Rob Stone: The Shrinking Green (εccentric Archives)

Quite a task,
Putting together Heaven, yet we do.
James Merrill

While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind
Ruyard Kipling

The Academy that Plato inhabited with his agents and interlocutors was a sociable place. It was a garden that rang with voices. In a sense, the entire philosophical output that is signed ‘Plato’ might be regarded as an archival trace of the heightened sensibilities and sociabilities of that bit of historic greenery. What follows here takes up the motif of the garden as a means of expressing the idea of the archive as a learning environment. In particular, it is concerned with an uncertain relation of coming to knowledge, and the idea that eccentrically constituted archives are the cherishable product of that uncertainty. This is an essay about the value of fallibility, about errors and their proper voicings.
There are difficulties in writing plausibly about such easily dismissed and fragile types of archival knowing. One could be too positivistic, too certain. A circumspect allusiveness may be the best approach. For, the stake here, and for the project of ‘Akademie’, is the political-aesthetic importance of the unfolding of a subjective position in relation to an archive. This unfolding is re-characterised essentially by each and every new twist and unexpected turn – by each delight or hint of upset, by every fleeting impression or link in an uninfluential argument. For an attention to this kind of emerging, subjective and often contradictory knowledge, the named task of each archival inquiry, the stated reason for being there becomes only an alibi for more telling inquiries. So, for this type of engagement to succeed, there might need to be failure elsewhere. The eccentricity of archives depends on how we live in them.
Of the many intellectual encounters that Plato imaginatively depicted, one involving Cratylus is of the best known. Cratylus had a profound conception of the truth contained by words. His position was taken to be fallacious, and he was criticised for it. Though he was not exactly cast out, his reputation suffered. Nevertheless, his suggestion that there is something in the sound of words (which may in the end prove ungraspable) which is important for understanding the production of identities and similarities between archivally found materials. The voice as an archive? I’ll start with that.

The Summer Academy (I like that)
I spent the early summer introducing my son to rhyme. He’s only little, but quite an adept. What rhymes with house? Mouse. What rhymes with fish? Dish. What rhymes with head? Bed. What rhymes with orange? Nothing! What rhymes with salad? Ballad. Ballad? OK, what rhymes with beetle? Creetle. Oh!. I see. What rhymes with tree? Pee. Pea? Pee. P? Pee!!
His accent is complicated. It’s shaped by an aggregate of parental traces – bits of London, Wales and Toronto (there are grace notes from Bavaria and the eastern part of Slovakia behind that, as well). But his syntax, which is lively, is also inhabited by emphatic textures lifted from the idiolects of very many others in his life. Impersonations and definitions of class register in there too. It’s a bit of a walking archive in its own right, Gabriel’s accent. We live in London. He’s just at school. He’s talkative and inquiring. He meets all sorts of people from everywhere, all the time, and he talks to them.
And, like mine, his diphthongs aren’t what they could be. They are a bit unstable. And, because of all this variance, things can rhyme differently for different reasons. A word like again needn’t rhyme with one like strain, for instance. It may rhyme with pen. There is a short story with which he has a hot and cold relationship, Duck in the Truck. In it, there is a passage over which I have not yet failed to stumble.

This is the rope and here’s the Goat’s plan,
to tie a knot as tight as they can.
This is the push at the rear once again
This is the pull as the boat takes the strain

The tripping that this passage causes me is of an almost drunken kind, and points to variousness. I always have to re-read it. And because I keep getting it wrong, because it causes pause and re-iteration, I’ve had to think about how to accommodate the moments of modulation proposed by these paired couplets. Not in any serious way. Just as a kind of bedtime pragmatics, really.
In everyday usage, I happily swap between a short vowel and a longer one when saying the word again. Here though, my pronunciation, like Gabriel’s, invariably introduces the shortened vowel - ε. At one point I thought that this voicing appeared as a structural effect of the verse itself. There is a shift from nine syllables over ten beats in the first couplet, to ten over ten in the second. This produces a kind of syncopation, and then its disappointment.
Regarding this, my accent makes the following suggestion to me: In the first line there is an implied rest after rope. It divides the line into four and then five syllables. The first of these last five syllables is syncopated by an anacrusis; almost entirely weightless and barged up against the regularity of the remainder. Another rest similarly divides the second line after the word tie. As well, the first four syllables of this line are neatened into two pairs. My accent further proposes that at the end of the third line a shortening of the vowel in the word again might provide room for a little rubato and, thereby, a resolution of an emerging rhythmic structure. However, on the approach of the word strain at the end of the fourth line, my accent immediately reveals itself to be mistaken; and therein lay the drunken delights of reading aloud. How lovely.
For a time I was content, not to say quite pleased with this little formal analysis. It was comforting to think that the frisson suggested by the potential fallibility of this rhyming could be a subject of the organisation of the text itself. I resigned myself to remember next time, and to properly pronounce the word again. This, however, proved not so simple. I couldn’t shake the other, shorter, more precipitate pronunciation. I still can’t. I have become attached to it; inordinately. Or, rather, I think that I have become attached to the time afforded by the stumble.

~

The moment of recognition that here a-gεn should be pronounced a-geɪn, is in fact a kind of giveaway. It opens onto a reflective encounter. So, it is important to at least try to be sure about what it discloses – for it is certainly not a simple matter of verbal incompetence. Literally, that encounter concerns the tip of my tongue, and its refusal – there isn’t another word – to reach forward and relax behind my lower teeth. From there, the correct rhyming vowel could ring forth and articulate a metrical scheme, unhindered. However, rather than behaving so, it hovers, indeterminately. It invariably curls back away from the place where it could find the right rhyme, and prefers instead to be closer to the spot on the roof of my mouth where it will soon have to go to find an N. Perhaps this signals some profound indolence on my part. There is no great distance involved, after all. But, maybe there is also a desire to prevent the rhyme itself, a desire to retice rather than entice: to make awkward. The domestically practical effect of soothing and uninterrupted, murmurous, harmony is sacrificed for this. So, there may be pathology here.
That ε, that short, aggressive vowel is also the sound of a kind of questioning: – Eh? This is not quite the sound of interrogation, nor even perplexity. It suggests instead incomprehension, and even uncertainty. It is a provocation, a request for more. The unfolding logic of stresses and inflections in this bit of kids’ verse produces a heady vertiginousness at precisely the point where it becomes apparent that the word strain is going to contradict the pronunciation of a-gεn. For an instant, before the mistake is made (or forestalled), it is possible to inhabit the delicious ambiguities of a purely aesthetic emotion. The point is, however, that the verse in what might be called its intentions may have no conception of the metre-rubbing that the contest for its pronunciation occasions. It may have no sense of itself as a formal mechanism for prompting an aesthetic delight in difference. For it, again rhymes with strain. The question doesn’t arise.

There is something in my voice, and in Gabriel’s, which could be the subject of a history though. Adopting some Higginsian principle of ethno-phonology, it may be possible to construct a respectable heritage for the role of this vowel in my accent. Undeniably mine is one shaped, in part, by central London. My father’s extensive extended family came from Poplar, in the east end of the city – a place that is just (but only just) within earshot of Bow Bells. They might be called Cockneys. I can remember family discussions of this. That is I can remember the sound and textures of those discussions. I remember stances, not exactly what was said of the matter.
My paternal grandfather Bertie, worked as a machine operator in a paper mill in Aldgate. His wife, Beth, held any number of positions as a shop attendant. These things locate the character of the accent. There might therefore be something legitimate, justifiable, reasonable, even laudable about my pronunciation, then. That ε and its intermittence in my voice concerns Poplar. With this sense of plausible and evident continuity, a historically constant and well-formed, coherent and regular accent could be supposed and celebrated. That little sound, that ε, might be the subject of a glottochronology, a trace to be archived and pursued through my voice and others.
But, I never lived in Poplar. I never inhabited a public culture where that glottally stopped ε could be transparently exercised as the aural signal of other similarities. And neither did my father; not really. At the start of the war, in 1939, when he was, what, two or something, my grandparents took him and his siblings, left London and headed off towards Essex, the coast and safety. My impression is that they had no romantic delusions about Poplar. When they left, they were happy to. There was no sense of dispossession. They only rented. In Essex they became part of a property owning democracy – and their politics became fraught. My grandfather continued to read the Daily Mirror, though, and thought well of George Lansbury. Duly, of course, early one summer morning in 1940, a tired German pilot dropped a bomb in the back garden of their bungalow. There is sentimental familial history attached to this vowel, then. As well, there is a cartography depending from it – nothing so dramatic as a diaspora, but a thing of significance nevertheless.
My grandparents had Cockney accents, not my father. His accent became Estuarine, as it emerged from a collision of central London inflections with those older ones of the Essex coast. And, moreover, I went to school in South Wales. That is where my mother’s Welsh-speaking, Welsh-thinking family lived, and where I became noticeable as English for my use of precisely that vowel. I never got around to refusing it.
The complexity of that refusal to refuse derives in part from the simple fact that my paternal grandparent’s pronunciation of the middle vowels of again is the same as that I heard and used in Wales. It is exactly the same, and it sounds difference. This is not for any changes in buccal geometry. More, it is to do with the way the vowel is approached and dismounted, how it is ridden. A Rhondda accent might use the tip of the tongue rather than the flat to sound an N. It makes an inhabitable difference; one around which I was able to embroider a set of romantic associations which spoke the conditional nature of my place in Wales.

Let me be as clear as I can here. A formal glottochronology could entirely miss the point of that vowel in my accent. Or, at least it would if it were to take as its archives the historical transformation of that sound in the voices of Anthony Newley (or Meredith Edwards) or Steve Marriot (or Max Boyce) ... or Guy Ritchie. That shortened vowel, when I read it out and listen to its failure to fit, is not just the effect of one received English accent rubbing up against another. It is not just the moment where vernacular Welsh and English idioms find a shared phoneme, either. It is both of these things, true. But also and much more pertinently, that vowel is part of a paralanguage – a feature in an array of tones, tempi, sighs, pauses that add sentiment to language. That ε is a whispered sentiment that makes itself manifest as a slip when I read to Gabriel. It is a preliminary stake in our textural history.
The only reason this sound has a place in my vocabulary at all is because it reminds me of my grandmother feeding Henry (an abstractly violent tabby tom), or her rubbing my bruised eyebrow with her thumb, or my grandfather arriving home at exactly 5.45 pm, or broken shells in pebbledashed walls, or trains rattling at the end of the garden, or Old Holborn tobacco tins, potatoes delivered in sacks, “Try Hard”, red floor paint, Hilversum on a Roberts radio, snapdragons, fish cooked in milk and tomatoes, Lena Horne records, a yellowhammer, a green-painted Anderson shelter, a folding chair made by my great grandfather (an East End cabinet maker) - vicious on the fingers, the walnut trim of a green Triumph Herald and its smell, Ironwell Lane, fish, blood and bone on the vegetable rows, green. These things belong together but don’t piece together.

~

Gabriel and I were sitting in a fold of Green Park, at the Marble Arch end of Constitution Hill, sharing a lunch. There were delirious verdants and squinting hot weather. In his arithmetical grammar it was “hot and hot”. We watched the local constabulary exercise their dogs, which fascinated. Pee, since, always rhymes with tree – always. In the past it had been we, maybe wee. But now, pee. Or, pea. There is something territorial.
He wanted to know why all the trees had numbers nailed to them. “So the park people know where they all are”, I say. “In case thems get lost?”, he says. A group of park staff approached, sweeping trimmings, chatting. He tried to get me to ask one of them about the numbers. I wriggled a bit, declining. Spryer, he bounced over and asked himself. “All the trees in the park have got numbers. It’s so that if I see that one of the trees is sick, I can phone my boss and tell him that tree number three is dying, and he can send someone to chop it down”. Oh dear.
In the onomatopoeias of a parkland minute, headlong, trees and pee have been connected with chopping. I worry. How on earth will this be remembered? Will my lessoning be held to later account, the first gesture in a disastrous curriculum? Fast now, forward to imagined therapy, and in there lies the anticipation of an archive awaiting its necessarily eccentric constitution. An archive of ordinary familial dysfunctions, patterns of fatherly reticence, inscrutably explosive tempers, green, alcohol and ... ahem.
Nevertheless there remains a phonemenal awkwardness here that defines archives in their eccentricity. It is an awkwardness that requires delineation, but by something more like drama than drawing; by something sharing more the deportment of an archive than that of an argument.

The Colour of Context
Jigsaws themselves? I find them unsatisfying. Yes, and somehow unspiritual. This may just be a function of my own choices in leisure. I like swimming, and can’t remember when I didn’t. I like to listen to the regular and irregular plashings, There is a moody, diagnostic facility to them. I like swimming’s mnemonic fabric. I like that its archival sensibility is so capricious and obscure.
Jigsaws, I find conceited, too trim. Worse, they figure the deportment of archives unsatisfactorily. Jigsaws piece together too perfectly. They know what they will say and, with time, they say it. Everything has its given place. Of all forlorn things, there are few that can equally affect the sinister desire of the misplaced jigsaw piece for its proper place. Jigsaws are needy and inspire neediness.
Famously, James Merrill disagreed with this position. Well, maybe he didn’t. His most defining, or rather his best-known poem, Lost in Translation, concerns a jigsaw and the structured recording of things past. It is a work that animates, even if it does not respect the devices of autobiography. For the purposes of his poem, jigsaws were entirely about time; time and personal relationships, relationships both possessed and yearned for. He starts – a boy in the ‘sixties – with disappointments, waiting to “receive the puzzle which keeps never coming”. A wooden jigsaw of superior pedigree, delivered from a jigsaw rental shop. Each piece hand-cut, sandal-scented, and with autograph qualities recognizable to his connoisseurs’ eye.
With the time afforded by the jigsaw he tells of his affections for his nanny – French, but of English and Prussian lineage – patient, devout. He tells of her thumb, which crosses his brow “against dreams to come”; her kiss. And of the Orient adventure that appears gradually as the image of the jigsaw – piece by piece, texture by texture, colour by fragment of colour, context by emerging context. It is the quiet sociabilities and associations allowed by the time of jigsaws that are the treasure, not the completion of the puzzle; which can always be predicted.
For Merrill, jigsaws precipitate knowledges. Some of them are refined, and specialised to the extent of becoming esoteric. They are skills, and are to do with the dexterities of memory and cognition, of plucking and detaining pieces, cataloguing and heaping them aside for their later significance. Other knowledges, however, are organised eccentrically around shifting effects of domestic light, familiar scents, plywood, separation, sugar, missingness or any of the other transient qualia that may pass unstructured through a jigsaw’s time. “Mademoiselle does borders”. That is the archive proposed by the poem, and the poem is itself a theory of that archive. As for the jigsaw itself, its pieces, its picture, all this is mere occasion, sheer structure.

He kept a piece. He suspects he kept a piece ¬– in his pocket, as remembrance. He suspects this because so many other, later jigsaws had a piece missing. At this late point in the work, the imagic ante of the jigsaw has been raised considerably. These later jigsaws are to do with tart absences – the eventual failure of Maggie Teyte’s voice, for instance, much loved buildings found to have been demolished, the passing of a faddish taste in pets, a fruitless hunt in the Goethehaus for one of Rilke’s verses. These unseizable, almost entirely uninfluential things are given gravity, and they are given this in a way that allows a means for holding a door open onto a temporality and its qualities. Merrill’s question becomes: what is this time about? And because he has adopted a position whereby one cannot be subjective enough in one’s historical inquiries, he presents the antithesis of that other, more poisonous subjectivisation of history: iconology. In the end Merrill insists on nothing. He just propels his readers into a shared historical quandary.
It is in this way that Merrill’s romance – of a schoolboy’s tiny larceny – becomes an allegorical burden. The detail of the purloined piece is as distracting as the metaphor of the jigsaw itself. The very idea that a jigsaw may be rendered incomplete by a simple theft is unconvincing. It is as unconvincing as the vanity that a history may be produced as something conclusively, exhaustively correct and of its time. I know this. Yet, I am affronted by the theft, and I am astounded by my sense of offence. As if Merrill’s youthful audacity in stealing some image from the integrity of an archive were not enough, he compounds it by irresistibly laying claim to this act as a necessary virtue. It uncovers in me a prudish morality. There may be a little assault on the responsibilites of custodianship perhaps, or a common culture, original sin or it might just goad my fear of the dead.
It is unlikely to be so easily made large. Merrill’s realisation forces a further realisation about archives and history. Not only does the discipline of History have no exhaustive propriety over history, but also History is, in fact, not all that concerned with time. Merrill’s camp astringency may prompt a wondering as to why History should pretend otherwise. But already Merrill has won. History is concerned with producing armatures and tablatures, not temporalities, not the real senses of time that are occasioned by the inhabitation of archives.

~

I have liked it in the past, and fully expect to again, but at the moment, I don’t like James Merrill’s poetry. And this is not to say that, at the moment I dislike his poems. His poems have the virtue of never introducing a subject, discoursing upon it, and then explaining what has been just said. There is no recapitulation. Similarly his poems needn’t rhyme. But when they do, you’ll know all about it and something dramatic, or comic, or something will arise between the rhymes.
Rhyming astounds. It takes an abstract, arbitrary, formal similarity and from it makes uncertain but meaningful narrative gesture. As Gabriel says, it could be “hot and hot”. Rhyming can be disturbing or it can limn in the character of the slightest mundanity. More, the words that lay between a rhyme, may be contradicted by the rhyme itself.
When, at the closing of Lost in Translation Merrill rhymes S with peacefulness, and tree with imperceptibly and then memory, he exercises the coarseness of a doggerelling consciousness. The beautifully constructed scansions that connect these words, holding them out naked at the end of lines, involve the sentiments of wandering and loss and self-effacement. The rhymes themselves appear curmudgeonly, vulgar and inept in the light of such bruisable sensibilities. The drama that is evoked here is a formal one concerning the contest between two methodological imperatives. One which will batter its materials into relation until they rhyme and there is evaluable product, and another which desires ongoing incompletion as the goal of inquiry – where rhymes offer only landmarks, or points of transition, or reprise.
There may be a word for the act of writing the likeness between arbitrarily similar things: mimography. It would be something applicable to Merrill’s poetic theory of the archive. But, the term would be useful only for as long as it highlights the way that the processes of cathexion and identification animated by archival time are of greater import than the institutional tools taken in to do the housekeeping. The location of the act of mimography – whether in scansions, rhymes, or elsewhere – is pivotal, as it is this that supplies the coordinate eccentricity of the archive, as contradicting interpretations, differently grounded alight on the same materials. I cannot complain about the facility with which the endgame of Lost in Translation is metrically acheived. But the dramaturgy of the rhymes themselves, I don’t like it

The Acts of Peter
When in Wales the question – the ε – in my voice was most marked, and most remarked upon was when I was engaged in my school’s unscheduled activities. I was no academic success. And even though I didn’t feel naturally predisposed toward delinquency, I was something of a hit amongst the skiving milieux. Cigarettes, mitching maths, routine interrogation by passing prefects, discovering or handing on the places whereabouts it was possible to loiter unseen and with impunity; these all became the loci of knowledge and interest. And, in the end tedious.
I never figured out why I used to miss out bits of the curriculum. There was, of course, the other curriculum that I had my eye on. But what I do remember is that these moments were those when my accent became most repeatedly the subject of discussion and impersonation. My mispronunciations, my poshness, and the amusing elements of my syntax, all constituted part of an ongoing discourse. My accent served as a pass, in some regards, to societies that I would otherwise have no access. But that access was also provided conditionally. The cheery bonhomie and ribpoking could swiftly turn without notice to opprobrium under a colder, more precisely malicious grin.
I was ever apocryphal; especially as my accent went through that ugly and revealing transition from one to another. Those phonemes that, for whatever reason, wouldn’t change became tokens and liabilities. Their reprise provided a persistent rhyming structure whereby my desire to be different, rather than my difference per se, could register as a provocation. Periods during which indifference supervened were mimographic. There. But nothing was ever documented. The complex overdeterminations of that vowel can only be the subject of remembering, productive and creative invention, and a faith in the position of the confected and the apocryphal.

When I grew up, I became an architectural historian. That wasn’t the projection from the schoolyard. It was a mining valley after all, and the pits still working. In any case, there was no call for such a formally refined ability to recognise building types. It was precisely because of my relative directionless and lacking in a forceful will that I was able to do this. I had long valued uncertainty and a certain diffidence towards correctness as the most productive organising principles of any kind of cultural inquiry.
So my process of becoming an architectural historian was an almost magical one. Guesses, errors, a series of gross misapprehensions appearing as epiphanies, a penchant for listening to others’ voices (not always what they said) and an ability to keep reading anything whether I understood it or not; all these things emerged as the requisites of archival work. But a fundamental attachment to the idea that archives do not add up is almost anethama to certain of the most easily recognised and dominant branches of architectural history.
The doyen of the kinds of document-based architectural research that predominate in this sphere of inquiry is Howard (H.M.) Colvin. Over time, I became familiar with Colvin and all his works. I got caught up in a desire to know about eighteenth-century British architects, and his dictionary was worth reading. And, I have to say that I liked his works. I liked the kinds of diligence and intellectual probity they represent, even though I could never imagine myself as the kind of person who could produce them. I needn’t have worried on that acount. Colvin had his own students, and there were many others keener than I to identify with his methods. Colvin could be called adventurous in his self-imposed limitation of resources and interpretative options. He located architectural history and the cultural history of architectural discrimination in the archives. He was concerned with who designed what, where and for whom. Without several coordinate sources a fact remained an unsettled entity. Laudable. But it represents the preferral of a specific archival subjectivity, as much as it makes an appeal to historical veracity. When he wrote about archives, Colvin was quite happy to allude to this.
In a recent review, however, Oxford scholar, historian and author Toby Barnard remarked on Colvin’s working method. He said that “It checked, even if it has never entirely stopped, the habit of the fanciful and lazy to treat whimsical speculation and loose stylistic analysis as an adequate basis for writing the history of architecture in England and Wales. The Dictionary demonstrates magisterially what traditional historical methods can bring to the study of architecture (and art).” That is more than the considered outlining of a considered position of support for another. This frank fighting talk is a straightforward insult hurled out to anyone susceptible to its barbs. It reveals a view of the archive as piste.
He may have found it barbaric as behaviour, but as a feature of archival subjecthood, James Merrill could certainly have recognised this. The poetic qualities of introversion, limitation and aggression that Toby Barnard presents here as the patrilineal virtues of research, are of the order of affects that Merrill translated. From Michel Foucault, to Owen Chadwick and Umberto Eco, the impression of archives as the sites of intersubjectivity, of vanity, intrigue and mistrust – and every other organising emotion, is familiar. But to accept that archives are preeminently like this, before they are anything else, means to utterly revise the modes of attention to the products of archival research. The number of times that I have found letters and other archival documents purposefully misplaced, stashed and secreted is enormous. This activity is just one the many important features of the culture of archives worthy of study. It is another thing that archives are about, another of their centres. A subject in its own right, it is also something at which I can now grin, again.