Random Descents

I have been reading a lot of Wordsworth recently. I should be concentrating on his Duddon Sonnets, since it is this under-appreciated sequence that I have chosen as the primary focus for the research project I am working on at the moment, but I keep getting sidetracked. The visit to Lickey Hills had me leafing through The Prelude in pursuit of the 'spots of time' passage.

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. The Prelude, Book 12, ll. 208 - 218

What prompted the hunt is that I had a bit of a 'spots of time' moment myself as I wandered around the Lickey Hills. It set off a train of thought about the things I choose to record in 'field notes' and the the material that sparks off a response in poetry - the differing sources of inspiration for prose and poetry. 

Looking back over the field notes, these either take the form of straightforward reportage, or a more imaginative response written up as a semi-fictional 'derive'. Usually I choose the latter strategy if I wish to represent the place visited as an alienating environment, and the techniques of psychogeography lend themselves to representing the mundane as exotic, magical or disturbing; really it is a varient of magic realism, I think.

With poetry, often you don't feel quite so in control of the process. In some sense you are left with the impression that the poem has chosen you, rather than the other way round, it does not feel either rational or deliberate. Wordsworth's explanation is that such 'spots of time' are the result of experiencing the world at moments of high emotion or stress and the what we percieve at the time or shortly afterwards becomes in some way 'transfigured' and act later as a 'renovating virtue'. In the passage immediately following the one above he goes on to recount how after becoming lost as a boy on a wild moor, the fear the experience engendered caused his imagination to 'transfigure' the elements of the landscape:

Then, reascending the bare common saw
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
A beacon on the summit, and, more near
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,
An ordinary sight; but I should need
Colour and words that are unknown to man,
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all around for my lost guide,
Invested moorland waste, and naked pool,
The beacon crowning the lone eminence,
The female and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind. ll.  248 - 261

I do not doubt that something of the sort does happen and that the places and scenes that we regard as significant may often be those that we are bonded to emotionally. But not always, sometimes vivid moments  seem to simply strike at random. Sylvia Plath captures this sense of inexplicable transformation in her poem Black Rook in Windy Weather.

...ignorant of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality.

Unlike Wordsworth who found strength and consolation from such 'spots of time', Plath regards them as occassional interventions to relieve an existence which is otherwise mundane and meaningless:

With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

Perhaps these 'spasmodic tricks of radiance' are not the result of perception, but a 'trick' of memory. In At Castle Boterel Thomas Hardy recalls an incident from the past when he and his wife had climbed the hill to the village years before. Now he climbs the hill alone, as she had recently died:

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of

Matters not much, nor to what it led, ―

Something that life will not be balked of

Without rude reason till hope is dead,

And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever

A time of such quality, since or before,

In that hill’s story ? To one mind never,

Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,

By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,

And much have they faced there, first and last,

Of the transitory in Earth’s long order ;

But what they record in colour and cast

Is—that we two passed.

What an astonishing use of hyperbole! Through all geological time the only thing that the rocks recorded were 'that we two passed' .  Through a startling assertion of solipsism, Hardy communicates the profoundity of his loss. In the final stanzas the poet reflects upon the vivid memory of his 'old love's domain' as the phantom figure of his lost love shrinks in the rain.
  

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,

In mindless rote, has ruled from sight

The substance now, one phantom figure

Remains on the slope, as when that night

Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,

I look back at it amid the rain

For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,

And I shall traverse old love’s domain

Never again. What links the three poems is the power of poetry to transform place, to evoke a transfigured locale. This is what 'voceti' seeks, but as Plath points out it is a 'long wait for the angel, a rare random descent'.