Written in drafting preparation for a longer piece:
‘Our life is a theophany.[1] … Reflecting on Seán Hewitt’s (2020a) Tongues of Fire London, Jonathon Cape.
FOR NOW THEN: Partial piece: reading Callery Pear Hewitt (2020: 35)
In a statement about this book, Hewitt summarises the connection in it of some key themes: the reflexive examination of the queer self, the body and what we might call ‘description of nature’:
When I took a step back, I realised I was joining the poetry of nature with the poetry of the body, and the queer poetry of the body in particular, and those seemed to be the two strands I was working with. ….
And then also life happened along the way, and so the shape of the collection changed as my life did….
Cited (p. 2 of 7) in The Nan Shepherd Prize Interview with Seán Hewitt available at: https://nanshepherdprize.com/resources/who-to-follow-and-what-to-read/interview-with-sean-hewitt/
There are better quotations from which to derive the information but this will suffice to show that queer body is investigated in an autobiographical context, a context of a queer life that gives shape to poems, their sequence and shape and to their moments of Joycean epiphany. Epiphany is used by Joyce to name the sense of self-realisation or self-revelation, a vision of what his life is and means. Later, in the fuller piece, I want to explore how such moments grow through suffering from this notion of epiphany to the larger one of a shared theophany – the revelation in ‘our life’, that is in community of celebrants, of the appearance of deity itself. This deity, I’ll argue (though oft named God) is nearer to a kind of Feuerbachian natural supernaturalism experienced in the communities of bodies.[2] For now though I’ll stay with the concept of epiphany, the connection of it to religious and ritual connections, in the disturbingly beautiful and literally visceral poem The Callery Pear.
The Callery Pear is one of the easiest of the poems to begin with for looking for what is meant by the queer body in epiphany or, to use a word from one of Hewitt’s acknowledged influences its ‘inscape’. Hewitt discusses his poetic mission in a revealing pieces, written on the day of his first major publication, in The Irish Times, of course.[3] He speaks there of two themes within the book: a community with recent queer writing, including of course Andrew McMillan, and ‘a passion for the natural world seen slant’, attributed to, amongst others, Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘These two’ themes, as I have already shown here to are, in his words:
… never distinct. The body is the receptor, the focus of all of the poems here because they are, quite necessarily, all focused through my body. And so, in Tongues of Fire, the natural world is also a queer world, a bodily world.
Hewitt, S (2020b) ‘I would give all my poems to have my father back’ in The Irish Times, Thursday April 23rd. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/seán-hewitt-i-would-give-all-my-poems-to-have-my-father-back-1.4218852
This gets nearer I think than the earlier quotation to how body, self, specific life-circumstances and the observation of the natural world interact in the poems as a whole. However, for Hewitt, Hopkins’ theory of inscape, seeing things in their essential or epiphanic selves was already consciously a product of Hopkins’ self-acknowledged ‘queerness’. Hewitt quotes Hopkins in a 2018 piece:
“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness… Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.”
cited Hewitt (2018) ‘A century on, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is still ahead of the times: Tortured visions of a poet priest’. in The New Statesman 08 August 2018. Available in: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/08/century-poetry-gerard-manley-hopkins-still-ahead-times
Now without a doubt, Hopkins uses the term ‘queer’ without any theory to interpret it and it is not therefore Hewitt’s intention to say that. However, Hewitt makes it clear that Hopkin’s notion of inscape is linked to Aquinas’ idea of haeccitas, or thisness and, I’d extrapolate this to to Joyce’s notion of ‘epiphany’ by their common origin. Hewitt also says Hopkins links the expression of thisness to the sense of inner ‘vice’ (complexly viewed) with which he characterised his own sexual queerness.
The role of this despatch of my own from a longer piece on Hewitt’s new volume is to look at the conflation of the epiphany achieved in nature and queerness in one short lyric poem: Callery Pear. The poem refers to and captures, in an embodied perspective ’on slant, a tree (Pyris Calleriana) found in a cultivated form, known as the ‘Bradford’, in the USA but also uncultivated in South East Asia. Hewitt certainly visited Cambodia, as we know from his poem Ta Prohm, celebrating the ancient temple there, but I do not know if his knowledge of this tree relates to South East Asia or the States. Certainly, the poem feels as if it were capturing this element of nature as an inscape from an urban and constricted environment:
the same smell, loosing now
in drifts, through the hot streets
And the poem is fascinated by the enclosure or introjection to the body of the flowers natural scent.
Yet Hewitt choses ‘smell’, rather than ‘scent’ to signify the trees blossom (pictured below) as it fills the air, wind, and it all touches his body in the process of being taken in through nose and mouth.
Hewitt stands out amongst postmodern queer poets for his insistence on apparent distance from ‘the political imperative’ by inhabiting a lyric tradition, best exemplified in Yeats: ‘its patterning, its rhyme, its insistent “I”’.[4]. It is then in unexpected slanted versions of nature that the ‘insistent “I”’ finds both its ‘breath’ in this air of a lyric air, patterning itself in movements internal and external to itself. We have seen how ‘the same smell’ indicates not only the repetitive sense in which the smell endures but how it spans the time-space from its capture in the daylit streets in ‘sheets’ and ‘billows’ to instance where the smell of self (sweat and stain) also is that of ‘another man’, where the object of desire is projected from the interior to the exterior congress of queer bodies in a congress across time and space of ‘sameness’/homo-sensuous-ness (if I may coin a portmanteau word):
sweated; the stain of myself
(smelling almost of another man)
held like blossom to my nose.
That last line bends back, in the way fluid lyric patterns do, to ‘the same smell’ in the second stanza, such that experience of nature is ‘slanted’ and queered. It is not only made strange to any normative expectations of the natural scent of blossom but to expectations of the love lyric. When I first read this I felt it was a poem about masturbation but if it is, it is only this as well as potentially about love shared within the agencies of more than one body, the agency which ‘held’ the blossom to my nose.
Because this is a poem where self may be acting on its own body whilst also evoking the ghost of another male body who acts upon his (as the poem Ghost, preceding this one, shows more obviously). This may be because in writing from and about one’s own body attends not to bodies as wholes but as parts. The ‘fist’ clenching down ‘deep under my sacrum’ (we must return to this word) may be his own, another’s, acting frontally or anally on his body, or a metaphor for how the action of smell feels in the sympathetic nervous system and the internal organs, such as the prostrate, surrounding that particular area of anatomy and involved in sexual stimulation and the production of semen and the sensation of orgasm.
At their fullest, Hewitt’s poems mark the rhythm of sex, as described by Freud as an effect of the greatest art too (in The Interpretation of Dreams speaking of Greek tragedy) as a cycle of nervous stimulation and inhibition – holding back before final all-consuming release.
and then, as I breathe, clenching
deep under my sacrum: a fist
of longing, call of silvered
nights when I would make
my body burst its bloom
then ….
That piece blends violent images and/ or sensations, such as the clench of the fist, so that it also is a synecdoche of clenched buttocks (‘deep under the sacrum’) and the motion of the blood conveyed in insistent fast-paced rhythm and alliterative plosive ‘b’ sounds.
If the body has a bloom it also, like the ‘Callery Pear’ emits a smell that is also loosened, ‘wafting / in sheets’ in the same place we ‘snug down, half -/ sweated’. That smell is also true both to the chemistry of both body odours (sweat from different hotly contained parts of the body and of semen and that which it stains. Hence these trees that represent nature to us here slanted to the bodies of conjoined men (I use the specific gender marker here purposively).
Semen has always been posited in the sexual emissions of the Callery Pear Tree, as have the rhythmic pulses of movement on and inhibition so important to the effect of lyric lines in poetry. ‘Stops me’ is a performative in the first line – it part helped by a Dickinson-like dash:
All of a sudden it stops me –
acrid and sour-white, wafting
in sheets as the pollen catches the sun
The poet whose lyric starts by just as suddenly stopping captures a moment of stasis where nature is almost surprised at itself, in the fullness of its air and ‘breath’ with stuff, its sense too of containment as an effect of nature trapped in what contains rather than releases it. And then there is a multi-sensuous observation of the blossom that is visual colour, taste, smell and something slanted or ‘off-colour’: ‘acrid and sour-white’.
That sour is brilliant. It’s the moment the poem admits to the taste of semen. As for smell, it’s ‘wafting’, ‘loosing now’, as if sometimes realised only in illusions of an object resolving into wind and light. As I’ve suggested those ‘sheets’ in line 3 live on through the short lyric to illuminate the bed conveyed in a synecdoche of action in one in stanza 4, wherein poet’s (and perhaps another’s or not) body will ‘snug down’.
The time-frame of this poem (early morning where pollen catches the slanting sun and the night) is part of the queerness of this poem, what Hewitt himself names in talking of the night-time feel of the volume as a whole as ‘an inversion of the world I grew up knowing’.[5] Poets who work with other queer poets do not use words like ‘inversion’ lightly, since they were the popular appellations of homosexuality in the first flowering of sexology.
And here I think we need to look again at how and why Hewitt treats so sympathetically Hopkins’ sense that his queer way of performing things in the world, whether that be celebrant at a religious ritual, or as a writer or as a sexual being were a vice. Queer men, Hewitt knows, are brought up in a world that not only looks aslant at them but also with shame. As Hewitt so beautifully says the bodily world of young gay men is one inhabited by internalised sense of being ‘in-the-wrong’ too: ‘growing into sex and shame that queer people experience’.[6]
The language expresses this in the contested nature of its attempt to express sensuous, sensual and queer experience, whether in the morning at the foot of blooming pear trees or at night in a mix of sexual action and fantasy whose participants may be one or more as half disgust and half engaged stimulation, half fearful violence and half celebration of life at the senses. Hence the ambiguity of ‘clenching’ and ‘fist’, separated so that they are not normalised as a known thing, longing and violent fragmentation in that alliterative ‘burst’. The idea of a sexual self, and/or emission that might be a ‘stain’ like Hopkin’s ‘vice’.
A reader who had not noticed that might retreat in horror: either, because the queer sexual element seem ‘unnecessary’ or because, they have so far progressed in self-knowledge that sexual activity is no longer a matter of dualities of good and what is feared to be evil (as I think it might be in Ghost) but only of celebration. The answer is that this is a poem of growing up into queer sexual being not of its attainment. For the latter we’ll need to look at the whole volume (as is my intention in order to place this part-piece on one short lyric.
Before I move on to my final point her about the role of the ‘sacrum’ in this poem, and in leaning forward and backward to the rest of the volume, I want to show how and why the analogy of developmental queer sexual self-epiphany with the tree can be justified. We can see, if we expand our cultural grasp, in the tree, and cognitions of it, an objective correlative of such ambiguous developmental moments. Look for instance at the piece from corporate US literature in which the standing of the tree is discussed in the note marked here, which identifies here the chemical composition of its smell.[7]
That the flower and its emissions are so associated not only with the sexual but of body-odour considered as repellent, rather than as sexual attractants, tells us a whole story of the ‘civilisation’ of the sexual ‘instinct’, such that instinct is no longer the right name, a fact Freud often shared. The tree is thought an ‘invasive non-aboriginal pest’ in America not only for this but because its fruits taste horrible, a ‘useless ‘fruit’ indeed in the Anthropocene. There is already a problem for the queer body in making poetry here but it a problem pertaining centrally to queer lives which can form into both or either negative and positive cognitions and social cognitions and affects in the minds, bodies and societies of people
Finally to come back to the sacrum, pictured for the anatomically challenged above. The sacrum was identified as identified and named in Classical Greece and the assumptions it concerned carried over into Roman religion and health-cognition. Even a cursory look at an encyclopaedia definition of the words history shows that the anatomical area contained by the sacred bone (actually the pear-like shield formed by the fusing of 5 vertebrae and the remnants of a tailbone) was largely filled by ‘reproductive’ and sexual organs.
We cannot know if Hewitt intended the associations with the sacred in the history of our knowledge of this bony area to link to the sacred and, possibly to Greek and Roman sacrificial ritual. Certainly, I would not claim that such associations play a large part in the poem seen and read on its own. But in the development of the set of poems and on re-reading it rings bells. Because this seat of orgasm claims depth (‘deep under the sacrum’) and it is into sacred and ritual depths that the rest of the poem will lead us, just as celebrants at Eleusis were led to a final theophany or vision of the appearance of God or the Catholic Mass leads us to find in the body in the bread we make and eat the ‘real presence’ of God’s son in the fleshly body.
Far from being early to see this, many early reviews have made much of the return to the ritual in lyric, an idea not unknown to Poetic Modernists like T.S. Eliot and Yeats. A very early review by Juliano Zaffino picked this up thus:
There is a gradual move towards the Pentecostal, beginning there. As the poems move towards their end they acquire an increasingly acute taste of grief, as Hewitt’s “pre-elegies” for his father ask us to consider such things that we may never be able to fathom: “Are we all / just wanting to see ourselves / changed, made unearthly?” he asks in ‘Petition’, …
Zaffino, J. (2020) ‘Seán Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire’ Available at: https://severinelit.com/2020/04/28/sean-hewitts-tongues-of-fire/
Where I think I differ from Zaffino, as I continue to write the whole piece rather than this part-piece, is that I see the concern with ritual diving ‘deep under the sacrum’ and indeed the sacred itself to investigate the rhizomes and roots from which grow more than one kind of tree (‘Of Jesse’) and more and queerer gods of old, new and the future. This was the aim of the left Hegelians, as especially Feuerbach. Have we re-found this philosophical stance in its queered fullness. I want to investigate that.
Aiming to write it before Wednesday 6 May.
Steve
[1] From the poem Tongues of Fire p. 69 in Hewitt (2020: 65-69)
[2] Summarised by Todd Gooch as the iconic symbol of ‘an atheistic humanism that renounces the fantastical consolations of religion in order to embrace the historical tasks of human self-realization and the creation of the political and cultural institutions that are conducive to it’. Gooch, Todd, “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/>.
[3] I say ‘of course’ because the poems demand the understanding arising from a Catholic cultural history, if not Catholicism itself.
[4] Hewitt (2020b).
[5] Hewitt (2020b)
[6] ibid.
[7] “We come in contact with the smell of amines every day in the form of body odors, like under the arm pits.
The fishy odor produced by the Bradford Pear is likely a combination of two amines called trimethylamine and dimethylamine, according to Richard Banick, a botanical manager at Bell Flavors and Fragrances. Although perfumers know what chemicals produce the fishy smell (trimethylamine is often used an indicator of how fresh a fish is) they can’t be certain what causes the odor of the Bradford Pear, said Banick.
…..
Rodgriquez suspects that the volatile compounds in the Bradford tree are there as attractants, and not necessarily to repel pollinators.
Later, the trees produce little green-yellow fruits that you cannot eat.”
Business Insider ‘Why all of New York City smells like sex these days’ Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/bradford-pear-tree-semen-sex-smell-2013-4?r=US&IR=T
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