Equus

I'll start at the end, I suppose. Tonight I watched "Equus," the film of the play starring Richard Burton. I've seen and read the play; I hadn't seen the movie. What struck me, and Colleen as well, is how what is a mere undercurrent in the play, the boy's substitution of horse worship for an eviscerated Christianity, is made almost egregiously explicit. Now, I'm not one to throw out platitudes about how I like things to be left to the imagination, but the movie said too much. In being explicit it really took away from the psychiatrist's desire to know. In the play, Dysart's drive to probe this boy in session is spurred by the enigmatic nature of what he has to say. He is accustomed to being so far removed from the kind of passion the boy has, he is entirely ignorant of the stirring his own fervor when it comes upon him.

This morning, entirely coincidentally, I penciled the following, much to the chagrin of a neighboring student who genuinely thought I should be paying attention to a lecture I was hearing for the fourth time.

achilles

at least your horses were immortal, boy,
enough to eat the grass whose generations’
coming and leaving you would never see,
whose forgetting winter reminds you that
you are the undead caught somewhere
between the choices of life and the unchoices
of death, arching your neck to catch a glimpse
of uncorpses whinnying and shaking
their hoarse-hair plumes, that brush against the sun
and clear away the dust of prior sunsets,
the dust disguised among the talling weeds
whose shallow roots barely scratch the earth;
your neck a crane, an insufficient bird

At the time, I couldn't come up with a final line. I had in my mind the image I wanted, a neck craning up in a futile attempt to see past to the sun beyond. Even now I can visualize it so perfectly. I threw so many words at it to plumb its depths. None of them stuck. It wasn't until I gave up that image that I was able to pen a final final line.

to overcome the mounds of tombing dirt.

Sometimes in order to speak, to at least say something, we must bury what we can truly only see or feel. That's not necessarily in the movie, but there were horses.

Ad hominem

It is a shame that one of the greatest works of contemporary Western literature, partially because it is a comic and partially because its author is a raving egomaniac, may simply disappear from the radar and merge with nothingness. It is a shame, because comics struggle so hard to be taken seriously by our lot, most of whom are in fact at their least tolerant when it comes to judging the relative merits of a work of literary art, and fail largely due to the gleaming appeal of commercial viability. A comic, for the most part, is quite expensive to produce on the same scale as a 10,000 run new novel. Thus, the economic concern is ever more pressing, and even slight financial loss considered the death knell of a burgeoning career.

Let's not mince words: Dave Sim is an asshole. So, it should come as no surprise that his character, Cerebus, whose whole life Sim chronicled in the 300 issue eponymous opus that recently found its permanent end (Cerebus dies in the final issue) in March 2004, is also an asshole. Sim has managed to alienate most of his friends in comics, many of whose careers he practically made, due in no small part to his well-articulated but not always logically grounded anti-feminism. I refrain from saying misogyny, like so many do, in part because that word conjures the image of a liquor pickled troglodyte who assumes women ought to be in a position of subjection for no real good reason. Sim, however, is a celibate, who openly deplores the materialism of modern society, intends to let his work go into the public domain upon his death, has engaged productively if indirectly with prominent feminist and psychoanalytic critics, and mostly avoids women entirely, seeing "them" as beyond hope. Sim's "problem," which interestingly always seems to be Cerebus's problem as well, is a complete idiosyncrasy mixed with harsh iconoclasm. He is a bridge-burner par excellence, whose overreaction to an argument usually ends up finding him more alone than before.

Cerebus is a compelling character not simply because he has been thoroughly fleshed out--6,000 pages dedicated to one character will tend to do that--but also because his nigh pure selfishness permits him to slip into any social role. He begins his literary life as a barbarian mercenary, later becomes prime minister of a wealthy city state, later pope, later a transcendent mystic, later an introspective bohemian, later an adventuresome nomad, later a sports hero, later a rabid comic book (which in the Cerebus universe are called "reads") fan, later a textual critic, later the ruler of the known world, but always a complete drunk. Cerebus's life view is brutally consistent, which is perhaps what made him initially so compelling and later wholly repulsive to any but the most ardent fan.

Cerebus demands precisely the kind of critical work I abhor: the unified monograph. It's hard to approach the work at this point, for there is no shared critical vocabulary upon which a community of scholars could build. It doesn't help that the work itself says so much and invites the reader to say so much more, rendering it a veritable hermeneutic black hole. A monograph could do for Cerebus what Kaufmann did for Nietzsche in the U.S.; it could provide both the imprimatur literary texts unfortunately need in this cacophonous critical environment and the groundwork later critics both wittingly and unwittingly trope.

Oh, and did I mention Cerebus is an aardvark?

Puns

I thought I'd take a different tack this time, as I've been becoming increasingly unwilling to explain myself in English, I figure if I throw out something in Japanese, I have no choice but give some account of it.

All poetry for me is occasional, I rarely, if ever sit down with a prescribed idea to work through it and edit it until it shines. This is why so many of my recent sonnets have something of an unpolished feel: they're all off the top of my head. Even the "pet epic" I wrote as an undergrad was a surprisingly coherent mish-mash. Anyway, I was bored with Sappho and Catullus one day, so I penciled the following in one of my tiny notebooks:

神の苦に天の白花を見に行って
　霜の句がよめなくなると馬鹿

kami no ku ni ama no shirobana o mi ni itte
shimo no ku ga yomenaku naru to baka

it's so stupid that I see the white flower of heaven
in the gods' sorrow while failing to read the frost's verse.

Of course, it's not that simple. The two halves of this tanka turn on the paired phrases kami no ku and shimo no ku, "gods' sorrow" and "frost's verse" respectively. Those phrases are homophonous with the technical terms for the "upper verse" and "lower verse" of a traditional Japanese poem, due to the fact that the two halves of a tanka were generally written as a single vertical line. So, alternatively,

it's stupid that I watch the white flower of an upper verse
while failing to read the verse below.

The "upper verse" of a tanka is what was historically called a hokku, what we and our Japanese contemporaries would probably call a haiku. Part of the conceit of the poem is not only the failure of considering the divine absent its worldly counterpart but also the failure to see in a derived form, that so often is mistaken by we Anglo types as complete and perfect, its historical companion. Part of what authorized poets like Masaoka Shiki and the Americans who idolized him to say such superbly wacky things about the composition of haiku was the erasure of its historical condition as one of a pair in linked verses.

Which brings me to the verb yomu, inflected here as yomenaku ("unable to yomu"), which generally means to read, but often in the context of poetry means "to compose" or "to recite," because etymologically they share a common origin in an 8th century verb, also yomu, which meant to count aloud rhythmically in much the same way we as children recite the alphabet. What I mean to say with this cascade of odd puns, which I can only do prosaically, is "it's stupid to look for some kind of divine pathos in the seemingly lotus/haiku, all the while ignoring the rich tradition of suffering and sensation here on earth." It's not one over the other, just as the tanka contains both.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

If I were to retitle this poem, and I wouldn't, I'd call it "daydreaming." I was thinking of Eisenhower as I wrote it, because I've been reading a lot about him recently, but the poem isn't about him. If it's representative of anything, it's memory, not the kind of remembering where we all long for some idyllic past, but the kind of disorienting memories that while entirely vivid, make no easy sense, even to the one who experiences them.

ike

I got in the car and drove until it broke down
crying; his mother and father were gutted by
the color of the changing leaves in spring.

I got out of the army on a technicality; my arm
was gone fishing, said he’d be back for supper,
but no matter how long we waited, through the
sun and the moon and the deaths of white stars,
no one came home with a rack of meals in hand.

The message I got granting me my discharge
your firearm only after confirming hostile
intent: “how do I know he wants to kill me?
does he have the same orders? will our rifles
stare at each other until the sun breaks down,
and the earth’s complaints against us are mute?”

At some point, I decided for myself that I would write in a manner that's even a bit hard for me to grasp. I'd prefer concrete, often silly images whose sinister undercurrents (i.e. left turns) are meant to be deeply disconcerting. From just last night,

I’m writing to you from a desk in a computer
in a mind made up: it won’t die, won’t lie

and

a-musing

a little and a lotta love alone
in the brief tickle of light to trickle
through the canopy: he can’t
make can-o-pees outta canapés
or the sun from a ruddy sunburn.

the first of which still doesn't make much sense to me, yet I keep rereading it for some reason. And the second, with its oddball reworking of the word "canopy," is precisely how I feel sometimes when trying to rework one idea into another: sometimes, they are wholly incompatible. So, if words and things never come home to roost, well, it's because you really don't have a clue what words and things are, and that's perfectly fine.