Wording the Strange

I think “why I write” is a delightfully impossible question: it's like asking a child why do you speak or why do you play. In the first year of life the infant is awash in a presymbolic world in which the senses are being bombarded by the strange phenomenology of experience day in, day out. Being born and being alive in that first year of life must be an “unforgettable and unrememberable” experience. I would suggest that the writer is also forever trying to bear witness to that unforgettable strangeness of birth and life and give it a “local habitation and a name,” thereby making it, if not familiar, at least a little less strange.

George Seferis famously suggested that “the poem is everywhere!” I think he meant that that cluster of words we call a poem existed, non-verbally, in the phenomenology of the world and that it is the poet's astonishment and subsequent curiosity that comes up with the mots justes to represent it with a word-flourish that seems to fit judiciously. This preamble, in other words, suggests that the writer, like the infant, is always struck by the strangeness of the human condition, a strangeness that inspires a curiosity that seeks words to make sense of that strangeness.

I want to describe writings that all sprang from my curiosity about this gestational strangeness. I remember seeing Kenneth Branagh's film, Hamlet, in 1996. In act 1, scene ii, there is a parapraxis in Hamlet's first soliloquy. What was strange about this was that in all the other viewings of Hamlet, on stage or film, that I had seen over many decades, I never noticed this striking slip of the tongue. Hamlet, referring to his father's death, says, “But two months dead—” and then immediately corrects himself, saying “nay, not so much, not two.” Corrected, or not, the parapraxis stands as does its unconscious oedipal meaning! The parapraxis suggests that Hamlet must have had the death of his father on his mind before his Uncle Claudius killed him! In case Shakespeare's use of the