The Greenaway Suite[1]
Goltzius and the Pelican Company by Peter Greenaway (2012)
Old Hen is the word for a set of eggs which change.
In his metamorphoises, Ovide relates how the God Jupitur disguised himself as a satyr, in order to seduce Antiope.
One must question whether that transformation was necessary.
And then ask whether that question is also a waste of time.
In Hendrik’s lewd depiction of the story, we see Antiope asleep,
sprawled amidst luxurious cushions,
as the lecherous God approaches her.
Vibrant colours and bold, sculptural forms
increase the drama of the scene.
I’m sat by the toilet in Gail’s and someone’s jeans
are reminding me of what painting actually is.
A double sneeze, two letters which aren’t to be employed for words.
The sneeking, snapped sugary tiptoe of a God and a woman
who call toes beans, and lay eggs in the minds of medieval children.
O, this was a time. I have a time seeing it.
It is a time of times. A old rare time,
as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted
I’ve lost something down there.
The Falls (1980)
A strange way to not do what ever habit
is not knowable to people who don’t use what they have
but bin it and run the taps to make sound
as if a group of working, exercising, active limbs
is good when not used but left in the chamber, or tank,
if you wish to fish to the animal list
and whether that list, those people,
that family square of adaptation
that uses you to find fire to light,
to make impersonations of birds,
before the unknown violent event
during the play called little green finches
performed for a film called the reluctant singer
with random fluttering gestures
is the habit of singing through an almost closed mouth.
Whether it chew days off, is the indecipherable question,
whether it rests or something else that isn’t a miserable
brief smoke cloud that moves in the weather
that learns finally to properly swing and squat and clean and jerk
until the cables come loose and its a brief respite in the skies
like trains cutting Pollie’s (my favourite) language, Mickel-ease
and twelve another’s you didn’t see
just as she speaks no other of the new post-VUE tongues
not a word of Abcadefghan, Agalese, Agreet, Allow, Allow-ease
Althuese, Antoneen, Betelguese, Candoese, Capistan
Carn-est-aero, Cathaganian, Cathanay, Curdine, Entree
Fallaver, Foreignester, Glendower, Glozel, Hapaxlegomena
Hartileas B., Instantaneious Dekis, Ipostan, Itino Re
Karnash, Kantan, Katan, Kath-a-ganian, Maudine
O-Lev-Lit, Os-leet-ter, Orthocathalian, Regest
Sackamayer, U-thalian, Untowards, nor bloody Vionester
Languages are all an animal name group we lean on
like lamby and chimpy talk, and the summaries of our natural ways
like Pollie, who asks, in Mickel-ese, pronounced in high registers,
why waiting for the next syllable is like waiting for a child
to scream, after it has fallen? why not before?
She sings whether habitat is connected to habit
like clothing you smell? Or whether diamond
is a rough word for fruit? Or for whatever you associate
with conversation? It is a delaying tactic,
and yet it is whether you know it or not.
Film is a body that puts things inside of people,
which asks whether you wrote that
because its too good for you to have done so
and leads the author to think whether they did
out of habit, theft, asking whether habit is theft,
or conditioning, or soul, or whatever you want.
it’s just a list of delaying tactics that are better than say a pinch
whether a hand is placed on a throat or chest
chin or chest, or picked up, it comes to mind.
two hands wrapped around neck, whether the neck
of a fish, bird or person, or a skull base, it’s a height
whether you notice or not. it’s your mouth cupped
around a hole that’s just beneath a skin.
whether you pull the skeleton from the body, or not
its a plum. a chin, chest, shoulder blades, wings
a damage, to hold, to offer an intermediary delay
between conversation, whether you swim hands in
or fold elbows, whether its music or not or a suggestion.
it’s then a pick up, a cutting of walking words in the film of habit
it makes two small holes in all the rubbish around you
in your habits, because it’s different now
after the violent unknown event, so you might as well
stay on it, daily, repeating, confused, like the Mickel-ese
which stretches the voice box of humans
to influence the very language of animals
and goes back to also doing human imitations, like that were easy.
Notes:
[1] I was being eaten by a couch as though I were a child again. A film, finally, to time travel. Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts. I was abroad, with someone, Nyman’s score Time Lapse. Go and put it on now, it can’t do you no harm to do so. As the frame moves in to the light, as I know not which is fixed, so I also had to wonder was it the camera moving or something else. Here, finally, something imperiously good. A moment for me which I almost never have. Something with its nose up and fulfilling that view. Something that is actually what the director is, and for all Greenaway’s obvious and amusing difficulty, something brilliant, clever, authentically austere and gorgeous and unreserved and frantic and arrogant and silly and clever and complex. More more more more. It brought with it the past, the real history of histories. And it cannot be pretended that I didn’t love it so because it was so out of our pithy, pissy, banal aesthetics. It was big like the thing I would never do. From then on in, Greenaway, though some of his films remain unbearable, is a point of reference. I like too, his manner. His imperiousness, his intensity, his refusals. Now in his work, my nostalgia for the ’80s and ’90s too, and not my childhood, not my FilmFour subscription or finding The Cook The Wife The Thief and Her Lover in my parents wardrobe thinking it was banned or pornographic. Nostalgia for things I’ll never have, pre-internet yes, but also whatever Peter Greenaway is and knows and insists upon.
These poems are not celebrations because in real terms his films are poetic. Not poems, of course, as people use my medium as a metaphor and not a thing all day and back. But his films are linguistic in such depths that they are poetic, and they go beyond metaphor in the use of the multisensorious in those poetic terms. These poems then are fragments of what he insists is whole. They are what poems can be that film cannot. And that is a good place to start for anything I think, to find only what it is.