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March
22, 2006
God, body, Tony Hoagland, carnival, dissociation and postmodern
poetry
I just found a different Kabir translation
by Rabindranath Tagore:
I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty: You
do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from forest
to forest listlessly! Here is the truth! Go where you will, to
Benares or to Mathura; if you do not find your soul, the world
is unreal to you.
Versus:
I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.
You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own
house;
and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!
Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet;
if you can't find where your soul is hidden,
for you the world will never be real! Kabir
(trans. Bly 1971, p.9)
I understand subtlety and
nuance in translation, but how do you confuse Benares and Calcutta?
No matter. Bly has it right for me.
I embodied some God
quotes by exchanging "God" with "Body"): The first command is to love your Body with
all your heart and strength and mind. The second command is like
unto it: love your neighbor as yourself. - Jesus
..do not fear,
for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your Body .
I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous
right hand. - Isaiah 41:10
I do not need to seek my Body. My Body is already
here waiting to be found, soaked in my reality. My journey is
to be one of recognizing my Body, always, already present, and surfacing
that presence in my daily life. - Edwina Gateley, from
A Mystical Heart
You need seek your Body neither
below or above. It is no farther away than the door of the heart. - Meister
Eckhart
There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow
and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the
frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating
their mother's dead body. - Iris Murdoch, Bruno's Dream
Recently I said to Ellie: I want to explore how
important the concept of body as home (taproot, well, temple) has
become to me since starting embodiment studies.
So I was thinking about
hunger. Not that I was ever really hungry in suburbia, but hunger. appetite,
ardor, craving, devotion, doting, eagerness, fascination, fervor,
frenzy, greed, itch, lasciviousness, lechery, libido, longing,
love, lust, mania, need, passion, rapture, ravenousness, thirst,
urge, yearning. define my life. They're
constants. Itches, aches and great sadnesses that I feel, quite literally,
flowing from throat to body. But I used "well" to describe my concept
of my body. Isn't that strange? Doesn't that make my body a negative
space? A hole . cavity,
crater, den, excavation, fracture, gorge, hollow, lair, nest, orifice,
outlet, passage, perforation, pocket, retreat, shelter, split, tear,
void, a window.
Well: abyss, beginning, chasm, depression, fountain,
mouth, origin, pool, repository, reservoir, root, shaft, source,
spring, watering place, wellspring..
Temple: church, dirge factory (?), god box (?),
holy place, sanctuary, shrine, tabernacle
Taproot: The main root of a plant, usually
stouter than the lateral roots, growing straight downward from
the stem.
From Ellie: Do
you know Gaston Bachelard on home spaces? The poetics of space.
He looks at how poets evoke space - very
thrilling.
I
keep rubbing up against Bachelard. I took a class taught by a poet,
Gene Hosey,
who'd just been smitten by Bachelard, and talked about him a lot.
Marty and Gaston had their own love affair years ago, but Bachelard
and I have not met formally. I found this on someone's
Flickr site :
Bachelard's 'poetics of space' concerns
how the house is a cave of spaces, each with significant meaning
and strength. How we don't read space through rationalism but
through instinct and consciousness. "all
really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home."
...so I guess I'm ready to eat Gaston.
An hour later:
I'm screaming my head off! ... I'm
SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just found a way to tie the BODY to God to dissociation to Tony
Hoagland (here's his Self
Improvement) who writes
in the current
issue of Poetry Magazine about postmodern poetry vs. narrative
poetry, which is a hallmark of
Hoagland's work:
"...wobbling on the balance
beam between associative and dissociative, somewhat absurdist,
and, indeed, cerebral. (Tony's
thinking about dissociation!!!) Much talent and skill
are evident in its making, in its pacing and management of gaps,
the hints and sound bites which keep the reader reaching forward
for the lynchpin of coherence. One admirable aspect of the poem
is the way it seems capable of incorporating anything; yet the
correlative theme of the poem is that all this motley data i.e.
experience doesnt add up to a story. Even as the poem implies a
world without sequence, the poem itself has no consequence, no
center of gravity, no body, no assertion of emotional value.
If we ask, what is the subject of Improvisation,
the answer would be, the dissociated self; (whoa!) and
the aspect of self such poems most forcefully represent is its
uncatchability, its flittering, quicksilver transience. Poems like
Improvisation showcase personality in the persona of their chatty,
free-associating, nutty-smart narrators. It is a self that does
not stand still, that implies a kind of spectral, anxious insubstantiality.
The voice is plenty sharp in tone and sometimes observant in its
detail, but it is skittery. Elusiveness is the speakers central
characteristic. Speed, wit, and absurdity are its attractive qualities.
The last thing such poems are going to do is risk their detachment,
their distance, their freedom from accountability. The one thing
they are not going to do is commit themselves to the sweaty enclosures
of subject matter and the potential embarrassment of sincerity."
I can tie Hoagland to my lifelong abhorrence of the work ethic.
This is from Paul Duncum's Visual
culture and an aesthetics of embodiment. It moves from the carnal,
lusty and base of the good old days to the corporate greed of today.
Kant and the modernists served the purposes of early capital
in recommending that the mind take control of the body. Kant's
understanding of the aesthetic as disembodied disinterest is
but one manifestation of the general evolution of the disciplined
or civilized body, formerly undertaken by State and Church, through
new or radically changed institutions such as prisons, factories,
mass schooling, hospitals and asylums. Modernist aesthetics was
one method of disciplining the body through internalized control.
The emergence of the art world in the nineteenth century, as a
wholly new phenomenon, served the same purposes as other institutions
in enabling the Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism.
For the capitalists, accumulation of profits and investment necessitated
the delay of gratification, so they set immediate consumption aside.
For the middle classes, leisure even became problematic. They were
deeply confused as to its purpose and preferred the term recreation,
implying only a temporary respite from work (Golby & Purdue,
1985). Meanwhile, the laboring classes were condemned to live under
the dull compulsion to work for their very existence.
I'm going to blend this all into a tasty stew, along with our
culture's obsession with body image and the image of body as home.
Do you think I can do it?
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