Harold
Bloom speaks of ‘aftering’—the gnawing thought that we have always, somehow,
arrived after the event. The artist is there for the event all right; but the
memory of it flies even as he writes it down or tries to make art out of it. In
that sense, as T S Eliot says, every poem is an epitaph; not the living message
but the words etched on the gravestone of whatever passed, and passed on.
Some
of our gravestones are very beautiful.
