Hi everyone -
Today, I want to tell you about towers.
But first, a few announcements & updates from friends:
I’m going on a 10-date tour of the US & Canada with
as part of the release of both on !! I’m excited & terrified & pumped & overwhelmed. Can’t wait! I hope to see ** you ** there ! Here’s a link to where we all talk about how it makes us feel some more, and here’s the poster Lucy made for it, lol:
Clementine Was Right have a new album out and it truly slaps. I highly recommend you go give it a listen. Here’s the album cover:
Also, I recently read Jonathan Aprea’s two most recent chapbooks, A Thousand Years and 14 Sonnets. They’re handbound & made & they look pretty neat IMHO. Here is a link to his website & here is a pic of the latter book & my review via text:
Anyway… back to towers.
They feature pretty prominently in The Island (out June 4th - aka in less than 2 weeks !! aaaaah), or at least I thought they did until I did a Control+F on the manuscript and realized towers were only mentioned like, once. Oh well. They feature heavily in its imaginary!! Plus, I asked the illustrator, Mad Manning, to draw this one specific tower I am drawn to, for whatever reason, and so towers also have some visual prominence. Here’s the illustration she did:
And here’s a photograph of the Thing Itself. Pretty damn close, if I do say so myself:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3197c77e-f50b-408b-af82-3e63211b0ea4_750x1000.jpeg)
But so why - I am almost certain you are not wondering - why, Oscar, are you so obsessed with towers, and always going on about them? Or maybe you are thinking, ‘what are you talking about, I have never even heard you mention towers…’ So, maybe the obsession is largely in my head. And/or, taking it one step further, maybe I just like the idea of myself as a person who is ‘obsessed with towers.’ Well, whatever. I’ll tell you about the why regardless.
When my Publisher (aka Lucy), asked me about it I said it was a poet thing, and when she tried to confirm this with a few poets we know, I’m pretty sure all she got in terms of responses was some mumbling along the lines of ‘um, okay?’
But I guess I probably got the tower thing from reading Rilke in my early 20s (a highly volatile time), and specifically the 9th Duino Elegy where he says:
“Maybe we are just here to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–
at most: column, tower. . . .”
Which is part of a much longer bit about bringing the Things Themselves as we experience them into being through words and how poetry should allow others to experience the “thingness” of things more fully and oh I don’t know blablabla I don’t want to go into it you can read the poem if you want and much as I still like it to be honest some 15 years on all this heideggerian “das Ding” type stuff starts to sound a bit like whiny white boys trying to find ever new and innovative ways to take up space in people’s heads and on the page without actually having all that much to say. Still, the point is this image of towers stuck with me, that and knowing he’d actually written the elegies in a tower, of sorts, or at Duino Castle, which had been kindly lent to him by some princess, and which it is still possible to visit today. I’ve been.
It’s near the town of Prosecco (#smokeit) in northeastern Italy, and is built into a cliffside on the Adriatic at the end of a nice little hike you can do where Rilke is supposed to have “heard the angel’s voice” begin dictating the poem(s) to him. The castle itself was closed when I got there, though, so that’s about all I know about it.
But so yes, at some point I got this idea stuck in my head of, “Oh, if I could just get this or that prince/ss to lend me their tower, I wouldn’t have to worry about struggling along as a middling [insert thankless job], I could just sit there in a cravate at a desk with a window overlooking the sea and let the muses sing to me, be a real ‘antennae for the race,’ escape society & all the pressures of existence, etc., etc., and finally get down to simply Doing The Work – all my problems would be solved!!”
So, if you ever hear do hear me getting all “Oh, I need a tower…” on you - now you know what that’s about. Yearning for a kind of productive isolation that leads to Poetic Self-Realization, I guess. I had to capitalize those last terms because of how ridiculous they sound. Or isolation porn, I suppose is another way you might put it. For a long time, the idea of the tower felt pretty personal to me, like the sort of thing you could only whisper about to a lover in confidence. But I am done gatekeeping it now. So feel free to use the image in your own confused outbursts of yearning around your friends.
Recently, I’ve been reading Alice Notley’s Telling the Truth as it Comes Up, a collection of essays that is one of the most exciting, revving-me-up-about-poetry books I have read in… I’m not sure how long. And I feel like for me the idea of the tower came to represent what she, in one of the essays, calls The Crystal City, that is, the city of the poem, the poem ‘self-realized’, which is almost never reached - somewhere where all unconsciousnesses of the world meet and speak together unhindered outside time. It’s probably not a place one gets to very often. I know I probably don’t very much in The Island, but it’s certainly somewhere that it wants to go.
Here’s a question: do you think of poetry as research? Or as an attempt at beauty? Or something else? (Sound off in the comments...)
I know I’m pretty hopelessly impacted by the idea of it as the former - you know, the poet descends into hell or the unknown all Orpheus-style and comes back with outstretched palms full of bloodstained gold, new and heretofore undreamt of, kind of thing - and the latter as only a happy byproduct sometimes. But then there is another thing of it being sort of almost like a bit…? I don’t know. I feel when I was 16 I was absolutely certain I knew what poetry was about (and should be about), and now I have no idea.
As a side note, do you think telepathy is real? I don’t even think it’s a question, really, I think it’s just something that happens with people provided you’re a bit fusional with them – if granted in a completely unpredictable way. Sorry if that’s off-topic & controversial!!!
I don’t really think it’s off-topic, though. And have I ever told you about the witches? I caught them staring at me once in a kind of lucid dream, from underneath a stone at the bottom of a well, and they awakened this crazy existential dread in me - I felt certain that my ultimate wellbeing was at stake and that I was wrapped in some kind of psychic mortal combat with them. I don’t know, can you relate? No? I’m probably sounding insane at this point and feel I’m drifting dangerously away from the topic of towers…
Anyway, in a podcast I recently recorded with some friends called “My Fucking Birthday” (out soon), we talked about circling, but never quite encountering, The Work, and also maybe never really wanting to encounter it, because… what? It would end us? Or there’d be nothing left to do? And about how one nice thing about growing older and continuing to create things is that even if you never quite get there, you keep spiralling in closer to the thing itself (there’s that pesky das Ding again, there’s no escaping it), & hopefully get more and more of a grip on ‘truly speaking.’
So maybe the tower as an object of fantasy is something one never really wants to actually encounter, or inhabit. And I mean, the one tower I am particularly obsessed with is an abandoned one, a hollow structure with no roof, inhabitable only by birds. So even though I’ve found a physical tower to obsess over, in a way, it still remains just as inaccessible as the dreamt-of one.
I’m not much one for tarot, but I am aware there is a “The Tower” tarot card, so I googled it, and it is apparently not about stability or power, as I might’ve imagined, but about something that is built on faulty foundations and must fall, a sign of major change being due - which perhaps speaks to the impossibility of self-realization, its unattainability, or maybe the way in which believing one has attained it might be an illusion that rests on unstable ground…? I don’t know. Here’s a pic of one:
And speaking of towers and their instability, I’ll leave you with this meme I recently enjoyed, which I guess maybe suggests that towers have always been an unstable place to inhabit. I have no idea what that says about me and my yearnings for one:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38b85af6-a22d-4b3f-a37c-0cad414f90b0_750x984.jpeg)
Alright, until next time :)