PETER READING IN MARFA

Marfan. Peter Reading. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.
Bloodaxe Books. 2000.

Joe Francis Doerr

In 1998-99, with the help of a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency grant, Peter Reading exiled himself from his native England to become, like many Anglo adventurers and fortune-seekers before him, a prospector of sorts in the once-gold-and-borax-rich alpine desert country of trans-Pecos Southwest Texas. While he was not digging for gold, he did manage to strike literary paydirt and find there the raw material for his twenty-first book, a long poem called Marfan. The one-word title of the book is what citizens of Marfa, Texas (population: 2,474), the tiny town in which Reading lived, call themselves, and it is a safe bet that Reading relishes the sobriquet's vaguely alien connotations for reasons that will become increasingly clearer. In many ways, Marfa's rough-hewn and eccentric character is typical of the small mining towns sifted over the Big Bend region. The town, which began life as a water stop and freight headquarters on the Southern Pacific Railroad, was named, Reading tells us, in 1881 by the wife of a Southern Pacific Engineer, "a woman who aspired to higher things" who happened to be reading The Brothers Karamozov when the train reached the site in question.

She dubbed the tank town Marfa, after the loyal
retainer of the Karamozov household,
omniscient old Marfa Ignatyevna
who did not see the fall but heard the scream,
the strange, foam-stifled, long familiar scream
of an epileptic falling in a fit.

Apparently, things have been fitful there ever since.
Reading's Marfans are by nature reticent, but are driven by their isolation to become talkers, story-tellers really, as they manage to skirt all but the most trivial issues in their rambling conversations. Rather than discuss the agreement reached in the US House of Representatives to allow the states of Maine and Vermont to dump low-level radioactive waste in their backyard, for instance, they chat about their various sophomoric exploits declaring, "Tham wus the days," or about sensational stories in the local press like the appearance of the image of "Mary, Jesus, AND JOSEPH TOO!" on the breakfast tortilla of a woman from the nearby town of Fort Stockton. Occasionally, an individual will drop the homespun delivery without warning, and confess to some sinister truth about himself and the human condition. No doubt Reading reveled in the oddities he encountered on arriving in Marfa. One imagines him realizing quickly his dubious good fortune as a poet to be among such unusual people, and most likely feeling in his Liverpudlian heart the tug of distant kinship to the quirky, disconnected men and women hunched over their Lone Stars in the smoky parlor of "Ray's Bar." Reading's characters seem to have inherited a profound sense of ennui and inexplicable cynicism that stretches far beyond the town limits and relatively short history of Marfa. History and bloodlines seem to have conspired to infect every living soul in Marfa with the cancer of dejection. They can't help but feel it creeping and metastasizing in every fiber of their being. And this may be a clue as to why Reading chose to spend a year there—he feels it, too.
Those familiar with Reading's work know that throughout his career he has produced books of poetry that have chronicled his country's cultural, moral, and political disintegration. Works like The Prison Cell & Barrel Mystery (1976), Nothing For Anyone (1977), Tom O'Bedlam's Beauties (1981), Diplopic (1983), C (1984), Ukulele Music (1985), Stet (1986), Shitheads (1989), Last Poems (1994), Work in Regress (1997), and Ob. (1999), to name a only few, have established Reading as a contemporary English poet whose fierce moral anxiety is matched (and often masked) only by his overt cynicism. In 1990, Reading published an article in the Australian magazine Island (issue 42) called "Going, Going: A View From Contemporary England," in which he links the literary tradition of English pessimism with the "national sense of decline." His list of English historians, philosophers, poets, writers, and characters who may be considered part of this tradition is impressive: Henry Francis Lyte, Edward Gibbon, Hopkins, Dickens, Smollett, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Eeyore, Auden, Roy Fuller, Philip Larkin and Margaret Drabble. (One is tempted to amend the list by adding to it the so-called 'Leeds poets': Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, and Jeffrey Wainwright—a group of northern writers to which Reading might be added with little difficulty were it not for the fact that he has no discernible 'Loiner' connections). At any rate, Reading names four factors that contribute to the attitude in question:

a congenital English pessimism (attributable to our economy?, our climate?); an English tendency to self-denigrate (attributable in part to an inherent reticence, in part to a native caution, and it causes us sometimes to portray ourselves as even worse than we actually are); the actual English experience of loss of Empire; and, arising from this last, all the connotations suggested by such a fall as had been delineated by Gibbon as early as 1776. Gibbon saw History 'as little more than the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind'‚ as 'vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave'. His conclusion that 'all that is human must retrograde' completes the gloomy, if realistic outlook which many of his countrymen have subsequently inherited or adopted. We register our own degeneration when we observe external decay, and view our personal disintegration as a metaphor for universal entropy.

It is important that the reader keep these four factors in mind while reading any of Reading's poetry, including Marfan. For though the book was written about a tiny redneck town in Southwest Texas, it focuses on the same cultural (congenital?) maladies Reading has diagnosed in England.
    Marfa, Texas is one of the truly authentic off-center places in North America. Like the Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma conjured up in Kafka's Amerika, it seems to exist more in the realm of literary imagination than reality. It is strangely symmetrical to those places dotting the Big Bend which Texas author John Santos describes as having been "left unfinished at the time of creation." But unlike those places haunted by the dreamy Mexican-Americans about which Santos writes so eloquently in his memoir—places which often go completely unnoticed, where perhaps no sound or color can penetrate, places left with "no shape or substance" yet which exude a quiet sanctity—Marfa, as depicted by Reading, exudes all the holiness of a garish frontier town that never grew up. Marfan is rife with vulgar, ignorant, racist, often stereotypical 'Texans' that exhibit the worst human traits the Lone Star State (or any post-Imperial backwater with a strong infusion of English blood?) has to offer. Their hometown seems to be tailor-made for them.
    Marfa is a place so strange it appears to be the repository for all the sound and color denied to all the "unfinished" places. As a result, the shape and substance Marfa assumes is at once revolting and strangely appealing, making it prime real estate for an extended visit by Peter Reading. As he has demonstrated time and again, he is fascinated by such places that seem to straddle the seams that keep time—if not reality— bound together, but which, by virtue of their unique positions are frequent witnesses to signals from some 'other side.' Reading observes that this tends to happen especially when cultures inhabiting a place begin the inevitable process of self- destruction until only the place remains. And, of course, the ghosts.
    One thinks, for example, of Reading's impression of the village of Brabyns in "Brabyns Park" from For the Municipality's Elderly (1974). This book is often described by critics as Reading's futile gesture against transience—fair enough, but what is more impressive is what is revealed in the process of decay. At Brabyns Park it is physical decay, the outward appearance of transience itself, witnessed by the poet and his wife among the "litter of little [grave] stones sliced thin, incised / with Chang and Cani Fidelissimo," that reveals signals from the past in the communication of "long ago ghosts with ghosts in a ghost language." Reading includes himself among these ghosts, aware that he too will one day be merely a memory survived only by his written words. Thus, his perceptions are already part of this "ghost language" poised to communicate with unknown others in an unknown future. But there is much more at work here than a simple memento mori. History itself may be thought of as a conversation between past and present spoken in the language of ghosts, and those who would understand history must learn the language of decay. Reading perceives that it is the decay—of time, place, culture, language and body—that holds the key to understanding the language of history. In Brabyns Park, the decay has punched holes in the present and has allowed the light of the past to shine through.
    Something very similar is going on in Marfa and Reading knows it. Why else would he not be surprised to find while browsing the "Classics shelf" in the meager Marfa Public Library the inscription (most likely an epitaph) that had first come to him in Brabyns Park: Qui Caecus et Senectute Confectus ([Here lies] he who was blind and consumed by old age)? He explains that the inscription "reminds us of an earlier dynasty / no less alive albeit obsolete." There is a kind of pun in the double meaning of the word "confectus," which can mean either: 'was wasted, consumed' or 'was prepared.' Evidently, the inscription speaks of one who has been prepared by personal degeneration for something—death, perhaps, but also for discovery by the future. Reading first placed this inscription in the closing lines of "Brabyns Park" thirty years ago, but the sentiment becomes the unofficial theme of Marfan, as it appears just eighteen lines into the book: "Reading in Marfa Public Library: Qui Caecus et Senectute Confectus." Regarding puns, are we to read the word "Reading" in this line as a gerund or as the poet's surname? Either way, it is almost certain Reading is exploring the past's paradoxical relationship with the present: only when the present is perceived in its state of disintegration, is the past on which it is founded made truly visible. Once visible, each epoch is found to be, more often than not, oddly contiguous if not parallel to the other. It is as a result of this realization that one might conclude, for want of a better explanation, that history tends to repeat itself. Such is the language of ghosts.
    As for the ghosts, Marfa is home to an unusual phenomenon known at various times in the history of the place as "The Ghost Lights," "Apache Ghosts," or "The Ghost of Alsate" who was a famous chief among the local Apaches. More recently, the phenomenon has come to be called "The Marfa Lights," or as Marfans themselves say simply "The Lights." The Lights are a staple attraction in Marfa, and people come from all over Texas, the US, and the world to observe them. They have been fascinating and terrifying residents and visitors since their earliest reported sighting in the nineteenth century, and have now become part of the lore of the Southwest as well as a stock tourist attraction. The phenomenon provides the backdrop for Marfan, and Reading captures it in the flavor of the old campfire story:

One evening, back in 1883,
Robert Reed Ellison was with his wife
herding a bunch of cattle across the basin
from Alpine towards Marfa, heading west,
and, sundown coming on, stopped for the night.
As he made preparations for the campfire
he glanced up and was mystified to notice
lights flickering to and fro across a valley
along the side of the Chinati Mountains.
Assuming it was Apaches on the move,
he catnapped clutching his Winchester till dawn
when the weird incandescence fizzled out.

"Nearly a century later," he then relates, no doubt conscious of the odd sensation of history repeating itself, "the Houston Chronicle despatched Stan Redding—/'Check out this Marfa story; let's just see / whether there's anything in it.'" Reading records what Redding later wrote:

They darted about the ground—red, white, and blue,
orbs, baseball-sized. They blended into one,
then separated. One of them would zoom
high in the air, then plummet into the brush,
then rise an instant later and spin away
crazily. Unsupported and unattached,
each one illuminated the black-brush clump
over which it hovered.

Reading then supports what Redding once saw by admitting "Tonight, off 90 East, / a curious ignis fatuus fulminates..."
The Lights have been the subject of countless studies and photo- essays for the better part of the twentieth century. A recent on-line search revealed no fewer than 2,180 hits for web sites devoted to the phenomenon. Reading, of course, appears wearied by the sensational attention they have received. He snipes, "The Lights, demystified by divers eminents: / electrostatic discharge; swamp-gas; moonlight / shining on veins of mica; ghosts of Spanish / Conquistadors who sought gold here; a mirage / produced by cold and hot layers of air / refracting light..." Sneering in an angry sonnet, he rails at the circus of profit grown up around them:

$10 in advance! The Marfa Lights
Festival (held on Labor Day Weekend)!
This year we feature the great Dana Lee
& Mariachi de la Paz of Alpine;
the one and only Shelly Lares—enjoy!
[Also, a bunch of other total shites
like 'Randy' Bob Pulido ('Texas Cowboy');
and, all the way from Marfa, 'Injun Dancers';
'Los City Boyz'...] And, don't forget, at 9,
the 3-on-3 Hoop-D-Do Street Basketball
Tournament—remember, y'all come and see...
[some banjo-pluckin' strumpet from Big Bend—
all in all, a load of fucking chancers.]
Way wish a Texas 'Howdy!' tew y'all!

Reading fears that The Lights are a kind of ghost language no one even attempts to translate any longer. He also fears that whatever story they actually tell has been so obscured by the ravages of pessimism and ignorance as to be impenetrable. The Lights are this tortured region's greatest conversation piece, providing fuel for the discussion every Marfan should be having but which no one dares initiate. Like Pound's 'Vortex,' The Lights provide a focal point of departure for a variety of intellectual responses. In Marfa, those responses could be to the shared experience of a violent history, the ravages of which might be healed by productive open discussion. Unfortunately, that discussion never begins. Rather than find a way to heal the wounds of the past and forge a common relationship with one another, each observer of The Lights remains locked in an isolated, personal response to a phenomenon no one truly cares to understand. So the defeated Apache says that The Lights are the "restless spirit of the dead Apache Chief Alsate" perhaps come to exact his revenge upon the conqueror, while the paranoiac from whom Reading hitches a ride claims they are the result of a government conspiracy, "encrypted signals / transmitted from the Godbold's feedmill silo / beaming mah brains up tew the President," and the majority of Marfans simply choose to see them as a boon to the local tourist industry.
    Of course, there are the inevitable "alien" explanations for The Lights as well—UFO sightings are commonplace around Marfa—and the connection between the extraterrestrial sense of the word and the way it is used along the Texas-Mexico border is not missed by Reading, himself an alien in Marfa, albeit a white, 'legal' alien. "Alien," Reading implies, is never used when the epithet of choice, i.e., "Spik," will suffice in friendly conversation in "Ray's Bar." Given that, as anyone familiar with the development of English knows, the idiomatic drawl used to form any number of racial slurs in Texas is a close relative to that once used to speak the name of Grendel in Hrothgar's mead hall, it is no wonder that it produces in Reading the "desire to puke." Reading perceives that these Marfans are distant cousins who suffer from the Anglo-Saxons' island-bred xenophobia, and they prefer to brandish the old curse like a trusted weapon used to keep the enemy at bay. Reading is hard-pressed to find any enemies in Marfa, but he is assured they are everywhere: the ubiquitous "Spiks," the homeless and "scary" "Burro Lady," and the mental patient fresh out of the local rehabilitation center who, ironically, is the one character in Marfan who converses in formally prosodic speech—he tells a recidivist's tale, a cycle of incarceration and release in a loosely-rhymed iambic pentameter.
    Like Will Barrett in Walker Percy's The Second Coming, who observes that "Gentiles" living apart from the leavening influence of Jews "begin to act like the crazy Jutes and Celts and Angles and redneck Saxons they are...living deep in the Southern forests and growing nuttier by the hour," Reading understands that it is imperative for the pessimistic Anglo to acknowledge the humanity of his enemy‚ by engaging him in real conversation. A multitude of Götterdämmerungen might thus be forestalled.
    Whatever "The Lights" may be for others, for Reading they are the impetus for the conversation he wants to initiate, not only in Marfa, but everywhere. Once the discussion begins, he appears at least somewhat convinced that those participating will begin to see that the present may be understood in terms of the past, that it may be possible to remedy problems in the present by reviewing their historical causes. To this end, it is plausible that Reading considers himself to be one so familiar with the condition of English pessimism, as well as the possible ways of managing it, that he also envisions himself a kind of Beowulf sent in to aid his distant kin in slaying not the convenient, false 'enemy' without but rather the inconvenient, real enemy within. "'Twas then they sent in Lannan's Secret Weapon," he writes of his arrival in Marfa, mimicking the heroic diction of the Old English epic. Reading knows instinctively if he could write into being a lasting and universal change in human sensibility that would make even the most hard-hearted Marfan anywhere more historically engaged, and more compassionate and sensitive to the plight of the marginalized and dispossessed, his own pessimism might be alleviated.