'renew from mirrored truth the likeness of the True'
Poets. Tolkien. Jack and Jill. Yaminahua shaman. Sea squirts.
I’m a Creative Director and poet. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. I work with exciting organisations to invent worlds, campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I release new poetic objects every four months. I was the world’s second most awarded studio in the 2020 D&AD awards. This is a regular letter about my thinking and my work in progress.
‘Ok, poets, we get it, things are like other things’ goes the joke.
It’s a good joke.
It’s not just poets though. Biologists classify life forms into genera, groups of life forms with shared characteristics. Chemists describe life by way of compounds, elements and molecules. Physicists point out that molecules are made up of particles, waves and fields. Then mathematicians poetically render all the waves and fields as equations.
And no one really knows what maths is.
Or perhaps no one has discovered a good enough metaphor for it yet ... apart from maths being the mind of myu. (I get off on mythopoesis, don’t we all.)
We think of the path from observations of big, lumbering life to pure, cold maths as reduction, each stage getting more basic. But maybe we should see each new type of description as a sideways slide, every discipline – biology, chemistry, physics, maths – is describing reality, just playing with different metaphors.
I believe that poetic writing is a tool as fundamentally valid as the sciences. More so actually.
My new book is out now. It’s called Jack and Jill and is a re-telling of the nursery rhyme. It’s a folk-horror teen-romance. A new genre I’ve invented that no one asked for. It features a hill and the hill is a metaphor for being so in love you become myth. There are five covers to choose from. I worked with an amazing couple in New York who made masks for the characters and styled the gorgeous book cover photoshoots.
Photographs by Leticia Valdez.
You can buy it here and you can tune in to a launch on August 26th. I’ll be reading from the work, Natalie and Kasidy from Barbaric Yawp Workshop will be talking mask making, and I’ll delve into the writing process. I haven’t used the word ‘and’ once in the main text except when naming Jack and Jill.
Masks are metaphors too, of course. Metaphors you bring to life.
(If you’re a fan of the awkward random, I’m also planning to sit drinking in Bloomsbury’s Rising Sun pub – there’s a rising sun in the poem – on the evening of Friday August 20th. Join me. I’m giving free copies of the book to anyone who turns up. I might end the night by attempting to climb that awful scaffold hill by Marble Arch, a metaphor for late-capitalism if ever there was one.)
Published in L’Homme, there’s a wonderful 1993 article by Graham Townsley called ‘Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge’. In it Townsley records the Yaminahua shaman as performing songs created to be heard by Yoshi, the spirits embodying everything. These songs can only be understood by other shamans, that’s because they are densely metaphoric – using a form of analogy the shamans call tsai yoshtoyoshto, a literal translation of which is language-twisting-twisting.
Cor. Language-twisting-twisting, how lovely is that? I quote...
‘Almost nothing in these songs is referred to by its normal name. The abstrusest metaphoric circumlocutions are used instead. For example, night becomes ‘swift tapirs’, the forest becomes ‘cultivated peanuts’, fish are ‘peccaries’, jaguars are ‘baskets’, anacondas are ‘hammocks’ and so forth. Most Yaminahua are at a loss to understand the sense of these esoteric metaphors.’
Townsley explains that each metaphor is created logically ‘by finely observed perceptual resemblances between the song-word and its referent’. So jaguars become ‘baskets’ because the fibres of a particular type of loose-woven basket form a pattern precisely similar to a jaguar’s markings. Rain becomes ‘big cold lean-to’ because the slanting sheets of rain look like the slanting roofs of the lean-to’s which the Yaminahua build from shelter when away from the village.
Townsley asks a shaman why they use language-twisting-twisting when it can’t be understood by others. The answer ... ‘I want to see – singing, I carefully examine things – twisted language brings me close but not too close – with normal words I would crash into things – with twisted ones I circle around them – I can see them clearly.’
And Townsley further explains that Yoshi, hearers of the shaman’s songs, are real beings who are both ‘like and not like’ the things they animate. ‘They have no stable or unitary nature and thus, paradoxically, the ‘seeing as’ of ‘twisted language’ is the only way of adequately describing them. Metaphor here is not improper naming but the only proper naming possible.’
On page 20 of my Selected Workings is a sci-fi poem called ‘T’. I wrote it before I discovered Townsley’s paper, but it plays with similar themes. It’s about embodying objects, in this case a T-shirt, with spirits so they become symbols. And about how the repetition of symbols takes us further from reality but closer to deeper truths.
Verse one and verse three features doubled-similes, my own variation on language-twisting-twisting. In verse one a T-shirt is clutched like wires that are also being clutched like hangs of weeping willow. Crafting a simile for something and then crafting *another* simile for the simile is a joyful creative process to undertake. Do try it. It removes you from the original object but allows a step towards the mystical.
I’ll let you determine the doubling in verse three.
T
In this fast enhancing artificial /
below moonlight of synthesized blue-beam –
where sleep is a power-down to allow
economic units their abstract thought lines –
one has the other’s T-shirt clutched like wires
that are clutched like hangs of weeping willow.
One has the other’s scent, the nut and coal
from the pit of an arm. Simulacrums
of comfort. One has the other’s folds
and membrane of absence. Avant-garde love,
minimalist lust and weightless feelings
crossing worlds in a nylon-sped heart.
One has the image of the other jacked
from reality like breath in the mouth
that hangs momentarily like the airships
that seem to know everything.
Beyond the apartment new youthcults form.
They wear Ts, call themselves The Replicas.
If you’re a rationalist then you might describe the writer’s endless struggle (and it is a struggle, right?) as being one between offering clarity or atmosphere. If you’re a mystic then you’d call it a battle between the superficial and our shared endless magic.
I feel metaphors and how we use them are at the heart of this.
Hopefully you’ve watched Game Six, it’s an eleven-minute website about post-truth politics, language and illusion. Creative Boom have a piece on it here. Naturally, none of the literary publications have picked up on it – self-publishing is a cultivated peanuts they rarely venture in to.
From 7pm on September 9th in Camden, North London, I’m staging a live 128-minute installation experience of Game Six. One-night only.
There’s a guest list but if you’d like to come just drop me an email. It’s not superficial and it won’t offer any clarity.
Let’s end with an allegorical story. I wrote this short piece about a sea squirt for the LogoArchive Extra Issue: pLAy, designed brilliantly by the playful Studio Sutherl&.
It’s a paean and then an elegy to the sea squirt’s Yoshi. The writing shifts in tone, mirroring the path of our hero who takes an anti-shamanic journey.
How the silly Sea Squirt lost its brain: Journal of Play Studies Vol II, 38-45
Of all the wrigglydiculous jelly-thoughted, bubble-eyed and star-spiny deepsea couldn’t-make-it-up ocean goddities that gloop moon-bouncingly around beneath the chubby, hurrying ships, the Sea Squirt is quite very the absolute strangest.
Stranger than the Crowcrab. Stranger than the Elf Whale. Stranger than the Telescoping Mollusc. Would you be curious to hear why? Of course you would. To begin at the bigspinning.
A million cloud of shedded eggs meet some busy busy sperm for a nice bit of fertilizing and then praise Poseidon we’re finding little larvae-like tadpoles swimming everywhere as free as water can be can be. As free as water can be. They are gilly-glorious. Fintastic. And life is all deep imagination blue and catch this current, catch that current, up, down, every kind of circle, and they excitedly think let’s go wherever our thoughts may take us.
Somewhere up beyond is the boom of waves buttering the beaches, oh shall we go there one day? Go for the tumbling-surf, go for games in tides of time? Life is possibility. Life is a whole world of turquoise reveal and inky peeking and wine-green and lovely navy play.
What have we here? Rocks, polished rough by steady salty pressure. A comfortable craggy base from where we’ll sit to catch food as it floats richly by. Feed first, play later. Seems sensible. Careful there. Steady in place. An interesting vantage. Fix for a moment, switch off for a while. A pleasant reduction of the cerebral ganglion, (the vertebrate brain controlling movement).
Digestion of unwanted, unneeded organs is another sensible move. Conserving energy for the future. Digestion of the cerebral ganglion. Digestion of brain. Thoughts like a falling coastal shelf. Far away, hidden from the sun, deep, cold echoes of turquoise rememberdreams. We ... they ... we … are scientifically known as Tunicates. More commonly known as Sea Squirts. They are sessile, immobile. Permanently attached to rocks or other hard surfaces on the ocean floor, developing into a barrel-like and usually sedentary adult form. Marine filter feeders with a water-filled, sac-like body structure and two tubular openings, known as siphons, through which they draw in and expel water. During their respiration and feeding, Sea Squirts take in water through the incurrent (or inhalant) siphon and expel the filtered water through the excurrent (or exhalant) siphon. There are sensory cells on the siphons, the buccal tentacles and in the atrium, but there are no sense organs.