(Emi Honda, Scott Evans, Jordan Mackenzie)--------------
Here's Anne Carson on Emily Bronte:
Whacher is what she was.
She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.
She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.
Beautiful stuff. Especially "the bars of time, which broke."
-The barely perceived bars of time, stoically and heroically whached by Bronte.
-Actual weather.
-The poor core of the world.
What micro-vision perceives this near-invisible architectonic, these translucent specter-like bars of time, all waving and floating in the soul-cosmos?
Who states that the core of the world is "poor", and resists bedazzling the thing with mighty molten, and rebellious Satan, and vast chambers for plotting and war?
Dickinson?
Woolf?
Carson?
Akhmatova?
I am thinking too of Emi Honda's art?
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Is the woman's gaze pre-determined to be micro and mystic?
No. It just seems that way.
But shit: Lord Nelson/Trafalgar/Middle-Earth be damned, that gaze is the good gaze...The micro gaze is the good gaze...
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I have always felt this sense, when reading Dickinson, for example, that the interior mechanisms of the world were being perpetually and minutely mapped out. Here:
She slept beneath a tree
Remembered but by me.
I touched her cradle mute [...]
This poem is not about "the lady of Shallot". It is not about any muse, not about a muse to inspire both feats of verse, and feats of grandeur and epic heroism. It is about a Tulip. It sleeps beneath a tree. Only the speaker records its sway, its undulations under the bows of whatever nameless tree it roots by. The speaker is mute, speechless, as she touches it.
Beautiful stuff.
Or here:
The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring.
She felt herself supremer, --
A raised, ethereal thing.
You, speaker, are some raised and ethereal thing. Good guts to state it. For who else might see that sly finger of the sun slyly caress that hopeful twit, the morning? Only an elevated, spectral and ethereal thing might view that. The morning cuckolded; except, of course, that the morning is feminine and the sun is on a macho schedule, first for the dawn, second to the noon, and lastly to lie with his husky, booze-breathed darling, the dusk.
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And is this all "metaphysical"? I have never understood that phrase. It seems self-serving, like a rooster scratching his claws in a yard, his puffy red chest blooming in the sun. Rooster-y, if you know what I mean.
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And who, to now return to Carson, is seeing these broken bars of time? Carson? Bronte? Carson through Bronte?
Yes, that's it, Carson through Bronte. That's one objective shred of beauty in literature. What a beautiful thing it is to bend time. To bend a century or two and to fall back into Bronte's lap. Bend a few millenniums and walk around with that Alpha-poet who sang of ships and gore and dusty Hector's corpse! Though I would be self-silenced, jittery and nerve-stricken. Hopefully I have in my pocket a copy of Hamlet.
And the "whached". As if Carson is smiling at Bronte, a tacit recognition that she can smile through time at her. A recognition, within herself, that she can speak to the darkness. That she is a real poet. To steal a bite from Joseph Brodsky: like Tsvetavea writing to dead Rilke. She can speak in a myriad of tongues, and even speak the word of Bronte, that word being "Whached".
And it brings to mind Dylan's line: "Shakespeare, he's in the alley". But when Dylan places mere Shakespeare in the back-alley of his mind, it's a snide and self-assured sneer, and a poetic acknowledgment both of Shakespeare's greatness and Dylan (and his scene)'s greater greatness. As if to say, "I will put him wherever I want." Shakespeare, he's in the outhouse. Shakespeare, he's in the drunk tank. It's a one way edict, and Shakespeare's dust cannot mount a retort, much less set it to a catchy beat.
Carson has more of a dialogue going on. Dialogue is a gift, from Zeus.
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It is not Shakespeare that makes us human, it is the reading of Shakespeare. The bending of time. Just as it is the reading of Achebe, for me, that bends space. Time=classics. Space=other. Time and Space. These are the two dimensions of literature.
I bend the paths of space, the many thousands of miles between me and Achebe, when I think of his words.
Carson seems to be more into time than space. I have never understood time, except in the sense that it both destroys and reveals, like snails on fresh unpaved pavement, reveling, not revealing, in the sunny second before the steamroller's shadow falls upon their spines.
And I only understand Time Revealer and Time Destroyer because I went to university for a while. They aren't natural ideas.* They are "Milton" ideas.
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Anyways: Wonderful creatures: amongst the best: by that I mean they can eat lunch with Shakespeare in Heaven and interrupt his holding court, grill him on Titus (?), weep for Cordelia and sing a song for Ophelia.
Thus, I deign to wonder: What does Shakespeare think when he reads these following lines, again taken from Anne Carson's The Glass Essay?
I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.
It could have been just a pole with some cloth attached,
But as I came closer
I saw it was a human body.
trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off
the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind
was cleaning the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.
The essay ends with this beautiful-seraphim/eschatological-angel on the horizon. It is the body of us all. Feminism is an "us". It is for us all. The micro-gaze flows within the intramission of that sight. We can see the micro in the Tulip. We can hear it revealed in the good Coltrane, or the subtle shifts in any good drone. A drone, to me, should always mimic the opening of a spring flower.
And what can we make of this "light"? Is it the light of the renaissance? Surely not! Surely not some empirical light, for that same light is the monster's candle: it illuminated the judge's drawing, just as it illuminated the horrors that, in Sebaldian terms, continue to suck us back into a black hole of unknowing, of Auschwitz and Ivory. Its gravitational pull is so immense it is invisible. It is, in fact, not light, but the antithesis of light.
Against reason.
Not Against Nature.
And when I think of this light, Carson's light, I feel as if swaddled in a birthing light.
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This essay is, roughly, and jazzily, about woman poets, and a consistency of vision that I perceive in their works. There still, in 2009, aren't enough woman poets of renown (I do not have my ear to the ground) to make generalizing statements worthless--just as we might say something singular about 19th century Russian poetry. Argue that point if you have the energy--I know I can be made wrong, but it's important to the health and vitality of this essay that I ignore my ignorance, and just stick to this thread. I accept too, that in acknowledging a certain tradition, I enforce and ensure that this tradition exists. Thus, to be transgressive, I should be applauding those women who write like Milton. But, I say, Milton is a complete asshole, and the micro gaze is the good gaze.
And even if it is about a certain strand of women's writing, it is also about threads, and one of these threads seems to be a desire to delineate gender, to delete the conditions that create gender, that subordinate and hem in and, most importantly, that live to classify. I speak here of those impulses that salivate over terms, and limits, and barriers, and zones of the mind. Here's Dickinson's take on big hermeticism:
Arcturus is his other name,-
I'd rather call him star!
It's so unkind of science
To go and interfere!
I pull a flower from the woods, -
A monster with a glass
Computes the stamens in a breath
And has her in a class.
Indeed: that same (but not same) "monster" with a glass...this monster also walks the eschatological wastes of the Blood Meridian: that same judge, the judge who classifies a thing and then destroys it; a thing, a bird, a creature, its freedom serving to insult that vaunted, and macro, sense of the domineering human. It is a thing's freedom that rankles. Remember this.
"Definitions blur", to quote Carson, in her introduction to Euripides' Alkestis. If "Life and Death" can blur, (as it does in the play), then why not every other phenomenon real and imagined? It is the blurring that rankles.
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I will end by resurrecting Carson's image of that body that walks out of the light. This body, Carson's body, her body and yet not her body, that walks out of the light: it is not a woman's body. It is certainly not a man's body. It resists classification. Lines are blurred. WIthin this blurring exists a kind of rankling freedom.
A tulip is a tulip, is a small thing, is a connected thing, is a thing that a small tree shadows. And what shadows that tree, but a summer cloud in some stratosphere? And on and on into the celestial gardens.
Rankling freedom and its infinite connections; nothing can really be hermetically sealed. Nothing is a binary. In the world of ones and zeroes there really is just ones, not one one, but a trillion small ones.
Hear Woolf:
It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. [...] And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. [..] There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer.
I think I understand, if anything, this line about freedom and peace. One must not construct in anger, though the world provides for construction an endless array of fuels for outrage. Rather, one must construct using the last dying embers of righteous indignation withering in the soul of one's conscience, and one must also construct with an eye to the pink dawn. Soft anger, wild new hope, stillness of dawn, rankling freedom. Blurring definitions, with a gaze that is against Nation, against Milton, against systems and didactic talk, and forever and ever against the desecration of the Mysteries.
