matter how profound the adolescent hell angst etc. and Michael, who generally kept well out of that side of the parenting thing, was actually going to make a point of talking to Eve about it later in bed. But now a large moth had come in through the open window and was hanging around the lit candle. Moths couldn’t help it,
like a moth to a
, they were genetically programmed to be attracted by light, of course they saw all light as love-light. When they swam through air drunk towards it it was because they believed, genetically, that they’d found their Übermoth, the one moth in the whole world especially for them. They would even try in a clear night sky to fly as far as the moon if the moon was full.
No preamble–this one went straight into the flame and dropped on to the table with an audible thud. It was a brownish moth. Over it went on itself, and again, and again. He could make out the furred blur of its facial features as it flopped itself round on its damaged wing (he had always had excellent eyesight, good eyes; well into his forties and no need at all at any point in it for glasses or contacts or whatever). Moths and candlelight! Like a moth to a flame! Dr Michael Smart had been reduced to cliché!
Deeply exciting, though, cliché was, as a concept. It was truth misted by overexpression, wasn’t it, like a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen. Something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves. Cliché was true, obviously, which was why it had become cliché in the first place; so true that cliché actually protected you from its own truth by being what it was, nothing but cliché. Advertising, for example, loved cliché because it was a kind of pure mob truth. There was a lecture in this, maybe for the Ways To Read course. Source? clearly French, he would look it up. Larkin, for instance, the Sid James of English lyric poetry (now that was quite a good observation, Dr Michael Smart firing on all cylinders) knew the power of cliché.
What will survive of us is love
. His old racehorses in that horse poem didn’t ‘gallop for joy’ but for
what must be
joy. Larkin, an excellent example. Comic old sexist living all those years in the nether librarian circles of Hull, no wonder he was such a curmudgeon, but he could crack a cliché wide open with a couple of properly pitched words. Or when Hemingway, for example, wrote it before anyone else had even known how to think to express it,
didst thou feel the earth move
(or however it was he faux-peasantly put it in the not-very-good For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1941 Michael believed), could he have had any idea how his phrase would enter the language? Enter! The language! Cliché
was
earth-moving, when you understood it, when you felt it, for the first time. Earth and movement, an earthquake, a high-pitched shattering shift in the platelets far down in the heat, below the belt, beneath the feet. Moth plus flame. Right here, right now, Michael had seen and felt and heard the precise drama of the moment when that moth wing singed and went brittle in the candle. He had felt the whole substantial impact of individual moth hitting individual table. He had felt these things, yes, more acutely, more truly, more
surprisedly
, than he had maybe felt anything since he was, oh, he didn’t know, a fresh-faced (cliché!) twelve-year-old, and not a twelve-year-old like that one over there either, he thought to himself, casting a glance over the top of the bland combed hair of the head of Eve’s curmudgeonly girl, not a twelve-year-old now, when nothing was new and everything was so already known and been and done and postmodern-t-shirt-regurgitated, no, he meant a back-then tank-topped twelve-year-old at the side of deep water, lying deep in the long grass and the noise of summer, the sweet core-line of a piece of the grass in his mouth, when for the first time he saw two insects, two flies of some kind, long-legged water-flies, a metonym you might say
like a moth to a
, they were genetically programmed to be attracted by light, of course they saw all light as love-light. When they swam through air drunk towards it it was because they believed, genetically, that they’d found their Übermoth, the one moth in the whole world especially for them. They would even try in a clear night sky to fly as far as the moon if the moon was full.
No preamble–this one went straight into the flame and dropped on to the table with an audible thud. It was a brownish moth. Over it went on itself, and again, and again. He could make out the furred blur of its facial features as it flopped itself round on its damaged wing (he had always had excellent eyesight, good eyes; well into his forties and no need at all at any point in it for glasses or contacts or whatever). Moths and candlelight! Like a moth to a flame! Dr Michael Smart had been reduced to cliché!
Deeply exciting, though, cliché was, as a concept. It was truth misted by overexpression, wasn’t it, like a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen. Something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves. Cliché was true, obviously, which was why it had become cliché in the first place; so true that cliché actually protected you from its own truth by being what it was, nothing but cliché. Advertising, for example, loved cliché because it was a kind of pure mob truth. There was a lecture in this, maybe for the Ways To Read course. Source? clearly French, he would look it up. Larkin, for instance, the Sid James of English lyric poetry (now that was quite a good observation, Dr Michael Smart firing on all cylinders) knew the power of cliché.
What will survive of us is love
. His old racehorses in that horse poem didn’t ‘gallop for joy’ but for
what must be
joy. Larkin, an excellent example. Comic old sexist living all those years in the nether librarian circles of Hull, no wonder he was such a curmudgeon, but he could crack a cliché wide open with a couple of properly pitched words. Or when Hemingway, for example, wrote it before anyone else had even known how to think to express it,
didst thou feel the earth move
(or however it was he faux-peasantly put it in the not-very-good For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1941 Michael believed), could he have had any idea how his phrase would enter the language? Enter! The language! Cliché
was
earth-moving, when you understood it, when you felt it, for the first time. Earth and movement, an earthquake, a high-pitched shattering shift in the platelets far down in the heat, below the belt, beneath the feet. Moth plus flame. Right here, right now, Michael had seen and felt and heard the precise drama of the moment when that moth wing singed and went brittle in the candle. He had felt the whole substantial impact of individual moth hitting individual table. He had felt these things, yes, more acutely, more truly, more
surprisedly
, than he had maybe felt anything since he was, oh, he didn’t know, a fresh-faced (cliché!) twelve-year-old, and not a twelve-year-old like that one over there either, he thought to himself, casting a glance over the top of the bland combed hair of the head of Eve’s curmudgeonly girl, not a twelve-year-old now, when nothing was new and everything was so already known and been and done and postmodern-t-shirt-regurgitated, no, he meant a back-then tank-topped twelve-year-old at the side of deep water, lying deep in the long grass and the noise of summer, the sweet core-line of a piece of the grass in his mouth, when for the first time he saw two insects, two flies of some kind, long-legged water-flies, a metonym you might say
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