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Haring and (?) husband [MyHeritage]
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No doubt there are thousands of minor poets who flare
briefly in the darkness and are gone – some of them perhaps deservedly so.
Every so often you find a worthy whose ember is barely alive, but you have a
chance to blow a little life back in.
I just rediscovered a little volume called A Taste of Salt, by one Phyllis Haring.
In a life that lasted nearly a century (1919-2016), she published just 50
poems, 22 of them in A Taste of Salt.
But what poems! She is dark, death-obsessed, fractured – but also unflinching,
musical, a startling surrealist. She drew on dreams and myths and fairy-story
motifs, carrying on fragmentary conversations which are both overheard voices
around her and aspects of her own psyche.
Haring was born and died in Johannesburg, and lived there
most of her life, except for a brief period in London in the 1950s. As she
described it in a letter to Jack Cope, who edited A Taste of Salt, she was a tearaway youth, a “love-addict”, who
“married too young, divorced too soon – wanted 6 children and had one.” That
one, a son, died young, spinning her into depression and therapy, not for the
first time. Yet for decades she also ran a swimming school.
There’s a slippery relationship between the poetic
techniques of Surrealism and psychic disturbance. Surrealism – think of
paintings by Max Ernst or Salvador Dali – challenged the norms of realism,
logic, coherence itself, trying to represent the unfathomable leaps and
juxtapositions of dream-thought. Early Surrealists like founder André Breton
espoused a kind of automatic writing, writing by pure instinct, with almost
religious fervour. Dissenters like Georges Bataille were tougher, materialist,
even excremental. The established narratives of religion, politics and nation
went out the window. Life had no direction, no goal, no predictable outcome,
quite possibly no discernible meaning at all. In short, if you are bordering on
mad or just rebellious, Surrealism is ideal.
Phyllis Haring tackled her own disturbances, mostly
indirectly through scenes that hint at underlying narratives or parable-like
promise, but end with no didactic wisdom. In one unpublished poem, “Found
Lunatic”, she represented mental trouble more directly:
Now that the room
Is mysteriously full of flowers
And your hands are colder by far
Than last winter’s winter,
You don’t need to pretend any longer.
You can get up and go out.
... I’ll just stay quietly here
And try to collect myself.
... I must have been walking worriedly
Towards that sudden second all my life,
Watching myself in shop-windows, admiring myself ...
YOU
MIGHT AT LEAST ARRANGE YOUR LIMBS ATTRACTIVELY.
YOU
MIGHT AS WELL STOP STARING AT THE CEILING.
... And I remember childhood,
The long lane at evening, acorns popping underfoot,
Swimming in summer and small boys in trees.
At seventeen there was no-one to talk to ...
WHY DO YOU LET YOUR MOUTH HANG OPEN? CLOSE
IT!
And now that the room is so mysterious
This policeman won’t believe a word I say –
You tell him, darling.
A cacophony of voices, heading nowhere. Mostly she depicts
ordinary life as superficial and programmed, false, mere performance in the
shadow of inevitable death. In the 1970s she explained to Cope:
I now love and admire animals & birds more than people, children
more than adults, am still anti-fascist, and am also anti women’s lib. For me
the natural world is far more important than the political or religious, or anything,
since it encloses us all. If I have a faith at all, it must be more or less the
same faith a tree has, & wish I had the same acceptance of the ills of the
world. When it is time to die, I will console myself with the thought that in
any case in my life time there is no understanding, pity or love between people
and things. So, call me a crank!
Surreal and dark features were evident already in Haring’s
very first formally published poem, “The tunnel”.
Life, and the passage of time,
The days and the nights
converging,
And the long tunnel of time. Tell
me,
Where are you going, what waits
there?
Who dies in the dark there, who
dies?
There’s nothing in it for us at
all,
Unless you can say to me, “I am
going
Here and there, to do this and
that,
And I have an appointment with my
lover!”
[...]
Like this, with only the scream
of wires
And the personal idea of a
station somewhere,
The silence presses too hard on
the head
And heart, and some of us are
quietly
Sick on the side. It’s not
necessary;
We’re all here, look around, say
something!
For God’s sake lift your hat!
See how it feels, getting
together,
Getting the low-down on what it all
means.
And stop pushing.
Here is the deceptive simplicity, the unflinching
questioning, the mushy hysterics of not-quite-inner voices in conversational
drama. Society’s trivial gestures, endured rather than enjoyed, performed
rather than valued, hint at a terrible emptiness behind – the pressure of
silence. The governing existential questions are repeated in another early poem
titled “Who”. The final stanza is
shockingly bold:
What am I but only a particular
Particle of dust, of nothing but
blood and bone
Beseeching, searching, wandering
forever
Along the delicate snail’s trail
your spirit leaves
In passages and doorways, in
halls and auditoriums,
And in books and theatre
programmes, in love
With whomever has lips to meet
one. ... You stare
Solemnly with the eyes of anyone,
you speak to me
With the voice of strangers,
calling me onward. ...
To what end? What destination?
What new death?
As with other poems, the second-person addressee may or may
not be an actual or notional outsider, may be a reflection of herself – or
both. Is it mere wandering, or a search? If so, for what? Repeatedly, it
appears to be for a god whose “name and address” she does not know, for a
resurrection, or just for an affirmation that she “too, could be holy”. All
putative goals prove elusive or delusory. Even “reality” appears almost
mystically friable, if not threatening. As she puts it in “Iscariot”:
But my hands clasp the heavy
shadow
Of a faint reality, in the huger
shadow of the world –
Therefore I send myself along
regretful avenues,
Towards houses with secretive
numbers, relentlessly [...]
A surreal search for “tantalising fruit” again ends in a
question, as if from an already-emptied afterlife: “Will the flown soul/ Return
from distant orchards to inhabit me?” In
the poem “The Search”, a narrative is more evident: the speaker is searching
for a brother “among markets/ And harbours, among old men and sailors”. I am
reminded of Khalil Gibran, with his gently sonorous Biblical prosody, a setting
simple as that of a mediaeval allegory, and a figure of a lost pilgrim. But
this pilgrimage, if it is that, has already begun unpromisingly:
The earth asks, and receives
rain, the benediction
Of rain and of sun, and the
population of seeds.
But the worm inhabits the earth, and
multiplies itself
And makes merry in the blind
earth above which
The birds suspend themselves,
aware of the end.
People live on, “with talking/ And laughter, surrounded by
dogs and by children”, but they are subject to forces far greater than themselves,
and the poem, circling back to the imagery of its opening, turns apocalyptic:
[...] the earth presses upward
against their feet
So that they remain upright: but
elsewhere
The earth opens and engulfs a
city, and perhaps
My brother is hastening towards that
city.
– While I, as I lie on my
comfortable bed, as the blood
Courses through my hands and my
feet, as the blood
Courses over streets and over
flagstones, up to the doors
Of houses and cathedrals, over
the altars
Of the new religions, over the
world, I thrust my thought
Deep into the earth, watching the
worm with my mind’s eye:
The worm which devours itself
with the beak of a dead bird.
This is highly self-conscious myth-making by a ‘self’
querying itself through its own imaginings. Is the search really for a way of
living in the world which does not feel (as depicted in the poem “Poker-face”)
as trivial and depersonalised as being dealt out like cards at a cheap game –
or, worse, dealing oneself out like
cards? It may be that any authentic being-in-the-world is a fantasy; so she
projects it in the poem of that title:
There are times when the skin,
Where it joins down the middle of
my back,
Splits open and lets me out –
And I move quietly among you,
Touching the colour of your eyes
And holding your voice in my
hands
Like the light notes of piano
Or the soft sounds chrysanthemums
make
When being beheaded in gardens.
(“Fantasy”)
The speaker tries to compensate for that macabre note by
encouraging her faceless hearers, “Don’t be afraid”; but as in many poems these
‘conversations’, one suspects, are between aspects of herself; behind this
slightly disturbing, insect-like escape from her own “bag of bones” lie
opposing fears both of being socially present and of being alone.
Beneath the surface of apparent fantasy, common emotional
truths spark. As R D Laing famously suggested, this “schizoid” quality inhabits
all of us, as we balance private self-conceptions with acceptable social masks.
In Haring’s case, though, this state of internal fracture can appear positively
self-destructive – nowhere more so than in “Attack”, which reads in full:
I’ll set my anger loose upon you
Like a warm, red beast
To beat your head in
With its hoofs of music;
To gore your breast repeatedly
With sharp, distracted horns
Hidden in honey,
As for a sacrifice.
That’s an extraordinarily compact poem, its animal-human
conjunction redolent of Greek myth. It is ambivalent about the nature of this
sacrifice, if it is one. The language is tensed between “warm” and “sharp”,
“set” and “distracted”, the double
entendre of “beat”, the grotesque deception of “Hidden in honey”. Yet these
antitheses are held together by a robust and careful musicality: the internal
echoes of “loose” and “hoofs”, of “beast”, “beat” and “breast”, of “gored [...]
horns/ Hidden in honey”. It is a fundamentally mysterious yet forbiddingly
powerful drama.
The poems often express such feelings of entrapment (I
hesitate to say ‘Haring’, because I don’t think you can unproblematically
‘psychoanalyze’ a writer through their poems; they are fictions, after all, no
more so than in this work). No feeling of entrapment is more unsettling than
the recognition that, as the cliché would have it, we are born to die.
Extinction is implicit in the seed, and therefore haunts even the fruit that is
relished in the living interim. The ambivalence is encapsulated in one surreal
poem’s very title, “The sun imprisoned”, which reads in full:
The sun,
Imprisoned in the profound, close
house of the apple,
Astringently contained in
quinces, caught
For a season in the polished
shell of a walnut,
The sun has gone away for
Christmas.
Here’s the moon, and carnivals of
crossed stars,
All heaven is festooned
everywhere with brave lights
– But
the dark leans over everything.
The dark ...
And yet, behold the god
returning,
The sun enormously an orange in
his hand.
“Astringently contained in quinces, caught [...]”: such a
great line! The governing antithesis is ironically counterpointed by the
assonance-alliteration of astringently
and quinces. The word caught at the end of the line is
carefully balanced with Imprisoned at
the beginning of the previous line, as well as half-rhyming with walnut in the next. Haring can be as
gifted as Yeats in this kind of control, even as emotion spills into broken lines
with the advent of “the dark”. Fruitful day returns, powerful as a god, but it
is already devilled by darkness.
So many poems cry out for quotation, but I’ll stop with one
of her most-anthologised. In “Foetus”, the poet imagines herself in the space of
the womb – an inland sea, as it were, where “bones form themselves quietly,/
Turned on a lathe of tide,” and in which a “disconsolate” and “opaque dreaming”
prevails:
There is slime everywhere,
There are fishes, and powerful
anemones,
And an army of snails softly
advancing ...
Chrysanthemums
Spread themselves on my face and
on my neck, like fungi,
And my skin crawls, my hands
clutch and clasp
The warm temperature of the
water.
My head leans on the water, sad
as a bell,
Surrounded with silence, with
heaviness ...
Therefore my arms cross my heart
And with humility I hope to die.
Phyllis Haring was indeed humble, publishing nothing in the
last two decades of her life, dropped from anthologies of South African poetry
and never reprinted. But in my view her voice is an unusually powerful and
individual one, strangely beautiful in its very gloominess – well worth
re-reading.
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