[An editorial note: I wrote this on the 2nd March 2008, and then by the evening I'd massively reconsidered many of the points that it makes and raises, so that this article can be seen as now obsolete, but a good reflection of the kinds of things I was at a point thinking about. So in other words, don't take it too seriously! It's an essay in the really traditional sense of the word, a trying out of various ideas. On Whits, I'm more interested in lucid exposition than rambly piles of semicank like this. Three paragraphs of the original, about the individualism of metatropes, have been omitted for brevity.]

The more abstract the medium, the easier it appears to be to encode metatropes, so for example music is usually more metatropic than poetry. This is probably why I'm drawn to songwriting for my own art more than poetry, but also why poetry makes an interesting craft study: why is it harder? Does that make the potential results greater? One of the motivations of my current poetical bent is that, indeed, I think that the best poetry is better than the best music.

Music can't really talk about things as concrete concepts. It might conjure an image of a tree, for example, but apart from having rustling leaves in a piece there's no way to conjure such an image up consistently in the minds of the beholder. With poetry, all you have to do is use the word “tree”. Most songs come with lyrics, or at the very least a name, and it's possible to put some of the metatrope there, but that just gives you the problem of poetry again.

The idea of coining useful expressions to, in a sense, subvert the mechanism of poetry, has in retrospect proven a false lead when taken by itself. It just pushes the poetry from the arrangement of words to the arrangement of bits of words. But the overarching idea, that of subverting the poetic craft in some way, or at least finding a particular kind of poetic craft of mode that is most conducive to metatropes, is still one that I'm interested in pursuing.

One of the recurring motifs of my own art are the metatropes which describe aspects of things which may be typified as English, especially those evoked by English places. Because of that, I've been wondering about epic fiction. I'm a terrible writer of fiction because, as C. S. Lewis said before his conversion, I tend to think of fiction as simply being lies gilded with silver and gold. I just can't see as much value in making up a story as in describing nature. Yet on the other hand, I've wondered what kind of fiction I'd create if I really had to choose that medium. Could I make a good job of it if I really put my mind to it? Could it be a vehicle for metatropes?

Some extension of the Matter of Britain seems to be the obvious choice for the general setting; it would get around the problem of temporal provincialism. Temporal provincialism is when you're too affected by the customs of your own era to create works that are of lasting significance. Of course, the best writers can take both into consideration, but as I say, I'm not a very good fiction writer and one of my general pursuits here is how to make the expression of metatrope easier. As Terje Bless said, metatropes are “the one concept that justifies the existence of all art qua art”, and I agree.

Speaking of Terje, thanks to him Wikipedia now has an article about Tora Mosterstrong. She was the maid of the first king of Norway, and mother by him of the third king. This is apropos in its being connected to researching the Matter of Britain. Though I think that the Matter of Britain is an ample setting, I'm interested in the relationships between culture in the poetic literature. Not something simple like neighbouring tribes, but really huge distinctions like the pagan north and the rising Christianity, or Greek mythology being grafted into the kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Even the Matter of Britain has this strange quality to it in that much of the Arthurian romances, for example, were written by the French. And then Parzival, which was written by a German knight, puts the realm of action in a kind of strange juxtaposition of Britain and Brittany that can be walked across as though there were no English Channel.

Part of the problem is imagining how people made poetry before we got to our current period of information bombardment. Some information is good for poetry and some isn't, and if you're not a poet then you don't really think about the distinction; you just let yourself be bombarded with whatever pleases you. It's like Dylan says about good folk heroes. Somehow, John Wesley Harding makes a good folk hero. Al Capone does not.

So you have to imagine balancing the interplay of histories and fashioning a new kind of story out of some real historical backcloth, but you don't have to completely divest it of modernities. There's no reason why you couldn't embed a knowledge of the 20th century theory of prototypicality, say, in a work which is historically set in the middle ages or whenever. The narrator isn't subject to the constraints of the story, because the narrator, even if fictional, can be based in some unspecified time. Of course anyone reading the story is going to know anyway that it was written in the 21st century really. I don't think there's any reason, I mean, why you can't use that to your advantage rather than falling into the science fiction problem of having it be a burlesque of historical periods.

One of the main slogans, if you like, of the poetical investigations that I've been working on recently is that fragments are fine. There has been an odd tendency in the critical literature to assign an overall summary of failure to Coleridge due to his inability to complete his works as envisioned, but I think that scholars are starting to realise that this is terribly inadequate. First, he planned way more than it was possible to enact. Second, the plans themselves as much works as anything else; there is a clear scholarly and human value to them. Third, Coleridge was able to cover more ground that way. It was natural that he should be interested in so many things, diverse as he naturally way, so to have only concentrated on a few fields would have been much to the detriment of mankind.

In my notes, I've summarised this even better: “Coleridge wasn't a failure!”. As one of the most studied, widely published and analysed, and sheer respected of individuals, it would be wrong to characterise him as mostly a failure, and yet this is the sense that I get from all but the most recent or well informed of scholarship surrounding him. Of course, as a person he has many failings, and he failed to achieve goals and failed in relationships and so on; but in so far as a general judgement of the man goes, scholarship is very hypocritical to devote so many printed words to the subject and then sum it all up as not being very important.

But I digress. The point is that fragments and schemata are considered to be second class information citizens because they're not regarded as “complete”, which is a taxonomical inexactitude. So I'm quite happy to scribble some ideas about a work of epic fiction without really intending to write the whole thing, whilst also leaving that open as an option. It's important to understand that the planning is a work in itself, whilst also allowing that a work realised in full is of course more enriched.

The gilded lies problem has some relation to the question of metatrope solipsism. That's the question of whether any two people can have the same, or at least very similar, metatropes. If they can, then metatrope solipsism is wrong. On the one hand, if metatrope solipsism is wrong, then that might help to explain why poems such as Kubla Khan are so resonant. On the other hand, if it's right then it would help to explain why people seem to have such diverse metatropes. All of this is quite sketchy still, but I think that if metatrope solipsism is correct, then that provides a justification for fiction as art. Even if it's not correct, it still might provide a justification but it would make fiction less important as an art form. Again, quite sketchy. Perhaps it would be better to consider this as individualism, rather than solipsism which has the wrong connotations.

The solipsism or individualism question is also probably related to the question of temporal provincialism and criticism. Coleridge at first only showed Kubla Khan to his select circle of friends, and they seem to have been quite receptive to it. Lord Byron so much so that he had Coleridge publish it; but when he did publish it, the general critics absolutely tore it apart. Hazlitt was one of the most flattering, and he said something like it was a “good example of nonsense”. Now of course we later critics laugh at the earlier critics, but it took mainstraim criticism decades to work out that Kubla Khan was a good poem. Coleridge's friends knew that pretty much instantly. Why? Was it because Coleridge has chosen good people? Or was it because these people knew Coleridge's context and motivations and so on? Probably it was a bit of both.

So I'd like to take a minor existing character from the Matter of Britain and describe some kind of event encompassing lots of the ideas that I have as a matter of philosophy, artistic and otherwise. It should start out, in fact, by being a factual and perhaps chronological account of the story, laid out with the narrator's own interpretation of events. Then it could shift into the action itself, giving a contrast in that rather than subsequent analysis it would be the presentation of primary source data. This data would be tales, legends, poetry, whatever—things that the narrator is just pasting in or retelling about the events of the story itself. For the conclusion it could probably slip back into the chronicle mode again, or, even better, go off on some completely unrelated tangent that nonetheless adds some furtive value to the work.

As to the story itself, the main goal would be to minimise the triviality. It doesn't matter what imaginary person kissed what imaginary person where, or what battle took place when. It's the complexity surrounding and subsisting all that stuff that makes a story worth writing. As Milton said in his History of Britain, regarding the battles of the Saxon Heptarchy, “Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?”

Heled hwyedic y’m gelwir.
O Duw! padiw yt rodir
Meirch vym bro ac eu tir?

“They call me wandering Helydd
Oh God, to whom have been given
My brothers' horses and their land?”

The 9th (or 7th? is it important?) century Canu Heledd, or I Have No Time (To Spend With You), are so poignant because they seem so heartfelt. That's one whole kind of metatrope that you can't get with careful reporting and careful devising alone, though in the case of the Canu Heledd we can't tell just who the author was anyway, and I Have No Time (To Spend With You) was written by a Scottish city-boy. The poignancy of poets can be heartfelt even though it not have primacy, I suppose.