Necessary Friendship

on Joseph Minden's Backlogues

The other day, while waiting for my headphones to charge in to order to be able to do the dishes, I was suddenly estranged enough from what I was doing to be confronted by it. I was in a podcast phase, which generally coincides, in my experience, with feeling bad; there’s some relationship between these voices on tap and withdrawing from actual life. But as I did the dishes unaccompanied, my mind drifted further along the thought about how embarrassing this need was, and tangled it into knots of guilt rather than mere contempt. Here was I, dependent on the energy stored in the cobalt and lithium ripped from the DRC and Bolivia at great cost to real people, just to not be too alone to deal with an oven tray.

(As an aside, if you want to check out my recent essay on similar visions in recent fiction , which I’ve called (with apologies to Bruce Robbins) the supply chain sublime, in The London Magazine, check it out, it’s a great issue)

Everything in the world, of course, can be thought this way—it’s all connected to “the economy” one way or another. There’s nothing special about the voices of people simulating friendship that yokes them more sturdily to the sore spots of the earth. But maybe because we value friendship more than the rare earth metals most people now conduct it on, it seemed an upsetting thought to me—to have what I wanted mediated in this way. Everything that’s mediated is impure.

And insofar as we anxiously wish the voice of a friend, real or imagined, could escape this mediation, we might worry too that what the voice carries, what it is a medium for, can’t help but congeal into the more solid stuff that has allowed it to reach you. By this I mean that the transmission of words and whatever residue of thought sticks inside the words, right back to the first scream of the fish that discovered it could breathe on land, is and is not history. When you let a word carry your thought, you are letting the history of its uses take the place of whatever you might feel to be personal, to be your pure intention—though of course that private space was built out of other words. You emerge from other voices—and yet you feel, I feel, that I do not belong to them.

That tension has many different dynamics. It can carry many different thoughts. Frederic Jameson has a nice one, I think, when he says

History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force.

This is a justification  (laden with Hegelian and Marxian allusion) of the kind of literary criticism he practices, and of a series of debates about the priority of “history” over “language”. As in, when you try to understand why a book or poem is the way it is, what it reveals to you when you interrogate it suitably severely is history. Its meaning, and the possibilities it has to mean, are shaped by history.

Language imagined as a system—a nearly endless potential combination of tokens that can mean anything in the world—bumps up in this fairly dusty academic beef against language as history. The actual language is a limited number of actual expressions that themselves determine the way you shape tokens. For some thinkers, it’s the possible ways we make tokens that shape what we call history—for others it is the history that shapes tokens. Jameson takes the side of history but partly by saying that history is whatever limits you. Whatever is less than the structurally infinite possibility of language is history. History is a thing being said or done one way, and not another.

For Jameson this means you should read books to see how their form discloses necessity, and not possibility.  Why do the plots of the novel take the shapes they do—because of the way that the capitalist mode of production shapes desires.

But for me, who has no particular brief for the Jamesonian way of reading texts, but still feels something like the truth of this basic claim of necessity, what matters, is with apologies for the phrasing, a kind of historical animism implicit in the way I think about language, which is also the way I think all serious poets need to think about language. Words are alive. And they are alive in two different (I don’t want to say dialectical but I do probably have to say dialectical) ways. On the one hand, they carry what we think of as personal, what we need of other people not to feel alone, and on the other, they carry not just impersonal necessity in the abstract, but all of the particular things that did happen, and did hurt. These things, we are compelled, I think, to imagine as alive, too.

As I thought against my dishes, I was reminded of the opening of Joseph Minden's newish book-length poem Backlogues. And now as I try to explain the thoughts I had, this explanation might help me to explain more of the perfection of Joe’s poem. He’s a dear friend, so I’m not offering a review, but I want instead to try and show you what the friendship in his poetry has offered me.

The poem begins:

Who’s that

            whistle in the distant

kitchen

                             kettle going

spray arc

                panorama whiplash

froth down scroll

                       white sea script

pulse of old

                                buy habits

tea pools on the

                                   sunburst

day supplied

                                  resolve to

more past tense

                                  in silence

thoughts so

              wingful black scatter

in the green

                      bleached clumps

and wet teeth rattle

                            at the skylights…

Backlogues is a lockdown poem. Set in somewhat idyllic pastoral isolation, it’s about the forces shaping that isolation. Obviously the law, and the necessity of social distancing to prevent the spread of Covid, are the first or proximate necessities. But we feel necessity itself stretching much farther back. The title, Backlogues itself is a pun on Eclogues, on the pastoral poem as practiced, reimagined, and projected into history by Virgil. It’s also a pun on backlogs. What is blocked, what has not been dealt with. History.

The poem is beautifully situated—limited in space—but what feels at once like its chief constraint and shaping power is not space but time. It offers a kind of diary of a month or so, in paratactic, pulsing lines, many of which seem to me to have two strong stresses, a bit like you’d find in the hemstitches of Old English poetry, but looser still. And as it’s a lockdown poem, it’s also a poem about loneliness. About seeking out company and finding it, complicatedly, in language.

There’s something about that ‘who’, in the first line, which gets to the heart of how I conceive of a range of problems that I have learned to think beautiful because of Joe. Though I do not think he would call them beautiful.

One of the problems of language, its having emerged as a way of communicating, or expressing the desires and capacities of agents, is that it tends to project agency, desire, and capacity, onto anything it touches. Things mean, they do, and they want all the time when we talk about them. Sometimes this kind of animistic language obscures the actual actions of actual humans, as when we say inflation does X and really it’s five ghouls in suits doing it to us. A lot of the rigour of scientific thinking also serves to slough off this anthroporphism or animism. Evolution doesn’t want anything. Neither do quarks. And yet that is also the basical consolatory function of any and all language usage. To make us feel less alone. We imagine that the world responds to us.

At the beginning of this poem, the whistle of a kettle is humanised. Everything is humanised that enters language. And that is both a good and a bad thing. Because humans make history, but they certainly don’t make it under the conditions of their choosing. The way we cannot but choose not to be alone is not ours to control. History follows us into locked rooms.

And that’s what Joe’s poetry is so concerned with: the shaping force of the past; the wrecked heritage, discovered in the the smallest speck of personal life.

Wider public discourse is full of people stressing the importance of understanding history, and especially the after-effects of history. People are always calling for more investigations into the legacy of empire etc. Most of it seems to me to be good and salutary. But the question of how personally we are to take the historical past is the one that Joe’s poetry, using the anthropomorphic or animistic function of language, makes visible, a question that is distinct from the more straightforwardly political what we should we do with the knowledge of historical British barbarism?

Throughout Backlogues, British history, that pile of wreckage, washes up on the shore of the speaker’s coastal idyll. Every thought threatens to mutate from a beautiful description of the waves or of his companions in lockdown into The Opium wars, or ‘atavistic Buckinham’s suspenders’. It doesn’t help that British culture is full of the smug accretions of habit from this history. On the right we see the refusal to think about history and the desire to live with it as if it were an old friend, 1066 and all that. Some of this encrustation is personified initially in the poem in the presence of Julian Fellowes.

But the point is made most obviously in the fact that Joe is accompanied by a figure called Brian, who tells him “welcome to the history/ of Great Britain/  numbnuts. Brian is an amusingly Puckish figure. In some ways the embodiment of that refusal to think—an anagram of brain, a scrambled thought. You can imagine that people who get mad about the National Trust investigating which houses profited off slavery feel that history is comparable and if it had a form, it might be like Brian.

Still, I also like to think of Brian as a kind of retort to Jameson. History can be apprehended only through its effects he says. His point being that we don’t have objective historical forces that we can see, only things moved by them. But such a view of absent forces itself forces you only to interpret after the fact. The true necessity of history is in the way it reverses your intention. But what if you if you don’t want to reveal history after the fact, but to portray it, knowing that someone else will later point out where you fell for its ruses? If you want to Maybe then we have no choice but to see history as not even reified force, a thing, but perhaps  a person. Numbnuts.

Because that’s the tool that the imagination has. History cannot be apprehended as anything other than an absent cause, perhaps, but what a poem does, I think, is allows us to apprehend things. To personalise them. Rather than read it as shaped by the hidden necessity, we watch the beautiful way it needs to make necessity visible. This is one of Joe’s great gifts as a maker of phrases and images. I think of this particularly stunning passage from the poem:

                            the truth is

at this latitude

                   the sea becomes

a kind of land

                                 not land

but solid state

                              the weight

holding you up

                            like an anvil

or a tuna steak

                             lean muscle

as though you were

                 between two walls

small baggage

                                 of history

one weak root

                          a mung bean

proper croft door

                                           Kat

Bea

                                     look up

white wall

                          nine woodlice

well when

                       Laurence called

with news of his

                        new fatherhood

grief

                                       terror

the feeling beyond

                                  of simply

the baby

               the extra-egotistical

reality of care

                   the circumstances

comfort like

                              stuckness

well I walked

                   down to the sea

with Kat

                     and the thing is

the waves were milk

                  milk, and Kat said

blue trifle

          and really astonishing

glass tubes

          stretching their backs

because also muscle

            and then collapsing

into a wide

                       and disturbed

lather of milk

In this passage, you can see some of the movements between the different things we need to do to and with history. How we might choose to present it, to go against our sense of what it does.

The sea is history, as Derek Walcott once said. And the sea is impersonal. As Joe hears about a friend’s new fatherhood, we see the sea as the somewhat destructive power of continuity. The way it reminds us that we will dissolve into it, and that it holds us up. “Small baggage of history” is a quotation from Barry MacSweeney’s Ranter, another poem obsessed with the patterns that history imposes on us. But the joy is in the surprise that is intended, the reversals and ruses of the author. The presence of “Tuna Steak” to describe the feel of the sea is funny, deflationary and apt, for example. Or grossly inapt. To see the sea as tuna steak is not merely to bring it into the man-made world, but to link it to the destruction of marine ecosystems. But that very reversal is is Joe’s personal gift, here.

And when the muscle of the tuna steak returns later down in these lines, it serves as a reminder of the aliveness of all that is seen. The glass sculptures of the rolling waves are also alive. The trifle image that Kat offers is also alive. The milk, which is maybe accurate to the lather of the sea, and also connected to the continuation of human need seems to me to be an image of the human need underneath necessity, the need which humans answer to.

If we are shaped by necessity it is because we need things. And need is somehow the thing that brings us together, in language. We are under the sway of necessity but we exist to fulfil one another’s needs. In Joe’s poem, written at a moment when a new interconnected vulnerability emerged, you can also see a kind of consolation in poetry’s power to repersonalise history—not to misunderstand it but to humanise the demands it makes of us. The poem ends by dissolving into one of the oldest poems in English history, and there’s a melancholy to that, but also a beauty. I won’t ‘spoil’ the end by quoting either poem, but their fusion reconnects history to human desire and need. And in the old poem and the new poem, I see my friend. The poem becomes the friend that I needed.