[R. Nemo Hill]

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Narcissus



The reader must be carried to the point where he should conclude
that the work is an accident, and the author a peculiarity.
.................................................. ...—Paul Valéry



When I was young, I spit
into the pool, then watched
the tepid foam-of-me
dissolve and cool and ripple
outward from my self’s
cold calm reflection.

Grown into my desire,
in later years I rigged
a mirror system, reflecting
my reflection from behind.
By then, I knew my eyes,
but not my nape, my skull.

Now, I seldom stare,
or strain to catch a glimpse
in glass or puddled water.
But in the dark, I hold
my many selves as one—
the one I will relinquish.


*


When I was young, I spit into the pool
and marked that tepid foam-of-me a fool,

too swiftly cooled, too soon dispersed—dissolving
in the rings of ripples round my gaze revolving.

Full-grown into that gaze, in later years,
I blinked at frontal hopes.
......................................Yet, nether fears! —

I studied them in mirrored mirrored mirrors,
and verified the darkened side of spheres.

My eyes are weary now, averse to glare.
Likewise, to knife-edged focus. I’ve stripped them bare

of all reflection in the dark that breeds them
and where, erased, I shall no longer need them.



*


I watched my gob of phlegm drip down
the polished glass that held my image
and I did not flinch, I faced my face, my own,
the thief and the reflector, both thrower and thrown.

I did not drown, but bathed my burning eyes
in time. The architect, the sculptor of my gaze,
time turned them, turned them on its wheel, its lathe,
to cradle, skull and bowl—to empty grave

where gather now the ghosts of all my faces,
camera-less, without obsessed reflection,
each fly’s eye calmed by cyclopean graces
of looming dark, which focuses, erases.


*


On recent shoreside visits, I still mark
.....that rundown old motel,

that dreary room atop a single flight
.....of creaky wooden steps,

and that battered bathroom mirror where I spit
.....at my bemused reflection—

before I ventured out to cruise the bars,
.....to seek the eyes of others.

It took some years to lose that tired text-
.....book sense of self-contempt,

to clarify my self-to-self’s rude gesture.
.....That single splash of spit

was the impatient boat by means of which
.....I crossed my first abyss:

the distance, clear as glass, that lies between
.....the seer and the seen.

I went exploring then, around and through,
.....ahead and far behind—.

By now these eyes of mine, as mind, have mined
.....ten thousand times

ten thousand selves, a shimmering collection
.....of shades of seeing being.

The lamps have cooled, the current rises
.....to scar the silvered surface

that carries all my faces out to sea,
.....to where I am not me.


*


Slashed with spit, lost youth all bespattered in fragments;
pooled no more, my gaze, become re-definer;
eyes ashift through cisterns of bar-lit shadow—
witness, collector!

Overcrowded lens! Soon re-polished by absence,
filled with eyeless skulls, with a vigil grown vatic!
Eye of mine, your pool once again awaits you,
dry now, and blinded.

Focused face to no face with an empty place,
every vision, every snapshot is shrinking
from eye to inner eye to its closing lid—
being un-manned.


*


My heart of spit lies scattered on a glass
which the fire in my soul can’t understand.
My colder self just dries its brow and laughs.
The mirror becomes pool. My eyes expand.

The pool is in my eye now. And what’s outside
will dive or float, will sink or splash or swim,
will share the naked truths, the brazen lies—
ten thousand are the ways to enter men!

I turn my face back to my refugee,
my poor self mired in riches. I close my eyes.
The many now are one. —Is one too many?
Ears scour the dark for vision’s vacant sighs.

I think I hear faint strains of Orphic flute.
When will the questioner fall senseless, mute?


*


There was a young faggot, self-schooled,
who’d studied his face in a pool.
When he glimpsed his own ass
in a cracked whiskey glass,
well, he knew he’d been played for a fool.



And also the recognition of the pure or absolute Me,
the Me = Zero which is identical in us all, rejects all, is opposed to all.
And yet is the nexus of sensibility and “consciousness”.
.................................................—Paul Valery

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Changes (thanks, Matt.)
The pool is in my eye now. And what’s outside ... Italics eliminated


It took some years to lose that tired textbook
.....sense of self-contempt, ... "textbook" hyphenated and split between lines

[Jim Moonan]

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I can't help but rave.


Some raving thoughts...

It's as long as life is long, which makes it too short.

It's a poem ladder runged with incremental visions of the same truth. It's one poem and many poems. The central piece that connects them all is the spit, which I see in sequence turning from defiance to self-loathing and finally to inner vision.

It's a suite of poems. I was stunned by the first one. I feel like I can't say any one is my favorite. All are necessary. It's an increasingly darkened world we see as if through a prism of persevering.

It is one poem written from different reflections reflecting yourself, persevering to the end. Perseverance is the prism through which the whole is seen.

I don't know the backstory of Narcissus well enough to compare the myth with the seer in your poem. I did listen for Echo but she is nowhere to be found. Then I realized she might be the N. she is everywhere.

It is beyond personal, entering into the universal.


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[Jim Moonan]

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Ok, I'll continue...

I hear the poet revisiting over and over his examination of self in order to fine-tune/encompass what he wants to say, each time saying much of what he's said before but not quite the same way. Each attempt unearths more and more. In a sense, it is an ostinato — but not only repeating, but also contrasting. Much like this

Based on the response, it obviously isn't for everyone. Nothing is. Not even Shakespeare (N. Matteson make note). It is uncomfortably ugly in spots, beautiful in others. It is a finished work in progress. Nothing could be cut to make it better. For me, that's the whole point of the poem. The poem is long. Self-realization is life-long. Life, if we're lucky, is long. But it ends too soon.

It's a beautiful expose of self-examination. No need to respond to my comments. I make them only to express my pleasure in reading it.

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[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Nemo—

I was struck by how the variations in form and rhythm, from ballad to sonnet to Sapphics to limerick, can cause something as simple and ordinary as spitting into a pool of water to become a kaleidoscope of impressions, colored by the subjectivity of the poet. Enjoyed it.

Glenn

[Roger Slater]

An impressive sequence that rewards rereading. Narcissism so extreme that it becomes the opposite of narcissism, sort of, if I'm reading it right. Honoring one's true self amounts to an annihilation of one's true self, the poem seems to be arguing, though it's not exactly happy about that. For me it somehow made me think of my favorite lines by Shelley, in Adonais, which is certainly his greatest poem:

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity

Shelley was writing an elegy for Keats, while you seem to be writing something more like an elegy for yourself.

It's strong work throughout. If there's a section that seemed a bit too opaque for me, it's the one starting "Slashed with spit", though it may just take a few more readings to settle in for me.

[Matt Q]

I was a little daunted by the length when I first saw this, but it held my interest throughout. It drew me in and on. I enjoyed the shifting play of repetition and variation (and in subject and form). And I think the multiple forms the poem adopts is apt to theme of multiple selves. (Love that it ends with a limerick!). This is really very good, Nemo.

A few, mostly very small, things.

iii, S1L3: Possibly due simply for a desire for regularity, I find myself wanting "and did not flinch". Somehow it feels like a stronger (more unflinching!) statement if regularly iambic. Also, because of the feminine ending of the previous line, reading aloud it's easy to hear "AND i DID not FLINCH ..." and the line becomes hex. This is very much a minor quibble mind, and I can also read it aloud and have it sound fine.

S2L3 maybe "its wheel and lathe"? otherwise it can read that the "its wheel" and "is lathe" name the same thing. Plus I prefer what it does to the rhythm, but that's a purely personal preference.

iv S421 "that tops", maybe? To avoid the overused-for-metrical-convenience "atop". Doesn't bother me too much though.

iv S5: you might go full Cameron and and have, "It took some years to lose that tired text- / book sense of self-contempt" for some play on "text" (including self as text).

vi S2L1. I wondered at "my" being italicised. For me it seemed more remarkable that the pool was in his eye, where previously it had been outside it. I guess the implication is that pool was previously in another's -- or, more accurately, in others' eyes: that reflections of the younger N were through the eyes of others? He saw himself as (he imagined) others saw him, or as they reflected him back? The does make a lot of sense, but if that's what your after, I don't know that poem has done enough to set that up.

I don't know that I'm a fan of the Valery quotes. I'm not sure what it really adds. And the closing one seems to tie down a particular interpretation of the "one self", and I'm happy supplying my own. I don't know that the poem needs him.

best,

-Matt

[David Callin]

Nemo, Glenn has used the word that came to me, almost immediately - variations. Bravura variations - more like Beethoven's Diabelli than Bach's Goldberg (because more strenuously heroic, I think). And, like Matt, I love that it ends with a limerick.

I was just reading, last night, about the significance of the Narcissus myth to A. E. Housman, so that was serendipitous.

Cheers

David

[R. Nemo Hill]

Thanks for (double) breaking the ice, Jim. And for your subsequent ice-skating, the sort of relaxed exegesis which you excel in. I realize the poem is a long one to be posting here, though it is all of a piece in conception and execution. It starting with my recent readings in Monsieur Teste by Paul Valery, the epigraphs, yes, of course—but also a comment of his that after he’d written a certain poem in lines of 10 syllables, someone suggested he change it to lines of 8 syllables. That got me wondering: if I could write the same poem in a variety of different forms, how that same poem would turn out not to be the same poem at all—because the process of writing in form is constantly, out of necessity, changing the trajectory of a poem.

Fishing around for a subject for such an experiment, I thought of how both Valery and Rilke (who I've been re-reading lately) have written extensively about Narcissus. I’ve never been able to get very deeply into any of their poems on the subject; in fact, the Narcissus myth has never been one that compelled me. Well, I thought, since I have few preconceived notions about the myth, why not choose Narcissus as my subject, and let the shape-shifting of form’s changes guide me into his pool. Once I got going, I found the whole process quite invigorating.

It is a “suite”, Jim, and “suite” is one of my favorite terms to refer to this type of structure. The poem evolved into an exploration of the one and the many—and how, over the course of a lifetime, focus tends to expand from itself and then shrink back into itself, how the self passes from one to everything to nothing.

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Yes, Glen, the variations in form do create a kaleidoscopic effect on the mythic subjectivity of the poet’s own focus.

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“Honoring one's true self amounts to an annihilation of one's true self…” Roger, I feel like that is the hidden subtext of many of the poems I write these days. And in a way, the pathway there is one of shattering, of becoming many-selved, bursting into smaller and smaller bits, until one vanishes. As for the Sapphic stanza you had some trouble entering, it is certainly the most belabored—the form, for me, demands an entirely different approach to the subject at hand, a sort of foregrounded storm of sensual detail that all but obscures the content until one steps back into the distance and can see it there at the center of the rhythmic whirlwind.

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The length of this one daunted me as well, Matt, even before I began its composition—for I realized it had to go through a number of formal changes sufficient to illustrate its equation as I formulated it beforehand. Actually, I had intended it to be three or four stanzas longer, but the Sapphic stanza wore me out, and began to make me think perhaps my wheels would begin spinning soon...and so I went on, cautiously, with a sonnet...and then, in a flash, embraced the idea of ending it, in comic humility, with a limerick. The limerick finale seemed a great way to reconcile both my confidence and my doubts about the poem, ha! And the final Valery quote really clinched it for me, providing me with the second beat of a two-beat vaudevillian coda.

I hear you about the meter of the flinch line, and you may be right. I would have to end-stop the line to make it work for me…

I watched my gob of phlegm drip down
the polished glass that held my image.
I did not flinch, I faced my face, my own,
the thief and the reflector, both thrower and thrown.

I did not drown,

…but there is still something about the and that makes the run-on sentence perhaps preferable to me, and at the same time keeps my repeated grammatical structure (I watched, I did not flinch, I faced, I did not drown) from becoming too cloying.

As for wheel and lathe, I conceive of them as different objects, thinking of the wheel as a potter’s wheel. The rhythm? Well, it is a personal preference, for after extensive fiddling I do prefer it the way it is.

Does atop have a reputation as an overblown poeticism? Oh, yeah, I guess it might, like upon (which I also use on occasion). I found it useful here, and the context is less than exalted.

Your suggestion of going full-Cameron there may be one that I can’t resist (Cameron, are you out there?) It seems a really great idea. Thanks.

The italicization of my was an afterthought. When I would read the poem out loud to myself, I always stumbled there, sometimes emphasizing in and sometimes emphasizing my. My reasoning there was that since in already had the metrical emphasis, I could italicize my to give them equal weight. I do think the poem has given plenty of set-up for the seeing of myself in the eyes of others, that’s what all the trips to the bars are, the cruising, and the multiplication of selves. Still, I think it is a step too far, that italicization, and I will eliminate it.

I do disagree heartily about the Valery quotes. They are absolutely essential to the poem as I wrote it, and as I read it. And I don’t hear Valery, in the final quote, settling on the self as one, but rather as zero. “Me = Zero which is identical in us all, rejects all, is opposed to all.” The quote as a whole seems to sum up the quintessential contradictions of the one and the many in nothing. And though its objections are absolute, at the same time it salutes its act of erasure as the source of consciousness. Whew! —And it’s a lot shorter than my poem!

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Thanks, David. The limerick yes, that limerick saved me from the hubris of all the heroics that precede it.

Nemo

[Matt Q]

Hi Nemo,

Originally Posted by R. Nemo Hill

I don’t hear Valery, in the final quote, settling on the self as one, but rather as zero. “Me = Zero which is identical in us all, rejects all, is opposed to all.”

I'd read Valery the same way as you did. However, the self as one is in your poem, as is the doubt that that the self is one. The poem gives us multiple selves that over time become (or come to be seen as) one self, and then the poem raises doubt about there even being that one self, wondering "is one too many?".

There are a variety of ways in which one self could be too many -- a variety of ways to conceptualise there not being a (one) self. The Valery quote spells out one such way. My original point was that I didn't particularly want a quote to spell things out and tie things down. I was happy with where the poem ended and to be left to fill in how there was no self. I'll add to that, I don't see that that the specifics of what Valery says especially follow from the poem. It's additional information. If you think the poem doesn't say enough on its own and needs to conclude with that particular conceptualisation of (non) self to be complete, why not have a section of the the poem say it, and perhaps couch it in the poem's existing metaphors? Personally, I think I'd find find that more satisfying.

Of course, if you're happy with quotes, you're happy with them.

best,

Matt

[Roger Slater]

But whether or not you think the Valery quotes are entirely consistent with what the poem is saying, part of the experience of reading the poem is pondering whether that's the case or not. The quotes are certainly in the same general ballpark, but I don't think they need to confirm or encapsulate the poem itself. For me they were just additions to the Nemo-written series of poems that serve as further variations of the theme.