The Harpocratic Oath

John Glenday on the space between words

So it turns out Harpo Marx didn't name himself after Harpocrates, the Greek God of Silence, which disappointed me no end. He was wordless, anyway, rather than silent - there was always that little phallic toot from his horn as he pretended to chat on the phone, or chased pretty girls across the set, and when he sat down at a keyboard, or at the harp, his fingers would break the silence. It appears Harpo opted not to speak on stage simply because he was rubbish at learning his lines. And nicknamed Harpo, surprise, surprise, because he played the harp. Mind you, this was a smart move if you were making movies in the 1930s and your birthname was Adolph.

Harpocrates, it seems, was adopted from the Egyptian pantheon - the God Horus manifested as a child, with a finger to his lips representing the hieroglyph for 'child'. This was misinterpreted by the Greeks as an injunction to haud yer wheesht. So he became the god of silence and secrets.

In his 1911 painting 'Silence' Odilon Redon's subject is Harpocrates holding two fingers to their lips. The figure is enigmatic, eyes downcast like a Flemish Christ from the Middle Ages as they peer out from wherever into wherever; from darkness into light, from silence into uproar, as if language were a place they dared not enter.

There's a careful balance in poetry between what we say and what we don't. Silence is there for at least two reasons - as a means of avoiding saying what needs said, or of saying what needs said. Every word comes bedded in silence - we know that - there's a tiny silence between words; a wider one between verses; a huge silence surrounds each poem - just look at all that white paper and imagine what I'm not saying. For Kay Ryan, in her poem 'Silence', the blank page is an Ice Age:

Silence is not snow.

It cannot grow deeper

A thousand years of it

are thinner

than paper. So

we must have it

all wrong

when we feel trapped,

like mastodons.

Sometimes poets highlight the silence by foregrounding the wee sounds that persist when there are no words there: Jan Wagner's 'Guericke's Sparrow' where at the moment of the eponymous bird's death, stifled in a vacuum flask as a party piece, even the poem itself cannot bear to watch, but turns away, towards the window, to the exterior, natural world, that Science seems intent on destroying:

'...and now

they watch the sparrow start to flutter

like the flame on a spirit of wine - its air

grown ever thinner. beyond the window

mirabelles grow ripe in the buzzing heat

the grass spreads on the ruins...'

And then we hear the tick of a clock, and the sound of a horse and cart in the street outside; it's another seven lines before a voice leaches back into the poem, tentative and guilty and uncomfortable:

'that dead sparrow", whispers one,

will one day fly through an empty sky.'

In Tess Gallagher's 'Black Silk' the inability to talk about loss, the unspeakable, uncrossable emotional distance between ordinary folk in extraordinary circumstances, is announced by the tiniest and tinniest of sounds:

'I went into the bathroom to see

how I looked in the sheen and

sadness. Wind chimes

off-key in the alcove. Then her

crying so I stood back in the sink-light

where the porcelain had been staring. Time

to go to her, I thought, with that

other mind, and stood still.'

One of the crucial decisions a poet must make is how much to say and how much to leave for the reader to say for themselves. An unemployed reader is a bored reader. My early drafts are usually far too pretentious and blethery - they butt in before the real poem has had a chance to speak - a sort of linguistic warming-up exercise - and then keep on talking long after the poem has run out of things to say. I then spend days, weeks, longer, taking out most of the things I want to say, so the poem ends up as a sort of epitaph to itself, if that makes sense. A gravestone with no grave beneath it. The closest equivalent I can think of is the way archaeologists will gather flint flecks from a site where tools have been knapped - all the tiny chippings that were discarded. When reassembled in a sort of three dimensional jigsaw, the perfect shape of a lost arrowhead is there in the heart of the flint waste, made out of nothing but air. My poems are that waste.

I love it when poems leave me in the lurch so that I end up having to do some proper thinking for myself - Eavan Boland's 'Histories' from her collection 'Domestic Violence' is a good example. Here's the whole poem. We're suddenly thrown into the action and equally suddenly abandoned to our own devices:

HISTORIES

That was the year the news was always bad

(statistics on the radio)

the sad

truth no less so for being constantly repeated.

That was the year my mother was outside

in the shed

in her apron with the strings tied

twice behind her back and the door left wide.

And sometimes the wordlessness - the lack of permission to speak, rather - is explicit, as in this Isabel Galleymore poem from her collection 'Significant Other':

SEAHORSE

Isn’t it shocking how he speaks for her?

His thin voice wavering across the restaurant — 

she’ll have the cod artichoke bake.

A giggle of  bubbles comes from behind them:

a fish tank curtained with seagrass

where a seahorse is tying itself

to one of those slim, tweedy forms

like a hand shaping itself  inside another’s

the way my hand tucks into his

like a difference pretending it’s not.

Silences are owned - I learned this in my Counselling days. They belong to people and are the responsibility of those people to fill, or to leave intact. Sometimes they are the property of the writer, and sometimes of the reader.

But in the real world, in the real universe, I mean, there's no such thing as absolute silence. Even in the unfathomable depths of space - just one or two hydrogen atoms per cubic metre of nothing - there's the infinitesimal shriek and rumble of stars decaying and stars being born; and in the absence of every other sound, in the anechoic chamber of our solitude, blood sings inside our ears.

Harpo had it right, of course. When he laid off from the clowning around, and sat down at the harp he would set his mask of silliness aside and gaze beyond the set, the scene, the extras, into somewhere else. For him, the serious stuff lay in the music, not in the words. He was right, in a way - poems are built from words and those words have their work to do - they show the reader things, they tell them stuff; but they're never quite enough. The best they can do is remind us that there's more to a great poem than mere words, and gesture towards whatever it is language cannot encompass, like a god holding a finger to his lips.

John Glenday will be teaching on the Poetry Fundamentals course, starting 22nd April. His first event, A Weather Eye, is on 15th July. Get all the details at northseapoets.com 🌊