Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I was a student then, and my teacher was kind. The first day was simple enough; we began naming: objects. picked out the three objects I knew, and hesitated, but caution was unnecessary; my friend got only two. First doubtfully, then in triumph, I rearranged my three objects, moved them about the room, turned them upside down, felt the flavour of their names in my mouth, savoured my cunning. A short-lived triumph as it turned out, for instead of being impressed my teacher was appalled. There were so many other things in the room that we had missed; there were hundreds of things to be named; it wasn’t merely ignorant not to know them, it was dangerous.

Of course, to know certain things you had only to learn their names. But there were apparently other things which you couldn’t even see until you had learnt their names. Places were always more crowded than we thought - those of us who didn’t know the names of things. And listen to this: what about all those special things, lots of special things that had to be named first, before they could actually exist! They were - not there - waiting for us. Think of the power of that! Was I still satisfied to rule over my three things? What were we going to do about it?
 
We were surprised that the lesson had finished, for we were still sitting in our place long after the teacher seemed to have gone. We could disagree about this, about how, in this crowded room, something as big as a teacher could walk out without waking us; without upsetting things - things which we didn’t know, which we couldn’t even see; or leaving a gap.
 
My friend began to doubt that there were any such things. He hadn’t heard about them before; and really, did we go about bumping into things that nobody could see? On our way here, for instance, did we remember crashing into an empty space? Or did I have to make a sudden detour to avoid bruising my shins on a nothing in front of me?

“Maybe we were lucky,” I said.

“Lucky - shit.”

“Suppose we bump into them and can’t feel them!”

“You ever bump into a parked car? Or an old fence?”

“What about the other things?”

“Like what?”

“You know ... that you can’t see. That you’ve got to give a name to before you can see.”

“How about ... the man inside the radio?”

“No. Something different. More different.”

“A teacher with three legs.”

“Ever seen a teacher with three legs?”

“Seen a teacher with one leg. But it’s got to be different. Like ... think of a word.”

“Can’t think any more. I’m hungry.”

“Bvstcrumwavztmuvst.”

“What’s that?”

“A thing.”

“A live thing?”

“Could be.”

“What you doing now?”

“Writing it down. Now I’ve got four things.”

Now I had to justify my thing to press home the advantage. My friend waited ominously. I looked at Bvstcrumwavztmuvst and tried to give it a shape, first on the paper. I experimented. It didn’t look the same backwards; I decided not to confuse the issue; it was difficult enough finding its forward shape. Disregarding the false starts, I tried to walk round it first in my mind, so as not to look silly; but the shape wouldn’t come; whenever something like a shape started to form, it soon slipped away, playing its own game with me.

I had to admit defeat, but I was going to prolong the moment until I could find an explanation. I was on the point of admitting that Bvstcrumwavztmuvst was a joke when I distinctly saw the shape, could almost touch it but was paralyzed, paralyzed because between my new shape and me were all the millions of shapes that I couldn’t see. I was sure to crash.

I begged my friend to sit still and wait for help. Other people would soon know what was happening, would understand that we couldn’t move, and send help. But it was no good. He had had enough. He rose from his desk, lunging into the network of clattering, clanging objects that stood in his path, and made his way to the door leaving the familiar debris behind him. My shape, of course, had vanished.

Now, after many years, I was the teacher. My friend had given up trying to name objects he couldn’t see. He had even given up trying to learn the names of those he could see. He knew enough. He could clearly see the corns on his hands, he told his friends, and that meant they knew the sort of man he was, the sort of job he did; he was their sort of man. He would build them houses, he would look after their interests when they elected him.

And still students came to be instructed, to learn the names of objects they couldn’t see. Teaching was difficult. It was difficult to build from one lesson to the other, as we often got lost in the space in between. The students were eager; they were so eager to name things they couldn’t see, they tended to ignore everything else. At first they all denied that they had seen a man with corns on his hands, surrounded by friends. Half-way through the lesson, many lessons later, they admitted with impatience that they may have seen something which looked like a man (though from his clothes and his conversation they had their doubts) surrounded by what seemed like trouble. They didn’t look at his hands, however; they were late for their lesson as it was. By the end of the lesson, we had created an object which looked like a man surrounded by friends, and we inspected his hands to make sure there were no corns. A difficult lesson.

My friend said the lessons could continue. He was not against the lessons; he was no tyrant. But the lessons concerning this new situation were particularly difficult.

And the new students came and made life more difficult. They needed all sorts of assurances; clarification. I had to dismantle the hurdles before they could enter the room. I had called them new students. New in what sense? New in the sense that others before them had been new? New, meaning recent? Meaning ignorant? Were they new when they set out to join me or when they actually arrived? Was I equating the difficulty of one journey with that of another? I had to clarify my terms, meet their conditions, before they could enter. My attitude, you know, was a barrier, a thing which they had to surmount before they could commit themselves, and enter the room like young people.

Now, it took more than half the lesson to get them into the room, and that hardly gave us time to avoid recrimination. But on a good day, we could anticipate each others thoughts and the ensuing discussion cutting through what was no longer space, but a store, a warehouse of antiques which threatened us, was halted only by the sporadic fire of the radio. In time, the students, old and bent, would turn away from the door, and the thing, which seemed to have replaced me a long time ago, would give no indication whether it was waiting for a new lesson to begin, or whether it was already battling with external students annihilating from their fixed points what was no longer space; a full-scale attack enlivened by the spluttering of the radio; the occasional crash of an object which no-one claimed to have created, and the conviction that, in this war, there was no place for prisoners.

Drawing - Ian Robinson