It is a delicious phrase you will admit (taken from a poem I was reading by Elaine Feinstein called – Old Poets – which I found in her 2007 collection Talking to the Dead).
Celeritas! And perhaps a similar sort of experience to yours in the thrilling fresh air of Dartmoor, on a bicycle up and down hill, because last Tuesday evening I was still in London –
Heading for the Poetry International 2010, Imagining Peace event at the Southbank Centre, Thank you for cumin, said Simon Armitage in Pennine-speak as he began his introduction of the six overseas poets assembled to give readings that evening, which included a late replacement, I confess his name now lost to me, a fine Columbian poet complete in not-to-be-removed overcoat, thick scarf, and pony tail, who read in lyrical Spanish, pausing from time to time to glance up over his shoulder to look at the text of each poem being translated on a large overhead screen behind him, and laughing nervously to himself as if considering whether perhaps we were able to read his mind
– and also flagging. Or was it flinching? These days whenever I am in the city there is a persistent thought that starts at the back of the mind and remorselessly grows, Am I being observed. Even disreputable me, darting from shadow to shadow, up to no good I admit, but as skillfully anonymous as I can be, and surely, as I think it, of no interest to anyone else as I dawdle zig-zag-wise along these anonymous streets, galleries and shopping arcades, but still underneath the CCTV cameras, and the recurring thought, What if they have me under surveillance. And the guilty feeling like flinching arises, akin to cheating at school, What if She can see me cribbing (… for more on ‘flinching’ and ‘cribbing’, see below *).
Pinhead.
And none of the poets, and nothing that evening, matched the maximal internal economy of Anne Carson. Striking odd how it worked, soberly dressed as she was in dark gray wool with her gig like academic spectacles and fluted voice, while she read from her most recent published work, textual references relating to obscure classical sources, long lexicographical translations, and verbatim records of personal letters and reported speech, all formatted in a notebook list of entries.
Afterwards the same illicit ‘flinching’ or ‘cribbing’ feeling arises as I join the lengthy queue to obtain a signature from her for my old copy of If Not, Winter (Fragments of Sappho, translated Anne Carson. 2002). Hello, I say and she gives me a dainty smile and asks my name in the same fluted Canadian voice, and close up, as she writes my name and then signs hers on the book’s front piece page, I observe that behind the glasses her eyes glitter like fires of coal.
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* from the PANOPTICON WRITINGS (1787) of Jeremy Bentham [ref: a.]
Letter XXI: (“Knives, however sharp, are very useful things, and, for most purposes, the sharper the more useful.”)
Flinching would then be as impracticable in a monastery, as cribbing in a school. Old scores might thus be rubbed out with as much regularity as could be desired; nor would the pride of Toboso have been so long a-disenchanting, could her Knight have put his coward Squire into an inspection-house.
Neither do I mean to give any instructions to the Turks for applying the inspection principle to their seraglios: no, not though I were to go through Constantinople again twenty times, notwithstanding the great saving it would make in the article of eunuchs, of whom one trusty one in the inspection lodge would be as good as half a hundred. The price of that kind of cattle could not fail of falling at least ten per cent., and the insurance upon marital honour at least as much, upon the bare hint given of such an establishment in any of the Constantinople papers. But the mobbing I got at Shoomlo, only for taking a peep at the town from a thing they call a minaret (like our monument) in pursuance of invitation, has cancelled any claims they might have had upon me for the dinner they gave me at the divan, had it been better than it was.
If the idea of some of these applications should have brought a smile upon your countenance, it won't hurt you, my dear ****; nor should it hurt the principle. Your candour will prevent you from condemning a great and new invented instrument of government, because some of the purposes to which it is possible to apply it may appear useless, or trifling, or mischievous, or ridiculous. Its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to. If any perverse applications should ever be made of it, they will lie in this case as in others, at the doors of those who make them. Knives, however sharp, are very useful things, and, for most purposes, the sharper the more useful. I have no fear, therefore…
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[Ref. 'a'] Complete online text