WHEN THE STUDENT IS READY RESONANT POETRY WILL APPEAR
A CONFESSION
Despite many years of formal and higher education, most poetry I have read has left me relatively untouched. I am uncertain as to whether this is so due more to my own realistic limitations or because of the limitations of the poets I have run across.
I have found most poetry to be hopelessly obscure and opaque. I start out with high hopes of getting it, but often I find my attention wondering. What is the meaning of this and that phrase, image, combination of words? Often the answer to this question is an empty, wordless response. Repeatedly I find myself stuck with little to no desire to press on often feeling stupid and inadequate. At such points my attention is easily diverted, or I grow tired, or I swear at the poet or myself for promising meanings that either he, she, or me is unable to deliver.
I am not proud of this attitude but being a truth seeker I have a self imposed responsibility to tell my truth as I experience it.
BUT, EVERY SO OFTEN
If my experience of poetry and poets was only this uninspired reaction there would be no fruitful reason to write this article. Fortunately my 'confession' is not the whole story. Every so often in my travels along the highway of my being there have been encounters with life defining words in the form of special poems. Poems become special when either the entire work, or single phrase, or even a single word is enough to astonish me. It is during those rare times when I feel as if I am a deer caught in the headlights. These are times of exquisite resonance, attunement, at one ment with the content, form, meanings, sounds, and spirit of the poetry of the moment.
EXAMPLES
Two examples come to mind. The first happened with my introduction to T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock." The context was when I was a Sophomore at Columbia University in a course on literature. The second was two years later in another literature course hearing a recording of Molly Bloom's soliloguy at the end of James' Joyce masterpiece - Ulysses - read by Siobhan McKenna.
WHAT STIRRED MY WHOLE HEARTED ATTENTION?
The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock begins:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.
It is difficult to know for certain what it was that instantaneously induced me to sit up and take notice. I think a partial answer is the identification I made with the imagery "like a patient etherized upon a table." This to me is the quintessence of passivity... waiting to be operated on. Little did I know then that a decade later I would be nervously stretched out on my psychoanalyst's couch for the first time, frightened about lying down rather than sitting up face to face, I would free associate to Eliot's words: {I am like the} patient etherized upon a table.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Split internally as I was in my early college days I walked around with a smug supercilious contemptuous attitude which was often focused on what I felt were a generalized collection of snobby and pretentious Barnard students.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
here will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea. …
I started a thirty five year journal in my senior year of highschool. The first lines were: Plato says the unexamined life is not worth living." But I have discovered that the overly examined life is incabable of being lived."
In those days, I had a major disconnect beteeen my head and my heart, between my probing, analytic intellect and my often confused and messy emotions, between theory and action. I was increasingly aware of this often paralyzing state of affairs but kept rationalizing that I could manana -{take all the time I needed}- through life. Without knowing it at the time my organizing mantra was "there will {always be enough} time." I will do it tomorrow.
And in the meantime, I could and indeed did hold onto an illusion of perfection so that any action would be viewed as only partial. Any idea would and often was cancelled out by an equal and opposite idea. What was built up could and would be inevitably eroded like sand castles on a beach.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’…Do I dare
Disturb the universe? …
I felt as if I had the force of a hydrogen bomb underneath the hole in my soul. I longed to make trouble - to shake up the world - to take Socrates advice to the youth of Athens seriously- challenging all first assumptions. I longed to be my own final authority but secretely I felt like an insecure chiken shit: gutless, whimpy, spouting conciliatory statements - afraid to have any enemies - conflict averse. I developed a second mantra: "Do I Dare?" The answer, in those days, was a loud, unspoken NO!
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume? ….
I feared exposure. And exposed I felt when beginning my psychoanalysis. Pinned down by my knowing analyst who I experienced as seeing right through me and could see right down to my fraudulent essence. My essence stripped bare. A gutless wonder. The aspiring truth seeker who can't get started and if he somehow manages to connect hitting a lucky scratch single knows he doesn't have the stamina to make it to second base let alone score a home run.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin? ….Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .
What I knew for certain was that I was essentially isolated and alone identifying with the imagery "of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows{no question mark needed.}
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.’
Yet through my persistent misery I kept writing in my journal - attempting to order my chaos - trying my best to capture in special words the essence of my truth as I experienced it. But although pages and pages piled up I felt as if I always fell short from attaining my objective: to say exactly what I meant.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
My youtful optimism turned into bitter cynicism and despair. At 21 years old sitting by myself in the The Lions's Den at Columbia sipping a beer on my birthday I felt as if I was 120 years old. I was three quarters dried up. It was increasingly difficult to make even the supposedly simplest of actions.
Shall I part my hair behind?
And then I came to the line of lines that made me freeze as I saw my horrifying psychological reflection in the mirror of Eliiot's thunderous words:
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I knew in a instant that was how I was feeling at the bottom of my soul as I obssessively ran away from taking any risks.
STIRRING NUMBER TWO
Two or three years later still at Columbia - I had three important occurrences. I entered a failed but initially stimulating psychotherapy experience; I discovered and immersed myself in activities associated with the esoteric occult such as attending a spiritualist church and participating in seances - associating with a psychiatrist who went into trance states channeling poetry purportedly dictated to him by Freud and Jung; and I had a passionate affair with a woman twenty years older who was getting a degree in counseling psychology. Collectively these stimulating activities were a counter weight to the negative inertia that had been strangling me for the past eight years.
It was in this context that I read Ulysses and heard the stirring recording of Molly Bloom's soliloquy.
{The last chapter}
"Molly's soliloquy(or interior monologue) consists of eight enormous "sentences," with only two marks of punctuation in the entire episode (periods after the fourth and eighth "sentences"). Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, then reminisces about their first meeting and about when she knew she was in love with him. The final words of Molly's reverie, and the very last words of the book, are":
...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Bloom's_Soliloquy
On hearing Joyce's words for the first time I felt as if I was being transformed listening to the sounds of all of the colors of reality: pure and messy, light and dark, radiant and bleak - a veritable total and passionate committment and unconditional acceptance to all of internal and external reality.
This poetry mirrored the other side of my passive inertia. It both pointed the way to that which I most aspired and underscored the possibility of both experiencing it and possibly potentially sustaining it.
As I said in the beginning of this article - most poetry I come across leaves me neutral at best and decidedly turned off at worst. But from time to special times I am impacted with special words that stir special experiences that are truly transforming.
Comments