Digital Poetics 3.4 from ‘Dissonance and Authenticity’ by Robert Kiely
Image by Robert Kiely
We were at the bottom of the stairs. I might have been anything between 8 and 11. I reached for your hand, but you refused it, since, you said, I was soon to be a man. The wallpaper kept changing. We haven’t held hands since. I rewrite this later, wondering what age provides least embarrassment to me and what would be least for you. Maybe they coincide. It isn’t happy, and it isn’t sad. At the back of class in Ireland has been and continues to be deeply tied up with the British economy because those economies are intertwined. Class is an ordering and re-ordering of the world. In every generation classes are re-formed, re-made, old modes re-packaged, new entrants welcomed and former powers lost or shirked off. If we stereographically project the 4-dimensional knot of classes from the lumpenproletariat up to the ruling onto our 3-dimensional present, then further onto this 2-dimensional page hovering above it all, the lumpen would surround infinitely, the ruling classes, the 1%, tiny. When it rolls, that projection changes but it is still the same knot. A boomer moves from manual labourer to foreman, continues to socialise easily with labourers, is red-faced and deferential to the architects, earns more than his daughter can ever hope to earn, in fact continues to with that pension. Transformations occur, I mean there are 20 types of ice in the galaxy. If you gain access to the means of describing your situation that doesn’t mean but not of it inside some economic determinism, fatalism, smearing could not but across the windscreens of a thousand BMVs but not of it, in transit between lascars and navvies and royals
or in a pedagogy mourning a loss but not of it
nobody here will lay a hand on you
sure I’ve done some bad things probably
now that I speak things come back slowly
the weight of those hands
the dappling of the light on the smooth wall
it isn’t smooth at all
Fathers. I hate them and must impress them
This is why I will repeat the same behaviour.
no pedestals, what is the family relation
after antagonism and aunthood, no pedestals
just a constantly shifting modality of a person’s property held with their attributes, a sequence of transformations the aftermath of which we take to be class which used to be the older notion of fate or character, not just upward and downward trajectories, but the relative trajectories of alleged class positions and their subsequent impositions on others. Class is where people are at and how they talk to you bundled up with where they’ve been and where they’re going, it doesn’t help an upward trajectory which could not but in fact be inside a trajectory you will never exceed, sent to University or studying, writing assumed to be middle class even if about small bubbles components forced down as house prices rise almost sevenfold and access to the middle class via dating and here the writing which makes you more middle class and more poor with each letter you type and word you write or Curriculum Vitae what lifts away from the bubbles the roots they are somewhere the writing pulling you away you’re not very grounded are you crushed down it isn’t a good enough application for interview and can’t get you up
what is the topology of that on the stairs
and you stand on the top and scatter the student papers down, and those near the bottom step well they stay there and those at the fifth step well they stay there but they’re not of it and those at the top could not but not be of it. “There isn’t a bomb in your bag is there?” the administrator in the Royal Opera House asks. My collaborator looks shocked. The walls new shades of tope. My father and mother grew up with many siblings, and when food was served it was chaos probably. For my father, if he didn’t get to the food quickly, it just wouldn’t be there. So he adapted – he ate quickly. In later life the fast eating continued. I was the eldest child with only two siblings. Because my parents ate quickly, I ate quickly, though the practical reason for the behaviour was gone. My fast eating is a kind of spandrel of their particular childhood experiences – experiences marked by class, or but not of it. It isn’t sad, it isn’t happy. Halfway up or down the stairs, the orientation is impossible to tell, the stairs which used to be a wheel of fortune, it must be up insofar as the bills and without a theory the house prices can only go up. What some people call an explosion is often just a mild loosening or tightening of the knot. Authenticity’s bad essentialism. Could not but celebrate with a trip to the zoo. When you were a child you were asked if you wrote that yourself – this was the highest compliment. They could not but be complaining that students are being forced to make economic decisions about study, while lamenting that only one out of however many PhD students will get a full-time academic job. The only thing more provincial than provincialism is the critique of provincialism, you can extrapolate on from that.
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Robert Kiely was born in Co. Cork, Ireland in 1987, and is currently based in London. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Ludd Gang, Cambridge Literary Review, LONGITUDINES, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. His poetry collection simmering of a declarative void was published by the87press in 2020, and his book of criticism Incomparable Poetry by punctum in 2020. His latest book Gelpack Allegory, a meditation on the entanglements between mathematics, SF, and Elon Musk, was published by Veer2 in 2021 - extracts from that previously appeared in The Hythe.
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
