“Hello Grandpa”, kindly defiance, defiant humility and with a feeling like I am not done with my story either. Well, you would have to come out of hiding too faced with that kind of greeting wouldn’t you? Really, after that sunny command you are not going to stay crouched down on your knees with your arse sticking in the air are you?
But before we continue I need to give early notice that my reading work in the atelier this year, and my Wordstall book of the year, is Broken Hierarchies, the Collected Poems of Geoffrey Hill. The 4cm thick hardbook has arrived in the post, an it is the definitive edition. Not that the secular priest/poet, now late on and into his eighties, is done with his story or has any intention of stopping. In other words, the newly published collection is just for the time being. ‘The Daybooks’ (2007-2012) fill pages 625-936 and this is where the collection ends for now. Kindly defiance, defiant humility.
It is continental – the ‘Broken Hierarchies’ (BH from now on) – the reader’s task, and even reading one poem a day I won’t get through this collection in a year. Let alone the complexity, and that several of the poems are very long and will take days if not weeks to read. Then where to begin*? The usual instruction to begin at page one doesn’t feel quite adequate. To get there, and it feels a long way off although it isn’t really, we would be well advised to approach cautiously.
“Hello Grandpa”, he says for the second time and I am ripped through time and space (dot-dot-dot)
Insert Here (BH P491):
…
the angular sun
on windows or windshields
…
Let me be, says the dying man, let me fall
Upwards towards the roots.
It is a convenient half-way point. Midway over and looking back it is late on in the day. On the Left Bank of the River Dniester – Yes, I know it simply sounds like cheek, but it seems we are into the D-world. That is ‘D’ for defiance, as well as ‘D’ for decline, ‘D’ for dialogue.
Transnistria, the Left Bank of the River Dniester, is not exactly subject to the Rule of Law in the normal sense. So when is the best time of day to make the crossing? And where is the safest spot to cross? From the outside looking everybody in outlaw society appears criminal. It is not that they wish me harm, I tell myself. know this, but the question here is how to distinguish between ‘honest’ and ‘sinful’.
Mostly we came here just hoping for a few laughs. However, right now we are not smiling, we are looking into the language of signs. Face to face, since tattoos are also a big part of ‘Siberian’ life in Transnistria, and after the first greeting it is clear Russian isn’t the ‘lingua franca’. There is a face covered with tattoos close up looking straight into mine. It is a face full of suffering, both young, and old at the same time. He is a ‘kolshik’ – (one who stings) – an artist, secular priest, tattooist who uses the traditional way to write our lives on our skins. Or at least that is who he is in my imagination. Now of course I don’t know tiddly-squit, and my heart jolts as I realise that death can come at any age.
“Hello Grandpa”, the man with the face covered in tattoos says for the third time. At this point we shit ourselves in our pants. If Rabelais, being another priest/poet storyteller who is also full of kindness, were in charge of the narrative at this point, he would say that this is what happens next. It is sound advice for any erotic/ascetic.
* Shout! Shout! No 10 (Selected Poems, 202)
From the beginning the question how to end
has been part of the act. One cannot have sex
fantasies (any way) as the final
answer to life.