Language-Games

by Veronica Forrest-Thomson

35 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest-Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016.

Veronica was born in Malaya to a rubber planter, John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean, but grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She opted to hyphenate the surname, having originally been published under the name Veronica Forrest.

She studied at the University of Liverpool (BA, 1967) and Girton College, Cambridge (PhD, 1971) where her first supervisor was the poet J.H. Prynne. Her Cambridge friends included the poets Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley.

Forrest-Thomson later taught at the universities of Leicester and Birmingham.

Her poetry collections included Identi-kit (1967), the award-winning Language-Games (1971) and the posthumous On the Periphery (1976). Subsequent gatherings of her work include Collected Poems and Translations (1990) and Selected Poems (1999). A further Collected Poems, minus the translations, was published in 2008 by Shearsman Books with Allardyce Books.

Forrest-Thomson was married to the writer and academic Jonathan Culler from 1971 to 1974. She died in her sleep on 26 April 1975 at the age of 27, after an accidental overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michaelmas


daisy:

garden aster of a shrubby habit

October:

bearing masses of small purplish flowers

blackbird:

the ring ouzel

crocus:

the autumn crocus

moon:

the
harvest
moon

Michaelse maesse her on lande wunode
se eorl syththan oth thet ofer sce
in 1123

masses of small purplish flowers
the ring ouzel
the autumn crocus
the
harvest
moon

tide:

time

spring:

Indian Summer

term:

a term of session of the Higher Court of Justice
in England and also of Oxford,
Cambridge

the kinges power and is ost wende vorth
to Oxenforde aboute mielmasse
in 1297

time
Indian summer
also of Oxford, Cambridge
at the gret cowrtes at Mykelmas the year
in 1453

Trinity
Nevile's
Queens'

and

bearing masses of small purplish flowers
the harvest
moon.

(All quotations from the OED.)

*

The Brown Book


But in a fairy tale the pot too can hear and see1
and help the hero on his way2
to stimulate something to thoughts of his own,
Noms de Personnes, Noms de Pays

as Proust taught le tout Paris
his little phrase
trying to get between pain and its expression.3
bring light into one brain5,6
but a man who wants discrete particulars7
cries out in pain

with the aphasiac surface of a day's
object and events,
can only choose the mouth which says:8
I should have liked to produce a good book.

This has not come about
but the time is past in which I could improve it.

1 Certainly but it can also talk
2 But of course it is not likely
3 We are not concerned with the difference, internal/external
4 Language-game no. 30

5 Or another
6 In its poverty and in the darkness of lost time
7 When the light strikes Fizeau's mirror
8 A stamp which marks them mine.

(Quotations freely adapted from Brown Book, Investigations, and Proust.)

*

Ducks & Rabbits


in the stream;1
look, the duck-rabbits swim between.
The Mill Race
at Granta Place
tosses them from form to form,
dissolving bodies in the spume.

Given A and see2
find be3
(looks at you, don't look at me)4
Given B, see A and C.
that's what metaphor5
is for.

Date and place
in the expression of a face6
provide the frame
for an instinct to rename,7
to try to hold apart
Gesalt and Art.

1 Of consciousness
2 The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception.
3 And at the same time of the perception's being unchanged.
4 Do not ask yourself "How does it work with me?" Ask "What do I know about someone else?"
5 Here it is useful to introduce the idea of a picture-object.
6 A child can talk to picture-men or picture-animals. It can treat them as if treats dolls.
7 Hence the flashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thought.

*

Zettel


Sure
if we are to speak of the experience of thinking
the experience of speaking is as good as any,
thus:
"Who is Wittgenstein?"

(she said, having been present
at some months' acrimonious
debate on Philosophical Investigations)

With the configuration of chess-pieces
limbs describe themselves in the rooms
under the angle-poise.
"What is the opposite of brown?
- orange?
- another shade
of brown."
Limbs of the angle alter,
poise, in rooms:
what is the opposite of me?
- you?
- another shade
of me.
Suppose it were
part of my day-dream to say
"I am merely engaged in fantasy."
I can write
"I am healthy."
in the dialogue of a play
and so not mean it,
although it is true.
This is dialogue in a play
- the language-game
with pronouns.
A spot-light swivels
through faces of the cast and rests in
the mirror.
One can own a mirror
does one then own the reflections
that may be seen in it?
I love you.
- the language game
with pronouns and
"Confucius he say":
The concept of a living being
has the same indeterminacy
as that of a language.
Love is not a feeling.
Love is put to the test
- grammatical test.

Anyone who does not understand
why we talk about these things
must feel what we say to be mere trifling,
thus:
"It seems a bit of a fuss about nothing."

(she said after reading
The Language of Criticism)

Roomspace in which we dispose
ourselves is not external.
The gap between
my purple trousers
and his pale-green shirt
is then
grammatical.
I love you.
One says the ordinary thing
- with the wrong gesture.
Folded & re
folded the
map of the
town is pass
ed through
our lives
& hands ac
ross the table.

The same indeterminacy though,
which could suggest a cast-
list drawn up in language
play, that speech commits
to fantasy. And so it does
at least in the first
person singular, for:
One's hand writes it does not write because one wills
but one wills
what it writes.

(Quotation from Wittgenstein, Zettel.)

*

Acrostic


And can the first attitude of all
be directed towards a possible disillusion
so that one learns from the beginning,
"That is probably a chair."
Thys crede is called simbolum
that is to say a gaterynge of morselles.
Choice of words is the best paradigm
for other choices. What other choices?
I have as many friends as the number
yielded by the solution of this
equation. For the college system
makes "pretty inchoate" a topic -
itself - of the present dissertation.

And now how does one learn the question?
"Is it really also a chair?" Well
bit by bit daily life becomes such
that there is a place for hope in it.
The name begins to mean its bearer.
(A connection between the concept
of meaning and the concept of teaching.)
Is someone speaking untruth?
If I say "I am not conscious."
"I am not in love any more."
And suppose a parrot says:
"I don't understand a word."
or a gramophone: "I am only
a machine." I am only
a machine and paint my love
by numbers, a gathering of morsels.
For the meaning of a name
is not its bearer. (And truth
if I say it while unconscious)
I like things this way.
They are probably, chairs?

(Quotation from Zettel.)

*

Idols of the (Super)Market


"Wittgenstein would say"

(L.W. 1889-1951)

but he is dead;
therefore and nevertheless
can be said in literary monograph to say
anything.
No more helpless in this respect
than we, the stakes in our own
language-games - Eng. Lit. in this case
but History or Science
will serve the purpose equally well.
"Perfection of the life or of the work."

(W.B.Y. 1865-1939)

"Perfection is possible in neither."

(W.H.A. 1907- 1973)

These are some of the
Lessons of the Masters

(and another is that sexuality
is a branch of aesthetics;
bu the really is a digression.)

Further both meanings
of hieros

(Gk. sacred, accursed)

apply to the Sacred Fount, "fromwhence my being flows
or else dires up."

(H.J. 1843-1916
W.S. 1564-1616)

Minny Temple dies for him.
He found it necessary for red hairto become pigment on a canvas
by Bronzino. It is necessary
for us to become pigment
and when confronted, on any
social occasion, with the canvas

(in the art of the novel
there is no scene
that is not plot,
no dialogue
that is not scene.)

to say, as of Wittgenstein,
"and dead, dead, dead."
But "art is disposable nowadays"
which makes the definition that much
more difficult; especially as a
psychiatric hospital sifts more
efficiently "the mad abstract dark."

(or else dries up)

*

Antiphrasis


I went to the British Museum
I looked at the Egyptian Antiquities;
neat syntax of ibis and scarab
sum up my several identities;
the stone face is dumb,
the mummy enclosed in its chattering sarcophagus.
I stared at the Rosetta Stone
I was irritated by a crowd of French schoolchildren
My feet hurt.
I am working at the collation
of these parallel texts
"the t'one in ye proper simply speech
and t'other by the fygure of irony"

(Thos. More, 1533

Socratic method
(This is to be the theme.)
"esp. in reference to the dissimulation of ignorance
practised by Socrates

(c. 400 B.C.)

as a means of confounding an adversary."

(OED)

Thought is a subversion of reality
and "time is the evil, beloved"

(E.P.)

Shall I compare you to Apollo (or Perithoös)
on the west pediment of The Temple of Zeus?
I dreamt you were made of stone
and struck your head off with a pen.
It rolled and lay still and bled
sawdust. There is a sawdust pit
below the sculptures to protect
them from earthquakes which are
frequent in the area. The attribution
of identity (Apollo or Perithoös)
to "you" is disputed.
("Other Minds" etc. vide supra)
Each figurative speech forms
"a contradictory outcome of events
as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things."

(OED)

I went to the British Museum
I fled from words to stone
I read the chatter of ibis and scarab
on the Egyptian tombs.
"By the fygure Ironia which we call the drye Mock"

(Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589)

*

Antiquities


A gesture is adjective,
two hands, granite
when they turn bread to flesh
(Notre Dame, July 14th)
A mirror is a museum-case,
two hands, priestesses'
when she mummifies her face.
Emotion is a parenthesis,
two hands, irony
when I light the candle
and cross myself.
Aesthetic approbation is glass
when it encloses her faience eyes
and gilded skin
(Musée du Louvre, July 18th)
Glance is the copula
that petrifies our several identities,
syntactic superficies.


II

Michaelmas
My cardboard daisies are in bloom
again.
The city's silhouette stands out
just like real, from a child's
pop-up book, "a castle cut in
paper" (Gawain & the Green Knight
c. 1400). Autumn eaves turn like
pages, black and white. For green
and gold must be as parenthetical
as walks thought sharpening air
and clamant colour, smoky light
along the backs from typewriter
to Library. "Grammar" derives from
"glamour"; ecology may show the two
still cognate: Museum, Gk. mouseion,
a seat of the Muses, a bulding
dedicated to the pursuit of learning
or the arts. (OED)
The glamorous grammatical frames
captions for a monograph on non-
existent plates. Glue, paper,
scissors, and the library together
paste a mock-up of an individual
history. The art of English Poesie?
"Such synne is called yronye."

*

The Hyphen, for the centenary of Girton College


i hyphen (Gk. together, in one)
a short dash or line used to connect
two words together a a compound
1869-
1969
to connect Chapel Wing and Library.
But also: to divide
for etymological or other purpose.
A gap in stone makes actual
the paradox of a centenary.
"It was a hyphen connecting different races."
and to the library
"a bridge for migrations".
In search of an etymology

for compound lives,

this architecture,

an exercise in paleography

(Victorian Gothic)

asserts the same intention.

Portraits buts and books

the "context in which we occur"

that teaches us our meaning,

ignore the lacunae

of a century

in their state-

ment of our need to hyphenate.

*

Alka-Seltzer Poem


With beaded bubbles winking at the brim
the effervescence is subsiding. Drink
before effervescence subsides. Inert
liquid and undissolved tablets are dangerous.
It is like the unperceived rearrangement
of ice, a gradual crackle spreading under
our feet, signalising thaw. In cold weather
Andrew's Liver Salts may be taken in water
with the chill off. Freeze alternatively
or crystallize the alteration in acidic
percentages which is this process of
dissolving. The cause is physiology,
and the effect, metaphor. Alleviation
of the effects of over-indulgence
in alcohol or words is one of her
cloudy trophies. Silver tinsel hangs
like nets of frost, like votive
offerings for our escape from water
in all the shop-windows. "You can use,"
she said, "glue to stick it on with -
Durex." This metaphor requires completion
in a chemists' with a request for a packet
of Durex." This metaphor requires completion
in a chemists' with a request for a packet
of Durofix (gossamer). For exerience
is an active verb and the end
of poetry is activity. Hung-over
this morning in a gossamer net
of words, the bubbles wink & subside.

*

Three Proper


and witte familiar letters
lately passed between two
Universitie men: touching
the Earthquake in April last
and our English reformed
Verifying. (I) Long lackt alas
hath been thy faithful aide in hard essay
While deadly fit thy pupil doth dismay.
I like your late pentameters so exceeding
well that I also enure my Penne sometimes
in that kind:
A cuts off
B's arm, shaves
it & sends
it to C,
C being the
logical con
stant, the
situation we
are to infer
in metaphoric
relation.
We are, for instance, two
on a raft &
starving, A
a surgeon
with hairless
arms and
ingenuity. Being thus so closely and eagerly
set at our game we scarcely need perceive
the rest: Spanish Burgundy, Georges Brassens,
tripos finished, a lack of love and cigarettes.
P, however, implies Q. The entailment
relation between fact and fiction is perhaps
called metaphor, (B is hirsute and hard-
up.) or some new ind of Cambridge
Platonism:
P cuts off
Q's arm
and puts
it in a
film (a
stocking
stuffed with
handkerchiefs)
sent to X
to the im
mortal mem
ory of Ed
mund Spen
ser (C's
concept of
moral respons
ibility is
exigent.) And V had better mind her p's
and q's. For the entailment works one way
only, poetic licence being allverywellbut.
Sith none that breatheth living air
does know where is that happy land of Faëry.
(2) We are all ribosomes
of the same phoneme.
(3) I think the earthquake was also
there with you, overthrowing divers
old buildings and peeces of Churches.
Architecture is the jumping-off point,
for example, The Senate House Leap, to
Caius; it is responsible for a lot. How
oft do they their silver bowers leave
To come to succour us that succour want.
We must admit that the self is not
enclosed by a wall, although castles
of extendible polystyrene may be respons
ible for a lot. A castle is called
Alma. Its
walls are
painted
faire with
memorable
gestes, of
artes, of
science, of
Philosophy
and all that
in the world
was aye thought wittily. That hight
Phantastes by its nature true. For when
our minds go wandering uncontrolled, when
we pursue imaginary histories or exercise
our thoughts on some mere supposed
sequence, we give rise to a problem.
Heaven being used shorte as one
sillable when it is in verse.

*

Two Other


very commendable letters of the same
mens writing: both touching the fore
said Artificial Versifyign and certain
other particulars. Enclosed find
my writing up of the W.P.'s M.Phil.
Many thanks for your informed,
intelligent and convivial contribution
to the discussions: The Exaination,
to be conducted at 12, Benet Place,
will take the form of an essay on
life (No previous knowledge of the
subject will be assumed.) It should
show, within the clear limitations
of the topic, equivalent qualities
of scholarly competence, critical
intelligence and independence of,
thought as required for the Ph.D.
A "high" standard will be maintained.
(It was a convivial contribution.
Whether it nectar of divine tobacco
were, from whence descend all hopeless
remedies.) And yet me thinkes all
should be Gospell that commeth from
you Doctors of Cambridge. Heaven
beign used shorte when it is . . .
(Yet verses are no vaine.)
A breaks
down B's
castle &
C rebuilds
it in Ari
zona.
"Architecture
being less
dispensable
than people."
(2) Reason! quoth Madame Incredula.

*

Criteria For Continuing A Series


This is Cambridge
This is Cambridge
The train now standing at Platform 4 terminates
here
Will all passengers change
please.

NN. is a full-time student
(We are always expecting him to come
to tea; we look at our watches; we
wonder if he smokes.) And Upon
Westminster Bridge, when the light falls
across the green field, he regards the swing
and stillness of the axes of time and place
as lines drawn on the lens of a telescope.
He wonders if this ecstasy is worth
cultivating and "how many" have killed
themselves from "pure joy" (If one is used
to a small river, the Thames is always something
of a shock.) The focus tightens and . . .
rests on the tedium of its metaphor.
It's a mugs game, this stance, after -
Mauberley? NN. is not a mug. This is
to certify that he is full time student.

Will all passengers change
please?
The focus sharpens and the turning axes
are lying still. Will all passengers terminate
Here?

(We pause a moment; we think; we lay out)
cigarettes.

*

Notes to Chapter 1,002


And for my sixteenth point,

Scharazade:

there was a time when
I did not want to grow up
because I should have to stop
telling myself stories. But
(were "bu" of the stuff)
typing -ribbon at midnight
burns as beautifully as any
Arabian taper.

Here we can consult the admirable
article de vulgarisation de Eccles
on the structure of the cerebral cortex.

Yes, I too am silghtly tired
of wind-screen wipers. When,
as noted above, the location
of choice implied a technique
for book-binding the universe.

I am inebted for this point
to my friend, Dante Alighieri.

[Epifras]

disjunktivt spännande och fin