Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences. (J.G. Ballard qtd. in Jenkins 5)
Gareth Sion Jenkins is a multiform poet and artist, whose work is informed by a research background in psychology and whose first collection Recipes for Disaster won the Anne Elder Award in 2019. The Inclination Compass is an ambitious work that draws on nearly twenty years of creative practice, with images and QR codes interlinking the poetry to visual and auditory material, as previous artistic installations and explorations by Jenkins vibrate and congeal to create a strange yet enthralling narrative world. This narrative unfolds across a prologue (titled ‘The Bodymind’) and ten sections (that function as chapters) and six appendices. Together with the material linked via QR codes, the book forms a dazzling and daunting body of work that is constantly replicating, refracting, and reshaping its form.
Probing deeply into the nature of the self and psyche sit at the core of Jenkins’ poetics, expressed through Jenkins’ use of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s spiritual-literary-philosophical notion of the ‘inscape’ (which Joel Ephraims unpacks in his review of Recipes for Disaster). The prologue ‘The Bodymind’ declares:
I’ll write ‘Imagine’ like it is an inclination and it is an inclination like it is a compass for the deep assignment’ (11)
Jenkin’s title, The Inclination Compass, vaguely recalled to mind Philip Pullman’s alethiometer, however, while the latter was designed to tap into a mystical substrate of the outside world to answer human questions, the focus of Jenkins compass always returns to the ‘inscape,’ to cast into relief that inner most stratum from where our inclinations come.
[…] if we are not the object […] we are the measurement. (11)
At the core of this problematic is the interplay between exteriority and interiority. The collection’s cover design features two arms overlaid on a compass, which are actually schematics of a disused World War Two-era underground bunker – the Illowra Battery, Port Kembla, Wollongong. These subterranean chambers, likened to a “cathedral womb,” spatially frame the narrative’s ‘deep assignment’ into the belly of the whale that is the modern city/psyche (51). Tapping into the phenomena of urban exploration, The Inclination Compass’ psychogeography is built up image by image – underground bunkers, abandoned factories and empty pools and aviaries – cataloguing the urban underbelly, its abandoned fringes and hidden histories. These places, where some vague memory of the human lingers, appear to offer themselves as vessels to refract the self.
This exploration of liminality takes us not only to physical spaces, but along and beyond the edge of human sensory experience, through fields, energies, and vibrations: “we are / all harmonic oscillators resisting equilibrium positions” (19). Auditory and field phenomena suggest not only unseen resonances, but bring science and technology into the dystopian (Ballard-esque) poetic world Jenkin’s constructs:
sound waves reverberating our inscapes all the metaphors are fading leaving the scent of diesel and the burnt (26)
The death of 87 migratory birds on a beach, in ‘3 the virus speaks what is forgotten,’ echoes and reverberates across the book, eventually interlacing many of The Inclination Compass’ underlying concerns. Migratory birds have long been symbols of human restlessness; here they suggest our lost patterns and pathways.
a latent harmony speaking what is forgotten a never forgetting pattern of migration replication inclination (45)
Guided in their migratory pathways by their own ‘inclination compass’ that gauges the earth’s magnetic fields, the death of the birds (by presumed technical interference) at the hands of technological modernity suggests lost and repressed aspects of our ‘inscape.’ Seemingly left dead upon the shores of a shifting world, they nonetheless suggest:
[…] we are all just following directions from the margins […] electromagnetic flight paths of migration […seeking] ‘the dormant ideal’ (87-8)
Several characters recur across the narrative, including ‘Swedenborg’ (the Swedish scientist turned mystic), and ‘Crashman’ (seemingly an invocation of the dead), though the most persistent (and discombobulating) are the Owen(s). Initially appearing to be a mythical character or a persona, the Owen(s) appear to represent some aspect of the psyche:
A latent harmony infection in our body and in the mind of our bodymind happening the meanings their meanings unlike our meanings but like them too at rest there is no resting we are replicating. (66)
The Owen(s) turn into a (sub)liminal figure who is a guide to the void or edge space of what might be called ‘The Everywhere Anywhere’ (77). The Inclination Compass consistently juxtaposes dualisms and binaries: body and mind; outer and inner; indeterminism and determinism; naturalism and spiritualism; technology and mysticism. Both ‘he’ and ‘I,’ the Owen(s) are “the one that is two,” embodying the convergence of two seeming polarities at high frequency that seemingly underlies the book’s poetics: “sounds / pattern matter decibels distort vision […] the frequency of our fascination” (81; 92).
At times these poems read like an incantation of algorithmic intensity, an interleaved harmonic of high-powered hertz. They are also incredibly visual, corporeal, and even cinematic, recalling David Cronenberg’s body horror. Jenkins references avant-garde writer and director Antonin Artaud whose ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ intended to liberate the human subconscious via primitive and shocking material; there seems here to be a modernist-to-postmodernist through-line underlying Jenkins’ artistic creations and poetics, from Artaud to Ballard and Cronenberg.
I laughed out loud when ‘9 Owen’s Waiting’ begins by declaring “We had hoped / it would be a bit clearer now” (134). This line expressed what I felt as a sense of increasing distortion of the narrative as it progressed – a resistance to clarification and resolution. Although the collection’s appendices reveal many of the notions and concepts informing the poetics (ranging from Karen Barad’s notions of ‘intra-action’, to Emanuel Swedenborg’s dream journals, Carl Jung’s ‘synchronicity,’ and, importantly, William James’ notion of the mystical ‘transport’), Jenkins’ focus is not the terminus, but rather, as the final section of the book is entitled, ‘The Transport.’ As Artaud’s quote, referencing Gérard de Nerval’s The Chimeras, suggests, we are the “cavern” or vessel, poetry is the vehicle, “a magnetic innervation of the heart” (209).
When exploring the ‘inscape’ there are no final answers to be detected in the static, only resonances, harmonies, and perhaps, patterns and assemblages, yet as Jenkins’ The Inclination Compass shows, all the more reason to continue probing the depths.
come see the artist book at the end of the world […] these sounds are inside (116)
