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?

Blue Light, Candy and the Power of Voice

One night in western Massachusetts we went out to a poetry open mic and saw this guy Dave Macpherson headline. He was quite good, sort of a mix of slam and free verse poetry. He's probably one of the most spellbinding poets I've ever heard, and I'm including the 10-disc Dylan Thomas set I was given.


The poem itself is pretty good, but the passion and vivid voice acting in his performance was what knocked it out of the park, the twists and turns of the narratives echoed in the rise and fall of inflection.


But I think the best part is the chapbook I bought from him that night: it's got what may be the best title of any book I've ever read. It's called "The Road to Hell Is Paved with Candy."

Blue Light

Dave Macpherson

1. She dances on the lip of the stage to the men below her.
The blue spot finds her and her skin becomes
The turquoise of a Caribbean reef.
The men, with their pointing dollar bills,
Can almost hear the crash of waves
And smell the saltwater forming on their brows.
She dos not see them.
She is movement and light.
She transcends the beer stains and cigarette butts.
Her thoughts are her own,
As she is bathed in a blue light.


2. He pulls his car to the side of the road,
He curses as he puts it in neutral,
And takes out his license and registration.
The flashing light now illuminates his glove compartment.
Any minute now, the trooper will emerge from his car,
And try to smell the three scotch and sodas he had at TJ's.
Where were his breath mints?
If he had his breath mints, he wouldn't lose his license.
The trooper is still in his car.
But he will come, and alter his life with a non-chalant tone,
While bathed in a blue light.


3. So, they hit me with this bright blue beam,
Right before they transported me to their mother ship.
I was just taking the garbage out like I do every Wednesday,
An the circle of light surrounded me.
I didn't know what they wanted. I still don't.
They probed, ya know. Treated me like meat.
Let me tell you, it was not a wonderful experience.
I ain't hanging out waiting for their return.
But in that first moment, I thought it was beautiful.
I thought I was beautiful.
I thought I had been allowed to change,
When I was bathed in the blue light.

Suzanne Vega, My Ex

Fact

Suzanne Vega

It's not the fist, not the
Smack, not the
Black eye
It's the unexpected
Tenderness
That makes you cry.




I love her music and her writing, even if I somehow grew out of it. When her album "Beauty and Crime" came out we drove to Quebec to see her and were thoroughly underwhelmed by the material and the performance. I haven't seen her live or really listened to her music much since. (It's kind of like my very messy and painful breakup with Counting Crows, but that's neither here nor there.)


But I grew up listening to "Tom's Diner" on Ukrainian radio, then fell hard for "Knight Moves" and "Blood Makes Noise." I've covered "Caramel" and "Gypsy" in several bands. But my wife and I were really in the grip of her record "Songs in Red and Grey." 


We had just gotten married and it's a pretty weird record to listen to as newlyweds. It deals mostly with her divorce and the conflicted feelings surrounding it. The album seemed to be her most personal and most painful. (And that's saying something for a writer who thrives on personalities and pain.)


She has a song on there called "Soap and Water" that is haunting and serene, troubled and weightless. It's so weird that something so difficult to write can seem so effortless. 


I hate when people talking about a song divorce the lyrics from the melody, so I'd request you play the link below while you read the lyrics. Otherwise why even bother with songs?

Soap And Water - Suzanne Vega

Soap and Water

Suzanne Vega

Soap and water

take the day from my hand
scrub the salt from my stinging skin
slip me loose of this wedding band


Soap and water
hang my heart on the line
scour it down in a wind of sand
bleach it clean to a vinegar shine


Daddy's a dark riddle
Mama's a headful of bees
you are my little kite
carried away in the wayward breeze


Soap and water
wash the year from my life
straighten all that we trampled and tore
heal the cut we call husband and wife


Daddy's a dark riddle
Mama's a handful of thorns
you are my little kite
caught up again in the household storms


Daddy's a dark riddle
Mama's a headful of bees
you are my little kite
carried away in the wayward breeze 

There Are Worse Ways to Get Old

Many apologies, faithful readers - coming up on the end of vacation and things have been busy. I promise to pull double-duty when I get back and ensure there's a post for every day I missed.


Today I've got a little something about aging. (A visit to my 90-year-old grandfather is to thank, I guess.)


I don't think I've talked yet about T.S. Eliot in this blog, but he was the Big Bang that jump-started me into poetry. I had always enjoyed poetry as a kid in that nursery-rhyme sing-song way. I thought "Casey at the Bat" was the bomb, and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was pretty cool, especially the whole Nightmare Queen who shows up at the end, all very comic-book and cool. ("Tales of the Black Freighter", the comic-within-a-comic from "Watchmen" owes a big debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)


But nothing really switched me on until I read "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I'd never heard a poem like it, forceful and muscular rhythms, but the things the narrator described really matched the dour Augustinian philosophy I was growing into. Never you mind that the speaker (and the poet, for that matter) was a nebbishy, ineffectual man who tended to get pushed around and push back in passive-aggressive ways.


Both the content and the technique blew my face off, and ignited a search for the next thing that could make me as excited and passionate as "Prufrock." To this day, I find the rhythms and repetitive play of Eliot's verse making its way into my writing. These days it's mostly osmosis and remnants of that first explosion of poetry, but at times in my life it's been a very conscious and scrupulous imitation of his style and habits.


I'll talk a lot more about Eliot's poems throughout this blog, mostly because I can't help myself - like the music of U2 or Christopher Nolan's films, I can't seem to keep from circling back around to them time and again.


This one, if I recall correctly, was partially inspired by the aging Edward Fitzgerald, translator of the very famous Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The epigram at the beginning is from "Measure for Measure." And if you feel the need (as I do) to track down every last source and reference Eliot cribbed from, here's a good starting place.

Gerontion

T. S. Eliot

Thou hast nor youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both.

HERE I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.


Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;


By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.


After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.


The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.


Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.






I can't add very much, considering the strength and power of the imagery, but I will say that I love Eliot's historical imagination at play, especially in the service of something as pointed as this. From Thermopylae to the conquest of the Americas, from museums to deserted alleyways, I love the ability to peer inside his mind and see the geography and wide-ranging subjects he employs to create the portrait.


There aren't many things from my childhood or adolescence that have held up in my critical judgment. But I can't imagine a time when T.S. Eliot will fail to live up to my expectations, or stop firing my imagination.

Hatred and Courtesy

I wrote this a few years back when I worked in a grocery/pharmacy. It was one of my first "big boy jobs," meaning one not on a campus of some kind. I had a lot of time to think in that kind of mechanical job, where it only requires scanning bar codes, bagging items and giving change.

I thought about the things we teach kid right from the beginning of their being able to speak: please, thank you, you're welcome. And how these little graces are a lubricant that keeps everyone's self-interest and selfishnes from rubbing up against everybody else's self-interest and selfishness.

Especially in the South, where I spent a lot of time growing up, these kinds of outward signs of deference and politeness are there almost by design to keep dislike and social stresses from bubbling to the surface. It's the only place I know of where "bless their heart" can soften literally any gossip or slander. ("Lord knows she's the biggest whore this side of Texas, bless her heart.")

I feel a lot of it also has to do with racial stresses, and the veneer of courtesy serves both to hide outward signs of that divide even as it provides a makeshift framework to allow a deeply wounded and distrustful society to function.

It's not at all a bad thing: in the U.S. anyone can joke or make small talk with other people in line at the bank or grocery store. But it can literally take years of relationship-building to move past the surface and into someone's thoughts and emotions. In eastern Europe the common greeting in a store is, "I'm listening." (Meaning, whaddya want and get out of here.) But it's a very fast process to become a part of someone's life and circle of friends, especially in a society where hospitality and gift-giving are a hallmark of cultured behavior.

So this poem about the dance of courtesy and outward signs of respect doesn't really get into those areas, but that's the place it came from.

"This delicate dance we do..."

Matt Quarterman

This delicate dance we do -
contrived, surely, the steps long set
(a pavane perhaps, or a courtly step),
but the emotion shines through
in unexpected moments.
And there is still, as always,
some limited freedom in the moves.

The reverential hush dancers
hold their bodies in
is fitting for even such a
commonplace routine.
At its best, these exchanges
are proof enough of grace,
where artifical courtesy can keep
violent transactions in their place.

As we brush past each other
with a nod and a bow,
these social graces may be
more than elegance
and give even these mundane exchanges
some hint, however removed,
of the holy.

Gods and Monsters

I seem to be watching a lot of science fiction on vacation - last night was Duncan Jones' "Moon" which was really quite well done, and then Tarkovky's "Solaris" today during which I had to be kicked throughout in order to stay awake.

For some reason I thought of this poem. I first heard it in on Halloween last year when we were driving down the California coast to see some friends and listened to some poetry podcasts to stay awake. It's made even spookier by the author's reading style - flat, eerily flat. Not a monotone, but a disquieting stillness and it just freaked me the heck out. I've been haunted by it ever since.

Magnificat

Eleanor Wilner

When he had suckled there, he began   

to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms,   

but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet   

milk she could not keep from filling her,   

from pouring into his ravenous mouth,   

and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy   

feeding its own extinction . . . soon he was   

huge, towering above her, the landscape,   

his shadow stealing the color from the fields,      

even the flowers going gray. And they came   

like ants, one behind the next, to worship   

him—huge as he was, and hungry; it was   

his hunger they admired most of all.   

So they brought him slaughtered beasts:   

goats, oxen, bulls, and finally, their own   

kin whose hunger was a kind of shame      

to them, a shrinkage; even as his was      

beautiful to them, magnified, magnificent.      

   

The day came when they had nothing left   

to offer him, having denuded themselves   

of all in order to enlarge him, in whose   

shadow they dreamed of light: and that      

is when the thought began to move, small   

at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally,   

it broke out into words, so loud they thought   

it must be prophecy: they would kill him,      

and all they had lost in his name would return,   

renewed and fresh with the dew of morning.   

Hope fed their rage, sharpened their weapons.   

   

And who is she, hooded figure, mourner now   

at the fate of what she fed? And the slow rain,      

which never ends, who is the father of that?      

And who are we who speak, as if the world   

were our diorama—its little figures moved   

by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers,   

spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history   

under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity   

that no one any longer wants to see,   

excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds   

on air, grows daily on radio waves, in cyberspace,      

who sows darkness like a desert storm,   

who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms,

who touches the hills, and they smoke.

Sure, you could argue this is horror and not science fiction, but no accounting for synapses firing. 

There's a grace and ineluctable fascination mixed with terror, along with a Cormac McCarthy-esque vagueness that's made all the more specific and frightening due to the lack of details. The word choice, rhythms, the story that's being woven... Man, it's just fantastic. 

In lesser hands it would seem pretty sophomoric: "There was a monster that terrorized the whole country! Children were lost to it!" Oh, wait, that's also the start of "Beowulf." I don't know of many poems like this one, unless you count "The Raven" or some of the more gruesome Baudelaire also-rans, but this one has no right to be as incredible as it is.

A Bookmark in My Back Pages

I've been killing time tonight while doing a bunch of tech stuff for my brother's computer. He's got a ton of books lying around, which is always an endearing quality in a person. Since he was a philosophy major a lot are pretty highfalutin' too - like an introduction to Derrida I finally made my way through.

But one of the cool finds tonight was a trove of the old textbooks we used in high school, especially lit anthologies and one ("The Humanities") that taught me most of what I know about aesthetics. (If you're reading this, Mrs. B. aren't you proud of me? Well, you ought to be.) As I flipped through a few, I realized how much my poetic sensibilities were shaped early on by the authors and selections in these books and others like it.

And as much as I may look on some of those poems and authors as childish or passé, they were big formative steps to learning and appreciating poetry, both for my education and for my life. Here's one that had a very distinct effect on my tastes for a while, partially because of the (not very good) Simon & Garfunkel song.

Richard Cory

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, 
We people on the pavement looked at him: 
He was a gentleman from sole to crown, 
Clean-favoured and imperially slim. 


And he was always quietly arrayed, 
And he was always human when he talked; 
But still he fluttered pulses when he said, 
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked. 


And he was rich, yes, richer than a king, 
And admirably schooled in every grace: 
In fine -- we thought that he was everything 
To make us wish that we were in his place. 


So on we worked and waited for the light, 
And went without the meat and cursed the bread, 
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 
Went home and put a bullet in his head. 




It's not fantastic, but it does catch you off guard if you're not expecting it. (Which, if you're not a high school student, you probably were.) And that sudden shift into very dark territory and the bigger questions that are raised - that's still something I appreciate. See my very first post, the one on Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," to see what I mean.


I feel that just like with sex, epic film trilogies, or Steven King novels, the ending is the thing. If you can't stick the landing the rest of the routine doesn't seem as worthwhile. Sure, there were thrills and chills, twists and turns, double-crosses and car chases and metaphysics galore. But if that last act leaves an odd aftertaste, it seems to cheapen everything before it.


So it's no masterpiece of world literature, or even of American literature. It may not even make the Top 10 Poems from Maine category. But it stuck with me, gave me something to gnaw on for a year or two and led me in some good directions. (Those directions, incidentally, tended not to point towards more E.A. Robinson works.)


Here's another poem from those days, one that I didn't get then and probably still don't get now.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip 
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. 
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress 
As they are used to wear, and let the boys 
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. 
Let be be finale of seem. 
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


Take from the dresser of deal, 
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet 
On which she embroidered fantails once 
And spread it so as to cover her face. 
If her horny feet protrude, they come 
To show how cold she is, and dumb. 
Let the lamp affix its beam. 
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.




Kids, get your allowance money: the death truck is coming!


It amuses me now, but I had a pretty adverse reaction to Stevens back then, mostly because I didn't feel I could stomach what I saw as his I'm-better-than-you atheism where life is so much grander without God. I tend to appreciate his elegance and understatement, his combination of the bizarre and the ordinary. He refused to tie himself down to a single meaning on this one, which I applaud. Nothing ruins art (or an inside joke) more than having it explained to you: the Maltese Falcon was a sled! 


Clownwater!