The Hide-and-Seek Muse, page 13
Why? An exploration of the reasons is something I’ve just begun to consider and is far beyond the scope of this piece. But I’ve always been attracted to self-portrait poems for their compelling mix of revelation and veil, for the way they abstract their subjects and implicate my reading of them into their bodying forth. I’m intrigued by the ways in which, as poet and critic Leslie Wolf has written of Ashbery, “to reach [painting’s] state of freedom in a verbal art, the poet must use the signifying quality of his medium against itself …. The poet must arrange ‘brushstrokes’ of his tableau in such a way that they yield contradictory clues.” One thing that seems fair to say is that early experimenters in the self-portrait poem were interested in and knowledgeable about art, and that the use of “self-portrait” in their poems is an overt nod to its long, fascinating, and complex tradition in art history.
Julian Bell, in his Introduction to Five Hundred Self-Portraits (a gorgeous Phaidon compilation of 500 visual and spatial self-portraits from ancient Egypt to the present) calls Ni-Ankh-Ptah [whose limestone relief carving Self-Portrait, Kneeling in a Boat (c. 2350 BC) adorns the Tomb of the vizier Ptah-Hotep] the earliest known self-portraitist (“enjoying a drink while his Egyptian sailors joust”). Around 1500 AD, however, with the greater availability and quality of mirrors coming out of Venice and an increased ambition on the part of artists to elevate their social status from craftspeople to the learned class (painters began to work themselves into their historical and religious paintings in a “calling card” kind of way, for example), self-portraiture moves, as Bell says, “from the margins of Western art to centre-stage.” Also affecting the burgeoning of self-portraiture, of course, are Renaissance notions of individual self-fashioning and an increased awareness by artists of the techniques and philosophies of their calling. As Shearer West writes in Portraiture, “underlying all self-portraiture is the mystery of how an individual sees himself or herself as other. A self-portrait involves an artist objectifying their own body and creating a ‘double’ of themselves. Artists could use the self-portrait as a means of drawing attention to the medium and the process of production of the work, to show off their skill, or to experiment with technique or style. The viewer of a self-portrait also occupies a strange position of looking at a metaphorical mirror that reflects back not themselves but the artist who produced the portrait. Viewing a self-portrait can therefore involve the sense of stepping into the artist’s shoes … [making] self-portraits both compelling and elusive.”
No doubt this ability to distance (and thus to see, to efface and even deface) the self while engaging in a tradition that offers the expectation of portrayal may be one attraction of self-portraiture for poets. In a meditation on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (and evoking Michel Foucault’s analysis of that painting’s “blind point”), Anne Carson comments on the ways in which canvases and mirrors within that painting (which includes a portrait of the artist and positions the viewer of the painting in the shoes of the on-looking royals reflected on a far wall) allow the poet/reader to achieve what is almost impossible: to catch oneself in the act of seeing. “Artifice triangulates our perception,” Carson explains, “so that we all but see ourselves looking … that point where we disappear into ourselves in order to look.”
Charles Wright (“Portrait of the Artist with Hart Crane”), Jorie Graham (“Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay”), Mary Ann Samyn (“Self-Portrait as Wall Paper with Little Stoves”), and Lucie Brock-Broido (“Self-Portrait with Her Hair on Fire”) are just a few contemporary poets who have worked in a serious, serial way with self-portraiture. Of special interest to me is the self-portrait work being done by young poets, the thirty-somethings and younger, whose immersion in a culture of ubiquitous self-portrayal—in the media, technologies, social networking, even in the mirrored surfaces of our environments—furthers and alters the self-portrait conversation. In closing, I offer poems by three emerging poets, David Francis, Michael Rutherglen, and Sarah Schweig, whose pieces strike me as contributing to the notion of what constitutes a self-portrait poem in distinct and exciting ways, whether as a “declared” self-portrait, or not. Part of a generation dramatically both more claustral and more people-connected than their predecessors, these young poets are involved in creating as well as reflecting a sense of what it means to be a self in poems a decade into the current century of the era Anno Domini; they help us to see ourselves.
Quelle Night
by Sarah Schweig
She is, tonight, in spite of.
That’s what she said, going out,
locking the door, closing her winter coat
against the cold. She is
in spite of it all.
To hell, she says, with the weather,
swaggering to a café on Broadway.
She needs a drink & a novel
project. But how belabored
it all is. All these people
with all their first-world problems
talking over espresso red-eyes, commending
their dead-pan deliveries of jokes
about Nietzsche & flattering
each other’s dry Wittgenstein:
One of the most misleading
representational techniques
in our language is the use of
the word ‘I.’ (I sees that—
& yet—) “Exhausting,” she says.
“Quelle night.” What are you
searching for? As Miss S strays
back home, the salt trucks
salt the dirt-sick snow:
In spite of, in spite of, in spite of.
Self-Portrait as Mosquito
by David Francis
Midway through the latched room
I flew to sniff you in,
lick your blood;
rapturous hover-stud, fiber-tearing,
tooth-sinking, to drain the interstitial
vein. All I’d hoped for: a lit stove,
a taste I’d imagined: warm, a bit
of sweat mixed in, body welted
from sun, water wanting. This
is the hour you’d pulled
my sharp kiss thin and this
is the door you’d locked
with wetted key, leaving
the fan’s blades to turn. Wind
on a mattress ripped at the bed’s leg:
love in a cotton-field noon and forsythia’s
yellow-spattered stems—
I descended in.
The Flâneur Returns
by Michael Rutherglen
ERIC PANKEY
The Problem with the First Person
I confront silence as if it were a space,
A space altered by my occupying it,
A ragtag space, say, of a wilderness.
Each I I add to the addendum, to the slippery,
Serpentine thens equals, for now, the now.
Who am I but fragments and accretions,
A raft built from a shipwreck’s scavenged timbers,
A man in the dark as he pulls his shirt over his head,
A malleable metal bent over an anvil’s prow
Awaiting the hammer, awaiting the hammer’s fall?
Muddled by time, my attention is drawn away,
As I aim, as I thumb the arrow’s nock, and release.
An angel bends the date palm branch within Joseph’s reach.
I am neither the angel nor Joseph, but am the hunger
One knows intimately and the other can only imagine.
Beneath Venus
Bled through dusk-ore—the evening star
The roads cross at an oblique angle
The way two narratives dovetail
Lit by a black and white television
A woman unbraids her hair
Each night he stops to watch
He counts the seconds of his gaze
As a boy counts the pages left
In a book he’d like never to end
As if a charm or heirloom
He carries with him daily his death
Half a world away bees
Build a hive in a lion carcass
On the sidewalk home he hears
A tapping he cannot place
Perhaps a metronome
Perhaps chalk on a blackboard
As someone stalls solving for x
In Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Sharon Cameron relates the project of the lyric poem to the story of the Fall from grace—to the awakening of human desire, trespass, and expulsion from symbiotic Paradise (where words were not needed, every need being already known and met) into the realm of banishment, hunger, and mortality: “To transgress the limit,” she writes, “is to gain knowledge and death. Transgression displaces presence whether by knowledge or its designate language. True, Adam named the animals before the fall, but he had no real use for those names until after it. The desire for knowledge is, one might say, the desire for the possession of one’s own center, the desire to know the presence around which existence circles; knowledge, in its turn, puts desire at the center of existence: death is the consequence exacted for this radical displacement …. Man knows death through the primacy of language—the symbol of being’s separation from itself.”
One might argue that the birth of a discreet self—of an “I”—a first person—is commensurate with this “first” banishment, and that language is implicated intimately in the experience, particularly the language of the lyric poem. Critic Roman Jakobsen asserts that “lyric poetry speaks for the first person, in the present tense—a present toward which lyric always impels any past or future events.” As David Baker puts it in his rich compendium of essays on the lyric, Radiant Lyre, “If a lyric poem is a song of oneself, what is that self? …. The self exists. It is a vexed, changing, elusive, and fictive—a linguistic—construct. But linguistic constructs are real. We make the world when we say it, and it’s the only world we have.”
Each of us, then, has a moment, perhaps many moments, when we are “first” a person, sharing something akin to Adam and Eve’s thrilling, bewildering, terrifying moments of original consciousness and separateness. We realize that we are not our mothers, that we are separate beings who must learn to use language to get what we need and to attempt to recover or rediscover some of the wholeness from which we have been banished. The homes or relationships we thought secure crumble, the touchstones of our lives disappear, a bodily illness or natural disaster or struggle with our work or ourselves forces us to confront ourselves anew. In distinct ways, Eric Pankey’s “The Problem with the First Person” and “Beneath Venus” address the construct of the self in the lyric poem: its crucial paradoxes of claustral, essential solitude and implacable desire.
From line one of “The Problem with the First Person,” the reader encounters a self struggling with its own invention—specifically with its invention in language. The “ragtag space” the narrator, the “I,” confronts must, on the one hand, be the page, the nada altered by the word, the signifying “I”—but it’s an elusive self, who, the moment it pronounces itself an “I” inhabiting and moving through time, is already changed by the loss of that prior self to the spoken “now”—the speaker is not the self he was when the poem began, or even a syllable past. This is the lyric predicament, or one of them. As Cameron writes, “In a search instigated by longing, language is by definition a back-tracking through the space left in the wake of presence, in the hopes that it might rediscover its source. … [P]resence is a memory or a hallucination or a dream, a pure alterity …. It is a memory of a past before language and before the need for language, of that flickering beginning where fulfillment seemed, illusorily, to precede desire.”
Pankey means for us, I think, to feel in his lyric pronoun the specter of the banished Adam, expelled from Eden and now mortal, “muddled by time” in the wake of seductive “serpentine” powers:
Each I I add to the addendum, to the slippery,
Serpentine thens equals, for now, the now.
Who am I but fragments and accretions,
A raft built from a shipwreck’s scavenged timbers,
A man in the dark as he pulls his shirt over his head,
A malleable metal bent over an anvil’s prow
Awaiting the hammer, awaiting the hammer’s fall?
Muddled by time, my attention is drawn away,
As I aim, as I thumb the arrow’s nock, and release.
One consequence of freedom, then, is the burden of self-awareness, and the “howl” of this first person is the plaint of the thinking human. What or who am I? What constitutes a self? A hodge-podge of conditional, chance, and subjective shards? A saving remnant? A tool of the Gods? Though our speaker, who now must hunt to live, tells us he has little time to ponder these existential questions, Pankey’s stanzas have the feel of pensées. This is perhaps especially true in the final tercet, in which Pankey evokes the apocryphal story, told variously as occurring en route to Bethlehem or on the flight into Egypt, in which, again variously, the Christ child in utero or an angel divinely moves a remote date palm within reach of Joseph, so that he can pluck the fruit for the desiring Mary. This tale tropes the primal story of the Garden and allows Pankey to conflate the “first-person” (self, consciousness) with hunger, desire, something immortals can “only imagine” and which humans, because of our mortal knowledge, know all too intimately.
Like “Problem with the First Person,” “Beneath Venus” pitches the language of mathematics and reason (add, problem, equals, counts) against the mortal, troubled “muddle” of the self in time, specifically under the spell of Venus, Eros, bodily desire. The entire poem is cast “under” the spell of Venus, what Blake in his famous blank verse sonnet called the “fair-hair’ed angel of the evening,” evoking both the star and the goddess of love for which it is named. The poem concerns the “dove-tail[ing]” narratives of beauty and death—a man pausing in his evening walk to watch through a window a woman braiding her hair by the light of a television, for example, or a boy in one temporal world counting
… the pages left
In a book he’d like never to end
As if a charm or heirloom
He carries with him daily his death
Half a world away bees
Build a hive in a lion carcass
On the sidewalk home he hears
A tapping he cannot place
Perhaps a metronome
Perhaps chalk on a blackboard
As someone stalls solving for x.
Especially moving in these lines is the way “He carries with him daily his death / half a world away” (the boy is young—his demise, one hopes, is far off) blurs, syntactically, into “half a world away bees / Build a hive in a lion carcass.” Life is a vanitas, and death is the mother of beauty (or the “mother of nothing,” as Charles Wright puts it), host of new life. Surely the “tapping” the man at the crossroads, walking home, “cannot place” is not only the minutes passing, his own heartbeat, but also what must stand in for what is already lost to him: the pen sketching on paper, fingers tapping on keys, eyes transcribing the miraculous intrusion of breathtaking desire into the terminal sentence, score, and script of our lives. And what is the lyric poem, the heart’s infinite capacity for exultation within the body’s mortal equation, if not a stalling on the inevitable way to “solving for x”?
JOHN POCH
Echo
I couldn’t understand the thing he told me.
He said he couldn’t make it any clearer:
I’d rather die of thirst than have you hold me.
Hold me, I said. His elegance consoled me,
and his refusal made him all the dearer.
I couldn’t understand. The thing he told me,
twice (how could anyone repeat it?), bowled me
over. I put it to myself, and queerer:
I’d rather die of thirst than have you hold me?
Give me a look at least, I wished. Behold me!
You wish, he mocked and looked toward his mirror.
I couldn’t understand the thing he told me.
Perhaps our likenesses, not love, controlled me.
Then something turned and spoke in me. I hear her:
I’d rather die of thirst then have you hold me,
is what I should have said to draw him nearer.
We have in common our redundant error.
I couldn’t understand the thing he told me:
I’d rather die of thirst than have you hold me.
Back in November 2010, the New York Times ran a piece about the plans of the personality disorders committee of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to eliminate “narcissism” from its fifth edition, due out in 2013. The removal of narcissism from this highly regarded list of personality disorders caused no small stir in the mental health profession, and a typical reaction among lay persons ran something like “narcissism must be so prevalent in our self-absorbed culture that it’s now considered normal and not an aberration.”
Whatever one thinks about whether or not narcissism should remain an acknowledged full-blown personality derangement or just one of an array of traits that might contribute one dimension to a complex “self,” it’s worth remembering that the mythical Narcissus, at least in Ovid’s version, gets something of a bad rap in relation to the eponymous “disorder.” The typical dirt on Narcissus is that he is so self-involved that he falls fatally in love with his own reflection, refusing food and punishing himself as he pines over his own unattainably gorgeous image. And in a way this is of course what happens. But Narcissus doesn’t realize that he is gazing at himself, at least not initially. When Narcissus leans down to drink from that “unclouded fountain” he is “astonished” by an image of an “extraordinary boy.” But he does not recognize the reflected image as himself. “Unknowingly,” Ovid writes, “he desires himself … What he has seen he does not understand.” Addressing his reflection as an other, Narcissus cries, “Whoever you are come out to me!” And when he finally acknowledges, with despair, that “I am he,” Narcissus so much wishes to be not himself in order to know and hold his beloved that he cries “O I wish I could leave my own body!”
Julian Bell, in his Introduction to Five Hundred Self-Portraits (a gorgeous Phaidon compilation of 500 visual and spatial self-portraits from ancient Egypt to the present) calls Ni-Ankh-Ptah [whose limestone relief carving Self-Portrait, Kneeling in a Boat (c. 2350 BC) adorns the Tomb of the vizier Ptah-Hotep] the earliest known self-portraitist (“enjoying a drink while his Egyptian sailors joust”). Around 1500 AD, however, with the greater availability and quality of mirrors coming out of Venice and an increased ambition on the part of artists to elevate their social status from craftspeople to the learned class (painters began to work themselves into their historical and religious paintings in a “calling card” kind of way, for example), self-portraiture moves, as Bell says, “from the margins of Western art to centre-stage.” Also affecting the burgeoning of self-portraiture, of course, are Renaissance notions of individual self-fashioning and an increased awareness by artists of the techniques and philosophies of their calling. As Shearer West writes in Portraiture, “underlying all self-portraiture is the mystery of how an individual sees himself or herself as other. A self-portrait involves an artist objectifying their own body and creating a ‘double’ of themselves. Artists could use the self-portrait as a means of drawing attention to the medium and the process of production of the work, to show off their skill, or to experiment with technique or style. The viewer of a self-portrait also occupies a strange position of looking at a metaphorical mirror that reflects back not themselves but the artist who produced the portrait. Viewing a self-portrait can therefore involve the sense of stepping into the artist’s shoes … [making] self-portraits both compelling and elusive.”
No doubt this ability to distance (and thus to see, to efface and even deface) the self while engaging in a tradition that offers the expectation of portrayal may be one attraction of self-portraiture for poets. In a meditation on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (and evoking Michel Foucault’s analysis of that painting’s “blind point”), Anne Carson comments on the ways in which canvases and mirrors within that painting (which includes a portrait of the artist and positions the viewer of the painting in the shoes of the on-looking royals reflected on a far wall) allow the poet/reader to achieve what is almost impossible: to catch oneself in the act of seeing. “Artifice triangulates our perception,” Carson explains, “so that we all but see ourselves looking … that point where we disappear into ourselves in order to look.”
Charles Wright (“Portrait of the Artist with Hart Crane”), Jorie Graham (“Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay”), Mary Ann Samyn (“Self-Portrait as Wall Paper with Little Stoves”), and Lucie Brock-Broido (“Self-Portrait with Her Hair on Fire”) are just a few contemporary poets who have worked in a serious, serial way with self-portraiture. Of special interest to me is the self-portrait work being done by young poets, the thirty-somethings and younger, whose immersion in a culture of ubiquitous self-portrayal—in the media, technologies, social networking, even in the mirrored surfaces of our environments—furthers and alters the self-portrait conversation. In closing, I offer poems by three emerging poets, David Francis, Michael Rutherglen, and Sarah Schweig, whose pieces strike me as contributing to the notion of what constitutes a self-portrait poem in distinct and exciting ways, whether as a “declared” self-portrait, or not. Part of a generation dramatically both more claustral and more people-connected than their predecessors, these young poets are involved in creating as well as reflecting a sense of what it means to be a self in poems a decade into the current century of the era Anno Domini; they help us to see ourselves.
Quelle Night
by Sarah Schweig
She is, tonight, in spite of.
That’s what she said, going out,
locking the door, closing her winter coat
against the cold. She is
in spite of it all.
To hell, she says, with the weather,
swaggering to a café on Broadway.
She needs a drink & a novel
project. But how belabored
it all is. All these people
with all their first-world problems
talking over espresso red-eyes, commending
their dead-pan deliveries of jokes
about Nietzsche & flattering
each other’s dry Wittgenstein:
One of the most misleading
representational techniques
in our language is the use of
the word ‘I.’ (I sees that—
& yet—) “Exhausting,” she says.
“Quelle night.” What are you
searching for? As Miss S strays
back home, the salt trucks
salt the dirt-sick snow:
In spite of, in spite of, in spite of.
Self-Portrait as Mosquito
by David Francis
Midway through the latched room
I flew to sniff you in,
lick your blood;
rapturous hover-stud, fiber-tearing,
tooth-sinking, to drain the interstitial
vein. All I’d hoped for: a lit stove,
a taste I’d imagined: warm, a bit
of sweat mixed in, body welted
from sun, water wanting. This
is the hour you’d pulled
my sharp kiss thin and this
is the door you’d locked
with wetted key, leaving
the fan’s blades to turn. Wind
on a mattress ripped at the bed’s leg:
love in a cotton-field noon and forsythia’s
yellow-spattered stems—
I descended in.
The Flâneur Returns
by Michael Rutherglen
ERIC PANKEY
The Problem with the First Person
I confront silence as if it were a space,
A space altered by my occupying it,
A ragtag space, say, of a wilderness.
Each I I add to the addendum, to the slippery,
Serpentine thens equals, for now, the now.
Who am I but fragments and accretions,
A raft built from a shipwreck’s scavenged timbers,
A man in the dark as he pulls his shirt over his head,
A malleable metal bent over an anvil’s prow
Awaiting the hammer, awaiting the hammer’s fall?
Muddled by time, my attention is drawn away,
As I aim, as I thumb the arrow’s nock, and release.
An angel bends the date palm branch within Joseph’s reach.
I am neither the angel nor Joseph, but am the hunger
One knows intimately and the other can only imagine.
Beneath Venus
Bled through dusk-ore—the evening star
The roads cross at an oblique angle
The way two narratives dovetail
Lit by a black and white television
A woman unbraids her hair
Each night he stops to watch
He counts the seconds of his gaze
As a boy counts the pages left
In a book he’d like never to end
As if a charm or heirloom
He carries with him daily his death
Half a world away bees
Build a hive in a lion carcass
On the sidewalk home he hears
A tapping he cannot place
Perhaps a metronome
Perhaps chalk on a blackboard
As someone stalls solving for x
In Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Sharon Cameron relates the project of the lyric poem to the story of the Fall from grace—to the awakening of human desire, trespass, and expulsion from symbiotic Paradise (where words were not needed, every need being already known and met) into the realm of banishment, hunger, and mortality: “To transgress the limit,” she writes, “is to gain knowledge and death. Transgression displaces presence whether by knowledge or its designate language. True, Adam named the animals before the fall, but he had no real use for those names until after it. The desire for knowledge is, one might say, the desire for the possession of one’s own center, the desire to know the presence around which existence circles; knowledge, in its turn, puts desire at the center of existence: death is the consequence exacted for this radical displacement …. Man knows death through the primacy of language—the symbol of being’s separation from itself.”
One might argue that the birth of a discreet self—of an “I”—a first person—is commensurate with this “first” banishment, and that language is implicated intimately in the experience, particularly the language of the lyric poem. Critic Roman Jakobsen asserts that “lyric poetry speaks for the first person, in the present tense—a present toward which lyric always impels any past or future events.” As David Baker puts it in his rich compendium of essays on the lyric, Radiant Lyre, “If a lyric poem is a song of oneself, what is that self? …. The self exists. It is a vexed, changing, elusive, and fictive—a linguistic—construct. But linguistic constructs are real. We make the world when we say it, and it’s the only world we have.”
Each of us, then, has a moment, perhaps many moments, when we are “first” a person, sharing something akin to Adam and Eve’s thrilling, bewildering, terrifying moments of original consciousness and separateness. We realize that we are not our mothers, that we are separate beings who must learn to use language to get what we need and to attempt to recover or rediscover some of the wholeness from which we have been banished. The homes or relationships we thought secure crumble, the touchstones of our lives disappear, a bodily illness or natural disaster or struggle with our work or ourselves forces us to confront ourselves anew. In distinct ways, Eric Pankey’s “The Problem with the First Person” and “Beneath Venus” address the construct of the self in the lyric poem: its crucial paradoxes of claustral, essential solitude and implacable desire.
From line one of “The Problem with the First Person,” the reader encounters a self struggling with its own invention—specifically with its invention in language. The “ragtag space” the narrator, the “I,” confronts must, on the one hand, be the page, the nada altered by the word, the signifying “I”—but it’s an elusive self, who, the moment it pronounces itself an “I” inhabiting and moving through time, is already changed by the loss of that prior self to the spoken “now”—the speaker is not the self he was when the poem began, or even a syllable past. This is the lyric predicament, or one of them. As Cameron writes, “In a search instigated by longing, language is by definition a back-tracking through the space left in the wake of presence, in the hopes that it might rediscover its source. … [P]resence is a memory or a hallucination or a dream, a pure alterity …. It is a memory of a past before language and before the need for language, of that flickering beginning where fulfillment seemed, illusorily, to precede desire.”
Pankey means for us, I think, to feel in his lyric pronoun the specter of the banished Adam, expelled from Eden and now mortal, “muddled by time” in the wake of seductive “serpentine” powers:
Each I I add to the addendum, to the slippery,
Serpentine thens equals, for now, the now.
Who am I but fragments and accretions,
A raft built from a shipwreck’s scavenged timbers,
A man in the dark as he pulls his shirt over his head,
A malleable metal bent over an anvil’s prow
Awaiting the hammer, awaiting the hammer’s fall?
Muddled by time, my attention is drawn away,
As I aim, as I thumb the arrow’s nock, and release.
One consequence of freedom, then, is the burden of self-awareness, and the “howl” of this first person is the plaint of the thinking human. What or who am I? What constitutes a self? A hodge-podge of conditional, chance, and subjective shards? A saving remnant? A tool of the Gods? Though our speaker, who now must hunt to live, tells us he has little time to ponder these existential questions, Pankey’s stanzas have the feel of pensées. This is perhaps especially true in the final tercet, in which Pankey evokes the apocryphal story, told variously as occurring en route to Bethlehem or on the flight into Egypt, in which, again variously, the Christ child in utero or an angel divinely moves a remote date palm within reach of Joseph, so that he can pluck the fruit for the desiring Mary. This tale tropes the primal story of the Garden and allows Pankey to conflate the “first-person” (self, consciousness) with hunger, desire, something immortals can “only imagine” and which humans, because of our mortal knowledge, know all too intimately.
Like “Problem with the First Person,” “Beneath Venus” pitches the language of mathematics and reason (add, problem, equals, counts) against the mortal, troubled “muddle” of the self in time, specifically under the spell of Venus, Eros, bodily desire. The entire poem is cast “under” the spell of Venus, what Blake in his famous blank verse sonnet called the “fair-hair’ed angel of the evening,” evoking both the star and the goddess of love for which it is named. The poem concerns the “dove-tail[ing]” narratives of beauty and death—a man pausing in his evening walk to watch through a window a woman braiding her hair by the light of a television, for example, or a boy in one temporal world counting
… the pages left
In a book he’d like never to end
As if a charm or heirloom
He carries with him daily his death
Half a world away bees
Build a hive in a lion carcass
On the sidewalk home he hears
A tapping he cannot place
Perhaps a metronome
Perhaps chalk on a blackboard
As someone stalls solving for x.
Especially moving in these lines is the way “He carries with him daily his death / half a world away” (the boy is young—his demise, one hopes, is far off) blurs, syntactically, into “half a world away bees / Build a hive in a lion carcass.” Life is a vanitas, and death is the mother of beauty (or the “mother of nothing,” as Charles Wright puts it), host of new life. Surely the “tapping” the man at the crossroads, walking home, “cannot place” is not only the minutes passing, his own heartbeat, but also what must stand in for what is already lost to him: the pen sketching on paper, fingers tapping on keys, eyes transcribing the miraculous intrusion of breathtaking desire into the terminal sentence, score, and script of our lives. And what is the lyric poem, the heart’s infinite capacity for exultation within the body’s mortal equation, if not a stalling on the inevitable way to “solving for x”?
JOHN POCH
Echo
I couldn’t understand the thing he told me.
He said he couldn’t make it any clearer:
I’d rather die of thirst than have you hold me.
Hold me, I said. His elegance consoled me,
and his refusal made him all the dearer.
I couldn’t understand. The thing he told me,
twice (how could anyone repeat it?), bowled me
over. I put it to myself, and queerer:
I’d rather die of thirst than have you hold me?
Give me a look at least, I wished. Behold me!
You wish, he mocked and looked toward his mirror.
I couldn’t understand the thing he told me.
Perhaps our likenesses, not love, controlled me.
Then something turned and spoke in me. I hear her:
I’d rather die of thirst then have you hold me,
is what I should have said to draw him nearer.
We have in common our redundant error.
I couldn’t understand the thing he told me:
I’d rather die of thirst than have you hold me.
Back in November 2010, the New York Times ran a piece about the plans of the personality disorders committee of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to eliminate “narcissism” from its fifth edition, due out in 2013. The removal of narcissism from this highly regarded list of personality disorders caused no small stir in the mental health profession, and a typical reaction among lay persons ran something like “narcissism must be so prevalent in our self-absorbed culture that it’s now considered normal and not an aberration.”
Whatever one thinks about whether or not narcissism should remain an acknowledged full-blown personality derangement or just one of an array of traits that might contribute one dimension to a complex “self,” it’s worth remembering that the mythical Narcissus, at least in Ovid’s version, gets something of a bad rap in relation to the eponymous “disorder.” The typical dirt on Narcissus is that he is so self-involved that he falls fatally in love with his own reflection, refusing food and punishing himself as he pines over his own unattainably gorgeous image. And in a way this is of course what happens. But Narcissus doesn’t realize that he is gazing at himself, at least not initially. When Narcissus leans down to drink from that “unclouded fountain” he is “astonished” by an image of an “extraordinary boy.” But he does not recognize the reflected image as himself. “Unknowingly,” Ovid writes, “he desires himself … What he has seen he does not understand.” Addressing his reflection as an other, Narcissus cries, “Whoever you are come out to me!” And when he finally acknowledges, with despair, that “I am he,” Narcissus so much wishes to be not himself in order to know and hold his beloved that he cries “O I wish I could leave my own body!”
