Two Poems by Melinda Smith [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Here are two poems, "Stendhal Syndrome" and "Fugal State," from Canberra based poet Melinda Smith, both taken from her most recent collection Man-Handled (2020). Smith won the  2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call.

 

 

Stendhal syndrome is a curious phenomenon in which a person suffers dysautonomic symptoms, such as tremors and fainting, in the presence of works of art. Reading about the condition reminded me of the great opening passage of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, in which the narrator watches a man crying in front of  Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, and wonders if the man is having a “profound experience of art.” The narrator, a poet, worries that he is incapable of having such an experience, and is deeply suspicious of anyone who claims they can: “Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, the profound experience of the absence of profundity.” 

The speaker of Smith’s “Stendhal syndrome” takes this skepticism as the consensus position and, in disbelief of her own experience, claims an exception. The fact that she is arguing her case to a judge suggests there is a kind of failing in allowing oneself to be so affected by art, a slouching of our modern, permanently ironized, posture. It’s interesting to consider where the guilt arises from: is it too indulgent an act to submit so fully to an artwork? Or, perhaps, are such experiences only available to rubes and philistines, and to admit to one would be to admit to one’s own lack of sophistication?

 

Stendhal syndrome

 

Swooning is so 1817. But I can say truthfully, it happened, 

this century, in the Uffizi. It happened.

 

Tears, even. I know. I thought

I was past that. I thought we all were.

 

Everyone cringes at words like transport,

ecstasy. I was drunk, your honour, drunk on paint -

 

no, drunk on charcoal and paper,

those only. Or the echo of prayer. Struck 

 

dumb and ringing like a cuffed head, a bell,

a gong, trembling, concussed, a pulsing

 

tuning fork, thrumming the same note

as all the others, overcome by the marks of the master's 

 

hand, this last sketch too much, the straw, just

grey and black on yellowed paper, just perfect 

 

love, caught, still breathing, one radiant face

among thousands, full-on   felling me   still

The following are two definitions of Fugue taken from the Oxford dictionary:

1. Music a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
2. Psychiatry a loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

 

In “Fugal State,” Smith ingeniously demonstrates both definitions in the repetition of a single line: “You are always beginning again.”

Fugal State

 

You are always beginning again—

it is only a matter of degree:

you walk into a room, forgetting

 

the book you came looking for, walk out

with a dirty glass you lay down

another ring without realising

 

like a tree it doesn’t hurt a bit

You are always beginning again:

you walk into the forest, forgetting,

 

there is a storm, there is a morning,

you walk out, trailing possibilities

from your hands they drip, like

 

snapped branches There was a storm,

there was a morning There was

a name, once, a specific and grievous

 

history, a mobile number, a particular sequence

of houses, an immunity to certain indignities,

there was more and more forgetting

 

Entering a room full of bonsai, you breathe

moss, and cypress, and the clean, bald smell

of long-dry river-stones  The air hums

 

with age, with what the trees have known

and have forgotten and will know again

they are always beginning

 

you breathe, you dream you have been

reborn as a small ceramic deer

You sit under the momiji, the scarlet

 

baby’s hands of the Japanese maple,

in a forest small enough

to fit on a dinner plate

and begin

again

Comments

[Maria]

Beautiful lining and language that surprises in its simplicity and vivid-ity.