A F T E R F O R E W O R D
Why Afterforeword? Well, I felt this was a hybrid of a foreword and afterword, coming up with this Germanic-sounding compound as a solution. I also thought so much prose before the body of poetry and art here would deter some readers, while I hope those interested by the foregoing may continue their investigations here. It is also true that the making of Digressions has been in many ways a paradoxical process, not least because in Tristram Shandy, Sterne introduces us to a paradoxical world, reversing many of a reader’s expectations; regarding Tristram Shandy, Horace Walpole wrote “the great humour of which consists in the whole narration always going backwards”, and though its chronology might suggest this from time, its structure is nowhere near as simple as that. Furthermore, the novel itself can be viewed as having risen from the dead, Samuel Johnson famously declaring it deceased in his lifetime: "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last." The corpse went on to show much greater vigour than the doctor and it is healthier than ever today.
Bearing that in mind, where should we begin? You'll notice, should you visit Shandy Hall, a framed and mounted Krauze cartoon from Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books. This shows a copy of Tristram Shandy carved into the shape of a maze, an appropriate emblem for the course of the Digressions project, which began to take its labyrinthine shape at the end of 2013, the Tercentenary of Sterne’s birth. Like Gaul and Yorkshire, Digressions is divided into three parts: poetry, art and prose, appearing both in this book and magazines, on the internet and at exhibitions scheduled for Yorkshire and London, as well as travelling events on a smaller scale which are a mixture of these. To a certain extent, this tripartite division reflects Horace Walpole’s claim that “Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the science of Landscape, will be forever by men of Taste deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn Nature”; although we hope that our Sisters will appeal to women of Taste as well, we couldn’t pretend to be adorning Nature, and certainly not in God’s Own County, as its natives are pleased to call it, where my Gardening will take the form of pointing at neglected places within its landscape in a kind of knock-off John Baldessari exhibition.
I’ve always liked the notion of a ‘riding’ as a measure, an unusually dynamic unit which here and now it puts me in mind Frost’s analogy for a poem’s course as ice riding its own dissolution. Digressions was measured out by the ridings of my string of hobby horses and the melting of forms. The only other place I have personally come across in these islands divided into ridings is Tipperary, where Sterne (and my father) were born and there is an Irish dimension, among many others, to Digressions. Although he himself could display virulent anti-Catholicism and use the adjective ‘Irish’ as a term of abuse in the ecclesiastical and political disputes he became caught up in, it is worth bearing in mind that he lived through the very real Catholic threat of the Jacobite rising under the Young Pretender. There is a very real military dimension to Sterne, a soldier’s son, in his life and work, and it is one that is also reflected in Digressions. On the question of his bigotry, nevertheless, it is important to remember that Sterne spoke out for the victims of the slave trade at a time when it was neither fashionable nor advantageous for him to do so. In 1766, Ignatius Sancho wrote to Sterne asking him to write something against slavery, encouraged by a passage he read in Sterne's sermons, which had recently appeared as The Sermons of Mr Yorick. Sterne replied to Sancho and kept copies of the letters. We will return later to what Sterne wrote responding to this in Tristram Shandy.
A vaguely racist undertone lingers in a popular usage word ‘Irish’ as I am going to invoke it to reclaim it here, meaning quaint, paradoxical, back-to-front, as in the phrase “That’s very Irish of you”, employed when the speaker has uttered something in apparent contradiction of common sense, for example in Mahaffey’s explanation of an ‘Irish bull’ (an expression related to ‘a cock and bull story’) when he said “An Irish bull is always pregnant”. In this peculiar linguistic sense, it could be said that Tristram Shandy is one of the most Irish novels ever written. However, I’d go further in justification of the Irish dimension of Digressions by pointing to Sterne’s real literary influence on significant Irish writers such as James Joyce and Flann O’Brien especially in the latter’s novel The Third Policeman, where hobby horses are updated into bicycles in a world of circular wanderings.
Of course,Tristram Shandy’s influence was felt throughout Europe as well as in the Anglophone countries—in Russia, for example on Pushkin, while the novel’s discovery by the Russian Formalists in the 1920s gave it a new lease of life there. Shklovsky analysed Tristram Shandy as being structured around digressions sabotaging narrative momentum to a principle that he called “retardation” However, I was more particularly taken with the playfulness of one German response to Tristram Shandy, Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, where the composer and author almost out-Shandies Sterne in his crazy inventiveness. In this book, the eponymous feline has written his prose and poetry on the back of what he considers to be waste paper, in fact Johannes Kreisler’s story, in the process confusing and reversing our reading time in that narrative of the archetypal Romantic Kreisler, whose name invokes ‘Kreis’ meaning circle. Murr is even involved in some of the same play of identities shown in Tristram Shandy, for example in Volume VII Chapter 33: “as sure as I am I and you are you—and who are you? said he.—Don’t puzzle me; said I." In Part 1 of The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, he muses, “I then fell into a state that, dividing my Self in a curious way from my Self, yet seemed to be my real self.” Passages like this seem especially contemporary given our modern interrogation of the lyric I and the persistence of the Ego in literary criticism. Sterne carried these games into real life when in London he could move between being Sterne, Tristram and Yorick. This is like a playful version of the fate of thieves in Dante’s Inferno who, because they made no distinction between ‘meum’ and ‘tuum’, lose even their stable egos. The issue of theft brings calls up a very present concern with plagiarism, especially in the world of poetry, by which I don’t mean Détournement, or the use of appropriated texts by Conceptual writers in new ways, but passing off other people’s work as your own to win prizes in competitions or gain publication kudos (a digression I don’t have time to pursue would involve an analysis of gender power relationships in this area and why these kinds of plagiarists seem to be all male, even though they frequently steal women’s writings). Of a very different nature is what lies behind Tristram Shandy’s histrionic denunciation of plagiarism—itself plagiarised from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.
A tune is a hobby horse that can be ridden by lyrics with very different allegiances in a practice we can trace from medieval contrafacta to modern football chants. However, here I am as much concerned with the character of the tune. I wrote an article once for Poetry Ireland Review connecting Irish song styles with the narrative techniques of Sterne, Paul Muldoon and Flann O’Brien, among others, quoting Samuel P. Bayard:
“The English singer’s leaning to relatively straightforward and simple melodic lines is counteracted in Irish tradition by a love of ornament, of multiplying notes, of varying rhythmic patterns by this sort of multiplication. This ornamental tendency gives Irish music a ‘wavering and unemphatic movement’ as opposed to the English preference for the sort of melodic movement that ‘gets somewhere’, while the Irish habit of lingering on certain notes and tones, ‘repeating them before going on to another tone, thus almost impeding the onward course of the melody…dwelling on inconclusive or indecisive scale-tones that do not contribute to resolution or finality in the entire phrase or musical utterance…” For all the world, this sounds very much like Shklovsky’s principle of retardation applied to Irish singing.
Researching Digressions involved consideration of, and discoveries in, not only historical texts, but many at the very forefront of contemporary experimental poetry. A number of authors who have held residencies at Shandy Hall are of international standing in the field of Conceptual writing, such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin and Christian Bök. I could not fail to find Conceptual writing interesting, not least as it appears in part to be a hybrid of art and literature as Sterne frequently referred to what he was doing in Tristram Shandy as “painting”. I decided that if I got the opportunity to do something sustained with Tristram Shandy, I should set up an artist’s mirror opposite my own to multiply the creative reflections that would become available. When Arts Council of England funding made it possible, I immediately thought of Philippa Troutman. I have enjoyed her own work for many years and responded to some of it in my last book Pandorama, which contains a sequence based on her travelling exhibition The Shanties, developed from her research into the lives of the railway navvies and their families, and the horrors they suffered during the building of the Ribblehead Viaduct. Her sense of place was important, as I wanted the real place of Shandy Hall, Coxwold village and its countryside to anchor what I was trying to do in space and time, however those categories might be fluid. Wallace Stevens wrote that we do not live in places but in the descriptions of places and I was keen to incorporate new renditions of locality in Digressions beyond the verbal. However, beyond any notion of her sensitivity place and history, Philippa is a very versatile, contemporary and experimental artist. For example, I quickly saw the value of her cut-ups of Tristram Shandy’s text: apart from being visually interesting, they developed its theme of accident and we called Sortes Shandeanae, ‘Shandean Lots’, on the analogy of ‘Virgilian Lots’, although I don’t recommend it as a predictive tool. In printmaking, she introduced me not only to a great range of techniques, but also to accidents of the process such as ‘foul bite’, where acid strays into affects unintended areas of the metal, full of intellectual reverberations in relation to place and trespass in society and genres of art. A reference in a book I read during this time, Printmaking Today by Jules Heller, seemed particularly relevant:
“The Printmaker is a most peculiar being. He (sic) delights in deferred gratification and in doing what does not come naturally. He takes pleasure in working backward or in opposites: the gesture that produces a line of force moving to the right prints to the left, and vice versa; a deeply engraved trench in a copper or zinc plate prints as a depression in the paper. Left is right. Right is left. Backward is forward. The Printmaker, peculiar as he is, must see at least two sides to every question.”
Philippa also introduced me to suminagashi (‘floating ink’) marbling techniques added new dimensions to my understanding of these processes, which I had some acquaintance with having contributed to Shandy Hall’s The Emblem of My Work exhibition of 2013, inspired by Tristram Shandy’s marbled page. In one style of suminagashi, Japanese court artists sought to let ink on prepared paper immersed in the marbling trough to dissolve and create new patterns on the surface of the liquid, parallel to processes we were engaged in, immersing the text of Tristram Shandy in new media, seeing how its ink drifted smokily, reconstituting itself into new meanings. Alternatively, in the more usual suminagashi technique, where ink is dripped onto the surface of the liquid, its growing enclosed spheres reminded me of the matryoshka worlds of the Ptolemaic cosmic model destroyed by the Wold Newton meteorite, which I will return to shortly. Ptolemy’s tiered and broken worlds also reflected the science fiction Wold Newton Universe created by Philip José Farmer, another new discovery entering the creative mix after I chanced upon his writings. Philippa’s flexibility with techniques and approaches was a perfect foil for me for investigating Sterne’s motley novel in different settings.
Motley, things being various, hybrid and becoming each other in the world I was investigating led me to be particularly struck by a passage in Matthew Sperling’s excellent new book Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words. Interpreting poem 20 of Speech! Speech! where Hill writes “you wriggle so, / old shape-shifter”, Sperling interestingly comments "Language itself, therefore, is the ‘old shape-shifter’". Hill’s Mercian Hymns hadn’t been long published when I started as a student at Leeds University in 1974 where Hill was working at the time and it is one of his collections I have a special affection for as a result. Among other aspects of the book, I liked the way Offa as presiding genius passed through time and space and modes of address, and this was certainly in my mind while writing Digressions, although I was working at a less serious level, in the sense that I wanted a Shandean spirit to permeate the landscape as well as my words.
I read Sperling’s book at the same time as I was studying the ghost stories collected by a monk from Byland Abbey in the Middle Ages, which M.R. James brought to the attention of a wider public at the beginning of the last century. These tales often had Christian morals tacked on to Scandinavian patterns, for the Viking penetration of Yorkshire went very deep indeed, linguistically as well as imaginatively. When I was at Leeds University, its English Department hosted research into the Dialect Atlas of Great Britain, where I learned, for example, as we keep returning to the notion of ‘play’ here, that the Yorkshire word ‘laikin’, meaning playing, was etymologically related to the name of the child’s toy Lego. The terror of the Byland tales reside not so much in what the ghosts do as in the flux of their being, not just from human to animal, but from living matter into inanimate objects, much like the fate of the thief in Dante’s Inferno. In M.R. James’ short story Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance, the suggestion is made that the soul of Humphrey’s damned uncle is transmuted into an Irish yew. For some reason, I identified this yew with the tree that fell in a storm enabling Byland Abbey to be seen from Shandy Hall.
A maze plays a central part in this M.R. James story and planning digressions around Shandy Hall I read about some interesting-sounding local mazes. Alerted by Chris Pearson at Shandy Hall, Philippa and I attempted to visit one of them, Asenby’s Maiden’s Bower. I met Philippa for the Asenby trip in Ripon and took the opportunity to Shandy about in Market Place while I waited for her. In places like that, I see dead people: it's witch-smellers, wife-sellers and Catholic recusants gathered for the disastrous Rising of the North. Appleton’s Butchers is still there, its sausages so gorgeous Naomi Jacob described them as "poems in skins", not to be brutally stabbed by a fork on the frying pan but pierced with a darning needle. This reminded me of Tomcat Murr's description of books with mixed poems and prose, where he opines that the former should be like lumps of bacon in a sausage, to be discovered with a special glee—which only goes to show that this modern fashion of presenting a “sausage” as a collapsed pattie betrays its very essence; the content and the form have a vital interdependence as with a poem, be it subject to Oulipian constraint or the rules governing villanelles.
On arrival at the site of the Asenby maze, located behind the Crab and Lobster pub according to our information, the landlord told me he’d never heard of it, which I found hard to believe. On further investigation outside, as I stumbled about like a lost minotaur looking for its maze, half Irish bull, we discovered the mound on which the maze was supposed to be located was now part of a miniature or ‘crazy golf’ course. Sorry that such a feature of topographical interest had been lost in this way, I comforted myself by remembering that ‘Shandy’ used to mean ‘crazy’ and imagining what Shandean golf might be like, with bunkers including Toby and Trim’s military earthworks and holes missing, in the wrong order, or subject to metaphysical speculation with double entendres about holes being deployed in battalions.
Philippa and I did, however, on another expedition eventually manage to find the City of Troy, coiled on its hillside like a Cumberland sausage, a humble piece of land art with that magnificent, legendary name. Modest though it is, and I understand it to be the smallest such maze in Europe, this turf mandala which never seems to appear on maps is a perfect location for ‘bewilderment’ in Fanny Howe’s sense: a site physically reflecting the spirals of poetry in its structures of repetition and refrain, like Bayard’s Irish music or those ancient recurring spirals Jorn described in his unrealised 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art. The circular mazes of Jerusalem Miles in cathedrals were supposed to replace an actual pilgrimage, but our actual pilgrimages resembled entering the labyrinth of a Jerusalem Mile after we set off from from Leeds on shuttling journeys over the life of Digressions.
Leeds is a paradoxical place in itself, its name sounding a pun full of promise to the seeker while being “completely outside the literary world” according to the former editor of Granta, John Freeman. The architectural historian Patrick Nuttgens titled his 1979 book about the place Leeds: the Back to Front Inside Out Upside Down City and in its opening sentences wrote “The first and most constant problem with the City of Leeds is to find it. There never was a more faceless city or a more deceptive one. It hasn’t a face because it has too many faces, all of them different; it’s a city without logical unity.” Perfect, therefore, as a springboard for launching an investigation into a Shandean world. I’m not a native, and it always has been a focus for immigration, with significant Irish, Caribbean, African and Jewish communities. This has made it a target of prejudice and regarding the last of these groups it has attracted anti-Semitic nicknames which include the Holy City and the Jerusalem of the North—paradoxical abuse, you might think, for an old Puritan town. Leeds’ Jewish communities centred formerly on Chapeltown, and we’d take the Chapeltown Road where live to get to Ripon, Shandy Hall and our other digressions including the City of Troy, a road I found out was made by a blind man, Jack Metcalf. Metcalf was building roads at the same time that Sterne was writing Tristram Shandy, and it seemed significant in itself that a blind man should make the straight road I took to get lost in Sterne’s labyrinthine novel and our network of Digressions from and around Coxwold including the maze of Troy.
After having photographed, made notes on and sketched the City of Troy, we discovered that leaving it is even more difficult than finding it. It is possible to drive north or south from there, not easy to drive east and impossible to drive due west, a bit like a version of Abbott’s Lineland but gathering ancient mythical associations of being cut off from the land of the dead in the direction of the sunset. I’m assuming this difficulty in the roads is something to do with the long-gone railway line; I’d noticed the Coxwold signal-box at the bottom of the village, now there only for ghost trains or “trains of ideas”, as Locke describes them, which complicate so enrichingly the narrative of Tristram Shandy. I felt as if the imaginary train had been conflated with the fiend at the end of Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, which was pursuing me from Troy because, like it, I was too much a creature of the straight line. Film as a medium was much in my mind while working on Digressions, perhaps because of Michael Winterbottom’s achievement in his film A Cock and Bull Story, a paradoxically successful version of what most people would regard as the essentially unfilmable Tristram Shandy achieved by foregrounding those very problems, among other means. I’ve often thought that film is closer to poetry than prose as both rely on successions of images, while the non-Shandean novel, in Eudora Welty’s phrase must attend to the mechanics of getting people in and out of rooms. Rebecca Solnit, in another book I recommend, her A Field Guide to Getting Lost, uses the physical image of film-strip for an Ariadne thread, especially apposite in this context, while Patrick Keiller in The View From The Train writes “Films even physically resemble railway tracks - long, parallel sided strips divided laterally by frame lines and perforations, as is the railway by sleepers.” Straight roads and railway tracks are what busy city people want, not to mention developing capitalism—Patrick Keiller has made the Wold Newton Meteorite a harbinger of deracinated mobile labour exploited through the Speenhamland System. This puts me in mind of how in Das Kapital Marx’s biographer Francis Wheen sees the influence of Sterne, making that work, like Tristram Shandy, “full of systems and syllogisms, paradoxes and metaphysics, theories and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical tomfoolery.”
I quoted Wallace Stevens earlier and here invoke his definition “A poem is a meteor”. I think his idea was that they consume themselves with their own fire, rather like Frost’s ice poem which rides its own melting that I invoked earlier. If part of them make it to Earth, they become even more laden with symbolism—Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s grail was a meteorite, for example. The area around Shandy Hall is historically rich with them and meteorites have a particular appeal now to artists such as Cornelia Parker and Patrick Keiller. When I had the opportunity to discuss them with Cornelia Parker, she mentioned her ambition to relaunch one into space, which seems an appropriately paradoxical and Shandean thing to do. At a literally more mundane level, Patrick Keiller included the Wold Cottage Stone in his Robinson Institute in the context already mentioned, but it has always had a particularly Shandean significance for me. I first came across it, as paradigm-shattering in its scientific sphere as Tristram Shandy was in literature, in the course of reading Roger Osborne’s A Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology. Osborne describes how it landed on the grounds of Edward Topham in Wold Newton, and quotes Topham’s letter to the Oracle newspaper published on 12th February 1796:
“At Bridlington, and at different villages, sounds were heard in the air, which the inhabitants took to be the noise of guns at sea; but at two adjoining villages, the noise was so distinct of something singular passing through the air towards my habitation, that five or six people came up to see if anything extraordinary had happened to my house or grounds.
In burying itself in the earth it threw up a greater quantity of soil than a shell would, and to a much greater extent. When the labourer recovered from the extreme alarm into which the descent of such a Stone had thrown him, his first description was, “that the clouds opened as it fell, and he thought HEAVEN and EARTH were coming together!”
Edward Topham is only one of the fascinating characters I stumbled upon during the Digressions project. He was the son of the model for Sterne’s Didius, Francis Topham, who first propelled the author into a literary career with his The Adventures of a Watch-Coat (Didius also appears in Tristram Shandy) directed at Francis, who had attempted to secure for Edward the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest at York. The boy Edward led the famous 1768 boys’ revolt at Eton but later, joining the army, he earned the gratitude of the King by clearing Parliament Square during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. He later founded the most scurrilous and successful paper of his day, The World, during his tenure there establishing the limits of the laws of libel, setting the precedent that the dead cannot be libelled. Returning to Yorkshire as a magistrate, he took up dog-racing and bred one of the most famous greyhounds in history, Snowball—with appropriate paradox for our theme, a black dog.
However, getting back to the significance of his meteorite, it far transcends the literary, requiring a new scientific understanding of such phenomena: Humphry Davy’s address on taking the chair for his first ordinary meeting of the Royal Society as President includes the passage on “meteors which, in passing through our atmosphere, throw down showers of stones; for it cannot be doubted that they belong to the heavens, and that they are not fortuitous or atmospheric formations”, it having previously been imagined that such astronomical traffic was impossible due to the legacy of a Ptolemaic model of our solar system and that meteorites were the result of volcanic eruptions sending matter into the atmosphere that then fell back to earth. This paradigm shift necessitated considerable adjustment in some quarters, Thomas Jefferson supposedly declaring “It is easier to believe that Yankee professors would lie rather than that stones would fall from Heaven.” The phenomenon stirred later American imaginations though as the event founded a whole school of US science fiction writing, the Wold Newton Family centred around the work of Philip José Farmer. Farmer’s conceit was that passing coach passengers included pregnant women, radioactively affected by the meteorite at the genetic level so their descendants ultimately included the likes of Sherlock Holmes’ adversary Moriarty, H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller, Allan Quatermain, Doc Savage, Tarzan, Raffles, and Leopold Bloom—not the only appearance of Joyce in Farmer’s oeuvre: his 1967 novella, Riders of the Purple Wage is a pastiche of Finnegans Wake. That Farmer is keen on unlikely crossover figures can be deduced from the title of another of his books, Jesus on Mars. I knew I should maintain a sensitivity to the Christian dimensions of Sterne’s work but I hadn’t imagined it would take me to the Red Planet.
Having found so much of interest flowing from the Wold Newton Meteorite, a trip to Byland Abbey and the nearby Kilburn White Horse with Philippa was also attractive because of the history of the Hambleton Meteorite, a pallasite discovered near there in 2005, in relation to which I was very interested to come across a widely-held view now that it is a remnant of the Great Meteor of 1783, the year of a major edition of Sterne’s life and works (there is a copy in Shandy Hall library). One unlikely report of the Great Meteor contained in a contemporary issue of The London Magazine concerns an officer’s account as seen from his warship moored off Ireland, which mentions it stopping and reversing before continuing its former course, a very Sternean thing for it to do. So I Shandied about in Google for 1783 to see what other Sternean things were going on and discovered it to be the year of a stage version of Tristram Shandy as ‘a bagatelle in two acts’. This adaptation was by the Dublin barrister Leonard McNally, and “a sentimental and jingoistic celebration of British military might” according to Oakley in A Culture of Mimicry. McNally’s legal writings fixed the standard of criminal prosecution at beyond reasonable doubt; as well as a playwright, he was a lyricist most famous for The Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill. McNally was a founder member of the United Irishmen, betraying them systematically to the Crown at every stage through to offering to act as defence counsel for its leaders after the failure of the 1798 Rising (which McNally did so much to bring about), ensuring their convictions by secretly cooperating with the prosecution. I contacted Donald MacRaild, Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Ulster, about McNally, who as you can imagine is neither popular with the Irish or the English, to try and gain some insight into his motives. Money, Donald said. Britain was one of the richest countries in the world then and paid vast sums in today’s terms to maintain its security on its vulnerable Irish flank. I didn’t have more time on the Digressions project to digress further into the story McNally, but there is surely room for other writers to do so. Famous in his day, vilified by all sides since his treachery emerged after his death, McNally’s star fell into complete obscurity.
That Sterne’s name puns on the German for star was ingeniously deployed by contributors to Shandy Hall’s Black Page exhibition of 2009, which reminded me of an old love poem with the lines “Du bist mein Glück, Du bist mein Stern.” ‘Glück’ puts me in mind of how luck, chance, accident and design obsessed Sterne as a religious man whose faith in a divinely-ordained universe is inevitably compromised by their existence, as Fortuna was such a theologically questionable character to the medieval Church. The role of chance in modern art, however, has become something of a fetish. I was always struck by the unlikely story often told about finding a name for dada (its hobby horse meaning already connecting it with Tristram Shandy in my mind) by randomly sliding a knife into a dictionary. The blade’s meteoric intrusion into the world of letters is made in this way to appear part of a grander design than merely thinking up a name or reclaiming an insult, the work of an artistic Blind Watchmaker, or more appropriately in the Shandean universe, a Blind Clockmaker.
At Leeds University, one of my art lecturers was Sir Lawrence Gowing, who announced authoritatively in a lecture on Alexander Cozens of the famous blot-and-paper-crumpling landscape technique that there is no such thing as chance in art: Cozens’ crumpling of paper was analogous to the folding of geological strata while the apparently random fall of ink within it recreated the fall of light and shadow on and from rock. Nevertheless, I thought, isn’t there a genuine element of chance brought about by the resistance of the medium if nothing else? Every poet knows the feeling that she is only being allowed to take particular directions with her writing because of the nature of the language, especially when trying to box the shadows of rhyme: “Words mean something because they always threaten to sound like something else” James Longenbach wrote in The Art of the Poetic Line. The delusion persists that “It rhymes for a reason”, as the saying goes, which it obviously doesn't, though a poet may work hard to give the impression that it does. Perhaps the habitual effort to square circles is one of the things that distinguishes the artist from the scientist, although in his old age Thomas Hobbes convinced himself that he had actually managed to achieve this geometrical feat.
Francis Bacon (perhaps coming to mind after thinking of Murr’s comments about sausages) described something like this in an interview: “In my case all painting...is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint.” And again, “All painting is an accident. But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve”
and in a demonstration of the practical artist’s eat-your-cake-and-have-it approach, “I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.” I don’t believe this argument will ever be settled, an aesthetic equivalent of the Arian controversy about the nature of divine precedence within the Trinity, where the terms of the debate eventually become irrelevant. However, I was reading something by Rachel Galvin in The Boston Review recently where she referred to “Oulipian writers who are anti-Chance”, reminding me of the suspiciously-convenient story of dada obtaining its name from a paper knife slid between the pages of a dictionary. This too seemed to demonstrate Bacon’s desire for a very ordered image brought about by chance, the hobby horse flushed from linguistic cover to be the Pegasus for machine-age artists. But the machine we are mostly ghosts in now is intangible itself: “The Internet is a giant machine that does nothing but generate writing” was a recent Tweet from Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith makes the Internet sound like the Tarot was to Italo Calvino and regards Tweets as Oulipian constraints generating a kind of poetry he calls poetweets. For Raymond Queneau, Oulipo's co-founder, Oulipians are “Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape”, which sounds to me like the attitudes to chance of Bacon and whoever devised the dada story about its name: it should be fairly easy to find your way out of the labyrinth you build yourself after all. Sterne writes about Tristram Shandy as a machine at the beginning of the first chapter of Volume VII, but at a superficial level it appears to be one jury-rigged with bolted-on features back-to-front, made from whatever came to hand as a hedge-carpenter might effect rough and ready repairs from whatever lumber was about.
The internet is the modern writer’s lumber yard, but another writer concerned with the implications of religion has a more negative view of the Internet, which he thinks his absence from enhances serendipity: in his recent Oxford lecture, Geoffrey Hill said “Because I don’t go online in any way, I think and work almost entirely by serendipity. Serendipity works by the rule that the book which is to change your life stands next on the shelf to the book that you had intended to take out from the library, and which as often as not (the book you had wanted I mean) turns out to be a dud. You must envisage me, then, reading and writing from the centre of a small intense radiance of apprehension, a miniature vortex of intuition.” Ironies here include that the lecture is available online, but you know what he means.
In the absence of a better word, I often ended up using ‘desearch’ in talks about the Digressions project to describe the process that led me to McNally, for example: a semi-organised serendipity that you could could still not describe by the more purposeful word research. The book that stands next on the shelf to the book that Geoffrey Hill intends to get but turns out more valuable to him is, nevertheless, on that shelf according to the principles of a non-serendipitous classification system. Some other practice is required to thwart the demons of efficiency; even second hand bookshops can be too organised for such purposes and even some charity bookshops such as Oxfam present their stock in well-ordered sections. I don’t know if Queneau’s rats were in the back of my mind when I decided to buy Nick Mays’ book on the care of fancy rats, a creature I’ve never kept. The National Fancy Rat Society, whose history Mays traces in passing, struck me as such a wonderful example of hobbyhorsicality that I attended one of their events in Bradford. Tremendous love and care was lavished on these rats, which I discovered would laugh when they were tickled, like their owners looking down warmly on them as they did so, putting me in mind of the notion that people are supposed to start resembling their pets in a process analogous to that described by Sterne whereby our prolonged contact with our hobby horses leads to an interchange of natures. Flann O’Brien took this idea further in The Third Policeman through the book’s version of “atomic theory”, with this hybridisation an actual physical process at the molecular level between riders and their bicycles and all this not unlike the idea of joined beings taking place during the ceremonial coronation rite of sexual intercourse between Irish kings and horses Gerald of Wales recounts in his Topographica Hibernica, which I need hardly say is historically controversial, especially in Ireland. Nevertheless, when I was working on a commission to update the fourteenth century Fauvel cycle for the Clerks Group about the usurping horse-king in a world turned upside-down by Dame Fortuna’s wheel, I was fascinated to read Emma Dillon in her Medieval Music-Making and the ‘Roman de Fauvel’ how in handling its manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, “as flesh meets flesh, skin mingles with skin...readers, also, literally, become part of the object.” In this case it is human skin touching the animal skin of medieval vellum.
Touching the skins of rats to make them laugh or, to make me laugh again, the calfskin binding of 1783 Sterne’s Life and Works in the Shandy Hall library (the year of the Great Meteor); touching the skin of an Appleton’s sausage, testing the poetry inside—but these actions touch on abuse too: harm is done to creatures routinely on an industrial scale to provide us with food, especially fast food. Such considerations led to my wife and son to become vegetarians and me to do my best in that direction as well. Harm is done to humans too, historically, treating them like animals for reasons that are no more than skin deep or to do with gender. I alluded at the beginning of this to Sterne’s opposition to slavery, and there is an affecting episode in Tristram Shandy, written in response to the letter from Ignatius Sancho where the abuse of a black serving girl who works in a sausage shop is described, and the following exchange between Trim and Uncle Toby takes place:
“Why then, an’ please your honour, is a black wench to be used worse than a white
one?
I can give no reason, said my Uncle Toby—
—Only, cried the corporal, shaking his head, because she has no one to stand up for her.”
This still has the power to stop the reader in her tracks as it did me when I first read the book: it alerts us to a moral dimension to our consumption. The Slow Food movement emerged in the 1980s as a critique of Western society, growing from opposition to McDonald’s, and then everything that chain symbolised. Slow Reading emerged from this, although some trace the phrase back to Nietzsche, who referred to himself as a teacher of slow reading. In a 2009 Guardian article, Nick Laird stated “To read poetry now is to be part of a Slow Language Movement.” Books like Tristram Shandy require us to read slowly, never demonically straight, but taking in its byways: following Sterne is a paradoxical pun on his name in itself about chasing tails and often reminded me of something Blake wrote, “Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads, without improvement, are roads of Genius.”
Sometimes the language in Tristram Shandy doesn’t move at all but disappears, as in its missing chapters, black and marbled pages, the murdered darling of the coach journey or when, to describe the beauty of Widow Wadman, the readers’ imaginations are directly commissioned by Sterne with a blank page: “paint her to your own mind” which calls to my mind Botticelli’s climactic blank page for his illustrations to The Divine Comedy. The white space we have arrived at isn’t Dante’s ‘candida rosa’ but Yorkshire’s White Rose, whose culture and country we invite you to enjoy, to “Shandy about” in, to use Sterne’s phrase; a strange land of tangled songlines, its anthem, On Ilkla Moor Baht’at, seeming to invoke the worms of Hamlet as Tristram Shandy constantly invokes this play about the fatal retardation of its hero’s actions. While Yorick lives again for Sterne, Hamlet dies uttering “The rest is silence” just before the thunderous applause of audiences everywhere throughout time. The rest is nearly silence here too: our final Yorkshire paradox is to welcome you by saying get lost. Digressions is our record of just how rewarding a process that can be.
