Beast-Men, Boss Levels and the Impenetrable

Here's a weird one. I don't know if it's describing Gollum or a super-villain, Caliban or Rorschach. (Actually, I'm sure it's none of the above, but I'd love to pretend Elizabeth Bishop was a comic book geek in her spare time, importing the new FF title with the Kirby cover from NYC to South America.)

The Man-Moth

Elizabeth Bishop

          Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.


          But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.


          Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.


          Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.


          Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.


          If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. 




On a tangential note, I often listen to a movie podcast called Battleship Pretension. One of the hosts mentioned he saw quote difficult films endquote as like boss levels of video games, where every time you see the film you're trying to get past that point, beat that level. There are some movies I adore, I may have seen them a dozen times and still can't beat. But every time I enjoy trying. (They were discussing "Blade Runner" at the time, I think, but you could add "Memento" or "Vertigo" or "Chinatown" to that list just as easily.)


Sometimes these are the best poems, the ones you can't quite wrap your head around. Frankly, I don't ever want to unravel it completely, because it's the act of playing that I really enjoy. Reading it, puzzling it out, coming up with theories and counter-theories and getting to keep all the misreadings - that's where the good stuff is at. (If you think "LOST" is tough, try Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" - one of the hardest boss levels I've ever come up against.)


So hopefully, there's some good grist for the mill here. Any particular poems (or movies, or books)  you keep playing and can't beat?