#in parenthesis

[tonreihe]

“But sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered.”

David Jones, In Parenthesis

[musicmakesyousmart]

False Moniker - In Parenthesis

Monorail Trespassing

2016

[aeide-thea]

good morning! my ache-and-pain quotient is reasonably high at the moment (lots of bearable-but-frightening throbs all over, it’s fairly crap), but despite that i’m very pleased to have discovered a piece of wwi literature i’d somehow never heard of, despite its apparently having been lauded in rapturous terms by no less than auden, eliot, and graham greene?

the thing in question is david jones’ in parenthesis, a “lyrical epic that traces, via an alter-ego called John Ball, the contours of Jones’s own wartime journey, from his embarkation for France in 1915 to the Somme in 1916,” and “simultaneously contain[s] the contemporary and the ancient, the literary and the demotic, the realistic and the mythic”; one contemporary wrote of the work that “while retaining all the authentic realism of the event, [it] has the heroic ring which we associate with the old chansons de geste … a book which we can accept as a true record of our suffering and as a work of art in the romantic tradition of Malory and the Mabinogion” (source).

which is obviously a lot of grand talk, i gotta get my hands on the full thing and assess for myself, but in the meantime, let me leave you with the thing that prompted this discovery and this post: it turns out michael sheen did a reading of a sort of dramatic monologue from it, and it’s a very gorgeous thing to listen to, and very stirring if you like the sort of evocative lyric cataloguing that characterizes so much ancient poetry, which i really do! anyway without further ado:

[wild-bees-of-truth]

That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated--but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement. We stroke cats, pluck flowers, tie ribands, assist at the manual acts of religion, make some kind of love, write poems, paint pictures, are generally at one with that creaturely world inherited from our remote beginnings. Our perception of many things is heightened and clarified. Yet must we do gas-drill, be attuned to many newfangled technicalities, respond to increasingly exacting mechanical devices; some fascinating and compelling, others sinister in the extreme; all requiring a new and strange direction of the mind, a new sensitivity certainly, but at a considerable cost.

David Jones, In Parenthesis (preface)

[forgottenbones]

How E.E. Cummings Writes A Poem

[vividardent]

“his death was in parenthesis”

while the sky split i remembered what he’d told me – the fighting had come to the forest, bullets and artillery burst the trees around him, sap superheated shards of wood, fiery splinters killing men left and right. he didn’t know who was bombing the place, and took a shiv of oak to the gut. he noticed he was hurt when the blood pooled in his left boot, and he saw the forest herself come bring garlands for the fallen. he left his rifle under the bough, and crawled away.

i thought about that, his disconnected pause before he realized what’d happened, while i watched the sky fall away.

[tonreihe]

“Besides which there was the heavy battery operating just beneath the ridge, at a kept interval of minutes, with unnerving inevitability, as a malign chronometer, ticking off with each discharge an exactly measured progress toward a certain and prearranged hour of apocalypse.”

David Jones, In Parenthesis

[tonreihe]

The epigraph to In Parenthesis, by David Jones. (Taken from the Mabinogion.)