"For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then this splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. . . But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q" (Woolf, 37).
Flashes. Whenever I begin reading something new, it feels like an experiment. I observe and try to maintain a balance between emphasizing the small details while keeping the whole in mind. Sometimes an epiphany will dawn on me. Such epiphanies are so exciting when they occur that they feel, for a brief moment, like going flashing through the alphabet, running my hand all the way down a piano keyboard, or eliminating the perceived pause between an inhalation and an exhalation. Discreet patterns disappear, and a whole work comes together. I don't fish, but I'm also thinking of Hokusai paintings of Japanese fishermen, pants rolled up, fishing lines out, ready for action, but still unsure if they will catch the big fish.
Reading the selection of Adrienne Rich's poetry felt a lot like reaching for Mr. Ramsey's R or waiting for the big fish. I encountered a stanza that really brought her work together for me in "Planetarium": "I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind". I love the occasional pockets in literature where a writer seems to come out and state his/her mission. Might this be such a moment in Rich's work? It was after writing the following in my initial post that I had another realization: I wouldn't dare be so assuming, but the notion of human beings as instruments resonates with me. After all, isn't sound, communication, and the building of harmony (or dissonance) what we do in a way? Another question arises for me when I consider the traditional characterization of the sciences and humanities as masculine and feminine. I wonder what Adrienne Rich, a feminist writer, is doing with the sciences in her poetry. Is there an underlying feminist statement or challenge she is trying to make? What I realized was that the epiphany I thought I had had was just another struggle to get from one letter to the next. The flash was but a charming illusion.
And so, here begins my next post on Adrienne Rich. The last one was stale and myopic! Here we go again! Wee! I'd just like to draw out a connection that I'm entertaining between Rich and Strand. In both "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" and " For an Album", Rich thematically grazes on the power of stories, the first beginning with an anecdote about her son burning a mathematics textbook with a friend and traversing through book burnings, poverty (and with it colloquial English that reflects the socioeconomically disadvantaged), and the echoes of stories that are heard with the age old act of sex: "What happens between us/ has happened for centuries/ we know it from literature/. . .there are books that describe all this/ and they are useless" (353). I love the way Rich weaves such a rich (haha) tapestry of the political and the intimate-- in juxtaposing the two, they become strange allies. I was left thinking about how interconnected everything in this poem was, and as I mull over how exactly Rich waltzes across so much different terrain, I realize that what it all has in common is that it is united by style, language, and alignment on the page. Even if the moves are different, everything might be considered a variation on the same theme. Inger Christensen does this in what I consider the ultimate way in her poem "alfabet" which reads like a meditation. Strand's story concerns feel different to me, but since we studied "The Story of Our Lives" earlier in our blogging adventure, I thought I'd give it mention. OK, this is choppy, but it's time to post. This one has been sitting on the stove for way too long.
No comments:
Post a Comment