Troubling Deaf Heaven with Bootless Cries
An Exegesis of the "Skinny Texte without Meaning" of Daniel J. Weeks'
by Gregg Glory
What is the essence of "wascally?" How can we take seriously, consider seriously, or take serious meaning away from a piece writing that is so fully-armed against seriousness--so self-aware of its own devious slyness? Interviewing Brer Rabbit might yield more enduring and less curious results.
Yet this is the task that this essay sets before itself. The poem, "Skinny Texte without Meaning," will be made to yield its dissected meaning. Slyness shall meet analysis, and the silliest shall win. Parts shall be attacked by partitions until the Cow of How revivifies and gives up the Moo in the Moon or else our siring Osiris lapses into his permanent demise.
The challenge of the title of the poem "Skinny Texte without Meaning" shall be met, verb for verb. We must conquer it with our human capacity to discern and learn, or else live with our failure, having robbed ourselves of the delight of enlightenment.
There is a pun in the title of the poem that derides the text-independent method of analysis so favored by the followers of Deconstructionism, the "modern sort now growing up"--critics and cynics of critical thinking who muse rampantly over the ramparts of the Ivy League schools in contemporary America. This, originally French, school of Deconstructionism holds as one of its primary precepts that it is the reader who gives meaning to any "text," and not the writer who wrote the text. This point of view is challenged in the poem by embracing it--and then letting the reader live through some of the ramifications of such an idea. Confutation by example is the method employed here--and it is in the high parodic tradition of Alexander Pope to do so. And Alexander Pope, let it be noted, lived in an age when it was the exercise of definite and definable "Rationality" that gave the punch line to every joke--a something very real and un-subjective which called on a "common sense" available to all rational beings; not the sort of subjective and esoteric exegesis favored the a Deconstructionist's construction of fact and fable. The method, sinuous and sardonic at once, allows the reader to come to the truth of the writer's point of view through a series of "experiences" similar in some degree perhaps to the experience the writer went through to come to that point of view himself. This is almost a novelistic approach in the tradition of James Joyce, who saw the author as an uninvolved "God" of his creation, paring his fingernails in infinity while the characters shared themselves with the reader. The effectiveness of this approach in a non-narrative poem would be doubtful at best, perhaps, except that in this case, in this poem, the subject matter of the poem is writing, methods of written communication, etc. The mechanics of communication become both the meaning and the method of the piece--a sort of deeply self-conscious feat of self-reference that poetry is born to perform.
Maybe we can reason our way clear through the quaking quagmire of this Skinny Texte without too much torquing of our poor backs and reasons. Let's see who this poem is aimed at first. "For Jock de Ryder" reads the dedication. One of the mainsprings of Deconstructionism in the Twentieth Century is the French author Jacque Derrida. This poem is both "for" him--as an example of the authorial intent which Derrida derides--and "for" him to read, to correct his mis-apprehensions and pretensions about the author not being able to invest his text with a communicable significance that the reader can decode, rather than simply imposing his own readerly version of what the text might mean. A prevailing motif in this poem is one of journeying, and so our Jock will be riding along with us on this journey to meaning. In many ways this poem is a gauntlet thrown down before the common currency of today' academy; it is a chicken plucked and thrown over the ivied "Academy" walls.
First challenge: the vatic apprehension. Seers, visionaries, those who receive their insight from some higher source, prophets and poets of this ilk assert that there is an extra-ordinary or superhuman meaning in their words, or in what words may carry. Dull material words may carry an extra charge not apparent in any sort of mundane analysis. All time and all space may be pierced by such vatic formulations. Words become spears. Christ was nailed to the cross on syllables such as these--and the faith that words can be more than they seem, and that they can carry an extra-historical burden, a world-shaping revelation if you will. These are the word-journeys that human consciousness may undergo. Consciousness can travel self-enlightened through such turnings and extremities of meaning (as a prophet or martyr does)--or consciousness may meander onward only intermittently enlightened (like a faulty bulb)--aware and unawares in intermittent measure.
there must be the hideous to bear beauty like a painted boat upon a paper sea
Beauty, which in the inspired poet come from elsewhere (usually somewhere "above" ), is exiled to the world of uninspired reality, the hideous world, our world. In this world, beauty must float upon the words of poetry ("the paper sea" ) giving divine meaning to our graceless habitat. Derrida may eliminate the connection between the author and his productions, but if the production is "divinely" inspired, can he exile God's hand from His works as well? The question is open--a breeze upon the paper sea. The poem itself--having elbowed some room for meaning in the Derridian realm by this rough rebuff--does not rest on its watery laurels, but sails on, as a poem must, to complicate matters.
there must be the hideous
Beauty somehow requires that the squalid world exist and persist as the frame of its self-expression. Because beauty (an ideal) does not really derive from nor partake in dirty reality in the prophetic schema--it can only find representatives of itself in the hurly-burly world, mere "painted boats upon a painted sea."
a clue that my long journeying has ended an aborted dream
The dream ideal of beauty has ended its journeying in a particular reality, aborted and distorted by all the compromises that comprise our earthly estate. Also, the poet's boatride on the beauty of his words is over once beauty manifests, since Derrida and deconstructionism has torn the poem from his hand. Still, the poet longs for beauty, longs to identify himself with beauty, longs to be moved by beauty and by that which is beautiful. Now the farthest that the poet may journey is to crash-landing on the hideous planet; a tough terrain from which ideal beauty has been mercilessly exiled. Any further connection between the real poet and his ideal words, the children of his soul, has been "aborted."
And yet, even in this defeat, the poet works on the right to at least dream of meaning, as he may still desire beauty--even if that dream is doomed to remain insular and unshared--a skinney texte without meaning. This desire, and this desire alone, to mean and to be, is the "splinter in the new time of dreams." What else but desire could be described as a "warm ache?" And on this current of warmth the poet will continue to rise--in his closed dreams if not in his shared poems--" like a drunken star floating across the tarred roof of heaven."
With Derrida's reversal of where meaning is made, not only is reality "hideous" and problematically compromised, but even the realm of ideas, ideals and dreams has been "tarred."
"This is not a poem." There are three brief touchstones here for the reader. One: Magritte's "This is not a pipe" paintings where definitions of art and of what art manifests are absurdly abused and the picture element of what is being presented in the paintings--once the intellectual debris has been cleared away--can come to the viewer's senses with a freshened vigor and joyousness. Two: "This is not a love song," a song by John Lydon's Public Image Limited band that mocks the dead forms of thought presented as genuine feeling by a pop music industry solely concerned with profits and not music. Three: giving in to the agenda of Deconstructionism takes away what a poem is in its authorial essence--a communication from one person to another.
In "Skinney Texte without Meaning," Magritte is the second major challenge to Deconstructionist hype. Magritte's way around the blockades to meaning of the Deconstructionsts is through. For a poem to deny its own poetic character seems to accept the deconstructionist critique of language and poetry; but there is an escape hatch to meaning built into this acquiescence. If the actual poem is self-conscious enough to claim that it is not a poem, it evades the critiques that apply to poems and authors--since it is explicitly not a poem--and can then go on to simply be itself. And that is to be a poem. The poem thus--along with Magritte's pipe-painting--stands alone, alive, and unabused in the reader's mind. In the spirit of such self-aware simplicity, the second stanza of "Skinney Texte without Meaning" acts as a codicil or refrain for the first stanza. The journeying has come to an end; meaning has come to an end; poetry has come to an end. This poem is that end, and as the end of poetry remains a poem. The first thing to end in this stanza is the night:
the night ended the sea ended
and then the sea--two great bastions of unconscious energy--the very places in which dreams and ideals can first grow to be. Beauty ("the painted paper") ends here as well, splintered into inexistence. It is the title of this section alone, and the self-consciousness it grants to the poem that allows it to exist as more than merely an echo of the painting made in the first stanza. The title, coming after the night and after the dreaming, raises to poem to daylight and self-consciousness. And of course, it is only in such self-reflective light that the contrasts, hypocrisies, and the much-needed clarity of critical laughter can come to the examining mind. Now we have been readied by the poem to resume another sort of delight and daylight.
The Nietzsche, Night Sea pun is rather wonderful and is a play for escape from the real Nazi, who, in this poem, is not Nietzsche, but that ardent rule-maker extraordinaire, Derrida. Nietzsche is a free man, a thinker and dreamer afloat on the Night Sea full of dark possibilities. But, wait a minute, weren't we just awakened from the night and from dream at the end of the last stanza and set on our feet to trod the daylight and laugh in witty insight at all creation? What's going on here? How is the poem using this disjunction between expectation and delivery? Now we come into one of the pleasures of parody--an explosive expansiveness of context for the author's meaning to revel and unravel in. Parodists may knowingly knot and unknot their references and implications within the written world of many-onenesses. What is being said is not just what is being said, it is what has been said before as well; it is dialog disguised as diatribe. In this stanza it is revealed that the journey of this skinny texte takes place alongside the sea-voyage of "The Ancient Mariner" by philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "The Ancient Mariner" tells the tale of a fantastical, whimsical and nightmarish sea voyage that travels inward just as far as it sojourns outward--reaching both the whitenesses of the antipodes and the darkness of our inner core.
It is in this stanza on the night sea that we get our first side-note accompanying the text:
Wherein Christobaal ships off the page to his deep regret
So, despite the night and the dark, we are indeed awake and are "hearing" a poem being told to us as the Ancient Mariner told his tale to passersby. Furthermore, it seems that this Christobaal of the side-note will represent the reader of the poem that is not a poem. It is in this stanza that regret at the loss of meaning is being exiled from our parodic escapade, the pang of their departure is being eviscerated in the lively play of language and contexts. Now "the time of dreams" is "done in." And yet we are still able to sail on in our waking bodies--a new boat--not so beautiful as the ideal on of dreams that must be discarded, but serviceable with its homely
wood ribs and spine and a big black sail, like a square mustache
Yet this wakeful, imperfect body, having run out of nighttime dreams and meaningful ideals, is "stuck in the wind like a stilled tear."
But we can still, even in our immobility, think about what we feel and have felt--and the poem, "always obscurant," can help embody this thought in a way we can look at from the sidelines. So this challenge to the deconstructionist assertion that the "skinney texte" is "without meaning" occurs through the mechanism of consciousness itself--self-consciousness--and is represented by the side-note text that "looks on" the main text of the poem. This is also how Nietzsche often operated as a philosopher--calling himself simply a philologist, and making few if any formal claims of a unified system--he broke current systems apart to a deliberate and deliberative set of unsystematic insights and instigations.
Now the poem becomes a device of consciousness, a rational object as opposed to a vatic embodiment:
no salt spray, no rocking wave, no fishy leap
But, there is a cost associated with such a second-remove sort of extrapolated self-viewing operation. There is a distance imposed upon the feel of one's own existence--a separation of self into object and observer. It is a bit like reading your own obituary notice: very enlightening perhaps, but not all that vivifying. We come to witness ourselves as "a leaded body that cannot see or feel itself." But at least meaning can be self-shared in such a state, and the author can have some say about that meaning--even if it costs him everything, including his own liveliness and life, to say it.
The conscious self that sets sail in this new boat of the body allows for self-reflection even within the constraints of a limited expressive capacity cut off from inspiration and ideals. These reflections can help us see, in the earthly sun, the sin within--the chum of guilt that only self-reflective creatures can drag in their wake. And this guilt, witnessed within the body, and defined by the limitations of perspective imposed by that body, can never be expiated. This is another associated cost of this stanza's "escape" from Derridian lack-of-determinism.
Puns included in this section of the poem are the not-seeing nazis, the crystal ball Christobaal, the paradoxically-one pun of Christ and Baal Christobaal, the sail's Hitler-like mustache of tyranny, the sail's freedom-moving Nietzsche-like mustache.
The theme of alienated beauty and dream is reiterated in this section of the poem. The "starlike dreams" do not even have the reality of dreams; they may only "seem." The speaker is stuck "in this world" looking up at the undreamed stars. He is alienated from the world of dreams--and from his own, and Earth's, "fiery heart." Anything as outrageous as a dream or a star is likened to the "dream ache" of desire, from which the guilty thing of himself has been self-exiled. This recycling of phrases in the poem is another interesting example of meaning exerting itself against the Derridian nothingness. Even a repetition--if altered by consciousness--shows the trace passage of some particle of what can only, really, be termed the author's will. Even when the words used in a poem are the exact same words, and language would seem least likely to carry anything meaningful with it, anything new not already stated, their meaning can change depending on their placement--their implications can change, their tone, etc. Yeats uses this very successfully in many of his poems that have a refrain. The same words change their meaning at the end of each stanza. And, far from this exchange from being an authorial impossibility, it is actually a common device used in song lyrics.
Christobaal
rests while
the universe
spins on
Time and tide wait for no man--and the fearful, near-sighted traveler, uncertain Christobaal, is no exception. In Christobaal we see ourselves, as in a crystal ball, and we see the world and its beaity going on in their right relationships--" The heavens journeying from birth" --even if we have mistakenly stopped traveling to rescue our misplaced spectacles.
The star of dreams comes in sleep
imitating its dead cousin
The "dead cousin" seems difficult to place at first, it seems a bit of misplaced nonsense, an authorial intrusion away from sense (perhaps Derrida is right, and the author is absent from his works, a deus abscondis). The "dead cousin" seems to be some leftover from the author's education where sleep, like coital crisis, he learned, was called the "little death" in Elizabethan times. Most importantly, the star itself is "dead" because of the amount of time it takes for light to travel to our planet from the star. We are already alienated from the true condition of the star, ignorant and unknowing. Reality itself operates on principles that make the Derridean alimentation seem little more than a willful game played by a plopping boy at bathtime. The "deadness" of the star shows again how the human mind intrudes between the experience of the actual "star of dreams" and its inner representation in the dreaming poet. It adds little, or nothing, here except as a authorial intrusion, demonstrating the impossibility of escaping the reality of the author when we travel in a paper boat upon his paper sea. There can be no journeying, no pursuit of meaning, the poem is showing, except in the mind. The whole poem is a contradiction of the title--another "authorial intrusion." So the title does not turn out to mean what it means--meaning has been misplaced there by the reader; whether rightly or wrongly, the title can't not mean something. Meaning, not unmeaning, is a must.
In "the dark suspiring seal of dreamtime," we see that the dream is alive and well, even when the audience, or reader, is alienated from that dream. This whole passage asserts that the reality of the ideal is a form of the permanent--or permanently recurring (as in Nietzsche)--state or status of being that all human activity is involved in.
Again, beauty is disturbed from its integrated or whole state and can only be approached by means that are "splintered. . . floating without aim." And here we enter into a rather more sophisticated refusal or reaction to the deconstructionists--one that takes heart from a Yeatsean vision, and, ultimately, a romantic idea of reality.
the real image
of a dreamed reflection of a dream
Even an unbelievable or unbelieved reflection or image partakes of reality and is, in some essential sense, real. It is, at least, an image, and as an image is a real trace of some human activity or agony. As Mr. Weeks has put it in his poem "My Own Elegy" --it is "a fiction truer than a truth." This is a much more confident formulation of the idea that here hides and winks.
"It is a poem." So--there we have it. Even when false, or an image of falseness, this dream still partakes of all of the realities of poems and poetry. Putting this assertion in the title of the section is a fun reversal of section two. Indeed, we seemed, up to this point, to have traveled as far as we possibly could in an idea-derided (Derrida derived) universe. All of the possible parodic options have been exercised and exorcised. No wonder then that at this "end" of parody that we are informed (in the sophomoric debating spirit of "I'll take your abused premise to its absurd conclusion" ) that:
Time ended.
"Death is our arbor." Unlike Derrida and the deconstructionists, who operate in a perfected, depopulated vacuum, the poet must slog his way toward meaning as best he may as a human among other humans. Death, as in the classical pagan world, imposes meaning on our human existence--even if that meaning is arbitrary. Without death, things and poems might well drone on to infinity. With death there is a piquancy to all that we pursue, and to all that we might pursue but cannot. With death we must choose. And to choose we must be free, or our choices are meaningless. And, to choose meaningfully, our intent must be able to be manifested in the partial, death-truncated Reality of Life--and this reality includes both poetry and poems. Quite a head-trip. And the poet here underlines the immense unity of his conceit by using the almost violent images of "fruit. . . a-gleam like new babies still wet from the womb." Fruit is the end of a tree's seasonal cycle, and the start of new tree-life at the same time--a "cycle of force" that shapes us as our understanding shapes it.
This is the blessed death-paradox, the felix culpa of the Garden of Eden--an interpretation of the Fall prominent in many heretical sects which have scant use for the Arch of Time as defined by a Superman Jesus and his papa the God-arbiter and ender of history. Something of this rebellious faith is acknowledged in the side note, rather long and obscure, to this stanza.
Wherein "Gad the green swerver," chastises Plato, the bosun's mate
Plato takes the rap as another member of the infinite school--the dead furniture of heaven crowding out the life-impulses of being trapped with Death, the meaning-giver. God himself appears in the note, parodied as "Gad the green swerver" --a God of death-creating life that liberates us from meaninglessness by imposing on us the freedom of choice. God created the heaven of ideas that sucks all possibility of usefulness out of life, but then created a life that dies, giving meaning back to the temporary realm of existence. Perhaps the end of Time and History is a way of redeeming eternity into the same sort of meaning the dying gives to life, but I don't think so.
Welcome to the Dead Letter Office. Just behind the stacks of undelivered nonsense, you'll see our priest chanting to change Reality. The premise of "falseness" being necessary is simply the idea that in fiction, a false thing, we have our greatest freedom to create. All of language itself is a false thing, a referrer to reality, and not that true reality itself; the meaning that words have is placed there by human beings, not by any inherent meaningfulness of the syllables themselves. Grammar, the structure that holds those words in order once they contain a perceived meaning, may turn out to be a little different--but that is irrelevant to the matter at hand. So, fiction gives us a freedom to create, and what, my dear readers, is the greatest thing that we can create? Why, ourselves, of course. But you, being you, already knew that.
Shapes must be doors.
Of course, whatever trope (or shape) the hope of a poet has opened to the reader must be traversed in order to have its proper existence. The audience, even if that audience is simply oneself, is a vital factor, or aid, to meaning and to existence. But that the shapes "must be" is the vital factor here. "Shapes must be tunafish," would work here too for this point; but the shape must move through its shapeness, and beyond the quality of itselfness that it bears as a naked shape, and onward to the poet's dictated meaning. So, it seems, the shape really "must be" a door.
Soot must be golden notes sewn in a song.
The repetition of the "Must be" proves my point here. Whatever the poet decrees, in the sovereign freedom of his imagination, in the paper world of his poem, "must be." The soot is of course the ashy death that defines our hope to do or mean anything. We are the soot and we must sing, and even be, our "golden notes" by stitching ourselves to the realization of the necessity of the false--the incompleteness of all of our knowledge and knowing, the slapdash half-done omniscience of our inherent humanity, every half-baked project and projection left in our wake as we sail on. This necessity operates in the same way that every scientist knows that the Science itself is one grand, but merciless, "what if. . ." and "it's the truth. . . so far. . . to us.. . ." Only those who have "failed to exist" by dying (and by denying dying) are stuck in the self-assurance of their rightness in a irremediable solipsism. Only God in his dead heaven can be so self-assured and still participate in Reality--or so the holy theory goes. For the rest of us, there is only hope; the hope that, maybe, we have said something true, that acknowledging the falseness helps to make us self-aware enough to say something meaningful despite our self-acknowledged limitations; or is it because of these limitations that we have the freedom of "fiction truer than a truth?" In a limited world, fiction, like hypotheses, can tell the truth more assuredly than the flat-eyed fiat of the madman.
So since this "falseness" is being meaningful and making meaning in Hayes and in our lives, we should embrace its major mechanisms of expressions, one of which is language. "So let the letters hide us, write us," sets us up to play. But howled displaying proceed? In a world where the "false," where imaginative creation is one of the hopeful means of communication, aesthetics becomes as paramount as a semaphore dictionary on the deck of aircraft carrier. The letters, accordingly, are invoked to
bear us off to beauty
like the lie
my journeying has ended.
The codicil about the "lie" of the journeying ending is another one of the many self reflections in this poem, which in many ways (and as is common in humor, which points out how we are unwillingly changed by that which we cannot change--basically, how we cannot not exist and exist at once) somersaults all about itself; the "lie" of the journey ending all the poem continued was self-apparent if unarticulated until this point. The act of pointing out allows the poet to make two necessary "shapes" in the single container of the overall poem. Like Schrodinger's cat this power over the "false" allows the reader for a time (in his "willing suspension of disbelief" and exercise of "negative capability" ) to both "be and not to be" at once; we are thrust into a quantum state of flux--we are both the changing river and perishing Heraclitus, the actor and he acted upon, the disposable wish of the lie and a permanently recurring state of mind that the "necessity of the false" allows to exist and re-exist ad infinitum.
So, quite quite clearly, are journeying has not ended.
The dash of external reference here shows how, even to know the inside of one intimately expressed mind in a poem, one needs to know, and to believe he knows, or knows about, many things be on the self that are mainly learned through texts. History, philosophy, myth, visual arts, all depend on the deconstructionists' being very wrong in their main assertion. So, one more whap that is more or less continually whap-whaping throughout this poem. This is only one of the poem's satirical methods and devices.
As to the substance of the stanza, we have the assertion that man created time by divining the idea of history, of pastness. Only, once having created the past, man can then re-create his subjective vision-experience of that past. And so, VanGogh makes the irises live again with his palette knife. The art is then hung up in the Museum of Art along with Falstaff in his noose--for death, as we learned before, imparts to those who exist both meaning and life. Now, the imagination needs a playful space for all of these inventions and ideas that seem to stretch so far beyond any single mortal's scope. And so, these playthings of time and space, history etc. have invented the playground of being--God; or, as he is called here in homage to yet another satirical poem, Gad.
Here we have just the finest and funnest sort of rhetoric under the sun. Basically, this is a carpe diem theme--what use shall we make of our diminishing time in an unforgiving universe that ignores our will? The answer is, only and always, "what beauty have we engendered to justify...[reality]?" The meaning of all that is outside the self and in time comes from the self--the basically timeless self of the soul thrown into the trouble of life's temporary exigencies, and then--to make that life meaningful again in the way that life can become meaningful (by our dying, our ending, our having to choose meaningfully) being thrown back out of life "when our opposites appear."
The "destruction of opposites" is not so much a reference to the reconciliation of the final solution, state, or status, as it is a willful depiction of the hell on earth that occurs when our soul calls us home to our timeless estate where we do not create "beauty to justify" but, like the Angels, are simply "beauty" ourselves in a heaven-haven without clocks.
This meeting of our opposite, or anti-self, is also a moment of perilous potential to create. For, it is only by our ending in time that we can have a chance to "justify" all of the life that we've known. Without the destruction of death and immortality there would be no imperative to choose--and, without choice, there is no art and no beauty.
Beauty, it is assumed is capable of giving meaning to all that we perceive and all that may be destroyed:
our friends, our enemies, the sea, ... our journey and its ignominious end
This is certainty, this assumption amounts to an assertion in a complete opposite direction of deconstructionism--which is appropriate, for now we are entering a positive statement arena of this poem, has the next homey section will clearly show. The clarity of beauty's ability to create, or deign, meaning is not, however, a passive process--or, at least, not a morally passive one. It requires our acted agency and choice to become manifest--and, indeed that is the thrust of this section that is mostly a single long rhetorical question, the only reasonable answer to which is our entire life.
This section is the first one that begins to take notable advantage of Daniel Weeks' rhythmical ear--one of the greatest resources of poetry in general. It seems fitting that this resources should be exercise in an effort to "justify" the life of the poet; and this section stands as an introduction to the next two sections that discuss mundane life, as, indeed, do the surreal angels of the rest the poem. These sections also use the resources of rhythm and rhyme most notably. We see a glimpse of the life and a method by which life may be justified by beauty. The poem of columns--for a moment--very close to positive statement and abandons its critique of deconstructionism and its satirical thrust. Let us hope that this tactic does not cause the thrusting blade of satire to lose its edge.
Satire I would argue has kept its edge in this homey section by turning itself on the rest of the poem. It does this in a way and with a method that seems to abjure all of the traditional devices of satire in general. By coming across this sincerer, more rhythmical and rhyming section of the poem in the middle of the absurdity that surrounds it, we are forced once again to see the limits of the satire. That in itself is a very funny idea.
Reading this section we see the thinness of absurdity. Humor works its effects by dividing reality against itself in such a way that we see it with a new perspective. This division is--absurdly enough--an act of rational discernment, this seeing of a mechanism; often it is also a seeing of the mechanism by which we see and discern. In this way a particular instance, the meaning or essence of it, can be taken away by the reader a more general way and applied to the reader's new experiences. Laughter and absurdity are learning experiences. And mocumentaries such as Skinney Texte without Meaning are its textbooks. Such poems are deeply and intently didactic.
Felt poetry would seem to be extraneous in this process; felt poetry, the sort that comprises what is usually thought of as poetry, is extraneous to the satiric because it operates via and "inner" or felt documentation--it gives the reader its own experience. It takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the experience that it presents or creates and demands that the reader judge for themselves the meaning of the; it is a deeply nonbank tactic experience. Such poetry can become "the proof of its own premise" precisely because it's premise can never be abstractly stated--it can only be embodied and experienced. Felt poetry is exactly what this section of the poem is trying to include in the overall satiric work.
Because of the potentially problematic nature of sections ten and eleven neither fit into this poem, strictly speaking. Both are greater than any other portions of the poem. They contain, as no other part of this very self-referential poem does, their own justification for being. In some way, they show that poetry can go on existing despiteDerridian strictures and deconstructionist ethics. However, by actually being independent, living poems themselves, the over mastered the structure in which they occur. Frankenstein is smashing up the laboratory again.
Because a felt poem is its own experience sound values ascended to an almost supreme position within such poems. Sections ten and eleven have the integrity that comes with being a fully filled moment of rhetoric. But, like black hole nestling in a world size ball of tissue paper--even if that ball of tissue is as big as Jupiter--they cannot coexist without eventually ruining, or crushing, the rest of the poem into their own inevitable centers. So, let's listen to what is being said here, and how is being said. Let us "analyze, with sullen eyes" this place in the poem, this home "we shall never come to... again."
The first thing we see is that Dan Weeks is using what he has taught himself in the poetry that is gone before this section--he is lying. The necessity of the false is in full effect here and in fine fettle. Our first clue comes right in the sections title "we close our home;" this seems a far cry from the other sections and titles. Where are the far-flung references, the apostles standing on their heads? Where's Nietzsche? Where's the French quotes and the American pop stars? No, we are "home" here, and indeed this home, in the poem is a poem of itself and a social argue a poem of its own that is extraneous to Skinney Texte without Meaning's project and is not in extra blade intrinsic to the satiric poems means and meanings other than as an example.
This section has forced me to a meaning opposite to that of the old standard romance song "the nearness of you." The speaker shall "never see this space or time" again--and this ending is extended to the poem: "I shall never write this rhyme." At least this rhyme shall never be written again, the again we must take as implied since the poem obviously has been written. All is change, all is flux; all is uniquely valuable because of this--this is the "you-ness of being near." This tale is as old as the rivers and indeed we see Heraclitus, profit and programmatist of change, is not far away. He is over-watching the river of Skinney Texte withput Meaning as it flows on. He does not, however, seem to be able to quite adhered to his own strictures and ideas about "never stepping into the same river twice," since he is undergoing a modest resurrection during the poem. The Heraclitus "rolls back the rock" from his tomb. Perhaps he's been reading Nietzsche.
It would seem that, in some essential way, the state of mind represented by Heraclitus is a permit used to human consciousness and is available for recall when needed. "All is flux" the Heraclitus proclaims, and by so proclaiming the comes himself a permanent resource for the human mind, a touchstone in the molten river. In such a way it would seem, the "stilled tear" of memory is busy packing up this home that is no more home; and yet, even in its no longer being a home, it is a definition of home, of the very idea of home, for, by shutting the door to "never" be seen again it keeps "the homeless homeless in the night" --which only a home can do.
In much the same vein, when we are shut out from "space or time" at space and time begins edifying is the help to make us what we are not--or what we no longer participate in in a non-imaginative way. The only access to this locked capsule is the imagination, where freedom and responsibility are available to the mind as are their ultimate possible valuations. But as I am arguing all of this part of the poem is extraneous to Skinney Texte without Meaning, except perhaps the help define the Skinney Texte from within its own shut in glowing center of "cosmic self concern."
The wonderful lie of never writing "in rhyme anymore," which is disproven in the very lying. That the lie occurs at all shows strongly the impossibility of discounting what power there is in poetry. The snow that is gone helps us understand the present season where the "strawberries redden in the late spring sun." The poet is even able to project into the future by this past experience of being perpetually exiled by time. His "white shall pack for China," and he "shall pack the books." But they themselves are is perhaps unknowable, a constantly renewing river but what they are not is very definite, and a print is nothing definition with them when they move on down the stream. They are not China they are not books.
tonight we'll hang our empty shirts on other hooks.
Definitions appear and disappear in the flux--like Heraclitus himself--a rock upon which the suavity of selfhood may knot and unknot itself against.
But as I was saying, it is the sound values of this section that really do it up and do in the rest of the poem. The rhymes uniquely close in and close off this section of the poem which is so busy with its felt poem's self concerns.
Time forces meaning on all of those who die. Beauty becomes possible and existence is capable of poignancy. Human activity, the etching of our stories and histories into the stone images and tablets we read begins the reckoning that we call time. Paper gives rise even more ephemeral, and perhaps, more beautiful "fragile rhyme." Modern-day time is concerned not with how to order time and reality into conscious beauty--and a static bill television screen is used as an example of this in difference--instead modern life is "careless how we keep the chaos out." This image is similar to the one used by Neil Stevenson in his novel "snow crash," where the screen is a computer input device; once upon a time, when a computer "crash" it could only spit out a series of letters and symbols upon page--clues to its shattered consciousness, hopeful relics from which antediluvian flood could be reconstructed. After the advance of the G. U. I. (Graphical user interface) when a computer "crashes" the screen fills with meaningless static; indecipherable static, uninterpretable, unable to "keep the chaos out."
But as they say "time marches on," continuing to give us every opportunity to redeem ourselves and our lives within it. Time itself is a human creation that humans cannot escape; once created, a creation forever reflects back upon and shapes its creators. This notion is similar to one used by Alice B. Talkless in her poem Griffin, or the mythical Griffin, once created by man to serve his imagined God is abandoned by both man and God. God has disappeared because he is no longer believed in, but the Griffin, is mythical lieutenant owner, it still around to view humanity for God. Duty without ultimate purpose because the ultimate creators, humans, have forgotten or neglected their creations--and meanings they human life can hold because of having these creations. Similarly, in Mr. Weekes's Opus: "we no longer love ourselves, yet what does Chronos care." In a world avoiding meaning and full despair--this stated not even as a question--a call to thought and eventual action is as in the "destruction of opposites" section, where beauty is the key to justifying life. Chronos, like the Griffin, and like indeed Red Hanrahan in Yeats' "the Tower," once created, persists into our every moment--but not always meaningfully. The Chronos, the Griffin, and Red Hanrahan only have meaning with their creators look upon them and what they signify. The us, the Griffin has the potential to return imaginative activity to its realm of significance, Chronos is capable of allowing us to "justify" are existence by creating "ephemeral rhymes" and beauty within that existence, and Red Hanrahan--banished to death, can be recalled by his creator to witness him and, by witnessing his creator, help define and show the eternity within his hidebound bones--what we are forever calling humanity's "soul."
"I am not Poe." Despite the commonality and ubiquity of the imaginative enterprise's ability to invest "Reality" --each maker of the imaginative is doomed to be utterly unique. And it is this uniqueness and inability to not be other than oneself that, more than any deconstructionist pogram, makes the connection between worlds difficult, precarious (and in this instance) fun. There is no single "universal joint" connecting imagination and meaning other than our necessity, once we exist, to try to make meaning. The poet is not Edgar Allan Poe. This poem is not some other poem. Because our reality dream is so infinitely necessary, we must create it as we can have whatever we can.
I stole the pipe that was not a pipe.
Since this non pipe is the self's inextricable self creation, this statement is one of the coming self-conscious, being aware that one, just by living in a world or you will die you are already busy creating necessary "falsities" or fictions. The key to making art, into aesthetics is simply not to make such creations unwittingly. Stealing is a very distinct and deliver act. Conviction can only column with a felon knows that he is performed some culpable act. This poet is fully conscious and knows that Nolan non pipes are being created in this helps to create "reality." And reality is, of course, being "dream that is not a dream."
I smoked my soul in a painted bowl till my flesh floated in the air
So, whatever there is of the self in whatever we do, under the grand necessity of the false, all that we can know that we are by matching ourselves so--our soul--is smoked by the conscious self in the self reflective, "painted bowl" of art. it is here or all contradictions and contradistinction end in paradox, the paradox of being, the self-conscious colloquy of art. So, once a very existence gets put into the bowl, all of the saved self that death has graced with life, although we can know if what we are under the rainbow of Gad, all of our "flesh," is inhaled and exhaled--a painted, painted breath that floats through the pipe we stole until we hang, unnoosed and everywhere "in the air."