I get some news!
The first thing I
Do, without thought
Apparently
Is carelessly
Interpret it.
News that you receive oft takes a moment to interpret. Is it good? is it bad? Or is it somewhere in between. Perhaps the news contains a mixture of good, bad, or nuanced degrees between positive and negative interpretation as well as a mixture of elements that may be indifferent or neutral. The fact that I often feel ambivalent about a piece of news I receive is that I feel, almost tangibly, a gap in space as well as time, between the receipt of news and its interpretation or interpretations (later we can imagine that time and space as that intervening between Ghent and Aix)). I use the plural in the last sentence because responses to news more often flow in multiples not as singular meanings. It seems to me to call something ‘great, amazingly fantastic news’ so piles up the work of interpretation that there seems to be a need to hide a much more real ambivalence and pretend there is no difference between the quality of the event, how we receive ‘news’ about it, and the processes, in the longer duration, in interpreting (and of reinterpreting it).
Great, amazingly fantastic news!
Adjectival scrum comes after the 'news'
itself - really; inserts fulsome meaning
Into the words, retrospectively imbues
Us with feeling whilst the intervening
Processes go unnoticed.that make the thing
Seem greater than it was,. We are caught up
More easily by meanings that can fling
Joy at us with surprise. Take up the cup
That winners hoist above themselves so high
They forget that no news may be best news.
For there's no news does not yield by and by
To vast multitudes of conflicting views
That drop us lower when we've soared above
The chances of life. No news as final,
As that which forces off the sloppy glove
From our cold hand , knows that there only shall
Be chance of events so good if we make
What's mixed-up feel good, for our self's own sake.
Why bother with poor blank verse, I ask myself, reading that back through. the lesson emerges, rather than being told to us, in Robert Browning’s How They Brought the Good News fem Ghent to Aix. A knight rides from the battle field to tell his own country’s leaders that their war is won. Fired with being the bearer of good news and so full of the glory it will bring him, he rides his loved ‘pet-horse’ Roland so hard that at the end of the journey Roland collapses and dies. The final stanza of the poem has a mixed feel, as if the knight’s expectation that his news is ‘great, amazingly fantastic news’ and will reflect through him and must be felt by all. Roland’s fate and his hopeless response to it is a sign that the interpretation off good news will always be one of unnecessary ambivalence.
Stanza X.
And all I remember is---friends flocking round
As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground;
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)
Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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