C .H . SISSON Two Poems
WAITING FOR CHARON Waiting for Charon, looking back on figures Crowding the world still, I stand dismayed. Who are these who are now escaping the lures Of what seemed worth while once, though since decayed? Where was reality, in tissue-thin Shadows or less than shadows which they saw Once as the meat of life? Could it be in The amber of the flesh, or in the raw Spirit inhabiting that tiny space Fixed by a name to be unfixed by time? In the fair face of nature, or a grace Not to be burnt away by any quick-lime? It was not known. What is? We pass away Through seen to unseen, through the flaming crowd Claiming to live, bright in the light of day As if beauty and movement spoke aloud. Perhaps they do. Or perhaps nothing speaks But what can be intrinsic in a word: That not for long: it whistles as it seeks Its meaning, but afterwards it is not heard.
The spirits gabble, but they come to stand Where I do now and cast a backward look With Jean MeschinoCand my blind land Fills with the shadows other ghosts mistook.
UNCERTAINTY The future is the only thing That makes for thought, the past is past: It brought its presents, had its fling. But what it flung could never last. The future has not lasted yet Even the second that it can And so is good for any bet: It is the guessing makes the man. Human uncertainty is all That makes the human reason strong: We never know until we fall That every word we speak is wrong.
NICOLAS TREDELL
Christine Brooke-Rose in conversation
PARK COURT HOTEL, LONDON 6 MARCH 1990 Nicolas Tredell: Your latest novel, Verbivore, is a very inventive, very witty work, but it also seems to me to have a very sombre resonance. There's a strong sense of an ending, an apprehension of a fall, after an excess of noise, into a possibly terminal silence. How do you feel yourself about the book? Christine Brooke-Rose: Yes, 1 was trying to explore the possiblility of our minds being completely altered by the media, and if the media suddenly collapse, which is what the book is about, can we actually go back to a premedia mentahty? And we can't. Society was very structured and layered, but everyone knew where they were. This was not necessarily a good society, but there were all sorts of ways of communicating at different levels, and above all, people read. Perhaps only an elite. I'm not going to go into the sociology of it, but nowadays people read less and less, and they want easy books, and they're so formed by television. I saw this as a teacher. It was very difficult to get students to read even a short story, where I in my youth just read, that was it, that was the centre of my life, to read, and there was this notion of completion, I wanted to read all Balzac, for instance, I wanted to cover the whole terrain. Reading was always central and still is now, though I listen a lot to the radio and 1look at television and I'm very much more interested in the world and what goes on around me than 1was when 1was young I was very much a bluestocking, stuck in my books. So 1 was interested in the notion that people have lost the art of communicating. In this highly 'communications' age, we are in fact all isolated, looking at our television sets and identifying with these soap characters and newscasters. What would happen if this were taken away from us?
P N-REVIEW September/October 1990 29
