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J. H. Prynne's Triodes

Triodes is made up of three 'books' each containing ten verses that vary from between thirteen to twenty lines long and tend towards the upper limit of that range. The entire configuration gives up its consistency intermittently across manifold threads inter-related or required to inter-relate through the episodic adventures of Pandora and Irene. Pandora is the first mortal woman, made by the same Hephaestus who forged the armour of Achilles and endowed with her traits by the immortal gods. Depending on who you believe, she or her husband Epimetheus opened a container given her by Jupiter, and all the torments that plague us flew out to infect the human world; some versions of the story claim that all man's blessings escaped the container and only Hope remained behind.[i] Irene, on the other hand, means 'peace'; she is a Greek goddess, a Christian martyr-saint, and the beauty taken as plunder at the sack of Constantinople by the Turkish Sultan Mahomet II, in Samuel Johnson's Irene: A Tragedy. Together, the pair may also be figures in bas-relief on the tympanum of a neo-classical building and hassled, squabbling, career-girl commuters living in the East End of London.

No content or tone seems expressly forbidden or inappropriate to Triodes, although the expression 'Uh' which punctuates many of the utterances in the poem sounds throughout like a last gasp emphasis, pitched down to qualify its sentences with hesitancy, nervousness, disgust or dismay. But the several borrowings from or revisions of other texts appear principally to advertise the osmotic properties of the adopted form. Their identification – an ancient Sumerian poem-fragment; Dryden's translation of Virgil's Aeneid; Shakespeare's Macbeth ("no jutty, frieze,/Buttress, nor coign of vantage" gets condensed to "jetty coign"); the tiniest morsel from Florizel's perfect praise of Perdita's perfection in The Winter's Tale; William Collins's "Ode on the Poetical Character" and "Ode to Evening"; and Johnson's verse-play[ii] – doesn‘t help much, if at all. You could argue that each genre raided yields something of its own to Triodes: for example, the epic's concerted effort to depict and acclaim the historic dependence of our sustainable existence on the brutal destruction of their dispensable existences. But few, if any, of the noticings shed a useful light on what is happening, beyond the general recognition of the work's encyclopaedic range and sustained invention; the Sumerian poem and Irene: A Tragedy perhaps underline the importance of locations and events in the Middle East. Having said that, compared to most of Prynne's work since Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994) Triodes enjoys a relatively high incidence of normative grammar, reported speech, short, prosaic bursts that, along with the brevity of its individual lines, move things along with an immediately attractive, neo-plastic celerity postponing the problems that come with more detailed engagement.

The book is called Triodes for at least three reasons. (1) It is in three parts, and its amplitude constitutes a sort of claim to the modern ode-form, celebrated sarcastically by William Cowper for its too-convenient 'variety of measure.' (2) The word 'triode' means 'a place where three ways meet' and triodes allow the transmission of three simultaneous signals – a useful, if modest, metaphor for the pleiotropic sentences in the sequence. A diode is composed of a cathode, which emits electrons, and a surrounding anode, which collects them. They are used as switches or valves because current will flow in one direction only when the anode is positive in respect to the cathode. A triode is a diode with a control grid, which is a fine wire wound helically around the cathode. If there is no voltage placed on the grid it will slow down or block the flow of electrons; if
there is a voltage placed on the grid it can amplify electron flow. Its properties led to the development of the valve amplifier, modern radio and radar technology. The White Stripes recorded their album Elephant at Toe Rag Studios in London, to utilise the antique triode (valve) technology. The equations that stand as epigraphs to each book relate to the capacitance of grid, cathode and anode in a triode valve, the measurement of capacitance when connected to and disconnected from an amplifier circuit and when changes in voltage are applied to each element. (3) Another reason for the title seems to be the myriad interconnections that are disclosed, between the sun, the earth and everything on or just under its surface with respect to the omnipresence of electrical flow, resistance and interference at every level of the scale. This is the world as a circuit (and the poem as circuit diagram), a circuit where subtle or brutal measures of control can be exercised at intermediate points, to reduce or amplify power levels: politics by any other name.

Sugar is another theme in circulation. It is encountered as political rhetoric: dulcet honey-words, sweetly insincere ('sweet' and 'persuade' share an Indo-European root)[iii]; as an additive in food; as commodity in deals between Arab investors and African states (p.24); and as a biological necessity for sustaining human life. And the names of train companies are dotted through the text: Arriva, Virgin, Railtrack. There are many words for parts of trains, or tracks, more than you might think on a first reading, as well as indications of violent death in a serious train crash. Triodes appeared at the end of 1999, the year of a number of incidents and 'accidents' showing that safety requirements were being neglected by private companies in charge of train and track maintenance.

The structure on the cover of Triodes resembles the ornamental portico on the facade of John Webb's Gunnersby House in Middlesex, which dates from the late 1650s (and was designed from a drawing by Inigo Jones), an example of very early Augustan English architecture. It's also very close to some façades in Taylor and Cresy's The Architectural Antiquities of Rome (1821-22), which would make it a considerably post-Augustan rendering of an authentically classical building's frontage. The title uses the famous letter-forms from the inscription at the base of Trajan's column in Rome, upon which stands the famous, spiralling bas-reliefs that memorialise the Emperor's successful military campaigns in Dacia. There are also numerous allusions to Greek, Roman and neo-classical architecture in Triodes, which often resist establishing contiguous relations with their immediate context but accumulate a Kirlian aura of significance when connected to the circuit of their metaphorical economies. The description of a neo-classical publicbuilding defaced by "dippy birds" (p.19) has no one referent, being a composite or abstraction of most available models: the White House, the Washington Capitol building, Stormont, High Courts and City Halls, &c.

The complexity of this synthesis politicises the quotidian by situating each common occurrence, unexceptional situation and pizza topping in epically open contexts which set out the blithe reliance of the insured and familiar world on the gapingly unfamiliar and uninsured places. A description of travelling on the train to work, or the preparation of lunch, is enfigured in ways that keep it more or less recognisable but also redirect and connect it to its determining and usually suppressed wider contexts. Many other threads run through the text, including the expression of genes for insect segmentation and striping, so it's difficult to write a coherent text in response; generation of adequate review-essays is not the raison d’être of Triodes in any case, and my partial interpretation here will amount to reductive paraphrases that ignore other options from the overlaid fields of reference.

The first sentence of Triodes introduces a number of themes:

       Pandora made enlightened states for her sister,
                prized liquids in unwounded novice
                argumentum, she was raw that day
                           in promoting first flight over
                the Tenter Ground alto.

"Enlightened states" refers to the rhetoric that sought to justify the intervention of NATO in the former Yugoslavia, and attaches specifically to the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom. It inaugurated a precedent for the use of force wherever they decide it is 'just', according to their own definition of justice, i.e. in their own criminal self-interest or where tactics can be adopted which ensure minimal risk to their own personnel (even if they guarantee war crimes on the ground). Pandora's track record in the disastrous infliction of harm suggests that the creation of these "states" is to be lamented. "Prized liquids" may mix oil and water: "prized" meaning, of course, 'valued' though it could conceivably also mean 'made a prize of', a secondary meaning of the word 'prize' being "property seized, as in war…" (OED). If "Pandora…prized liquids in unwounded novice / argumentum," the unprecedented novelty of the untested rationale which has, for example, the seizure of oil in its sights, is suspect, even before we have considered whether "argumentum" is a lopped argumentum ad hominem, which depends for its effectiveness on attacking the motives and character of opponents rather than arguing the merits of its own case, so that her hoarse entreaties in favour of airstrikes are nakedly selfish but dressed up as moral initiative. The passage can, I think, also be read as a description of two working women, residents of Spitalfields, as they grab a morning cup of something hot before making their way to their respective jobs.

The now blatant retreat, by the government of the United States, from the notion of international law as generally applicable and impartial is returned to a number of times in Triodes:

                                Unlocking her oven with a zip 
              drive per second billing she stakes
                                            with Irene the digits over
              flush counter, drizzle speck on speck
                                                    in talktime for virgin
                       oil-fired second branch. For lunch
                               thus bright in tears when 
              I am gone remember, frozen Wye River (p.10)

Pandora's opening up of her Aga-cremation chamber, the sound of a bullet ("zip") and a discussion of the economic justification for a second Gulf War, the "oil-fired second branch", are all run through at speed in the radio-accompanied preparation of a neo-classical snack. But the Wye River Plantation Memorandum, a document that emerged in 1998 from meetings between Benjamin Netanyahu, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton, was meant to advance the despatch of agreed requirements on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides of their conflict, especially those concerning the redeployment of the Israeli occupying army and the Palestinian Authority's safeguarding of Israeli soldiers and civilians against attacks by Palestinian militant groups. The meetings are glancingly revisited in a later section:

                               ...butane refill trust me whenever
             leaving room to declare the hood of a should,
                                         the brow of a famous tea-towel,
             sounds like a Valentino remake uh Sharm
                       el-Sheikk will run and run how
     could you give an inch wrapped in tinsel,
                                 explode the text up on stage
               wrapped in a detonator, 'letters of guarantee' 
                       straight away, ink hardly dry. In this rope
                                           of sand, overcome with fumes
     look away and say what you must, Pandora
                       what's for dinner... (p.28)

The "butane refill trust me", refuelling with gas as metaphor for the politician's suave familiarity, bases the acceptance of a course of action not on the letter of the law but on the credulousness of an audience, while the "hood of a should" is the covert mandative of the subjunctive tense that retrospectively weakens treaties, allowing what has been agreed or requested to be set aside or silently dropped. As an expression of "medium strength modality", should "countenances that you may not do so":[iv] it does not demand compliance. A like manoeuvre was permitted by the "letters of guarantee" sent, in the wake of the Wye River Plantation summit, from the U.S. ambassador to Israel to the Israeli Cabinet Secretary, reassuring the Israeli government that the U.S. would "not adopt any position or express any view about the size or content of the third phase of Israel's further redeployment, which is an Israeli responsibility to implement rather than negotiate", leaving Israel to redeploy its occupying forces entirely as it sees fit, since in a subsequent letter of guarantee, the U.S. ambassador confirmed that "only Israel can determine its own security needs and decide what solutions will be satisfactory." The acceleration of occupation and seizure of Palestinian land by the Labour government of Ehud Barak was the foreseeable consequence; the repercussions go on today, the so-called 'security wall' being perhaps the most obvious manifestation. The Summit of Peacemakers, convened at Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt between March 13th-16th in 1996 by the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, President Clinton and President Yeltsin, here presents an example of more fatuous talk: "explode" means 'to drive out, hiss, hoot from the stage, to cry down and reject as obsolete, to discredit' (OED) as well as to blow up the anodyne texts emitted (in the sense of allowing a close examination, as well as in reference to the suicide bombings that provide pretexts for setting aside any previous agreements). The saying, "If someone asks you to make a rope out of sand, you better ask to see the old one first" means a rope of sand is an unfeasible task or situation; the desert turns to a noose and Western watchers retreat to the kitchen to see what's waiting in the fridge.                                   

                                                             To get towed
                              by brackets ahead, into 
            an exclusion zone of eagerness... (p.13)

The parentheses in treaties that qualify statements and permit loopholes, are also "brackets" in another sense: the relative distances between hits that establish the range of artillery. To cite one pertinent example from the war in Bosnia, Sarajevo was appointed an 'exclusion zone' in July 1993, by U.N. sanctioning bodies, making it a territory where military activity against civilians was prohibited, although Serbian artillery positions continued to send thousands of shells every day into the defenceless city.

The institutionalisation of 'legal' or quasi-legal injustice is perhaps the most important concern in Triodes:

                                                                 ...word ranking 
                           under the Sentences Act gives a choice 
                 of tempers, arbiter's freedom to set out 
                          where the deepest shadows shall fall.
          With blood on their hands is a terror attack
                            on the Jewish state, Antrim west bank,
                                       lemon Kurds. (p.41)

Michael Howard, as Home Secretary of a Conservative government, introduced mandatory minimum sentences, the so-called "three strikes and you're out" rule, to British law; but the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 included a form of words which have since been interpreted by the judiciary in ways which evade the most excessive and unjust consequences of the legislation. For example, a mandatory life sentence for a second serious offence can only be passed if the court "is of the opinion that there are exceptional circumstances relating to either of the offences or to the offender which justify not doing so." The room-for-manoeuvre in the forming and interpretation of legislation is battered by a flurry of profoundly contested issues: Palestinian demands for the release of their citizens from Israeli jails (denied by Israel, which cites the Jewish "blood on their hands"); the ongoing delays and deferrals of full implementation of the Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland; and the plight of the Kurds who, when Triodes was published, were caught between oppressors in Iraq and in Turkey. The litany culminates in a judgement that 

         The crime of the rational script permits a script
                  of crime in time to calibrate the forces
                                of pent-up sentence: word by word.

To paraphrase this sentence in a way that I hope doesn't travesty it: the evil act of the reasonable text (is that it) allows or does not prevent an evil or illegal intention eventually to determine the value and capacity of certain sentences to be interpreted in a number of ways. The failure of the sensible measure is this permission, tacit or otherwise, for offences and violations to be carried out in its name: its openness to interpretation supports one or both sides' ruthless pursuit of selfish ends by methods that go against the spirit of the law and against natural justice. The diagnosis of dangerous ambiguities does not fail to implicate poetry too; though poetry can, it is shown, also interrogate its own condition and that of the rational script.

There is another book, published more recently, which insists on culture's dependence upon war, which cites the work of many poets in its pages, including Samuel Johnson (and Homer, Hopkins, Holub, Auden, Larkin, Milosz…) and which shares aspects of its analysis with what I have tried to take from Triodes. But Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History takes a very different tack in its treatments of wars and their ends. He sees the situation since the end of what he calls "the Long War" (i.e. the first two World Wars and the Cold War taken as a single conflict) as comprising a fundamental transformation of the idea of the state, from out moded "nation-states" to emergent "market-states", as the most powerful governments, financial institutions and multinational corporations work to liberalize the movement of capital to a point where its flow is practically unimpeded by national governments or anything else. Peace and security, Bobbitt argues, have not been and cannot be supplied by the United Nations and World Courts because of their adherence to "the Wilsonian vision": a derivation, by Woodrow Wilson, from the American Constitution "with its emphasis on national identity and constituency – to universal, international law".[v] The Wilsonian vision holds that "collective security requires a state to intervene only to maintain the equilibrium of an international order" and "actions based on self-interest alone cannot serve as a durable basis for policy because without a moral foundation for policy domestic support will inevitably erode." So Bobbitt worries about the legal problems that might ensue for Western states in the present situation "where war often looks like crime and vice versa" and laws still insist that states should be treated equally, according to universal principles:

          Surely the time is not far off when the large hostile 
          majorities in the General Assembly that have denounced 
          Israel will be deployed against the developed states, 
          demanding economic concessions and constitutional 
          reform consistent with a universal mandate. […] When 
          [the current constitutional framework] is replaced by a 
          constitution for a society of market-states, this problem 
          will disappear because that constitution will resemble 
          those of corporations, which allow for weighted voting 
          based on wealth.

The vocabulary relating to games and sports in Triodes describes a system where the settlement of conflict by appeal to an impartial and generally applicable law is routinely set aside or corrupted in favour of settlement by a trial of strength, of economic and military power. The common moral standpoint of Western liberals, who might 'support' the Palestinian 'cause' in the same way that they would root for the plucky underdog in an international game of football, encourages the continuation of the 'game' and overlooks the routine corruption of and utter contempt for the most basic precepts of international law among its signatories. This is, I take it, the point of a remark in Prynne's "A Quick Riposte to Peter Handke's Dictum about War and Language":

          The concentration bombing of Bosnia by NATO, of the 
          defeated Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait by Rockeye 
          fragmentation bombs, and the reported British support 
          of the US in dropping, in the last eighteen months, 78 
          tonnes of bombs into Iraqi territory (The Times, 5 
          August 2000, p.17), are acts of barbarism which 
          implicate every human domain; but they mobilise the 
          anxiety of the only partially observant bystander 
          principally because of the moral imbalance between a 
          technologically superior aggressor against an under-
          equipped or third-world victim. This is luxury window-
          shopping for those normally busy with more important 
          things, which makes the protest almost as distasteful as 
          that against which it levels its superior moral 
          allegation.[vi]

* 

                    Uh Pandora read the running of these rails afar, 
           after the ovens of the land had been fixed up 
                                with the bellows of stupid amazement, 
                      after the earth had been separated from the sky 
                                          making the reeds jump and sway; 
           in their vermeil enriched cages the gazers 
                               fixed on the Lebanese percentage, 
                      the Armenian star shots from the bridge 
             of their ever sweet connection. To each tablet 
                                                    a flourish in radius, 
                                a memorial to oversee endingless divided 
                                accusatives of relation, bearing gifts 
              all worthless, pick one. Stick you say, 
                       the son who had a mother, she 
                                                      brought him bread: 
                       the brother who had a sister, she 
                                                      brought him bread: 
               all in abundance of necessity setting the strings 
                        tighter to promote the raft of confusion, 
                                           sailing each night. (p.12)

Pandora seems here to have foreseen the consequences of ignorant actions and opinions, their impact on other places, once the state citizenry have been brought to a pitch of revolted excitement, to fan the flames of war while the unreliable and easily-influenced ("the reeds") are suffused with fear and doubt. There is a Vermeil Room in the White House, decked out in gilded silver, in finest neo-classical style, so the gazers comprise a millionaire President and his kitchen cabinet of millionaires, who may fasten on the strategic importance of Lebanon and Armenia in, for example, negotiations for pipelines supplying Caspian oil. This passage contains a few loans from "Bilgames and the Netherworld: 'In those days, in those far-off days'., a Sumerian poem translated by Andrew George and published as supporting material to his translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh,[vii] so the tablet can be identified as a clay slab bearing inscriptions or a gravestone overlooking endless conflicting versions of the stories that divide peoples. The last Sumerian revision details the provisions available to the dead in the Netherworld, which are contingent on the size of their family and the verse ends with the ratcheting up of tensions which encourage widespread perplexity and disorder, or send desperate families on voyages for asylum and bread.

There are passages where the possibility for hope, a lift in the spirits, or significant protests are briefly countenanced and analysed:

                 What makes the rays cry out and rise, 
       to fall with a soft shrinking tremor,
                                   base rate on a needle,
                          gauging parity for those not too far
                                             from Rapunzel's spindle.
       Yet more doves make their hazy complaint in season
                and save and flutter on the wing 
                                   and grasp a twig to catch on 
       for sibilant inclusion, soothing the very air
                with unavailing news of themselves,
                          of nothing else; as up ahead
       from the balcony outlook the same puffy clouds
                          make their dumb allegations of 
               spot the difference, judge the moment
                                  lest, each to each in sweet sport,
                judgement is done. (p.14)

The persistence of light, as it flickers or glows dimly in the dark, counts as hope and a mark of opposition that gets thoroughly insulted and critiqued in Triodes: the protesting ranks are here reluctant, easy to put off, quick to withdraw, their power barely enough to shift the needle on a gauge. "Doves" is a term that was once used to describe individuals who argue in favour of discussion and agreement as the means to end or prevent military conflict, as opposed to "hawks" who are said to be advocates of war. In recent years, "doves" has come to mean individuals who merely favour a more cautious deployment of overwhelming force as part of a strategy that will safeguard their own troops and their perceived national interests, but here Prynne uses it to describe innocents of the pacifist persuasion who protest now and again in terms so vague as to be little more than advertisements for their own pious self-regard – prudent liberals who cut their spending, agitated at moments of international crisis, ready to join the bandwagon of harmless protest for the sake of a vapid communality. The balcony is occupied by the leaders of ineffectual protests which are based on simplistic accusations of moral equivalence, the kind of rhetoric that makes generalising, historically inept comparisons between different regimes and the sentence ends with an invocation of Matthew 7:1 ('Judge not, that ye be not judged'), in order to warn that we must be certain of the specific nature of the events which we criticise, otherwise we are spectators of or participants in a mere diversion. Our own actions or their lack should be weighed in the balance, or judgement itself, our ability to discriminate about anything at all, will be finished, over.

                                   All across the northern perimeter, all 
                tentered across with fresh mackerel skies, 
                                              the hours of isoglucose symmetry
                                     rush right-handed across the face
                                                       and melt down. And yes,
                come clean Irene, those dippy birds so scuttled
                                             along the pediment are for sure 
                         making their mark. Stone and sky
                                                     in the free mid-morning light,
                                           pale hands folded on little wrists,
                we skip the breeze with loops of plenitude. 
                                   The pediment joins charged clouds over
                                                      to its lightning earth, cathode
                                            protection of the whole body,
                the attic swaps salt for molasses. (p.19)

At this point the tranquil contemplation of the cirro-cumulus clouds that stretch across the sky takes place – can only take place – during a period of artificially sweetened harmony, until the illusion of agreeable mutual relation collapses in tears of despondency. The "dippy birds" who sit sunk in their feathers or hurry along the portico of a building soil it, as "we", heedless of the time ("hands folded on little wrists") while it away in mindless chatter and amusement, repeating our rituals of affluent repletion. The next sentence describes the discharge of electricity from negatively charged clouds in the sky to the positively charged earth below via the lightning conductor running from above the building to the grounding rod below, and the exchange in political culture of the sal Atticum, classical Greek wit celebrated for its refinement and feeling, for the thick, dark, sticky-sweet syrup of contemporary rhetoric.

                           Sterilised by recall, fragile infants, current
                                             in front anodised, that arm directing
                                                        30 lbs of Barrett Light 50,
                                   foldaway tripod swivelled like a feather
                                           quilling up its curated pods for free
                       by single shot sperm count. Uh the plaything 
                                 took out by lightest touches, as upon
                                                      a forearm quick with tendons
                                          coaxed along the flow axis, of blood
                                pulsing across the diode grid. The Durchgriff
                       crack force marked up the calendar, with red letters 
                                                            ripping its entry to shreds,
                                she would remember his arm resting like that,
                                         turning just slightly to freeze
                                                   the gamut of warning lamps, 
                        quoting coldly on the mount and by heart. (p.23)

This passage outlines the memory of seeing a sniper shooting a child or children: the "fragile infants" are "Sterilised by recall": the victims are fertility destroyed, are rendered harmless. "That arm" aiming the Barrett M82A1 (a rifle designed to take out everything from people and light vehicles to armoured personnel carriers) does what it does by being trained to act in a series of automatic responses; training is a sort of protective layer that governs the nerve impulses and blood flow along the arm: the blending of electrical current and blood circulation facilitates the efficient execution of "the plaything." "Durchgriff" is a noun derived from the German verb "durchgreifen", meaning 'to take drastic action in order to impose control on a chaotic situation', to take the reins firmly in one‘s hands, so the "Durchgriff / crack force" sounds like a special forces unit whose violent actions stain a date on the calendar ignominiously, marking a new and bloody anniversary to be held and rehearsed in the mind.

The familiar pattern of tit-for-tat escalation, of threats and skirmishes leading to war, is set up and set out like a grammar no-one needs to learn (p.25) and near the end of the book (p.39) comes a brilliant, self-consciously cynical treatment of documentary footage, of starving children waiting to be fed, TV-friendly gauze over their wounds. Being the end-result of events intended and bequeathed to them by the viewing audience: the children are "consumed to a crisp" – both watched while snacking, and reduced to little or nothing.

The final poem begins with a brisk account of how Pandora and Irene gave up and were given up by their anonymous narrator; the last admission of the privileged vantage from which the text has been unscrolling: "This is called 'The View/from the Balcony'".; and a brief ekphrastic excursion upon Jean Cousin's Eva Prima Pandora. This is a 16th-century painting depicting Eve in the pose of Pandora, a neo-classical Christianising of the Pandora myth, setting her under a "breast-arch", that is, an arch whose curve is shaped like a breast due to its decaying masonry and overgrown, hanging vegetation at one side. In the background, on a far shore, sits the city of Rome (Dora and Erwin Panofsky have speculated that the painting was initially intended to be Roma Prima Pandora). The speaker lingers to contemplate Eve's anomalous omphalos before starting on a measured fall towards the poem's conclusion, an end that winnows out the various, more historically specific themes while fusing the concern with premature, fiery destruction, crisis, mythology and electricity in the certainty of Irene-as-peace's next death or legal swindling. To an allegorical figure upon the pediment of a temple, or a voice grieving alone on a balcony, the time is announced "to go in and down", body and mind assaulted by the grievous particulars encountered on the way, down and into the inner chamber, to tend the vestal flame or further supply the fires of destruction.

These reckless paraphrases never stopped to admit that one word is rarely enough to go on, to spin to a web of associations and construct an argument or point-of-view. A case in point: the name "Rapunzel", in a sentence quoted previously in this essay, the name of a character in the eponymous tale compiled by the Brothers Grimm. Who are the people said to be "not too far/from [her] spindle"? An echo sent me to Paul Celan and his "Gespräch im Gebirg",[viii] a text said to commemorate a missed encounter with Theodor Adorno. This dialogue is a strange, repetitive, apparently bitterly sarcastic reiteration of anti-semitic ideas of Jewish rootlessness, mixed in with what sounds like survivor-guilt, in a discussion between two Jews halting to speak on their way through a mountainous landscape. The geomorphology of glaciated escarpments undercuts the idea that anywhere on earth is essentially a home for anyone else but the central relevance for Triodes seems to be that the name "Rapunzel" is reiterated a number of times in a short litany of indigenous plant species: "...bin ich ja, hier, beim Türkenbund und bei der Rapunzel...", Rapunzel being another name for the Rampion, Campanula rapunculus.[ix] A recent commentator on Celan's text brings together both Rapunzels in the following assessment: 

          Every flower, every plant, even the stones are overlaid 
          with and rest on symbolic values, are enmeshed in 
          historical discourses of power and destruction. Even 
          hearing the word "Rapunzel" evokes the Grimm brothers 
          and through them the rise of a nationalistic Germanic 
          philology that would contribute to the spread of anti-
          Semitism.[x]

But even if Jacob Grimm's editorial and philological work did evince a patriotic desire for greater German unity, doesn‘t the unhappy, specific, personal history of Celan sanction this evocation in a way that Prynne's usage would not? Or does Prynne utilise the name in order to reference Celan's text, with the aftershocks of the subsequent connotations playing a secondary role? Is any of this even close to justifying the appearance of "Rapunzel" in Triodes? Her "spindle" supports the botanical reference because the English word also, like the German noun "Spindel", means the stalk or stem of a flower. Could "those not too far / from Rapunzel's spindle" be the conversing Jews in Celan's Alpine range, and could they be made to stand for Jews in general, since the poem contains several references to the Holocaust as well as successive Israeli governments' criminal treatment of the displaced Palestinian population of the West Bank? It is difficult to accept that any one thing in Triodes might be there for the most capricious of reasons, but only because no critic is keen to make a fool of him- or herself: this is the closest I want to come to the "trust" that some other critics have invested in the work of the same author. What's left then, when everything except Hope has flown from Pandora's box, is a vague intimation that the attenuation of allusions is a deliberated attempt to foster just this kind of spiralling uncertainty. Prynne has, in a review of Jean Bollack's collected essays on the work of Celan, made efforts to connect that work with the current, daily horror of the Israel/Palestine murderous lock-step, which is an excluded middle forming the abyss between "[Celan's] exacting sparsity of lexical reduction and the unsayable enormity of vast crimes", and I could envisage putting together an argument that sees Irene, Pandora and Rapunzel linking all of these terms in a neatly satisfying alignment. If I'm reluctant to slot together the approximation of a poetics here, it is in a spirit of ignoble fidelity to a habitual reticence and to the idea of holding on, at the place where the force of all of these allusions cannot be discounted but, equally, where it cannot be fixed, cannot be settled upon and just used, at the sore point where gut feeling and evidential plausibility undermine each other in a panicky cycle of decision, indecision, judgement and misjudgement, and even the dictionary can't help us.

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i   See Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1956) for a thorough account of the often contradictory emphases and interpretations of the Pandora myth by Homer, Hesiod, Babrius, Erasmus, Goethe et al.
ii   Many thanks to Josh Robinson who kindly shared his unpublished essay on Triodes, alerting me to the use of Collins' "Ode to Evening" and Johnson's Irene: A Tragedy in Prynne's poem; to Nick Bailey and Roy Chapman, who tried to explain electronic circuits and differential calculus to me; to Harry Gilonis, who gave me an email tour of Tenter Ground; and to Anke Schmidt Felzmann, who advised me on the meaning and translation of "Durchgriff".
iii   See Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) p.155 for the etymology of 'sweet' and a short history of literary sweeteners from Chaucer to Shakespeare.
iv   Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullman et al, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.998.
v   See Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2002), pp.353-477 for the various references in this section.
vi   J.H. Prynne, "A Quick Riposte to Peter Handke's Dictum about War and Language", Quid 6 (November 2000), pp.25-26. In his essay, "Dirigibles", Quid 8ii, Peter Middleton misreads this passage as a grandiose dismissal of the little any of us can do: 
     Greatest denunciation is shot at those liberals who protest 
     between sips of vintage, whose 'protest (is) almost as distasteful 
     as that against which it levels its superior moral allegation.' Are 
     they really commensurable? The slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops 
     in Kuwait on a par with a superficial moral opposition to it? This 
     might mean we would only value heroic gestures, kamikaze 
     aesthetics, the total personal sacrifice of all out revolution, and 
     never the small incremental and mostly invisible public acts of 
     resistance and reconstruction. (p.40)
vii   From "Bilgames and the Netherworld: 'In those days, in those far-off days'., The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), lines 7-8, 20 and 156-157. Page 20 of Triodes also owes four significant lines to this version of the Bilgames tale, p.183, lines 144-146. See J.H. Prynne, 'Letter to Dr Andrew George, c/o Penguin Books' Quid 5 (August 2000), pp.2-7 for his interested and enquiring response to this translation.
viii Paul Celan, "Gespräch im Gebirg", Gesammelte Werke: Dritter Band: Gedichte III, Prosa, Reden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), pp.169-173.
ix In her English translation of this text, Rosmarie Waldrop renders "Rapunzel" as "corn-salad", which doesn‘t quite have the same set of connotations and is more commonly known in Britain as lamb‘s lettuce, Valerianella olitoria. See Paul Celan, Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp.17-22.
x Arnd Bohm, "Landscapes of Exile: Celan's "Gespräch im Gebirg". The Germanic Review 78 (25) Spring 2003, pp.99-112.