Comrade Aching

A poet I got into in my undergraduate days was Conrad Aiken. He acted as a mentor to Malcolm Lowry whom I read avidly as well. I haven't focussed on their writing for years. They wrote the kind of work that you have to really immerse yourself in to extract enough meaning for you to truly enjoy them, and even then the meaning you've gathered isn't enough.

Conrad Aiken fascinated me perhaps partly because a lot of his work was about not defining your identity by past experiences, that your memories are merely linguistic constructs which can be unpicked and redefined. I always found this very comforting. Perhaps Aiken tried to contrive this philosophy because of an horrific formative experience that took place when he was a child. His father killed his mother then himself in Aiken's nursery room - Aiken then found their bodies. He about wrote it in his autobiographical essay, Ushant:

"After the desultory early-morning quarrel, came the half-stifled scream, and the sound of his father's voice counting three, and the two loud pistol shots and he tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless, and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever."

Pretty traumatic experience to say the least. It's something that Aiken spent a lifetime trying to get over and, let's face it, he never succeeded. Here's his final poem, written in a Savannah nursing home. It's unfinished so a bit rough and ready, but nevertheless it resonates. It's unavailable in any of his poetical collections but I'm taking it from his Selected Letters:

Death is a toy upon the nursery floor
broken we know that it can hurt no more
and birth, much farther back, begins to seem
like that recurring and delicious dream
of middle age, the twin isles blest
in the Atlantic, where we paused to rest
and saw the sacred people of the west.
Ourselves? But in another time to be?
No, no such luck for such as we.
Angelic beings through and through
heart and mind and stature equal grew
all that they did and said was crystal true
a distant chime
from world invisible and unspeakable
in human prose and rhyme.
Dream, or a vision, we could not stay
and it is lost.
How can old age receive such Pentecost?
And yet, not so.
For no,
we heard the mystics, saw the mysteries,
it is to these
with clouded sight we turn once more
to look at death upon the nursery floor.

During his life he seemed to try to subsume his anguish in dissecting his pain through his poetry, by analysing every last detail of his life experience in words, to distance them from him and then bring them closer, re-contextualised and new:

Surround the thing with phrases, and perceptions;
master it with all that muscle gives
of mastery to mind, - all strengths, all graces,
flexes and hardnesses; the hand, the foot;
quick touch of delight, recoil of disgust;
and the deep anguish too, the profound anguish,
which bursts it giddy phrase. Surround the thing
with the whole body's wisdom, the whole body's
cunning; all that the fingers have found out,
the palm touched of smoothness or roughness;
the face felt, or coolness and stillness;
the eye known, of mystery in darkness;
the ear found in silence.

Surround the thing with words, mark the thing out
passionately, with all your gestures become words,
patiently, with all your caution become words,
your body a single phrase -

And what do you say -?
O simple animal, twisted by simple light -!
do you sell space or time what the thing is?
Or do you tell the 'thing' that it is you!

That poem's from Time in the Rock. I could go on quoting his poetry as I love it, but simply don't have the time. More of his stuff will appear, all in good time!