Collected Poems Anthony Burgess (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📖

becomes banal;

The stronger gust of sexual cruelty

Begs exploitation. And coprophagy,

Necrophily, paedophily all gape,

Along with sodomy and murderous rape,

To batten on a hard-won liberty.

Is there a limit, then, on themes that we

Submit for the high alchemy of art?

This is a question we may only start

To argue when the frontiers that persist

Between the aesthete and the moralist

Have better signposts or have none at all.

As for the law, it is unwise to call

Upon the jurist’s skill to separate

Pornography and art. Let not the State,

Only the aesthetician, work it out

And tell us what the business is about.

The writer’s business, on one level, is

Exploiting varied possibilities

In human language. There’s a trinity

Of author’s ends. We clearly see the three –

The pornographic, the didactic, and

The static or aesthetic, lie or stand

At points upon a wide continuum.

Art’s in the middle, at the far ends come

Linguistic modes freed from the artist’s aim –

The urge to educate, or else inflame.

At one end the didactic; here we seek

The treatise, large or small, on the technique

Of dice or dance, the neutron’s mysteries,

The wide, in contrast, sky’s immensities.

Appeal is made to the intelligence,

The reason, the bald brain. In consequence,

{The language must be plain, denotative,

{Transparent. No word anywhere may give

{A breath of the ambiguous, and live.

Extruded is the human tear or laugh.

Seek at the other end the pornograph,

Whose etymology means nothing more

Than this: the simple picture of a whore.

Whores, by tradition, need no other names,

Being mere items in erotic games,

And the desirable anonymous

Who, in commercial artwork, ogle us

With a bared bosom or a silk-clad calf,

Are each themselves a kind of pornograph.

But, by extension, the term covers now

The why, the which, the what, the where, the how

Of naked congress, dual, multiple,

With, if need warrants, such additional

Refinements as the pickaxe and the whip,

A luscious area for censorship.

Cocteau – or was it Gide? I am not sure –

Called pornographs one-handed literature,

A term that could, with justice, be applied

To the effusions of the other side,

For, cooking in the kitchen, we may stand

Stirring a pan, book in the other hand.

What the two genres hold in common is

One-handed, yes, but scarcely literature.

That bright commodity that sits secure,

Or nearly, between genres much preferred

By votaries of the thing and not the word,

Wishes to move, and wishes to inform,

But, more, to keep imagination warm.

{Imagination has no ready role

{In the other two. A total lack of soul

{Marks book-as-tool and not organic whole.

The object of one object is to teach,

That of the other – help the reader reach

A swift purgation, often by himself.

Restore the instrument then to the shelf.

Both types attain their stark kinetic aims

Outside, outside – in action or in flames.

But literature is different. It arouses,

Enflames the Thames, engulfs both men and houses,

Drags at the heart, excites to cathartise,

Purges within its rhythm, satisfies.

The reader, calm of mind, all passion spent,

Closes its pages, cool and near content.

True, pornograph and didact are too near

For verbal art to stay aloof and clear,

And they may, with the unskilful artist, taint,

Pollute his purposes and smear his paint.

Thus, in the fiction of the factive kind,

That fills the empty hour and lulls the mind,

The informative and pornographic meet.

Hero and heroine, beneath a sheet

Made sweaty by their amorous exercise,

Recount the history of some enterprise

Or talk of Tuscan incunabula

(The Encyclopaedia Britannica

Fills up the empty space between their ears);

They quieten the poor fact-soaked reader’s fears

That mere diversion may become a bore

By falling to their exercise once more.

The continuum is bent, the two ends are

Made one when linear grows circular.

Condemn the factual when it pretends

To be inspired by true aesthetic ends

And, similarly, literary art

Must be attacked and toughly torn apart

When it essays a propagandist aim

(Teaching again); the artist may not claim

The right to wield the pedagogic chalk,

Throw out the drama and resort to talk,

Hammer a tedious tuneless thesis, or

Endue the laurels of a senator.

And when the pornograph presumes to be

A sort of art, condemn it equally.

Do not invoke morality; your ground

Is an aesthetic one and deals with sound

And unsound literary pretensions. But

The door to moral questions is not shut.

The pornographic – is it bad or good?

It provokes onanism, as it should,

And moral theory or moral fact

Means nothing to the masturbator’s act.

Moral prescriptions never may intrude

On the amoral bliss of solitude.

But should pornography refollicate

The social act of sex, induce a state

Of mutual satisfaction, where’s the sin?

Keep out morality; let reason in.

Still, if the probing police commit to fire

Those ikons of a desperate desire,

Who will complain? So long as we ensure

The mauler’s paws are kept from literature

{Which, of its nature, is no instrument

{To gratify the onanist’s intent

{Or fire the rapist, we can be content.

We face another question now. Before

I pose it, let me travel back a score

Of years or more to a most heinous crime

Committed in the great permissive time.

Children were caught and tortured and their screams

Recorded in a montage helped by themes

Drawn from the vapid music of the age,

Then they were slaughtered coldly. Neither rage

Nor vengeance was the motive of the deed,

An acte gratuit. One killer who could read

Admitted frankly that he might have been

Infected by a glance at Sade’s Justine.

A lady, brooding on iniquity,

Let out a scream and screamed: ‘If only we

Could save one child from lethal agonies

By burning every book that was or is,

We should not hesitate,’ implying thus

The thing we knew – that books are dangerous.

Literature, certainly, is meant to hurt,

Seeking not to confirm but to subvert,

To prick complacency, but not to kill:

Here the perverted, not subverted will

Which, heaven be praised, is rare, can be impelled

To sin by what tradition has long held

To be not evil but beneficent.

Take, for example, the Old Testament,

Root of our culture, bright theophany,

Source of corruption for one man, for he,

Eyes misted by the steam of sacrifice,

Contrived his own sublunar paradise

By knifing children in Jehovah’s name.

Even the Catholic mass has garnered blame

For hinting anthropophagy to one

Who sought an intimate communion

By slaying all the women that he could

To drink their blood. ‘In God’s eyes it was good,’

God being he. We cannot legislate

For the unsullied children of the State

In terms of what will make the bad man worse,

The madman madder. The whitecoated nurse

Sequesters what is clearly venomous

To him but is pure