Human Connection
Who needs it?
Rootless by Jennifer Matthews
One poem in Jennifer Matthews’s mournful collection concerns a flood in a smallish place. How did the people there react to nature’s sudden forcefulness, when something was put upon them? They traded hot drinks and cigarettes. They shared tea and scandal. By and large, things were sorted out, gone through, and done. An optimistic idea, a vision of a society quite cooperative.
Very little of life is like this, however.
When the waters went back, of course, they revealed all that had been wrecked and taken. Including lives.
Much of the time, the gulf between people grows and does not wane. Good luck is partial — happiness, partial. We all have certain things in common. But most people are too depressed by the thought to discuss them at length. We are all alone inside our heads. A fact like that never changes.
We may stand around in houses vacated by the deaths of people we love. We may open up their cupboards to look at the old coats hung on pegs. We might take a look inside wardrobes. Try to make order out of the chaos of a life cut off. Try to take possession.
But when I do this, those things I see — everywhere, everything that catches my eye — were not put their for my sight or for my use. They were done by other hands. For the benefit of another life.
So many of the poems in this little collection are about falling down, coming apart, ageing and collapsing and staring into the past for hints that don’t arrive about how to live and die.
The generations gone whose arms seemed to encompass it all — histories, individuals, the great movements of natural landscape. Tide and sun, rain clouds, violent storms.
I can feel my own body, Matthews writes, as I age, growing fuller and fuller of holes — the gaps taking up more of the whole.
‘Old as we are,’ a phrase of Matthews’s is a nice little comment and I imagine it can apply at any age — from the moment anyone gains the second sentience, the sense of time passing.
Poetry of this kind is difficult to characterise. How useful is it to say that much chaos, much ruin, exists within the mundane? Within starter homes that young people might buy — there is a often a vacancy. A necessary gap left, something left unsaid.
Is it worth it to mention that lack?
A general malaise is, of course, sweeping the English-speaking (or English-writing) world and it’s difficult to give it a single cause. The entertainment that some used to give their lives purpose has begun to pall. The handheld supercomputers that were meant to connect people to their friends, to friends they hadn’t met yet, and to all the information they could want, don’t appear to have solved anything. Except increased the meaningless distractions that make time pass effectively enough but don’t fill it with much except lights and noise.
The isle is full of noises.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments.
George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London that, when he was a poor worker in Parisian hotels, he would go out drinking on the one night of the week he had off. Drinking with the fellow proletarians in his street. They would dance around and consume wine by the many litres, and three of four hours into the drinking and singing, they would all agree that the world was a fine, even wonderful place, and that all of them were important features in it.
By the very early hours, of course, the wine was being watered down — some men had been put to bed drunk and sickened.
One or two, far gone, would be crawling around the floor, barking like dogs. And some, annoyed at these antics by now, would kick them.
Eventually, the gaiety palls, and you realise yourself to be drunk with a mouth stained by the rough wine, your head hurting — and the world is not so fine a place and does not seem to have much of a role for you in it, after all.
On occasion, a character in a film — sometimes a comedy and sometimes a brooding, serious drama — will tell the truth: that it’s impossible to connect fully, truly, to have a connection of the kind that the romantic poets wrote about, with anyone. Sometimes this is played for misery; sometimes for laughs. What pretension! the viewers of A Cock and Bull Story (a Tristram Shandy remix) are meant to think when a young female character says the same.
But I can’t tell what you’re thinking about any more than I can tell, unless you look pained or give me some verbal or non-verbal indication, if you have a headache or not.
So what are we — we poets, we consumers of poetry — meant to do about all that?
Matthews doesn’t have any answers. How could she? This is a collection about confusion. About the oddness not only of living, but of living among other people. Bodies and communities have ‘meat’ and are all bones and skeletons and gristle. With clicking, jarred ankles and joints ‘rubbed bare.’ What’s true of an old body is true of a friendship — true of a village — true of a marriage. Eventually everything gets forever worn out, does it not?