Well, given the "jocking" and other erroneous (to me)
comparisons, I wanted to chime in about your poem, Alison.
I like very much its musing upon being , have kept thinking
of it since I read it, and am glad for your posting it.
One of the things I like about this is that it manages to
suggest both a genuine questioning which could wander
off in any direction and a sensibility always drawing the question
back to the preoccupations of the self, so that the wondering
"what does it matter" if one is dreaming or waking which
seems an open question is also directed, most subtlely
back to that sensibility in which the element in both dreaming
and waking is "pain, " rather than the so many other elements
possible in either state.
So the poem unravels as a questioning
that works in several directions, whether it is "my own
damage" or a "wound torn in others" and yet each veering
off into an apparently other direction doubles back upon
itself, so then the "wound torn in others" comes back to
the self "that they must diagnose/ through my skin," and
as a musings of a particular, if somewhat oblique and subtle,
sensibility. Evoking not only the play between one and others,
but upon the others in oneself, the fictional selves, all of
whom reveal and veil the particular sensibility who sees
them all in a sense through the I/eyeglass of suffering. The
'pain' in dreaming and waking, the wound torn in others or
the damage in oneself, the painted actress who "blinks" "blackening
tears of no response." The poem so questions the fictions of
the self but not the sense of suffering which is mysterious and
compelling, to that sensibility as if it were "behind" the word.
It's at times very sharp,
in its "speaking like a bad novel" and "endless museums
of self-regard," and I like that sense of consciousness as
a "a finger on this pulse," that so bodily sense, that is
sensuous and full of sense, in that last image, including
the "snail absorbing rain." It's quite compelling, so much
so that I was almost persuaded that it doesn't matter
if one is awake or not, almost not noticing that the sensibility
had so framed 'her' argument that the hinge that makes
it not matter is pain, since if one suffers in any world, what
world does it matter that one inhabits?
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
from Alison Croggon:
behind the baroque
mask a blankness
inflicting itself in concentric circles
she asks:
is this really my own damage
or a wound torn in others
that they must diagnose
through my skin
predictable as a tragedy
leached of all colours
in which the painted actress
pouts and blinks
such blackening tears that all response chokes
on the absurd
ancient seductions
smudging the heart
and again: finally
in the yellow dusk I understand
how a book opened prematurely
might be a fatality
dazzling the mind's innocence
so it forms a mirage
populous and exact in every detail
while the desert breathes
livingly beneath it
cheated of the eye
she asks again: what is more real
the life formed
out of our delusions
in all its tender
quickness of flesh or the vast
desiring cell
that mindless replication
swarming itself
out of its decay: or is this
not a question
the torment is always as the woman said
to find oneself speaking
like a bad novel though fiction is seldom
so misleading
as these selves we claim
to live by squatting
by middens of bones the sand
scours to whiteness
damasks of civilisation
woven by ill-used hands
rotting in those endless museums
of self regard
et cetera she asks:
if I have been asleep
how do the pains of dream
differ from waking
and how much does it matter?
this finger on this pulse
conscious as a snail
absorbing rain
|
