book of clouds | John Watson

The Books Of Clouds

1980

Introduction

The renga is a Japanese literary form of great antiquity. Several writers collaborate in a sequence of poems, each developing variations on themes established by another. Strict conventions and an elaborate decorum govern its advancement by successive writers.

In 1969 four poets (Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti, Tomlinson) met in Paris - in the Hotel Saint-Simon - to revive this communal art.

The Book of Clouds takes as its starting point this moment in historical time, and draws its initial energy from it. A few incidental facts from this week-long encounter are relevant: Trains in the Métro (between Solférino and Bac) could be distantly heard in their basement room; Roubaud is a mathematician; wives of three of the writers made fleeting appearances in the room...

The Book of Clouds is not an account of this week, the contemplation of this assembly soon diverges from it. The protagonists are no longer the four named poets, the room no longer merely the room, the train no longer the Métro...

Other resonances are revived: Valéry's account of the birth of Architecture from the musical scales; one of the castaways in Coral Island captured by pirates while his companions hide below in the cave; Plato's cave; Berkeley's quadrangle; the Michelson-Morley experiment; angels...

The principle of developing variation recalls Arnold Schoenberg - in whose String Trio it is made radiant - and to whom The Book of Clouds is dedicated.

1 Here in the remote South I raise

An unseen banner which only the sky

Makes chromatic alteration to acknowledge.

The caravans along the bank seem empty.

It is lunch. The gypsies are away.

A row of cumulus clouds flap on the line.

I look across the canal to South America.

The Flinders Range and the sublime coast of the Bite

Merge in a single ketch,

While elsewhere submerged in the Hotel Saint-Simon

The wrestlers ready themselves for the renga

As their wives bring fruit and celestial globes.

2 From the outset interest centres

On incidents in the biographies

Of the four luminaries.

At the mention of Marie-Jo,

"Media" waves break from the cosmos:

Did she descend into that maelstrom

To remove an orange peel from the table

And, dazzled by the tennis light,

Lean across the four protagonists,

A blonde hand in one tousled head?

When in fact had she or they last

Passed down the steps of the Sacré-Cœur?

3 More questions from the journalists:

What was the great God Pan doing?

How lightly did they wear their mantles?

Did they walk the hanging bridge

From the Sacré-Cœur across the palm court

Chasm? Did the air-borne rumour

Of earthquakes in each native land

Produce its slight tumescence? Did the Andes

Move towards the deep Atlantic?

Did the mysterious iconography

Of their helmets raise the further question:

Did these Aztecs walk the earth before?

4 The extraordinary is set out for their use:

Beakers full of the warm South flown in

With soda from some high volcanic lake,

Ice brought by runners from Olympus,

Bread by a thinly veiled Persephone

Who whispers of a poltergeist friend...

About to begin they hear the news vendor cry

Palinurus injured in a shallow dive...

Plans to dredge the silted Styx announced...

They pause, perplexed, and cannot work. And then

An orange from Versailles rolls from the table.

The real world has resumed and they begin.

5 And so I took a fifth place, as at

The servants' table. From a low window

A barn was visible and beyond it

The church and a spiral of smoke

Over hedges of every season.

Night and day like a reversible cloak

Lay across a chair. Beside me

The flowers with the look of flowers

That are looked at lost that look

When looked at yet again. Again

From the window's bright dark, the steeple

Took its light without casting shadows.

6 Rimbaud finished off the vowels...

So that at the servants' table I thought,

Accepting opportunity like a platter

Sent sliding down the waxed oak

And stopping just short of the edge,

The consonants! Why not try -

With a T as green as a lawn

The green amused by its arbitrariness,

L like honey, E the light behind it...

Then I look up and see in a glass -

Green's from a golf tee, honey = mel,

E is electric... Try numbers.

7 One: a red door in a barn

Facing a valley which struggles to be

Three despite its many departures

And indecision (returning indoors

For a warmer coat) despite

The divided inclination of the horizon

And the overriding hill. Seventeen

The girl in sunglasses recently

Dismounted who leads by the bridle

Five: the horse a brown bay chestnut

Gelding quadruped accommodating,

Its eyes enumerating, its strong head.

8 The proof that all numbers are "interesting"

("Uninteresting" numbers are eventually adjacent

To "interesting" numbers and are thus "interesting"!)

And the proof by diagonal that the cardinal numbers

Are non-enumerable, revives that curiosity

About God and information retrieval.

He knows the precise constitution of saliva

In the person confronting the fountain as the car

Draws up at the kerb in its spray.

He knows the number of grains in the summer silo

And the number of facts that he knows. He finds this number

Uninteresting, and the cardinal numbers enumerable.

9 Firbank wrote on visiting cards, Nabokov

Filing cards of precise dimensions.

Some used gin and the quiet of the brothel by day.

Others wrote standing at a marble lectern.

Would a mathematician (I mused)

Make chains of paper clips or spell

Amusing vulgarities on an inverted calculator?

Or could numbers, themselves unsentient,

By repeated division open windows

In the midst of curtains, fruit, flowers,

And in the oyster light from the street above,

Urge upon him certain tropes?

10 Descending by spiral staircase into

The vast lead-lined forward hatch

Of the clamorous diving bell

(Wallpapered in the Empire style

Lit by gas flares and chandeliers)

They came upon certain alterations:

A lace cloth covered the table,

A bowl of fruit had not been there before;

A luminosity in the air "positively glowed"

With negative capability. A shadow fell

In a leviathan's shape - Someone was standing

On the glass in the pavement above them.

11 And time would not pass

Until one of the wrestlers

Fell into a brief sleep

Whereat the renga flourished.

The lawn cloth was removed

With a single flourish without disturbing

The bowl of fruit. Light

Reverted to its old pursuits

Drawing time on like the donkey

Whose rider holds a carrot.

Then the stranger at the glass at last

Took a taxi to the Louvre.

12 If she is older than the rocks

Then she has seen and relegated

To the strewn and luminous landscape behind her

Time's sedimentary histories:

Ammonites at the moment of extinction

On the long sea floor; the growth of glacier,

Geysers and the paraphernalia

Of geology; fields of lavender

Diverging now from some ancestral grain;

The pomegranate descending from the myrtle.

All this she has seen as now she sees

The taxi drawing up near Maillol's naiads.

13 Everything should be done coldly

With poise. I envision a style,

One rhythmic as verse, precise

As the language of science, undulant,

Deep voiced as the cello

Tipped with flame, a style

That would pierce your idea like a dagger,

On which your thought would sail

Easily like a skiff before a wind

That very gale which, outside the basement

Of the Hotel Saint-Simon, blew

Unfelt, unseen while yet they dreamed...

14 A cornucopia of effects

Littered the table by morning's light.

Causality should learn some moderation!

It's we who have to dispose of residues.

It's not so easy for us to instigate

Those processes by which the light

Might be sent back to a star,

The sea urchin returned to its ocean

And the wet hand dried in the rock pool...

The cornucopia was spilled by accident

Amongst some fruit and cigarettes

With a copy of Baudelaire's How To Smoke.

15 On the first morning of April, Nature Herself

Smiling produced instances of trompe l'œil:

The skating rink looked like an empty car park,

The car park looked like a stage complete with trees,

The trees looked like skaters in winter

And the cold light held to the railings of evening.

Synthetic a priori stars emerged

From clouds to write The morning star is Venus

On morning's tabula rasa. And at sea

The headland baling out the bay looked up

With the puzzled gaze of the leviathan

Deceived, on its knees in the shallows.

16 When Nature arrives at the gravefield

We are already pronouncing our No! In Thunder.

Sifting through a confluence of leaves,

We will not accept the seasons as

Sufficient excuse for the delays - longeurs,

Mislaid directives, uncertain destinations - in short,

The general inefficiency of light,

Its startling lack of specificity...

We sift through skies, we invert them in lakes:

Afternoon is just like morning...

The repertoire of days is strained...

This confrontation will not be our last!

17 Rounding a turn in the narrow road

We came upon a handkerchief of lawn

Indecision written on its hem.

Beneath a lamp a deco moon

Above a muslin lake shook out

A frisson, catching on a thorn.

Turning from our circular path

We found the temple shielding from its face

The already falling sun

And there in that prolonged arcade

Heard talks on All and Everything

From a loquacious Sphinx.