Scene/Seen of Ballerina Poem

Ballet-Scene/Seen; thoughts on the poem and process

On reflection I decided that given that the poem Ballerina’s Song of the Earth is set on Dartmoor yet the Walkshop with which it is associated took place on the Blackdown hills some explanation is needed! It’s more or less the first time I’ve attempted to comment on my own creative writing, preferring to keep creative and academic writing separate and tend to be one of those who feels that one’s own creative impulse is best accepted for what it is. In this case, given the initial motive for the walk as providing material for the ongoing symposium at Exeter University and given that others of the group had spent time enhancing their work with such comment, I thought I’d have a go at making some sort of commentary on the thought processes behind the poem.

Taking as a starting point the assumption that a “physical environment imprints itself into every act of writing even when not directly the subject or object of that writing” (George Selmer: Landscape as Writing: synopsis) I’ll begin by locating the two scenes relevant to my poem. Ballerina was begun fairly soon after a walk on Dartmoor – whose circumference stretches round the landscape of my childhood - (this spot was just beneath Sourton Tor), with my little cavalier dog when unexpectedly a fleeting, and on hindsight rather surreal, picture/image/ of a ballerina wearing a wonderfully rich violet/cerise/mauve dress had come swirling down from the sky to dance before us. (I don’t think Isla was aware as she was too absorbed in burying her nose into the intoxicating smells provided by these fern-strewn lower slopes). The projected picture stayed with me and later I linked it with the televised programme I had recently seen of Darcey Bussell’s last performance of Song of the Earth at the Royal Ballet. Knowing virtually nothing of ballet and having had no previous interest I had found myself transfixed by something in the dancer’s poise and je ne sais quoi but had soon forgotten about it and her: life moves on apace nowadays.

The after-image/eidolon of the ballerina-on-the-moor was still with me when a week or so later I joined the other poets for the walk-shop on the Blackdowns and given the state of the inclement weather (to state it mildly) was more than a little incongruous: the two scenes/seens couldn’t have been more contrasted in terms of geography and weather. (I’m not claiming that this was some mystical vision of another dimension exactly: it just was as it was – a kind of day-dream projection). Perhaps I should have put the ballet-scene to the back of my mind and allowed other more appropriate ideas and images to gather. I don’t know what these may have been (but most likely the flowers identified by Tony would have featured) although this location on the Blackdowns had been an important place for me for several years earlier in my life and was now teeming with memories of people now gone from my life as well as special sites with particular resonance; these stretched from the pub to the lake and beyond. Anyway, the artist instinct being perverse (do the opposite of what you are supposed to do) - and by then bits and pieces, fragments, phrases, jottings re the ballet scene had begun to gather in my head and notebook so I’d more or less decided in advance that I wouldn’t be too anxious about discovering more material for another poem. In any case this was the first time I had had the chance to meet up with my long-time poet friends for quite a long while and that - with the opportunity for a meal and gossip - was sufficient for one day.

Anyway, when I began the first draft of the poem there were many images/memories/thoughts of the Blackdown walk bubbling away – and behind these another layer of thought/memories/images surfacing from times past – both impinging onto those of the poetic-scene itself; I knew that at least one level of writing I wanted to explore the links between the two places both in terms of outer and inner scene/seen and that the disjunction between the two locations fed into the notion of the exile who whilst living and working in one external location is actually in an inner-world pre-occupied with another (which would inevitably contain many ambivalent memories of love/family/friendship/loss etc) and frequently would be beset by bleak homesickness drawing him/her back to that one place, one special Home-land.

So the scene was set in terms of a doubling and/or opposition between two forces: a doubled-duality which I tried to actualise in the poem itself: these were the external landscape/scene/place and an internal landscape/seen/space. The doubling was enacted in several interlinked ways: the poet writing in one scenic place, yet the inner-seen is set in another place/dimension; and at the heart of the poem – with the lyrics of the final Song of the Earth (see below) which I now see as a kind of inter-text - that split between an actual place and a longed for place of be/longing.

I’m going to digress briefly so please bare with me. For both personal and academic reasons, I’ve been preoccupied by these kind of doublings and dichotomies for a while. Fate seems to have laid out for me the path of the wanderer who is yet always home-sick, longing to find again that lost and beloved scene/place of childhood (which for me was a beautiful house/garden built by my Grandfather high up and looking over a small Devon town and in the distance to Cawsand Tor on Dartmoor). Admittedly, as yet the wanderings have mostly been within the ambit of the Westcountry; significant Others seem to have been rooted effortlessly in their homes for ever, yet the more I covet this haven the more it eludes me. However, since I have been researching material for the book I’m writing on Devon women writers it has been striking and oddly comforting to find that several of these writers had for one reason or another kindred lives of perpetual travel and that frequently a text seems to have been generated and affected by the gap or divide in the writer’s actual place of writing and inner site-in-the-head – usually but not always a beloved home. Often, it seemed, the dichotomy must have allowed the writer to invest something extra special in the writing of a text, which therefore had more impact because of this life-split.

Three of these writers especially come to mind; for them it was particularly the split-scene of seascape that impinged on their life/writing: Jean Rhys, Sylvia Plath and H.D. were all exiles from their respective native lands when they were living and writing in the southwest of England. All three women crossed the Atlantic Ocean and spent periods of their life down here, perhaps drawn to the area because of our sea-bordered landscapes. Of course one can’t generalize and analyze their work as one but I think it’s possible to infer similarities: all three writers sought to delineate a textualised self in terms of the loss of an early idealized childhood sea-landscape and a real or figurative looking back over amniotic Atlantic water to their distant American or West Indian home-shores. In other words, whilst actually living and writing in a particular sea-location in the south-west, their inner sea-imaginings were “oceans” away with and at the sea-strewn coasts of their respective childhoods. (I think you’ll understand my intention here is not to suggest parallels between their work/literary status and my own but I guess that as individuals we are all fascinated by those with whom we look up to and would emulate, as artists/professionals etc).

Plath made her antipathy to Westcountry seas clear in Ocean 1212W – which she offers as a “fine white flying myth of origins”. She recalls visits to sea-places in Devon: rather than providing the solace she is looking for in re-membering her beloved “jewel in the head”, (which for her was the seascape of the Massachusetts coast), the Devon coast “Is not it. That is not it at all”. In other words she is announcing the significance of the schism of landscape without and within and the importance of landscape associated with text/s is implied: (see for example Blackberrying; also see Hughes’ comments on Plath’s reactions to the local Devon coast in Birthday Letters).

Rhys also experienced bleak reactions to the coastal resorts she stayed at in Devon/Cornwall: she loathed Bude, yet whilst there was working on drafts of Wide Sargasso Sea whose metamorphic modes feature the sea-strewn scenes of her childhood. It’s tempting to suggest that the dislocations in psyche and text evident in her fiction were only emphasized by the sea’s presence round her in the Southwest.

H.D though, writes of the “lost [sea] land of her childhood and often charts her inner world via such emblems as a chain of white necklace (which she associates with islands off the South-West as well as Greece); she is able to weave these into and with the memory of her beloved childhood islands on the eastern coast of Maine. So for her, southwestern seas become restorative; the coast seems to have enabled and enhanced her texts; this contrasts with sea-effects on Rhys and Plath which apparently provoked passionate homesickness for the lost lands of childhood and powerfully influenced their poetry/fiction via the negative emotions incited by the split.

For all three writers any real analysis of their textual self-realization needs to take note of the complicated effect of these splittings and /or doublings suggesting that the indefinable mind-space between real-scene and scene-in-the-head is a kind of alchemical container where mysterious, idiosyncratic and enigmatic psychological transformations can take place affecting both writer and text.

Another interesting splitting is relevant here. So many of the writers seem to have been endowed with a doubled artistic gift. What is always intriguing is that for some that gift in itself is more troublesome than enhancing as the writer is perpetually struggling to reconcile one with the other – and in many cases one art form has been abandoned so that the other can flourish; for others the doubled gift is enriching in itself as the writer/artist/musician has allowed one talent to complement the other. In some cases therefore the doubled gift has led to a split in appreciation or half-use of the dual gifts: whilst painting the artist would be longing to write; whilst writing a novel the writer would be longing to play the harp; whilst playing the flute the musician would only be longing to be able to paint that abstract scene seen in her mind’s eye. In other instances the artist would be complementing the picture with textual commentary; the writer backing her poetic manuscripts with evocative backing musical scores. And so on.

The link between split-creativity and the kind of divisions experienced and expressed by the writers noted above - and others - occasioned by living and working in dual- inner/outer landscapes struck me as being significant and as I began to write I released I could make use of and further explore these repercussions through the poem.

So there was the starting point. When I began to attempt a draft from my notes I had a mishmash of these thoughts dancing round in my head: as I wrote it seemed my sudden infatuation with Bussell/Ballerina/Ballet itself, fed into these preoccupations. There was the obvious split in the incongruity between seen image and scene itself; I began to see that She/Ballerina/Bussell represented for me an Icon of startling originality; in an age of post-modern cynicism she has that unique gift which bestows on her true (not “celebrity”) Star-Status - extra poignancy then to the realization that for her it was the final and last performance/presentation of her Gift. One of the critics expressed it so: “Darcey Bussell radiated eloquent affirmation in the face of death”: the heart rending last, faltering movements of her steps for Song of the Earth - where she seems to be stepping slowly into a future unknown - seemed to be so futile: still in her prime and her talent only partially revealed. What of the neglected and lost talent – where does it go? Can it be transferred somewhere (another dimension?), or to someone else? What constitutes self-fulfillment? Certainly the ballet itself backed by the inter-textuality of the lyrics of Song suggests that in spite of the inevitability of the finality of endings/finality/death there is an ever-moving renewal or cycle figuring perpetual movement beyond; the poem’s beginning is supposed to represent this reversal: the release of the dancer is imagined as rising again from the restrictive circles of empty circles within space which encircled her last tentative steps.

As well, Bussell seemed to embody (as archetype?) that kind of artist who manages to - and effortlessly at that - draw together the two dimensions requisite to a performer (inner-voice world and external dance performance) as well be a kind of conduit for dual art forms; in her case that of the dancer and that of the poet. You might challenge the latter thought, but many of the ballet critics in discussion of her and other ballet dancers employ poetic terminology to express their opinions: for instance dance is discussed as “choreographed poetry”. In other words, whilst dancing she was/is able to feel through the narrative/heightened emotion of the intense inner-experience she is living and to project it out through her dance on to the ground beneath her feet.

It wasn’t too much of a glissade from here towards the idea of ballet-as-text as being a useful metaphor for a statement of the ever-evolving inter-relationship between writer/text and landscape itself: dance as choreographed sigil is a living, changing document because dancer becomes the moving pen telling/dancing a story on over and across the land/paper-sheet, so co-joining the inner writer mind/seen and the outer landscape/ scene.

So in terms of my personal (rooted but rootless) and professional fascination with local landscape and texts by women, I’d like my ballet poem to be read as a way of re-grounding and re-establishing a grounded identification with that territory; in this day and age when the “land outside the computer screen is like a text we can forget how to read” (Simon Tresize, The Westcountry as Literary Invention) the metaphor of ballet-scene as text over the land presents a magical symbiosis between land and text/sigil and hence rekindles a renewed respect and attentive regard for Mother Earth – (lost bride). Somehow, writing it and this piece has given me a new understanding of my “roaming” habit as well as some sense of reconciliation of conflicting creative pursuits.