Photo: Cover artwork of 'After You Were, I Am'.
After You Were, I Am
By Camille Ralphs
Camille Ralphs is clairaudient. Like a necromancer, she conjures the voices of our tragic ancestors. In her long poem, ‘Malkin: An Ellegy in 14 Spels’, the defeated, the dishonoured, the hounded and harassed step forward and speak across the ravages of time, and the wasteland, too, of abandoned dialects and forgotten words. Here’s one Isabel Robey, her love lost, misunderstood, accused of witchcraft in 1612, and running to save her neck – haring off, as witches do, naked into the forest:
As
I
listen:
th wind
sinx a bhilllowing fist in th trees
the insects
are shrill in my eers
away
fr m my cl thes and my dr pped
Os
of love I
breakneck
harebrained
flee – !
But there was no sanctuary for witches back then – they’re on Pendle Hill in 1612, too early for Fox’s friendly vision (1652), too early for his cutting-edge voice, and the listening service which is Meeting for Worship. Hear them return, ‘flaygrant, ignerant tongues’, flickering candle flames at a poor woman’s Pentecost: ‘For when I gave my Jennet lynes | to summon drink’, says Elizabeth Device, praying for rain, ‘she marveled that | out back, the first rain clankd | sweet in th trof like a dog’s barcking’.
Keep an eye, however, on Jennet Device. She may have misheard the rain charm (the, er, spell, shall we say?), she may have been drawn to the authority of different voices, spelling (in fact) doom for her mother and neighbours. But be comforted, as our poet informs us in a wry (and inspiring) ‘Note on Spelling’: when we spell as we will, we may achieve a ‘lexical alchemy’ – ‘an opening or shattering of doors, within and between words’, the shock of dissonance and dissidence (God bless us), ‘an expression of identity and humanity’. This is freedom of speech properly understood – not an entitled licence to say any old thing, however offensive or disingenuous, but the freedom intrinsic to truthful speaking in the face of oppression. Early Quakers too, accused of witchery or popery, made free with defiant speech of a powerless and peaceable divinity in the face of terminally reduced circumstances. Freethinking, indeed.
This is an extraordinary collection of posttheistic lyrics, in which ‘charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world’ – ‘ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee’.
It’s almost all set and sentenced pre-Quaker, though two moderns both born in 1886 speak up too in her ‘Book of Common Prayers’: John Baillie (a Scottish theologian who died in 1960), and Margaret Cropper (died in 1980) – a Quaker.
Margaret Cropper isn’t mentioned in Quaker faith & practice, nor will you find her in the Quaker anthology A Speaking Silence. But Camille Ralphs selects Cropper’s hymn ‘Father, behold thy child’ for creative revision in this medley of sanctity and sacrilege, profanity and piety. (The helpful, and challenging word ‘posttheistic’ appears in an epigraph Ralphs takes from Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: A translation with commentary.)
It so happens that Cropper was a great friend of (and biographer to) Quaker favourite Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), author of Practical Mysticism (1915). In Camille Ralphs’ revisioning, Margaret Cropper sings for her twenty-first century supper alongside George Herbert, Rumi, Loyola, John Donne, and Francis of Assisi. What tune can they sing when all’s apparently been said and done and there’s no creed any more to speak of? Does truth still set us free?
Ralphs gives our luminaries a hint in a bookish epigraph (from the coptic Gospel of Thomas): ‘What you are waiting for has already come, but you do not see it.’ OK, let’s see. A post-modern George Herbert duly steps forward, re-thinking his apostrophic poem ‘The Call’:
Come, my Costume Play, my I Will Yes, my Organ Note,
Such a Costume Play as none can dress,
Such an I Will Yes as none can quote,
Such an Organ Note as plays in yes.
Mechthild of Magdeburg pipes up too for our ecocidal world:
O gush of bushfire, O quintuple denim sea, sun pressing like
a button on us all,
O moon mirabilis, unmirrorable mirrorball, O, you, most
bottomless of wholes.
And Margaret Cropper takes on the current phase of what William Morris (1834-1896) called our plutocratic anarchy, with typically Quaker impertinence and tenacity:
and here I come
O deathless mortgage, O unmanageable manifesto.
Ready or not.
Instead of scepticism and easy scorn for those who’ve maintained our metaphysical condition through the ages, we hear the counter-cultural thrust and pioneering sensibility of all authentic voices addressing the silence and emptiness at the edges of time and space and consciousness. It’s that silence which, Friends believe, calls out the blandishments and sleight-of-hand of the principalities and powers, the heavy weight of the post-truth witchcraft of the modern age. As the Elizabethan magus, John Dee, is heard to mutter in Ralphs’ ‘My Word: from the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee’: ‘My | mind darcs in its waight – a lightless candellabra’.
Despite his oppression, Dee is still able to utter these beautiful lines of original and originating, uncommon prayer:
my Word, still mither I and chace
selflessly after you, although I know you know
I cannot spel.
For this character, too, we can be grateful, disillusioned as he is with all the Elizabethan court has to offer, and longing like George Fox for one who will speak to his condition. He is uncompromising in pursuit (across Europe) of ‘you, Word’, whom the charismatic deceiver, ‘the unruly scryer Edward Kelle’, assures him can be found:
For longs I’ve yeared to know your cleer name sieving
to the cort’s Star Chamber from the chambers of the stars,
inscrutibly. And this man swairs you can be found.
Camille Ralphs prefaces ‘My Word: from the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee’ with a quotation from an essay by the poet Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) on the Oxford English Dictionary (‘Common Weal, Common Woe’) in which Hill examines the shortcomings and inadequacies of etymology and semantics (‘sematology’), finding them imprecise, misleading and unsatisfactory. Hill declares, startlingly, that ‘sematology is a theological dimension’, forever guilty (inadvertently, and despite best intentions) of imperfection, ignorance and self-deceit. John Dee obsessively attempts to get beyond mere common language to the original Word – that ‘Enochian’ language used by Adam before the Fall spoilt everything: ‘there is a language green and æon-deep; Edened’. Ralphs’ Dr Dee loses this faith: ‘Damb Eden, damb grammars of creation’. The scryer’s clairaudience fails.
And yet, poets like Ralphs do take us beyond quotidian, utilitarian language via rhythmic stress and celerity, sonic effects, calibrated silences and misspellings, ingenious parallels, juxtapositions and analogies. All this works to lift, to enliven, and to sublimate words into charms and spells and prayers which stop time, redeem the time, and save our souls. Is that what Geoffrey Hill meant? Sematology is a theological dimension, where brute fact meets Camille Ralphs’ free, really free, expression. Posttheistic clairaudience; a theological dimension not unlike modern Quakerism.
