Injustice

In Memoriam Dec 3, 1984.

Because it goes
too easily unnoticed

is toxic but invisible,
impossible to touch, taste, smell or hear

impossible not to feel.

Because it pricks at our eyes,
corrupts our blood,

fills our lungs
until they refuse to balance,

weighs down our hearts.

Because it is passed down
from generation to generation

until death becomes
a byproduct

irrelevant yet necessary.

Because it's in the air
we continue to breathe,

the excuses we swallow,
the tears

we do not cry.


[Part of this (1)]


[1] Sort of. I'm not sure I entirely approve of the whole 'I'm a Bhopali' shtick - it strikes me as trivializing the suffering of the real victims. Which doesn't mean, of course, that the anniversary should go unmarked. Hence the post.

Mental Ears

"The discourses of modernism in Western poetics make steeper descents into sub-intelligibility; and in my own case I am frequently accused of having more or less altogether taken leave of discernible sense. In fact I believe this accusation to be more or less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long has seemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry ("what does it mean?") seems less and less and unavoidably necessary precondition for successful reading. The task, however, is not to subside into distracted ingenious playfulness with the lexicon and cross-inflectional idiomatics, but to write and read with maximum focused intelligence and passion, each of these two aspects bearing so strongly into the other as to fuse them into the enhanced state once in an old-fashioned way termed the province of the imagination. "Mental ears" do not relegate us to the domain of performative sonority, nor do they elevate us into the paramount abstraction of inferred ideas and beliefs: they are an intense hybrid and I treat them as the essential equipment for reading poetry in today's post-traditional world space"

***

"I should not wish to claim that this selection was in any sense deliberate or conscious; if the underlying textual features exist it is because poets are tuned into their language structures to an unusual degree of linguistic susceptibility. Such features are neither invented nor discovered, they are disclosed."

- J.H. Prynne 'Mental Ears and Poetic Work', Chicago Review 55:1 2010

And because Prynne's essay references them, and because it made me go back and rediscover these exquisite lines:

"That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awaked, and found myself reposed,
Under a shade, on flowers, much wondering where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave, and spread,
Into a liquid plain; then stood unmoved,
Pure as the expanse of Heaven. I thither went
With unexperienced thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A Shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me. I started back,
It started back; but pleased as I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love."

- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV

Irre-verses

n. A line or set of lines that really don't fit in the poem but are so beautiful otherwise that you can't bring yourself to take them out.

Leftover Emotions

Some say they won't keep. Others that they're better the next day.

Sharp and mild, bitter and sweet. Sometimes I store them up all week, bring them all out on Sunday. A real family meal.

Left too long in the fridge happiness curdles to nostalgia, turns green with envy.

Leave space in your heart. I've saved us some regrets for afterwards.

Nothing special, you understand. Just a little something I had put by.

Contraband

Illegal lonelinesses. Substanceless despair.

These are the songs you smuggle through customs, carrying them in your gut, taking care not to let them touch you.

These are the poems they shall cut with raw grief.

This is the language they will sell on the streets, your words whispered in the ears of unsuspecting strangers, or offered at parties to careful friends, every line an invitation.

These are the phrases they cannot get enough off, an addiction to meanings, mouths writhing at the end of every hook.

Dream Interpretation

I blame the New Yorker. It's all their fault for printing articles about nightmares and screwing around with impressionable minds like mine.

So, last night I have this dream. The details are a little hazy now, but it's a sort of Alistair Maclean meets Lost scenario involving a scuttled ship that may or may not have been carrying nuclear weapons and a handful of survivors who find themselves trapped on a remote tropical island without either communication devices or firearms but a fairly impressive collection of medieval swords. There are a whole bunch of subplots (none of them erotic, in case you were wondering) but the main story revolves around four people, who I shall call Good Guy, Bad Guy, Scientist Lady and Mystery Girl. After a whole set of clues and at least three dead bodies (that I can remember) Scientist Lady figures out that the ship was wrecked deliberately, for reasons that are never explained but that are immediately clear to everyone involved once the discovery is made. Suspicion falls on Bad Guy and Mystery Girl, who are nowhere to be found, mostly because Bad Guy has lured Mystery Girl into the jungle to poison her so he can have all the prize (whatever that might be) to himself. His greed and treachery prove to be his undoing, however, because when he returns to the group his is confronted by Good Guy, and, not having Mystery Girl by his side, is killed after a protracted and fast-action sword fight. Needless to say, all this happens in full-blown Hollywood action flick mode.

But that's not the disturbing part.

Apparently dissatisfied with the way the dream plays out, my subconsciousness decides to run the whole scenario again. Again the ship runs aground, again the crew starts to die mysteriously, again Scientist Lady does her thing and figures it out. Only this time when Good Guy confronts Bad Guy, Bad Guy gets the jump on him and wounds him badly. Things are looking pretty bleak for Good Guy, until Mystery Girl suddenly appears and proceeds to defeat Bad Guy in hand-to-hand combat (again with the Hollywood action flick effects), before handing herself over to Good Guy and Scientist Lady. Has she had a change of heart? Was she secretly on the side of the righteous? No, it turns out that she learnt about Bad Guy's plan to betray her because she dreamed about it, and decided it was more important to her to get even with him, even if it meant her own undoing.

And no, that isn't the disturbing part either.

The really disturbing part is that the next dream I have involves me lecturing on the underlying themes and motifs in the last two dreams - the central thesis being that the trinity of the Good Guy, the Bad Guy and the Mystery Girl is really a reference to the Holy Trinity (or is it Peter Paul and Mary, with the ship as Puff the Magic Dragon?), or that the whole thing is really a political allegory, with the ship being the ship of State, the Good Guy being capitalism (because of his 'invisible' hands), the Bad Guy being socialism (look, his sword is really a sickle) and the Mystery Girl being fascism. (I swear, my dream self was actually trying to explain this to other people.)

I need help.

Portrait

I could never be an artist. I think I always knew that. Or at least suspected. It wasn't that I didn't have talent. Though there were days...no, it wasn't that. I just wasn't brave enough, tormented enough. Not enough to be great. And if you're not great as an artist what are you? A craftsman, an entertainer. The silhouette of an artist, all shape and no substance. What Dylan Thomas would call his sullen art. Sullen art. Such a beautiful phrase, that. The kind of phrase I could never...No, I was never meant to be an artist.

They used to tell me all I needed was to have faith. In my talent. In myself. As though faith were ever anything more than a lack of imagination. As if I didn't already have something more important - doubt, and the need to disprove that doubt, the endless circle of frenzy and disillusion, like a dog chasing its tail. And what a tale it was, this unwritten story, the life I once imagined but could never bring to life. All over now, of course, all impossible.

But wasn't it always impossible? Wasn't this the way I always knew it would be? Not a failure of fiction but a fiction of failure? And wasn't that what drew me to it in the first place, the romance of not being good enough? To believe in the impossible. Not to pretend to believe, you understand, but to believe truly, irrevocably, and in the certain knowledge that what you believed could not be true. The passion and the certainty locked together, feeding on each other, like darkness and light. Oh, how foolish the young are, and how heroic. And could it be there is an art to this? To falling short beautifully? But no, I was never an artist. Look at me. If I were an artist would I be sitting here like this, whining and whinging, when really, what has happened to me? Nothing.

No, nothing has happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to me.

Damaged Goods

Afterwards, God sat under the tree, weeping. Mourning the damage to his most precious fruit.

Identity without ideology

"But, if feminism becomes a politics of identity, it can safely be drained of ideology. Identity politics isn’t much concerned with abstract ideals, like justice. It’s a version of the old spoils system: align yourself with other members of a group—Irish, Italian, women, or whatever—and try to get a bigger slice of the resources that are being allocated. If a demand for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism without feminists."

- Ariel Levy, Lift and Separate, New Yorker Nov 16 2009.

Exactly.

Identification without ideology means power without purpose; you end up with a louder voice, but with less to say.

The really treacherous part of this is that the impulse towards identity politics is generally well-meaning. It's tempting to be inclusive; after all, there's strength in numbers. But that strength can only be used to achieve the lowest common agenda, and every new constituency you include diminishes the scope of that agenda further, so that in the end you're left with a mass that is all gravity, and no force. In a sense, identity politics is a local optimum - any movement from the status quo comes with an immediate cost and an uncertain (though potentially significant) benefit.

United we stand for nothing, and very still.

Grazing

Little by little, he takes possession of language. His lines like barbed wire stretched tight across the page.

The mind, blown, passes to where dreams graze like cattle on greener grass.