From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments, 2015-2021

By Jeff Rich

From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments, 2015-2022 collects the writing on culture, history and literature first published as an experimental blog. The posts have been revised and edited, and arranged by themes of history, social fragmentation, the infinite conversation of literature, and unravelling empires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Rich
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645159233

Book preview

From the

Burning Archive

Jeff Rich

Copyright © 2022 Jeff Rich

All rights reserved.

ISBN:

ISBN-13: 978-0-6451592-2-6 (Print)

ISBN-13: 978-0-6451592-3-3 (E-Book)

A billion pages of etched life

In minutes, memos, letters -

The familiar writing of everyday,

Few metaphors, many more lists

Within a day, ten thousand years,

And more, gone, gone, gone.

The cord that held us to them,

A line of white ashen hearts.

Jeff Rich, From the Burning Archive – the Beginning, in Gathering Flowers of the Mind

Contents

Part One. The Burning Archive

Part Two. Fire in the Voice

Part Three. Cultural Decay

Part Four. The Infinite Conversation

Part Five. Histories of Our Times

Part Six. Social Fragmentation

Part Seven. Unraveling Empires

Part One

The Burning Archive

The Burning Archive

August 2022

In 2015 I began writing a blog, The Burning Archive. It was my second blog.  Between 2010 and 2014 I had secretly written The Happy Pessimist blog, largely concerning national politics in Australia. But The Happy Pessimist was cloaked in a pseudonym, Antonio Possevino, who was a sixteenth-century Jesuit diplomat, priest and author. I identified with Possevino, who became my digital avatar, because he also published tracts without his true name. So my first blog, The Happy Pessimist, was haunted by the prospect of the outing of its author. Its voice was muffled by fear of reprisals since that author had a day job as a minor government official subject to draconian speech codes that discouraged living in truth. When I began writing The Burning Archive, I defied those codes. I wrote in my own name, with no obfuscation of my occupation, and I released my voice and my mind to wander where they may.

The blog began in a period of deep personal crisis when freedom of speech and freedom of thought were essential, as I suppose they always are, to endurance through pain, suffering and defeat. Although at that time I did not know the poem by Kahlil Gilbran, Defeat (1918), it was as if I was in this blog screwing my courage to the sticking place and acting out Gilbran’s final stanza.

Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,

You and I shall laugh together with the storm,

And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,

And we shall stand in the sun with a will,

And we shall be dangerous.

The personal crisis was in itself related to my decision eighteen months earlier to close down my Happy Pessimist blog in fear. A public servant in Canberra had been sacked for a statement on social media. Governments of all stripes were controlling the communications of their servants, and suppressing the right to freedom of speech and freedom of thought of minor government officials. Major government officials who spoke in partisan ways in support of the government had nothing to fear. But lowly under-castellans such as me could threaten their careers by stating their mind in plain language. At that point I wanted to protect or even advance my career and obtain the rank long denied to me. So I decided to suppress my writing and seek favour in the court, but I was not successful. Then the recognition of this failure and the silent price I had paid provoked a major personal crisis.

So, The Burning Archive began. Although the fire began with personal crisis, the distressed emotions seeped only a little into the writing shared with the Ethernet of silenced screams. I had other outlets to express my inner torment: sessions with a psychologist; the love of my family; a series of black notebook journals, each titled poetically to evoke the soul-deepening experience I slowly made my way through; and my poetry and fictional writing. But I found my authorial persona on the blog, where I commented pessimistically on my sense of cultural or historical crisis, which I pointed to in the very name of the blog. The archive of our culture, with all its social memories and inherited institutions, was in flames. I had written poems before on this metaphor of the burning archive, and these poems were later published in 2021 in Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, 1996-2020. But I had not dared to share the image with the world. It was too intense, too painful, too precious. As poems, the image of the burning archive amplified my cries, and did not diffuse my pain. So by making the burning archive prosaic, the blog helped to map my way out of my personal crisis, and to turn a haunting poetic image into prose diagnosing a new time of troubles. From the start, I wrote with the idea that the blog could be an experimental art form, emerging in uncontrolled conditions, and a kind of digital samizdat in which the thoughts of people excluded from the published scene could describe, more truthfully than over-promoted authors, a culture on the brink of collapse. As I wrote on the first day, The Burning Archive would be reflections and readings of today’s political, social and cultural orders, and my search for traditions in history, culture, and literature that I choose to preserve, so I might ward off an uneasy feeling of cultural collapse.

Today that uneasy feeling of cultural collapse, or at least senescence and sabotage of the West and other traditions, is a commonly expressed concern, certainly among more conservative social observers. Yet I had drawn the image from one of the founders of radical cultural Marxism. The poetic image inspiring the blog blew first from one of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history. In this aphoristic text of fragments, the oddly mystical cultural Marxist imagined an Angel of History, blown forward by a firestorm of progress, yet looking back with tenderness at both the horror and the glory of the ruins. In those dog days of 2015, when I had no anticipation of any audience or any reception, I set out how I intuited the writing ahead:

The burning archive is an image of human history, learning and heritage being destroyed through our own actions of forgetting and destruction. … My blog is an extended meditation on both what is lost and what, despite the flames, is preserved, especially my most loved fragments of culture and literature. The blog is evolving into its own form of artwork, a new form of artwork made possible by the simple democratic tools of creativity in our digital age.

The advent of this archive in flames released my mind from an imprisoning magic ring of fire of my own making. For so long I had encased my spirit in an ill-chosen vocation: public servant, bureaucrat, and policy adviser. By choosing this path, I thought I walked the low road of the vita activa, and not the high road of the vita contemplativa.

For twenty years, while I led a mediocre career in government, I had kept my writing and intellectual life hidden. But it refused to be cowed. I wrote poetry. I began and never finished novels. I wrote essays for the drawer. I struggled with saying `I am a writer’, not `I am a public servant’. I tried to make my working life as a policy bureaucrat a kind of intellectual vocation. I created a personal myth of the despised private intellectual, in which I, like Machiavelli, shared my thoughts privately with patrons, but remained unknown as a writer in the present. I believed, not without reason, because of my exposure to so many issues and so many people through government, that I knew more of the world than the journalists, academics, business flakes, advertising executives and NGO activists who make up our chattering classes. I tormented myself to believe my realm of knowledge, experience and thought was closeted and despised. It would only ever be known by some future archivist who might discover the genius of my boxed briefings a century on from now. My insights were privileged and secreted. I lived in a split world, experienced as a divided psyche, where I wrote for the Cabinet by day and for the drawer by night. This splitting of my psyche shackled my prose. I thought my commentaries had to be about the constructed practical and not the imagined real. I thought I had to control my topics to those in which I could authoritatively claim to be a subject matter expert—the practical policy judgments of governments. I thought I could not stray in public writings very far from the social consensus, capable of ready implementation, unlikely to provoke misunderstandings or conflict. I thought I had to choose between writing and bureaucracy, and that one path excluded the other. `Am I a writer or a bureaucrat?’ I would ask this question, over and over, ever doubting the course I had taken. I believed that the only sign that writing was my vocation was by conventional publishing success, and that there was no way that an outcast such as myself would ever be admitted by a publisher to the world of commercial book sales. I thought my habit of withdrawing from the practical world to dream of unfinished novels, histories, poems, notebooks of aphorisms, intimations of madness, and diatribes about the treasonous clerks who I encountered day to day only proved my impotence as a writer and my incompetence as a bureaucrat. I thought that anything I wrote would bring social opprobrium on me, and that every action I took looked fearful, trembling, and pathetic to the alpha males and females who prowled the corridors of power.

But the personal crisis of 2015 dispelled the magical prison I had cast upon myself, and broke the hard casing of my vocational identity. In that long winter of 2015, I mended the split in my life between writer and bureaucrat, and began slowly to fire an integrated voice in the kiln of the burning archive. I stood among the flames, and found a way to walk out from the fire naked, renewed and empowered. I embraced my life as an outcast from two disordered regimes. I became dangerous.

I began to write on different topics and in different ways. History returned to my writing, after a long exile. I wrote about the books I read. I shared the troubled prophecies that previously I had cast in magical runes. I dared to write on anything and to disrespect any authority. I condemned experimental poetry and considered conservative political thought. I even predicted the victory of Donald Trump, at risk of mockery by the progressive crowd who still dominate the cultural and political institutions of Australia. I went back to old notes I had taken in my twenties about Derrida, Ponge and Blanchot, and speculated on mirrors. I shared my poetry. I doubted the wisdom of our rulers. I learned off the cuff, and did not try to hide it.

Rather to my surprise I found readers. Not many, but appreciative, and more than I had ever previously known. Now in August 2022 my blog has been viewed more than 16 000 times. These figures are trivial compared to the top tier of blogs, but, in the despair of 2015, when I began in the depths of a threefold crisis of career, psyche and culture, I did not expected more than 100 accidental views.

In early 2021 I found the blog started to transform. I decided to focus on bringing to publication my collected poems, which were published in June 2021 as Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems 1996-2020. In April 2021 I launched a podcast, which I initially intended to name The Tragic Sense of History, but then built around what was emerging now as my author platform, The Burning Archive. The podcast evolved into a regular show exploring history and culture. It grew from my reflections on the blog over six years, concentrating on abiding themes that I began to explore as hypotheses on this history of our times: imperial rivalry, political disorder, cultural decay and social fragmentation. Producing these spoken word essays on history each week led me to rethink the role of the blog in my writing. In September 2021 I began a new experiment, a kind of live journal where I noted from my black notebooks, my reading and other sources the fragments, inspirations and flowers of my mind, evoked in the title of my collected poems. Each Saturday morning I would gather these flowers and share them on my blog, in all their transience. From mid-2022, I began new experiments as my writing persona bloomed.

It seemed that my blog had returned to earlier fragmentary traditions, such as the live journal of that strange Russian intellectual Dmitri Galkovsky and the hand-written cahiers of Paul Valery. I saw shape and completeness in the extended writing project I had undertaken on The Burning Archive over six years. So I decided to gather and publish the texts of the blog as a book. I have excluded from this collection the poems I first published on my blog, and that are now available in print. I have also excluded most of the posts on politics or governing. These posts on politics will be published together with other essays and fragments in another book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. Nearly all other posts are gathered, edited and now transformed in this collection of essays and fragments.

The writing of the blog is presented differently in this book. I have lightly edited the posts. There may be some repetition across the collection, but also common themes and evolving ideas will emerge for the reader in a way that may not be discovered in the screened and serial reading experience of the online blog. I have reduced many quotations in this book format, and gathered references to sources in footnotes, not hyperlinks. I have removed the images of each post, even though I enjoyed this form of play between text and image on the blog itself. The reader may turn to the online incarnation of these thoughts if they want to experience that shadow play. I have organised the collection into six parts, and within each part presented the posts in the order of their publication date. These six parts reflect some themes, abiding metaphors and enduring ideas.

In Fire in the Voice I have included the posts that show the slow development of my authorial persona, and the reflections I made on writing and its role in my emergence from the flames of my personal crisis. Here the post, Craft, Voice and Fire from May 2018 provides many of the keys to this section and the map of the journey I undertook in writing these texts.

In Cultural Decay I have gathered together cultural commentary and posts on my theme of cultural decay. These posts begin with a note on Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture (2015), and range across music, games, Jordan Petersen, travel, John Berryman, Bob Dylan and Emile Durkheim. They are all haunted by the fear of cultural collapse, and animated by the hope of rebirth.

The The Infinite Conversation contains posts on literature, other writers and the traditions of writing to which I belong. I took the metaphor of the infinite conversation from a misreading of the enigmatic French writer, Maurice Blanchot, although the trope of writing as emerging from dialogue with the ghosts of past writers or cultural figures is common, and appears in many forms in writers as different as Blanchot, Machiavelli, and Michael Oakeshott.

In Histories of our Times I have grouped my posts on that sub-category of literature, history. In the years after I left the university, I could not bear to read history at all for a few years. But I returned to the muse by reading Simon Schama, Citizens, on the French Revolution. Since then I have read widely, more in global history than my original sub-discipline. In these posts, I also write on history, even though I am not an accredited professional historian. It was a practice that would ultimately bloom in the Burning Archive podcast, which was dedicated to Faulkner’s line that the past is not the dead, the past is not even past.

In Social Fragmentation I have gathered some posts on contemporary social issues, and my diagnosis that the societies of the West are under stress. In these posts, my writing is informed by my practice as a government official, in which I have sought ways to govern many social policy problems, including mental illness, violence, terrorism, trauma, and population ageing. But the posts are also animated by my own experiences of madness, alienation and isolation. There will be a wider selection of essays on policy issues in my collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat.

In Unraveling Empires I have included my reflections on geopolitics and especially the unraveling of the American Empire. This theme is also prominent in Histories of our Times, but I have included here the essays, prompted by the decisive shift in America’s fate marked by Donald Trump’s election in 2016. My interest in geopolitics grew over the years of the blog, and emerged as a central theme of my podcast from 2021.

There are posts that I have not included in this collection. There is a large group of posts on political events that I am publishing with other longer essays in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. A few posts were too ephemeral or too low quality for inclusion in this book. There were a few posts that I have discarded because they were too hasty predictions of political or social events. There were some posts where my writing, in retrospect, was too affected by the confusion of the times. On the whole, however, I have let the writing and the thoughts stand in all the errors, mixed with some truths, in which they were forged. Consistency, after all, is the enemy of intuited insight. Please enjoy my burning archive.

Part Two

Fire in the Voice

Reclusive Samizdat.

13 October 2015

Today the artist, who lives in truth, has three obligations.

1. To live authentically within the ruins of our culture today.

2. To practise the ritual of writing solemnly, without regard for fame, fortune and the flickering nonsense of panel shows.

3. To be in the world as God’s secretary, meticulous and devoted to something larger than your own life.

To live truly to each of these profound obligations requires the artist to withdraw both from the world and the relentless publicity machine of publishing. Today authenticity demands samizdat,¹ not marketable publications. It is by circulating words and thought outside the merchant machines that writing can find its way out of the dark wood in which it cries out for a saviour. No saviour will come, and each writer must risk an ocean of silence in response to truthful words.

Blanchot, for all his obscurities, prefigured the writer to come in his rigorous refusal, not of friendship, but of any promotion of the marketed figure of the writer. He did so from a place of high culture and secure publication. Today his heirs know the simplest act of pressing a button can secure the circulation of their ideas, but no guarantee of a response. To withhold a photo and a profile of the author of this obscure samizdat renews the author’s sacred bond with Andrei Rubelev and a thousand anonymous icon painters.

Traditions beyond politics

29 December 2015

For much of my life I have thought about questions of politics and government. How can government respond to any one of dozens of social issues that have occupied my professional life? What can government do? How can a policy issue be presented to political decision-makers in a way that holds their attention, if briefly, and sustains their commitment, preferably with real decisions about people, money, rules and services, and not merely the empty word-pictures of abstract change, so beloved by the consultocracy.

Recent events in my life – and perhaps the broader world (these are difficult times when we must confront moral beliefs capable of terrorist murder) – have led me to doubt whether it is time to leave this field fallow for a few years. Our democratic governments are in a state of decay, with their administrative elites confused or treacherous about the purpose of democratic governing institutions. Managerialism has infected all institutions once served by a professional ethos. Political parties have lost all deep contact with vital social networks that might translate values into real political ideas, and have become patronage-ridden bureaucracies, over-stocked with networkers, advertisers and spinners, that turn political values into the degraded currency of brands. Universities lost their moral compass sometime after mass expansion and before turning education into an export industry. Their own forms of patronage persist despite mountains of managerialist rhetoric, and their sense of purpose to serve as wisdom for the state, as perhaps imagined by von Humboldt, was long lost.

It is a grim stocktake, and perhaps it leads to that other author of the ideals of intellectual life, Cardinal Newman. To him I should turn for inspiration, and in his fields of public reason on moral, religious, emotional and cultural life I may plant my next season’s crops. So, I do find that a turn to other traditions of public and private thought are those that must sustain me over the years ahead.

Ich Habe Genung (I have had enough)

30 July 2016

A change of scene: music. If I have an aim in life, it is to leave behind something of beauty, and this search for transcendence does not take a religious form. I have known it in music, literature, thought, certain psychological states.

If I attain it, I imagine myself then singing Bach’s Cantata "Ich habe genung" (BWV 82). It is exquisitely beautiful in its music, and its lyrics express a longing to leave the mortal body behind, to set aside this world of suffering after having achieved salvation, the embrace of Jesus, the attainment of transcendence. I secularise this longing and pursue it in writing and listening to music. Right now, as I write this post, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is singing this reconciliation of the body and spirit, and farewell to the world.

Some say that the music is similar to the Erbarme Dich (Have mercy) from the St Matthew Passion. I know that aria for contralto and strings, and its haunting striving for mercy, from the long opening credits of the Tarkovsky film, The Sacrifice. The hero of the film, who is some kind of estranged artist or intellectual, sacrifices himself to save his family and the world from nuclear disaster. This film has always enthralled me, for reasons I can never quite fathom but I think come in part from its slowness and its draping of human tragedy across the stark interiors of modern culture.

But Bach is always the master of transcendent beauty in my mind, and Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of the Goldberg variations, in which he plays the variations at half the pace of his 1955 recording, and, on some tracks, audibly hums along eerily with his own playing inspired the following poem that is now published in Jeff Rich, Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems 1996-2020 (2021).

Gould’s humming

In the first aria he begins to hum

This is the trace of true art and magic:

Ghostly.

At one with the music but different and beyond.

An hors–texte someone might say.

A moment’s expression endures through recording,

this ghost of the artist,

unbidden, improvised, unscored,

not even beautiful,

but it becomes what I listen for each time:

To search again for the traces of the dead in our lives.

Going Sane Writing

28 July 2016

Adam Phillips says somewhere, perhaps in one of his intriguing essays, perhaps in an interview with the Paris Review, that writing is for him an experiment in what your life might be like if you were to speak freely.

It is also a description he gives, in another way, to the process that goes on in the course of psychoanalysis and many other psychotherapies; for fifty minutes you can speak freely and know there is an audience to catch you, to cradle you, to correct you, to chase you to the deepest part of your self.

Phillips’ essays are intriguing for three reasons: their style; the tacit knowledge of the psyche that he brings to them; and his own practice of writing.

The style reflects the pleasure that Phillips states as the only real purpose of his writing. Sentences roll on through enigmas, with never a hectoring voice or a pedantic explanation. Making beautiful sentences is the point of the exercises, and Phillips is true to the essay’s exploratory and experimental genre, playing with and teasing out the silken strands of our stories with which we bind our inner lives. The simple play of his style is there in the title of Going Sane, pleading the paradoxical case that though insanity is well known, the course of developing into a sane person is not. His essays are, like Montaigne’s, peppered with enigmatically selected quotations that point always to this strange artwork that we all practise: making sense of our lives. The epigraph that opens Going Sane is from Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals: if, by some mischance, people understood each other, they would never be able to reach agreement.

This deep, tacit knowledge of the strange workings of the psyche makes Phillip’s essays worth reading, when an equivalent stylist’s musings on fluff and fashion or the latest dilemmas of choice in politics are not. Though many of us have had experience of psychotherapy, much that is written about it does not register its subtle entanglement with the imagination. Here Phillips’ sense of style makes him the best ambassador psychoanalysis has ever had. Confidences are not breached, but he does gently share the insights of years of listening to the enigmas and dilemmas of his patients, for whom, he says somewhere, life does not work. So it is for all of us from time to time.

This unique perspective is also seen in his practice of writing. It is not planned, except that he has a routine that he follows. He sets aside every Wednesday to write, while maintaining his other profession of therapist. He writes only what pleases him, and is not concerned to persuade or badger or entertain. He claims that the topic of each of his essays or talks is formed in response to and at the moment of the demand. It is, in its own way, his mirror of his patients talking out loud, not now as the patient but with a kind of free association of the mind of a very literate and cultured psychoanalyst.

It is this quality of his writing as a free experiment that I most admire; a release of the mind to think on the page; to think freely with compassionate attention to an audience, connected by an unspoken background belief that we do not share stories but do share the same endeavour to share stories; but without wanting to force himself into an invented image of the public or marketers. The advice on how to write, how to write to go sane, that began this post is a practice that I will bring to bear on my own writing, with a different professional background, requiring suspension of a whole different set of restrictions on speaking freely.

Gathering Flowers of the Mind

25 July 2016

This morning I pulled down from my bookshelf a cardboard box that contains a hundred or more index cards on which I had written in the 1980’s and 1990’s, back before personal computers, when I was a student. On each card I had transcribed a quotation drawn from my reading. This old habit is like gathering flowers for the mind, and the sewing together of wisdom or insight or simply perceptive observations from writers of the canon has long been a foundation of the essay genre.

Montaigne’s essays after all are patchworks of the classical authors. I open the complete essays at a random page, and there in the first two paragraphs of Of not Communicating One’s Glory, I see Montaigne quoting a verse by Tasso, who I confess I do not know, and writing, For as Cicero says, even those who combat it [the concern for reputation and glory] still want the books that they write about it to bear their name on the title page, and want to become glorious for having despised glory.

These cards remind me of what I have striven to be, a custodian of a cultural inheritance, a poet in destitute times, a prophet of the banished. I shuffle through the names – Arendt, Adorno, Heidegger, René Char, Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Beckett, Norman Brown, Barthes, Wallace Stevens, Weber, Schiller, Kafka and more. For years I reached for the titans in my mind; I sought to scale my mind’s mountains, cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed (Hopkins). Did it bring me anything but knowing I had sought the summit? These cards are my souvenirs, my pressed wildflowers of those long hours of walking into maelstroms of black thoughts and light-less uncertainty.

I find from Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education (letter 6):

Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of his humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his knowledge.

So long I have sought transcendence of that petty imprint, the husk I have known I have lived in, with the disappointment of not finding a way to make a living in accordance with my deepest humanity, in this infinite conversation, whose ghosts and night whispers I have recorded on these cards. And this curse of being adrift in the world of work in a way that wars with my spirit I find annotated from Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burned. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become a housing as hard as steel [or an iron cage].

There I find myself and my struggles again in the summoning of the irresistible force that took me far from the life of the mind and the way of life I most love. There in the hint of dark prophecy – ‘when the last ton of fossilised coal is burned’ – I see my own troubled relationship with our times, driven by both an ethic of responsibility to act in the world, not merely to paint word pictures of it, and a deep unease with the people and preoccupations of corporations and contemporary governments.

I read Arendt’s musing on whether political traditions exert their force most powerfully on human minds when the living force of the tradition has died, and people can no longer even think to rebel against it. And I wonder how I can be a vessel for a more vital tradition, a tradition of political thought that honours the ordinary virtues of governing well, if only I allow all that I have been to flow through me and become all that I might be.

And then, at last, I remember Mikhail Bakhtin, and his sense of the carnivalesque and the dialogic, and his words, from Speech Genres and other essays, may best complete this glimpse of recovery of the imagination and of the narrative of my life:

There is neither a first word nor a last word. The contexts of dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and the most distant future. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest past will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue. At any present moment of the dialogue there are great masses of forgotten meanings, but these will be recalled again at a given moment in the dialogue’s later course when it will be given new life. For nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival.

When will be my homecoming festival? Beyond the flames and ash of the burning archive?

Allusiveness

11 August 2016

When I used to play World of Warcraft – happy nights, even if not the best for my writing – I would name all of my characters by an allusion. So, I named a night elf priest, Paracelself (Paracelsus was taken); another character, Minnerva, and two historical figures wandered through Azeroth, False Dmitri, the pretender tsar of early 17th century Russia, and Possevino, the Jesuit priest whose mission to Moscow in 1582 encountered Tsar Ivan IV (groznyi), as he wailed in grief at the murder of his son. I even created a guild, Allusions of Azeroth, to gather my names and legends together. I played the game as a form of literary invention, with these tokens of belonging to an infinite conversation wandering the alternative universe in search of seeking itself.

So too, in both reading and writing, I enjoy the webs of significance that allusions weave. Memorising poetry heightens this pleasure, and fills my head with echoes and notes of humanity’s great incantations. The more poems you know by heart, the more common the pleasure. So yesterday, as I learnt by heart Shelley’s Ozymandias, I found the source of one of Fernández-Armesto’s chapter titles in Civilizations, `lone and level sands’. Fernández-Armesto delights in his allusions, defying his tormented editors, but showing greater respect to his readers.

Allusiveness is a more light-footed dance than dull pedantry, which prefers to bore, rather than banter. It is more than ceaseless quotation, and requires a more versatile repertoire. Reading Bloom’s Anatomy of Influence, I discover a typology of this lifeblood of literature, borrowed in turn from Hollander’s Figure of Echo (itself an allusion):

Hollander avoids distinguishing between intended and what I might call unruly allusions, and divides allusion in Milton and after into five types of echo: acoustical, allegorical, schematic, metaphorical, and metaleptic, illuminating this last mode with a marvelous excursus upon Angus Fletcher’s trope of transumption, which I tend to call the Galileo syndrome.

This last mode means the use of a figure of speech in a new context – and is this not a favoured device in entitling a blog post? – and shows how allusion need not only be the preserve of the erudite and the bookish. It is a game we all can play. It is life in literature. It is the great chain of being revealed in language.

Coming Back Late from the Hyacinth Garden

August 2016

Is there a muse more poorly treated in modern culture than Clio?

We forget. We lose the art of telling the stories of history in all their intricacy. We seek to judge and condemn, identify and parade, rather than understand and look at the ruins with curiosity. We raid the same old valley of stories from Western civilization over and over, like George Martin ransacking the War of the Roses, and neglect the greener fields on the other side of the valley. Even the names of Clio and her sister Muses have become brands for more commerce, more advertising awards.

Sure there are exceptions. Inga Clendinnen and Felipe Fernández-Armesto are just two historians who write in a way that does celebrate Clio. But perhaps we should not be surprised. Life, even in the mythos, did not turn out so well for Clio. After offending the goddess of love, she was passed off in some loveless marriage to some mortal king.