Every year when May comes around I think of May, a damsel with whom I was once closely intimate, entwined and complicated. I can (surprisingly for me) remember what she looked like. I can remember what she smelled like. I can remember how she would cook belly pork and peppers in soy sauce and white wine, telling me that it was a favourite dish of her mother’s, who was from Hong Kong and ran a Chinese takeaway in Bradford with an iron fist and a cheery smile. When I think of May I have a tendency to become lyrical, and in order to forget about her for another year I usually sink a bottle of the best port and drink myself comatose. I am not proud of this, and really ought to get a better grip of myself, but even I should be allowed an annual moment of weakness, even I, a gentleman of genius.
Speaking of my genius – a pastime of which I never tire – in the course of ferreting among my dusty archives while trying to gather together gems for the mooted publication of my “Collected Poems”, I came across a folder labelled “Confusionism”, which brought back a veritable trickle of memories. “Confusionism” was a brand of poetry I invented decades ago, when I was at Oxford, and not going to lectures or seminars or tutorials or, in fact, to anywhere much at all. The essence of “Confusionism” was very simple: all you had to do to create a Confusionist poem was to take a chunk of somebody else’s poetry and jumble the words up to make something else. What you made didn’t have to make sense. In fact, not making sense was very important, because not only were you confusing the order of the original words, you were confusing the reader, too. Here’s an example:
DREAMY THE PEDLAR
a merry what there sigh you sell were the
cost the shakes crown a passing would
down you buy crier ghosts to dreams
there rung if and would what fresh bell
sad buy light tell to leaf and that sell were
if from some only bell life’s rose to some
The process, which was idiotically simple, was to write out the original words, cut them up into individual bits of paper, put them in a bag, give it a good shake, and then bring them out one by one at random and write them down, and that was the new poem. I told you it was genius, and I am pretty sure that at the time I thought it was, and the folder had about 50 of these unpleasant poems. It was not genius, and perhaps is my only poetic failure. None of them will appear in my “Collected Poems”, because I have torn them up and given them to Jethro to help with his next bonfire. The idea (which a lot of so-called experimental poets cling to for dear life) that you can just bung words down in any old order and let the reader make what they will of it all may be intellectually justifiable on the grounds that the mind will make sense of whatever is put in front of it, but as Cook often says when she accidentally overhears Melvyn Bragg on “In Our Time” on Radio 4, “Where’s the pleasure in it?”
Speaking of Cook, I might mention that, somewhat late in the day, she has come up with a marvellous way of cooking a salmon fillet, so that instead of the thing turning up on one’s plate a bit overdone, dry, and rather flabby, the skin is instead nicely charred and beautifully crispy, and the “meat” is moist and succulent. I do not know how she does it, and do not care, as long as she does it again, and again. I think she said something about the frying pan, but I was not really listening.
Apropos of nothing at all, I have come across in Montaigne an idea that was apparently held by many in the past, which is that if you end up in Hell it is only for a certain amount of time. Plato, I think it was, who held that after a hundred years you would go to Heaven, having in effect suffered enough. Seems fair. By that reckoning, it was believed that everyone eventually would get to Heaven. I’m not sure when they threw the idea out of the window. It does not matter a jot, of course, because neither Heaven nor Hell exists. Actually, I think I probably spend too much time copying out chunks of the great Michel, but I do not care. He is worth the ink, and he can even make semen interesting:
Pythagoras said that our semen is the foam of our purest blood; Plato, a liquid draining
from the marrow of the spinal column (supporting this with the argument that our
backs are the first of our members to feel tired when we are on the job); Alcmeon says
becomes troubled when they work immoderately at that particular exercise); for
Democritus it is a substance extracted from the whole mass of the body; for Epicurus, a
substance extracted from the soul as well as from the body; for Aristotle, the final
excretion drawn from the nutriment of blood which spreads through all our limbs; for
others it is concocted blood, digested by heat in the testicles – because extreme
exertions can make us ejaculate drops of blood: there may be a little more probability
here if, that is, any probability at all can be drawn from confusion so infinite.
How does this semen achieve its purpose? Opinions are as numerous and as
contradictory. Aristotle and Democritus hold that women have no semen, but only a
it plays no role in generation. Galen, on the contrary, and those who follow him assert
that generation can only occur when semen from male and female come into contact.”
Speaking of semen, I received a poetry magazine in the post today – “Lack of Parental Guidance”, which is a stupid name for a poetry magazine – and was rather concerned to read a couple of poems by someone I know that are worryingly similar to pieces of my own that I know for sure that person has read and expressed admiration for. This is further proof, if proof were needed, that the literary world is chock full of people for whom “arsehole” is too kind a description.
Before I sign off, I might mention that I was reminded today that local elections are taking place this week. A chinless worm from the Conservative Party came calling, with a view to securing my support and vote. I have a strategy when such people turn up: I ask them to wait a moment, then return a few moments later with my shotgun. It is amusing to see how fast they scamper away.
,
James Henderson
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