Alzheimer's (Jane Hirshfield)

Alzheimer's

This is a subject that frightens me. When I think of who 'myself' is, I think of my mind. I am a mind; my mind is my essence. I can imagine being me in another body, or in an artificial body that's nothing like human. I can imagine being moved to a situation like that, and still being me.

But what that means is that it's exceptionally terrifying to think about losing that self, having it be impaired. Or losing none of it, but losing the physical ability to express it. I can't decide whether I think Hirshfield's interpretation of Alzheimers (holes, blockages, but the essence still there) is right or not - I feel sure science doesn't know the answer, either. But more than that, I can't decide which interpretation is more frightening: to lose myself, or to be myself but not be able to show it.

The last line of the poem is an interesting reference. "Contrary to Keatsian joy" is surely meant to invoke this passage from Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

I think this is why I feel such an urge to create tangible things, to write. Because there is this sense that if I can create a thing of beauty, it means that I will have created something that lives on after the thing that makes me myself has gone. But the man in the poem is "contrary" to Keatsian joy - perhaps denying it, perhaps proving it false simply by being what he is - and I think maybe he has the right of it. Maybe a fine old carpet with holes chewed in it ceases to be a carpet and becomes only a rag. I don't think that makes it any less beautiful when it is whole. Maybe more beautiful, for being something that only lasts so long.

Fourth World (Jane Hirshfield)

Fourth World

The line that struck me from this one most was "A man dies over and over again on the news." (My book version says "man" but the earlier, Cortland Review version I've linked to says "woman" - interesting that she changed it before republishing. My guess is because using "woman" there made that more of the focus of the sentence, hinted at something a bit darker there, whereas "man" is more generic.)

There's an interesting implication here - that we are not merely watching someone who has died once, but that the act of watching means that the person dies, that each time we watch, the death happens once more. It's not a causal connection - the act of watching doesn't cause the person's death - but some other sort of connection. Similar to the way observation of a quantum event changes something fundamental about what is being observed.

I've been working on a science fiction piece about a person who relives the same day over and over again (kind of like the movie Groundhog Day), and one of the things he wrestles with is that if he doesn't stop someone dying every single time he goes around, is he morally culpable for their death and suffering? Even if they go back to not being dead when morning rolls around, even if they don't remember any of that pain - does it still matter? And I sometimes think the same about what we see on the news - there are things that only become news by virtue of being aired as news. Once a news organization decides that this thing is something that counts as news, something people should care about, then suddenly people start caring about it. We've seen this in particular with runs on banks, where the news stations go on about urging people not to panic, which is what causes people to panic.

And then there's the phrase "the fourth world" - in one sense it's like "third world" in representing a particular type of human population: non-industrial, stateless, poor. I think that's a fairly accepted usage. But I also wonder if we could categorize human populations in terms of how much they are recorded. For most of us, the modern first world would still be the first world, with driver's license photographs and closed circuit TV and so on. If we extrapolate that down to "fourth world" level, though, would we find people who do not even create drawings of themselves? People for whom being physically present is the only representation they have? I suspect things wouldn't go that far, for even in tribal civilizations they can refer to someone who isn't present, they have drawings. But I wonder what it would be like to live in a world like that.

Day Oops-I've-Fallen-Behind: First Light Edging Cirrus

Well, so, this is what happens when one sets goals like 'daily,' isn't it? Life has just been too busy - we've taken delivery of a new bed and have established tomorrow as the night for attempting to get it up the stairs (woe). And I've been going to hear music, because it's getting cold out, and when it's full on winter I know it'll be much harder to get myself to go out when there's a warm house waiting.

But enough of excuses. Maybe I won't manage daily, but I'll keep on nonetheless.

Today: First Light Edging Cirrus (Jane Hirshfield)

This is from a book that was a birthday gift this year, and having only looked at a poem or two I can already tell I'm going to like this author and find her challenging at the same time. I've always liked writing that spoke to the joy that I find in science and in understanding the universe in a measured way. Because to me science and math are beautiful, they reveal a deep truth about the world that's huge, bigger than anything else. To believe that the world is logical is to believe in something ultimate. But at the same time, there's a distinct gap between our current understanding of science and math, and what I think the ultimate truth is likely to be. We think on a concrete level, and the universe functions on something like a quantum level (by which I don't mean to limit to our current thinking about what 'quantum' means). I think that ultimately we don't know what it is to know, we don't understand what it is to understand. But I think those things are knowable.

 First Light Edging Cirrus seems to get at the gap between those things.

10²⁵ molecules
are enough 
to call woodthrush or apple.


I think it's the "enough" that's the key word here, as if to say that there are some things which get defined by reason, by measurable functions. And then implicitly we are set up for the things for which reason is not enough, which "cannot be counted."

And of course love is one of those things, love is the thing. The thing which is not counted, which is inside each thing looking out to each thing. If you didn't know about sound waves, you'd think it was magic that strings move when someone near is speaking. So it is with us and the understanding of love. We think it is magic because we do not know what is in between us all that allows for waves of influence to pass between. But someday we might understand it. And I don't think that takes anything away from love. I don't think that makes it more romantic just for being mysterious.

I'm not sure that Hirshfield would agree. She might say there's always something unknowable, something for which reason is not enough. I wonder which of us is right.

Day eight: The Last Days of Summer Before the First Frost

The Last Days of Summer Before the First Frost (Tim Bowling)

Skipped posting yesterday because I went to hear music instead. Afterwards, walking back to the subway from the concert hall, I didn't want to put my earphones in because what I'd just heard was still sort of with me. It was brisk then, and dark (city dark, the kind where there's plenty of light but things take on a nighttime character anyway), and this poem reminds me of that, even though there's nothing of the city in it, really.

There are parts of this that I think are a bit sentimental for my taste, and a bit simplistic ("a child's love" and "I followed my heart" - yeesh). But I love the wilderness language, wolf and deer and salmon, the way these make me think fly fishing in the Rockies, standing in a stream with waders on and seeing a grizzly go by. I've been working on a fiction piece that starts off in Yellowstone and this is the same sort of mood I'd like to evoke. I also like "the bee trails turning to ice as they’re flown."

And I love "where the spider lets its microphone down" - what a great, precise-but-new way of describing that. You can picture exactly what it means, but it's a really unusual metaphor. So cool.

Actually, I pretty much like the first half of this a hell of a lot more than the second half, except for the last line. The nature imagery is way more convincing than the schmaltz. I think it's really hard to do straightforward emotional stuff in writing these days - you have to approach it sideways rather than head on. Partly because of the whole earnestness thing. But also because emotions have become cliche. Just expressing an emotion in straightforward terms isn't convincing because it's been said before. Which makes things difficult, because of course, the reason it's been said before is that it is a near-universal experience that we all want to talk about. But by approaching emotion via metaphor, if you do it right, you can convey the sort of personality of the specific relationship between this mother and this child, and still evoke the universal relationship between mothers and children.

Day seven: LXIV (granted the all)

LXIV
E. E. Cummings

granted the all
                     saving our young kiss only
must unexist,solemnly and per rules
apparelling its soullessness by lonely
antics of ridiculous molecules)

nakedest(aiming for hugely the
ignorant most precise essential flame
never which waked)& perfectingly We

dive

      out of tinying time
                                (into supreme

Now:
        feeling memory shrink from such brief
selves as fiercely seek findingly new
textures of actual cool stupendous is


nor may truth opening encompass true)
while your contriving fate,my sharpening life

are(behind each no)touching every yes


Picked this one at random from Complete Poems 1904-1962. Opened the book in the middle and took the one on the left hand page. I've been feeling melancholy today and was hoping Cummings could cure it. So much of his work is joyful and celebratory. But I'm not sure this is the right poem for that - it suits my mood more than something I would have chosen.

"Lonely antics of ridiculous molecules" feels like a pretty accurate summation of what humanity is, today. Not for any particular reason, just that we humans seem a bit fragile and small in the scheme of things. Things feel hopeless, like society is this thing that is happening to us instead of a thing that we make happen. I don't know which of those is true.

What does it mean to be "touching every yes" in modern life? I think it's about being fully engaged with what you're doing, about mindfulness. That's something I've been working on for a while, actually. I stopped taking pictures because I felt like it was creating this distance between myself and the experiences I was having. I was spending more time thinking about taking a picture than I was enjoying the experience I wanted to commemorate. But it's hard to be in the moment all the time. I could turn off the picture-taking impulse, but I haven't yet figured out how to turn off the narrative impulse, the way my brain sort of describes what I'm doing, finds ways to phrase things humorously, writes little blog entries about everything. Sometimes I can sideline that by thinking very deliberately about a physical sensation, but that doesn't work for long.

I want to "fiercely seek" more often. I want to feel without thinking, hear without thinking. I want to learn how to just be. I just don't know if I have it in me.

Day six: I Am Waiting

I Am Waiting (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

This poem makes me think about Occupy Wall Street. Because we have been a generation of waiting, of thinking that things would happen someday, soon, now. Only we’re still waiting, aren’t we? Waiting for the system to change, for the war to end, for all those things we’ve been promised (jobs, homes, happiness). But they haven’t come.

This feels like a protest poem. The repeated “I am waiting” is like a chant, a drumbeat, a demand. All the mythologies of America as the promised land are still out there, are still being sold to us, but there’s no there there. Just pretty pictures with nothing underneath.

But it’s not just about the problems of our generation, or of Ferlighetti’s generation, or of any generation. It’s also about being an adult, I think. About realizing that reality never measures up to our imaginings, that all mythologies and symbols are just pretty pictures, that none of humanity’s dreams will come true. That’s the nature of dreams. Even if we reach some specific goal it won’t be like the dream. We went to the moon, but it wasn’t heaven. You can write that “great indelible poem” but it won’t be good enough. It won’t ever be good enough.

So we’re waiting. We’re always going to be waiting – for the war that will end all wars, for God to show himself, for humanity to come together as one and death to be overcome. We’re always going to be waiting for the point when we can return to the innocence of childhood, when we can return to hope. For “the new rebirth of wonder.”

Day five: Enthusiast

ENTHUSIAST

Jonathan Williams

literature – the way we ripen ourselves

by conversation, said

Edward Dalhberg…

we flower in talk, we slake

our thirsts in a brandy of heated speech, song

sweats through the pores,

trickles a swarm

into the sounding keyboard,

pollen falls

across the blackened paper…

always idle – before and

after

the act:

making meat

of vowels

in cells

with sticky feet

I happened across a book of poems by this author in the library while hunting for another poet, picked it up more or less at random (went to return 2 books, came out with 4, you know how it goes). The back of the book describes the poetry within as “eccentric, strange, and boundlessly authentic,” and I certainly found it so. Though the authenticity is of the sort that I think would seem false, to someone not familiar with the context.

Because this is Black Mountain poetry, Appalachian poetry. It’s poetry of the American south, but the part of the south that gets forgotten even by the rest of those states. It’s scatological, sexual, dirty. A lot of it’s found poetry, but without the romantic NYC associations of the Beat poets. And it’s spare – each word chosen with no space for frills or lyricism.

Which sort of ties in with my comments on Saturday’s poem about how things should be read aloud. The Black Mountain group was associated with this manifesto by Charles Olson, which talks about shaping poetry by breath rather than by the formal constraints of meter, that form should come from content rather than content from form. A lot of that essay is pretty incoherent, I think, but there’s something to the idea of poetry as an essentially sounded thing, where a word is a sound above anything else, even above its meaning. (“speech is the ‘solid’ of verse, is the secret of a poem’s energy”)

And I think there’s a natural connection between that idea and found poetry, because the act of creating a found poem is an act of listening, of taking what’s there rather than making something be there. Yes, the poet shapes the end product, but that shaping is subsidiary to the source material. There are things you can’t do in a found poem – you can take things out, you can put things in a new order, but you can’t add things, not if you want to keep the authenticity of the found.

So, Enthusiast. I picked this one out I think because sub-consciously some part of me thinks of this as one of the more poem-like poems, one that seems most crafted. That doesn’t surprise me – I like art that shows skill and crafted-ness and effort, so it’s natural that I would like this more than some of his more clearly experimental or found poems, the ones that are more explicitly snippets:

one edinburgh publican has

a sign over the

bar that says if

assholes could fly this

would be an airport

or

my daughter can spot

a cute boy at

150 yards what she

can’t find is a

tomato in the refrigerator

And Enthusiast is a poem about words, which, you know. Button, pushed. So what do I like about it? I like the way there is this series of images but that they’re given in a very terse way. Each of these words makes me think of a different image: brandy, sweat, swarm, pollen. And more isn’t needed - my brain supplies all sorts of detail to go with those words. To analogize, reading the poem is to reading a book, as reading a book is to watching a film. Watching a film can be great, but when you’ve got this very spare wording, your imagination does the work.

I like the sounds of the poem as well. I tried mouthing the words and found myself really aware of the shapes my lips made, the movement of my tongue. It’s the sort of thing you don’t really think about most of the time because it’s become second nature, and then when you stop and try to think about it, it seems really weird. I wrote a poem about reading as eating once, and this reminded me of that, of sort of taking each word into your mouth.

I think I’m going to try finding more poetry at random, maybe hit up the library again tomorrow.

(This should be day 6 but I missed a day due to busy life, etc)