Most of all I can see, not mass slaughter, but this little vignette of vital and electrifying substantiation of one man’s limited experience. A German soldier throws a stick bomb at Private Ball, Private Ball lobs a grenade back, and kills his fellow soldier—and rather than talk about his sense of guilt or pity or rage, or indulge in journalistic or humanist or philosophical or psychological expostulation, he simply notes two things: that he liked the colored label on the handle of the stick-bomb as it flew towards him; and after his grenade explodes, he notes how “you scramble forward and pretend not to see,/but ruby drops from young beech-sprigs—/are bright your hands and face.” And in that awful brightness Jones shows how poetic problems are, as such, problems of perception. That the artist is necessarily empirical rather than speculative. That the question for the artist, according to Jones, is always “‘Does it?’ rather than ‘Ought it?’” And that perception can’t be faked because it is important to be “anthropomorphic, to deal through and in the things we understand as [women and] men—to be incarnational.”
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 22:31:54 +0000