Ballylee, 17th December 2008

Driving back from Kerry yesterday, I got very tired as I approached Gort and decided that I would have to have a nap if I was to make it back to Mayo safely. So I turned off the main road and went down to the Yeats tower where, I knew, there is a handy car park away from the noise of traffic. As it was dark (about six p.m.) I thought I would park right beside the tower itself, out of some feeling of insecurity, so I pulled in at the stable right opposite the Thoor. After a few minutes I had the passenger seat down and had cleared enough space to spread out my sleeping bag.

   This was a place of many recollections and associations; Yeats himself might have referred to psychic memory. I thought of Robartes and Aherne in 'Phases of the Moon' approaching the tower in the evening and looking up to the lit window where the modern poet laboured away. Other moments from the 'Meditations' and the Tower poems: the young man killed in the civil war skirmish; WB praying for his daughter as the storm howled outside. I was on all fours in the back of my ford with these visitations in my mind when a car sped past and, I thought, caught me in its headlights. Did the guards patrol the area? If so, I thought the local officer with his torch might be a more likely visitant than the ghost of our poet. 

   Once I was in my bag I could lie there and listen. Another car sped down to the car park, skidded around aggressively, and drove away again: sussing out the place for untended vehicles, or just touring, who could know. Then just the noise of a windy western night, the body of the car being buffetted by the gusts, and, briefly, the sneeze of a fox. I also heard a loud crack, as if a branch had broken in the wind ('a pear tree broken').

   WB, the proprietorial ghost, did not materialise; I vainly thought he might have been curious about this traveller lying there among stacks of old books. Of course, for all his encomiums to the stability of the Big House tradition, he was himself an unsettled type: Ballylee was a bleak place that night. I might have been better off in Rapallo in pursuit of my psychic quest. 

   I did not sleep after all, but an hour with these images washing through my mind was rest enough from the demands of night driving. At 7.45 I got back behind the wheel and drove home.  

The unknown unknown

Donald Rumsfeld's formulation helped me to think my way through an impasse lately: I was writing and revising, and feeling that some of what I had written was too deliberately willed, referable to the known known, or to the known unknown. Poetry should be a negotiation between what we known to be our limits and the revelation of something we didn't even realise was there in the first place. Some great primary talents are able to access this level of perception almost at will; for others it involves taking dry stick and moss and spending hours or days perhaps rubbing these improbable materials together to produce a flame. The very process of revising is a way to produce this heat: Yeats did this: if you look at the development of his mss. you see that some of the most memorable poems had unpromising beginnings in the early drafts, but it was WB's dogged determination that arrived at the pure drop in the end. Wordsworth describes the process also, in his remarks on 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling': as you read on to the 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' bit, you can see that it's the act of writing through the stages of revision that he's describing. 

   Where Heaney writes about the bird that 'sings very close/To the music of what happens', he has discovered one of those moments: something entirely unforseeable, unforscriptable, something not referable to any prior abstract proposition. It is just such a moment that many of us are after in our burrowing. The outcome requires at least two conditions to emerge: the energy to pursue the thing for as long as it takes, and the judgement to recognise the revelation when it happens. No one who has the vanity to begin this process in the first place is likely to admit that, perhaps, they haven't got the talent that's required for the enterprise, but then that's a risk inherent in any creative career. 

   Two poems to match my current mood: 'Crow Hill' and 'Strawberry Hill', from Ted Hughes's Lupercal.  Another poem that I admire, which I think may be a great poem: 'Sisyphus' by Alice Oswald (from Woods etc.).