For me the poem is about the relation between seeing and saying, between the image and the word. I have eyes, and so image has always seemed primary to me, with words trying to capture the image after the fact. But for the sightless it may be language that is primary, it is the word that evokes the world. And according to western traditions, it is Adam who names the individual species whose multiplicity makes up the garden, placing "a word's noose around each neck".
The poem thus calls into question my entire value system, for I am accustomed (like many self-questioning poets) to denigrating language, and to favoring the image—or rather, to viewing the magic of poetry as the clearing away of the accumulated obstructions of language that block our view of the world as it is. If I close my eyes, however, then that language becomes the world as it is. Yet the poem does not force me to choose sides—it is more skillfully tentative than that, it allows me to both close and open my eyes, and to compare the resultant worlds, both Eve’s world washed of words, and the Eve-less "kingdom of the blind". It plays with the re-valuation of biblical myths, asking: Which kingdom is fallen? Which is Edenic? And, of course, as in any myth, both realities are present at once, and their superimposition, while ultimately incalculable (and thus conventionally uninterpretable, i.e., unavailable to any single-minded interpretation) offers a world as only poetry can more fully create it.
Emotionally, however, there remains the ache of exclusion, of one world’s exclusion from the other. Here, Eve is expelled from the garden, and Adam must carry on in his blindness without her, each experiencing a different kind of flood, a different kind of washing. Locked as we are into our own realities—blinded by language, or blinded by sight—we feel “alone”, we feel the loss of that other which only poetry, or a poem like this, can irrigate with the possibilities of healingly multiple vision. Personally, I fully feel every intellectual meander the poem takes. The more I read it, the more magnificent it seems. It brings back all the self-doubts of the language of the great-outer-sighted poets of the past, and reminds me of the potential of language to build a new universe, unseeing the apparent world to make way for another inner-sighted world. Together these worlds spin in the myth-gyre. And crowning that whirl of worlds is the evocation of the loneliness of any one proposition made too real: every personal language an isolated Eden. The conflation of the flood with the creation story seems apt here, for this is in many ways an un-creation story too, an Eden of Erasure.
With eyes closed, Cameron, it makes me wonder about another element not mentioned here: sound, sound as the widow of the erased image. And it also raises question in my mind about thinking and feeling, for with my eyes closed I can I feel rather than see my way through the world, a kind of progress that shares much with thinking my way blindly through it. So sometimes seeing comes first, sometimes seeing comes afterward.
This is where you poem has brought me.
Nemo
|