BERNEVAL

A discussion about the political uses of anger (and the dangers of internalized unexpressed anger) led me to reread “The Phenomenology of Anger” by Adrienne Rich. It is found in Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. Nestled mid-way in the volume, the poem begins not with a depiction of anger but with one of madness.

1.     The freedom of the wholly mad
to smear & play with her madness
write with her fingers dipped in it
the length of a room

And it ends, sections later

Every act of becoming conscious
(it says here in this book)
is an unnatural act

And then, to search out more clues to this unnatural act mediated by books, I turned to the other poems and recalled the figure of the merman-mermaid from the poem which gives its title to the collection, “Diving into the Wreck” and found more. There is the androgyne from “The Stranger”.

I am the androgyne
I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language
[…]
the letters of my name are written under the lids
of the newborn child.

I raise the presence of these images of the androgyne because they are associated with the expression of anger. Earlier in the first stanza of “The Stranger” there is an assertion/cancellation of gender

walking as I’ve walked before
like a man, like a woman, in the city
my visionary anger cleansing my sight
and the detailed perceptions of mercy
flowering from that anger

Blossoms all wholly unnatural. And here is that passage from “Diving into the Wreck”:

This is the place
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold
I am she: I am he

“Diving into the Wreck” ends with a brief catalogue of items carried by this composite being; the last to be enumerated is a book, “a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear”. Naming is of course a path to power (a theme that was to preoccupy feminist thought and practice, see for example Mary Daly’s deconstructions and reconstructions in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Beacon Press, 1978). For Rich, the work with language is a quotidian task, something that arises out of daily interventions and constant attention to the mundane and its links to greater systems. Emotion becomes a route to analysis and creation or rather a re-creation. I close with this concluding passage from the first section of “Incipience” — what appears to be a synecdoche for full scale conflagration is also a figure for trust in the cumulative impact of small gestures.

to feel the fiery future
of every matchstick in the kitchen

Nothing can be done
but by inches. I write out my life
hour by hour, word by word
gazing into the anger of old women on the bus
numbering the striations
of air inside the ice cube
imagining the existence
of something uncreated
this poem
our lives

Androgynes may not be popular mythical figures these days but they’ve not lost their historical lustre, they shine with righteousness, lighting a path to the yet to become.

And so for day 1052
30.10.2009

On the DVD of Ferlingetti: A Rebirth of Wonder there is a bonus track of the poet reading “History of Airplanes”. He is wearing a leather aviator cap and goggles. The performance is disarming. He looks goofy and the viewer smiles as the poem begins with the Wright brothers hoping the invention of aviation would lead to peace. And on the poem goes and the historical examples accumulate until you think this is just another recitation by a peacenik, harmless commentary. Sentimental in a Charlie Chaplin fashion.

The poem ends with the Third World striking back and America becoming “a part / of the scorched earth of the world”. And on the screen we see smoke billowing out of the Twin Towers.

And a wind of ashes blows across the land
And for one long moment in eternity
There is chaos and despair

And buried loves and voices
Cries and whispers
Fill the air
Everywhere

http://www.citylights.com/Ferlinghetti/?fa=ferlinghetti_poems

Note: it’s not “a history”, it is simply “history” as if there were only one. The grand gesture is founded in the title. And it is this sweep that generates a tone of patriotic sentimentality. Nonetheless, I find this an effective poem. I like how it builds. The examples of “man-made birds” cumulate and a warning is sounded:

And so then clever men built bigger and faster flying machines and
these great man-made birds with jet plumage flew higher than any
real birds and seemed about to fly into the sun and melt their wings
and like Icarus crash to earth

The stanzas are knit together by the bootless search for the doves of peace. None to be found.

The lines lengthen, stanza by stanza, until the ending quoted above where they return as simple shortened descriptions that stand alone without commentary. All the commentary has proceeded and the poet knows when to pull back. What remains for the imagination to contemplate is the notion that history could have been otherwise, if men had been but wise and humans alive to the dangers of exceptionalism and subsuming all histories under the one history.

And so for day 1049
27.10.2009

Denise Riley in the “Bad Words” chapter from The Force of Language has a very visceral evocation of the lasting hurt of words meant to injure.

Old word-scars embody a ‘knowing it by heart’, as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ.

That thickly pulsating organ reminds one that offerings of one’s heart à la Valentine’s is not all sweetness and light — what is on offer is damaged goods. That is all we may offer — broken hearts.

“Fado” the opening poem from D.M. McClatchy’s Hazmat begins with the supposition of a broken heart and runs on to imagining the reception of a proffered mass of dangerous tissue set afire. Here is the heart of the matter:

Suppose my heart had broken
Out of its cage of bone,
[…]
Suppose then I could hold it
Out towards you, could feel
Its growling hound of blood
        Brought to heel,
[…]
Would you then stretch your hand
To take my scalding gift?
[…]

There is a hint of ambiguity of reference in the stanza devoted to the metaphor of the hound. One is not sure who can feel the hound brought to heel. Is it the speaker of the poem or the addressee? But that is an effect of too rapid a reading for the comma makes it clear that the initial feeling is that of the speaker preparing the way for the addressee to consider after the heart is exposed as a synecdoche (“Its scarred skin grown taut / With anticipating your touch, / The tentative caress / Or sudden clutch.”)

What juxtaposing Riley and McClatchy uncovers about the somatic preservations of pain is that pain exposed comes into the orbit of exhilaration by a sort of contagion through language. The poet offers us a type of verbal homeopathy. And permission to pick at our own old scars and be mindful of the pulse accelerating and the beat skipped and the ever-breaking broken…

And so for day 1045
23.10.2009

The figure of St. Sebastian, the martyr, is the object of an identificatory moment in Richard Howard’s “Purgatory, formerly Paradise” collected in Fellow Feelings. This one line stands out for our purposes:

so that the arrows in us become our prayers

That is a mighty triumph to turn pain into exultation. (Abetted in the case of Howard’s poem by the hint of race privilege: “we are free / to pray, unless we are holding a sword or scrip, / or unless our hands are tied behind our white back / so that the arrows in us become our prayers.”) Still we are puzzled by the transmutation. There is the intimation of an efficacious process at play.

Consider Howard’s description in the light of some thoughts about the power of damaging words. Denise Riley begins the “Bad Words” chapter from The Force of Language with the following:

The worst words revivify themselves within us, vampirically. Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed: the bad word, splinter-like, pierces to lodge. In its violently emotional materiality, the word is indeed made flesh and dwells amongst us — often long outstaying its welcome. Old word-scars embody a ‘knowing it by heart’, as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ. But their resonances are not amorous. Where amnesia would help us, we cannot forget.

So very tempting to consider scar-words as the precursors to prayer: setting the stage for pleading. Before its expression in language, prayer is more like tears.

and we cry when objects penetrate our hide

writes David Bromige in Tiny Courts in a world without scales.

What is prayer? But an apostrophe to a place of power. Before the address to the power that resides there, there is a judgement, an assertion that there is indeed power there. And an apostrophe? A request for channelling some of that power. How can an atheist pray? By engineering the material world, re-enforcing the shields, and aiming the bow for the heart.

And so for day 1044
22.10.2009