Form, Function, and Poetry

In all of my useless casting-about to try and figure out what to do with myself prior to dying, I have made up a list of things that, I figure, might constitute a life well-lived, or at least a farcical resemblance thereof. This list faces constant revision and addition, though not too much outright subtraction.

In a recent fit of additions, I decided that I wanted to memorize approximately 10 poems. These would be 10 poems which capture the joy of sound that many poems offer, and have something to say about the human condition which, when trotted out of the back-room of memory from time to time, give me a gristly profundity upon which I might chew an hour or two.

This was the plan. I began selecting poems, and immediately, like all plans that come within a 2-mile radius of my hands, the plan began fraying at the edges and mutating at the core. Ok, not really - it's just that I have a difficult time saying "No" to any poem I like, so the body of poems I am drawing from seems to be growing.

The first thing I did was write my favorite poetry authority, and ask him of to suggest some poems. He responded with the following:

“Sunflower Sutra” (or “Supermarket in California ”) by Allen Ginsberg

“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

“ Lake Isle of Innesfree” (or “When You Are Old” or “Second Coming”) by W B Yeats

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion” by Dylan Thomas

“i thank You God for most this amazing” by cummings

When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman

“The Windhover” by Hopkins

Psalm 23

Sonnet XXI by EB Browning

“Kubla Khan” (or “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”) by Colerridge

If I was going to memorize Shakespeare, I’d memorize the St. Crispin’s Day speech or, like you said, something from Hamlet.

I promptly looked these up on the internet, and began printing them off. Unfortunately, while there, I started looking at other poems, and ended up with a few more - such as:

The time I've lost in wooing
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd
She walks in beauty like the night
Delight in disorder
Some chapters of the Tao
Some Quartos of the Rubiyat

And then printed them all off, and stared that them for a while. Where to begin? For no real reason other than the size of it, I shuffled Whitman's "When I hear the learn'd astronomer" to the top of the pile, at which point it occurred to me that perhaps, if I were going to undertake a body of stuff to memorize, it might be wise to begin with the small stuff, the better to train the brain to it, and gain that extra juicy-reward feeling that squirts up between the toes of my brain when I manage to kick a totally useless personal goal in the ass.

(Don't let yourself dwell on a mental image of that last metaphor.)

So it was with Whitman that I began. And within a day, it was well-done. Here, some days later, it is, from memory. Please pardon punctuation mistakes.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting, heard the learn'd astronomer, as he lectured, with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

What I quickly noticed was that the second portion of the poem was easier to memorize than the first half. And the more I recited it to myself, the more I noticed the differences. The first half of the poem is broken in odd places, and has a hacking/coughing start-and-stop to it, punctuated by the wheezing "when," whereas the second half has more lilting words, and a rhythm that slides one line into another. Furthermore, the first half is full of science and order words - columns ranged and diagrams shown with charts to measure and astronomers and learn'd lecture rooms. The second half has not a single one of these words in it, but instead has soft action - rising, gliding, wandered off, mystical stars moist night perfect silence by myself. And somehow these changes made the second half easier to remember - easier to follow.

Which was odd, because in the course of memorizing that poem, I had accidentally memorized 1/3 of another one. Which is to say, just by flipping past it, and reading it once or twice in passing, it was now dancing with gluey slippers all over the echo-chamber of my mind, with no suggestion of stopping. It literally just fell into my head with almost zero effort. The first half below, is what I already had memorized when I finished with the first poem.

The time I've lost in wooing,
In watching and pursuing,
The light that lies
In women's eyes
Has been my heart's undoing.

Though Wisdom oft has sought me
I scorned the lore she brought me
My only books
were women's looks,
And folly's all they taught me.

So I immediately set about learning the rest of it - I will skip the middle 2 stanzas, as they really are not up to the level of the others, and go on to the last couple.

And are these follies going?
And is my proud heart growing
Too cold or wise for brilliant eyes
Again to set it glowing?

In vain, alas, th'endeavor,
from bonds so sweet to sever!
Poor Wisdom's chance
Against a glance
Is now as weak as ever.

I had to wonder - how is that I had to work at "The learn'd astronomer," but "The time I've lost in wooing" seemed to go straight into my brain?

I think the answer is the reason for poetry itself: that rhythm, rhyme, and repeated relationships between sounds and concepts, allow the brain to make connections between the items faster, thus enabling faster commitment to memory, and better long-term retention. Naturally, if you were living in a pre-literate society, and you wanted future generations to remember reliably remember the combination to the alarm system on the family's country-house, or not forget what utter uncle-raping bastards populate the village three hill's over, you might choose to set it to rhyme and rhythm to facilitate it being sung or chanted around the camp fire.

And from functionality to form, like all art, it moved. What was a useful device for carrying water becomes in time an exercise in precision crafting, cutting, glazing, painting and firing, and is an art form, valued for its aesthetic. What was once the necessity of keeping your hair from your eyes and out of the fire, in time becomes a multi-billion dollar industry and art-form, with its own high temples and high priests from whom women the world over purchase the unguents and conditioning cremes with micro-gel beads of exotic fruit extracts, and make cash offerings to in hopes that their hair will now better express their unique, sophisticated yet simple, vivacious yet with a touch of mysterious reserve, personality.

Oscar Wilde once said that "All art is quite useless." The line preceding this one was "The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely." And perhaps that is where the dividing line lies between Art and Utility - between function and form. When one begins to add function-less (useless) aspects to a thing in order to make it more worthy of admiration, one is engaging in art.

The joy of useless beauty is captured to a (for me, at least,) jaw-dropping degree in the following poem, by e. e. cummings, written here from memory, so please excuse any errors.

i thank you, God, for most this amazing
day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees,
for a blue-true dream of sky, for all
that is natural, that is infinite, that is yes.

(i who have died am alive again today. this is
the sun's birthday. this is the birthday of
light and of love and wings, and of
the great gay happening illimitably earth.

how could tasting, touching, hearing, breathing,
thinking any, lifted from the no of all nothing,
human merely being, doubt unimaginable you?

(And now the ears of my ears awake,
and the eyes of my eyes are opened.)

I saw a snowflake falling by

I saw a snowflake falling by
It seemed to find its way by feel
Into a hollow of my heart
That harbors up my secret fear.

I saw the snowflake strike and slide
Across a window warmed inside
And thus reduced, a droplet drip
Into a puddle brown and wide

(Brown cold and wide as the night,)
So sinking rippled from my sight.

The means are the ends

Only earlier today I had a minor epiphany. (And thank you, UCLA library ching-chong girl, for helping the public to remember such a great word.) Here is what I was writing at the time:
Yet - if the joy of a thing is in the doing, and not the having done, then surely the reading that I have done due to this list is its own reward, and the "completing" of a list is but a silly by-product of time well-spent.

I have often wondered at the many activities in which I engage, and the value they could possibly hold. I (and much of the world, incidentally,) at some level think that Travel, (with a big T,) somehow leaves one with a bigger soul. Or that having a wide range of experiences, (like having been forced to eat one's own liver in an igloo in the frozen north, or having sex with two women) or mastering certain skills (like playing a musical instrument while having sex with two women, for example,) leave us with . . . I don't know - an expanded conception of our own humanity - a better sense of who we are - a richer life . . . something like that.

It was a couple of years ago, in the midst of achieving a life-long dream, that I first began to wonder about this, or began to realize that there was something here of which I was not sure. It was in Egypt, at one of the numerous famous sights filled with antiquities which to the American mind are so impossibly ancient as to be beyond an age worth thinking about in specific terms. (Frankly, the longer I am outside of the US, the better I do in thinking things that are 600 years old are "somewhat" old, and those of a thousand years "rather" old and those of 2000 years "quite" old, and those preceding that . . . well, now - that is "really very," isn't it?)

But in any case, I was in Aswan, say, or Luxor, staring at some unbelievably dusty piece of rock that some poor slave or 400 had labored over extensively every day for probably the better part of a year, and the afternoon sun was causing my brain to smell like an overdone quiche, and the tourist police kept gesturing to me to follow them off somewhere private, where no doubt they would show, (or, I am told, do) something for which I would have to part with a sum so small as to border on embarrassing, with which they would (whatever the sum,) pretend to be discontented, and demand more, and the sweat was trickling down my back and being absorbed into the backpack which pressed into my back and the dust had over the past hour accumulated again into the small rivulet-stained lines from the last time I poured water over them in an attempt to cleanse them (which had instead just left them muddy,) and I had to ask myself if it was worth it.

After all: What was I here for? Why was I not seated in the shade somewhere, drinking something cold and heavily infused with stupeficants? To what end was this damn misery being endured? (It was at moments like those that I think I came closest to understanding the mindset of the British colonial masters; because frankly, had I been handed a riding crop and a pistol and had a man-servant to walk behind me porting a cooler of cold gin, I too,would have tolerated a lot less cheek from the local touts, I am sure.)

First, I suppose one reason for enduring this misery was because long ago as a wee lad, I had made a goal: to see the pyramids, and The temple at Abu Simbel and such. (And what is the point of making goals if you are only going to discard them later because it necessitated a bit of sweaty traipsing-about and being annoyed by men leading camels?)

Secondly, this "Traveling" thing was supposed to be good for one. After all, why else does one, (and oh, one does!) hear so many people under the guise of "getting to know each other" start trying to out-story and out-travel and out-country each other? Why would people do this, unless at some underlying level, we have the belief that travel makes one . . . smarter? more experienced? more worldy-wise? better-traveled? special-as-a-two-headed-animalcracker? I don't know what it is that we think it does, but it seems overwhelmingly apparent that we do think it signifies something and that something is, to us, very, very, positive - boast-worthy, even.

Consider, then, the number. Have you (I have!) ever heard the question posed: "So how many countries have you been to?" No one ever asks how many meals you've eaten - how many haircuts you've had, how many times you've stubbed your toe in the middle of the night. No one inquires how many times you have broken the speed limit or eaten an ice-cream sundae. No - the number question only comes up in a few areas: How many countries? How many tattoos? How many years? With how many people?

Is there a common thread here? Certainly we ask these questions because we believe that the answer informs us of something. How many years/How old are you correlates to a degree of experience, perhaps? We certainly expect people of different ages to have differing views on life - note the reassessment that takes place when you find out the perfectly acceptable 25 year-old guy at the party is really 36. Suddenly he begins to seem mentally stunted in a way that is only acceptable for people under the age of 26. How many people have you had sex with? The question presupposes that the numbers will communicate something relevant to the person's life experience, or medical history, or values, or to what degree they prefer to stay up late and tolerate crap conversation from drunken people rather than going home and reading a good book. How many tattoos do you have? OK, you got me there. I have no idea why anyone asks that. I certainly don't, as it seems to make fat men begin to disrobe in restaurants.

So given that we think travel does something for one, shouldn't one know what it is that one is trying to do, so that one may arrange one's travel the better to achieve said end? What is it about staring at a carven rock, or paying to ride an elevator to the top of a tower, or being overcharged for drinks that constitutes something regarding which later we would boast?

After a great deal of thought, I believe I have arrived at a (for myself) satisfactory conclusion, and here I offer it to you: There is no particular aspect inherent to travel that would cause one sane person to commend it to another for whom he felt anything more in the way of human feeling than absolute mortal hatred. In other words, paying for an airline ticket and hotel room is absolutely unnecessary unless you absolutely cannot find a way to be inconvenienced, pushed-about, swindled, conned, baked, broiled, dusted, dehydrated, wearied, worn, confused, (actively and passively,) and generally put-upon and put out within the confines of your own familiar hometown.

For that is what we travel for; there is no magic in monuments the simple viewing of which will activate an attack of the wisdoms. Rather we wish to encounter the unfamiliar - to taste the novel, in order that we may think that which we had not yet thought, and feel that which by dint of long exposure, for our own stones we no longer feel. We wish to be pushed free from our well-worn grooves and have our familiar hand-holds taken suddenly away that we may find ourselves fumbling to feel again the security of our own well-known home.

It is, in short, experience that we seek. The travel, the time on the train, the airfare and waiting lounges and even the majestic sites themselves are incidental. It is an inconvenience and an accompanying exercise in patience, it is a hunger and a thirst which our own well-marketed lands will not permit us, it is that modern-stand in for xenophobic combat, the clash of wits and wills within a swindle brought on by the sound of a foreign accent lilting of lightly of Lira's; it is these and more that we seek when we from our quotidian ways wander.

So I had made a goal - so what of it? Goals are worth the breath it takes to think them up. But my goal was made in service of an underlying and then unarticulated value. At that time, at the eloquent age of seven, if queried I would probably have said simply that I wanted to see and do everything. At a later and more mature stage of romantic illusion I would probably have stated that I wanted to secure for myself a life rich in experiences. Later, as the awareness of my own mortality began to close round me I rephrased the same point to say that when on my deathbed I wanted to have certain experiences to look back upon, by means of which I could convince myself that I had not here wasted my time, hoping thus to ease the apprehension and poignant sense loss I might then suffer when poised upon that last precipice.

Now I will not say that any of those are untrue. They all are, in each their own way, still very true to me, and speak in tones relevant to and resonant with my own mind. I have, however, come to a better understanding of what it was that I wished upon myself, or what the essence of these things are. Depth no doubt counts for much in many times and places, but breadth has also its day. Each in its way poses its own difficulties, though those of depth consist of grinding deeper into a groove long-established, while breadth is only found by forging new paths through rough and rocky, unfamiliar and unbroken ground. It is by being dislodged from our familiar footpath onto a bumpy and rocky way that we wear ourselves into a form a little finer.

So it is not in the seeing of the sight that we find what we were seeking. It is in the going and the doing - the site which we came to see is just an another interesting rock along life's weary way.

I will never do 2010 again

You may or may not be aware - I may or may not have said - 2010 was a bit of a shitty year for me. Which might go a ways toward explaining why I did ONE single blogpost here in the whole year of 2010.

I and my wife, (of 10 years,) divorced. It was, as far as these things go, a relatively clean one. (Which is a lot like saying, "As far as limb-severing car accidents go, this one was pretty good!") We don't talk anymore, really. We did at first, periodically, but it just became too painful. (After she stopped calling I changed the ringtone on my phone because every time I heard that ringtone I started up with a feeling of dread that left a not-nice stomachache coming on, long after I knew it wasn't her.) Toward the end she only wrote me to ask what had or had not been sent, or to say thank you for the periodic cash deposits. Now it appears that even the "thank you" has gone by the wayside.

Two nights ago I dreamt of her - but not of her, in person, but of her as a memory. In my dream she was of the past, and I was doing something (I recall not what,) or saying something to someone which was predicated on our relationship being over. I remember very little of it, except my surprise upon waking to note that now even in my dreams we are over.

I rarely look at her photos - it is painful, it raises memories that would rather quietly slumber. I have learned the ways of thinking that before applied mostly to medical procedures, or things unspeakably disgusting: how to think of them without thinking of them. How to deal in the abstract discrete minute portions of the thing, and by observing closely the tree manage to miss completely the forest. Living flesh becomes muscle-tissue, and pus becomes white blood cells, or seepage only. To kill is only the act of proper placement and then the pull or the push - the result being incidental - though the result be all. Red-swollen-painful-to-the-touch is nothing more than a secondary infection and pain is only insufficient anaesthesia.

She is my ex-wife, my former-wife, and thus I rarely say her name. The curtain in one room has accidentally come to cover the photo that sits on the windowsill and I will not move it.

People ask me how I am - I find I can truthfully say anything: I am fine, (because I am,) I am in great pain, (as I am,) I wish I could go back and fix it, (because I do,) I think it is better this way, (I am sure it is.)

I am happy, (rarely been more so!) I cried a couple of weeks ago, (but before that - it had been months!) I want her to call me, (I long to hear her voice, her soft and hesitant syllables,) I don't want to hear from her, (I start in fear and feel deep dread every time my phone displays an unfamiliar number.) I am happy to be dating - (it's fun after 10 years to be free as a bird,) I miss our conversations, (but not the crying,) I miss her presence, (when not silent/sullen) I miss her killer luscious little body (without qualification.)

When we separated I embarked on a program to remake my life - to break old habits and begin new ones. It was a smashing success for some months, then less and less so. I began writing in a journal more often, cooking at home, meditating on some evenings, working out like a fanatic, and reading more. The nights were cold that winter - the house lonely was full of terrors of the thoughts that might come. The house was dark without her, her smell still in the closets. I filled every hour with activity. I took on extra work at work, I trained like a demon at the gym - I found out later the others are now afraid to spar with me - I still don't really know why. (What are a couple of noses between friends?)

And I read - spiritual and self-help and fiction and classics and whatever else I could lay my hands on. The Bible, the Tao, the Masnavi, I read every night, these and more. I practice meditation some nights or days, till my hips and back ached.

And all this - did it do me any good? I have no idea - it helped. It gave me a handle to hold on to. It gave my mind a place to turn, a raft of ideas and activities to carry me through each frightening week. I don't know how much it helped - I am better than I was - I suspect I am on the upswing - but I think it will be yet another year before I can move the curtain that hangs across the windowsill in one room.