Lately, I've been thinking about bodies. --No, that doesn't mean firm bodies, attractive ones (bodies that make you look over your shoulder or keep you up at night in the dark) but-- more in line with Thoreau's mangled speech when he was heading up Mt Ktaadn, "Earth... made out of Chaos and Old Night... not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland [but] ... Matter, vast, terrific." The awe he felt to be treading such stuff (him, a low-lands man, whose Walden kept him alone but not lonely, whose surrounding Nature was friendly and sweet) transfuses this often-marked passage:
"What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound had become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,--that my body might,--but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them... Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"
He sounds like someone just roused from a dream--the kind of waking you can never really shake off.
(And yet two sentences later, he's talking about how he'd "expected to dine on trout" back at the "batteau" but they weren't biting.... I guess that's understandable. You can't really finish your hike or eat dinner if you stay on that starry surface.)
Talk of mysteries. One gets older (who, me?) and develops a different relationship with one's body. When I was a girl, I mean, I was a horse. And wherever I wanted to gallop or trot, I had to just think it & my body would take me.
Last night, I heard about a man who'd had a heart attack, drove himself two blocks to the hospital, arrived, and promptly died.
He was a distant cousin of mine.
--I tremble to meet them, not the spirits or ghosts: but the bodies, unpredictable, the inseparable insufferable companion you think you know. --And meanwhile, in some back room, it's plotting against you.
(Maybe that's uncharitable: it's just drawing up different maps, and it's arriving at the X long before you think you'll get there.)
--A student tonight joked with me about an answer he'd gotten wrong on the test I'd just given him and his colleagues. I set up the joke, half-wittingly: going over the multiple choice possibilities for the right response, I'd said, "And the answer couldn't be Whitman, 'cos -- he just wouldn't say that." So the student said, "Are you so sure Whitman wouldn't say it? How do you know?" So of course I offered, "If you can get Mr. Whitman to call me, I'll discuss it with him and then we'll see." [Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we? .... Whitman foresaw our reading his work: he saw generations of us, extending into the future...
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Bodies.
Can't live without'em!! (But sometimes it's hard to live with them, they do such strange things.
--Like this whole built-in obsolesence, the rash that pops up, the odd pucker, the gurgle, the night-time repair and unraveling, fed by all that breathing.... ).
Maybe I'm pursuing this avenue tonight because I feel close to Whitman; I feel close to Thoreau. What matter that their bodies lived in another century? Same for lots of other writers I encounter again and again, because I introduce students to them; or one night I'm having trouble sleeping and pull out a book that I've read many times before. Isn't it easy to fancy you know a writer whom you've never met, a contemporary, I mean? Reading is an intimate activity. Poetry is especially intimate, I think, because you're inside the "I," that narrow aperture the poet creates for you... it feels like a snap to assume the subjectivity.
And I guess that's one reason I pursued some of the Yiddish poets, when I'd stumbled on them. I heard their voices, even before I could understand any of the language they were speaking; they were frustrated. No one was paying attention to them (well, hardly anyone!). Their poetry was every bit as good as the American! -- Why didn't people take the time to translate them? --In their cafes down on Broadway or deep into lower Manhattan, they drank tea, smoked, coughed, nibbled hard rolls (drove the proprieters crazy by hanging around for hours and not ordering any real food); read out loud from the newspapers, this one's book being panned, that one's just published, read aloud from their own poems, sat close and poked fingers into one another's faces (of course they did--Yidn, Jews, you talk loud & use your hands... ) And there was one in particular, a fellow named Mikhl Likht, who some poets edged away from while others drew-in closer to... He was the one I felt I really understood: even though his poems are very hard to follow (even the Yiddish natives felt non-plussed): reading him in my "store-bought" Yiddish, I mean, the Yiddish I paid heavy tuition to Columbia to learn, my textbook Yiddish that I felt entitled to instantly know (because didn't my grandparents speak it? live it?)... reading him in that Yiddish, my Yiddish, felt like tuning into a static-y frequency (or like watching the test pattern on a 1940s TV, awaiting it to transmit meaning) (and didn't Jack Spicer say Poetry is radio signals from Mars? ... or some such... )
the whole kit-and-kaboodle in-the-beginning things [bereshisdike zakhn]
with pure reason thoroughly explicated
with history (the Rebbe with his leather whip)
with samovars ships
telephone and radio
...
come come weak eagle come [kum kum shvakhe nesher kum
wrapped in periphrases, rags
schematic hum..... [skematishe gebrum...
--Hey: it's midnight.
Halbe nakkht.
I'll tell you more about these poem fragments tomorrow, and about the poet himself.
Meanwhile, this poet's body needs some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzs...
Comments