Sorry for my long-delayed response here, but pre-holiday obligations have had me running in some tight circles.
Thanks, Jan, for your vote of empathy. The pun came about quite organically, and struck me with the force of the obvious at the time, even though on further reflection it is hard for me to pin down its power. It almost seems as if as soon as one clearly knows where one is, the place becomes no where at all, but nowhere in its positive rather than its negative sense; or simply nowhere in relation to all the knowledge that brought one there. Like the Buddhist raft, when it reaches the far shore of its river, both raft and river disappear. Kind of like no thing and nothing, where no thing is negative in its connotation of the absence of all things, but nothing is a positive thing, an entity all its own. Valery always posited that knowledge obscures truth, and I guess I am at an age when all my accumulated knowledge seems like a burden, something that needs to be shed if I am to cross the border beyond which it is no more than a puff of smoke. We all shed in different ways, of course, but we all do go stripped down into the distance.
I have never co-habited with a dog in my life, only cats. Dogs in Bali are horribly abused, seldom kept as pets, and this one just appeared one year in the garden of the bungalow where I always stayed. We grew quite fond of each other by the end of my trip. It was quite sad to part from him, and I eagerly awaited our encounter when I returned the following year—my anticipation swiftly squelched with a shrug, and the offhanded comment that someone might have poisoned him. So, I confess, the poem has a sentimental quality for me, one that attaches me to that dog-moment.
Well, Jim R, you’ve got me there in your portrait of my poet. For years I never wrote in the first-person-singular, expunging the “I” completely. Yet now that “I” have crept back stealthily into my own poems, I’m not surprised that your little portrait of the outcast artist rings true. In the poem I think I was trying to minimize the rebellious aspect of my outcast, and focus more on his burgeoning exile. But I guess that burst of politics before the end, which some find jarring or distracting, is the proof that exile still contains all that which has been left behind. Indeed, that is what creates the exquisitely melancholy mode of exile: the perpetual tension of continuous escape from the “tumult of the times”.
Jim M, do you mind if I focus on the final sentence of your post? “I’ll just say it came at the perfect time.” For me that rings a welcome critical alarm. Everything about us is entirely time-based, we are constantly changing, no moment of ours resembles another, the ground is always rolling away under our feet. It’s understandable that we feel the need to construct all these elaborate critical systems which we believe can endure in all the ways which we, with our disparate cells and selves, cannot. But we give these systems too much credit when it comes to the stationary opinions we thus arrive at. For each opinion is slender as a thread, and each is only one of the countless threads at rhythmic play on the loom of time. How fortunate for us that occasionally the ten-thousand things do combine is a certain way that elicits from us an appreciation of the moment, at the moment it occurs. And all the moving pieces of the puzzle are stilled by that moment, and they form a paradisal whole—which soon re-disintegrates, re-forms itself, keeps moving. I have skimmed and skipped over so many pieces of writing over the years; I have landed so gratefully on others. But as time passes further and further, and I am changed, the poles might just as well be reversed as I land on the formerly skimmed and skip the former landing. Love and hate and all the states between, all have their own kaleidoscopic contexts, and the loom’s threads are apt to loosen, and become tangled. And always, in every moment, there is an aspect of chance. I have of late been experimenting, going back and reading books and watching films that in the past I was always proud to vocalize my hatred of. My attention at this new moment in time is re-directed, my opinion revised. To tell a poet that that their poem came at the perfect time is really all I should ever need to know. We should all be grateful to the endless shifting of context and its mysterious conjunctions. It’s so lovely to meet there.
John, I don't think I have ever experienced “deep depression,” at least not for more than the length of a hangover. Though I do think of it as a malady of the depths, a vertical drama—my own depression seems a horizontal one, shallow, but broader than the eye can see. Thus, even when I am wading through it, I can still walk. Indeed, the feel of it around my feet is a comforting one. And although it is makes me intensely pensive, it is not paralyzing. I suppose I am describing melancholy, rather than depression. Still, every poetic term coined to describe such a web of feelings seems to tap into the same reservoir of sadness through a different vein. Paradoxically, what might seem a depressive drone throughout this poem, at various passing moments might sound more like the low hum of a peaceful chant in the distance.
As for excising the crass political intrusion on the peaceful exile, it did occur to me when writing that the details were out of register somehow. I told myself to remember that this was a diary entry. (I was working on a prose version of it for the second volume of my postcards from elsewhere, when I decided to versify the images instead.) I have been trying to include more of the diary’s quotidian detail in my latest transcriptions. The new volume is coming to feel more like a memoir. I guess everyone, as they age, comes to the conclusion, earned or unearned, that their life has at least some sort of shape—ragged though it may be, with all that clutter stashed just behind the photograph. I’m no different. And, besides, those political details were so much of the moment I was trying to capture. I couldn’t cut them. In their violence, they have a tonally opposite kind of specificity than the rest of the poem’s details: dog, tooth, chair, etc. I really have come to think of them as providing an essential balance to the choices the poem makes between loud & fast and low & lost. In the poem’s overall rhythm, they are the force that propels me to this point in my travels, and they make my stillness stiller.
Max, I hear you about wallowing. When I first stumbled on the word I thought, no, you’ll never be able to set it unostentatiously into the poem as a rhyme-word. The thing is, those last two lines of S4 are my favorite moment in the poem, one of the few runs of phrase that I managed to salvage directly from my prose version. Perhaps I am simply so happy to hear swallowing ring out in echo that I am overlooking the behavior of my reckless rhyme-driver. Did learn too well from Byron that the deliberateness of a heroic rhyme can be a useful tool? Perhaps. Yet I really did feel rescued by this blaring rhyme, and so have grown attached to it.
Yes, David, it’s a moment of rest. Yet, though that porch was landlocked, still I could feel the trembling of the waves beneath me, ready to carry the temporarily exile away sooner or later. Years earlier, in another more primitive dwelling, in the middle of the rice paddies, during rainy season, I remember how often it looked and felt like I was on a little raft, sitting perfectly still and reading while I floated away.
For certain readers it would seem that most of the discomfort comes to them in the middle of the poem. The poem does change its voice there, as well as changing verb tense. Originally the poem was in three blocks of text, the past bookended by a pair of present presences. I did want the “bad day” to be as generalized as possible, Roger, so as to rob it of its destructive power. It doesn’t matter which of those “so many things” it refers to—in the poem, with one gesture, I am trying to sweep them all clear of the cleaned slate of my next morning’s awakening. I acknowledge their inevitability with minimal emphasis, leaving my ritual offering on their altar. Alas, one man’s ritual offering is another man’s “belabored yet vague whining”. But seriously, I didn’t want this moment of collapse to have the sharpened landscape quality that my first two stanzas had, and the pile-up of metaphors seems to me a sort of whirlpool, a vortex of impressions, breaking down, whirled into nowhere.
I talked of context before, and this poem will certainly be in an exhaustively detailed setting that should go a long way toward clarifying some of its general lines of thought, as well as unifying some of the details which seem unnecessary now. At least I hope so. This will be just one day’s entry among hundred of such entries, over a five-year period. Nevertheless, I did post it as a stand-alone poem, so it is good to know what works and doesn’t work for individual readers. Such echoes are very useful, and for me they often re-emerge months, even years later, and lead to changes.
So, thanks, all.
Nemo
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Linear Mode
