Water Stories

Nobody, by Alice Oswald.
W.W. Norton, $25.95.

One of the riskiest moments in literature is when Odysseus calls himself Οὖτις (outis, no one or no body) hoping that the Cyclops Polyphemus will repeat his pseudonym. By Zeus’s will or the hero’s sixth sense, the one-eyed giant, like a ventriloquist’s doll, reproduces Odysseus’s word when he shouts out for help after being blinded by the hero’s spear. With this gold-standard escape strategy, Odysseus treads a thin line between revelation and concealment, and other thinner lines between violence and freedom, wit and humiliation, identity and duplicity, and presence and absence. If the eye is the window to the soul, what happens to the soul when the eye is a void? Obsessed with the visible and invisible world, one of the speakers in Alice Oswald’s Nobody (possibly Proteus) “blinked himself into thousands of self-seeing eyes,” trying to grasp the mutable water’s “blue-green and black-shine with white lining.” At times a multicolored, multiperspectival collage, at times a tidal chorus of grief and disharmony, Nobody is a heartbreaking and challenging meditation on the sea and the sea changes of our time. Intensely visual yet fluidly musical, the book-length poem haunts us through a cast of anonymized, syncopated voices from Homer’s The Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Oresteia lost at sea.

Something fundamental about narrative, truth, and metaphysics seems to have changed when Polyphemus repeats Odysseus’s pseudonym, and we overhear fragmentary retellings of the past, especially the Homeric past, in the primal scene of Alice Oswald’s poetry. But Oswaldian haunting is not only time-specific but site-specific, and her haunted voices, like Death’s protean selves, excel in their specificity. “Pruning in Frost,” the first poem in her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), opens: “Last night, without a sound,/a ghost of a world lay down on a world.” At the heart of  her book-length poem Dart (2002), tracing the river from its source to the sea, we hear the “river’s mutterings” intermixed with many restless voices, including that of a drowned canoeist who became “a tattered shape in a perilous relationship with time.” The living world and the dying world come equally alive in Woods, etc. (2005) when they meet, as where each letter of the alphabet remembers a cut-down tree in “Tree Ghosts,” in which “C is for both Copse and Corpse.” In Memorial (2011), “an excavation of the Iliad,” Oswald gives voice to 218 war deaths, mainly those of minor characters in the epic, to create what she described as “a kind of oral cemetery” where each violent death is reprojected, shot-by-shot, in super close-up, counterbalanced by sixty-two pairs of self-repeating similes (and fifteen single ones) describing landscape, creatures, and the changing seasons. Gravity and transience pervade her fifth collection, Falling Awake (2016), in which the poet’s microscopic vision is as haunting as a sedimentary form of intimacy, as in “Vertigo,” a poem about “the two-minute life of rain,” which ends:

I feel them in my bones these dead straight lines
coming closer and closer to my core

this is the sound this is the very floor
where Grief and his Wife are living
                     looking up

Buried underneath wet soil, what do “Grief and his Wife” see when they look up? In collection after collection, Oswald unsettles us by gripping our hands in a tug-of-war between the living and the dead, the obedience and rebelliousness of poetic form. “What is born wants to die,” Heraclitus wrote, and reading Oswald we encounter a poetry which sheds its skin like a cicada, scorpion, or snake in a cycle of growth, death, and rebirth.

In terms of its book-length scale and its watery setting, at first glance Nobody looks like a cyclical return to both Oswald’s familiar war-torn Homeric terrain in Memorial and the hydro-anthro-topological investigations of Dart. What’s underneath the surface, however, is a completely different performance. While Dart traces the riverine journey and documents the luminous details of its coinhabitants, and while Memorial catches the dying moments of the lesser-known casualties of the Trojan war, Nobody dispenses with structural unity, narrative coherence, and any stable identity for its speakers, depriving people and places of their names and uprooting them from any specific locale. This leaves the reader unanchored and at sea, left drifting like a castaway haunted by the wave-like anonymous voices from the distant mythical past. Take the sentence, “How does it start the sea has endless beginnings,” which leaves us puzzling about what that “it” refers to. Is it the sea? The poem? The Odyssey? Like the horizon in an empty sky, this unpunctuated line occupies a whole page and is repeated twice in the book, along with several blank pages. Kafkasque, Eliotic, and Beckettian, the line and blank pages are part of the wider sense of textual vertigo and fragmentation that interrupts the narrative flow like the sharp jump cuts in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

Oswald’s lines, like images on film, work as jump cuts. Her words, like the continuous passing of time in film, are unmoored from punctuation. Nobody begins with a traveler’s sea-weathered mindscape:

As the mind flutters in a man who has travelled widely
and his quick-winged eyes land everywhere
I wish I was there or there he thinks and his mind

immediately

as if passing its beam through cables
flashes through all that water and lands
less than a second later on the horizon
and someone with a telescope can see his tiny thought-form
floating on the sea-surface wondering what next

The music on the page commands a lungful of oxygen and strategic pauses that can shape and reshape meaning, as words and lines are ambiguously conjoined and disjoined while some invisible hydraulic power propels the eyes. The poem’s visual intensity evokes Jorie Graham’s cinematic line-marathon-relay but without Graham’s brackets, dashes, and programmatic symbols such as “→.” Oswald’s speaker seems to generate a narrative momentum larger than the confines of the poem. Who is “he” and what is “his tiny thought-form”? Odysseus? Proteus? Hermes? The book begins with an elusive epigraph from Book 3 of The Odyssey, which tells of an anonymous poet who was ordered by Agamemnon to guard his wife but was subsequently taken by Aegistheus, Clytemnestra’s lover, to a desert island and left “as a/lump of food for the birds.” In the brief prologue Oswald explains that the poem “lives in the murkiness between those stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending.”

The idea of the “damaged”—both the corporeal pain and psychological scars inseparable from the pain—runs like a curse through many of the voices in Nobody. The “he” that opens the book could be the stranded anonymous poet, another nobody. Throughout the book, the poet appears and disappears, observes and discerns, holds forth and withholds. We hear someone who could be Aegistheus report:

I took him to an island the merest upthrust
of a stony shoulder sticking from the sea
and he paces there as dry as an ashtray
making up poems about us patchwork unfinished
while the sea-crows traipse to and fro regarding him sideways
what does it matter what he sings
there is all this water between us
and it is blind a kind of blind blue eye
it is alive it is dead it more or less ignores us
look at all these ripples everywhere complete with their shadows
I do not think a human for example
drowning in this measureless mosaic or floating up again
I do not think he will


hear us

I imagine Elizabeth Bishop and her inquisitive seal would be transfixed by these lines touching upon so many boundaries and contradictions—between captivity and creativity, light and shadow, rock and water, songs and written words, life and death, and the power of sight and the limits of visibility. The address to “us” and the use of the present tense channel a sense of urgency and intimacy, connecting the mythical dimension to us now. The book, like “the measureless mosaic,” captures minute shifts in thought-process against the abstract backdrop of the mutable sea, like trickles of color taking shapes on Jackson Pollock’s canvas.

Perhaps oil paint is too heavy a medium as an analogy, as Nobody had an earlier incarnation as an art book (published by 21 Publishing in the UK in 2018) in which Oswald’s poem was in dialogue, coexistence, juxtaposition, or symbiosis with two sequences of watercolors (twenty-three pictures in all) by William Tillyer, widely regarded as one of the most significant watercolorists of our time. Close inspection reveals that Oswald has done a substantial amount of rewriting and re-editing in what she has called this more “mobile” version. She has added pages of new lines, reordered the text, introduced new blank spaces and pages, removed a few seagulls and the only punctuation mark (a comma) from the art book, among other things. To help Nobody on its solo journey without the abstract environment of Tillyer’s accompanying watercolors, Oswald’s textual rejig has enriched the narrative and compensated for the absence of actual colors with new texts. She has also complicated the rhythm, as we can see in the example below. Only the first five lines existed in the art book:

A goddess or fog-shape in full wedding dress
sulks in that loneliness what a winter creature
whose lover loathes the everlasting clouds of her
and sits in tears staring at the pleasure-crinkled sea
but she as if a dash of hope
discoloured her sight stands waiting
the way a spider when it wishes to travel
simply lets out a silken

               aerial


electrostatiscally alert through every hair
to the least shift of the ionosphere
at last it lifts on tiptoe and lovely to behold
like a bare twig it begins to blow
whatever the wind will take it but the wind
is the most distracted messenger I know

The new lines at the end of the page carry a rhyme scheme (aabcbc) rare in Nobody and connect the goddess (the owl-eyed Athena who is Odysseus’s protector in The Odyssey?) with the precise, calculated work of a spider, breathing a different kind of life into the “discoloured” world without the watercolors. The two versions of Nobody create a counter-parallel universe for Oswald’s reimagination of The Odyssey, revisualizing the epic as a collage made out of imagist fragments or glimpses of “water-stories,” as the jacket to the UK version calls them. The two texts speak to each other like twins staring at themselves in the mirror, registering uncanny similarities and differences.

“A man is a nobody underneath a big wave,” Oswald writes, and Nobody mimics the sea’s many contradictions—its rich, full-bodied wateriness and its violent bodilessness, its solid clockwork tidal pattern and its radical scattering of solid substances—unlike the beginning and end of a river, rainstorm, or more definite form of water. Simone Weil wrote that “when the attention has revealed the contradiction in something on which it has been fixed, a kind of loosening takes place.” Nobody is a book about attention to every detail and every shimmer of the sea (“the radius of water/maintains itself in proportion to its circles”), yet simultaneously it is a poem that captures a process of drastic loosening in terms of form, voice, and emotion (“it is human to have a name but you seem unsolid somehow/almost too porous to be human I would say”). On the one hand the book wrestles with the spirit of contradiction, on the other it is invested in “a cold mathematical power” akin to the Pythagorean spirit of problem solving. Mathematics and geometry are omnipresent in Nobody: we hear of a “small geometric figure/lost inside colour,” “two clouds with wingtips/teetering on the very pivot of vision,” and are told that “the sun brought measurement to everything” and “each raindrip made a momentary calculation.” Philolaus, a follower of Pythagoras, wrote that,

Number, fitting all things into the soul through sense perception, renders them comprehensible and mutually in accord, and gives them a body and separates by force each relationship of unlimited and limiting things.
—From Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks by Simone Weil, her own translation

Responding to her own translation of Philolaus, Weil in “The Pythagorean Doctrine” observes that “Mathematics is doubly a mediation between these two kinds of thought. It has the intermediate degree of certitude, the intermediate degree of inconceivability.” Nobody is a poem that intermediates between certitude and inconceivability. As the sea scatters the many voices in the book, in page after page mathematical curiosity accompanies “bitter grief-songs,” as if trying to solve the problems of a mind possessed by “this untranslatable colour of scratchiness and indecision.” Oswald uses the sea’s formlessness and instability to create an amorphous poetic form which captures the essence of Proteus, the shape-shifting sea god who embodies the spirit of pattern and mathematics, as Sir Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus described when he questioned the figure of the quincunx: “Why Proteus in Homer, the Symbole of the first matter, before he settled himself in the midst of his Sea-Monsters, doth place them out by fives?”

In her translation of Aeschylus, Anne Carson argues that

everywhere in Agamemnon there is a leakage of the metaphorical into the literal and the literal into the metaphorical. Images echo, overlap and interlock. Words are coined by pressing old words together into new compounds—“dayvisible” ... “dreamvisible.”

The same can be said of Oswald’s Nobody. The book is populated with at least 113 hyphenated words, as if invoking the protean power of the sea has enabled the poet to push etymological and morphological boundaries by blending and clashing unlikely nouns, adjectives, and adverbs: “out-character,” “sky-lids,” “sea-film,” irregular-metrical,” “blood-shade,” “thin-leaved,” “inter-mirrored,” “human-salt,” “goose-fleshed,” “ghost-grace.” Hyphens hold a peculiar, controversial, and essential place in the yokings and un-yokings of poetry, as Christopher Ricks has noted in discussing Geoffrey Hill’s hyphens. Like Ezra Pound’s luminous details, Oswald’s hyphens and compound words evoke a sense of place and placelessness. Toward the end of Nobody, an unrecognized voice says “this is only the water/talking to us in the voice of amnesia” and suddenly we are taken to the roof where “the caretaker” (possibly the Watchman of the opening of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon) sees a man (possibly Agamemnon himself) who is “nailed to the night” and “dressed in his fate but as yet//unmurdered//suddenly appears.” Despite such vivid allusions to Greek mythology, the book resists being grasped and deciphered, as if it wants its readers to be haunted not only by memories but by amnesia. In this respect, it brings to mind the opening of Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas”:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea.

These lines offer an appropriate echo chamber for Oswald’s mytho-aquatic elegy about loss and displacement, suggesting why Nobody is one of the most haunting poems of our time.

“Not every sound/is a voice not every breath is a self,” a nameless speaker in Nobody observes. In defying the familiar links between sound, voice, breath, and self, Oswald has created an intransigent body of work that is more interested in questions than answers, fractures than perfection, risks than security. Reading Nobody, I kept asking: Why do we look at the sea for questions and answers? “The sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look,” Marianne Moore says in “A Grave,” “the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.” Nobody is such a grave, and reminds us that the sea remains one of our primal sources of awe, loss, and memory, as one of Oswald’s anonymous voices tells us:

             one person has the character of dust
another has an arrow for a soul
but their stories all end

         somewhere

                  in the sea