Fragments and Aggregates: Thoughts on flies, on being consumed, discord and harmony, and on trails of words: Miroslav Holub’s ‘The Fly’ (trans. by George Theiner), and Syd Barrett’s ‘Opel’ and ‘Word Song’
I
think we’ll start with viewpoints. Big pictures and life’s details. Both Barrett’s
‘Opel’ and Holub’s ‘The Fly’ present different perspectives at different
points. In ‘Opel,’ the perspective is initially that of a dispassionate
observer, which morphs into a first-person anguished declaration, seemingly
seeking some kind of indistinct absolution. In ‘The Fly’, a detached observer
describes a horrendous battle scene before effectively zooming in for a closeup
on the titular insect as she mates, rubs her legs together, sits and meditates
momentarily in a very human fashion, and lays her eggs. Abruptly, the view
reverts at the poem’s end as the poetic speaker matter-of-factly relates the
fly being eaten (appropriately swiftly) by a swift ‘fleeing’ from
human-generated fires. And thus is a cycle of life succinctly portrayed, death
begetting life. Nature acts as both stage and impassive host for these events.
‘Opel’
opens with the description of a ‘far distant shore’ that is ‘miles from land’,
an absurdity emphasising its status as part of ‘a dream in a mist of grey’. Yet
one can almost hear the sea caressing the shore as ‘warm shallow waters sweep
shells / so the cockles shine’ in this dreamlike otherworld. The stark,
alliterative monosyllables of ‘crisp flax squeaks tall reeds’ sound slightly
sinister as they ‘make a circle of grey…around man’, but the effect is
mitigated by the intervening ‘summer way’ by which Syd has them do it. Perhaps this
is a protective dream, the creation by nature of an illusory barrier, but this could
be an illusion that entraps. The ‘way’ is ‘empty’; the ‘tears’ are ‘dry’. As
with Holub’s poem, nature persists, unconcerned with a lone ‘pebble’, or
‘driftwood’, or a lost human being. The only colours Syd mentions are ‘grey’
and ‘ebony’, each appearing twice in the lyrics. Just like the illogicality of
a shore being ‘miles from land’, how can one see an ‘ebony totem in ebony
sand’? Everything is obscure and far away. There is a sense of desolation in
the ‘pebble that stood alone / and driftwood [that] lies half buried’, in the
‘bare winding carcass’, ‘empty way’, and ‘dry tears’. Someone seems to be alone
on an island (or perhaps they are the island) as the vividly descriptive
tones of the early part of the song are replaced after the instrumental by a
first-person, forlorn, dissonant vocal over jangling guitar chords (FYI, the ‘I’m
trying’ section features an A sus 4 chord modulating to G sharp, as per an
interesting conversation I had with my piano teacher and past musical
collaborator, Max Hunt). The sense of being adrift and misplaced is accentuated
by Barrett’s well-known irregular timing, which is as unsettling as his
stridently haunting, searching, almost pleading vocal.
Syd’s image of a ‘bare…carcass’ that ‘shimmers’ as ‘flies scoop up meat’ repels, suggesting a horrible attractiveness in death to at least one other life form and voracious gorging on a thing decaying. Everything is eaten up, devoured, in its turn, demonstrated with similar imagery in Holub’s poem as a fly lays eggs on a dead armourer’s eye and is then ‘eaten by a swift’ fighting for its own survival, ‘fleeing / from the fires of Estrees’. Everything is cyclical, as it is ‘[w]hen silence settle[s] / and only the whisper of decay / softly circle[s] the bodies’ (all expressed in creepily sibilant language; for which credit is due to the translator) that the fly begins to reproduce. Is this analogous with Syd’s ‘circle of grey’, I wonder? Nature is utterly indifferent to suffering as the fly ‘sits on a disembowelled horse / meditating / on the immortality of flies’. There is a cold yet ultimately meaningless triumph in the tiny insect (here ironically given the ability to ruminate on existential matters) sitting atop the comparatively vast ruins of the eviscerated horse, and even then, it is clear that what matters is the species as a whole, not the individual fly, which itself survives only long enough to reproduce. Human signposts are even less meaningful. Aristocratic titles and noble positions are irrelevant to nature, since the ‘Duke of Clervaux’ merely provides a ‘blue tongue’ in death for the fly to alight on, and a ‘Royal Armourer’ unknowingly offers up his dead eye as a convenient location for incubation of a fly’s eggs. Place names such as ‘Crecy’, ‘Vadincourt’, and ‘Estrees’ are only incidental. How trivial are the titanic battles of humanity when set against the mating of two flies. Does it matter that it was ‘the fourteenth charge / of the French cavalry’ that coincided with the timeless and perfunctory act precipitating regeneration? What are ‘the shouts, / the gasps, / the groans, / the trampling and the tumbling’ of dying men but an ironic and distorted evocation of lovemaking and the creation of new life achieved bathetically in the midst of large-scale destruction by two tiny flies?
One
of Syd Barrett’s most striking characteristics was his childlike nature; naïve
and not naïve, explorative, and irreverent. Anyone who knows his story will be
able to see how this aspect of Syd’s personality allowed him, on the one hand,
to create startlingly original songs, but on the other, led him down a dark
path where it was all too easy to become lost. For children, of course, each
new day is an act of discovery, a process of collecting fragments to reassemble
and thus build knowledge. I am reminded of this kind of impressionistic piecing
together of a whole in ‘Word Song’, a perennial favourite of mine by Syd, something
I’m sure I share with many others. Who needs complete sentences to communicate?
Why not just enjoy each splendid new word and roll it around the tongue with
its brethren? It’s the sound and what sounds good next to something else that
matters here, and meaning derives from that. My favourite juxtaposition in the
lyrics is ‘sugar, teak’. There’s something about the sound of it and the
sensory suggestion of the sweet and granular food and solid wood. I’ve read
that Syd experienced synaesthesia, which may (at least, in part) explain ‘Word
Song’. Or maybe not. These are stream-of-consciousness lyrics, a seemingly
random mixture of nouns, adjectives, and an odd verb. Somehow, they’re evocative
of lessons learned in a school day. It’s like nipping in and out of different
classes: one minute you’re in geography, with ‘lake’, ‘jungle’, ‘volcano’,
‘valley’, and ‘island’; then history, with ‘medieval’, and ‘Mycenean’. Let’s
have a nature class, and today we will look at ‘clover’, ‘goat’, and
‘chameleon’. Time for science, and the world divided up, delineated, named, and
measured by humankind: ‘heat’, ‘helium’, ‘refraction’, ‘radar’, ‘scales’,
‘gamma’, ‘gyroscope’. There is obvious alliteration of the sort a child might
enjoy: ‘glaucous, glycerine, gold, goat’. I love the way alliteration and
thought process are connected and can be inferred, as in ‘jaws, jungle’ and in
‘inflect, impression’. However, there might be just a hint of the sardonic in
‘gold, local stocks, […] hunter, interest, bullet, market’. Hmmm…. We have
precious metals here, as shimmery as the carcass of ‘Opel’ and as valuable to
humans as dead meat is to flies: ‘gold’, ‘lead’, ‘silver’, ‘tin’, ‘copper’. We
have other commodities, too: ‘teak’, ‘ebony’, and ‘rubber’. But then, ebony,
gold, silver, and copper are all colours as well, as are ‘glaucous’ and
‘beetroot’. Ah, where was that famously irregular head of Syd’s going with all
of this? There are some wonderfully sudden injections of thought in places, with
Syd following their trail, such as ‘ingot, lovely, mirror’: here is something shiny,
delightful to look at, and the place to admire things is in a looking-glass. There
are darker, descending thoughts, too: ‘vain’ and ‘wreck’. There is a sort of
structure, but it is in line with Syd’s thought processes (like his sense of
musical timing) and not in conformity with anyone else’s expectations or
requirements.
‘Opel’ in particular (and, of course, it’s not the only one of his songs to do this effectively) underlines the tragedy of Syd, the man-child who somehow lost himself but left behind a pocketful of vivid glimpses of the world and some other world, as refracted through his own singular lens. Perhaps he got trapped between them. Syd’s fragmentation collided and coincided with a unique inventiveness born of a childlike nature that could not flourish in the long term. In much of Syd’s work, mainly that created outside of Pink Floyd, we see creation in the midst of destruction, a manifestation of that wonderful and terrible balance that controls all, that allows flies to feed and breed on death. On one side of the scales, each of us is tiny, inconsequential, ‘living’ and ‘giving’ and ‘trying’ (as Syd so plaintively sings) until we are ‘eaten’, if not by Holub’s swift, then by the swiftness of time. On the other side, weighed against our apparent insignificance, allaying despair, is the inevitability of creation and propagation, and our own part in the formation of something greater than ourselves. Each note, each chord, each word, each line, each verse builds the poem or the song. One needs little pieces to make a whole, and to understand the whole, we have to examine its component parts. Such is the balance of things. And I’m fairly sure where I sit within the scales: probably A minor.
The poem: The fly (ronnowpoetry.com) Available from: Poems Before & After: Collected English Translations by Miroslav Holub ISBN: 9781852247478
The song:
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