On Thursday, August 21, I'll be giving a lecture about Philip Larkin. We'll read poems like "Church Going," "High Windows," and "Ambulances" as we talk about Larkin as a lens for looking on modernity. Put that way it sounds dry. But any lecture that uses poems that have first lines like "Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three" can't be too lame. Here's the info: http://brooklynbrainery.com/courses/the-poetry-of-philip-larkin-and-the-crisis-of-modernity
Two great videos about “Church Going”:
1 - This is from a BBC program that brought together Larkin and John Betjeman. This is a video dramatization of the poem with Larkin in it. It’s so hard for me to imagine Larkin not finding this hopefully silly….but I’m happy he did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7sDXBLBrvY 2 - Here is Larkin reading the poem “Church Going.” He actually was not a fan of poetry readings. He thought poetry is better appreciated on page where you can better grasp things like line breaks. All the same, this audio is cool: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xluogn_philip-larkin-church-going_creation Church Going -
(from “The Less Deceived”. I've footnoted certain unfamiliar words. For a fantastic summary of the poem, one which explains it in very simple language, go to http://www.shmoop.com/church-going/summary.html Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new- Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce "Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate, and pyx[1] in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; Pick simples[2] for a cancer; or on some Advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort or other will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress[3], sky, A shape less recognizable each week, A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts[4] were? Some ruin-bibber[5], randy for antique, Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff Of gown-and-bands[6] and organ-pipes and myrrh? Or will he be my representative, Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation - marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built This special shell? For, though I've no idea What this accoutred[7] frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. [1] A container that holds the wafer used as the host in communion [2] Medicinal plants or herbs [3] A stone support built against the side of a wall [4] In churches, the rood loft is a display gallery above the rood screen, the piece which often divides off the section of the church reserved for church singers and musicians. [5] A steady drinker, although obviously it’s used here to mean someone with a steady devotion to church ruins (instead of alcohol). [6] Bands are a clergyman’s collars. [7] To “accouter” is “ to clothe or equip, typically in something noticeable or impressive.” Explanation: You never forget your first love. And this was the first Larkin I loved. I read it a few months before graduating college, around the same time I completed my transition from Orthodox Jew to orthodox atheist. Yet even while I was giving up personal religious practice, I still frequently attended religious services. I consistently arrived late to Friday night davening at Hillel, and because I worked multiple mornings a week in a library right next to Memorial Church, I often attended the church’s morning service. I was headed towards a life where I didn’t believe in God, but I still frequently found myself in houses of God. Or as Larkin writes, “Yet stop I did: in fact I often do.” You cherish some poems because they espouse truths you feel deeply and understand well. Others, however, you cherish because they verbalize truths you feel deeply but can’t fully articulate and make sense of. For me, this poem was one of the latter. I read this poem, and suddenly my own actions made a bit more sense to myself. “Church Going” was published in The Less Deceived 1955. Like “Broadcast,” it too is a very autobiographical poem. In a 1981 interview, Larkin explained “It came from the first time I saw a ruined church in Northern Ireland, and I’d never seen a ruined church before - discarded. It shocked me. Now of course it’s commonplace: churches are not so much ruined as turned into bingo-halls, warehouses for the refrigerators or split-level houses for architects.” By the mid 1950s: the church of England was in the process of a long and gradual decline both in numbers and authority to the point where, according to author Callum Brown, modern Britain is one of the most secular societies in history. When Larkin wrote this poem, churches were indeed becoming “A shape less recognizable each week,/ A purpose more obscure.” Larkin had kept a newspaper clipping from the Church Times on May 7, 1954, entitled “Save Our Church week” announcing a campaign for the Historic Churches Preservation Trust. In the clipping, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that over 2000 churches must be helped at once from falling into ruin. Each time I read those lines, I recall a late-night college bullshitting session with a friend who described a future where tour groups will enter a large building and stand in awe and confusion by the unfamiliar images and figures adorning the walls. The tour guide will have to explain, “These buildings are called churches. Thousands of years ago, people worshipped a God named Jesus, and they would come to these buildings to pray.” No specific cultural practice, least of all specific religious practices, lasts forever. They evolve into new forms, still unknown to us. Larkin hated when people called this poem a religious poem. He described it both as a secular poem and a humanist poem. The poem isn’t about the eternal existence of God and divine power. Larkin doesn’t care about Godly concerns. Hell, he didn’t even believe God exists. Rather, Larkin is interested in the basic human compulsion for an order to our lives and how churches long provided that organization to their parishioners. People will always hunger to believe this world is the product more than mere randomness - “Power of some sort will go on/ In games, in riddles, seemingly at random.” - and this poems focuses on the fact that the church’s specific power to offer this power is in decline. What loss does our speaker mourn? The holism the church and religion offered to our life’s events by bringing together “marriage, and birth,/ And death, and thoughts of these.” (This is another great line breaking, with the jump to “And death” signifying the rupture of death to our lives.) Both the poem and Larkin’s correspondence are clear on point. In a letter to Monica Jones in 1954, he explains that his poem is trying to make people see “the church as a place where people came to be serious, were always serious, & all their different forms of seriousness came to be intermingled, so that a christening reminded of a funeral & a funeral of a wedding: nowadays these things happen in different buildings & the marvelous ‘blent air’ of a church is growing rarer….” The church gives a unity to the entropy of life simply by bringing together the different stages of life into one space, and in doing so, when someone attends one event, they naturally reflect about the other events that took place there. Larkin doesn’t mourn the loss of specific church ritual; what was important for him was the unity the building brought to the stages of life. Why was this unity important? Because a house of worship provides people with a place where “our compulsions meet,/ Are recognized, and robed as destinies.” There is a primordial urge shared by almost everyone, a hungering for seriousness and meaning, a desire to clothe ourselves in grander destinies rather than thinking of life as simply kicking it around on earth for a bunch of decades before entering eternal nothingness. Even though the speaker sees churches as declining in popularity, they can still offer a space for pondering the basic existential questions. Indeed, the very act of visiting a church has, for our speaker, led him to consider these stages of life and write about it. But what his visit does not do is provide him with a robe for his destiny. In this poem, as well as others, particularly “Faith Healing,” Larkin sees the destinies offered by religion as mere artifice, akin to a piece of clothing you casually put on after the shower. One of the central crises in Larkin’s poetry is the fact, seemingly obvious to him, that the earth, so wonderful and full of moments of bliss, is ultimately void, a sentiment many of his readers share. The church used to lead us to think otherwise, but with the decline of organized religion, the sense of void is inescapable. This brings us back to those crucial opening lines of the 3rd stanza. A sense of loss permeates the poem. That’s what moved me the first time I read, and it’s why this poem moves me still. I too feel on the personal level the loss Larkin describes for society. I once myself turned to houses of worship and religion to give my life a holism and destiny. I too know the “hunger…to be more serious” and the sense of loss when you realize that the house of God cannot solve your own existential angst. Most importantly though, Larkin also manages to capture the continued paradox for myself that “It pleases me to stand in silence here” and the fact that, bereft of faith, I find it oddly soothing to still come to houses of worship so full of human longing. Let’s use “Broadcast” to think about audio technology and the ways in which electronic devices can both isolate people as well as bring them together.
The mass proliferation of technology that offering easy access to music began in the late 1800s. According to Mark Coleman’s book Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money, before the 20th century, listening to music was “a rare treat…. a temporal, fleeting experience.” The first widely popular form of recorded music was the phonograph. It was invented in 1877, and and their mass productions begins in the 1890s. Radio broadcasting began in England in the 1920s, and the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded in 1922. Radio rapidly grew in popularity, and by 1933, half the households in Britain had a radio. Before the proliferation of television, radio was the dominant home entertainment medium, for many the primary way they listened to music and received the news. Live music proved a popular choice for early radio stations because it offered better sound quality of live music than much of the available recorded music. Technology plays a crucial role in our poem, as the radio is the object driving the speaker’s emotions. The radio has a contradictory role in our poem. On the one hand, it links the speaker with his love, letting him listen to the same sounds she is hearing live in a concert hall far away. At the same time, listening to the concert alone in his living room only intensifies his isolation. We can frame this divide as a distinction between the material exterior and the psychological interior. The radio itself, the material device with its “glowing wavebands” that offer “rabid storms of chording” give the speaker a tangible way to connect to his lover, and yet, psychologically, our particular speaker is saddened by the one-sidedness of his connection. Much recent thinking about music and recording devices highlights its isolating role. For example, “the Walkman Effect,” a term coined in 1984, refers to the way music listened to via headphones gives people increased control over their aural environment, providing them with increased power to ignore external stimuli. While Walkmen might seem obviously isolating, they were not perceived that way originally. Interestingly, as described in the Wikipedia article on the topic, “When Sony released the first Walkmans, they featured two headphone jacks and a "talk button." When pressed, this button activated a microphone and lowered the volume to enable those listening to have a conversation without removing their headphones. Sony Chairman Akio Morita added these features to the design for fear the technology would be isolating. Though he thought it would be considered rude for one person to be listening to his music in isolation people bought their own units rather than share and these features were removed for later models.” Today, smart phones are often scorned as cloistering devices, and the conventional wisdom is that, when people use these devices at at a live performance, the phones are taking people’s consciousness away from the event at hand. Smart phones are ubiquitous, and at any live concert I attend these days, it seems like at almost any given moment 1/3rd of the audience is recording the show on a smart phone. Seen from this disapproving perspective, technological mediation is inherently anti-social and anti-experiential, as if, by watching a song through your phone’s screen, you’re not really experiencing the concert. Yet, I increasingly find this viewpoint close-minded (something that might surprise my friends who never cease to make fun of the fact I prefer a flip phone). I’m reminded of the time I asked a professor of mine what he thought about the fact that children use irregular vocabulary and grammar when texting, and I assumed this British senior citizen would undoubtedly rage against the bastardization of standard English. So imagine my surprise when he told me that he found these new forms of communication delightful and exciting, and, in fact, he was enthusiastic that kids were finding new ways of expressing themselves. I have come around to thinking the same of smart phones. Their ubiquity now give us new shared social practices and new means of collectively experiencing an event. One definition of ritual is “a series of actions or type of behavior regularly and invariably followed by someone” and, with that as our definition, we can reliably say smartphones give us new social rituals. Evidence A: a recent performance by Sir Mix-A-Lot’s performance of “Baby Got Back” with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra At 1:53, Sir Mix-A-Lot takes out his phone for a selfie. When I first watched this, I found that moment so odd. He knows the event is being recorded by the symphony, and from the stage, he can see that many people in the audience are taking out their phones to record it too. So why would he remove himself from the situation to take a selfie? I realized while watching this that he’s not taking the image just for himself. Rather, taking the photo constitutes a social act. The act of taking a photo can serve many purposes, and one of them is to mark an event as important, as worthy of documenting. Moreover, by deeming an event worthy of a photo and by later sharing the photo with others, you make this ritual a public act. In calling it a ritual, I don’t mean to imply a great deal of intentionality. I don’t think Sir Mix-A-Lot is thinking “I want to distinguish this event from others and let people know I’m marking it as important, so I will publicly take this photo and share it.” Rather, by calling it a ritual, I want to highlight the fact that selfies at public events have quickly become a form of behavior shared by people around the globe. They are a form of unconscious ritual, something you do without really considering its meaning, just like taking off your hat during the national anthem at a baseball game. Ritual has two kind of power. Firstly, there is the meaning of the particular act itself, its specific symbolism. Secondly, a ritual has power simply by dint of being it is shared behavior. This second level makes taking a selfie during a concert or recording the performer’s encore anything but an isolating act. Instead, it’s a communal one. Be recording, you’re implicitly showing yourself as a member of a larger collective, demonstrating you know one of the socially sanctioned ways of behaving at that event. Furthermore, new technology and social media also lets us share experiences with a rapidity and breadth that is brand new. Now you can instantaneously share the event by posting it to Facebook or Instagram, thereby letting your friends know what you have been up to. Finally, using smart phones during shows also allows individual connections between people. If I take a video of an event and send it to my friend, arguably I’m not distracted when my phone is out during the concert. Perhaps I’m actually hyperaware, hyper connected, thinking not only of myself but of my friend as well. Larkin's poem “Broadcast” highlights the duality inherent to technology. Even though the poem was written over 50 years ago, it serves as a succinct description of the dilemma technology and social media pose to us today. Audio and visual technology, both of which are found nowadays on our phones (even my Samsung Convoy 3!), offer the possibility of both linkage and isolation. Moreover, they offer us the possibility of being both linked and isolated at the same time through the same act. Our own smartphones, much like the radio in "Broadcast," has no inherent power. Instead, its meaning is what we make of it. Sources: Coleman, Mark, Playback : from the Victrola to MP3, 100 years of music, machines, and money, Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, 2005. Leibowitz, Stan, "The Elusive Symbiosis: The Impact of Radio on the Record Industry," Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, 1:1, 93-118, 2004. Wikipedia articles on "radio," "old-time radio," "Walkman effect," and "phonograph" Broadcast (from "The Whitsun Weddings") Giant whispering and coughing from Vast Sunday-full and organ-frowned-on spaces Precede a sudden scuttle on the drum, 'The Queen', and huge resettling. Then begins A snivelling of the violins: I think of your face among all those faces, Beautiful and devout before Cascades of monumental slithering, One of your gloves unnoticed on the floor Beside those new, slightly-outmoded shoes. Here it goes quickly dark. I lose All but the outline of the still and withering Leaves on half-emptied trees. Behind The glowing wavebands, rabid storms of chording By being distant overpower my mind All the more shamelessly, their cut-off shout Leaving me desperate to pick out Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding. Explanation:
This poem makes much more sense if you understand the scenario described: the English speaker is listening to a radio broadcast of a live classical music concert. Hence the title, “Broadcast.” The situation is not not obvious, but just like seeing the arrow in the Fed-Ex sign for the first time, once you know recognize the setting you will wonder why you didn’t see it all along. This poem is a good entry point to Larkin. Within the poem, we see traces of many of Larkin’s poetic and personal concerns. It is a poem about music. Larkin was a music aficionado, particularly for jazz, and he wrote jazz reviews for many years. Furthermore, it is a poem about crowds and ceremony. Larkin has a good eye for observation about these topics, as evidenced, for example, by his description of a country fair in “Show Saturday” and wedding parties on a bank holiday weekend in “The Whitsun Weddings.” Yet, I particularly think this poem serves as a good entrée to Larkin because of its tender description of love. Larkin is underrated as a poet of love, perhaps because in his poetry, romantic attachments are rarely sources of great joy. You could easily write a collector’s item book of Larkin quotes on love, thereby making a horrible Valentine’s day gift. More commonly, he describes the unfulfilment of romantic and sexual relations. And this poem is no exception. The speaker’s plight is quite plain: his love is attending a concert, and he is separated from her. Exacerbating his anxiety is the fact that, while the concert attendees are focused on the music, he pays careful attention to the woman, but unfortunately he is too far away to do anything about it. He cares about the details the others ignore. To him, the music is simply “chording” and “cascades.” Instead, his attention is drawn to the glove, a traditional symbol of love and fidelity, that lies “unnoticed on the floor.” He knows enough of her shoes to recognize the ones she wears are new. Yet, ultimately, he is not with her, a fact that leaves him “desperate.” He would pick out her hands from the thundering applause, but that’s impossible. The speaker focuses on minutiae, yet, sadly for him, the poem’s space is expansive. From the outset - the poem’s name - we are reminded of the wide distances radio broadcasts carry. In the first stanza, even before bringing the focus to any individual concern, we are presented with adjectives describing a humongous space that is “giant,” “vast,” “Sunday-full,” and “huge.” This expansiveness only heightens the break in perspective at the end of the first stanza when the speaker bluntly makes clear the poem is not actually about a concert broadcast, but instead, it’s about a broadcast that spurs a man to think about a face in thatcrowd. In fact, the only time the speaker actually leaves his own room spatially is when he looks out the window at the darkening sky. It is an image of diminution. He can only see the “outline” of “withering” and “half-emptied trees.” Not long after Larkin’s death, his literary executor, Andrew Motion, published a insightful biography, one that revealed many of Larkin’s darker xenophobic and racist tendencies, and since then we have seen the publication of several volumes of Larkin’s letters. In addition to learning more about his life, we have learned much about the history and autobigographicality of his poems, and while the poem is moving even without knowing the backstory, we actually can pinpoint this concert to a specific date. Larkin wrote this poem about bout Maeve Brennan, a woman with whom he had a non-exclusive romantic relationship lasting decades. Brennan has described attending a concert on November 5, 1961 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Hull, one that Larkin listened to it live at home. From the Larkin Complete Poems: “Philip, who knows I was in the audience, listened at home. The inscription in my copy of the Listener…where the poem first appeared, reads: ‘To Maeve, who would sooner listen to music than listen to me,’ accompanied by a caricature of himself, enveloped in gloom beside his radio, while I sit nearby, lost in my own musical world, one of my gloves unnoticed on the floor.” She also added that the description of the “outmoded shoes” was an inside joke they shared. “They were an unusual color of pearlised bronze, very smart, with stiletto heels and long, pointed toes….Philip raved about the shows. He used to take them off my feet, hold them up, stroke them, put them down on the sofa and continue to admire them; not just once, but every time I wore them. He thought they were the last word in fashion, until one day, slightly exasperated, I teased, “I don’t know why you go on so about these shows. They’re almost out of fashion now’…He laughed and said, ‘Well, I still adore them even if they are slightly outmoded.” However, while it is always fun to be able to know a writer autobiographical impulses, Larkin’s poetry - and this particular poem - moves us because this emotion described is so universal. So many of us readers have felt this desperation, this utter hopelessness, longing for the impossible: a person who is not present and is instead with others. This is the magic of Larkin’s poetry. He is rooted in a very specific place and time. His poetry is the very distinct voice of an mid-20th century, conservative Oxbridge librarian, wary of much social change, and yet his poems remain popular because they evoke universal emotions. Why am I starting a blog about Philip Larkin?
For years, I have been meaning to blog about Philip Larkin, my favorite poet. I first read Larkin my last semester in college, and his poetry immediately spoke to me. The first poem of his I fell in love with was “Church Going,” a poem that captured (and still captures) perfectly my own feelings on religion, the enduring power of religious buildings, and the reason they still attracts atheists like myself. Since then, other poems have become beloved, and more importantly, they often manage to describe the exact feelings I have on various issues. I think Larkin is so moving because his works encapsulate so well the emotional challenges modernity and the 20th century pose to the individual. On the one hand, these changes offered a remarkable degree of personal freedom, with secularization and sexual revolution undoing many of the bonds that previously structured social behavior. Paradoxically however, rather than offering us pure joy, “a brilliant breaking of the bank, a quite unlosable game” (from his poem “High Windows,” these new freedoms have laid the groundwork for an increasing atomized society, and people are forced to face the challenges of life without the comforts of community and tradition. Ironically, it is new found freedoms that most imprison us within our fears. Beyond that, Larkin has wonderful insights about other topics, like urbanization, decolonizations, and visual culture. I have consistently found him useful to think with, as well as a pleasure to read. Of course, to say he is valuable to think with is not to agree with him. The fact he is an apologist for empire does not mean you are for enjoying his poetry. It simply means, however, that we can understand that viewpoint better - and what it means for a society to eschew empire - by looking at him. We can understand the practical effects of social change with him, both by looking at the details of everyday living discussed in his poems and because his poetry does a god job of exploring the interiority of someone living through great social change. How this blog will work? I intend to write a post every ten days about Larkin. I hope that making this vow in a public manner will spur me on to keep my word. I want to write different posts for each poem, looking at both the pesaht and drash of a poem. In tradition Jewish scholarship, two ways to look at a text are peshat and drash. The peshat is the simple meaning, the literal interpretation. The drash is a different type of analysis, one that isn’t wedded to literalism. It is a more expansive reading, one that can interpret the text in a unconventional fashion, placing it in a different context. I want to do that with Larkin. At first, I will write a post that simply discusses the poem in a literal manner, unpacking the poem itself. The follow-up posts (or posts) will look at Larkin more expansively, using him as a spring board for thinking anthropologically with his poetry. | AuthorFilmmaker, musician, scholar, Larkin fanatic ArchivesAugust 2014 Categories |
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