Having just logged on for the first time today, I've had to scurry
to catch up with the lively Muldoon/"Holy Thursday" discussion. As
to the first (and in response mainly to Andy's irritations with my
"genius" and JK's "linguistic dexterity" re Muldoon), I know what
you mean by the irritating critical luster that can create an aura
of spurious interestingness around every minor detail or bit of
punctuation in a poem, Andy--and it tends to irritate me too. My
own use of "genius" for poets of Muldoon, Ashbery, and Prynne's
calibre is a very personal one, i.e., these are my "genii" as a
poet, the ones in whose work nothing seems "minor" or incidental
to me until it's had a good hard look by me. With Muldoon, I'm
familiar enough with the work and the criticism on it to read his
"or" constructions in terms of what one critic has called, rather
wittily, his "borderline disorder." This is one poet who invariably
speaks from an ambivalent position (linguistic, emotional, or
otherwise), which most critics attribute to his having grown up on
the North/South border of Ireland, and if there's a lot more to it
than that glib explanation (as I suspect there is), it is probably
fair to say that most, if not all, Muldoon poems are a commission
from the Boundary Commission in one way or another.
But a recurrent binarism interrupted by a third term, yet often
linked to some sort of oneness as well, that can also be traced
back to Muldoon's early work and which I think of as his personal
trinitarianism. His relationship with his parents, the original
pair he interrupted as the third term, would seem to be one nexus
for his consistent ambivalence, going by what's enacted in "Milkweed
and Monarch," where he kneels at the graves of his mother and father
in a poem whose recurring line is "could barely tell one from the
other." In an earlier poem, "The Mixed Marriage," he refers to his
schoolmarm mother's "world of Castor and Pollux"--twin students in
her classroom whom "she could never tell" apart. And then there's
Muldoon's own childhood classmate, Lefty Clery, who appeared twice
in their class photograph when he took advantage of that period's
slow photography to dash from one end of the posed group to the
other with perfect timing.
It seems to me that the same thing is going on in "Holy Thursday"
with the numbers and the associated ambivalent position of the
speaker, who constitutes one leg of the (trinitarian) triangle,
sacred and profane, on which the poem is structured. Whoever the
speaker's fellow diner may be (and I take Peter's point about his/
her nonspecificity while still reading the pair as romantic due to
its fit with the Passion, which begins in Gethsemane after Supper
on Holy Thursday), they form a pair together (if not for long, we
gather) relative to the waiter, whose remoteness from them is
signaled by "a waiter" (i.e., he's not even THEIR waiter) and
reinforced by his coming out of the kitchen with "stew or soup"
(they can't tell from where they're sitting) and then seating
himself at "the next table but one" from theirs. Whatever he's
eating, though, must be swabable with bread, which, like the wine
he "drains" is required in this poem for his subsequent dumbshow
"Mass"--the part of it that occurs post-Communion (according with
the lovers already post-we/us state), when the priest (with an altar
cloth folded over one forearm--just like a waiter, I always thought
as a chilkd) must finish the leftover wine and wafers before putting
the Host-containing Chalice back in the little Tabernacle that sits
on the altar--and genuflecting, or bowing, to it. The same act of
Transubstantiation that renders the Communion wafers and wine into
the body and blood of Christ elevates the priest to Christness as
he administers the sacrament of Communion to those at Mass and then
partakes himself of the corporeal remainder. When the Host/Christ is
returned to the Tabernacle, the priest reverts to his own identity,
just as the waiter, briefly elevated to the diner's role, then bows
and smiles in his own servile capacity to his "absence" as the diner
whose bread and wine he both served and consumed.
As for the chair that was "simply borrowed," well, hasn't Muldoon
himself "occupied" one or two "folding chairs" (as they're known
among American academics)--temporary appointments--at Columbia,
Yale, and/or Princeton? Maybe Matthew can date "Holy Thursday" for
us, but, as it almost certainly preceded one or both of Muldoon's
current pair of relatively elevated positions at Princeton and
Oxford, I suspect this "borrowed chair" represents a piece of
Muldoonian mischief, among other things that other readers might
also see in it. If it's self-reflexive, though, it entails a brief
identification by the (half-of-a-pair) speaker with the waiter (the
third term in this socio-sacred triangle)--the one who "waits" for
the two who "linger."
Candice
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