'I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly,
I'm crying.
I am the eggman. Oooo.
They are the eggmen. Oooo.
I am the walrus
Goo goo g' joob'
...cohere because the Beatles were alive. There is nothing that you can say or write that does not cohere. And remembering this, again, a poem is like a snake skin not a puzzle. It is sloughed off. And remembering this, that at some level, whatever you say coheres you should relax. Say whatever it is you want to say instead of uselessly worrying about the intrinsic worth of what you say. Pay attention to your craft.
This is why, for many poets, craftsmanship is all. They place no value on what is said and meant because that just is what it is: a good poem is like an object, a and has presence. Lot's of people have lots to say about knowledge, but few have anything to say about that place where knowledge sticks so closely to the marrow.
Before some people read a poem, they want a guarantee of meaning and relevance. They feel they must take a leap of faith. They need to know that there is a puzzle to be unlocked and that it does hide a secret. Some expert comes along to reassure us there are puzzles and an meanings to unlock in the poetry before we take the leap of faith.
But to really unlock the secret of a good poem, in this case, would be to unlock the being of the poet. And the road to another's soul barred to you and I. When one speaks of puzzles then one refers to lesser matters: the inanimate, the dissected, to the conundrum of craftsmanship and culture; time and place, of who knew who and what they ate and the king.
Puzzles unravelled by dashing intellectual gymnasts or psychologists. You lie next to someone and nestle with them, Yin-Yang, psyche-to-psyche and you may fit together somehow - or split apart - but you do not have access to their essence.
Perhaps there is another layer to discover; the layer of personality and personal history. That set of tools and pictures bracketed by memory. In the morning open the box and say. 'Oh. I am this person and I believe this and I like this and know this and feel this.' This, of course is not being at all; it is the forward wake of memory.
And if I penetrate this layer in a poem then perhaps I really will be disappointed. Do I really want to discover the detritus of T. S. Eliot's life. I prefer his doubt and angst and experienced questioning. I like the snakey skin of his being, but detest his anti-semitism.
To have the puzzle of Eliot's personality and personal history rolled up into a ball only to have to say No, sorry, no thanks, that's not it at all. Give me his poems instead, and his literary criticism.
Or to find that in finding the key that unlocks the door to Ode to Autumn I have to keep company with Keats and his sputum and listen to his youthful opinions.
Personality and personal history are the forward wake of memory.
A really good poem is the sloughed off skin of a snake. Less than a year ago we found a black Mamba skin in our garage. It was warm and delicate. It was slippery and lacy at the same time, and it still held something of the form of the snake.
I phoned the neighbours. 'What should we do? There's a black mamba nest in the garage somewhere.' 'There's nothing you can do, they said. Nothing. Nothing. Just put the snakeskin in the bathroom and admire it when you brush your teeth.'
A really good poem should be slippery and lacy to the touch and it should take the form of a snake. It should cause you to be alert and to look thoughtfully into shadows.
A childhood friend of mine is an artist: Simon. A decade ago, in Mexico, he showed me pictures of his paintings. They were of large interlocking earthworms painted in homemade colours: ochres, browns and reds.
'I sold that one,' he said, 'to one of the Rothschilds', and laughed. 'But I don't know what he sees in them. The mess. My psychological leavings. But he seemed to like them and wanted to pay for them, so good luck to him.'
One needs to cross cultures before one can understand why the idea of the independent semantic truth of poetry is a false trail. One needs to study pragmatics, where American philosophy easily trumps British empiricism. Nevertheless, though we can't rely on universals, we can still rely on our shared experience and shared humanity.
I always thought The Glass Bead Game was an interesting book, but I never thought Castalia existed. The name was obviously derived from Castel Gandolfo. But it did exist, and might still do so.
A master of the Kabbala, a person that I travelled far to see last year, was a student in a school based on the idea of The Glass Bead Game.
Poetry would make sense then. Poetry as the most condensed form in the game of shared meaning as understood by humans makes sense. The philosopher Heidegger, also a fascist, ended up believing that poetry was the sina qua non of human culture.
There are counter examples. Dryden's version of Virgil's Aeneid tightens the Aeneid into a 17th century poetic stricture. The versification makes it more difficult to appreciate. The Aeneid is easier to read in a reverential prose translation.
The only place a poem can cohere is in ontology, in the poets being, even if it is written in jest; even if it words were written because they just rhymed or sounded fresh and sonorous. The nonsense of the Beatles's lines...