Washing of Hands

Water boiling

Under canvas

Little Malaya

(Pissing down)

With minor surgery

Planned

Some clumsy grunt

Through a windscreen

Glass

To be removed

Cuts

Sutured

I wash my hands in the prescribed manner

In the prescribed manner

I wash my hands

I must avoid spreading infections

I must cleanse my hands before and after examining patients

I must cleanse my hands between examining infected and clean body sites

Even when working on the same patient

I must wash my hands

Cleansing may involve soap

And

Water

(Pissing down)

Water alone

Or

Alcohol rubs

Today it is water alone

The rain rattles

Like Bren Gun fire

On the canvas roof

Today we have the washing of hands

This is not easy

The water isn’t running

It was running

When it was boiled

Twenty minutes ago

Now it is cooling

Rapidly

In that stainless

Rain-filled

Old

Steel

Bowl

I stand over it

Like

Hecate

My genius rebuk’d

(so fair is foul and foul is fair)

My hands hover

Chopper-like

In this fog and filthy air

And I am washing

Washing

Washing my hands

I am washing my hands

I am washing my hands

And it bodes well

This

Washing of hands

I do not understand

Yet

Why

It bodes well

It

Just

Does

Today we have daily cleaning …

Scrubbing

Dumping glass

Bloodied gauze

Field dressings applied

Syringes

Needles

(Those too)

I dispose of these

Having

First

Hidden them

In my kit

(My blood runs hot)

My

Lifeblood

Coupled

With

These

Sharp

Cutting tools

This

Stabbing

Jabbing

Life-affirming

Gear

He is tidied up

That grunt

Quiet

I tidy up

(on fire)

Today we have the washing of blood

I have washed up before …

Before blood

I have washed up after …

After blood

I have washed away blood

That sanguine smell

Forever

Ever in my nostrils

Like cordite

Like the scream of creatures in the night

Like fear itself

Like the fear

I cannot wash away

Like my fear

My fear

The fear I cannot wash away

That girlie fear of blood 

Blood I will never shed

Blood

I am a witness

There is still a ‘yet to come’

I do not know

Just

What this is

But tonight we have washing of hands

Matagouri

Tangle-branched

Tiny, white flowers

Steppe stars weeping

Glistening glass beads

Shimmering wet

In the dry riverbed

Close by

I will lie by you

The thwang of the ricochet

Overhead

The other crack that kills

Unheard

I will lie by you

Without fear

Without fear I would happily bleed

If I should die

Think only this of me

That I died

Not in some foreign field

But here

At home

Dead

Of stupidity

Not mine

But

Dead all the same

On my back

The sky

Clouded grey

Gun-metal grey

Is

Unmoved

As I am

No fear there

Or

Here

My

Destiny

Is

To lie

With that small white flower

That smudge of cowardice

Close by

Close to my 

Right hand

Then the flat flat flat

Rotor blades

Doing the rounds

As the politics departs

Reality kicks in

The sky remains the same

Trudge in

Trudge out

Kit dump

Can opened

Silence

The void

This is the no-thing

And

This …

This is

The alcohol rub

Which in this case we have not got

Hold the hands up

Point the fingers

Skywards

(as instructed by Lance Corporal Tasker)

Water running

Back

Gravity fixed

Down the arms

To the mud floor

Tasker

(who is to be believed in all things)

Though he cannot articulate

Hippocrates

Making it

Hippo

Crates

(We laugh behind his back)

Draw crude pictures

(Hippos in crates)

But

(All the same)

We point fingers skywards

And

The

Water

Runs

Down

As the blood runs out

As the blood runs out

He has taught us the washing of hands

Later

(Much)

Finding I do not care

Do not care any more

Do not care for you any more

Reminded

Of those wet days

Of that dank smell

That sanguine smell

When I cared so little

When I was at peace under fire

When I washed to be clean

Unsoiled

Washed to be sanitary

Washed to be clean of you

You

Who I did not know

Who I did not even know

You

Who I washed

Away

When we had washing of hands …

Now

I wash my hands

Of you

I wash my hands

I wash my hands of you

I hold them up

Blood runs up my arms

Up my arms

The smell of blood in my nostrils

And

I am washing my hands of you

I am washing

My hands

Of you

Of me

I remember

Branches

Plum

(I think)

Silent, eloquent gestures

Reaching up

Half lost

Behind

Mist

Steam

Steam

From the washing of hands

My hands

Dry now

Ready

And

This is my safety-catch

This washing of hands

This washing of hands

Is

My safety-catch

My denial

One easy flick of the thumb

One last flick

And it’s done

Done

The plum blossom

Fragile

Motionless

Frail

Meaningless

(Floating in space)

At last

Here is this

Harbinger

This harbinger of death

The

Purpose of this

Is to open the breech

Easing the spring

Clearing the chamber

Bathing the wound

And I wash you away

Wash you away

With the blood

With the blood

And the blood

On my hands

Is my own

Bees

(Early bees)

Assault the flowers

Fumbling 

(As I would have)

Bees

Know

Falling petals

Signal

The

End

The end of this washing of hands

The plum blossom

Silent

In

All of the gardens

The bees going forward

And

Back

The first petal falls

And now we have the washing of hands ….

NOTES:

The inspiration for this poem, if it can be called that, is Henry Reed’s Naming of Parts (1) and Horace’s Vixi duellis nuper idoneus, Et militavi non sine Gloria and the Carmen Saeculare (2)

 “Carmen Saeculare” (literally, “Secular Hymn”, usually translated as “Song of the Ages”), sometimes known as “The Carmen” for short, is a hymn or ode by the Roman lyric poet Horace, commissioned by the Roman Emperor Augustus in 17 BCE. It is collection of mythological and religious verses encouraging the restoration of the tradition and the glorification of the gods, particularly Phoebus, Diana, Jupiter and Venus.

The Odes and Carmen Saeculare

For ladies’ love I late was fit,

And good success my warfare blest,

But now my arms, my lyre I quit,

And hang them up to rust or rest.

Here, where arising from the sea

Stands Venus, lay the load at last,

Links, crowbars, and artillery,

Threatening all doors that dared be fast.

O Goddess! Cyprus owns thy sway,

And Memphis, far from Thracian snow;

Raise high thy lash, and deal me, pray,

That haughty Chloe just one blow!

 (1) Reed, Henry. “Naming of Parts.” New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942): 92

(2) Horace. The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace. John Conington. trans. London. George Bell and Sons. 1882.

For a translation of the Horace, see printed below ‘Now We Have the Washing of Hands …’

Auckland, New Zealand

15 June 2010 

Today I happened to run across a version of Henry Reed’s Naming of Parts (1942). It is much anthologized, and I thought I knew it well. But the version I saw today bore a Latin epigraph which I am sure I have never seen before:

Vixi duellis nuper idoneus

Et militavi non sine gloria 

This clever misquotation of Horace (Carmina iii:26) seems to me to add a great deal to the piece– which has interwoven layers of meaning, talking of weapons, of nature, and of the qualities of men. The epigraph very cleverly points up the sexual imagery of the piece, by explicitly denying, in a hyper-erudite way, that it is doing so. It qualifies, I think, as what the ancients called praeteritio, a rhetorical figure in which something is included by pretending to omit it.

So: why on earth are those two lines of almost-Horace so often omitted from the work as anthologized?

Reed, Henry. “Naming of Parts.” New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942): 92 (.pdf).

LESSONS OF THE WAR

To Alan Michell

Vixi duellis nuper idoneus

Et militavi non sine gloria

I. NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,

We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,

To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica

Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,

          And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this

Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

Which in your case you have not got. The branches

Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

          Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released

With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me

See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy

If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms

Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

          Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it

Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

          They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom

Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

          For to-day we have naming of parts.

Condon, Richard A. “Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts.'” Explicator 12, no. 8 (June 1954): 54.

Reed’s NAMING OF PARTS 

“Naming of Parts’ is a deceptively simple poem; its situation is so painfully familiar that the reader is tempted merely to nod in wearied assent to its explicit structure, a series of ironic contrasts between rookies who are being instructed in the arts of death, and a nearby garden which is teeming with the life of Spring. It is only when we begin to explore these contrasts in some detail, however, that the richness of the poem beyond this overt state of affairs is apparent. Such exploration shows that the term “parts” has three meanings in the poem: it pertains to the elements or “parts” of the gun; to the “parts,” faculties, or talents of men, now employed for destructive ends in war; and to the private “parts” or genitals. Implicitly, the poem is an affective union of the three.

The surface differences between the life of the recruit and the life of the garden are obvious enough: the glint of sunlight on the barrel of the well-cleaned gun finds its natural counterpart in the glistening of japonica; the rookies are all thumbs and awkwardness, and they do not have “silent, eloquent gestures” but the stiff, rigid, unnatural motions of an unfamiliar military bearing. Nor will they have the grace of natural objects when they fall in battle, only the frozen, macabre postures of the dead.

But there are broader differences. Like Eden, Reed’s garden is a place of innocence and peace which contrasts starkly with the instruction in evil and death to which the army classroom is devoted. It is a place of abundance, fertility, and unfallen nature (the bees celebrate the Spring by pollinating flowers, thus giving life), and not of fallen humanity (the men can “ease” only the spring of a death-dealing weapon). The garden is thus a tacit reproach to man, who has lost his Eden. Because of the loss death has entered the world, and the earth is now merely a scrimmage of technically skilled beasts. The “parts” or faculties of man which, in his prelapsarian state, knew no evil and could do only good are now totally depraved, so that man’s talents are employed only for new forms of sterile destruction.

The commitment to death rather than life which man has after the Fall takes a sexual form too. Even here his “parts” are depraved. The incompleteness of the rookie’s equipment is a mocking symbol for his sexual incompleteness, his isolation from women in a wartime camp. The result is that he lacks a “point of balance” and can ease the tortures of Spring only by masturbation and debilitating daydreams. The concomitant is crippling frustration and guilt. What the bees do in natural fulfillment of their being can be accomplished in this society only by means of a degrading perversion; this is the final irony of a fallen, inverted world.

A British edition of the poem is preceded by an epigraph which every American printing I have seen omits— “Vixi duellis nuper idoneus / Et militavi non sine gloria.” The quotation is from Horace, with one significant substitution: the original reads, “Vixi puellis…” Our society, Reed seems to say, is based on just such a substitution.

Puellis relates to a female child

Duellis to war or battle.

The Latin appears in no American editions.