How to carve a chair into a poem or a poem into a chair is the sort of puzzle you find yourself pondering on a cold day close to the fire in a strange dwelling.
‘Oak’, says M, ‘stained and varnished’. It fits me perfectly, a Goldilocks chair. I want to know its story – who made it – carved the wood, from a single tree or several, with such playfulness. Though the fat-chinned and cheeked angel, hair lilting like ocean waves, is the presiding spirit, the genius of the chair, ready to warm your back with her quilted wings and her halo of leaf and diamond, the rosette and chain of her belly, it’s not so much the angel as the artist who carved the angel that moves me as I look into the dark, mysterious shine. Something a little pagan about this angelic messenger and the artist who sent her. She brings word of endless circles, the secret signs of those who know the ways of wood and also the shape of a body sitting down. Every mark and curve bears the ghost of the unknown maker’s hand.
He – assuming it was a he, which it generally (though not always) was – has taken some pains to show a range of skills: embossing and incision, different styles of turning, figurative and symbolic decoration. I wonder if it was the work of an apprentice, offering a sample of techniques, proving to someone that he has a natural gift or has learnt well. I think I’d like him – despite the heavy, almost black wood, the design is full of wonder at the world it depicts, a sense of humour and lightness, an easy rhythm. How much you can tell from a chair if you read it like you might read a poem – moving between the weight of the words to the empty space, the end of the lines, between the stanzas. The way you see what’s there and can sense the hand that made it, more visible than the maker intends, or perhaps would like.
I badly want to write a poem about this chair that’s made such an impression on me, but after several faltering lines I have to admit defeat. Some chairs might be poems but they can’t all find their way into a poem, even though wood looks so like word. The poem was my knowing the chair, appreciating the chair, and better that it should stay there, where it belonged, in my musing. Sometimes the skill of a poet is knowing when not to write a poem, what isn’t a poem. Perhaps the greatest skill of all.
To my regret the chair must also stay where it belongs. I’d do anything to smuggle it out in the back of the car. I’ve been sleeping under the same roof as it all week – in a vast room on the first floor of Cawood Castle (remains of) Gatehouse. There are three carved wooden chairs, all of different provenance, two large chests, a sizeable wardrobe, two big beds with their own side tables and still the room feels enormous. You could dance a pavane, advancing and retreating, from end to end on the faded Turkey runner in front of the massive stone hearth, empty but for a pair of desolate fire dogs, long out of commission. Hanging above it is an ancient fraying tapestry, so faded it’s impossible to make out what the man (who appears to be playing a pipe) and the two women and a dog might be doing in their stately fertile landscape. Up to no good probably.
I dream more vividly than I have in years and sometimes wake with a sense of past or future trouble resting its bony hand on my shoulder, but on the other side of the room I know the oaken angel is keeping an eye on me and I don’t need to worry myself about the fate of Cardinal Wolsey plucked from Cawood Castle on the 1st of November 1530 and placed under arrest, to serve the King’s need to justify taking a new wife when Wolsey had turned the law inside out in order for him to marry his previous one.
There’s a copy of Wolf Hall on the bookshelf (of course) and I can’t help re-reading it, despite having brought my own small library. It reminds me of so many things we are still familiar with seven centuries later via Conservative Party politics, Succession, ongoing Royal dramas etc etc. We know so much of all these human machinations but we know nothing of whoever made this chair. I’m glad they did. If I could leave behind a poem this honest, well-made and touching, I’d be happy to die anonymous and lost to history.
I’ve long loved Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and, even though he doesn’t mention chairs specifically, what he has to say about our intimate relationship with houses and furniture extends to what’s touched in me by this excellent chair – which might leave someone else cold.
It…makes sense to say that we, ‘write a room’, ‘read a room’, or ‘read a house’…Thus, very quickly, at the very first word, at the first poetic overture, the reader who is ‘reading a room’ leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past. You would like to tell everything about your room. You would like to interest the reader in yourself, whereas you have unlocked a door to daydreaming. The values of intimacy are so absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room: he sees his own again. He is already far off, listening to the recollections of a father or a grandfather, of a mother or a servant, of ‘the old faithful servant’, in short, of the human being who dominates the corner of his most cherished memories.
Reading the chair, I’m taken to a space where I am held, supported, with a comfortable place to rest my arms, somewhere safe and strongly rooted, close to trees and plants, as well as to a world beyond my understanding. It is an origin place, a seed for dreaming, out of which making grows.
I come home still preoccupied with chairs, a wisp of a poem in my head by my late friend Andrew Waterhouse.
It’s a sad poem – as are all the others I find when I seek them out. George Szirtes and Billy Collins also scrutinise the phenomenon of the empty chair – how it speaks of the human condition, solitary, susceptible to absence, loss. Reading these, I’m aware I hadn’t even considered who’d actually sat in the Cawood chair, what their stories were. There were enough ghosts in that room without me summoning more.
As ever Emily Dickinson offers an alternative perspective, bestowing upon her mountain a ‘tremendous Chair’, though not a hundred miles away from Bachelard’s ideas about memories of childhood invested in furniture.
The Mountain sat upon the Plain
In his tremendous Chair —
His observation omnifold,
His inquest, everywhere —
The Seasons played around his knees
Like Children round a sire —
Grandfather of the Days is He
Of Dawn, the Ancestor —
(975)
I reach no clever conclusions, no neat summaries of my chair-borne wanderings. They are a chair with wobbly legs – you can sit there for a short while if you stay very still – then get up and go on with your day.