Rage To Order: A Close Reading of Simon Armitage’s
“Five Eleven Ninety Nine”
by Phillip Crymble
© 2002, Phillip Crymble

Following this display, a blind man walks down from a hill and begins recounting tall tales of fires from the past. Hard to resist the temptation of equating him with Homer’s blind prophet Tireseas, but then, he seems more a record keeper than a soothsayer, a vessel in which the ‘word’ of the fire is carried, a kind of living scripture. That he is blind presumably speaks to ideas of exaggeration and inaccuracy inherent to all religious tracts. Still, he is a figure to be esteemed, for after recounting the past, “someone gets the man a drink, and a seat” (43).

The next several pages of the poem are taken up in a physical description of the fire’s tremendous burning and the ritualized activity of fireworks’ displays that accompany it. Of note here is yet another exhaustive list, this time of sounds, colors and names of fireworks:
A soundtrack of sibilants, clacks and clicks,
and thuds and shrieks that are harder to place -
warfare or birdsong, peacocks or bombshells

air raids, kittiwakes. And familiar sights,
like a Catherine wheel escaping its tail,
a Roman candle that snowballs the moon.
Clear skies, a night with its lid taken off

but peppered and strafed with fractals and flak,
gerbes and Saxons, star shells, Mines of Serpents,
Bengal Lights and other coruscations,
and the fire, glazing every act and scene. (45)

What we also see revealed here is the language of warfare, a language that speaks to the idea of apocalypse in the British Mind. ‘Flak’, ‘strafed’, and ‘air raids’ are terms inherent to World War Two, while ‘star shells’ were used to illuminate enemy positions at night during the First World War.

The origins and mythology of fire are taken up in the next sequence, a rumination that comes out of “a heat so solid now, a hard glow/we take for granted” (45-46). The primordial and foundational aspects of fire and our relationship to it are weighed in the balance, then “by one degree the brightness fades/ a fraction at first” (46). And it is now that the poem’s fascination with measurement comes to bear on the fire’s gradual depletion:

and in the space it takes to check a watch
another inch of time gets dropped, slides by,
is lost. The way it is with peaks and troughs -
that’s how it goes with Fahrenheit and clocks.

So we look to ourselves for something to burn,
to slow up the countdown of Centigrade … (47)

It becomes increasingly clear that the new system is one that will necessarily be short lived, but at the same time, the faithful scramble around looking for ways to keep it alive, and part of that stay against the absence of belief is contained in the knee-jerk behavior of trying to understand through naming and measurement.
Shortly after this “a man/who hasn’t pulled his weight … is taken away” (47), tying in the Old Testament ritual observed on the Day of Atonement, where the sins of the people were placed upon a goat sent to the wilderness. And adding further to this ritualized, rote behavior, “a girl who is said to be deaf and dumb” tries sweeping “seeds and knots and crumbs, chippings and thorns” into the fire to keep it going, but at last, “she backs off to a darker place, resigned” (48). The old means of sustaining belief are failing, and in the half-light, Armitage suggests:

We stand in profile, figures from an age
before the dawn, paintings on a cave wall,
people waiting for a word or sign … (48)

They exist now in two dimensions, and are taken back to a time prior to the dawn of conventional belief systems, paralyzed in the face of the void. They wait in futility for ‘word’ of a new system, one that they prophecy as being based, as before, on measurement and reclamation. It does not come, and they are left wondering:

But we have given all of what we own
and what we are, and it has come to this:
this place, this date, this time, these tens of us,
all free, but shadowless and primitive,

no more than silhouettes or negatives
or hieroglyphics, stark and shivering. (49)

There is nothing left but measurement itself, the only bearings they are capable of taking localized and meaningless, “until it dawns on one of us/to make the most of something from the past” (49).

At this point in the poem, Armitage is working at the height of his powers. The following sequence is loaded with meaning:
He walks us to a garage, picks the lock
and pinpoints with a torch a heavy cloth,

asbestos, woven, terrible to touch,
then covering his mouth against the dust
that hangs like plankton in the beam of light
he drags the cloth away to find a cross.

No time for measuring the shortest straw
or drawing lots. There’s mention of a name,
and singled out the strongest of us bends
and takes its length along his spine … (49-50)

The fact that the garage is locked suggests that what is inside should not be tampered with, and this is made expressly clear by the fact that the cross is concealed beneath a cloth of asbestos. But aside from being woven from toxic fibers, asbestos is also a material impervious to fire. So to this point, the cross has been protected from the conflagration, implying that it is the last and perhaps most sacred relic of the old belief system. That the dust ‘hangs like plankton in a beam of light’ indicates the primal or foundational nature of the cross in the old system, but perhaps the most telling moment in this sequence is when we are told there is ‘no time for measuring’. It is at this moment we start to see the old system of measurement collapsing in on itself. Primal urgency takes its place.
What follows is literally a re-telling of the bearing of the cross story, as the strongest man in the district struggles to drag his charge back to the fire site. It is an ordeal that lasts for several pages, until he sees the remains

of the light and heat, and raises the cross
to its full height, and hugs it like a bear.
Upright, it seems to stand for something there. (51)

This masterpiece of understatement is followed by the cross’s “noiseless splashdown in a pool of ash”, and as it slowly ignites,

Those expecting an incense
of palm and cedar, the scent of olive
and cypress, are surprised by the odour

of willow and oak and pine and alder,
resins and oils from the Colne and Calder
that whitter and whine as they brush with fire.
Warmth for an hour, but not a minute more. (52)

The cross of biblical scripture would have been made of more exotic woods, but this is a cross made from indigenous trees, and thus, like so many of the principal combustible elements of the fire, is representative of the decline of British Culture, a culture now capable of providing only limited spiritual warmth.
In the “blackness [that] follows every burst of flames” the meditative gaze is turned toward the moon, and consolation is sought in one of the most pagan and rudimentary of belief systems, a system “under which we figure out our next move” (53). At last, “a star, four-sided, breaks the horizon” (53), and we begin to anticipate something monumental, much as the star that heralded the birth of Christ. But instead, it is attributed to a light from the dormer window of a boarding kennel, a poor man’s nativity stable to say the least. The man who leans out of it “shouts the odds about dogs and vomit, fools returning to folly” (54), a direct allusion to the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, the implication being that the time for looking to the old ways is now past, that they can no longer offer any form of comfort or security.

But it is at this point that the listing, measuring and naming in the poem reaches a fever pitch:

And on the one hand someone rattles off
the preconditions, lists them one by one:
for little, wedding, middle, index thumb,
read pressure, discharge, friction, action, heat

of any kind. But on the other hand
the things we’re up against: clay, fibro, lime,
the silicates and tungstates, certain salts
and sodas, borax, alum; more than five,

not counting water and things of that kind.
Scissors cut paper and paper wraps rock,
rock blunts the scissors but water, water
swamps and dulls and rusts and dampens the lot. (54)

But listing offers no consolation, and at last there is “nothing else for it” (54), as people begin to toss their most valuable personal possessions into the dwindling flames in an attempt to sustain the fire of their beliefs. Bank notes, photographs, licenses and birth certificates are all given over, and finally, articles of clothing are stripped off and surrendered:

The act of keeping warm by burning clothes -
like eating your own hand to stay alive
or tapping your arm for a quart of blood
to survive. Tell that to the starving, though. (56)

Bankrupt at last of any recognizable value system, their lists totally exhausted and useless in the face of the void, the few hard-liners, the ones faithful to the last to the old ways that have forsaken them, slowly walk away from the fire site:

We turn to go, then go together, home
in numbers, then in pairs and then alone

to houses that are empty, frozen, stone,
to rooms that are skeletal, stripped, unmade,
uncurtained windows, doorways open wide,
to beds without cover, lamps without shade. (56)

The world they return to is totally empty, a world that is described almost entirely by negatives, ‘the doorways open wide’, suggesting the rules that had previously governed their lives no longer apply.

When they “drift back” the next day at dawn, “through the living daylight” we come to feel that they do so in a manner commensurate with their persistent listing (56). They know of no other way, and seem to gravitate almost against their will or better judgement to what now resembles “a crater punched home by a meteorite/or else a launch-pad or a testing-site” (56). They literally pour over the ashes for a sign, something that might speak even remotely to the possibility of redemption or renewal:

Kicking through the feather-bed of ashes
someone flushes out a half-baked apple.
Softened, burnt and blistered on the skin, but
hardly touched within. Inedible thing,

the flesh gone muddy, foul, the core and pips
that no one cares to eat still fresh, still ripe,
and him who found it heads off down the slope
towards the park and plants or buries it. (56-57)

The apple, then, so central to the Genesis story of the old system, is found again among the ashes. The suggestion, of course, is that it is powerless to bring about renewal in its present state, but the fact that the pips and core are still ripe intimate the possibility of future salvation and the installation of a new belief system. But in the meantime:

We wait, listless, aimless now it’s over,
ready for what follows, what comes after,
stood beneath an iron sky together,
awkwardly at first, until whenever. (emphasis added, 57)

Simon Armitage’s “Five Eleven Ninety Nine”, a project he completed just prior to 1995, is very much a product of all the anxiety and trepidation that had surrounded the turn of the Millennium. And that he chose to explode the idea of a monumental Guy Fawkes’ Bonfire, to use it as a means to sustain a concentrated meditation on the failure of conventional belief systems and the insidious nature of their trappings is truly ingenious. The failed Gunpowder Plot, at its heart, contains the same essential paradox of creation and apocalypse inherent to the fire of Armitage’s imagination. If the Plot were to have succeeded, a whole new system of government would have been put in place, the course of British and world history altered irrevocably. As it stands, the system that survived has evolved to the point where it is now pushing us toward a cultural and spiritual apocalypse. In essence, we have already thrown every article in every one of Armitage’s exhaustive lists onto the scrap heap, yet we refuse to light the match.

Wallace Stevens’ often anthologized poem “The Idea of Order at Key West”, much like “Five Eleven Ninety Nine” is an extended meditation on, and indictment of order in the conventional sense. Armitage goes out of his way to emphasize that measurement has come to take on a far more significant role in our culture than what is being measured. In many ways, the gestures of measurement have become ritualized to the point that they have come to inhabit a greater place of importance than what they try to contain. We are in a sad state indeed when words win out over things. But words are so much easier to commit to memory, to arrange and record. Names and numbers are the things we believe in, but as Armitage suggests, they have no substance and are simply abstractions-we only fool ourselves into believing otherwise. Stevens understood our ‘rage to order’, to order words in particular. He also understood that “ourselves and our origins” sounded most keenly “in ghostlier demarcations” (1900). It may be he was onto something.

Works Cited or Consulted

Stevens, Wallace. “The Idea of Order at Key West”. The Norton
Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Fifth Edition. Eds.
Nina Baym et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999,
(1899 - 1900).

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