Bill Herbert Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Whenever I’m in Crete, I keep a blue τετράδιο or child’s jotter, with a clear panel attached to the front, into which the child can slip a small card with their όνομα (name), τάξη (class), and μάθημα (lesson). Into this I usually place a small image.
This year it’s a profile of Magritte, which I drew and cut out to stick down on a bookmark I’d made, on which I’d redrawn his painting ‘Clairvoyance’, in which the artist looks at an egg, but paints a bird in flight. My replica replaced the bird with, of course, a cartoon chicken, but the head wasn’t very good. So I redrew it ‘better’, but never got round to sticking it down, meaning Magritte’s head has tumbled around my Cretan papers for several years.
Magritte painted lots of replicas or slight variations of works like ‘The Treachery of Images’, even translating his word paintings into English for the American market. He happily painted not very convincing forgeries of famous artists to sell to the gullible. But he was also interested in what a replica was in the same way he was interested in the relation between word and image, or between the image a person projected, be that petit bourgeois or surrealist pope, and their actual self, assuming they had one.
The non-sequiturs of the word paintings in particular set us puzzles we can neither avoid, solve, nor entirely ignore. For instance, ‘La clef des songes’ begins its grid of four images with an image of a briefcase captioned ‘Le ciel’, then, after two more disconnections, the fourth image, of a sponge, is labeled ‘L’éponge’. This is surreal in the way John Ashbery is - something appears to be consistent at the same time as engaging with it seems to establish that it is not. Ashbery keeps approaching narrative or autobiographical sense without either quite believing in it or ever arriving. This is too nearly sensible to be nonsense, meaning we could instead place it in a category called ‘nearsense’:
That there is so much to tell now, really now -
to tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there.
Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing.
Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him.
Nearsense is of course the original domain of poets from Lear and Carroll to the psychedelic jumblies like Syd Barrett or Don Van Vliet: it is their proximity to sense which draws us to them, not their separation from it. When Lear declares ‘…awful darkness and silence reign/Over the great Gromboolian plain…’ or Barrett admits to being ‘lost in the wood’ but won’t or can’t decide, given it’s ‘so quiet there’, whether this is good or bad, we are aware these are allegorical territories of deep unhappiness if not dissociation.
Similarly, when Carroll’s White Knight distinguishes his song (A-sitting on a gate) from what the song is called (Ways and Means), the name of the song (The Aged Aged Man), and what the name of the song is called (Haddock’s Eyes), we can tell that this is both an intelligible set of distinctions and an indication of his lostness.
When Lear visited Crete in 1864, as well as conventional landscapes he could work up later into sellable oils, he was also looking for those correlations between exterior and interior landscapes that might add to his never-completed project of images embodying certain lines by Tennyson. These, like ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, moved him so profoundly he set many of them to music. One of my favourites of his Cretan works is a quick watercolour of the moment he saw Mount Ida, birthplace of Zeus (which I know as Psiloritis), from a small town near here he calls Phre (which I call Fres, or, in my interior tetradio, ‘Phrase’). Label layers over image over intent.
There is an interesting contradiction between classical descriptions such as Pliny’s of the Cretan labyrinth as a maze-like space, in which a monster can be trapped and his victims lost, and the visual depictions of the same structure on ancient coins. These are invariably unicursal, meaning that you can walk straight in and straight back out again. Either people then were easily disoriented, or the derangement he describes was symbolic: in the space of the labyrinth/wood/chessboard we can think about rules, puzzles, names, differently.
While writing this I was looking at images by the great surrealist photographer Lee Miller, and one, of Nusch Éluard sitting in Roland Penrose’s splendid automobile, caught my eye. Only her head is visible above the streamlined metal, demonstrating, as the caption by Mee-Lai Stone states, ‘the surrealist trope of the head disconnected from the body’. The surreality of this perhaps derives from the Revolution, and that strange final moment of consciousness Madame La Guillotine appears to grant, in which the severed head knows that it is a severed head.
I think that is the moment Magritte seeks and Miller so frequently achieves: where the viewer feels as though they’ve been decapitated, not physically but metaphysically, that everything which made sense a moment ago, and will hopefully make sense in another moment, right here, at this point in the perfectly intelligible labyrinth, has taken them beyond themselves. As Beefheart puts it, in ‘Hey Garland I Dig Your Tweed Coat’, ‘out looked Panatella, naked and not ashamed, without no clothes.’
I think that’s the view I hope for as I trudge from line to line, in a notebook with Magritte’s head in an envelope on the front. It’s like Lear’s glimpse of Mount Ida, a point somewhere about 13 kilometres from where I sit, without much expectation of finding my way to the precise site. But (unless of course he made it up) I know it’s there.
—Bill Herbert, 2024
The Plaintive Door-handle
Once we have all been locked in the seminar room
the limitless poetry reading can begin. Almost
at once the fascinating introductory remarks,
in which every nuance of this two line poem is
beaten senseless by the cudgel of contextual reminiscence,
are interrupted by a slight turning of the door-handle.
There is a pause as when you are sitting on the toilet
on a speeding train and someone tries the handle
who either cannot read the word ‘Engaged’
or is too engaged by their own restive bowels
to bother. Then the door-handle is tried again.
We watch it jiggle a little from inside the room
as though we were dead. Who could possibly desire
to come in here, what with all the poetry? Perhaps
the bat of which the poet was speaking at such length
earlier. The bat, whose wing is like a long hand
in a leather tea towel, but not enough
like a hand to grip the door-handle properly.
Perhaps it is the candle that the poet referred to,
lit for their father in a basilica in this strange new city,
as though to startle his spirit with their unlikely where-
abouts. The candle drips beeswax on the parquet
outside as it leans toward the handle. Its flame leaves
a greasy smut on the ceiling like a dark moon.
Perhaps it is the door which wants to come in
and is plaintively rattling its own handle
like a man who can waggle his ears, and so must.
Since one side of the door is already with us,
like a flap cut in the skin of the room,
we will have to discuss this. We realise
none of us has much idea what the other side
of the door looks like, as though it were
the far side of the Moon, only flatter. Perhaps
the other side of the door intends to moon us?
The occasional slight turning of the handle does look like
a lunar module attempting and failing to take off.
We decide to ignore the door-handle, and turn
to the reading which appears, thankfully,
to be over. The poet is being asked if they’ve an image
which stands for the world their work seeks
to create. They clearly do not. The word ‘No’
reluctantly steps off their lips and levitates
in the stuffy air. The door-handle turns one last time,
and it is as though it were an ignition key -
the word ‘No’ suddenly expands, shattering
all the windows and escaping over the city
dropping little ‘No’ bombs from its massive ‘O’
which blow open bloody doors in the people’s hearts.
Addressing the crowds from his impressive balcony
the dictator is suddenly aware the game is up.
*
Forky Donkey in Hell
This is Forky Donkey. [Insert illustration.]
Forky Donkey is in Hell. [Insert illustration.]
Hell is a place where almost everything always happens.
Much of it happens to Forky Donkey. [Insert illustration.]
Forky Donkey has a fork sticking out of his forehead.
[Insert illustration of a fork.] It is a real fork,
but much bigger than a real fork should be.
[Insert illustration of a fork, but bigger.]
Why does Forky Donkey have a fork sticking out
of his forehead? Forky Donkey doesn’t know.
Even the devil assigned to help Forky Donkey
experience almost everything all the time
doesn’t know. The devil assigned to Forky Donkey
is called Tulofooz. [Insert illustration.]
He she or it also has a fork. It is a long allegorical
toasting fork [insert illustration of allegorical fork]
given to he she or it to poke Forky Donkey with
by the Devil. Or rather the Devil’s Quartermaster
[insert illustration], as the Devil is very busy
trying to organise the pandaemonium so that
it happens to almost everybody most of the time.
This is a big job, as pandaemonium is fundamentally
problematic to organise. [Insert illustration.]
Now we had better pause. That’s the third big word,
and we must pause at every third big word
if things are to proceed in an orderly fashion.
That’s what Forky Donkey would have wanted,
had we been able to ask him. [Insert illustration.]
Forky Donkey started out wanting to understand
these things himself, but now he would be content
if anyone at all understood them. Note we do not say
if he knew that anyone at all understood them.
[Insert illustration.] Now for the big words.These were
problematic, allegorical, and quartermaster.
Possibly there were four, if we were to include
fundamentally. It depends what you think of as big.
The Inhabitants of the Garden Have Questions
Who has extracted the giants’ organs and
upended them here, given that they more close
ly resemble the inner parts of crustacean claws
rendered pink by boiling in some adjacent
geothermic pool, and are clammy to clamber on
or to dwell for a day or two within, feeling
their lobes, tubules, and spiracles against
this universal nudity of our thighs and bellies,
before we return to the cityless plains, there
to gather the outsize strawberries and cherries
as if we were indeed outside? If it is not,
as you suppose, that we forget we are dead,
but rather that we do not recall if we were alive,
then what is the ledger of griefs and agonies
which your troubled features record, compared
to Paradise, if that is indeed where we are?
We ask it of the crystalline bubbles or eyeballs
to which we retire in the absence of evening
to experience the absence of dream. We ask it
of the chimeric herds, driven by their incompatible
sinews to tramp circles in the wincing grasses.
We ask it of the devils, who seem as lost here
as us, and loll in the same exasperated grasses,
as though their flight or indeed their fall
has been cancelled, but their insurance will cover
all of this forever. We ask it of you and for you.
We ask it of the oneiric fold, like a third eyelid
or nictitating membrane, beloved of monster-
makers, which has been drawn across either
the language or our understanding, so that closure
itself or just the hour of opening of the book of hours
is now uncertain. Come back whenever it is Friday.
The Dog with Hands
‘Do you know the Battersea Dog’s Home?’
‘I never knew it had been away.’
(Chic Murray)
The dog with hands had to protect them
while out running with the pack and so ~
its gestures became cryptic in a way
the other dogs did not care to follow.
The dog with hands would open and shut them
like jaws in the moonlight as though they took
hold of something that it could not smell -
their shadows resembled its parents.
Whose fingerwhorls were these and why
were they in the world? asked the dog
with hands but not aloud - it didn’t want
to get in any more trouble with the pack.
The dog with hands gnawed the thumbs
half off but could not make sense of them,
so fashioned itself a cone and wore it
to stop the gnawing. ‘What’s it like wearing that?’
asked the shadows. ‘It’s rough,’ it whispered.
The Moon shone down on the palms
as though in receipt of high praise. At least
the smell of the Moon was the same.
What’ll I say, it asked itself, when I go home
at last to the Master? Will he have paws where
his hands should be, or will he have the face
of some other creature altogether?
The Idiot
God was watching the idiot get on with his life.
He kept himself busy and was fairly competent.
His associates didn’t let him get in their way too much
and occasionally he was almost helpful.
‘No, no, no,’ said God: ‘you’re doing this all wrong.
What you must do is take up a skill you have no
aptitude for at all, and pursue it clumsily, shabbily,
using the most primitive and inappropriate implements.’
So the idiot put together a few devices of his own
which usually broke after a couple of uses,
or produced quite other effects from those
he intended, which he was at a loss to control.
‘You see?’ said God: ‘Now you’re getting somewhere!’
Even the most sympathetic of his acquaintances edged
away, even those who held him in some affection.
‘He’s lost control,’ they’d say. ‘He doesn’t know
what he’s doing.’ Of course, he did, because God
had told him. The problem was he wasn’t any good
at it. ‘At least this is better than where I was,’
he told himself, ‘Just middling between the ages.’
‘No, it isn’t!’ said God, laughing so loud He cracked
the mantelpiece in the idiot’s unkempt home.
Papers were everywhere, some torn from manuals,
used to wrap up loaves, fish, or large butter pats.
‘Why is there so much butter in the house?’
the idiot asked himself. ‘And most of it rancid?’
He realised he was wiping down the wallpaper
with a newspaper smeared with engine oil.
Partially obscured was a photograph of his wife
and daughters, but he couldn’t read the story
for the treacly oil. ‘What’s happened to them?’
he asked, trembling. ‘Don’t ask me,’ said God.
W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee and usually lives in North Shields, from where he pines for Emprosneros, a small village in Crete. He has published nine volumes of poetry, most often with Bloodaxe, and five pamphlets, including Murder Bear (Donut Press, 2013), which won a Saboteur Award. Speaking of prize culture, he has been shortlisted for the Eliot, the Saltire, and the Forward, but not once for the books he loves best - The Big Bumper Book of Troy, Omnesia, and The Wreck of the Fathership - which to this day have never been read by a living soul. He has gained four PBS Recommendations and three Scottish Arts Council Awards, plus a Cholmondeley Prize. He was first Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere and first Dundee Makar, (city laureate) and in his brain he still is. Instead, he is currently Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His Unselected Poems (yes, really) appeared from Smokestack Books earlier this year.
