Where Seas and Fables Meet (8 page)

The angel visited the struggling poet. He was struck down by an epileptic fit after his conflict with city politics. He'd been an honest Florentine councillor for years. Now he was to be exiled. He was to be torn from his family. He'd have to journey northwards, seeking sanctuaries. He would find none.

But she visited him and showed him the heart of the world. He would have to move with this heart, and make poetry out of its beat.

The poet called his visionary work a comedy. He did this, even though his life was scarred by misfortune.

The angel visited another aspiring poet. He was lazy and vague – a teacher who disliked his pupils, a sometimes printer who disliked the process of hot type, an occasional journalist too inattentive to be a good reporter, a stay- at-home who dreamed of travelling the world but rarely ventured beyond the zeal of his burgeoning city's streets. But through her he found a voice. This voice amplified freedom. Suddenly the loafer caught fire. He wrote and wrote. He didn't recognize the being burning with life in the words. But he wanted to become it. He spoke to this life, caressingly calling it soul, spirit, self, lover, O and you. When he forgot her, or when he was disturbed by the sufferings of war, he sometimes shrank in his aspirations. He penned miniatures addressing the cramped quarters of

a troop in a bivouacked tent. He wrote in terms that the soldiers might understand.

The more readers he had, the more he changed his way of writing for them.

But when he aged, he began to add pieces to his one long poem – the only one he ever truly wrote – that reflected her absence. While breath began to leave him he called out for her, knowing that she'd already moved on. He wrote goodbyes, more and more only farewells, in the tone and pace of someone already slipping on to the other side.

The angel visited a poet who lived between the new world and the old. An American who chose to live in Europe, he found the shades of the past were visible to him. In the new world he heard only wind across the dusty plain, the wind whispering down empty streets in cities beside a great river and the sea.

Her visit was short. But he felt her presence in the way he once saw a darting reflection on an abandoned pool whose surface was almost clogged by lilies. He began in his vocation with a love song. He later caught the wind's desolations in fragments, in Europe. He extended his long poems with minor variations. He ended his vocation with a promise that air, fire, water, and earth would one day – out of time – become one, the quintessence, the heart and soul of the world. (There would be more writings but these were the truest ones.)

His vision of her was broken.

Sometimes he remembered her visit as if it had been like a breath over a pool filled with dust. Afterward he felt parched. Then she became the girl who hesitated on the stairs, the girl showered in rain and hyacinths.

At times he would fold himself back into a shield, dressing in an armour of dark suits and forced courtesies. He tried to become a minister, in a way, but people kept giving him awards for his poetry. The angel left him long before too many awards had come.

She visited the singer when she was young. She had a voice; she already sang of beauty. She was so startling in her gifts that she was herself taken for an angel – though a fallen one, so she sang later.

The visit increased the charm of her songs. They recalled ancient chants when she moaned and hummed and whooped and sighed. At the singer's side, the angel placed the originator of plain songs, the Abbess of the Rhine, to strengthen her will and to help her reach the eerie high notes.

The singer learned something profound from the visit. She learned how to enter into experiences that she herself had never had. (This was the same gift given to the playwright who'd given birth to so many characters he'd caused a stir in heaven; he was rivalling the inspiration of the source: he had the capacity to imagine what he was not.) She wrote a generational anthem, and yet never visited the site where that generation gathered one summer weekend on a farmer's field.

The singer lost her visitor's trace for a time. She hunkered down into experimentations meant for a charmed few. She rose again at her side when the singer's voice dropped almost an octave (“coffee and cigarettes,” she explained), and started to revise her original inspirations. She found both loss and sprightliness. The sorrow was a channel of emotion. The spritely side showed that the old singer was very much alive.

The angel opened the hearts of well-shielded people. Their souls had grown. When people opened their books, or opened up a channel to the songs, they grew by assuming the awareness or the emotions that were in the words, in the musical notes in the tracks. These had been mostly private activities. The experiences became public when the poet's book was published and circulated, and when the singer went on tour and her albums went into circulation. Now the angel could enter into many individual psyches. The screens were portals of discovery. She could ask many people to rise. She'd entice them or fire them up. She wounded them and inspired them. They had to have cracks or nothing could come through.

Her fire entered the many because an age was ending and another was full-throttle underway. Technology and the soul were becoming one.

The soul's growth caused anguish. It was painful beyond belief. New stories, films, songs, and images showed people twisting into barely recognizable forms. These were the

Super-comics, the alien stories, the tales of magicians and possessions, the vampire chronicles, the visions of watchmen and watchwomen, the stories of hunter games and the films about transformer robots who protected humanity against interfering demonic sentient machines and Hobbits and knights who fought for power and a just use of it but who sometimes succumbed to the addictions of magnified being... Human forms were changing with unimaginable speed...

She had once visited the few who were receptive. Masses were opening.

She had much to do.

More messages were on the way.

One day a university student opened the screen on his laptop and found messaging tags. You have mail. He looked at the news from Abyssinia. He saw images of starving children and drought. His heart pounded. He had to travel, become someone else. His university life seemed irrelevant. He tapped out a collective message to everyone he knew and pressed Send. Tapping he found a voice. He was inside light, the beams off this mobile surface. PC... PC... PC... PC... he chanted, as if the letters were a drug or an abracadabra.

In his message to all he'd tapped: “I'm Rimbaud.” To himself he muttered: “I've become an other.”

Once a young woman who worked for Canada Trust, a bank in Toronto, opened her screen and trolled websites. She was dissatisfied with her career and her current relationship. Something was missing. She had to search. She pressed enter and enter. What was she entering? She couldn't say exactly. But she went on entering. What beautiful words, she said to herself: Enter, Entrance.

She started reading about waves and a lighthouse. Why this, she wondered. She was accustomed to reading about Angelina Jolie. She liked her sass. Then she read about a great house and a hero who changed sexes: Orlando. From male to female: she wondered what it would be like to go the other way, from female to male. She loved looking at women, and did so with an attentive sensual eye. Then she read how angels were often hermaphrodites, which meant they contained both sexes in them, neither male nor female but both. She thought, this means they'd be crazy good fun at a free-for-all party.

She started an avatar identity on line. She called herself Orlando. And she pressed Send.

She'd entered another realm.

How she loved these words, too: Sending, Send.

The angel of inspiration looked on, impressed. She had many names. Sophia, Aphrodite, Erato, Calliope, Clio, Thalia, Terpsichore, Shekinah, Euterpe, Carmenta, Athena, Medusa, Isda, Israfel, Beatrice, Matilda, Psyche: a multitude of masks and forms for one identity. She was always waiting to be welcomed. You only had to honour her and she'd come. But now she was perplexed. In fact she was confused. These shifts were occurring rapidly. They were happening so fast not even an etheric being, created elsewhere, could keep up. She had a lot to learn from these beings who had found a source for their own recreation. She'd have to consult elsewhere about what to do in the next phase of earthly transformation.

The angel mused between stars. She hovered, floating, swaying, eyes opening closing, listening to the world's communiqués. Serenely, she followed the voices. What a magnificent jumble, she thought.

A streak of light raced by. It startled her. The light was travelling faster than her angel brethren.

In a stunning realization she felt how the streak of light was human, tearing past the earth's gravitational pull, darting outwards, streaking towards her, dashing beyond, onward to the stars.

A new form, without a name –

It was racing at a speed that made the angel shudder.

If you're about to be shackled off to prison, shipped to the stormy ice jails of the Gulag, about to be shot or tortured, shoved off into exile – if you were to spend time in solitary confinement, in isolation for a long period of punitive time – if you were bereaved, mourning the loss of the love of your life, or left desolated on a cruel night by fateful medical news – then what poetry would you take with you? What poetry would you turn to for company or solace?

I wonder if you would choose the avant-garde verse of the Concrete Poets or the playful LANGUAGE artists, or the prose of a writer for whom a theory of literature (accomplished though this could be) transcends the experience of literature. Maybe the playfulness would be what you need under such circumstances.

Still I know I'd open Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
(the 1855 edition), a selection of Emily Dickinson's verses (fragments 460 to 800 especially, though I couldn't live without 320 through to 410), Blake's “Proverbs of Hell,” Rimbaud's
Illuminations
(taking his Season in Hell would be redundant), Eliot's
Four Quartets
, Rilke's Duino
Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
, Wallace Stevens' “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West”, a selection of poems by Pessoa and Neruda, and Lorca – lots of Lorca,
Suites
in particular.

If I were permitted novels, I would bring the collected works of the Brontë sisters,
Ulysses
,
Across the River
and
Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, The Border Trilogy, One Hundred Years of Solitude
, and
Love in the Time of Cholera
.

If plays –
The Tempest, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Buried Child, The Stonemason
.

If I was going into the riptides of hell (or if I thought that I was about to do so), then it's likely I'd choose to carry with me Paul Celan's Breathturns, or Kafka's
Parables and Paradoxes
(or maybe just the so-called
Blue Octavo Notebooks
), a selection of Mandelstam's verses and poems by Akhmatova. Maybe some lines and poems by Leopardi, too.

I'd need ache and eloquence: those for whom the truest audience was the soul, or readers who hadn't come to be yet.

The point in words where mind and nerve-ends meet – so we may breathe across dark plains – across death – to the light beyond grief –

The fascinating exception to the playfulness of the LANGUAGE poets is Anne Carson, a poet of pastiche and enigmas. She combines scholarship, wit, parody, linguistic

experimentation, and the poignant depths of lyricism and grieving: white space, quiet music, bafflement, farewells. She reached her apex in the limited edition of Nox. The book unwinds and spreads out in your hands, becoming an art object, a meditation on words, a searching poem of loss, a series of elegiac fragments that are both transcendent and wounded. Erudition and poetry meet in her highly original visions. She makes autumns in rooms. Her mourning is curiously contemplative and comforting. Her addresses to No One draw me. She keeps the wilderness within. The white spaces are also her frontier.

Jack Kerouac: his heart seemed to beat faster than the others of the movement he named and represented. Hence his life had to be short. The blessings on his work and life were that much more intense.

William S. Burroughs: wanted revenge on reality. Re- reading him is to live in his tenacious long suicide and in his broken murderousness. His words were meant to tattoo us with curses.

Allen Ginsberg: so generous he abandoned poetry on the page for the circle of oral communication. Everyone could participate. Performance became enwombing for him.

On Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan:

How far can you fall and outdo the others who have fallen, who have crashed?

Burroughs:
Naked Lunch
is a voluntary descent into hell, initiated and perpetuated by his visionary hallucination- inducing addiction. He wills madness. Dante trusted that his Hell had an exit point: the ascending narratives of Purgatory and Paradise would follow the descent. Burroughs abandons this trust and that narrative sequence. For him there's only hell.

Plath: the formidable
Ariel Poems
are a voluntary descent into the aesthetics of hell. She creates beautiful performances out of madness and genocide. The exquisite poise of her crash in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”: Plath's

words dance on the edge of the void. The nothingness that surrounds her spectacular verse is death. It's emptiness with a gloss.

Celan: his
Death-Fugue
and
Psalm
are descents into the hell created by the Nazis. He witnessed organized perdition, and had no desire to be in its throe. All Celan could do was mark the way down into the inferno with choked lines: he speaks in sputters, spasms –

... Is Celan's poetic voice the most authentic resistance to 20
^th
century totalitarian-Nazi hell? His gentle resistance comes in the breath between gasps, convulsive lines that reach out to nothing, no one. His no-thing is cabalic: it is the ultimate unknowable, the no name that can't be spoken and yet breathes into dust. Celan and Plath are visionary extremists – but the difference in their vision, essential and poignant, must be this: Celan wished to be elsewhere.