Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Yesterday, I went to a poetry reading – Lorraine McGuigan is the Cafe Poet of a neat little place in Eltham called The Lane. Eltham’s always had an active artistic community as well as loads of trees. I remember in high school being quite jealous of the (artistic-hippie) folks who lived out that way, though living out that far had its caveats – dirt roads, bushfire danger, bad lighting in the night so you’d invariably get lost (like I did en route to see Lorraine perform).

Its environs was also home to the first person I fell in love with.

We both went to the same high school and belonged to different social circles (him, ‘cool’ kid, me, music-nerdy-but-not-as-smart-as-my-friends).

I don’t really remember how we became friends – I think it was some teasing in a VCE Physics class. I could not have picked the worst person to fall in love with: artistic, athletic, highly intelligent and drop-dead gorgeous. Fuck, Universe, cut me some slack?

Driving back out Eltham-way made my memories of him, our friendship and our similarities seem so vivid.

Particularly the ‘Thomas Covenant’ chronicles written by Stephen Donaldson. I recall devouring the First Chronicle (which was the first three books) and the Second Chronicle (which I used to refer to as the ‘fourth’, ‘fifth’ and ‘sixth’ books to annoy the object of my affection).

Fairly recently, Donaldson started up this fantasy franchise again – so now there is the ‘Last Chronicles’, comprising three last books. Will he stick to that word? Ooh, I wonder… What made him start it up again? Will it really be finished this time?

I’m pretty intimidated by the notion of having to reapproach the series, though when I last recalled to mind those final high school years and that first falling in love, the memory though tender does also sting; but now, loves and books and years and schools later, maybe it’s time to finish the series. And maybe to stop falling in love with people who hail from foresty areas.

I’m rereading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with my good friend Ranjit. It’s time I focussed on other loves.

I thought it might be nice to share one of my favourite passages. I’ve read this poem several times over the years (and rarely been none the wiser though now I have a Norton Critical Edition to help out) and this one passage constantly haunts me. I’m not sure why.

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed. I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.

This hyacinth girl, I want to meet her. The NCE says that there are so many variants of the poem and in comparison to my first copy (Faber & Faber edition), it’s really obvious. Eliot himself supervised both the publication of different versions near-concurrently in the US and the UK. It got me thinking: technically, there would be no such thing as a ‘definitive’ version.

My inner lit wanker asks is that actually necessary, even our crappo pomo world etc. etc.? Does having a definitive edition add to the enjoyment of the poem? I personally don’t think so. But then again, chasing down the variants does have a ‘collecting bootlegs’ feel to it and heaps of music nerds do that.

As a practising poet, I agonise over punctuation and line breaks endlessly. If I were a healthier person, I dare say it would be the one thing that’d keep me up at night. Incidentally, I don’t like the capitalisation of ‘Hyacinth garden’ though having read the UK standard version first, it probably ‘feels’ more natural for it to remain uncapitalised.

If you see the hyacinth girl, tell her I’m looking for her.