Elegant and Palpable Variations

Just some notes.

In the second act [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof], the family members who have crowded into Brick's room disperse, and he and Gig Daddy are left alone together. During their fraught conversation, Big Daddy suggest, tentatively and with some trepidation, that his son's relationship with his best friends Skipper might not have been entirely normal. Brick responds with a swift disavowal but his detachment has been broken for the first time in the play. At this moment, the playwright himself bursts on the to the page with longest of the many italicized stage directions that exist between the lines of dialogue. 

The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to 'keep face' in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the 'mendacity' that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestations of it, not even the most important. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering--fiercely charged!--interplay of live human beings in a thundercloud of common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character, just as a great deal of mystery is left in the revelation of character in life, even one's own character to himself.

1.do you & me know each other, will we ever know each other, and ourselves
2. how social everything is, me in poetry land, how solitary, need to see the experience in a group of people.
3. big deal about Brick, the things that define me, no it might not be the thing that defines him ... is my ex-wife smothering my son Jack with a pillow after she's drugged him with sleeping pills at 12 years old because shes afraid that somewhere in the future he will suffer, she will suffer, and she wants to avoid that. `1 event maybe not even most the important.

Hunger, liquor, need, pieces, wrote. A sense was building in me that there was a hidden relationship between the two strategies of writing and drinking and that both had to do with a feeling that something precious had gone to pieces, a desire at once to mend it--to give it fitness and shape, in Cheever's phrase--and to deny that it was so.

Writing about Marguerite Duras, another alcoholic writer what liked to rake over the live coals of her own experience, Edmund White once observed:

"Perhaps most novels are an adjudication between the rival claims of daydreaming and memory, of wish-fulfillment and the repetition compulsion, Freud's term for the seemingly inexplicable reenactment of painful real-life experiences (he argued that we repeat them in order to gain mastery over them). And as with music, the more familiar the melody, the more elegant and palpably ingenious can be the variations." pg 171

imagination alcohol
fantasy alcohol
rewriting tragedy
preserving memory
gaining control over it

As to the role of alcohol in all this: imagine the mixed relief and terror of getting that sequence down. Imagine pressing the words, letter by letter, into the page. And imagine getting up, closing the door to your study and walking downstairs. What do you do, with that sudden space in your chest? You go to the liquor cabinet and you pour yourself a shot of the one thing no one can take from you: the nice good lovely gin, the nice good lovely rum. Click in a cube of ice. Lift the glass to your mouth. Tilt your head. Swallow it.

Hardly any wonder Recovery was unfinished. What a title. What an insane risk.

Excerpts from The Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing.

pg 173.

Not grief. Not yet.

If I stare long enough
will these surf-scoured stones
on my window sill glow
green and pink like tourmaline
the way they were animated
by sound and rain when
I bent and picked them up?
Will they glow like embers
seething in a draft from the dark
outside? Do the stones remember
the difference between sound
and bay? Do they remember
when the glacier dragged its feet?
I will come upon more rocks
where sand blunts the ocean's edge
and I will place them on the sill
by the others wet with memory.

From Passaic Headwaters, Truman Beach near Orient, NY, Buffalo Mountain,
and the ones in this poem, from Ft. Worden.

"Sitting Waiting Wishing" by Jack Jackson makes me feel much more sad than this poem; hence the title.

Other notes:  In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (as the revisions progressed, has become less relevant for this poem). Keats on negative capability. I'm also slowly reading Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Sugar stained

Sugar stained

The despair I felt toward the end of summer
that leaves would fall before I learned the names--

do I feel it still? It is handy learning to look down
for cones, for small twigs a bird or squirrel breaks free,

and for the leaves. When hearts stop pumping
green colors to brown and sugars stained red

and orange emerge. How many lobes?
How sharply pointed? It is handy to look

right in front of you. Is the bark deeply rutted
or peeling like paper or is it scarred

in angled steps that walk your eyes up
through an empty crown to see that they are not gone.

Much is Given

Much is Given

I had a thought about planting tomatoes.

I would plant romas.

I like their shape.

They make me feel useful

with a knife--their consistent

resistance to my blade.

I’ve been reading about nature all winter.

Though I’m not in the mood

maybe I will find some seeds

and press them in soil

in an unbleached egg carton.

They would command me then.

Not my entire life, but hours of it.

When they sprout, and many would,

they would insist I find sunny ground.

Then after suns and rains

when fruit follows flower

I would obey and eat them.

I came across this

on harvesting seeds.

It seems straightforward.

Choose a tomato.

Slice through her equator.

Cup one half in your palm and squeeze

the red pulp into a glass.

On a sunny sill let the slippery mess ferment.

After a couple of weeks

spread the seeds on wax paper

under the sun. If you don’t

plant them all, they make

great holiday gifts.

Gordon argues Dickinson had epilepsy

In "Lives Like Loaded Guns?" Gordon lays out her theory that Dickinson had epilepsy. I haven't finished the book, but it is interesting and the diagnosis seems to fit several facts. It triggers a different reading to words in her poems like "fit" and "throe" which makes it something worth considering. I guess there is nothing definitive available ... and even we had some doctor's explicit notes, we'd still question it perhaps, because the standards for diagnosis varied.

Illness neither deters nor attributes to genius. But one thing it might do, Gordon theorizes, is give Dickinson space and time--a doctor's encouragement to live a reclusive lifestyle.  It would have been consistent with treatments at the time ... acceptable to work late through the night where lamp light was softer than sun ... to avoid social situations, stress ... and even sex, Gordon reports, which was thought to risk a seizure.

Here's an example: I like a look of agony.

PS. One google trick I learned from a fellow #ModPo student was how to search a word in Dickinson's poems: google "throe site:edickinson.org"

meta this and meta that

I've been reading Lyndall Gordon's "Lives Like Loaded Guns," a biography of Emily Dickinson, and came across this quote (pg. 110):Biography is not exactly irrelevant, but bound to be misleading with poems that throw the onus of introspection back into the lap of the reader: they compel us to recognized how our cherished emotion of love--even (or especially) deathless love--is largely imagined, a fictitious vessel for our tastes and dreams.

Who or what is the Sea in “Wild Nights Wild Nights?”  Where is the “I” longing to moor? Did those nights exist only in Possibility? Doesn’t the Reader want a wild night too? I know I do.

With Dickinson, her storied life of seclusion (with Bronte sisters, George Eliot, EB Browning … ) is cultivated by her, her family and friends, and is well known by readers.

You could argue that all poetry, all reading, (perhaps any conversation at all) compels us to imagine. In Dickinson’s poetry we notice how far our imagination takes us.

More from Gordon (pg 111): With strong-willed imaginations it's vital to stress the gains that accompany the pains of denial and longing. During these extraordinary years [in her early 30s from 1860 to 1863] the poet is distilling theorems of experience from her life: desire, parting, death-in-life, spiritual awakening, the creative charge and creative detachment just short of freezing. I want to propose that her poems work when a theorem is applied to a reader's life. It's a mistake to spot Dickinson in all her poems; the real challenge is to find our selves. She demands a reciprocal response, a complementary act of introspection.

I resist the discussion in #ModPo on meta this and meta that. I'm not going to argue that some poets (poems) are not completely meta but those are ones I like (or respond to) least. Too clever (and exclusively clever -- no other idea, no other emotion) for my taste.

In Wild Nights, Wild Nights --  With "Rowing" I get the sense more of treading water (along with "Futile"), not making much progress into the "Wind", or not using the wind like a sailing vessel would. And then "Eden." I read Eden as prelasparian--so innocent. The Sea is opposed to Eden. Dickinson wants to moor in the Sea not in the harbor, not in Eden. Mooring there would be not really moored at all. Best case, she and her imagined lover, would be cold, wet and, entwined, bouncing around a bit.

I don't like a meta reading, that "thee" is the reader, and she is mooring tonight in us.

On Emily Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed --" (214)

I agree with the conventional wisdom that the poem is celebrating nature and the inexplicable source of poetic inspiration. I take the “I” literally to be Dickinson, and that she, like the bee, is inebriated by air, dew and the nectar of the “molten blue” Foxglove. In this pub crawl from one blossom (“inn”) to the next, she persists even when her peers, the Butterflies, have quenched their thirst and “renounce their ‘drams.’” She continuously drinks even if she needs a lamppost, “the – Sun!” to stay upright.

The line that is hardest for me to understand is “Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats --.“ Many critiques skip over the difficulty of this line, taking “Seraphs” literally--if that is even possible. (The snowy Hats would be halos), This reading sets up an opposition between religion and nature--the human space where Dickinson operates. This is in the poem--I don’t disagree--but my gut tells me there is more.

Some read “snowy Hats” as snow-tipped and “Seraphs” as trees, and that Dickinson persists past summer, into fall and winter when the blooms have fallen, still “reeling” in nature. I also don’t mind that reading. I agree that her inebriation, her poetic inspiration, is everlasting. But interpreting Seraphs as trees is a stretch. The Seraphs are positioned in opposition to nature, they are watching the “little Tippler” at the flowers, so, for me, trees don’t fit. (Nor would clouds, pollen, a white flower.)

The temperance movement was strong at the time, as was the Second Awakening of puritanism. Many were railing against drunkenness and other scandalous behavior. The word "renounce" triggers in my mind a feeling of prudish zeal. Succumbing to peer pressure, perhaps, some Butterflies give up drinking. The white bonnet (picture a Pilgrim woman’s bonnet or a nun’s habit) “swings” as she shakes her head disapprovingly. (See this photo of Lucretia Mott wearing a white bonnet.) If male, he wags his powdered wig. “Seraphs” and “Saints” form a zealous Society. More narrowly for Dickinson, Literary Society condemned (or fixed) her poems which used unconventional grammar and lacked charming rhymes (“pearl does not rhyme with alcohol”*).

Another difficulty with the line is “Till.” Until when? Dickinson “tastes,” she reels, and will “but drink the more” until the Seraphs and Saints see her “Leaning against the -- Sun!” Society, protesting, can't but help "to windows run" and see who or what is making all that racket outside on the street. Dickinson, unrepentant, will keep drinking, keep writing poem after poem in which her liberated art shines as bright as the Sun. I can’t decide whether I think Dickinson is playfully teasing Seraphs and Saints, or if she is furious with them.

Dickinson’s creativity, her intellect (as expressed in her poetry) is “never brewed.” There isn’t an editor or publisher she trusts to oversee the poems’ aesthetic or potency. Inebriation is liberation from convention. She may have cared that Seraphs and Saints misunderstood her genius, but she wasn’t going to let them stop her. If her lamppost is the sun (which she can’t literally lean on) then she is relying on herself, her own artistic sensibility. If she leans against the Sun, then there is implied equality of scale between her and the Sun. And let’s not forget fire (Seraphs**, molten, Sun!) Her creative energy burns, renews; her urge to speak is unslakable.