We are also writing history:
Again we work between space and space – / And both are dark.
Writing history in what appear sometimes to be altogether dark times, even downright evil. Is God truly about to make another sudden landing here on earth in 4 weeks time, or will he put it off this year because we have been too naughty? Or rather, not writing history, but transcribing it, setting it down
– With no mistakes.
Please, suppress your groans, this is not a boastful claim. It is not that errors don’t take place… Oh, they do, they do, and all the time! Take it as read, the truth-telling is dishonest. It is only that the effort is towards accuracy.
Accuracy, rather than originality (…or even point of view). And despite the surrounding dark there is enough light here to be going on with. Could we be doing with more? It is not an option at the present time, we must work within the limits of our technology. Just about enough to see across the page.
It is true of course our eyes do peer and wander towards the circular rim, eccentric, where light meets shadow, and memories and imagination creep in so that he who is telling us all this, appears to admonish.
As at this moment now soon.
Such as when the historian, poor dead Tony Judt receives a terrible bashing from the most recent New Left Review for his “grand narrative for today’s Eurocracy”. Oh dear! I used to rate Postwar, I thought the other day in central London walking along Piccadily, but like everything, now I see, only another dazzling failure.
Passing an open courtyard on the north side of the street an amazingly tall red painted angular metal tower. I walked into the courtyard and spent several minutes mingling with the small crowd walking round the circular base of the pryamidical cone. It is Tatlin’s Tower, I told myself excitedly, named after the Russian who designed it in 1921, and this was an exact scaled down version of the original, which (I am reminded, we have visited here before) in fact was never built.
Go to look at it if you can while it is there, it is free! Looking up, what you see is a breath-taking spiral, a cut-away cantilever cone like a crazy helter-skelter with vertical planes of slender steel. And what you feel is a sense of being in common, of a human intelligence, and a location where people can meet and disseminate ideas under the cover and protection of what could be described a sort of shade or shadow. It reminded me of something old and historical, about a joined-up vision, or, if you prefer that simpler old-fashioned word, about solidarity.
Telling it better than putting it in books, and the wall installations, if you can slip by the brocaded doorman of Royal Academy unnoticed and continue past the toilets under the stairs, include the structural engineer’s further admonishment having calculated the margins for error (with no mistakes), “the long and slender members shown on Tatlin’s original drawing would have been even harder to realize in a full size tower”, predicting its certain collapse before completion.
—
'Bede's Copyist' by Chris McCully
I have no proper name, yet his is tall
On Europe's stones and in the candleflukes
Whose culture briefly held a sparrow's brawl
In a crowned head. We set it down in books,
A lettered Latin – that bird, this birth, that stall –
With no mistakes.
Outside, the snow almost obscures the park,
Our wooden Christ's obliterated face.
Inside, with all the negligence of grace
His habit falls across my page's mark.
Again we work between space and space –
And both are dark.