Photo: The cover art of Fourth & Walnut.
Fourth & Walnut
By Jeremy Over
Jeremy Over won first prize in the 2002 BBC Wildlife Poetry Competition with ‘Whip Tim Kelly’, from the curiously-titled Deceiving Wild Creatures. This is how it starts:
Bipple-be-witsy-diddle
One, two, three, four, six,
Qu’est ce qu’il dit?
Ra-vi-ol-i
Qu’est ce qu’il dit?
Po-ta-to chip
You can see how this – for the birds, right? – might get a bit moreish.
Fourth & Walnut is moreish too. Over has been reading the famous mystical monk, Thomas Merton (1915-1968). He could have stolen the title of Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) for this collection, couldn’t he? In that book, Merton laments the loss of mystical experience and regrets the ‘flight from being into verbalism, mathematics, and rationalization’. Instead, Over’s title refers to Merton’s description of the scene of an epiphany in Louisville, Kentucky. Fourth & Walnut is also the name of a junction in Louisville, where there is now a memorial to Merton.
It appears that Merton’s mother, who died when Merton was only six years old, was an artist and something of a Quaker. In Merton's autobiography he narrates that ‘One Sunday I went to the Quaker meeting house in Flushing [New York], where Mother had once sat and meditated with the Friends.’ He didn’t get much out of it, apparently, sad to say – too ‘commonplace’ for him. And he goes on, rather satirically, ‘when I read the works of William Penn and found them to be about as supernatural as a Montgomery Ward catalogue [a mail-order business] I lost interest in the Quakers.’
Oh, dear. Not enough supernaturalism? Happily, Merton did leave a door open to Quakerism: ‘If I had run across something by Evelyn Underhill it might have been different.’ And well, for Jeremy Over, I rather suspect that, as we’ll see, the commonplace, and that mail-order catalogue – that’s where the good stuff is!
What was Merton’s epiphany, I hear you ask? Well, let’s remember first of all that Merton was not afraid to go where other more earth-bound (non-supernatural?) denizens of modernity will not. Ignoring Wittgenstein’s appeal not to speak of that whereof we cannot speak, he wrote a book entitled Raids on the Unspeakable (1966), and this features in Over’s book. So, brace yourselves: ‘I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.’
No way of telling people? Over thinks otherwise.
Am I digressing? I’m afraid I have to blame Jeremy Over himself for this – the wandering, idling, randomised approach, the mindlessness of hanging around, the embrace of entropy – all this is the cri de coeur of his extraordinary book of levity and, yes, levitation – you’ll find an angelic figure gracing its front cover (see left), and you’ll find ascension too in ‘Reading in the Rain: an Essay’:
So light, lighter and lighter but deeper and
denser blue. Blue laughter rises up to the ceiling at tea time
in the ‘Laughing Gas’ chapter of Mary Poppins. Rises up and
through the ceiling that James Turrell has kindly removed
from his sky space so that, in looking, we may be lifted up
through the roof and healed.
I’m inspired to say this: Jeremy Over’s poetry is, contrary to commonplace expectation, neither irreverent, nor irrelevant, but err-reverent and err-relevant. Let me explain. Over has also been reading James Turrell, who is eighty-two this year, a birthright Quaker and an artist referred to as a ‘master of light’. Over invites us to sit in James Turrell’s Deershelter Skyspace in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Spend a day there, waiting on the light. At ‘17.39’ he’s both mystical and whimsical:
Ill-defined cloud white grey and blue ab-
stract whispering.
Quiet-ish.
Two cheesy wotsits [or other unidentified cereal snack] by
the entrance.
One crushed underfoot.
That’s err-reverent, and err-relevant.
We readers are encouraged, as it happens, to experience this book as a ‘commonplace book’, according to which we might expect to find random and disconnected thoughts, first drafts and errors, lists and quotations. Well, yes to all of those things, but, as if by magic, shapes and structure emerge, observations and wordplay, and readings focussed through five investigative writing projects.
Despite all the mischief and experimentation there’s a serious convincement underlying all this. It’s like William Blake’s poem, to be found in Blake’s own commonplace book (1789-93), a four-line poem going by two different titles, ‘Eternity’ and, (helpfully?) ‘Several Questions Answered’ . You'll probably know it, but here it is:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise’
And this is how Blake makes his appearance in Over’s apparent advice to himself:
And here is William Blake singing to his wife Catherine on his
death bed:
‘He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the wingèd life destroy . . .
But he but who
But he who he who
He who kisses the he but who as the crow flies
Happens to live in -igh –igh--,
In the midst of writing, --an---o--.
Over admits that he has ‘trampled’ clumsily over Blake’s verse here, and later shows that ‘rhinocerotic’ falls from grace are of course inevitable, we being human. (Over makes much of John Tarrant’s book Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Other Zen Koans that Will Save Your Life.) I have to admit here that I’ve practised a bit of ‘erasure’ in the lines I’ve just quoted – Over gives us his address you see, and if you want to go on pilgrimage in search of this master of poetics, persiflage and peroration, well, you’ll have to acquire a copy of the book!
‘Over professes light and lightness, frivolity and joy, fit for the heavy truculent-flatulent odour of these authoritarian times.’
Some Friends will be annoyed with this erasure practice of Jeremy Over’s – he’s been scribbling in library books. Look at this, he’s even boasting about it – borrowing one of W T Stead’s ‘morally improving one-penny “Books for Bairns’”, of all things, and he’s made it unreadable. Its title – Eyes and No Eyes (or the Art of Seeing) – has been reduced, what with all the erasures, to ‘Yes and Yes’. Silly nonsense, you might say. What are things coming to! This is not what ‘borrowing a library book’ is supposed to be about. This is taking the rights of the reader too far.
But I say: ‘Lovely’. Jeremy Over professes light and lightness, frivolity and joy, fit for the heavy truculent-flatulent odour of these authoritarian times. Unbearable lightness of poetry takes on the witless load of populist claptrap. I want (almost) to say that this light-hearted, light-headed vandalism – 'cheerful vandalism' declares the blurb – is the blithe and unhurried and self-possessed ‘Eternity’ of Blake’s fragmentary vision. A poetry of arrival at the skyspace, and several questions answered!
In the meantime,
in downtown Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut,
Thomas Merton is standing still. He thinks ‘There is no way
of telling people that they are all walking around shining like
the sun.’ Perhaps you could try.
