry for forty years so you give me a prompt and I’ll write you a poem but I can pretty much guarantee that it won’t be my best work. I’ve long accepted that a writer—at least this writer—is comprised of two parts, the ideas guy and the guy to types up his stuff. The ideas guy can be a bit sloppy and so the other guy, like any half-decent secretary, does more than transcribe; he tidies up the material. Although I’ve written stories and novels when I look in the mirror I see a poet. I can live with calling myself a writer but it’s the poetry that sustains me. I think of my poetry as pure. I work over the prose mercilessly but the poetry never needs it. I’ll tweak a word or two here and work out the line breaks but that’s about it. Problem with the ideas guy is he doesn’t like to repeat himself and the older I get the less he’s got left to say. I never know when a poem’s coming. It’s like what I wrote in ‘The Poetry of Regrets’:
Poems turn up out of the blue these days
like family
[…]
but you don’t turn family away. Not ever.
The Muse is maybe a projection, or maybe not. I was watching a YouTube interview with Borges in which he recounted the injury that almost killed him when he was a librarian and that made it so difficult for him to write. In fact, he thought he’d have to give up writing–but he wanted to test it. He remarks that he thought of trying to write a new poem, but poetry doesn’t come from us (he says), so it wouldn’t be a valid test. Instead, he wrote his first short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote.” Luckily, his Muse started visiting him again after a time, as did yours!
I’m always fascinated by the poems people choose. I’ll send half a dozen into some magazine and it’ll be the one I stuck in to make up the numbers they’ll pick. But that’s the great thing about it because it makes me look at a poem with fresh eyes: Why that one? And, of course, you had nearly a hundred to pick from. So why this one? It’s a rhetorical question. I’m not expecting a serious answer—you probably couldn’t answer it—but I can’t say I’m displeased with your choice. I was quite prolific about the time I wrote this piece. B. was the closest thing to a muse I’ve ever had and I think more poems were written for her than anyone else including my wives. After she moved away I fell into a slump and didn’t write a thing for three years.