Sprague’s Poems III

In a stream-of-consciousness sequence in my novel, Mara, Marietta, the following dialogue flows through Sprague’s (the hero’s) mind: ‘Who speaks when I speak? To whom am I speaking when I speak? To submit to language is to forget: Poetry occurs where language gives way. What is the task of poetry? To push toward the origin of language. Memory and devotion, invocation and address: the spirit and the word.’¹ Sprague is a poet and a rock song lyricist. It is entirely natural, then, that he resorts to poetry (and lyric-writing) whenever he is reliving, during the process of writing—he is the narrator of the novel that turns out to be a long love letter to the heroine, Marietta—emotions and thoughts that overwhelm discursive language. Note that the poems are presented in the sequence in which they occur in the novel. They may, therefore, serve as markers on the map of Sprague’s relationship with Marietta. They cannot, however, trace its chronology: Marietta, Marietta is governed by the fluid time inherent in the process of memory, a time akin to dream-time. Finally, note that in the novel the ‘titles’ of the poems are not given: they were ‘purpose-built’ here for ease of reference. The poems intermingle with the prose as Sprague passes organically from one mode to the other. As Mara, Marietta aims to sustain a heightened sense of being from the first word to the last, the reader will therefore find no sharp distinction between poetry and prose, but rather a continuum.

1 – These thoughts echo those of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his book, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford University Press, 1999).

The bold demeanour of your breasts,
The rose-petal lips of your pussy;
The arch of your instep,
The refinement of your fingers,
The dimples in the small of your back:
They are pavane and bolero,
Madrigal and canticle,
Sonata, concerto and symphony to me.
Yes, your breasts are Ravel, your ass Purcell,
And your pussy is pure Wagner!

Teach me to walk the high-wire
Till I vanquish my need to fall
Teach me to turn my back
On the irreversible

May I always meet you
In the place you cannot master
May I always complete you
Without making you whole

I feed on your hunger
You feed on my greed
You are inexhaustible
And everything is mine to learn

Stand to face me beloved
And open out the grace of your eyes:
It comes to me now, this fragment of Sappho;
It comes to me from the depths of my soul.

Sappho, I hear your voice in the hills of Mitylene,
I hear your lyre in the mixolydian mode:
With unabashed frankness you reveal yourself,
With undeceived insight you lay love bare.

I would like to pay you homage, however humbly;
I would like to pass on what you have given me:
The conviction that love needs no premeditation,
That in the being of another one’s self expands.

And so I tune my lyre to your intonations,
From my lyric I expunge ornament and explanation:
It is enough that I open myself to grace.

If tragedy is ruled out by free love,
The rites of separation withstand;
If undoing our ties undoes me,
What of telling a story that ends?

What remains?
Your blue sweater, your black cap,
Your long hair loose;
Your smile, your walk,
The touch of your hand.

Must it end, my love?

I still have so much to learn.
You are the sea,
Refusing no river yet never filled,
Washing every shore yet never emptied:
You are inexhaustible
And everything is mine to learn

You could yearn for your virginity
When we make love;
You could hold back and be evasive
When we talk.
You do not.

Instead, you look me in the eye,
You beat your wings and burn me.

You could play hide-and-seek,
You could leave me in the lurch.
You could be present
Without being present to me.
You could say,
Wrapping cruelty in generosity,
‘Let us remain friends’.
You do not.

Instead, you fold a lesson in ethics
Into your lesson in love,
You give me the lushness of your presence
In this barren landscape.

Is that why,
In this phantasmagoric geology,
In this distillation of the elements
To their essence,
I feel such humility?

Do not show me stars:
I don’t want to conceive of distances.
Do not hold me too closely:
I may never let you go.

The lapping of the water,
The sailors’ lullaby;
The lapping of the water—
Boys don’t cry.

You are all the moments
We have lived together;
You are all the lightness
I’m about to lose.

Who do you think you are?

Do you really believe there can be a transition?
Are you so naïve as to assume her ghost will comfort you?
I tell you, there’ll be no subtleties in the sunset:
Upon a wasteland swept by an icy wind
Darkness will descend, unvarying.
Nothing will change that.
Nothing and no-one.
Face it.

Didn’t you say you want to live out this loss in reality?

Oh ravish me, my beloved,
Reclaim me as your own;
Take me as your husband,
We’ll build us a home.

We’ll live on fish and berries,
We’ll live on knowledge and love;
We’ll have a clutch of kids,
And books undreamed of.

Never in a million years
Will I forget your resplendence
Forever and a day
I will admire your intransigence

Never in a million years
Will I forget your loving-kindness
Forever and a day
I will draw visions from blindness

For Hegel, lyric is the subjective genre of poetry, as opposed to epic, which is objective, and drama, which is mixed. In the lyric the ‘content is not the object but the subject, the inner world, the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding to action, remains alone with itself as inwardness and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of subjective life’. Poetry is an expressive form, and even what is most substantive is communicated as ‘the passion, mood or reflection’ of the individual. Its distinguishing feature is the centrality of subjectivity coming to consciousness of itself through experience and reflection.

In Hegel’s aesthetics, art forms are a material realization of spirit—man has the impulse to produce himself and recognize himself in whatever is external to him. In this conceptual framework, lyric best exemplifies the process of spiritualization, the reflexive action of consciousness: ‘For romantic art the lyric is the elementary fundamental characteristic’. Lyric becomes the poetic norm, for the external world enters only insofar as the spirit finds in it a stimulus for its activity. Hegel distinguishes two operations that characterize lyric: on the one hand, the lyric poet ‘absorbs into himself the entire world of objects and circumstances and stamps them with his own inner consciousness’; on the other the poet ‘discloses his self-concentrated heart, raises purely dull feeling into vision and ideas, and gives words and language to this rich inner life’. In both cases lyric differs from epic, whose unity derives from action: in lyric, the unity of the poem is provided by the poet’s inner movement of soul.

Although the essence of lyric for Hegel is subjectivity attaining consciousness of itself through self-expression, he stresses that the lyric process is one of purification and universalization: ‘Poetry does deliver the heart from the slavery to passion by making it see itself, but does not stop at merely extricating this felt passion from its immediate unity with the heart, but makes of it an object purified from all accidental moods.’ But it is not liberation from feeling so much as liberation in feeling: ‘This emergence from the self means only liberation from that immediate, dumb, void-of-ideas concentration of the heart which now opens out to self-expression and therefore grasps and expresses in the form of self-consciousness what formerly was only felt.’ The lyric is not a cri de coeur. It becomes ‘the language of the poetic inner life, and therefore however intimately the insights and feelings which the poet describes as his own belong to him as a single individual, they must nevertheless possess a universal validity’.

Thus, despite the centrality of subjectivity to his account of the essential nature of the lyric, subjectivity functions as a principle of unity rather than a principle of individuation: what is essential in this theory is not that the formulations of a lyric reflect the particular experience of an individual but that they be attributed to a subject, which brings them together. While for Hegel the point of unity must be the inner life of the poet, this life may be ‘fragmented and dispersed into the most diversified particularization and most variegated multiplicity of ideas, feelings, impressions, insights, and so on; and their linkage consists solely in the fact that one and the same self carries them, so to say, as their mere vessel.’ To provide this linkage the poet ‘must identify himself with this particularization of himself so that in it he feels and envisages himself’. The tension between conceiving the poetic subjectivity as a mere vessel and requiring that the poet identify himself with this particularization of himself illustrates the tension between the demands of Hegel’s formal system of poetic possibilities and the logic of the progressive realization of the spirit, in which the goal is for the subject to realize itself as itself, whence Hegel’s inclination to deploy notions of genuineness or authenticity as a standard of poetic value.