David Jones on Blog Communication

Avant la lettre. Jones in the 'Preface' to his London annotated poem The Anathemata, quoted from today's Isola di Rifiuti [here]:

‘What I have written has no plan, or at least is not planned. If it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns to its beginning. It has themes and a theme even if it wanders far. If it has a unity it is that what goes before conditions what comes after and vice versa. Rather as in a longish conversation between two friends, where one thing leads to another; but should a third party hear fragments of it, he might not know how the talk had passed from the cultivation of cabbages to Melchizedek, king of Salem. Though indeed he might guess.’

incantatory Thames scholar

A nice overlap between my present involvement with ideas of existential communication and my former immersion in Iain Sinclair's aesthetic in the Jones tradition. There is a transcendental 'unity', a truth, but no writer knows how he or she is going there. The 'weird, magnificent, unapproved narrative of the city wriggled and twisted, determined to remain beyond the reach of salaried explainers', Sinclair wrote here. I hope to continue to describe Jaspers' theory of existential communication, of conversation aiming at absent founding truth, in my next post.