Abstract
In this chapter, focussing on Alice Oswald and John Burnside, I consider, through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty how there is a concrete experience of finding oneself intertwined with the landscape, the subject’s corporeality sharing the flesh of the world as one of its visible things. In this concrete experience, through it, the spectral appears, for one comes to see oneself indirectly, finding ourselves haunted by an imminent, invisible sense of ourselves as perceiving; in coming to this apperceptive event, we are given the possibility of apprehending, hearing and feeling how the invisible, the ghostly, resonates within us. Haunted as we are, place and cultural memory give us access to the realization of a cultural accumulation or sedimentation of spectral traces. The poetry of Burnside and Oswald give us access to such a sense of our hauntedness, and thus all the more in touch with the places in which we find ourselves; finding this interwoven condition in ourselves, we experience what Catherine Malabou calls the ‘telephonic memory of a touch’. The language of poetry is revealed in these readings as a gateway between subject and world, between the material and the immaterial, between the material experience and the ghostly realization.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank Monika Szuba for the invaluable, unrepayable gift of introducing me to Louise Westling, and so getting me to look at the landscape with renewed vision.
- 2.
Martin Heidegger Makes this point in his 1951 article, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in a phenomenological argument that counters the objective, empirical fallacy: ‘When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience. IT is not that there are men, and over and above them space; for when I say “a man,” and in saying this word think of a being who exists in a human manner—that is, who dwells—then by the name “man” I already name the stay within the fourfold among things.… We do not represent … things merely in our mind… From right here we may be even much nearer [to a place] … than someone who uses it daily…. Spaces, and with them space as such—“space”—are always provided for already within the stay of mortals. Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man’. Heidegger , ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1975, 154). There is a certain consonance between Heidegger’s use of ‘opening’ in this passage, and that opening spoken of by Blanchot, already cited. Heidegger’s thinking also announces the reflexion of consciousness in Husserl’s thinking on consciousness and Nature in the latter’s Ideas (2002b, 155–58).
- 3.
It may be a reading too far, but Oswald’s sibilance might be said to echo ‘Little Gidding’s own soundings, “Field” in turn’ being apprehensible as a form of response to Eliot’s poem, in which the ‘soul’s sap quivers’ in responds to the ‘short day’ with its ‘brief sun’ that ‘flames the ice’, which in turn ‘Stirs the dumb spirit…/ In the dark time of the year… / Now and in England / England and nowhere. Never and always’.
- 4.
The passage from Heidegger cited by Burnside is from the penultimate paragraph of ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (159).
- 5.
Known as Verdi’s A, 432 Hz is the natural vibration of the note of A, not 440 Hz, which is standard pitch for A above middle C, and has been used as such throughout the western musical world since the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Before this, there was no standard, but composers such as Verdi and Mozart used 432 Hz, which is said to be the natural frequency of the universe. Ancient instruments such as singing bowls from Tibet, use 432 Hz as their base pitch.
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Wolfreys, J. (2018). ‘And for a moment’: Voicing the Landscape with Alice Oswald and John Burnside. In: Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98089-8_8
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