Poetry & Panic

12 downloads 617 Views 124KB Size Report
Brian Henry's Quarantine, which is comprised of two long poems ... off by its subject, I was caught up in the language's hypnotic cadences, even as I was ...
Rusty Morrison

Poetry & Panic 1. Brian Henry’s Quarantine, which is comprised of two long poems “Quarantine” and “Contagion,” is a collection that panicked me. I read it in the weeks following my father’s death, when I was not only stricken with loss, but also with remorse. Even though I’d taken my father to the doctor immediately when he suddenly grew ill with what turned out to be pneumonia, and then stayed with him in his hospital room for the last three days of his life, I’d not been able to communicate, in words, all of the things I’d hoped someday to express to him. It was always my father’s nature to leave the most difficult communications unspoken, especially those involving deep feelings. We’d never even had a serious talk about what he actually believed about death. I knew he’d signed those “no extreme measures” forms at least a year prior to his death, but even that did not bring about a conversation on the subject. It had been my intention, for years, to speak to him directly about all the subjects he’d taught me to avoid with him. Yet, in those last days with him in the hospital, I could only offer the same silence to him that he had taught me. After his death, the last thing I’d wanted to read was a book about a difficult loss. Yet, I did pick up Henry’s book. Before I could be put off by its subject, I was caught up in the language’s hypnotic cadences, even as I was dis-comforted, arrested, panicked by the ways the meanings in Henry’s simple language could slip, could seep from the containment of his equally simple syntax and thus subvert my understanding of what the poem was saying to me. I suspect that even if I hadn’t recently experienced a troubling death, the form and subject of Henry’s book would have unsettled me. Quarantine gives voice to a corpse abandoned in the midst of a catastrophic, population-decimating plague that seemingly was transmitted through illicit intimate contact. Here is the beginning of the book:

P l e i a d e s — 1 17

By the time the sun touched the grass beneath my back where I lay beside my wife and son who seemed to be breathing a fog of breath I thought hung above each mouth I knew I had died and was dead though thinking through where I was as if the thinking could bring me where death is not an is instead of where I found myself

As I’m compelled from line to line, my panic is met by fascination as I watch the ways that his seemingly direct thought progressions disperse, echo, oppose their own embodiment. Even though the speaker’s descriptions of death, and of ensuing guilt, rub painfully against my own personal experiences, I can’t stop reading. I hear the poignancy, the tedium, the repressive self-reproach, and vitriolic desire for retaliation that an ego, trapped in its corpse, and still enslaved to its fears and compulsions, might repeat endlessly. It is a perfect conceit to use to interrogate the living-death that we each suffer when trapped in our obsessions. But Henry pushes far beyond such allegory: No one wants to take the bodies away if I were not dead I would not touch me alive or dead I would not touch me

And, from an early section of Quarantine: An attempt at truth when truth is what is most difficult to hold down the three bodies in the grass stable there as they we lose composition and become an else a handful of elses in a field beneath the moon as it is replaced by the sun now risen above the trees

P l e i a d e s —1 1 8

Henry’s doubling up of pronouns and other odd grammatical choices, and his meaning-shifts after enjambment and sometimes midline—all of these intensify and reconstitute the speaker’s obsession with the circumstances that lead to his death. Such formal stutterings and repetitions exemplify the way our minds can hold us hostage; it’s painfully clear that the speaker is restricting what he can let himself understand about his break with the social mores that demand heterosexuality and familial responsibility, his guilt at the cost of his actions, and his unrelenting fury at himself and at everyone and everything of the world that has abandoned him to his fate. It is difficult to demonstrate the power of this work in excerpts; only reading the full text would allow one to enter the speaker’s position fully and to feel the obsessive conflicts that rage unrelentingly within him. For me, the work’s motion created a small but intensely sharp panic that pierced and aerated my own personal experience— which was my guilt at standing by as my father faced in silence whatever fear his dying brought to life in him. From Henry’s depiction of the inability to break from wracking guilt, I received the insight to see into my own guilt, and begin to break from the most tyrannical repudiations that this emotion can engender. Of course, this is a very personal reading of a text that is open to many readings, many interpretations. But this openness is at the heart of its value. There are the discursive arguments raised by the text—arguments pitting responsibility to one’s own desires against one’s accountability to the needs of the group, which invoke the most basic and all-consuming questions of morality and freedom. But they are not presented directly in the voice of the speaker. Instead, the reader is left to appreciate and apprehend her own answers however she will, as she weighs the impact that this voice’s limitations bring to bear upon her own beliefs. In this there is some recourse from the relentless sadness, fear, and recrimination in the poem’s monologue. Henry’s text offers a voice freighted with death’s finalities—narrow in scope, minimalist in presentation, quarantined from the solace of rejoinder or recapitulation. Yet, in hearing that voice, and acknowledging the panic that it brought forth in me, I felt myself become more alive to the demands of human existence, and more adept at intuitively responding to them.

P l e i a d e s — 1 19

2. Since reading Quarantine, I’ve begun to look for other books that might cause a similar sense of panic—of startled confusion or disquieting disorientation. Is it hyperbole to say that reading certain kinds of poems can cause panic? For me, the word “panic” catches the quickness and surprise, the lurching and vertiginous quality that I recognize when a piece of writing overwhelms my typical systems of comprehension, when I feel the comforts of my usual thinking processes desert me, when the ground begins to shift beneath my expectations. And, I appreciate that “panic” brings to mind the name of “Pan.” The physical features of the Arcadian shepherd god—with his upper body of a man and lower body of a goat—are commensurate with my image of a mind being carried off by the robust physicality of instinct. Recent work in the field of neuroscience demonstrates that instinct presents itself to us in our emotional responses to circumstances, and that those emotional responses—panic, fear, pleasure, excitement, etc.—are actually rich with past knowledge. Jonah Lehrer, who has written extensively about the practical application of discoveries in neuroscience, calls it “the surprising wisdom of our emotions.” In a sense, instinct, or call it Pan, carries us where our past experiences suggest we should go, well before our logic would be able to figure out which direction to travel or how best to get there. And, of all the emotions we experience, nothing draws our full involvement as quickly as panic. 3. Another word that begins with “pan-” (but, this time, the prefix means “all inclusive”) seems relevant to this discussion, since poems that arouse panic create a “pandemonium” in my heart and mind (borrowing the word John Milton coined, which has come to signify a place where all are engaged in uproar and dissonance). But a poem offering pandemonium needn’t sustain the hell of lawless confusion. Rather, it can open me to the unimaginable, offering the opportunity to see what new ordering of understanding might assert itself. I should clarify that I don’t believe any poem (those that induce a surge of panic included) can offer a “panacea”—an all-encompassing cure to any of life’s ills. I certainly don’t intend to cast poets as snakeP l e i a d e s —1 2 0

oil salesmen or saleswomen. Instead of offering panaceas, I imagine the poet who has written a poem that induces panic (in at least some readers) is recording—through the process of writing—his or her own groping toward new openings, new alternatives. I can imagine writers working with their own panic, which may come as a result of life experiences that they then attempt to reanimate and further pursue through their writing’s unfolding. And, I can imagine that some writers are attempting to engage with the panic stirred up in the act of writing itself. I don’t think they see their poems as creations of a perfectlyadapted and adoptable expression of either reality or identity, but rather as offering an opportunity for the reader (and for themselves) to face into whatever language can show them, letting this experience provoke all manner of opportunity. George Oppen, in discussing the process of writing poems, tells us that when “the man [sic] writing is frightened by a word, he may have started.” To find a true beginning is to leave everything familiar behind and enter the dauntingly unknown. I would suggest that actively-engaged reading of the kind I’ve been discussing is akin to writing in this sense, and that poetry, with its rhythms, assonance, abrupt shifts, and aural surprises, is particularly effective at taking advantage of our ears’ and eyes’ immediate and involuntary receptivity to this kind of emotionally provocative material. 4. Is it possible that by attuning to the slight inrush of panic in reading, I might train myself to become more intuitive in adapting to crises in real life? To appreciate why seeking panic-inducing reading experiences might have this effect, it’s useful to consider recent work done by neuroscientists who are studying when, and how, insight arrives. Many have an interest in the moments that follow the arrival of panic. Even though the mind is not inclined to think logically or creatively when riveted by this emotion, panic’s jolt of intensity has been seen to precede the instance when the mind finds an entirely new ordering of reason. Such instances of re-ordering allow the mind to adapt to what had seemed to be an impossible or impassible conundrum. In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer’s study of decision-making and the mind, he quotes Mark Jung-Beeman, a cognitive psychologist at Northwestern University, who explains, “Insight requires a clean slate” and panic P l e i a d e s — 1 21

is an excellent slate-cleaner. Of course, to remain caught and stifled by the throes of panic is to fail to use it as an opportunity to find new solutions. But we’ve all heard the stories of people who have let their intuition guide them out of a panic-filled crisis. Most memorable to me is Wag Dodge, a forest firefighter who lived through a flash fire that none of his team survived. Everyone else ran. Instead, he had the sudden, unheard-of idea to lie down. Then he lit a match and burned the grass around him, and covered his face with a dampened cloth. He called out to the other firefighters, telling them to try his idea, but no one listened. He said later that he couldn’t have explain, even to himself, where this idea had come from or why he suddenly felt so sure about it. Though it was a re-constellation of bits of information he knew, it was nothing anyone had done before. Now it is taught to all forest fire fighters. In extreme circumstances, how do we find in our panic the adaptability to make the leap of insight beyond our own previous reasoning skills, beyond our previous limitations? Neuroscientists report that to practice seeking insight in unusual or unexpected ways, and from unexpected sources, can strengthen our ability to access that intuitive acuity. Certainly, this is an apt description of what happens when we read poetry that upsets our normal pathways to meaning. And, interestingly enough, the part of our brain that is most active when any kind of insight comes to us is, in fact, the same part that we each put to work when we engage in complex forms of literary discernment. Using brain imaging techniques to test for insight, Jung-Beeman and John Kunios, a cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University, have determined that a particular fold of tissue in the right brain, called the “anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG)” “becomes unusually active in the second before” an insight occurs. This, Jung-Beeman explains, is the same area of the brain’s right hemisphere that is linked to subtle as well as overarching aspects of language comprehension—such as the interpretation of metaphors, the processing of jokes, the detection of literary themes. These cells in the right hemisphere are more “broadly tuned” than those in the left, and they collect “information from a larger area of cortical space.” As Lehrer puts it “when the brain is searching for an insight, these are the cells that are most likely to produce it.” What we call new ideas are actually heavily dependent upon the reconstitution of thoughts already present, which the brain P l e i a d e s —1 2 2

has collected together in new ways from its cortical space. Thanks to the brain’s ability to refer back to a large number of disparate pieces of information, it can learn to see new ways of orchestrating its understanding. This is the way that people come up with stunningly new insights in a crisis that let them survive life-threatening situations. Linking new material with what had seemed to be unrelated ideas held in working memory, or simply reordering the mix of old material in radically new conceptualizations: these create what we experience as a flash of insight. It seems reasonable at least to posit that a poem—one that challenges a reader’s usual emotional equanimity or typical systems of thought—can offer the right brain’s “superior temporal gyrus” an opportunity to practice arriving at such flashes. Though the reader must hold in her working memory what may seem to be a disorienting array of information when following such a poem, she also receives the poet’s surprising means of modulating, managing, regrouping that amalgam. The leap, the deep step, that the reader is taking with the poet into the poem may seem dizzying, but the process of following such steps may be wonderfully instructive, even if the arresting interfaces between ideas may initially induce in the reader what I am calling panic. Is it too much for me to suggest that reading for the panic—or for the Pan-ic—in poetry might help a person later, when she is in the midst of a life crisis? Certainly, I have no studies to corroborate this. But I can refer to Jonah Lehrer’s quoting of Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at M.I.T. who tells us that “epiphany registers as a new pattern of neural activity…[and] [o]nce that restructuring occurs, you never go back.” It’s at least an intriguing to conjecture that the patterns of neural activity a reader generates when she’s adapting to appreciating a particular poem that initially panics and disorients her—and thus increases her ability to incorporate new ways to frame old information— will be useful to her at other times in her life, especially if she is looking for this possibility, and thus leaves herself more open to its occurrence. 5. A book that I’d like to think has been a catalyst for increasing my own neural resourcefulness is C. D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining. Her book-length poem might be called a travelogue through the South, P l e i a d e s — 1 23

though in it she is also reporting an impulse by impulse, instinct by instinct, or “instanter” by “instanter” (to use Charles Olson’s term for poetry’s “split second acts”) journey into perception. It is a foray that exposes much more of the cacophony of competing stimuli, memories, beliefs than I normally allow to enter the focus that I discern as conscious attention. By opening wider the screen on this unwieldy onrush, Wright offers me an opportunity to consider the selective processes that my own mind uses, of necessity, to filter the material that coalesces into awareness. Open the window. That the glory cloud may come and go. Inside the iris of time, the iridescent dreaming kicks in. Turn off that stupid damn machine. Kepler’s invention of the camera lucida fell into oblivion some two hundred years. There is no avoiding oblivion. Where does this damn stupid thing go. For god’s sake. Are you sure you want to wear that. Especially in this one-stoplight town. Watch out for the “swerve of smalltown eyes.” (Agee) Feel them trained on you in uni son. Boiled peanuts. Now that is an acquired taste. Once the eye is enucleated. Would you replace it with wood, ivory, bone, or a precious stone. Who invented the glass eye. Guess. The Venetians. Of course. Go to Venice; bring me back a mason jar of glass eyes. They shall multiply like shadfies.

Even as such paratactics disrupt my expectations—bewildering me to the point of panic—Wright lures me to attend closely to these strange ghostings and disorienting observations with her wryly playful, conversational phrasings. And her diaristic reportage lets me feel I am her intimate. P l e i a d e s —1 2 4

Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining is an excellent example of the kind of literature that Italo Calvino applauded in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium—literature that shows us the value of attending to the “communication between things that are different simply because they are different.” Without it, the “fantastically speedy, widespread media” saturating our experience can too easily “triumph” over our powers of discernment by “flattening all communication into a single homogeneous surface.” As Calvino explains, we need literature that is “not blunting but even sharpening the differences.” With respect to all manner of differences, Wright’s work is both dispossessed of expected normalcy and resonant with strange familiarities: If I shell those beans for you, will you cook a mess for me. There goes Hannah behind that cloudlet

And: Saucer of light on the wall the hand of god

That otherness—with its suggestive allusions to death—so casually referenced, seen as so close at hand, may induce a slight rush of panic in some, disbelief in others. For me, such writing emulates, even legitimizes, experiences that I had after my parents’ deaths: I would sense my mother or my father’s presence. Often, this happened in the midst of an otherwise mundane activity—like stepping outside with the trash in the evening, or putting washed silverware back into the drawer. Such quiet moments seemed to trigger in me a hyper-awareness of the uncanny, of the absent who suddenly seemed present. I don’t mean to suggest that Wright’s work has loss at its center; this reading of her work is a personal one, which would be exhausting to attempt to corroborate here. But I do believe there is a delicacy and expansiveness in the ways that she listens for and acknowledges the absent, the impossible, the outlandish, while allowing each its panoply of potential meaning and emotional range. Here, shock and mirth and abundant sensuality meet each other but do not merge. And, whatever happens may spin into and out of control, with respect paid to both directions. “When you go to pee, shut your eyes and grab a tree.” P l e i a d e s — 1 25

Wright begins Deepstep Come Shining with lines from Shakespeare: Lear: …you see how this world goes. Gloucester: I see it feelingly.

The synesthesia of seeing “feelingly” is helpful advice for traveling Wright’s road trip—“O lucky stars. / Motel 6 left its light on for us. Remember you are nothing / without credit”—which is chock full of improbable lore, custom, and injunction that might have been lifted from an occult country almanac, or a swamp doctor’s book of remedies, or a slightly deranged code of worker etiquette: A ghost has hair. That’s right.

or Odontokeratoprosthesis: a tooth for an eye. A gruesome procedure, but not a bad trade.

or Employees must pluck out an eye before returning to work.

By presenting such lines without explanation or apology, Wright seduces with the charm of their mystery. Expressed, too, with the wittiness of parody, is the power that a belief or rule exudes when it comes as part of the tradition that any long-standing community creates and asserts, and which becomes so difficult for its members to question. Since Wright grew up in Arkansas, she is enough of an insider in the southern landscape to overhear its deepest secrets and to mimic some of them, with her wry, candid humor. And, she is enough of an outsider to understand the shock value, as well as the canny resonances that each acquires when it is cast adrift from the kindred meanings and mores that usually keep it safe from scrutiny. Wright’s displaced and displacing images, aphorisms, memories, mental banter, literary and historical references, travel bulletins, and lore have given me an excellent opportunity to consider how the onrush of external stimulus mingles with the store of meanings that a person builds up over a lifetime. I begin to sense the poignancy of it P l e i a d e s —1 2 6

all; how fleeting and how unconscious is each choice we make regarding what we tune in, and what we tune out. Yet the accumulation has such an enormous impact upon us, and weighs in so heavily on all future decisions we’ll make for managing our attention, and for acting upon our environment. What is tuned out won’t be kept in mental storage, and so can never be evaluated or used. And what’s kept is forever understood based upon the perspective we had when it entered our perception. Watching Wright expose the ego’s adaptations as she opens her field of perception to so many captivatingly unexpected coherencies and dis-coherencies feels like taking lessons in “deepstep”-ping into a wider and wider perception stream. Sometimes I’m in over my head, and there’s the taste of panic, but it often is followed by the excitement of discerning uncanny harmonies in the flow of what at first seems like a flood of cacophonous external stimulation and internal responses. Following her, I believe I’ve become more attuned to the ways I manage my own stream of information, and more aware of how my pre-conceptions temper that flow. 6. Of course, I realize it is unorthodox to suggest that reading poetry can increase one’s adaptability to all manner of real life experiences, especially those that induce panic. I have to acknowledge that the next experience of panic, however it comes to me, will be entirely new, and entirely disruptive to my systems of balance. That is, of course, the nature of panic: no matter how well I’ve incorporated the lessons of my past, panic comes on whenever I face something that seems to be unlike anything I’ve known before. I can almost hear Pan laughing at any comfort I might want to take from my speculations, and I can nearly sense an uproar of hilarity rising from the dark halls where pandemonium reigns far beneath my feet. In fact, listening for that Pan-ic laughter and hellish uproariousness may be the most valuable insight I’ve gained from my interest in poems that disrupt my equanimity. Thanks to Brian Henry, C.D. Wright and other poets like them, maybe I’m just more willing to stay alert to the fact that there is often another perspective—maybe deeper or wider, darker or brighter—to use to view a crisis, another deepstep to take into alternative, even when I panic because the syntax of my experience has begun again to rupture. P l e i a d e s — 1 27