Pebbles on the Beach

Periodically I look back through my "draft" blog posts – there are nearly 100 of them now – which sit there in various stages of completion, ranging from a single quotation to a few notes, sentences, or paragraphs that seemed to go nowhere. Many of them have passed well beyond their nominal "best before" date (being tied to a particular event, news story, or some long-finished project), but even those can often be mined for the raw material of a fresh post. For example, I found this quotation (actually a quotation within a quotation) lifted from something I had been reading:

To quote the narrator of my first novel who is here describing an exaggerated version of my own experience:
I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.
(Ben Lerner, excerpt from "The Hatred of Poetry")

That really resonated with me, and still does. I read considerably more poetry than the average person (who, after all, reads none at all) but I find that I often react most strongly when I come across a self-contained nugget of poetic concision and compression quoted by someone in just that way. It's not only that the glitter of a jewel is most intense when it has been extracted from its setting among rival gems, or that some longer work has been reduced, like a sauce, to its most savoury, haiku-like essence. As Ben Lerner is suggesting, it's more that I feel re-connected to the idea of poetry, an idea that was first installed in me when studying at school, and one that can be powerfully re-activated by just this sort of unexpected encounter with its smallest fully-functioning component: you might say it's the application of the rhetorical device of synecdoche to the whole poetic enterprise. If that has also been your experience, or if poetry was once important to you but you find your faith has lapsed, then I recommend reading that whole linked extract from Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry.

Once, essays were riddled with quotations, small and large, mainly taken from the Bible and the Latin and Greek classics – have you ever tried to read Montaigne or Francis Bacon without the footnotes? – but it's a more infrequent habit these days, probably because the presumption that authors and readers share a common culture is no longer safe. Certainly, few of us today would recognise even the most well-worn classical references, even in translation. You might be on safer ground with the Beatles, say, but as someone or other once said, all things must pass. It is a fact that most British children today are unfamiliar with even that basic Christian shibboleth, the Lord's Prayer, let alone those passages of the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer that for so many generations formed the common expressive treasury of our culture. Oh well... One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the art school dance goes on forever.

Trickier – or should we say more annoyingly smug? – than the direct quotation is the allusion to a quotation. By pointing sideways in the direction of some "famous" words, accompanied by a wink, the writer is not just presuming a common culture with the reader (or at least some readers): they are simultaneously highlighting it and concealing it, in what is the literary equivalent of a secret handshake. In the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, for example, you probably realised I had made an amalgam of two quotations, although I doubt you will have recognised them both (that's how annoyingly smug I can be). The first is from the Bible: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever" (Ecclesiastes 1:4). Which reminded me of the second, the title of an album released in 1970 by Pete Brown & Piblokto: Things May Come, And Things May Go, But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever. An album I have never listened to, but was one of the intriguing LP covers I used to pore over in the record-racks of W.H. Smith on the way home from school. Doubtless, that album's title is itself an echo of Ecclesiastes, reflected and refracted through various intermediary sources – culture is nothing if not "intertextual" – but for whatever reason it has stuck in my mind as a "thing" ever since. Of course, if you did spot them both, then "Pass, friend!" and welcome to the Pleasuredome (oh, stop it).

Photography is all about quotation, of course. You notice something interesting "written" in what the mediaeval mind thought of as the liber mundi (the "book of the world"; author: God) and record it for others to see (or "read"), isolated and set within a frame like a block quotation. It's no accident that the very first photo-book, published in 1844, bore the title The Pencil of Nature, and not "The Magic Pencil of Henry Fox Talbot". There was even a disclaimer from Fox Talbot stating that "The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil". It is, like every subsequent photographic book and album, a book of quotations from the Book of Light, and the alleged last words of J.M.W. Turner – still living at the time – come to mind: "The sun is God" [1].

At its most sophisticated (or annoyingly smug) photography can also be all about allusion to other, more famous photographs, and yet another secret handshake between initiates. To the appreciator of photography as an artform with a history every photograph of a large latticed window, for example, stands in relation to Fox Talbot's foundational photo of a window in Lacock Abbey (made in 1835 and probably the oldest photographic negative in existence), just as every photograph of weirdly identical twins is an indirect quotation of Diane Arbus, who was herself probably not unaware of precedents made by August Sander and numerous 19th century studio portraitists. Too great an awareness of precedent can be oppressive, but the fact is that, once an artform gets going, it inevitably suffers from what the literary critic Harold Bloom called "the anxiety of influence". That is, the cumulative difficulty (and ultimately the impossibility) of originality. But, as so many have been said to have said, originality is overrated.

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

Mark Twain, Chapters from My Autobiography  (published in the North American Review, 1906-7)

This world-weariness had already set in as early as 400 BCE it seems, when King Solomon (or the anonymous ghost-writers who really wrote the book of Ecclesiastes) declared:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.

Which is hilarious, really, when you consider what innovations were yet to come, from printing to plastic packaging (listen, Your Majesticality, nobody said "new" was necessarily going to be "good", did they?). Besides, gloom about originality can always be countered by quoting the many artists and writers who have been said to have said, in numerous variations: yes, everything has already been said / painted / photographed; but not by me. There is always everything to be said for joining in the game, rather than leaving the field in despair or sulking in one's tent, provided this is accompanied by an appropriate spirit of humility in the face of what has already been achieved. The art school dance goes on forever.

On the subject of humility, I have always enjoyed a certain much-quoted remark of Isaac Newton, which I recently decided to track down to its source. This turned out to be Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men. Collected from the Conversation of Mr. Pope, and Other Eminent Persons of His Time, by the Rev. Joseph Spence (1820). In the book Spence quotes Andrew Michael Ramsay as follows:

Sir Isaac Newton, a little before he died, said: "I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me".

Isn't that great? You can see it for yourself here. Even more apposite to my current purposes, you will see there that this alleged remark of Newton's is followed by an asterisked note from the editor (Spence):

* This interesting anecdote of our great philosopher's modest opinion of himself and his discoveries, is only another proof of his consummate wisdom. It will recall to the memory of the poetical reader the following beautiful passage from the Paradise Regained of our great poet.

--------- Who reads

Incessantly, and to his reading brings not

A spirit and judgment equal or superior,

(And what he brings, what need he elsewhere seek)

Uncertain and unsettled still remains;

Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself,

Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,

And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,

As children gathering pebbles on the shore.

Apart from the image of children on the shore gathering pebbles, I think Spence rather missed the point of Milton's words and how off the mark the comparison with Newton's humblebrag is, but that is the fate of quotations, isn't it? They serve the purposes of the quoter, and not the quoted. Severed from their context, they can be bent out of shape to fit pretty much any design, including the complete opposite of what was originally intended [2]. In the end, it doesn't much matter to me what Ben Lerner really had in mind when he quoted himself in that extract from The Hatred of Poetry, although I do take care to quote his words accurately and to identify their source, which is more than can be said for nearly all popular quotation websites.

What does matter to me is that those words sparked something in my own mind that was – just to slip in one more quotation – "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" [3] and which led, a little bathetically perhaps, to this blog post. Just as, some years ago now, Newton's remark about looking for pebbles "whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me" led to one of my first attempts at making an "artist's book", Newton on the Beach [4]. So, I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy, etc. Well, you get the picture.

1. Dialogue from an imaginary 4-frame cartoon strip, "The Death & Final Words of J.M.W. Turner":

    "What did he just say?"

    "I think he said, 'the sun is god'? Might have been 'the sun is hot', though?"

    "Really?... Ask him again..."

    "Too late: he's gone. It's 'last words' time, I'm afraid..."

    "I must say I like 'the sun is god' a lot better"

    "Me too. Let's stick with that. I'll write it down"

    "I think I'll open that window now. It is getting a bit warm in here..."

2. If you want some context, the entire text of Paradise Regained is available here: search it for "pebbles".

3. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

4. All copies of which seem to have disappeared, except for the one I deposited in the library of Winchester School of Art. Probably just as well; it wasn't terribly good.