Final Project

Tracing Poetry

            Often times, we forget the limitations of text—not of a text so much as text itself especially when it comes to poetry.  Writing is, on the very face of it, something which attempts to contain and portray language which, itself, is attempting to contain and represent thought.  Poetry, in a sense, is trying to cut out the middleman by blurring the line between text and language in an attempt to bring the reader closer to the world of thought.  The two poems that we have looked at most in depth this semester are T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”  While both of these poems deserve consideration, I will spend this time focusing on “Kubla Khan.”  Coleridge takes us a step closer to the world of thought when, in “Kubla Khan,” he attempts to draw us into his dream.  This is a text which, since it was assigned to be memorized, we have all seen (and hopefully read) more times than we have heard it performed. However, we must move beyond the text itself.  We must present the text in such a way as to display the language that has been reduced to text and we must enact the dream that has been reduced to language.  This is something that is lost when poetry is read only as text.  Therefore, I have, after countless repetitions, devised my own version of “Kubla Khan” which I hope moves beyond the realm of text into the realm of dreams and thought.

            This idea is something that came to me last spring during a poetry reading by Frederick Turner, who I have already been mentioned this semester.  I do not remember the poem that he read where it clicked and, come to think of it, I still have not seen any of these poems in text form from his collection The Undiscovered Country, but there was something about the way he read them: the timing, the verve, the highs and the lows.  At this moment, I realized that anyone who does not hear this poem read, or performed, rather, by its author, will never understand what I am seeing.  The poem was well written; but admittedly, were I to stumble across the text version somewhere on the internet, I likely would not have looked twice, but in this auditorium, I was stopped in my tracks by the performance in front of me.  I pushed the thought to the back of my mind for some time but, slowly, it began to creep up on me and I began to realize that every poem I have ever read has only been some ghost of the original.    Emotion cannot be placed upon the page in the way that the author of poetry needs it to be; there is no punctuation that tells the reader to slow down and enunciate every syllable; there are no stage directions; there is no symbol to tell the speaker to lower his voice to a barely audible piano or to rattle the window-panes with a booming fortissimo.  The poet is like a craftsman working with tools that just do not fit into his hands: he does his best, but in the end, there is not a language for the thoughts of a poet.  In “Kubla Khan,” we see Coleridge struggle with these same problems.  That is why, whenever Dr. Sexson recites any portion of the poem, we are all left thinking, “what the fuck?”  Some thoughts lie to deep, are too thought-like to find a place in our system of language.  Keeping these insufficiencies in mind, I have taken “Kubla Khan” and attempted to move beyond the text and to do some things to the words on the page that cannot be written.

 

            In my reading of “Kubla Khan,” there are several of things that I employ that are not written on the page.  The first of these is the speed with which the first stanza is read.  I think the first stanza should be read slowly: the speaker (presumably Coleridge, since the historical context for this poem is so rich) is still trying to comprehend the dream that he has just had.  The words, “Xanado,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Alph,” are finding their way into language for the first time.  The strangeness of this must be just as striking to the poet as to the readers.  Along these same lines, there also needs to be some subtle question marks written in as Coleridge finds the correct word to fit what he is trying to describe.  This could hint at the fact that perhaps these words do not describe what he saw at all, but are as close as he can get using the English language.  The line break is the deep breath before the plunge: a ‘Eureka’ moment for the poet that demonstrates that he has realized, perhaps in that instant, where is going, and now he is going be drag the reader along.

            In the second stanza, Coleridge really picks up the pace.  We start to see exclamation points—four in the first five lines—as he becomes excited and really starts to let the description go.  The speed and volume of this stanza increase, perhaps so much so that the listeners are left a little bit behind because he knows that if he does not get this description out now, he never will.  And as the river falls for the second time, we slow down again.  The speaker, like the listeners is listening, listening for the “Ancestral voices” that “Kubla heard from far.”  We continue the slow speed throughout the end of the stanza.  Are these the words of the ancestors?  Probably not.  There are not words for their language, so we continue with our description, slowly now, since we are nearing the end and we read the final exclamation point of the stanza not so much as one of the excitement that carried us through the bulk of the stanza, but a note of triumphant resolution that we have made it thus far and are ready for the next step.

            The line-break between the ultimate and penultimate stanzas give, both the reader and the listeners a chance to catch up and be sure that they are on the same page.  The first five lines of this final stanza start slow and matter-of-factly, much as we ended the preceding stanza.  By now, the listener begins to think that the speaker has calmed down from the frenzy of the second stanza.  But, as the speaker paints the picture of the maid and her song, and begins to think about recreating them so that others could hear her “symphony,” we begin to increase the volume, and the tone is almost one of anger and frustration.  The speaker knows that he could never accurately recreate his vision and the maid’s song (which are one in the same), and he hates it.  What’s more, even if he could recreate it those who heard him and heard her song and saw the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” would think him a madman.  This frustration is what leads us back into the exclamation marks and a second frenzy which brings us near the end.  As the fury breaks over the speaker and he realizes that everyone would think him mad, he realizes that it is he who has “drunk the milk of paradise.”  This creates the fall that seems to end the poem on a sad note, but there is something joyous in the broken voice, but it is an inner joy, a self satisfaction that, with these divine visions, he knows no one will understand, but that does not make them any less real.

 

            Keeping some of these things in mind, I would like to take some time to talk about how this poem relates to some of the other works we have looked at this semester.   Since I would like to allow for some time for discussion about any of these ideas, I am going to keep this discussion relatively short and focus on discussion points more than on a discussion itself.

            For Annie Dillard’s book, For the Time Being, we get the feeling that the “forests ancient as the hills enfolding sunny spots of greenery” are some of the places that she brings her reader.  From China to a hospital’s delivery room, Dillard helps how similar some of the most seemingly different situations, places, and people really are.  Is “Xanado” really any different from the archeological sights or the hospital or Israel or Rome?

            In The Secular Scriptures, Northrop Frye says,

On the lower reaches of descent we find the night world, often a dark and labyrinthine world of caves and shadows where the forest has turned subterranean, and where we are surrounded by the shapes of animals.  If the meander-and-descent patterns of Paleolithic caves, along with the paintings on their walls, have anything like the same kind of significance, we are here retracing what are, so far as we know, the oldest imaginative steps of humanity. (111-2)

Does the river in the poem do anything besides meander and descend?  In fact, Frye’s whole chapter titled “Themes of Descent” feels as if he could have been writing about “Kubla Khan” the entire time.  From the strange nature of the landscape, to the seemingly unintelligible language, to the fact that Coleridge experienced this all in a dream only helps to make this fact more apparent.  Is this the creative process? a series of rabbit-holes we all must fall down? And is it possible to descend too far?  Is this what Coleridge did?

            And finally, is Mircea Eliade’s Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries doing anything more than telling us to embrace those “Ancestral voices” that Kubla hears and we all listen for?  If Coleridge has descended into an unknown land, perhaps his drug induced stupor has made him privy to something we can only guess at: something primal and grotesque.  These are our primitive desires, thoughts, and creations, and we should surrender ourselves to them in order to get back in illo tempore.  Then, that before-time place, in the world of the descent, did Coleridge, somehow, tap into the collective imagination?

            How do all of these points relate to the other works of fiction that we have read and discussed?  To the poetry of “The Four Quartets” and the prose of The Magus?  Can Nicholas Urfe relate to the speaker’s frustration at the end of “Kubla Khan?”  What do we learn about time and descent when we pair “The Four Quartets,” Frye, and “Kubla Khan?”  Is Alison the demon lover? Or is Nick? Perhaps both?

 

            While many of these questions may not have definite answers, I am interested in knowing your thoughts when viewing these works from a ‘Kubla-centeric’ perspective instead of using The Magus as our starting point as we have done for the second half of this semester.

Time Past and Time Present

Since I have not done this yet, and it is long overdue, I figured I would give my two-cents on Arcadia since I have not yet said anything about it:

My comment has something to do with time.  We have already talked about the strangeness of the fact that past and 'present' are overlaid in the play, I wanted to talk a little more about the effects of that.  In a 'normal' story with a linear timeline, we watch events transpire in order and, in that case, we are able to hope for the characters.  We can see the bad coming and hope that something will change and that they will be alright in the end, but in this case, the characters in the past, namely Thomasina, are doomed, not by their time, but by the future.  In the case of Thomsina, we cannot hope for a reprieve from fate because, instead of being told of her fate in the present and, like Oedipus, suffering in real-time, the fate is given from the future.  In a literary sense, Thomasina is not doomed by her circumstances, or by the present, but is, instead, doomed by her future.  As soon as the people in the 1990s say that she dies that night, it is unavoidable.

This might seem like something insignificant, but in terms of literary devices, (in my knowledge) it is very rare.  It is not something that happens often, and the way that the story plays out both in its textual space and phenomenologically, unite to create an a-typical version of fate in literature.

For Lunatics and Poets

 

 

            Having finally finished The Secular Scripture, I thought now would be an excellent time to reflect on the book as whole.  I must start by admitting that if I have ever encountered “referential mania” in the real world, it has been in the works of Frye.  His ability to fly through works and draw obscure connections without making those connections explicit is something that will be lost on most readers as I expect will have happened on a lot of this class.  Frye expects his readership, or perhaps does not expect them, to recognize the works of the Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, know the relationship and—for lack of a better word—competition between them, all without naming the two of them specifically:  Tom Jones and Pamela are all the clues Frye gives to the relation.  Perhaps this type of mystery is what I find most pleasing in Frye’s work.  This demanded placed upon the reader to be well-read and be able to move from the smallest references to the larger works is what will make these works nearly impenetrable to someone who is not a fifth as well-read as Frye himself.

            Since we have talked about nearly all the chapters of the book in class, I want to point out one of my favorite sections from the final.  Near the end of the chapter, Frye, quoting Sartre, says “hell is other people.  The creative act is an individualizing act, hence, for all the sense of participation, we are also returning to a second kind of isolation” (184).  This reminded me of another quote that I once encountered, though I am not certain where, that said, “I am a writer because I want to tell stories, but I do not want to have to look people in the eyes.”  Later, Frye notes, “In human life creation and contemplation need two people, a poet and a reader, a creative action that produces and a creative response that possesses” (185).   There is, indeed, a unique relationship between the writer and reader.  There are no relationships that are the same.  Every reader, has an unique relationship with any writer.  No two are the same.  This creates a sense of isolation for the writer.  Each reader composes his or her own image of the writer and none of these creations, may be the correct one.  In this sense, the writer is surrounded by people who may think they understand him, and, perhaps, that is the greatest of isolations.  

If it doesn't change your life, you're not doing it right.

My collection of passages from The Magus.  I'm not going into this with a particular end in mind, so let's see what we come up with.


"Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripateia" (Chapter 49)
 --[Note: Peripeteia (because the word 'peripateia' doesn't appear to exist) -  In classical tragedy (and hence in other forms of drama, fiction, etc.): a point in the plot at which a sudden reversal occurs. In extended use: a sudden or dramatic change; a crisis.(OED)]

"We are all actors here, my friend.  None of us is what we really are.  We all lie some of the time, and some of all the time" (Chapter 52)
--A little commentary on, not only the novel, but life itself.


Since we discussed the value (or absence of value, in the wrong hands) of writing in a book, here is the only thing that was written in my book.  Of all the 656 pages of my copy of the book, the only mark in my book that was not made by me is a bracket on pg 409 and demonstrates that someone thought this portion of the novel was the only part that merited any attention.

---------
     'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.'
     'Then your ... meta-theatre is really a medical one?'
     Maria's shadow appeared behind him as she brought a soup-tureen to the white-and-silver table in its pool of lamplight.
     'You may see it so.  I prefer to think of it as a metaphysical one.'  Maria announced that we could take our seats.  He acknowledged her words with a little boy, but did not move.  'It is all an attempt to escape from such categories.'
     'More an art than a science?'
     'All good science is art.  And all good art is science.'
     With this fine-sounding but hollow apophthegm he put down his glass and moved towards the table.
---------   (Chapter 52)

--It starts mid conversation, and ends mid paragraph.  I can't tell whether her or she thought this was the only important part, or the only unimportant part.


"I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extraverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her" (Chapter 54)
--If this is not Fowles as his most eloquent, he was never eloquent.

Maniacal in the Best Way

I wanted to talk about coincidence.  Since it feels like nearly everyone else has shared some of their coincidences with the class, I figure that now is as good a time as ever to stop pretending that I am not experiencing the same thing.  We have already discussed the coincidence of me running into my grandmother after my ‘big dream,’ so I’m going to skip over that one but here are some of the other others, and most of them have to do with my own writing.  Let’s just look at some of the bigger points from the last week:

 1)       The other day, Dr. Sexson said, “One never returns, one only recreates.”  This rang a bell in my mind because for the past year—or there about—I have been working on a long story called, “No Traveler Returns” the title of which is, of course, inspired by Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy wherein Hamlet describes death as “The undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”  Sometimes it is good to hear one’s own thoughts sound from somewhere else.

2)      This is one that has been on mind for about half of the time we have been in class.  It started when Valerie posted a blog about our position as humans amongst the cosmos.  This is something that we have returned to several times throughout the semester, and each time, I have refrained from posting a short poem that I wrote a while ago that touches on the same topic.  This isn’t a forum for grandstanding, after all.  But in the Denk piece about the Goldberg variations that we read on Thursday, we came across the line, “infinite possibility from a single piece of code.” The words “infinite possibility” struck me like the one above.  Because, again, it was very similar to something that I had once written, except I called it 'infinite improbability.'
            The Stuff of Stars
We are each billions of years old,
Flying through the cosmos,
Across distances unimaginable;
We hold the fire.
 
From piece to piece
We gain existence.
Infinite improbabilities leading
To our human collective.

We’ve been waiting,
Since the beginning of time,
To be jointed, one particle
At a time.

A smile; a heartbeat;
A warmth; a tender kiss.
Assembled by gravity,
We are the stuff of stars.

A Big Dream

 

 

For the past couple years, I have always had, at quasi-regular intervals, dreams, which, if they are not ‘big dreams,’ are something of more complicated a nature.  For these dreams are so real and affect me so foundationally that when I wake up, I am still somehow tied to the dream an can’t help but to feel that my entire outlook on life has been changed.  And, when I say my outlook on life has changed, it isn’t really as positive as it might sound.  Instead, it is almost always something negative and makes me question exactly how influential our dreams are on shaping our perspective of the world around us.  In my attempt to explain this, I feel like I am doing nothing more than floundering, so I will share with you the last ‘big dream’ I experienced and the aftermath and hope that that will help with the explanation— 

It was one of those dreams where you think you know where you are, but, when you look back, you realize that things were not at all how they had ever been and that should have been your first clue to wake the hell up.  Alas, dreams and reason have never walked hand in hand.  It started with my going to my parents’ house—but it wasn’t my parents’ house, it was my grandparents’ (something I didn’t realize until I woke up).  This entire semester, my mother has been nagging me that she never hears from me and that she never gets to see me anymore.  Since they live just down the road in Three Forks, they expect that I would make that trip more often than I do.  Anyways, this day was one of those days where I was going to visit them, so I arrive at the house.  I remember thinking that things seem kind of strange but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  I went to the door and walked inside.  Things there also seemed strange but, again, I continued on.  After talking to the family for a little while, my mother finally, by her estimation, had found the perfect time to tell me that I was being kicked out of the house.  At first, I was taken aback by the mere fact that I had been out of the house and living on my own for years.  I tried to understand more specifically what was happening, but all that they would give me was that I was being kicked out and they had made up their minds about it.  After demanding a further explanation, I began to realize that I wasn’t only being kicked out of the house but I was, in fact, being banished from the family.  Again, I attempted to understand what was really happening and why my family, who have always been relatively close, was deciding to ‘kick me to the curb.’  Eventually, they became annoyed with all my questions and decided to leave and told me that if I was not gone by the time they got back, the cops would be called and I would be removed by force.

After they left, I went over to my grandparents’ who, for the some reason, had been moved next door and hoped that they could shed some light on what was going on.  Unfortunately, they had no answers and told me that is was best to “just do what your mom says.”  Realizing that I wasn’t going to get any explanations from anyone, I decided that since I already lived on my own, this wouldn’t been that much of a change and that I would just grab the few things that I had left there and be on my way.

Next thing I know, I had gathered my belonging (more things than I am positive are still in my parents’ house today) and had them all out on the front porch and was about to move them to my car when another complication ensued.  My parents, believing that I would either, not be able to move my stuff, or simply choosing to ignore them, would not leave their house and so, they had called (and paid for) a tow-truck to take my car if I hadn’t moved my stuff yet.  My stuff was already on porch, it was a short distance to the car, but try as I might to prove that I was nearly done and gone, the tow-truck drivers refused to believe me.  I begged them to see reason but they weren’t having any of it.  They hooked my car to the tow-truck and began to pull out of the drive… and I woke up.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t end here.  That dream was on a Sunday night, and so, when I awoke, I was shaken by how strange the dream was and how real it seemed.  I just sat there for a couple minutes trying to get my bearings: I wasn’t banished from my family; my car was still outside; I still had all my stuff.  Somehow I managed to pull myself together and push it all out of my mind.  Later that day, when I was walking home from class I ran into my grandmother on campus.  She works for some branch of the engineering department  and this is the first semester what we cross paths of a regular basis so I wasn’t too surprised to be running into her, but she told me that she was meeting my grandfather for dinner and that I was invited.  Of course, wanting to put off doing schoolwork and not having anything too pressing to get done, I told her I would be glad to go.  On the way there, she asked me if I had talked to my mother lately because my sister’s birthday was this week etc..  I was a little shocked that my first response which, I don’t think it came exactly in the form of words but something more, it was a general disgust that she would talk to me about my mom, a sense of ‘why would I talk to her, I’ve been banished, that ship has sailed, that bridge is burnt.’  Fortunately, I managed to get it together and explain that I hadn’t talked to my mom in a while and that I’ve been busy so I don’t really know what’s going on.  Eventually, I managed to get my shit together and realize that this was all in my head and dealt with that, but that first surge of—for lack of a better word—hate is something that was brought on by this damn dream.  If that’s not a big dream, I don’t know what is.



In a Dream of Passion

 

            Today, after only a brief mention of Conchis’s theater, a theater without an audience, I could not help but to feel the need to do some exploring of the topic of Conchis’s theater and theater in general.

  First, let us start with the image of Conchis’s theater: everyone who is around is on or behind stage.  Everyone who is watching the play at all is also a part of the production.  What is happening in the play?  Is it not the creation of another world, a world apart where “all the world” is, indeed, “a stage?”  This microcosm is a world unto itself.  How are we to say that this world, our reality, is nothing more than another stage, a microcosm of something so much larger that we cannot possible imagine? Perhaps, we are simply another production without an audience and one day, the curtain will close and that will be the unveiling.  It might seem paradoxical that the closing of the curtain might be the unveiling, but perhaps that is what it will take for us to realize our parts.

            We also encounter other kinds of stages if we look closer at The Magus.  First we see the novel itself as a stage: a platform upon which a prescribed set of actions are to take place.  All novels are, in fact, nothing more than a portable stage.  This allows one to carry a various production around with ease; on an airplane, outdoors, in the bathtub, in a box, or with a fox, the novel is the most portable version of theater.  

            Within the novel, we also see several places where stages themselves exist even if they are not, at first, obvious.  One of the first that come to mind is any place where Conchis manages to have an extended monologue.  Throughout the story, Conchis has several stories that he shares with Nicholas and whoever else is present.  These stories are presented on an impromptu platform and all Nick can do is sit and listen and ‘enjoy’ the show.  We also see the blatantly obvious dramatizations such as the initiation scene.  This production is interesting because it raises the audience and puts him (Nick) on a platform instead of, as would be expected, putting the actors (if we are, in this instance assuming Nick is not an actor) on the ‘stage.’  Interestingly, here, we see three different kinds of audience to the production.  First we have the audience which is, in fact, part of the play itself.  This ‘listeners’ that quietly sit and watch the proceedings are as much a part of the proceedings as the ‘psychologists.’  The second audience is an audience of one, Nicholas Urf and he is forced to sit through the play.  He is literally bound and gagged and forced to witness the production which continues to draw him in and convince him that he is as much a part of this as everyone else whether or not he wants to believe it or not.  The third audience is the reader of the novel.  In this case, Nick is as much of an actor as are the ‘psychologists’ or the ‘audience.’  Is this, then, a play within a play within a play?

 

These are merely some brief reflections of stages and theater, and given the breadth of the novel, it could probably extend into many of hundreds of pages, but for the constraints of time and space, I will leave this as, if nothing more, a starting point for further reflection.