Truth is Far and Flat

‘This night shall thy soul be required of thee’
My Soul is never required of me
It always has to be somebody else of course
Will my soul be required of me tonight perhaps?

(I often wonder what it will be like
To have one’s soul required of one
But all I can think of is the Out-Patients’ Department —
‘Are you Mrs. Briggs, dear?’
No, I am Scorpion.)

I should like my soul to be required of me, so as
To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea
I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must
Be no cow, person or house to be seen.

Sea and grass must be quite empty
Other souls can find somewhere else.

O Lord God please come
And require the soul of thy Scorpion

Scorpion so wishes to be gone.

Academic considerations aside, Stevie Smith’s ‘Scorpion’ is one of my very favourite poems. I remember being about seventeen, wandering around my room and saying it witheringly to myself. Especially this bit:

Sea and grass must be quite empty
Other souls can find somewhere else.

That stanza appealed – and continues to appeal – because of those wonderful dismissive italics. One doesn’t often get to be so unashamedly intolerant of other people (they can all find somewhere else.)

But I’m struck, now, by how interested Stevie Smith is in flatness (Sea and grass must be quite empty). Spaces with no variation or texture. She fantasises, in Novel on Yellow Paper, about going to an area ’empty ‘of all human interest’.

There’s a peace in flatness. A leisure in freeing the eye from the burden of curiosity: having to engage with change and variation. Smith is always ‘too tired for words’ – and the flat space in Novel on Yellow Paper brings her relief:

…there is nobody else in the whole wide world and so I fall asleep. No dreams. No dreams.

Flatness as relief, then – but also, in ‘Scorpion’, fulfilment. A sense of narrative completion and fullness. And it surprises me to find that in an image of uninflected, unvaried flatness.

As I was thinking about this, two other literary examples came to mind. Both from children’s books.

The first is C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’. The children have sailed to the ‘utter east’, until their boat runs aground. Reepicheep the mouse goes over the edge of the world, to find Aslan’s country. And so the children:

…got out of the boat and waded…They could not have told you why they did this; it was their fate. And though they had felt – and been – very grown-up on the Dawn Treader, they now felt just the opposite and held hands as they waded through the lilies. They never felt tired. The water was warm and all the time it got shallower. At last they were on dry sand, and then on grass – a huge plain of very fine short grass, almost level with the Silver Sea and spreading in every direction without so much as a molehill.

And of course, as it always does in a perfectly flat place without trees, it looked as if the sky came down to meet the grass in front of them. But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here at last the sky did really come down and join the earth – a blue wall, very bright, but real and solid: more like glass than anything else. And soon they were quite sure of it. It was very near now.

But between them and the foot of the sky there was something so white on the green grass that even with their eagles’ eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw that it was a Lamb.

“Come and have breakfast,” said the Lamb in its sweet milky voice.

Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted.

So here flatness is purity and simplicity. It frames the Divine, and allows it to appear openly. The Lamb becomes the only thing in the world: overwhelming in its brightness, against an otherwise unmarked backdrop.

The other text which came to mind is more sinister – Marianne Dreams, by Catherine Storr. Ten-year-old Marianne finds that whatever she draws with a certain pencil comes true in her dreams.

Here’s the beginning of her first dream.

Marianne dreamed.

She was in a great open stretch of country, flat like a prairie, covered, as far as she could see, with the long dry grass in which she was standing more than knee deep. There were no roads, no paths, no hills and no valleys. Only the prairie stretched before her on all sides till it met the grey encircling sky. Here and there it was dotted with great stones or rocks, which rose just above the level of the tall grass, like heads peering from all directions.

Marianne stood and looked. There seemed to be nothing to do and nowhere to go. Wherever she looked she saw nothing but grass and stones and sky, the same on every side of her. Yet something, a nagging uneasiness which she could not account for, drove her to start walking…

For Marianne, flatness is sinister. It’s disturbing because it’s unmarked, giving her no directions. And it’s full of threatening potential. Those stones, barely visible above the tall grass? Later in the book they come alive and start chasing her (It’s a brilliant book, incidentally.)

I’ve tried – and failed – to find some interesting reading on flatness, to buttress my work theoretically. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Noreen Masud, 2015 ©