Monday, September 22, 2008
The Perfect Poems: V. 1: "In the Waiting Room"
My first two blogs were very long, and I do not want to try anyone’s patience, so I will try to keep this one a brief as I can. I have included the full text of Elizabeth Bishop’s perfect poem “In the Waiting Room.”
Strange to say, but I am not really a poetry kind of guy. In fact, until the first year I was in graduate school, I used to say “Any poet worth his/her salt would be writing fiction by now.” Happily, I have come to really appreciate brilliant poems though.
When I teach poetry in my classes, we spend several days discussing poems that are for one reason or another emblematic of a certain period or form, or else we study poems that have excellent examples of different literary devices. This sort of thing is compulsory to be sure—I am, after all, supposed to give them the tools to make sense of poems. However, I always save some room at the end of our poetry unit for a handful of poems that (at least for me) peal back the edges and give me a passing glance of what is on the other side. Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning” always makes the list, as does this poem by Elizabeth Bishop.
For me, great poems are always concrete, at least initially. I am not much for lyric abstractions. I don’t want unicorns or butterflies. Bishop’s poem puts you in a dentist’s waiting room with a young girl who is accompanying her “Aunt Consuelo.” You can feel the discomfort of the child as she sits and tries to read. The mind of this girl is distinctly child-like (note phrases like “full of grown-up people,” “I was too shy to stop,” and “wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs”), but at the same time very intelligent (“spilling with rivulets of fire”) even condescending (calling her aunt a “foolish, timid woman”). To pass the time, this girl awkwardly reads the National Geographic, horrified by the "large sagging breasts" of the native women photographed there.
Then in the second stanza, she hears her aunt cry out in pain from the next room. This sends her mind spinning because for some reason she strangely recognizes the voice that calls out as her own. Not in a metaphorical way either. He has this kind of transcendent moment, where she realizes in a flash that “Without thinking at all / I was my foolish aunt, / I—we—were falling, falling.”
In the third stanza, we find the girl has this strange sort of anxiety attack where she feels a startling emotion that is equal parts empathy and alienation. She struggles to individuate her own identity from everyone else around her by reciting, chant-like, her own biographic details. He is connected to everything at once, but also finds everything distinctly foreign. The poem turns deeply philosophical, and I choose no to paraphrase her questions or argument, except to say that she keenly articulates how strange it is (how “unlikely”) to be human in a sort of David-Lynch-Presents-The Lion-King's-"Circle-of-Life" kind of way.
"Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance"
For me this is the real power of the poem: how strange it is to be human. How generous of Elizabeth Bishop to share her "sidelong glance."
Enjoy:
In the Waiting Room
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
Copyright by Elizabeth Bishop
Sunday, September 14, 2008
The Perfect Novel V. 1 Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest
Tonight my good friend Jason Hensley sent me a text message: "david f wallace killed himself."
* The Broom of the System (1987)
* Infinite Jest (1996)
* Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
* Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
* Oblivion: Stories (2004)
* A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
* Up, Simba! (2000)
* Everything and More (2003)
* Consider the Lobster (2005)
http://www.davidfosterwallace.com/news.shtml his unofficial website
Friday, September 12, 2008
The Perfect Albums V. One
Miles Davis
"Bitch's Brew"
I was reading a bit of my Masters Project the other day—brushing up on my "Taming of the Shrew" for Honors Intro to Literature—and I read a certain combination of words, and some wires in my brain crossed and a shot of music surged into my body, accompanied by a feeling that I had forgotten all about, but that was immediately familiar again. The music that I heard was Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew." The feeling that I felt… that is harder to explain.
Miles had formed a reputation for himself as one of the most progressive musicians in jazz well before the 1969 recording of "Bitch's Brew." His "Kind of Blue" (which may be his best album) is notable among other things because of the quixotic composition process that Davis brought to the record. It is well documented that Davis "wrote" the songs on "Blue" in only the loosest sense. He would take a hint of a melody or a mild suggestion of a key or mode, a couple chords, a few notes, a tempo, a few words about the feeling he wanted… that was it. Then they rolled the tape and the band played. The results are stunningly beautiful, even for the uninitiated into the world of jazz. Any fan of music will attest to the amazing pathos of that record.
But even for its innovation, "Kind of Blue" is still very much jazz in a conventional sense. Davis's trademark on the trumpet was a cool, luscious style and rich tonality. This is never more keenly felt than on "Blue." Simply stated, when one listens to "Kind of Blue" you can tell immediately that your ears are in good hands. Davis is gonna take care of you.
All this to say: "Bitch's Brew" was no "Kid of Blue."
Legend has it that Davis was inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and the wildness of the rock music scene he saw at Woodstock a few months prior to recording. Here we see Davis breaking all the rules, in an almost adolescent way. Imagine an electric bass, and upright bass, three drummers, two or more electric pianos, and a bass clarinet all playing at the same time. Now imagine that Miles called these people together into the studio, not only without ever practicing any of the songs, but often with no clear idea of the song at all. With the prominent rhythm section wailing, rattling, collapsing, resurrecting, exploding, breaking, diving, halting, whimpering, spanking, barking, pouting, and slipping its way along, Davis plays simple yet aggressive melodies over the top, occasionally accompanied by a sax.
What are the results? Frankly, it is a complete mess. If "Blue" makes you feel like it is under control, "Brew" makes you feel like nothing, absolutely nothing is in control. In fact listening to this album is more than anything else like reading the worst parts of Thomas Pynchon's long novels. For those of you who have never been in the guts of one of Pynchon's novels, I will not try to approximate it, but let me say this: his novels are 1000 pages or so and feel like 5,000. Tedious, arrogant, chaotic, difficult, esoteric, and frustrating.
So why on earth is this album under my "Perfect Albums" list. Well, first of all, I put it here for the same reason that I would probably put something from Pynchon's difficult fiction on my "Perfect Novels" list. The work that is demanded of you to listen to the CD is rewarded by rare but breathtaking payoffs. The accumulated effort that is required to grind through the esoteria prepares your mind perfectly—just perfectly—for the moments of brilliance. The dis-ease builds up and builds up and the frustration grows until, unexpectedly, there is a moment of sublime culmination. In fact, there is no other way to get this exact kind of experience with art. There is art like "Kind of Blue" that feels right from the start. But there is also art like "Bitch's Brew" that feels wrong almost all the time.
I liken it to Chuck Yeager's descriptionsof breaking the sound barrier for the first time. Every time anyone got close to the speed of sound, the jet craft would start to shake madly and the pilot would become afraid it might fall apart all together. So the pilots would decelerate and the engineers would go back to work. But after trying and failing several times, Chuck finally just said "to hell with it," and when his jet started to shake itself to pieces, he punched the throttle all the more. Maybe it would come apart, maybe not, but he was determined to find out what it felt like to go faster than sound. What he discovered is that once he hit the speed of sound, the sonic boom would crack through the air and the jet would flatten out, smooth and still like the morning. This is how it feels to work through "Bitch's Brew" and to find those moments of culmination. Is it fun to when you are shaking around, fearing for your life? No. But without that work, you could never get where you want to go.
The first time this album worked for me, I was about twenty-five or so, and I lied on the floor of my family room, placed the speakers of my stereo on the floor beside me pointing at my ears from each side. I was determined to make it all the way through (I believe that I read somewhere that J. Spaceman listed this as one of his favorite albums), so I cranked the volume and let it fly.
The physical discomfort that I felt was measurable, but I stuck with it. And when the clouds broke and I found myself on the mountaintop with the light of God shining on me… well it was really something. Something in fact that I could never have gotten without doing the work of enduring through it. That work, you see, made me ready for the eventual revelation.
It turns out I have had many good experiences with the CD, although none of them has equaled the first time. Interesting note that I cannot fully explain: each time I achieve the white light with this CD it has been at a different point of the recording. Hm.
So when I was reading my MA project the other day, the words I read triggered a neural reaction, and I found myself in the basement of the California State University, Fullerton Library, in the computer lab. My project was in the final deadly throes. The words were thrashing about the pages and pages of notes I was writing from, snapping at the screen, tearing my sentences apart. I was facing a cruel and ruthless deadline, and I simply had no choice but to get the words written and the project done. I would use violence if I had to. I wore headphones and blared music through my portable pre-mp3 CD player. I tried various CD's, but the only two that worked (seriously I couldn't write single stinking word without one of these CD's blaring in my ears) was Medeski Martin and Wood's "Tonic," and Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew." The music was maddening. It nearly drove me crazy, but it was the right kind of crazy. A madness that got me through my project.
And that was the feeling I felt in my office the other day. And I was reminded of what a great and perfect album this is.