Matthew, thank you for replying. A few more refelctions. One is:
There is no final greetings such as "Love!" (Orpheus) that can
legitimate the systematic change of what another person
has been saying in a text, no matter how enthusiastic one might become in
lending an helping hand to the deepening of textual distortions.
Follow me:
Erminia writes: "I deeply object to the use of "we"..."
Matthew expands : "you said that you hated the use of "we" ....."
Orpheus adds: " I am surprised that anyone can hate anything in a text"...
From this line on, one can understand where the "commedia dei costumi"
originated from , as a criticism to socially constructed bad habits. Well,
this is not a way to proceed and only creates mythologies.
Matthew, in my view an enormous number of published lyric texts would
have been better poems if the author - while keeping the same content -
changed the angle of his perspective.
Anyhow, God knows why am I giving away such a good set of advices
for free.
Example:
"Turpin Song" (Electric Light)
"The horse pistol, we called it" (Heaney re-stating himself once again
after thirty years as a cultural authority depositary of Irish language,
sense and national identity as well as of the secret nature of useful-
symbolic objects).
I try now to make a change in the author's perspective: "It was called
horse pistol", "They called it horse pistol", "Its name was horse
pistol..." , "I learned it was called horse pistol..."
and later on in the same poem, the poet goes on telling "us"...
"A horse pistol comes tumbling
From over the door of the world
(his previous “door into the darkness “
has now and more ambitiously turned into a "door of the world”)
And it's nineteen forty-eight
Or nine, we have transgressed,
We've got our hands on it
And it lies there, broken in bits.”
(again, "we" ? Who? Why? where? on the behalf of whom? Is such poet-
spokesman acting in a legitimated fashion or not? how many people among the
readers wish to or do recognize themselves into this "we"? What evidence is
given for such a mandatory role? And if it is a fake, why should I come to
this pantomime? ..But, wait a moment...
here it comes, the revelation of this poem's secret: Heaney as the first
man on the planet ...proclaiming itself to be the primordial poet Vico was
philosopher was talking about, the bard looking at the elements with pure
lyricism and wonder,a nd pure eyes, uncontamianted)
"I lift up my eyes with the apes."
A part from reminding me of an old TV advert, where the copyrighter ,
copying the theme from "2001 Odissea nello Spazio", makes an ape stand up
from the cave and go towards the tool and then towards a Renault 2000, this
text makes a perfect example of a manipulative use of the personal
pronoun "we" aiming at conferring a kind of authority to the author.
So now, at the last line of the 5th stanza of "Turpin Song" (Electric
Light) we discover, we are told who the "we" are ... and we should thank
God that this prodigious, this survived Neanderthal poet, Seamus Heaney of
the Bog-Lands, endured millennia just for the sake of reaching us, here
and now , to bring with him to us the voices of our communal ancestors.
So to expand adoration beyond the Irish borders and be acclaimed as the
world bard. But an humble one , though, handling humble tools and using
an thruthful language).
I simply object to –, not hate, for God ‘s sake, - THIS kind of "use" of
the personal pronoun "we".
erminia
|