The Motive for Metaphor : Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis 9781782414940, 9781782203261

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THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR

THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis

Henry M. Seiden

First published in English 2016 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2016 by Henry M. Seiden The right of Henry M. Seiden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-326-1 Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain www.karnacbooks.com

For Sara

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

xiii

FOREWORD by Nancy McWilliams

xv

INTRODUCTION

xix

CHAPTER I Jokes, fathers, grief, and angels: a poem by Sherman Alexie

1

CHAPTER II Speaking of pain: Yehuda Amichai

4

CHAPTER III A sad story, briefly told: a poem by Simon Armitage

8

CHAPTER IV “Finding in the sound a thought”: Matthew Arnold’s “Dover beach” vii

13

CHAPTER V Auden’s “Lullaby” and Winnicott’s “Hate …”

17

CHAPTER VI An awakening: a poem by Elizabeth Bishop

22

CHAPTER VII On the pleasure in play: the poetry of Billy Collins

28

CHAPTER VIII Tyger time: e. e. cummings on conscientious objection

32

CHAPTER IX On idea and image and “the space between”: a poem by Albert Goldbarth

36

CHAPTER X “When your heart cries out, being carried off …”: a poem by Eamon Grennan

40

CHAPTER XI “Old pond, frog jump in …”: the genius of haiku

44

CHAPTER XII Postmodern metaphor: a poem by Robert Hass

48

CHAPTER XIII The air of another time and place: a poem by Seamus Heaney

53

CHAPTER XIV Poetry as argument: a poem by Tony Hoagland

57

viii

CHAPTER XV Marie Howe on “What the living do”

62

CHAPTER XVI Kenneth Koch on psychoanalysis in the “glory days”

66

CHAPTER XVII An old man’s love song: a poem by Stanley Kunitz

71

CHAPTER XVIII “They fuck you up …” Philip Larkin’s “This be the verse”

75

CHAPTER XIX The art of the ordinary: Philip Levine on “What work is”

78

CHAPTER XX How otherness dissolves: a poem by Thomas Lux

82

CHAPTER XXI Mysterious tears: a poem by Rose McLarney

86

CHAPTER XXII A meditation without punctuation by W. S. Merwin

90

CHAPTER XXIII Narrative as metaphor: Sharon Olds

94

CHAPTER XXIV “The meaning of simplicity”: a poem by Yannis Ritsos

99

CHAPTER XXV Saying a lot with a little: the poetry of Kay Ryan ix

103

CHAPTER XXVI On the love of beauty—and a poem by Charles Simic

106

CHAPTER XXVII When the narrative changes: a poem by A. E. Stallings

110

CHAPTER XXVIII Metaphors for mind: the poet Gerald Stern

114

CHAPTER XXIX Negative capability and Wallace Stevens’s “The emperor of ice-cream”

118

CHAPTER XXX Tracks in the snow: a poem of the Sung dynasty

122

CHAPTER XXXI On style: Tennyson and Cavafy, and intersubjective engagement

126

CHAPTER XXXII Empathic music: a poem of William Carlos Williams

131

CHAPTER XXXIII The pathetic fallacy: William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson

135

CHAPTER XXXIV W. B. Yeats on “Where love has pitched his mansion …”

139

x

ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS

I have many people to thank for the essays that make up this book. First, the poets themselves of course for the great pleasure their poems have brought me over many years. And I want to thank my many poet friends and poetry writing teachers, notable among them Alan Dugan, Marie Howe, Rosalind Pace, and Gerald Stern, who taught me much about writing poetry but even more about how to read it. And I want to express my gratitude for my two great writing teachers, Mary Henle and William Zinnser, who, although coming from different worlds, gave me the same ambition: to write clearly in order to think clearly. I want to thank William MacGillivray and David Lichtenstein, my colleagues and friends, the editors respectively of Psychologist-Psychoanalyst and Division/Review—both journals of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. They were the ones who encouraged me to do the columns that have become the chapters of this book. They provided important editing and printed the pieces first. I want to thank William Fried, Frank Korahais, Peter Lin, and Spyros Orfanos, friends all, for their contributions to the thinking that went into several of these chapters. And I thank many responsive readers for their encouragement, support xi

and useful criticism, among them: Mark Seiden, Matthew Seiden, Lowell Rubin, and Nancy McWilliams. Most of all I want thank my wife Sara without whose loving presence and good advice this book—and much else in my life—would not have been possible.

xii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry M. Seiden, PhD, ABPP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who lives and practices in Forest Hills, New York. He has published poetry in a number of journals including Poetry, Literal Latte, Passager, Midstream and the Journal of the American Medical Association. He has also published a chapbook called Tinnitus. His published professional papers include articles on Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, the longing for home, the use of metaphor in psychotherapy, on using poetry in psychotherapy with children, and on mindfulness, among other subjects. He is co-author (with Christopher Lukas) of Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide (Jessica Kingsley, 2007), which was originally published by Scribners and is now in its fourth printing. It has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese and Russian and has been in English as well as American editions. Seiden is a member the Board of Editors of Psychoanalytic Psychology. Several chapters of this book were originally columns on poetry and psychoanalysis in Psychologist-Psychoanalyst and Division/Review, both journals of Division 39, the Division of Psychoanalysis, of the American Psychological Association. He has been a member at large of the Board of Directors of Division 39 and is currently its Publications Chair. xiii

FOREWORD

Nancy McWilliams

Perhaps like most people whose education in the poetic arts was limited to a couple of college courses, I respond to most poems organically, letting their images activate my feelings, memories, and previously unformulated perceptions. Rarely can I articulate what it is in the poet’s craft that evokes my visceral reactions or my internal impression of being propelled into a more image-filled sense of some profound emotional reality. The way that poets can link our minds and hearts feels utterly mysterious to me. Hence my gratitude to Henry Seiden, whose meditations on some particularly evocative poems have begun connecting my lived experience, my psychoanalytically infused language for trying to comprehend the meaning of that experience, and the artistry behind the poet’s achievement. Ever since its first appearance in the newsletter of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association, I have been reading Seiden’s poetry column religiously; when my copy arrives, it is the first essay to which I turn. Many colleagues have told me they do the same. It is not surprising that these commentaries are prized by the analytic community, for psychoanalytic therapists share with poets the fundamental life project of trying to narrate what is true. (And surprisingly true, and often painfully true.) It is no small gift from Seiden, xv

a poet who is also a psychoanalyst, to explicate the poet’s art and connect it to the powerful, recurring moments of human suffering, yearning, and transcendence that therapists witness every day in our offices—moments that we cannot, because they involve sacred confidences, share with others. And these moments are ineluctably fleeting: We can no more sustain them than we can preserve the essence of a living animal with taxidermy, and yet we long for language that will capture their vital nature. Prose is essential when we try to nail down a specific message or meaning. In contrast, as Seiden has noted, poetry “points at” things and then lets the reader or listener fill in the multidirectional blanks that its images evoke. Freud would probably agree that a good poem liberates free association far more than a willed effort to obey his “basic rule” of saying everything that comes to mind. Poetry illuminates areas in which our sensibilities need to be complicated and expanded, while prose illuminates those domains in which we have to define our terms simply and precisely. Thus, trying to “translate” a poem into some core message would deaden it. For psychoanalysts, who immerse themselves daily in the emotional, the irrational, the ephemeral, the shameful, and hateful parts of self-experience, poetry can both stimulate and soothe the soul. In other words, it offers therapy to the therapist. Seiden’s commentaries have sensitised me to both similarities and differences between writing poetry and working as a psychoanalytic therapist. The poet and the analyst both work to condense a complex narrative into pithy, emotionally alive communications. Both trade in the currency of metaphor. Both try to expand what is known, not to contract it or pin it down. Both struggle to turn inchoate, isolated impressions into mutually recognised, nameable experience. Both disciplines hover on the boundary between knowledge and wisdom, between what can be represented in factual statements and what feels like “received” understanding. Because both disciplines xvi

involve what some psychologists have called “expertise in uncertainty,” both embrace the limits of knowledge; they prostrate ego at the altar of what we cannot know. Words are the medium for both therapists and poets, and yet for therapists, facial affect, body language, and vocal tone flesh out what we verbalise. The fact that the poet must reach us with words alone may be one reason for the sense of wonder we can feel in response to a powerful poem. The poet communicates profoundly to the audience, but without the responsive gaze, the affirming nod. What Seiden does in these commentaries, as he makes the poet’s decisions comprehensible to those who witness the final work, is to reduce the isolation of both the poet and the psychotherapist. He brings the analyst’s talent for relationship into the sphere of the written word, connecting readers with a larger community of seekers of wisdom and reporters from the human front. The meditations in this book have moved me, warmed me, amused me, humbled me. And not least of all, exposed me to some remarkable poems I would never have run into on my own. Reader, you are in for a treat.

xvii

INTRODUCTION

Each of the chapters of this book is a kind of meditation, one that could well take inspiration from Freud’s (perhaps apocryphal) remark: “Wherever I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Each focuses on a poem or sometimes two from a selected poet—and sometimes from two poets. The poems are beautiful, interesting, and exciting even in the absence of discussion. I hope my discussion will deepen the reader’s appreciation of them. The chapters are alphabetical by author but follow no particular conceptual order otherwise. They reflect the poems and the poets that interested me, or came across my consciousness one way or another, at the time of writing. They can be read that way too—in no particular order. I imagine the reader picking up the book, reading one or two pieces, more or less starting anywhere, thinking about the poems, putting the volume down to read some more on another day. And if so inspired, going to the internet to find more poetry by the poets, or more about them. And maybe even to find and buy their books. This book, of course, has its context in psychoanalytic practice. The pieces were written with practicing psychotherapists— and their patients—in mind as the audience. As with any clinical practice of any medical specialty the application of the xix

underlying science is an art. But I think this is the more so in psychoanalytic practice. We deal in narrative, metaphor, feeling, individual and often idiosyncratic meaning, the transformation and illumination of meaning: whatever else it is, ours is an interpretive art. We deal always as listeners, as makers, as interpreters, as finders of meaning, responding as we do to what might be called the music of thought. In terms of my own psychoanalytic orientation: as with most practitioners, I’ve picked and chosen among a variety of schools in shaping and growing into my own thinking. Those familiar with psychoanalytic discourse and the variety of subdiscourses will recognise influences: Kohut, Winnicott, interpersonal and intersubjective thinking, inevitably a Freudian magnetic north (although this selectively). Important to say: when I say “psychoanalytic” and “psychoanalyst” in this book, I refer to a broad stream of practice and thinking. It’s a stream that runs not just to the north but follows the experiential terrain wherever it leads; I, along with most of my colleagues, swim in it adaptively. While I’m a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist and have been for thirty-five years, I’m also a poet. I’ve been writing and studying poetry, and publishing poems for at least as long as I have been a therapist. I should say that in my writing, as in my clinical work, my commitment is to a discourse that takes pleasure in the way meaning is made and transformed— and not to one which looks for meaning in reductive reinterpretation. This has a way, often, of raising more questions than it answers. I’m OK with that (and hope the reader is) as long as the new questions are better questions, more interesting, more productive, and lead to the opening up as opposed to the closing down of experience. My excitement with poetry is that it makes beauty in a way not so different from the way psychoanalysis makes truth: that is, in discovery, evocation, elaboration, and transformation of meaning. Both arts can make what’s alive in us more so. xx

A note about the title: “The motive for metaphor” is the title of a short poem by Wallace Stevens. In it he embraces the subtleties of experience, what he calls the “half colours of quarter things”,—as opposed to the certainties, the hard primary “reds” and “blues”. To grasp and make sense of what is elusive (and beautiful), of “things that would never be quite expressed/where you yourself were never quite yourself”, that is, for the essential and puzzling condition of poetry, we are obliged to make metaphors. The same, I think, is true of psychoanalysis.

xxi

CHAPTER I

Jokes, fathers, grief, and angels: a poem by Sherman Alexie

T

o have a psychoanalytic perspective is to see the way larger meaning is folded into small. Each association, each dream report, each memory, indeed each moment of expression or perception can be seen to be organically connected to a larger motivational whole. Poets too make great and exhilarating hay out of the universal connectedness of meanings—finding beauty, it might be said, where analysts look for truth, finding the wonderful in the particular, finding it, moreover, in fresh and surprising ways. Here’s a breathtaking example from the contemporary Native American novelist and poet Sherman Alexie. GRIEF CALLS US TO THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD The morning air is all awash with angels … —Richard Wilbur The eyes open to a blue telephone In the bathroom of this five-star hotel. I wonder whom I should call? A plumber, Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

1

Who is most among us and most deserves The first call? I choose my father because He’s astounded by bathroom telephones. I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,” I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps, And then I remember that my father Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,” I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry— How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says. “I made him a cup of instant coffee This morning and left it on the table— Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years— And I didn’t realize my mistake Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs At the angels who wait for us to pause During the most ordinary of days And sing our praise to forgetfulness Before they slap our souls with their cold wings. Those angels burden and unbalance us. Those fucking angels ride us piggyback. Those angels, forever falling, snare us And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

Well, we all know what this poem is talking about: the dead don’t just go away. For years after my father died I found myself reaching for the phone to call him—at odd excited moments, like after the Giants scored a touchdown on TV. A student of Kohut’s might say this is the fate of a selfobject; it never dies. But there’s more in “Grief calls us …” than recognition, there’s some evocation, some experiencing, some deeper catch 2

in the throat at the end of this poem. I think it has to do with the series of emotional changes the poem puts us through— the carefully controlled turns. I took a seminar once with the poet and teacher Billy Collins where we spent a long fruitful day analysing poem after poem for the turns: the quick shifts, juxtapositions, the buts and twists, the veering in a new direction or into a new dimension, the gear changes, however wacky, which surprise and startle but afterward, and only afterward, seem inevitable—and seem just right. This—in poetry—is a kind of associative process that is both free (in the sense that there’s no censor, no limit on where it can go) and skilfully controlled for maximum emotional effect. Look at the successive concerns in “Grief calls us …”: the absurdity of the telephone, the joke about whom to call, the thought of the poet’s father, the all-too-human forgetting that the dead are dead, then (the major turn) the thought of angels, then “those fucking angels riding us piggyback […] into dust”. Funny, funny, startling, then serious, dead serious and finally deeply, deeply sad—yet mysteriously beautiful. “Grief calls us …” is a report of the experience of a selfobject in transformation: The sense of the presence of a lost loved other (there in the small and silly “things of this world”) being replaced by a sense of being among angels. Alas, these are falling angels—that’s finally all we’ve got for company, the spooky ambivalent agents of a universe in which we, both “prey and praying,” come to dust.

Reference Alexie, S. (2007). Grief calls us to the things of this world. In: Thrash. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press.1

Note 1. © 2007 by Sherman Alexie, by permission of Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY.

3

CHAPTER II

Speaking of pain: Yehuda Amichai

D

espite Robert Frost’s famous remark that poetry is “what is lost in translation”, there are times when translation works. Here’s an example, an incisively lovely poem—in translation—by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.1 Amichai, who died in 2000, is much revered in his native land and considered by many to be the greatest modern Israeli poet. His themes, in his many books written over a long European, Jewish, Israeli, twentieth century lifetime, tend to be experiential rather than literary. He was celebrated in particular for writing in colloquial Hebrew. AmIchai drew on the Talmud for much of his orientation to the ordinary experiences of living, loving, losing, and dying. Here is a piece of a longer poem sequence from his book Open Closed Open (2000), the book title itself a translation of a Talmudic phrase. The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I’m thinking how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor’s office.

4

Even those who haven’t learned to read and write are precise: “This one’s a throbbing pain, that one’s a wrenching pain, this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain and that—a dull one. Right here. Precisely here, yes, yes.” Joy blurs everything. I’ve heard people say after nights of love and feasting, “It was great, I was in seventh heaven.” Even the spaceman who floated in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, “Great, wonderful, I have no words.” The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain— I want to describe, with a sharp pain’s precision, happiness and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.

I think this funny, sweet, sad poem works beautifully in English because it grows out of trenchant observation of universal experience. It does not depend—as poetry often does— on the native diction and the allusive resonances of its original language and so translation is less of a problem than it might otherwise be. “The precision of pain …” does what good poems always do: it signals truth and it raises interesting questions—in this case interesting questions in particular for psychoanalysts. For one, everything we’ve been taught about repression and, more recently, about dissociation would have us think that we should be better able to talk about joy than about pain. And yet, clearly, Amichai is on to an undeniable observational truth. We laugh—and ache—in recognition: Indeed, indeed, we talk better—and certainly more—about pain than we do about joy. Why should this be so?

5

Moreover, Amichai is a poet and when he refers to “pains”, we know he is referring to all our pains. The physical ones he lists are metaphorical stand-ins for psychic and emotional ones. As psychotherapists, of course (and to say the least), we’re not unfamiliar with the fluency with which people describe their pains! But how to account for this fluency? One would have to guess that there is some gropingly obsessional, perhaps adaptive, but ultimately tragic self-soothing going on here. I say tragic, of course, because experience tells us that in the long run it’s hopeless: behind the pain, there will be more pain. And how to account for the relative wordlessness when it comes to joy? Amichai suggests that it’s because people are so much less familiar with joy (that, like him, we’ve all “learned to speak among the pains”). Or is language unnecessary when it comes to joy—and we’re grateful just to be in such a rare and blessed state? Or are we afraid of dragging joy down somehow, that to use language risks nailing what might be airborne to the ground? Or is it a kind of habitual superstitious anxiety (things are good? Say nothing! Don’t invite the evil eye, my grandmother used to say—in Yiddish and with great regularity)? There’s another question too—an argument really, which perhaps it takes a psychoanalyst to raise. When you look closely, people aren’t really all that precise about their pains. There’s something ironic about calling this “precision”. It’s only that we dwell on our pains elaborately, and identify them with a kind of verbal pointing: “Right here, Precisely here,/ yes. yes.” Indeed, the clinical activity of psychoanalysis might well be thought of as helping people to be more precise about their pains—even if in the end it amounts only to a more precise pointing. We help our patients make better words—a little like translation but different—words in which, it could be said, the poetry is not lost but found.

6

Reference Amichai, Y. (2000). The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. In: Open Closed Open: C. Bloch & C. Kronfeld (Trans.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.2

Notes 1. Much of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry and discussions of his work are available on the internet. 2. Copyright © 2000 Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

7

CHAPTER III

A sad story, briefly told: a poem by Simon Armitage

P

sychoanalytic clinicians are no strangers to incomplete narrative: to stories assembled from the bits and pieces of our patients’ unreliable and unsystematic reports about their lives. We take what we can get, gather the details, and together with the patient, construct a more coherent and, hopefully, a more liberating narrative. We know we never have the whole picture—we’re always connecting the dots, making constellations, it might be said, from only the most visible stars. Poets study a version of the same problem: how much do you need to know to know the story, how much will you have to say to tell it? Often, because in poetry brevity is its own pleasure, it’s how little can you say? Here’s a wonderful lesson in concision from a brilliant contemporary British poet, Simon Armitage. ABOUT HIS PERSON Five pounds fifty in change, exactly, a library card on its date of expiry. A postcard stamped, unwritten, but franked,

8

a pocket size diary slashed with a pencil from March twenty-fourth to the first of April. A brace of keys for a mortise lock, an analogue watch, self winding, stopped. A final demand in his own hand, a rolled up note of explanation planted there like a spray carnation but beheaded, in his fist. A shopping list. A givaway photograph stashed in his wallet, a kepsake banked in the heart of a locket, no gold or silver, but crowning one finger a ring of white unweathered skin. That was everything.

The title, of course, is an artful pun: what is found “about his person” tells a great deal about the person. The constellation of details tells the tale—of a suicide, a failed marriage, a failed life. Interestingly, the form of the poem is not technically narrative, not in the sense of “this happened, then this and then this”. The concluding punch line is a conceptual not a narrative one: “A ring of white unweathered skin/That was everything.” In form, this is a list poem, a list of imagistic and resonant details, additive but in no chronological order, each bouncing off the one before, deepening our sense of the tragic story. Walt Whitman was the great modernist list-maker. But this is not Whitman. Whitman’s lines spill and sprawl across the page. Armitage’s are sculptured and spare; and the images are 9

metonyms: ironic, tension filled, rhyming double-entendres. Each and any of them signals the whole. A definitional note: a metonym is a device, a linguistic term, for referring to something—an action, a person, a situation— indirectly by referring to some other thing associated with it. Metonymy differs from metaphor; metaphor asserts identity. If we say (to use the classical example) King Richard is “lion hearted”, we use a metaphor: we say that the king is a kind of lion, brave, strong, fierce, and so forth. By contrast, if, metonymically, we refer to the king as “the crown”, we indicate his royal position but we don’t imply that the king is a kind of hat made of precious metal. The crown is associated with the king but not the same as the king. As a common literary device metonyms can be used like props or stage sets to evoke an emotional situation. Example: “It was a dark and stormy night” establishes an emotional tone for the events which will unfold (but doesn’t imply that the characters are like rain clouds). Of course it all depends on context: if one said a character was “stormy”, that would be a metaphor. Telling metonyms can have powerful resonance. How about, “an analogue watch, self-winding, stopped” as a figure for the life of a man who has taken his own life? And how about the “mortise lock” as an expressive figure—perhaps for his own heart, perhaps for the heart of one who might have loved him. What does it mean that he’s found with a “brace of keys”? In “About his person” the metonyms are piled on in an increasingly grim list: the “date of expiry”, the diary “slashed” with a pencil, the suicide note “like a flower beheaded”. In our clinical work we know that this is only a little exaggeration of the way experience organises itself and the way language works—each moment, whether of reported history or of present day event, of dreaming or of interaction in the consulting room, can be seen as an expression (metonymic or metaphorical or both) of the larger life and experience of the patient. 10

This is a poem, of course, and not a clinical report. And while a well done case report brings insight and its own kind of satisfaction, a good part of the pleasure one takes in poetry is its musicality. “About his person” is assembled in a musical, and brilliant, rhyming chant (near-rhyme or slant rhyme, speaking technically). This is in the tradition of W. H. Auden and of Philip Larkin, both British like Armitage and earlier modern masters of biting rhyming verse. Compare Auden’s “Unknown citizen”. He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.1

The voice in “About his person” isn’t archly conversational the way Auden’s is. More it’s like something a child might skip rope or bounce a ball to—which gives an ironic innocence to its chilling report (our nursery rhymes generally may be about things that were not originally so sweet: take “Ring around a Rosie”, “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down …” had its origin, it has been argued, in the Fourteenth Century experience of the black plague). Finally: who is the person this poem is about? We don’t know! This is the central tension in the poem—and perhaps reflects the genius of poetry generally. Even as each resonant detail contributes to and sharpens the clarity of the specific picture, it evokes a larger general mystery—the mystery of this and any life, however we might encounter it: in poetry, in fiction, both in and outside of our consulting rooms. 11

Reference Armitage, S. (1992). About his person. In: Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.2

Notes 1. W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen, in Another Time (Random House, 1940). 2. Originally in a volume called KID, 1992. © 1992 by Simon Armitage. It is reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, UK.

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CHAPTER IV

“Finding in the sound a thought”: Matthew Arnold’s “Dover beach”

M

athew Arnold’s “Dover beach” (written in 1876) may be one of the most beautiful poems in the English language: beautiful for its music and its imagery; for its historical scope and philosophical clarity; for its honest ambivalence: optimism against pessimism; for the way it sets the beauty of the natural world against the melancholy of loss—and against uncertainty and existential anxiety; for its meditation on what love can mean. To appreciate the poetry of another age is to overcome some difficulties. The unstated assumptions and the intellectual struggles of that age, the ground against which the figure of the poem is set, may well be opaque to us. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) was a Victorian poet, essayist, and literary critic. The great thinkers of his time wanted to make the world right with new science and technology, with new social, psychological and economic theory, with cultural improvement generally. This was the age of Darwin, Marx and, soon, Freud. But the dark side of belief in progress is doubt—of optimism, pessimism. The poets of Arnold’s age sought spiritual truth, and the beauty that signalled it, in a world undergoing deeply unsettling technological, social, economic, and religious change. And 13

lurking within the celebration of the beautiful was the anxiety that beauty could be glimpsed only briefly and therefore, perhaps, could not be relied upon at all. The great Romantic, William Wordsworth, as early as 1798 (in “Tintern abbey”), celebrated the memory of his youthful communion with the natural world. But even as he celebrated, he felt himself (only five years later!) already past the possibility of such communion. Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877 (in “God’s grandeur”) would insist eloquently on the spiritual beauty of the world even as he bemoaned its despoliation. The world he saw was “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man’s smudge”. At the risk of simplifying a large and complex history: this was an age that wanted to believe but was oppressed by doubt. “The sea of faith”, as Arnold says, was retreating like the tide. Historically, Arnold wasn’t quite Modern: the last wholesale destruction of the belief in the essential goodness of the world is understood as coming with World War One. But surely he prefigures Modernism. He hears faith’s “melancholy withdrawing roar”. In that, and in his ability to evoke the sound in his reader’s ear—even in the ear of a (postmodern) twenty-first century reader—he is one of us. “Dover beach”, starts with an image of great tranquillity but within the first stanza it becomes clear: this will be no picture postcard. DOVER BEACH The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,

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Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

“Dover beach” opens with such lovely music! The waves roll up the beach and down again in the rhythm of the reader’s 15

breathing. The sea is calm; the tide is full. There is the tranquil bay, the night air, a splendid view, a geographical and historical perspective. But then in the sound of the sea, of the pebbles grating on the shore, there is a “tremulous cadence” in which we find “an eternal note of sadness”. The melancholy feeling is carefully registered and philosophically clear-headed: the sound in itself isn’t sad. We find the sadness in it. There is no pathetic fallacy here. The imputation of emotion and intention to a non-human universe is understood as a human reading, a human projection with a long history going back at least to the Ancient Greeks, to Sophocles’ awareness of the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery”. To find and make such meaning (again) gives us a moment (again) of sweet, sad beauty. The sadness makes what’s beautiful more beautiful. But the finding is inherently anxious— it gives us our terrifying loneliness too. We want “a land of dreams, various and beautiful”. But we know the natural world “hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain …”. Well, this is modern. This is the psychoanalytic vision— a vision that had its birth in the Victorian age—is it not? We live in our unreliable and anxious inventions. We want meaning and make meaning out of our longings. But all we really have is the existential possibility of being “true to one another”. And even then we can’t escape our anxiety: we live our lives conflicted and ignorant “as on a darkling plain”. Then again (and maybe this is Matthew Arnold and maybe it’s my reading of him), we do find our thoughts! That is, we transform the inhuman sounds of our universe—inner as well as outer—into human experience. And we find the consolation of being able to share that experience. On the beach—or in the consulting room. And in the sharing we bring a little light to the overwhelming darkness.

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CHAPTER V

Auden’s “Lullaby” and Winnnicott’s “Hate …”

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fter I read Winnicott’s “Hate in the countertransference” (1947) the world would never be the same. I could not hear “Rockabye baby” (or sing it to a child or, now, a grandchild) without thinking of the ambivalence buried in it. More than that, and worse than that, never could I think seriously about love again—much less about countertransference— without knowing that however good and pure and whole an attachment feels, it’s likely that something in it will be swimming the other way. Alas for the idealisation of love! In our purest loving moments, in the most tender of tendernesses, that between mother and baby, the “hate”, says Winnicott, is never absent. It is sublimated, transcended, but never banished. Well, here’s another lullaby worth a psychoanalyst’s attention—this one for adults—from the poet W. H. Auden,1 who was roughly contemporary with Winnicott (Auden was born in 1907 and died in 1973; Winnicott lived from 1896 until 1971). They may well have known each other. An internet search shows them appearing in the same issue of a popular English magazine—and they almost certainly would have known of each other in the England of their early adulthoods.

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Auden’s “Lullaby” is widely regarded as one of the great poems of the Twentieth Century. The poem is informed by a sceptical psychoanalytic vision. Auden was a close reader of Freud, an admirer of Groddeck, and is said to have undergone a brief analysis with him in 1928. “Lullaby” is informed by a profound distrust of sentimental idealisation. Auden had much to be disillusioned about: as a homosexual whose love life was regarded as criminal, as a disenchanted idealist and (now ex) Communist, and as an appalled witness to the catastrophic horrors of the age. “Lullaby” (1940) was actually written in 1937, at about the time he was deciding to abandon his English life to come to America with his lover. LULLABY Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. Soul and body have no bounds: To lovers as they lie upon Her tolerant enchanted slope In their ordinary swoon, Grave the vision Venus sends Of supernatural sympathy, Universal love and hope; While an abstract insight wakes

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Among the glaciers and the rocks The hermit’s carnal ecstasy. Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell And fashionable madmen raise Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, Not a kiss nor look be lost. Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough: Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.

This is a beautiful poem and a masterful one—for the conciseness of its expression, for its music, for its complex construction: ten line stanzas, rhyming on the fifth line, and rhyme so organic, so of a piece with the diction of the poem, that one has to look twice to see that it’s there. And I think you will agree that this is an adult version of “down will come baby, cradle and all”—the quintessential modern love poem. The voice is ironic, disillusioned, worldly and at the same time wounded, heartbroken, and tender.

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The poem has the intimacy of a love song but the conceptual power of a manifesto. It’s brave enough to state the facts, brave in the way psychoanalysis wants to be brave, which is to say, unsentimental. “Sentimentality”, says Winnicott, “is the denial of hate” and as such is “useless”. When (and if) we get real about it, we know that love is never simple and that the comfort love brings is more comforting, not less, when we acknowledge its complexity. Interestingly, Auden’s “Lullaby” came before Winnicott’s “Hate …” and takes things further: love is corrupt and the universe winds down. Lovers will be unfaithful; beautiful children will grow old and die; what truth there is is unreliable—lovers “in their ordinary swoon” will feel themselves to be one with God; hermits (and theologians and scholars) will have orgasms over their “abstract insights”; detested moralists abound. Our situation is absurd. And yet. And yet, some human comfort is to be had. There’s the comfort of this night, the possibility of a welcoming tomorrow; people can watch over each other and call a blessing down upon each other—even as we doubt the existence of the “involuntary powers” that we call upon. What can we lovingly wish each other? Hear the echo of Winnicott’s “good enough mothering” here? That we “find our mortal world enough”.

References Auden, W. H. (1937). Lullaby. In: W. H. Auden Collected Poems. London: Random House.2 Winnicott, D. W. (1947). Hate in the countertransference. In: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Notes 1. The website of The W. H. Auden Society (www.audensociety. org) is an excellent resource for his poetry (including some

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recorded readings in his own voice), and for bibliographical and critical material. 2. Copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER VI

An awakening: a poem by Elizabeth Bishop

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sychoanalysts are necessarily developmentalists. We look routinely to significant early life experiences to explain who and how people are in later life. Poets too (although less necessarily) are deeply interested in childhood experience and for much the same reason—although traditionally there is a difference in emphasis: generally, psychoanalysts want to explain and poets want to evoke the early layers that are folded into adult experiencing. Here’s an example of a spookily beautiful evocation by Elizabeth Bishop, the great American modernist. Bishop was known, along with Robert Lowell and other poets of her generation as a “confessional” poet. Feminist critics have been particularly interested in her work because her materials were largely the events of her own, woman’s, life. 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.

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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 I 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;

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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.

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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.

One finds in “In the waiting room”, as in much of Bishop’s work, a plain story, a surface clarity. Unlike so much other modern poetry, we know—that is, we think we know—what she’s talking about. But then we find we’re not so sure: there’s a mystery, ambiguity, a complexity below the surface. Bishop worked with legendary attention to the smallest details in her poems, attending to the resonances, revising and 25

re-working, often for years. There would be nothing in this poem she didn’t mean to have there—starting with the title. Something is “in waiting”. Well, what’s in waiting? The dentist’s office is ordinary and familiar: the waiting room, the waiting patients, the pile of well-thumbed magazines. But “inside” a bloody ritual is taking place. And inside the magazine with its “yellow margins” and a date remarkable only because it signals her age, a vortex awaits. Seven-year-old Elizabeth has learned to read. But her expanded awareness brings something she’s not ready for. Remember, for Bishop every word is considered. Here are: a “volcano”, “black ashes”, “rivulets of fire”, “horrifying breasts”, a (perhaps) even more horrifying “Long Pig”, “babies with pointed heads”. The genius of this poem is that the strangeness of the world of the National Geographic signals an inner strangeness; the otherness is within! The cry of pain is coming, the child realises, from her own mouth. So many kinds of inside, so many kinds of in-waiting! This is an evocation of a moment of lost innocence: An ordinary errand in the course of which, “nothing stranger had ever happened”. The dissociation is palpable. “Falling and falling” is the language, “round and round” is the description; the whole is like “sliding beneath a big black wave, another and another”. Ready or not, the girl is on her way to womanhood, like “them”, like the other women. The “awful hanging breasts” hold them all together. And with dissociation, depersonalisation: “Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone?” Ultimately, what’s in waiting is growing up. Shy Elizabeth does recover—more or less. She returns from the “too hot” to the “night and slush and cold” of Worcester. But somehow the poet leaves us knowing that this is only the beginning. There will be a succession of unwished for awakenings—real and imaginary and often both, sometimes more, sometimes less 26

traumatic—in waiting and inevitable. And for all of us, I would add, women and men alike.

Reference Bishop, E. (1979). In the waiting room. In: Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.1

Note 1. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, NY. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. And by Random House Co, UK.

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CHAPTER VII

On the pleasure in play: the poetry of Billy Collins

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ince Freud and through Winnicott and a long list of distinguished others, psychoanalysts have paid serious attention to play—to children’s play and to its various adult forms, like wit and humour and jokes and playfulness in art and in language. But that same attention has often had a reductive quality—and had a way of taking all the fun out of it. To read poetry (the playful use of language in its highest form) is to be reminded: to take play only as a code to be cracked is to miss a vital pleasure. And the question of whether this is a derivative pleasure (derivative of anxiety and/or libidinal urges and/or relational striving and/or whatever) is beside the point. The joy is essential to the meaning. Here’s a good example of play where the serious can’t be separated from the giggle. Billy Collins is a recent Poet Laureate of the United States and much honoured and celebrated. He is immensely popular for a poet. By one report his half dozen or so books have sold over 500,000 copies when most poets are lucky if a book sells 2,000. A serious poet, he was recently named winner of the Poetry Foundation’s first Mark Twain Prize for Humour in Poetry. He is a master of the

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sweet, gentle, quintessentially playful, but at the same time accurately illuminating and emotionally telling, report on ordinary experience. When I say “ordinary experience”, I do mean ordinary upper middle class American experience. I suspect that his large popularity, and some of the criticism he gets for being “too easy”, grows out of the fact that Collins’s poetry does not come out of the more typically agonised concerns of contemporary poets. His is not a voice of alienation, of a disenfranchised minority, of rage, despair or anomie, of social or political engagement (although, more power to those voices!). Indeed, Collins plumbs, and plays with, the sweet, sad moments of his own (and his likely reader’s) daily experience: a walk by the lake with the dog, a pot of tea on his writing table, the fish and asparagus for dinner, the experience of teaching and of writing, memories of a middle class childhood. Here is Collins playing with a familiar emotional situation (one entirely familiar to psychoanalysts) in a surprising way. NO TIME In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

Collins’s special genius is to make of the outer world an inner one. His poems are reports on moments in the life of the

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mind—the mind in play with the ordinary reality around it (in one of his later poems he refers to himself as “Secretary of the Interior”). In “No time”, his parents (and ours), although gone and buried, continue to be, now and forever, who they always were. Of course this is absurd. And of course, it’s true. There’s a funny and deeply pleasurable accuracy in the way he captures both the truth and the absurdity. Interestingly, it’s a serious pleasure: this is much more than silly. A good joke has to hurt a little. Time passes, the poem reminds us, while we’re driving by the cemetery. Even the sweet life passes. Even those of us lucky enough to have a busy and successful life have lost and will lose the people we love—people we love regardless of their failings and foibles and, maybe, love because of them. The whole important psychodrama of our lives just slides away, condenses, becomes a little comedy and then not even that. Death is a base note in Collins’s writing; and often it’s in the treble. But even death can be the mind’s plaything. In a poem called “Writing in the afterlife” (2008b) Collins imagines himself crossing the mythical Acheron, the ancient Greeks’ river of death—and imagines Charon, the ferryman, as a writing teacher! He writes about how he himself always imagined the afterlife in the more or less conventional way […] but how could anyone have guessed that as soon as we arrived we would be asked to describe this place and to include as much detail as possible— not just the water, he insists, rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water, not simply the shackles, but the rusty, iron, ankle-shredding shackles— and that our next assignment would be

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to jot down, off the tops of our heads, our thoughts and feelings about being dead, not really an assignment, the man rotating the oar keeps telling us— think of it more as an exercise, he groans, think of writing as a process, a never-ending, infernal process […].1

This is the world of a tweed-jacketed English professor who has attended and taught a thousand writing classes: how he plays with the received advice! Delicious, how he comes to the conclusion that writing is “a never-ending infernal process”! He’s right, about writing of course and you can picture him in a slow four o’clock class finding his inspiration for this one. Well how about us? How about psychoanalysis—with its own received advice—as an “interminable” and never-ending infernal process? Who among us, patient or analyst, hasn’t known the interminability and known it ruefully and best during the last late session on a winter Thursday night? Who hasn’t sat (or lay) there thinking: this must be what forever feels like.

References Collins, B. (2008a). No time. In: Nine Horses: Poems. London: Random House. Collins, B. (2008b). Writing in the afterlife. In: Nine Horses: Poems. London: Random House.2

Notes 1. “Writing in the afterlife” can be found in its entirety—along with other poems of Billy Collins on Poetry magazine’s website: www.poetrymagazine.org. 2. Copyright © 2008 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER VIII

Tyger time: e. e. cummings on conscientious objection

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illiam Blake tells us that, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” in an oftenquoted aphorism that is one among many in a long and entertaining list of “diabolical” and paradoxical proverbs in his prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.1 One has to think that Blake, a great Romantic poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is recommending, perhaps paradoxically, feeling, not thinking, as a basis for knowledge, feeling in particular as a basis for knowing what one knows about the moral world. Pay attention, he’s saying, to what makes you angry. There’s something to learn from rage that no careful formal education is likely to teach. And when it comes to poetry, it is honest wrath, not careful study, which will point to truth. Here’s a modern poem which honours the tygers of wrath: e. e. cummings’s “i sing of Olaf glad and big” (1979). Cummings (1894–1962), of course, is a well-known and influential modernist. His experiments with spelling, visual presentation on the page and quirky punctuation (like avoiding capitalisation— once radical, now a cliché of the email age) opened up space for experiment for other poets and in many ways epitomised an attitude of modernism. And his relatively simple, baldly 32

stated themes were powerfully expressive and clear, making him accessible to a popular audience. i sing of Olaf glad and big whose warmest heart recoiled at war: a conscientious object-or his wellbelov’d colonel (trig westpointer most succinctly bred) took erring Olaf soon in hand; but—though an host of overjoyed noncoms (first knocking on the head him) do through icy waters roll that helplessness which others stroke with brushes recently employed anent this muddy toiletbowl, while kindred intellects evoke allegiance per blunt instruments— Olaf (being to all intents a corpse and wanting any rag upon what God unto him gave) responds, without getting annoyed “I will not kiss your fucking flag” straightway the silver bird looked grave (departing hurriedly to shave) but—though all kinds of officers (a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride) their passive prey did kick and curse until for wear their clarion voices and boots were much the worse, and egged the firstclassprivates on his rectum wickedly to tease

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by means of skilfully applied bayonets roasted hot with heat— Olaf (upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat “there is some shit I will not eat” our president, being of which assertions duly notified threw the yellowsonofabitch into a dungeon, where he died Christ (of His mercy infinite) i pray to see; and Olaf, too preponderatingly because unless statistics lie he was more brave than me: more blond than you.

“Olaf …” invites us to rage. And psychoanalysts know the paradox of rage. We’re a careful and studious bunch—ever appropriate, and generally careful in our truth-seeking discourse. But we know (and our clinical work depends on) the importance of the mobilisation of feelings (in patient and therapist alike), however painful. We know that feelings point to truth more reliably than thoughts in the absence of feelings ever could. (To be clear: feelings don’t tell the truth: they point the way to it.) Cummings method is interesting. He deliberately abandons received form, even the look of received form, on the page. I read it that his intention, like the intention of free association, is a radical interference with too easy formulation. The argument for this—in cummings’s poetry as in psychoanalytic method—is that the structures of ordinary discourse can get in

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the way of hard to see truth and, most important, of things one prefers not to see. And what is the truth at issue here? “Olaf”, although written in the 1930s, sings of the early twenty-first century political climate. These are complex times, the ethical issues are complicated—there’s a place and a need for study, for the horses of instruction. But this is also (and perhaps, as ever) a tyger time. It’s a time when only recently torture was still debated as an instrument of government policy; a time when “yellowsonofabitches” are thrown into military prisons; a time moreover, when good and otherwise thoughtful and wellinstructed people are all too willing to “kiss that fucking flag.”

Reference Cummings, E. E. (1979). I sing of Olaf glad and big. In: The Complete Poems: 1904–1962. G. J. Firmage (Ed.). New York: Liveright Publishing Company.2

Notes 1. Blake’s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was written between 1790–1793. Among other well known paradoxical proverbs found there are: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; and “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” 2. Copyright © 1931, 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmace, from The Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by e. e. cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Company.

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CHAPTER IX

On idea and image and “the space between”: a poem by Albert Goldbarth

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n psychoanalytic practice, the analyst’s ability to move the conversation through levels of abstraction—from idea to image or from image to idea—is a little remarked on but essential skill. Our method demands that as therapists we learn to illuminate the general with the affect-charged specific and to give perspective to the specific with statements of the general. “You say your mother always disappointed you? It sounds like she never put candles on your birthday cake.” Or, alternatively: “You say your mother never put candles on your birthday cake? Ah, it sounds like you were always disappointed”. Such verbal re-formulations are not automatically given in the patient’s discourse. They are more like deliberate, and hopefully, skilful, impositions (be they images, labels, the naming of feeling states, theoretical remarks or what have you) of the analyst’s onto and into the flow of experience. I think we have something to learn in this from poetry— which depends, of course, on analogous devices, on vivid images which speak for ideas, on surprising ideas which indicate, or sum up or collect lived moments of experience. A good poem models the mastery of such devices. Here’s a wonderful

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example, a meditation on idea, image and “the space between” from contemporary American poet Albert Goldbarth.1 HUMAN BEAUTY If you write a poem about love … the love is a bird, the poem is an origami bird. If you write a poem about death … the death is a terrible fire, the poem is an offering of paper cut-out flames you feed to the fire. We can see, in these, the space between our gestures and the power they address —an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty, a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm from out of nowhere hit New York one night in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught unloading props: a box of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped and broken open, and that flash of white confetti was lost inside what it was a praise of.

I love this deceptively simple, but surprising and startlingly pleasurable little poem. A little poem, but a big statement—nothing less than a postmodern meditation on what Goldbarth calls “distinctly human beauty”. He means, I think, the kind of beauty made by people interested in making beauty. One might expect

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such postmodern self-consciousness to produce a detached and/or ironic and/or debunking poetic statement. But Goldbarth, surprisingly and delightfully, gives us a fresh, invigorating view of human possibility. Note that he works here with classical concerns, with the poet’s (and, of course, the psychoanalyst’s) time-honoured and essential raw materials: love and death. But notice too that Goldbarth is not writing about love—but about writing a poem about love; not about death but about writing a poem about death. He runs through levels of abstraction: love and death as abstract ideas, then as natural images, then as poet’s images, that is, as artifice, as gestures made of paper—which is where the real interest of the poem lies. His concern is: “the space between our gestures and the power they address” (his odd line-breaks which seem to make you catch your breath in the wrong place emphasise “the space between”). Goldbarth is interested in an “insufficiency” not unlike the one we experience in offering what we call an interpretation, the space between our words and the patient’s experience. And yet he says, despite the insufficiency, there’s a beauty. I’m sure we feel that too. Here’s how Goldbarth nails that beauty (and this is something a poet at the top of his form can do): he offers an image of the transaction, the extraordinary image of the paper snow lost inside the real snowstorm it is “a praise of”. Yes, we think, our best human gestures are just like that—as inadequate and as beautiful.

Reference Goldbarth, A. (2004). Human beauty. In: The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972–2007. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press (originally in Poetry: May 2004).2

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Notes 1. Albert Goldbarth is the author of over twenty collections of poetry, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award. 2. Copyright © 2004, 2007 by Albert Goldbarth. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www. graywolfpress.org.

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CHAPTER X

“When your heart cries out, being carried off …”: a poem by Eamon Grennan

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ne of the intriguing parallels between psychoanalysis and poetry is the process by which one gets from muddle to meaning, from the smallest, swimming details of experience to the big picture—and then back again with the detail clarified and illuminated as never before. Seen right (and said right), the detail implies the whole no less than that the whole contains, organises and orders the parts. Every percept, every gesture, every word is part of a tapestry of meaning. This, of course, is a fundamental assumption and a working algorithm in psychoanalytic practice. It is no less in the practice of poetry. Here’s a poem by a contemporary poet, Eamon Grennan,1 that speaks to that awareness. DETAIL I was watching a robin fly after a finch—the smaller chirping with excitement, the bigger, its breast blazing, silent in light-winged earnest chase—when, out of nowhere

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over the chimneys and the shivering front gardens, flashes a sparrowhawk headlong, a light brown burn scorching the air from which it simply plucks like a ripe fruit the stopped robin, whose two or three cheeps of terminal surprise twinkle in the silence closing over the empty street when the birds have gone about their business, and I began to understand how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.

So this is “how a poem can happen”! Note the poet’s almost photographic deconstruction of the process: you’re an interested observer with “your eye on a small elusive detail, pursuing its music” when bang! the truth strikes. This is Grennan’s method—and it’s a credit to his quiet genius that he makes us feel that we could do it too: walk about the world, head up, eyes and ears open, noticing what we notice and open to the (often stunning) meaning just there waiting to thrust itself on us. Importantly though, the metaphor goes just so far. Illumination is not an accident: it’s a matter of readiness. In one of its earlier iterations “Detail” was called “Lesson”. The first part of the lesson here (for poets and their readers and for analysts and their patients) is that an alert receptivity is a necessary condition of insight. Here’s what Grennan says in an interview about insight: Most of us live in a sort of linear and horizontal way, but what lyric poems and poetry are trying to do is […] live in a vertical way down the shaft of one of those single horizontal moments […]. Another image may be dowsing

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for water—you walk around the landscape and then the willow wand dips and you say, dig here! And, you find water.

Of course finding (or stumbling on, or for that matter falling into) metaphorical water, that is to say, finding truth, requires art. The world doesn’t necessarily give up its secrets so easily. Here’s what Grennan has to say in “Desire” another poem in the same collection. He contemplates the bees that have drifted into his house and “cannot understand the window they buzz and buzz against”. They “cannot fathom how/the air has hardened and the world they know/with their eyes keeps out of reach”. They “can only go on/making the one sound that tethers their electric fury to what’s impossible”. So it is with us he must mean: so often we bumble around in an essential stupidity—like the uncomprehending bees, furious in their ignorance and desire. And the stakes are high. The search for truth may well start out as a sweet contemplation of life on a sunny day. But the matter itself is grave. The robin’s surprise is terminal. The observer’s illumination is heart-stopping. The truth that strikes us may be joyous for being true but terrible for what it teaches.

Reference Grennan, E. (2002a). Detail. In: Still Life with Waterfall. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.2

Notes 1. Grennan is an Irish citizen and divides his time between Ireland and this country. He’s a professor at Vassar College, widely published on both sides of the Atlantic and the winner of many distinguished poetry prizes. The interview with Grennan can be read in full online.

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2. Copyright © 2002 by Eamon Grennan. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress. org.

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CHAPTER XI

“Old pond, frog jump in …”: the genius of haiku

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’d venture to guess that no poetic form is at once so widely admired and so little understood as haiku. The brevity seems to invite imitation—as if being short should make it easy to do. And the minimalist form lends itself in popular imagination to corny imitation. But even when taken seriously, the seventeen syllable, five-seven-five, arrangement of lines, which has an organic relevance in Japanese (having to do with Japanese writing, speaking and even breathing patterns), has little meaning or relevance in English. In fact, the brief haiku form disguises enormous complexity. And the larger intention is far more interesting than the syllable count. The aim is to capture the tension between the timeless and the momentary, between the big picture and the distilled and clarified instance (I rely on a number of translators and commentators for my analysis here, including Robert Hass, 1994, and Kenneth Rexroth, 1955, and Hiroaki Sato, 1995). Haiku evolved out of a feudal Japanese Buddhist consciousness—out of a view of the universe (then and now still) in which all of time, and cyclical time (usually represented by reference to the seasons of the year), and no-time-atall are understood as one and the same. The poetry is an effort to express, embrace, and illuminate that view. 44

Interestingly psychoanalysis has its own concern with the way in which the timeless and the lived moment come together. We are ever mindful of the timelessness of the unconscious, the big picture, the long story, but, as therapists, we want to address the experiential moment with maximal clarity. Our recurring clinical challenge is to address the two together. Which is to say that in our best interpretations we want to do much of what a haiku does! Of course I do not mean that we want to sound like oracles. I mean that we want to address, in a minimum of words and with a minimum of fuss, both the big picture and the small—this moment in the context of many such moments. And we want to do it pithily, in a word, a phase, and in common speech. Here are some examples of addressing the big picture in a word, a phrase, and in common speech: readers might recognise my title as two-thirds of what is perhaps the best-known classical haiku, this by the seventeenth century poet, Basho (there are literally dozens of translations of this poem into English—which gives some idea of the degree to which complex ideas and extended references and resonances have been compressed into a few words. See Sato’s 1995, One Hundred Frogs). Here’s a translation I like: Old pond, frog jump in: water sound!

So many evocations packed into one distilled statement! The natural world, summertime, the image of an old pond (lilly pads, vines hanging down, the deep silence of the woods) the slightly comic, homely frog, this moment, all moments, all of this in one kerplunk! Here’s another lovely haiku by Buson, a somewhat later poet, in Robert Hass’s translation:

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Coolness— the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell

“Coolness” is a kigo, a traditional seasonal phrase, here a metaphor for autumn—and of course for that season in a person’s life. And the “bell” is a temple bell (the original audience for haiku was a learned one, mostly other poets, who could and would appreciate such references). Here’s a version of one of my favourites by a third great classical haiku master, Issa: One bath after another— How stupid!

Haiku can be wonderfully funny. But dark too—in this one, a Western reader might not understand that there’s a reference to the bath one gets on the day of one’s birth and the bath one’s body gets on the day one dies. Reading these little poems as a group it becomes clear that central to haiku there is an expression of surprise. As I understand it, this sense of surprise is built in structurally: typically, there are “pivot words”, kake-kotoba, which function to change the direction or meaning of a thought. And there are “cutting words”, kireji, a kind of voiced punctuation with no exact equivalent in English—variously rendered as a dash, a colon, or an exclamation point, and sometimes as an “Ah!” or an “Oh!”. So surprise, a freshness, is of the essence—and, I think, the source of the haiku’s delight. But note: it’s freshness in the context of the already (deeply) known. This tension too should have a resonance for psychoanalysts. Clinically (as Stern, 1997, will have taught us) we want to be fresh, ready to be surprised,

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ready to express surprise—even in the context of old familiar stories and of truths we take to be inevitable.

References Buson (1994). Coolness. In: The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa. R. Hass (Ed.). New York: Harper Collins Publishers.1 Rexroth, K. (1964). One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. New York: New Directions. Sato, H. (1995). One Hundred Frogs. New York: Weatherhill. Stern, D. (1997). Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Routledge.

Note 1. Copyright © 1994 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers, NY.

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CHAPTER XII

Postmodern metaphor: a poem by Robert Hass

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sychoanalysts deal in metaphor—in both our clinical exchanges and our theoretical formulations we talk about one thing by referring to another. Of course, we’re not alone: The use of metaphor probably goes back to the beginning of human thought—relatively recent examples are found in poetry four thousand years old, in ancient Egyptian poetry, in the epic of Gilgamesh. There is serious opinion that the cave paintings of Lascaux, some 30,000 years old, are visual metaphors. And the awareness of and study of the use of metaphor as a trope, or formal rhetorical device, is a Western classical pursuit—going back at least to Aristotle. I. A. Richards (1935) has provided the received modern analysis of metaphor: there’s a vehicle; it carries a tenor, or meaning. When one refers to King Richard as “The lion hearted”, (to use Richards’s example) “lion hearted” is the vehicle, “courage” is the tenor. A metaphor carries a meaning. The difference between lions and men is important too, creating a tension and a resonance with other meanings that give power and beauty to the rhetorical device. But as psychoanalysts we know that thought doesn’t necessarily work in such an orderly way. We know that a metaphor is less a carrying than a pointing at (as I have argued, Seiden 48

2004a, 2004b) and that the pointing is often vague, foggy, ill-defined or unconsciously driven. Psychoanalysis has shown us that the true tenor (what’s being pointed at) can be unconscious. The relationship between vehicle and tenor can be muddled. When a child who knows his mother is angry says “my mother is going to kill me”, is “kill” only the vehicle—or the unconscious tenor? These complexities shed some light on an interesting poem by recent Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Hass. In “Heroic simile” (1978) he turns metaphorical orderliness on its head with an associative, postmodern playfulness (his title indicates that his subject is simile—a simile, you will remember, is a metaphor stated literally, a direct comparison insisting that one thing is like another: e.g., “Richard is like a lion” or “his heart is like a lion’s heart”). HEROIC SIMILE When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. They stacked logs in the resinous air, hacking the small limbs off, tying those bundles separately. The slabs near the root were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; the logs from midtree they halved: ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,

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moons and quarter moons and half moons ridged by the saw’s tooth. The woodsman and the old man his uncle are standing in midforest on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. They have stopped working because they are tired and because I have imagined no pack animal or primitive wagon. They are too canny to call in neighbors and come home with a few logs after three days’ work. They are waiting for me to do something or for the overseer of the Great Lord to come and arrest them. How patient they are! The old man smokes a pipe and spits. The young man is thinking he would be rich if he were already rich and had a mule. Ten days of hauling and on the seventh day they’ll probably be caught, go home empty-handed or worse. I don’t know whether they’re Japanese or Mycenaean and there’s nothing I can do. The path from here to that village is not translated. A hero, dying, gives off stillness to the air. A man and a woman walk from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.

This is a dizzying poem because the ground keeps shifting. The initial vehicle, the pine tree, becomes the tenor; the fallen 50

tree becomes the concern of the poem—or seems to. Then the concern is the woodcutters. Or is it? Is the subject fallen heroes or woodcutters? Is the setting twentieth century cinema or the medieval Japanese forest, or is it ancient Greek myth? The associative shifts are disorienting. Everything, it seems, is metaphor! Everything is vehicle—and if that’s so, is there no tenor? Is everything we think about only a way of thinking about something else? It’s characteristic of postmodern sensibility to find that there’s no bedrock—here or anywhere. Or so it would seem. But then one discovers that there is something familiar— and intimately and accurately so—going on in “Heroic simile”. This is indeed the way we float along inside our private musings. And as we give ourselves over to the poem, the floating sensation becomes a pleasure. The dizziness gives way to lightness and to the recognition of a sweet truth. One realises by the time one finishes reading the last few lines that the subject here is consciousness itself. This is a poem about imagination, its power and its limits. Like the woodcutters, we’re rich if we’re already rich. And like the woodcutters, we’re stuck with what we’ve got. And like the man and woman, we’re stuck in the loneliness of our “separate fidelities”. Our dead and dying heroes leave us more lonely still. Although even this apercu gets a “yes” and a “no”! A good poem, the poem reminds us, makes it possible, however briefly, to break through the prison of aloneness. And of course we look to our lesser heroes, our loved ones and our analysts, to help with that too.

References Hass, R. (1978). Heroic simile. In: Praise. London: Carcanet Press Ltd.1 Richards, I. A. (1936). The Philosophy of Rhetoric, New York: Oxford University Press (1965 edition).

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Seiden, H. M. (2004a). On relying on metaphor: what psychoanalysts’ might learn from Wallace Stevens. Psychoanal Psychol. 21, 3: 480–487. Seiden, H. M. (2004b). On the “music of thought”: the use of metaphor in poetry and psychoanalysis. Psychoanal Psychol. 21, 4: 638–644.

Note 1. “Heroic simile” is used by permission of Carcanet Press ltd. and appears in Praise.

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CHAPTER XIII

The air of another time and place: a poem by Seamus Heaney

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hose who follow the world of poetry will know that one of the great poets of our age, Seamus Heaney, died in Dublin in August, 2013. His life and work have been much celebrated—volumes of poetry, criticism, and translation, including an outstanding translation of Beowulf from the Anglo Saxon. His honours included a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. The New York Times in its obituary (Margalit Fox, August 13th, 2013) described him as: “A Roman Catholic native of Northern Ireland […] renowned for work that powerfully evoked the beauty and blood that together have come to define the modern Irish condition.” Heaney managed to be hopeful without being sentimental, and political without being polemical. He was learned but never obscure and so was a poet of great popularity. Here’s a lovely example—at once simple and nostalgic and complex and evocative. As in all great art, the craftsmanship disguises the labour that goes into making it. A KITE FOR AIBHÍN After “L’Aquilone” by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) Air from another life and time and place, Pale blue heavenly air is supporting A white wing beating high against the breeze,

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And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon All of us there trooped out Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn, I take my stand again, halt opposite Anahorish Hill to scan the blue, Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet. And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew, Lifts itself, goes with the wind until It rises to loud cheers from us below. Rises, and my hand is like a spindle Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher The longing in the breast and planted feet And gazing face and heart of the kite flier Until string breaks and—separate, elate— The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

Like Heaney’s work generally, “A kite …” is immediately accessible and can be enjoyed with little explication. The reader feels that he or she can almost breathe that “air of another life and time and place”. But some context deepens the pleasure: Aibhin is the name of Heaney’s new-born granddaughter. This poem was written to celebrate her birth and recollects an earlier poem for his sons called “A kite for Michael and Christopher”. Anahorish, as is perhaps obvious, is Heaney’s childhood home, a township in County Derry. But one would not necessarily know that the name in Gaelic means “a place of clear water”. In another poem, Heaney calls it: “the first hill in the world where springs washed into the shiny grass”. And the poem by Pascoli, Acquilone, is a poem Heaney translated into English from the Italian as “The kite”. In 54

Pascoli’s poem remembered joy and happiness are mixed with bitterness over the death of a fellow student. It includes the phrase, “air from another life and time and place”. So underlying the apparently simple nostalgia of Heaney’s poem and complicating the sweet, bright memory, there are complex resonances (deeper currents, it might be said, under the surface of the clear water): the continuity of family, a celebration of the fragile temporality of our lives; elation, of course, but even in that moment of elation, separation—and a falling and a dying. Psychoanalysts will not be surprised to find that here, as elsewhere, nostalgia is complicated. In classical terms (see for example, Werman, 1977), we have treated nostalgia as screen memory—defensive, a saccharine recollection covering things that are not so sweet. And we distrust nostalgia as sentimental—having learned from Winnicott (1949) that sentimentality is the suppression of what he called “hate”. “A kite …” is certainly nostalgic and pleasurably so, but is no exercise in sentimentality—despite the lovely images. And despite the implicit innocence of the rhymed verse (a slantrhyme handled so skilfully that one hardly realises it is there). The moment of elation reaches its peak—but ends when the kite string snaps. One is reminded of what Winnicott made of “down will come baby cradle and all”. And while we’re tempted to take the “windfall” as a kind of liberation, we understand that it can only be a falling, the beginning of the end. High-flying young life is precious even as and because it ends in death. The literary critic Frank Kermode in a now classic essay called The Sense of an Ending (1966) has much to tell us about the function of nostalgia. We in the Western world are dogged, he says, by our culturally bound view of time as linear. We know time passes; it must have a beginning, a middle and, inevitably, an end. We live our lives oppressed by the certainty of that ending. We invent elaborate “fictions” (defences of a 55

kind, although Kermode does not use that word) to make our apprehension palatable—religious fictions notable among these. And one way we tell ourselves the story of our journey through time is the embrace of sweet times past—a way of living, if only partly persuasively, in the good old days. I’m inclined to think that nostalgia gives us, too, a sense of sweet times future: as in “The kite …”, a recollected sense of those exhilarating days when our precious future was before us.

References Heaney, S. (2010). A kite for Aibhin. In: Human Chain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC.1 Kermode, F. (1966). The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford University Press. Werman, D. S. (1977). Normal and pathological nostalgia. JAPA, 25: 387–398. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the counter-transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 30: 69–74.

Note 1. Published in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by Seamus Heaney. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XIV

Poetry as argument: a poem by Tony Hoagland

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t’s not always obvious that a poem is a kind of argument. For example, it might be an argument of persuasion, as in, “How do I love thee/Let me count the ways” or an argument of praise—in praise of the king, for example (which is how poet laureates got their jobs), or in praise of God or of life itself. Often the argument is for a political or moral or theological point of view, as in, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And with increasing frequency in contemporary writing, the argument might be epistemological, that is, about what’s real and how we know what we know. Most important, whether obvious or buried, the argument in a good poem must point to a truth, be it an acutely observed reality or an emotional truth. We take pleasure in being persuaded of that truth—surprisingly, skilfully or entertainingly. The parallels with our own art—the art of psychotherapy— are apparent. In our work (it could be argued) there is a very large argument going on, something on the order of, “Here’s how you’ve always seen the world; but here’s a way you might see it more profitably or more comfortably or more sanely.” The parallels extend even to the use of language. The therapist’s words (or withholding of words) are of value only as they move the argument along, not because the language is 57

impressive or inspirational (or worse, jargon laden). We know: plain words usually work better than fancy ones. This is so in either art. It’s not poetic diction that makes a poem beautiful. Indeed these days, overly “poetic” utterance is seen as a kind of lily-gilding. Simple words should to point to deep truth. Here’s an example from contemporary poet Tony Hoagland.1 Vivid but frankly un-poetic images lead us into and through a kind of cranky argument—and, surprisingly, into the experience of a lovely truth. I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process. There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool and think about past pleasures unrecoverable and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians. I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings do not send their sinuous feeder roots deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives as if they were greedy six-year-olds sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw; and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality. Do you see that creamy lemon-yellow moon?

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There are some people, unlike me and you, who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as unattainable as that moon; thus, they do not later have to waste more time defaming the object of their former ardor. Or consequently run and crucify themselves in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha. I have news for you— there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room and open a window to let the sweet breeze in and let it touch them all over their faces and their bodies.

Despite the unpleasant contemporary images (the broken swings, empty swimming pools, flies in motel rooms, greedy six year olds), and the complaining, world weary and conversational tone, Hoagland’s poem has a hidden classical form— there’s a sonnet buried in it. And the sonnet form is argument. A word of background: the structure of the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, from which the English or Shakespearean derives, is in structure a fourteen-line argument. The opening octave (actually two quatrains) states the “proposition” or “problem”; this is followed by a six-line sestet that proposes a resolution. The ninth line, the “volta” signals the turn from proposition to resolution—and communicates a promise of proof—or at least of illumination. While there are no fourteen lines in Hoagland’s poem and no iambic pentameter, the discourse has the force if not the literal form of a classical sonnet. There is the statement of a problem (what most people do) and a resolution (what some people manage to do). And there is a volta: “I have news for you”!

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The problem is all too familiar. Some people may by habit look away from the immediacy of experience in their search for meaning and insight. Or they may impose pre-conceived politically or theoretically correct notions, or prefabricated symbol systems on their experience, or allow their thinking to be guided by extraneous ambitions. For most of us, Hoagland says, our thought process takes us away from our experience and not into it. “I have news for you” reminds me of a short poem of Walt Whitman’s that makes the same argument. The poem is called “A clear midnight.” This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.2

Ah, says Hoagland, echoing Whitman, there are people who just “open a window and let a sweet breeze in.” For most of us this will be good and corrective counsel—in our consulting rooms and, indeed, in any room.

Reference Hoagland, T. (2010). I have news for you. In: Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.3

Notes 1. Tony Hoagland teaches at the University of Houston and at Warren Wilson College. Psychoanalysts will find one of his book titles particularly delicious: What Narcissism Means to Me.

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2. The Whitman poem is the final poem in the section “From noon to starry night” in the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass (1881). 3. Copyright © 2010 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress. org.

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CHAPTER XV

Marie Howe on “What the living do”

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t might be said that psychoanalysis and poetry have a common spiritual concern. For psychoanalysts, the form the concern takes is that our patients’ lives (not to mention our own) are largely a mess, the circumstances often terrible. Our treatment depends on a faith that despite the mess, and wrapped within the destructiveness and the selfdestructiveness and the absurdity, there is something healthy— or at least a striving toward health—in every human being. We know that our method (our careful questions, our reassuring presence) would take us nowhere if it were not for that essential striving in our patients. Modern poets, at least since the nineteenth century English Romantics, are up against the same, often daunting, reality. They too want to find an underlying and redeeming value, a truth and beauty in the ordinary and the ugly, in sadness, in loss, in a world spoiled by human stupidity and indifferent to human need. They want to celebrate an essence that makes value where there might appear to be none. Both arts depend on the conviction that there is something numinous buried in the troubles we see. By numinous, I mean some spiritual life-giving spark, something redeeming

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(although not necessarily in any formal religious sense). The job is to find that enlivening possibility, to point to it in words–as a way of helping to actualise it. Here’s a good and instructive example of finding the numinous in the mundane from the world of contemporary poetry. This is the title poem of Marie Howe’s widely acclaimed What the Living Do (1997). Her volume includes a series of poems that bear witness to her beloved bother’s slow death from AIDS. WHAT THE LIVING DO Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up. waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the evening we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want

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whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living, I remember you.

I find this is a deeply moving poem, one that sings out of its vividly drawn location and situation. There’s a big idea here, too: the life force. But it’s a life force found not in the sound of a heavenly choir, or in a glorious sunset or a declaration of transcendent love but, astonishingly (and, formally speaking, ironically), in the homeliest of details—in the poet’s glimpsed reflection of herself in the window of the corner video store, in the chapped face, the wind-blown hair, in missing the dead. Life goes on in the Drano in the clogged sink. Poets like Marie Howe can teach us how to think big and write small—for us, as analysts, it’s thinking big and talking small, talking concretely about what the living do. And for us there’s a personal payoff: the feeling, even while being saddened by a world-in-tears, of being exhilarated by the unfolding of a resilient response. We’re lucky to be there in the enabling that response and to be sharing in it— where each well said word is a small victory and a spiritual triumph.

Reference Howe, M. (1997). What the living do. In: What the Living Do. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.1

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Note 1. Copyright © 1997 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Co Inc.

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CHAPTER XVI

Kenneth Koch on psychoanalysis in the “glory days”

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n the popular imagination poetry is a solitary pursuit— Emily Dickinson alone at her writing table in an upstairs room, Whitman walking down the highway singing to, and of, himself. But such images are misleading. The poet may be a solitary, the poem cannot be. Language is dialogical. Indeed, it may be said, there is no speech, poetic or otherwise, without an implicit hearer, no writer without an anticipated reader. Particularly in the carefully considered language of a poem, some “I” always addresses some “you”. In terms of “getting” poetry, this is no theoretical fine point. To appreciate a poem, one must appreciate the dialogical context. Who is being addressed? And by whom? Is it the beloved, the departed, the poet’s mother, one’s countrymen, an audience of other poets (and/or critics, editors, and teachers), the gentle reader, future generations, unspecified witnesses, another better self, God, or the gods? The nature of the addressee establishes the situation of the poem, influences the diction, the emotional texture, the voice. And to make things just a little more complicated, there can be and will likely be, especially in a public poem, more than one addressee. Privately a poet may think to address only his or her beloved. In a public poem, even a love poem, a larger 66

audience is called in as a witness—to this love, or this pain, or this particular moment of remembering. Well, one of the things about modern poetry—as in modern art in general—is that everything is fair game, including the givens of the genre. One poet who has played effectively and deliciously with the matter of “address” is contemporary American, Kenneth Koch.1 Here’s Koch’s direct address: psychoanalysts should get a rueful giggle out of this one. TO PSYCHOANALYSIS I took the Lexington Avenue subway To arrive at you in your glory days Of the Nineteen Fifties when we believed That you could solve any problem And I had nothing but disdain For “self-analysis” “group analysis” “Jungian analysis” “Adlerian analysis” the Karen Horney kind All—other than you, pure Freudian type— Despicable and never to be mine! I would lie down according to your Dictates but not go to sleep. I would free-associate. I would say whatever Came into my head. Great Troops of animals floated through And certain characters like Picasso and Einstein Whatever came into my head or my heart Through reading or thinking or talking Came forward once again in you. I took voyages Down deep unconscious rivers, fell through fields, Cleft rocks, went on through hurricanes and volcanoes. Ruined cities were as nothing to me In my fantastic advancing. I recovered epochs, Gold of former ages that melted in my hands

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And became toothpaste or hazy vanished citadels. I dreamed Exclusively for you. I was told not to make important decisions. This was perfect. I never wanted to. On the hartru surface of my emotions Your ideas sank in so I could play again. But something was happening. You gave me an ideal Of conversation—entirely about me But including almost everything else in the world. But this wasn’t poetry it was something else. After two years of spending time in you Years in which I gave my best thoughts to you And always felt you infiltrating and invigorating my feelings Two years at five days a week, I had to give you up. It wasn’t my idea. “I think you are nearly through,” Dr. Loewenstein said. “You seem much better.” But, Light! Comedy! Tragedy! Energy! Science! Balance! Breath! I didn’t want to leave you. I cried. I sat up. I stood up. I lay back down. I sat. I said But I still get sore throats and have hay fever “And some day you are going to die. We can’t cure everything.” Psychoanalysis! I stood up like someone covered with light As with paint, and said Thank you. Thank you. It was only one moment in a life, my leaving you. But once I walked out, I could never think of anything seriously For fifteen years without also thinking of you. Now what have we become? You look the same, but now you are a past You. That’s fifties clothing you’re wearing. You have some fifties ideas

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Left—about sex, for example. What shall we do? Go walking? We’re liable to have a slightly frumpy look, But probably no one will notice—another something I didn’t know then.

Funny! “I took the Lexington Avenue subway/to arrive at you in your glory days.” But more: the voice is grateful, slightly self-mocking, sweet, and sad—grateful because in its own terms this was a successful analysis, and sad because analysis didn’t solve everything. Koch is addressing psychoanalysis generally—and surely his own analyst in particular. But this is art, not private clinical experience. The rest of the world is being addressed as well. Koch is talking to all the other analysands, I should say all of us analysands, us recovering and unrecovered neurotics, us self-preoccupied intellectuals, confirmed in an “ideal of conversation—entirely about me but including almost everything else in the world”. I love the rueful last lines—at least as a psychoanalyst I find them rueful. “We’re liable to have a slightly frumpy look,/But probably no one will notice—another something I didn’t know then.” The world has moved on. Classical psychoanalysis, which at one time seemed to define the intellectual universe, is now just one more thing in it. Not passé exactly, but “slightly frumpy”. Well, he’s got a point. Arguably the culture in general has incorporated—while forgetting the source of—the best ideas in psychoanalysis (repression, unconscious motivation, symbolic expression, the repetition compulsion, the importance of early development, to name a few). And the worst ideas (like “fifties ideas […] about sex”) are well on their way to becoming footnotes to intellectual history. But, as Koch himself might say, there’s another thing we didn’t know then. Psychoanalysis by now is much more than 69

the “Freudian type” and has changed a lot since the frumpy fifties (whether or not the world would notice). And what we didn’t, maybe couldn’t, quite see was that from the beginning, from Freud, and despite the struggles with it, we’ve treasured change—in our discipline as well as in our patients.

Reference Koch, K. (2005). To psychoanalysis. In: The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.2

Notes 1. Kenneth Koch died in 2003; he pronounced his name “coke”. In his volume New Addresses (2000), Koch speaks directly to various unseen and un-seeable presences in his life—with poems like “To piano lessons”, “To Jewishness”, “To World War II”, “To orgasms”, “To driving”. Apostrophe would be the rhetorical term for this device, an address to an unseen presence; the way the offstage gods were addressed in classical Greek drama. 2. Copyright © 2005 by The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XVII

An old man’s love song: a poem by Stanley Kunitz

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raditionally we think of romantic love as the privilege of the young. Romeo and Juliet would be our archetypes. Rarely is romantic passion seen as the province of the middle aged—although sometimes it is given to movie stars or to heroes and their heroines like Odysseus and Penelope. Never do we think of passion as a possibility for the aging. By cultural habit we conflate a loss of muscle tone with a loss of desire and a diminished ability to perform with a loss of the capacity to imagine. And yet experience will tell us differently. My Medicare patients want to talk about their love lives (and not necessarily about their children or their aches and pains). And then there’s the late poetry of Stanley Kunitz. A word about Kunitz: he died recently at the age of 100— after having been appointed Poet Laureate of the United States at ninety-five years old! He was an influential teacher, friend and mentor to generations of contemporary poets. I first heard him read and lecture in Provincetown Massachusetts where I spend my (psychotherapist’s) Augusts. He was a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center there and much revered: when he entered a room people (poets, artists, writers all) stood—as for a judge, or the President!

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Here is his “Touch me” (1995), the last poem in Kunitz’s hardcover Collected Poems, published in 2000 when the poet was aged Ninety-four. TOUCH ME Summer is late, my heart. Words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost in two scatter like leaves this night of whistling wind and rain. It is my heart that’s late, it is my song that’s flown. Outdoors all afternoon under a gunmetal sky staking my garden down, I kneeled to the crickets trilling underfoot as if about to burst from their crusty shells; and like a child again marveled to hear so clear and brave a music pour from such a small machine. What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire, The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life. One season only, and it’s done. So let the battered old willow thrash against the windowpanes and the house timbers creak. Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.

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As many times as I’ve read, and heard the poet himself read, this poem I can’t get through it without a catch in my throat. The love song of an old man could be maudlin or embarrassing (our Freudian colleagues can explain the embarrassment: repression; an unwillingness to address our own libidinal desires as, embodied, they are made to seem monstrous). An old man’s song could be sentimental or remorseful or selfpitying. This poem is none of that. Kunitz makes sexual desire profoundly relational: “Touch me”, he says, “remind me who I am.” He gives desire a narrative (and developmental) context: this is not a last flickering of lust, this is the need to love and be loved still, another moment in a lifetime of loving. He provides a metaphor for that lifetime—a man tending his garden, a man on his knees staking his garden against the storms of the non-human universe. Wonderfully, he provides a metaphor for the man, a “small brave machine,” a cricket with his “crusty” (not horny!) shell. (A biographical note: Kunitz did indeed devote himself to his garden almost as much in his later years as to his poetry. It was a place of great beauty. And in those later years, as a small, frail and stoop-shouldered old man, there was something more than a little cricket-like about him.) As for the lifetime, alas (and as if we need reminding): “one season only” and the dance is done. And almost buried in the centre of the poem, there’s that amazing onomatopoeic couplet: “What makes the engine go?/ Desire, desire, desire.” If Kunitz is remembered a hundred years from now for just two lines, it will be for those.

Reference Kunitz, S. (1995). Touch me. In: The Collected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.1

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Note 1. Copyright © 1995 by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company Inc.

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CHAPTER XVIII

“They fuck you up …” Philip Larkin’s “This be the verse”

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ere’s another lively example of poets and psychoanalysts working the same dysfunctional family terrain. THIS BE THE VERSE They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

Since the great contemporary English poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985) published “This be the verse” in 1971, it has gone on, for obvious reasons, to be one of the most quoted of contemporary poems—recitable in full by many who probably 75

couldn’t name its author. Larkin, who in his lifetime gave the world a large body of memorable sardonic, seriously despairing, and anti-sentimental poems joked that he expected this one would be intoned at his funeral by a chorus of a thousand girl scouts. Larkin was a prodigy when young, unmarried all his life, a lonely librarian in the small provincial English city of Hull, a man who remarked famously that deprivation was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth. “They fuck you up” is Larkin at his clear, tough and anti-romantic best. There’s a rude giggle, a recognition, and, it would seem, not much mystery in this poem. But then there’s the title. “This be the verse” is a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” (1921), some lines of which you no doubt will recognise: Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

So in “This be the verse” Larkin is presenting the world with his own anti-romantic epitaph. But note the source of the quote: Larkin’s barely submerged emotional subtext is a sweet, sad longing, the longing for home. And what about the longing for home? Here’s another Larkin poem, written some years before—and this one’s not so funny: HOME IS SO SAD Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

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As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Most of us these days would like to think, perhaps romantically, that we can do better by our children than our parents did by us. No, says Larkin, it will not be so! But—no surprise to psychoanalysts—hidden in his anti-romanticism and just under the surface of his ironic joking about the impossibility of an improving family life, one finds a self-protective distancing. Distancing from what? In these two poems, it becomes clear, from profound sadness—from the mourning for the idealised home which was “a joyous shot at how things ought to be”, a shot now “long fallen wide”. Someone once said, “A cynic is a disappointed idealist.” An anti-romantic, one would have to think, is a romantic in despair.

References Larkin, P. (1988a). This be the verse. In: Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Larkin, P. (1988b). Home is so sad. In: Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.1 Stevenson, R. L. (1921). Requiem. In: An Anthology of Modern Verse. A. Methuen (Ed.). London: Methuen & Co.

Note 1. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.

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CHAPTER XIX

The art of the ordinary: Philip Levine on “What work is”

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arly in my career I had a supervisor who would say (tapping the ash off his cigar): “The art of the clinical is the art of the ordinary.” Our patients don’t want theories, they want their experience addressed (including of course the pre-conscious edge of their experience). And they want it addressed in ordinary language. Well, that’s what we want from poetry too. The great American poet William Carlos Williams famously recommended against abstraction: “No ideas but in things”, he insisted. Philip Levine is a contemporary poet after Williams’s heart—and after my cigar smoking supervisor’s and my own. I love the plain voice of his poems and the direct address and the location in salt-of-the-earth experience—and how, while grounded in ordinary things, his poems lift off into another dimension. Levine comes by the working class settings for his poetry honestly. He was born in 1928 and raised in Detroit and worked in the auto plants and factories there before going on to poetry and professorship and acclaim. “What work is” (1991) is the title poem of his signature volume of the same name, which won a National Book Award in 1991.

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WHAT WORK IS We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him

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you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don’t know what work is.

“What work is” may start in homely detail—the shape-up line on a rainy morning in Detroit—but it goes on to evoke much more: big brothers and brotherhood and hard work and hopelessness and dreams and love and the embarrassment at tenderness in men who want to be men and innocence and experience. Oh, that one of our own psychoanalytic interpretations should be so fresh, so compressed, so powerful, so direct—and so beautiful! The emotionality here is complex; the bitterness is mixed with rueful humour, the toughness is leavened by tenderness. Ambivalence prevails. Levine’s is a complexity and an unsentimental honesty to admire; this is the way life is—the way our lives and our patients’ lives are. Note the “you” that shifts from a direct you who is other, as in “if you’re old enough to read this, you know what work is”, to a “you” which is inner, the I of the poem addressing himself. And in addressing himself he addresses the “we”, the outer, and all of us. As psychoanalysts, our art too is to work back and forth from the interpersonal exchange to the inner dialogue to the outer again. There’s another parallel between Levine’s art and ours— which recommends it to us: this is what might be called the “posture” of the authorial voice. Levine is no Lord Byron standing above it all in the turret of a crenelated castle. This is 80

a man remembering himself as a kid with a lot to learn. I dare say there’s no more valuable reference for any of us than own growing up: how we stumbled our way into adulthood, into our work, into love. “What work is” is a kind of love poem. The object of love, selfobject really, is an idealised older brother with his sad history already spooling out before him—like our selfobjects, (and those for whom we are selfobjects) which is to say, the ordinary people who are our patients. In another well-known poem, “On the meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane”, the translator has a headache and needing a break walks over to the window and looks down at the East River. At that moment he has a terrifying vision. “The two greatest poetic geniuses alive/meet, and what happens? a vision/comes to an ordinary man staring/at a filthy river” (1994, p. 30). That kind of man, that kind of vision—that’s what our work is.

References Levine, P. (1991). ∼ What work is. In: What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.1 Levine, P. (1994). The Simple Truth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Note 1. “What work is” from What Work Is by Philip Levine, copyright © 1991 by Philip Levine. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XX

How otherness dissolves: a poem by Thomas Lux

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s psychoanalysts we deal all day long in stories— stories that never begin at the beginning or end at the end, stories often barely articulate or relying on words with unfamiliar shades of meaning, about people who may seem very little like us—different in age, in gender, in values, in native tongue—told by people whose lives have been led in other parts of the world or in other parts of town. Yet, the mystery: however strange, the stories speak to us. How is this possible? Is it the essential shared humanness of the teller and the listener? Is it the medium itself—the way narrative (even when composed only of narrative gestures) organises experience for both of them? Here’s an example. “Dead horse” (1997) is by contemporary poet, Thomas Lux. Lux is a well known teacher and poet. Born and raised on a dairy farm, he is a former Guggenheim Fellow the recipient of many grants and awards and has published many books. This poem’s rural American, conversational setting is reminiscent of Robert Frost. But the diction is even plainer: Lux does so much with apparently simple, direct speech. But as with Frost, a deep psychological sophistication is folded in.

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DEAD HORSE At the fence line, I was about to call him in when, at two-thirds profile, head down and away from me, he fell first to his left front knee and then the right, and he was down, dead before he hit the … My Father saw him drop, too, and a neighbor, who walked over. He was a good horse, old, foundered, eating grass during the day and his oats and hay at night. He didn’t mind or try to boss the cows with which he shared these acres. My father said: “Happens.” Our neighbor walked back to his place and was soon grinding towards us with his new backhoe, of which he was proud but so far only used to dig two sump holes. It was the knacker we’d usually call to haul away a cow. A horse, a good horse, you buried where he, or she, fell. Our neighbor cut a trench beside the horse and we pushed him in. I’d already said goodbye before I closed his eyes. Our neighbor returned the dirt. In it, there were stones, stones never, never seen before by a human’s, nor even a worm’s, eye.

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Malcolm, our neighbor’s name, returned the dirt from where it came and, with the back of a shovel, we tamped it down as best we could. One dumb cow stood by. It was a Friday, I remember, for supper we ate hot dogs, with beans on buttered white bread, every Friday, hot dogs and beans.

This little report of an ur-American childhood experience is, to say the least, a long way from my own childhood experience in the Bronx. And yet, I get it. And we get it—as a matter of deep apprehension—that this tale of a small tragedy, and small awakening, is a moment in a much larger narrative. We understand that although a sharp new awareness for the boy, the death of a horse is not an exceptional event for a farm family. Death, certainly an animal’s death, is part of life’s routine. These would be people with little patience for sentimentality, with nothing left for mourning a loss as usual as this. This is a report on a life where words have little use. What happens gets summed up in a kind of grunt: “happens”. The people in their own way are as dumb (that is, inarticulate, not stupid) as the cow. That inarticulateness is signalled further in the way the lines often break in the middle of a simple thought: one pauses for breath, for orientation, in the wrong place. The poet may rely on words and we may rely on words as readers, but he and we understand that this is a concatenation of events, large and small and both mysterious and inevitable, in which words will make little difference. People here are almost as helpless as their animals, that is, at the mercy of the natural rhythms they can only struggle inadequately to mark with significance. Because this was a 84

good horse he’s given the dignity of being buried in the field! “Makes sense”, we’re tempted to grunt too. And there’s a recognisable ordinariness, a neighbour proud of his tractor, happy for an excuse to use it. We all know that kind of helpfulness in our own neighbours (one of mine has a snow thrower). We understand too when ordinariness becomes maddening because without imagination: “[…] every Friday,/hot dogs and beans.” We all live and have lived with such near-ritual, homely repetitions, family things which upon examination or looking back on later we realise don’t or didn’t have to be that way—but are and were. There’s much alike in all our childhoods. Finally, there’s a wonderful irony in the fact that the poet, the child of an inarticulate world, should be able to tell his story so well. It takes two: the reader gets it because the teller knows how to tell it. Lux with a deceptive artlessness—this too, somehow, learned at home—turns up stones “never seen before by a human’s … eye”. Not that the stones weren’t there, just that they were never seen. Lux does what poets do: uncovers the mystery in the ordinary—in his own life and in ours. With poet or with psychoanalyst it’s in that uncovering that, at least for a moment, otherness dissolves.

Reference Lux, T. (1997). Dead horse. In: New and Selected Poems, 1975–1995. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company.1

Note 1. Copyright © 1997 by Thomas Lux. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company, All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXI

Mysterious tears: a poem by Rose McLarney

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erhaps like me you’ve had the experience of listening to a poet read and finding yourself in tears without knowing exactly why you’re crying. Or of reading a poem on the page and being deeply moved and only afterward working out for yourself what it is that moves you. For me, Rose McLarney’s “Gather” (2012) is such a poem. .

GATHER Some springs, apples bloom too soon. The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs, pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty and quiet. No reason for the bees to come. Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches, the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit.

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You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled. You could say, Some years, there are apples.

Rose McLarney is a poet whose name I hadn’t known until I stumbled on her work in a poetry blog I subscribe to. She writes out of her rural North Carolina dailiness—out of experience on the surface of it that is a long way from my own urban life. But while her metaphors may be local they are also universal—as here in “Gather”: I may be a city boy but I have gone apple picking. I know what an astonishing place an orchard can be at harvest time; I know what it is “to fall in fruit”. This would seem to me to be the first condition of poetry—the evocation of rich and recognisable experiencing. By rich experiencing I mean not just the lovely image of apples weighing down the branches, the fallen ones covering the ground, but the larger concatenation of meanings— the abundance and over-abundance, the excitement of plenty beyond plenty, the taste and smell of ripe apples, the sense that there are more here than one could ever eat, the sense, too, that this is a recurring miracle, a gift to be “gathered.” And, of course, the still larger sense that this is a lucky gift and by no means inevitable—as with rosebuds, to be gathered “while ye may.” Some summers “the orchards are empty and quiet”. Of course “Gather” isn’t only about apples and their seasons—a phenomenon no matter how beautifully described not likely to bring one to tears. It can be said that while the content of a poem (here, the orchard in bad times and in good) may be one thing, the subject of the poem may be something else. By the last stanza we are given to understand that the poet is talking less about the trees being “quick to trust” than about her own seasons of being fooled and of foolishness, and less about sometimes barren orchards than about times in her own life when she came up empty. 87

McLarney is a writing teacher and a poet of some sophistication. She teaches in the highly regarded writing program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This is not a naïve farm girl’s meditation; no primitivist painting of the orchard at harvest time. This is a poet in the act of interpreting her own history. Indeed, the poem is situated in the act of interpretation! She sees her life in this recollection as a series of chancy harvests. Note, too, the language: “you could say” (my emphasis). Interpretations are conditional, efforts at persuasion that recognise that other interpretations are possible—as we psychodynamic interpreters know well. The best interpretations offer empathic consolation even when they address a difficult memory—that we know too. McLarney’s inner interpretive dialogue becomes ours. It is we—because we are also “you”—who are now invited to consider the seasons in our own lives, our own seasons of foolishness and emptiness, but then our own seasons of fullness too. Good interpretations signal truth of course. But more: interpretations have a performative function—they do something, they don’t just say something. And that performative quality can be powerful indeed. Something is done to us: we’re touched. Thinking follows. And poetic interpretations—those that depend on a well chosen metaphor or an image or a series of images or a good story—have a way of doing what they do before we even grasp the logic of the language they do it with, before we know exactly what it is that’s being done to us. When (as poets, as clinicians, as readers, as patients) we work this way, it can bring us to tears.

Reference McLarney, R. (2012). Gather. In: The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. New York: Four Way Books.1

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Note 1. Copyright Rose McLarney. Reprinted by permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXII

A meditation without punctuation by W. S. Merwin

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s psychoanalysts we’ve long been taught to recognise that thought follows its own drift. We’re reminded of this on an hourly basis in our offices (not to mention, on a nightly basis in our dreams). Ideas will slide into associated ideas. Organised thought is a civilising, daytime, afterthought. Poets know this too of course. They know that even the organising gestures of punctuation (which appeared late in Western written language historically) can be dispensed with if the flow of language is true to the experience it is evoking. And no contemporary poet knows this better than W. S. Merwin who writes wonderfully evocative poetry free of punctuation’s constraints—poetry which relies instead on line break and breath stop and internal associative logic. “Before the flood” (2001) is a fine example of his work. BEFORE THE FLOOD Why did he promise me that we would build ourselves an ark all by ourselves out in back of the house

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on New York Avenue in Union City New Jersey to the singing of the streetcars after the story of Noah whom nobody believed about the waters that would rise over everything when I told my father I wanted us to build an ark of our own there in the back yard under the kitchen could we do that he told me that we could I want to I said and will we he promised me that we would why did he promise that I wanted us to start then nobody will believe us I said that we are building an ark because the rains are coming and that was true nobody ever believed we would build an ark there nobody would believe that the waters were coming

Merwin is a former Consultant to the Library of Congress, much admired and much honoured in the world of contemporary poetry. In his long career and in his prodigious output he worked in many forms before arriving at the unpunctuated verse that has become his stylistic signature. I think you will agree that “Before the flood” is wonderfully evocative of essential psychological experience. But clearly, essential doesn’t mean simple. Indeed the hallmark of essential may be complexity. How complex the evocation is here even as 91

it is achieved in the simplest diction and in a few short lines. The ideas flow the way a child’s ideas flow. There’s the child’s plaintive repetitiveness (“why” and again “why”, and “ourselves” and “ourselves”, “could we do that” and “I want to”, and “nobody will believe”, “nobody ever believed”, “nobody would believe”). But at the same time it’s clear that the “I” of the poem is an adult absorbed in the memory of his own childhood experience. There is, strikingly, an absence of metaphor— which signals the concreteness of a child’s thinking, but which signals too the still lingering concreteness of child-like thinking in the man. But more, and this of course is the genius of poetry, even in the absence of metaphor, the poem reaches well beyond its concrete origins and becomes emblematic of something larger. It evokes not only the tragi-comic relationship of the child to his father but the relationship of the (remembering) man to himself. There’s little doubt that “Before the flood” is an autobiographical musing. Merwin’s father was a Presbyterian minister. Many of his other poems deal with their relationship. As a child Merwin must have heard the story of the flood (and probably heard his father tell it) long before he could make any sense of the story, when he could only picture, with dread but also excitement, the waters rising around his house in Union City, New Jersey. In a poet’s hands, memory becomes meditation—and here a meditation that evokes something in the experience of all people (while I say all people, this poem is so clearly located in the relationship between a son and his father that one might leave it gendered: it’s certainly about all men). If we heard this from a patient in our consulting room, we’d think, ah yes, this is his sad and puzzled disappointment in his idealised father—the father who could build an ark if he wanted to, who would not idly promise what he couldn’t deliver. We’d note the selfobject failure. And we’d hear the 92

sweet and touching yearning for a father he (and we) could believe and believe in.

Reference Merwin, W. S. (2001). Before the flood. In: The Pupil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.1

Note 1. Copyright © 2001 by W. S. Merwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXIII

Narrative as metaphor: Sharon Olds

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f as psychoanalysts we know anything, we know that every symptom, every dream and every slip of the tongue, every word and every gesture, down to the most apparently inconsequential, resonates with potential meaning. As with words and gestures, so with stories—the accounts we give of how things are, how this happened and then that happened and who did what to whom. Our stories are inevitably metaphorical. The tales we tell ourselves, the big ones and the little ones, our collective and our personal narratives, carry meanings beyond the simple and the linear—summing up, embodying, pointing to, crystallising the complex collective experience of the culture, the subculture, the family or the individual life in which they arise. Think of Bettleheim’s (1975) analysis of Grimm’s fairy tales. Think of how those “enchanting” stories have functioned for generations of children to instruct, reassure, organise and stabilise psychic life. Stories—as metaphors—help us understand ourselves and our struggles; from our earliest years they orient and organise us in our roles. That we find them compelling and beautiful attests to the deep satisfaction we get from such understanding and organising.

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Poets can be splendid story-tellers—giving us both beauty and truth. A good narrative poem (like a good clinical retelling of the patient’s narrative) captures both what is universal and what is unique in a person’s experience. Here’s a luminous example from a master of the narrative form, contemporary American poet Sharon Olds.1 This is from her book The Father (1992). THE RACE When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was canceled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was canceled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll see a yellow bus, get off at the second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then

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run. I lumbered up the moving stairs, at the top I saw the corridor, and then I took a deep breath, I said goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort, I used my legs and heart as if I would gladly use them up for this, to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of women running, their belongings tied in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my long legs he gave me, my strong heart I abandoned to its own purpose, I ran to Gate 17 and they were just lifting the thick white lozenge of the door to fit it into the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not too rich, I turned sideways and slipped through the needle’s eye, and then I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet was full, and people’s hair was shining, they were smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a mist of gold endorphin light, I wept as people weep when they enter heaven, in massive relief. We lifted up gently from one tip of the continent and did not stop until we set down lightly on the other edge, I walked into his room and watched his chest rise slowly and sink again, all night I watched him breathe.

I find this a beautiful poem, crystalline in its simplicity, deep in its evocation. The situation is clear, altogether recognisable, human. The story has a wonderful (literally “breathless”) 96

forward propulsion, and, of course, it tells a bigger human tale: it’s not just about this daughter and this father, it’s about children and aging parents, and it’s about the living and their anxiety about the dying. When poets tell stories they tell them differently from what we’ve come to expect from prose writers. The larger who, what, when, where, why in “The race” are submerged. The narrative is allusive, metonymic (each carefully selected detail expressive of the fraught whole) and, of course, metaphorical. What we get is more like what we hear when a patient tells us about something: experiential bits and pieces, not free association but an associative telling. Olds’s sophisticated skill is such that she can create a sense of naive discovery: the narrator knows her personal odyssey has larger meaning but doesn’t quite know what that is. And there’s a confessional intimacy in the way we are told—not unlike those breathless clinical accounts wherein we (as analyst) are participants in and witnesses to the story-making and therefore made part of the tale. Olds is working, of course, within the conventions of a genre. In modern narrative poetry there’s likely to be a disruption of order and/or balance. Here it’s balance: the poet dwells on the ordinarily forgettable but anxiety-provoking details of the airport and says nothing directly about her feelings about her father or about what he and his impending death mean to her. She starts her story after the beginning and stops before the end—in modern poetry, it’s said, the reader finishes the poem. Selected metonymic details do the work: the left, the right to the escalator; the long legs inherited from her father; how she thinks of women “[…] running, their belongings tied in scarves grasped in their fists”; the narrator’s loss of breath anticipating her father’s more ominous loss of breath; the way she watches his chest rise and fall. And—perhaps another convention of the genre—there’s no living happily ever after in modern poetry! 97

Finally, the relationship is a mystery, the father a cypher, the daughter’s anxiety palpable, understandable, but ultimately irrational. We’ve all been here (or will be): the living attending to the dying, breathless, racing, racing only to sit helplessly by.

References Bettleheim, B. (1975). The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Vintage. Olds, S. (1992). The race. In: The Father. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.2

Notes 1. Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942 and lives and teaches in New York City. She was named New York State Poet in 1998. Her honours include a National Endowment for the Arts grant; and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She’s published many books and her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. 2. Copyright © 1992 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXIV

“The meaning of simplicity”: a poem by Yannis Ritsos*

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e can thank Freud for the definitive modern demonstration that nothing in human experience is simple. The range of ever-developing theories that contemporary psychoanalysts rely on in our clinical work can be thought of as honest efforts to extend Freud’s lifelong attempt at making sense of the complexity underlying apparently simple things. But useful and reassuring as his efforts were and as ours may be, we are always aware of their inadequacy. We know that in every human encounter (clinical or otherwise) mystery remains. Poetry, it could be said, addresses the same mystery— without the need for explaining. It allows us to appreciate and take pleasure in our mystified situation: in the apprehension that things are both what they seem and more than what they seem; in our awareness of the quivering balance between what we know and what we’ll never know. Poetry aims, moreover,

* This chapter is taken from a longer discussion with my colleagues Frank Korahais and Spyros Orfanos in the pages of Division/Review #9, Winter 2014 and owes much to the contributions of each of them.

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at celebrating this tension—economically and concisely: surface simplicity, underlying complexity; surface clarity, deeper ambiguity. Here’s a lovely meditation on simplicity from the Modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos in Edmund Keeley’s translation (1991). THE MEANING OF SIMPLICITY I hide behind simple things so you’ll find me; If you don’t find me, you’ll find the things, you’ll touch what my hand has touched, our hand-prints will merge. The August moon glitters in the kitchen like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way because of what I’m saying to you), it lights up the empty house and the house’s kneeling silence— always the silence remains kneeling. Every word is a doorway to a meeting, one often cancelled, and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting.

“The meaning of simplicity” is populated by simple things: an August moon, the kitchen of an empty house, the moon shining like a tin-plated pot, an absence, a presence, a meeting. Merging handprints: A lover’s kitchen we think—but we’re not sure. And there’s the lovely last thought about the true word “insisting” on a meeting (an elegant statement of the essence of the intimate verbal exchange: the lovers’ exchange, or the poetry exchange, or the psychoanalytic exchange!). But all is not so simple. The I of the poem is “hiding” behind “simple” things. And hiding so that someone can find him! 100

Why is he hiding—and how? And from whom? And why does he want to be found? The mysteries abound. Why is it that it’s the saying it (the “I” to his other), that makes the moon glitter like a tin-plated pot? And more: what about the “kneeling” silence of the empty house? Why kneeling? One would think this is mixed metaphor: silences don’t kneel. Yet Ritsos insists on repeating the phrase. Clearly the idea, confusing as it is, is of central importance. Is he evoking an attitude of prayer? Of supplication? Of humility? Of expectation? Of longing? “Kneeling silence” makes me think of the silence in a church. Is this an evocation of the presence of the divine? The more we examine it, the more ambiguous the situation of the poem becomes, the more ironic the claim of simplicity. Is this about lovers? About the poet and his reader (that is, his audience)? About God and prayer? Is it about mourning? Is the situation factual or a kind of dreaming? Is someone leaving? Missing? Gone? What kind of meeting is a true meeting? And there’s a further complication—compounded by the problem of the translation. The “doorway”. I have it on the authority of Greek speaking friends that the word in the original Greek is exodos, which means a way out, not porta which would mean door or doorway. So is this a way out, a reaching out (as one translation, Kimon Friar, 1989, has it) or a way in (as Keeley’s translation might suggest)? Where do we imagine that the meeting might take place? We do know a little of Ritsos’s history. He was a political as well as a lyrical poet. He was a leftist who ran afoul of a succession of right wing governments and spent much time both in prison and in forced exile. He spent periods of his early life in tuberculosis sanatoriums. He would know about longing, leaving, and missing—missing his empty house, his loved ones. So maybe this is a prison-poem (Ritsos published a volume of prison poems)? Or is this the poem of a man who knows 101

what isolation is like? Is it a love poem? Maybe this is a kind of prayer, a kind of yearning for simple happiness? Maybe this is an imaginative reaching out from exile, or from far away? Maybe this is a modern Odysseus longing for home? We’ll never know in any final way, of course. Yannis Ritsos died in 1990 and isn’t here to explain. And one suspects that even if he were, he probably wouldn’t–or couldn’t. The poem, it is said, is larger than the poet; its layers of meaning mystifying even to its maker.

Reference Ritsos, Y. (1991). The meaning of simplicity. In: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses. E. Keeley (Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.1

Note 1. Copyright © 1991 Edmund Keeley. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Kimon Friar’s (1989) translation is in Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938–1988, translated by Friar and Myrsiades, BOA Editions Ltd.

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CHAPTER XXV

Saying a lot with a little: the poetry of Kay Ryan

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thing I appreciated about my own psychoanalysis was my analyst’s ability to do so much with so few words. I remember those moments when, almost casually it seemed, he pointed me at what I had to think about. Of course these would be just the things that were hard for me to think about. It was a revelation, this learning in the absence of lecture. Having been raised by parents who were school teachers and inveterate explainers, I was particularly grateful. A similar economy of expression has always been a goal for me in my work. And partly the ambition to be economical has fuelled my appreciation for poetry, for the lovely possibility of saying a lot with a little. Kay Ryan, a recent Poet Laureate of the United States, is an exemplar of this genius— the genius of brevity. Here is Ryan at her pithy best (2005): THE NIAGARA RIVER As though the river were a floor, we position our table and chairs upon it, eat, and have conversation.

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As it moves along, we notice—as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced— the changing scenes along the shore. We do know, we do know this is the Niagara River, but it is hard to remember what that means.

Brief, accurate, “The Niagara River” makes its point by pointing. As with a good clinical interpretation, brief is not the same as simple. This little report on a frame of mind is packed with complexity. There’s the diction, the casually observant and unexcited tone that mimics, indeed enacts, the casualness with which we look around us as we float along down the river of our lives. There’s a dreamlike dissociation. It’s all, “as though”: “As though dining room paintings were being replaced.” There’s the denial which the dissociation serves—addressed with understated but insistent irony. “We do know.” Ryan repeats: “We do know […] but it is hard to remember” what is at the end of this river. As with a good interpretation, there’s the use of metonymy— the mind’s willingness to take a part as standing for the whole. (We rely heavily on metonymy in psychoanalytic thinking and talking—an event in the patient’s life, for example, is taken to represent his or her whole life. Indeed, our work could not do without this well-developed trick of the mind.) In “The Niagara River” a few specifics—tables and chairs, eating, conversation, the changing scene—evoke the alfresco supper.

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And the supper, the floating picnic, of course is a witty metaphor. We want to relax, eat and drink, look around—and we want to forget how this picnic cruise must end. Of course communication—on the page or in the consulting room—is interactive: patients it is said famously need to learn how to be patients; readers need to learn how to be readers. That is, to communicate requires an audience schooled in the conventions of the communication: here, in this poem, the diction, irony, metonymy, metaphor. And the compression of meaning: to say something important in so brief a way requires an alertness and receptivity in the audience, not unlike the alertness and receptivity which we want to cultivate on both sides of the analytic exchange. The poet of “The Niagara River” relies on a faith in the reader’s capacity to get it, to see the big picture in the small—to grasp the extended meaning of a snapshot taken on a cruise down the river towards the Falls.

Reference Ryan, K. (2005). The Niagara River. In: The Niagara River. New York: Grove/Atlantic Inc.1

Note 1. Excerpts from The Niagara River, copyright © 2005 by Kay Ryan. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

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CHAPTER XXVI

On the love of beauty—and a poem by Charles Simic Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty. All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. —Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930a, p. 83 Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths […]. —Wallace Stevens, from the poem “Sunday morning”, 1915

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ere’s a lovely erotic poem by Charles Simic, a recent Poet Laureate of the United States, that raises an interesting question for psychoanalysts: is beauty a matter of Eros or of Thanatos? Or are we dealing with both? Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Serbia and experienced in childhood and at first hand the German bombings during World War Two and, later, the Stalinist government in 106

Yugoslavia. His family emigrated to the United States in 1953 when he was sixteen; he learned his English then. He went on to be educated at American universities and has had impressive success as an English language poet, critic, and teacher ever since. Although he has lived for the last nearly forty years in southern New Hampshire with his wife and children, he says, in a recent NPR1 interview, “[…] Hitler and Stalin, it’s thanks to them that I became an American poet.” And so it’s no surprise that death and a blackness haunt his poetry, and haunt this poem (2003). CLOUDS GATHERING It seemed the kind of life we wanted. Wild strawberries and cream in the morning. Sunlight in every room. The two of us walking by the sea naked. Some evenings, however, we found ourselves Unsure of what comes next. Like tragic actors in a theater on fire, With birds circling over our heads, The dark pines strangely still, Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset. We were back on our terrace sipping wine. Why always this hint of an unhappy ending? Clouds of almost human appearance Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely With the air so mild and the sea untroubled. The night suddenly upon us, a starless night. You lighting a candle, carrying it naked Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly. The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

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But now, as psychoanalysts, what to think? Is our response to “Clouds gathering” strictly a function of “impulse inhibited” derivatives of sexual desire? And what of “this hint of an unhappy ending”? Certainly that hint—it’s more than a hint—deepens the sweetness of the strawberries and cream and the naked walks by the sea. But it’s hard to accept (for me, and in this age of experiencenear psychoanalysis) that the metaphorical clouds gathering are only a matter of repression. One has to think along with Wallace Stevens that it’s a knowing not a repression that is at play here. And in particular that it’s in the knowledge of death and of the inevitability of life’s ending that the erotic becomes precious and beautiful: sweet, sad and beautiful. Terrifying too, of course—Simic says we’re “like tragic actors in a theater on fire”; the very rocks we step on are “bloodied by the sunset.” Interestingly, the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca— a canonical voice and a point of reference for modern poets— insisted that true art derived from this kind of terror. He thought that what he called the “duende”, the “dark sound” originating in a demonic source (the “death instinct”, perhaps), is the central engine in poetry, music, and painting. “Clouds gathering”, like most of Simic’s poetry, involves us, in a way which is both romantic and clear-eyed, in a dialogue not with the repressed but between things we know: Here, life in some wonderfully erotic moments, those made even more intense by an awareness of life’s dark and terrifying opposite, certain death. The emotional power of Simic’s vision is in the struggle between these opposites—which he gives us in bold terms and in primary colours. Which raises a general question: can there be any reconciliation—and what are its terms? Here’s what Wallace Stevens says later in the poem “Sunday morning” (1954)—bringing Eros and Thanatos together in a grand oedipal reunion: 108

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Perhaps our love of beauty constitutes an effort at reconciliation. Perhaps it reflects our embrace of life and gives us to revel in it even as, and because, we’re exquisitely aware of how transitory our life must be? Here’s the lovely last reconciling image at the end of “Sunday morning”: At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

References Freud, S. (1930a). Civilization and its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI. London: Hogarth. Stevens, W. (1954). Sunday morning. In: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.3 Stevens, W. (2003). Clouds gathering. In: The Voice at 3:00 Am. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company.2

Notes 1. The NPR interview with Simic and a good translation of Lorca’s famous lecture at Harvard in 1930 can both be found online. 2. Copyright © 2003 by Charles Simic. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company. All rights reserved. 3. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXVII

When the narrative changes: a poem by A. E. Stallings

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he argument” by contemporary American poet A. E. Stallings, could be a poem for couples therapists. Or a poem for anyone who is married or has ever been, or indeed, for anyone who has ever been in an important relationship of any kind. There’s a moment—in anybody’s life with anybody—when something turns and not necessarily for the better: some words, a revelation, a betrayal, an eye-opening perception, often mutual, of serious difference. At such moments the narrative, the story couples tell themselves about who they are together, changes. Here’s “The argument” (2012).

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THE ARGUMENT After the argument, all things were strange. They stood divided by their eloquence Which had surprised them after so much silence. Now there were real things to rearrange. Words betokened deeds, but they were both Lightened briefly, and they were inclined To be kind as sometimes strangers can be kind. It was as if, out of the undergrowth, They stepped into a clearing and the sun, Machetes still in hand. Something was done,

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But how they did not fully realize. Something was beginning. Something would stem And branch from this one moment. Something made Them both look up into each other’s eyes Because they both were suddenly afraid And there was no one now to comfort them.

A. E. Stallings is a poet of great accomplishment. Born in 1968, she is a 2011 MacAuthur Fellow and is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to poetry journals. She has published three books of original verse and a verse translation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. She is also a poet of subtle psychological observation. Her close reading here of the changes in emotional weather that come with a serious marital fight is brilliant. She captures the odd dissociative estrangement after the burst of “eloquence” that follows when long-unuttered thoughts have been expressed, that moment when we know things have been said that cannot be taken back, performative words, speech acts requiring further acts. And we recognise the exaggerated politeness of people unsure about where to go next, overwhelmed by the changes their words have wrought, and reluctant to lose the something good they thought they had. Stallings is regarded as one of the “new formalists”— contemporary poets who make use of traditional forms. She gives us her observation of the couple’s transformative process as a sonnet. She does take liberties with the form. But the deep structure of a sonnet, a this, but then this, informs the poem. And the sonnet form is a particularly good choice because the sonnet is understood as a kind of argument—reflecting the duality, the ongoing yes-but of experience as it contradicts or transforms itself. Psychoanalysts who work all day with ambivalence, with resistance, with conflict and its vicissitudes should be interested.

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Sonnets come in a variety of historical and contemporary shapes, in different lengths and meters, in free verse and rhymed. But there are some general characteristics: complex thought is compressed into a short lyric poem (traditionally fourteen lines) with a rough and slightly unequal distribution of weight between a first idea and a second. The second statement may develop but more usually is set against or transforms or argues with the first. And the last lines, often but not always a couplet, offer a resolution, a bringing together of the contending or antithetical thoughts. The key element (and, I think, the source of poetic excitement) is the hinge, the turn, the volta, the line that takes one from the first sentiment to the second, that is, the line which signals a sudden or surprising transformation of experience or understanding. In “The argument”, the turn is sharp (quite literally) and breath-taking, the image is stunning: stepping out into “a clearing and the sun, machetes still in hand”. The metaphorical knives take us from odd “kindness”, to clarity and sudden fear. Fear is right: this fight is a killing fight. The couple knows that “something was done”, that “something would stem […].” They are afraid, but more than that they are suddenly alone with “no one now to comfort them”. This is not just that they no longer have each other. When the narrative governing a sustaining relationship changes, a kind of innocence is lost. The loneliness that comes of that loss is inescapable. Still there may something to be said for loneliness. And there may be a place for a psychoanalyst here. Heinz Kohut thought that the disjunctions, the breaks in the narrative, the inevitable failures of the “self-selfobject bond”, are vital opportunities for what he called “transmuting internalisation”. That is, that we grow up by coming to terms with the impossibility of relying on someone else (like a marriage partner—or an analyst) to

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complete us. The disappointment, which may at first be heart breaking—or enraging as here in “The argument”—requires us to provide our own completion. It starts us (we hope) on a process whereby we can go forward more whole.

Reference Stallings, A. E. (2012). The argument. In: Olives. St. Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.1

Note 1. From Olives: Poems copyright © 2012 by A. E. Stallings. Published 2012 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. All right reserved.

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CHAPTER XXVIII

Metaphors for mind: the poet Gerald Stern

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ontemporary psychoanalysts know that to speak of mind is to speak in metaphor. We’ve been frequently and well reminded that our theoretical concepts, honourable and useful as heuristics as they may be, are metaphorical. Our formal terms describe psychic life by indication, by pointing, by comparing the things we mean to talk about with other things that are easier to describe: for example, “ego” to a mechanism, “defence” to a military strategy, “repression” to a pushing down. And so much of our actual clinical work involves taking up our patients’ experiential metaphors (that is, the words they use to point, however gropingly, to their experience) and helping them to run with and through their words to the dawning of undiscovered meaning. So often we’re like midwives to metaphor. We can only envy the skilled midwifery of our poets. Here’s an example of what a poet can do with metaphor: this is Gerald Stern1 on “mind”. Stern is greatly admired in the world of contemporary American poetry—although perhaps less well-known outside it. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 to immigrant Jewish parents, and has spent his life as a poet and teacher.

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I REMEMBER GALILEO I remember Galileo describing the mind as a piece of paper blown around by the wind, and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree, or jumping into the back seat of a car, and for years I watched paper leap through my cities; but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck, dancing back and forth like a thin leaf, or a frightened string, for only two seconds living on the white concrete before he got away, his life shortened by all that terror, his head jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust. It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground, his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing, that showed me the difference between him and paper. Paper will do in theory, when there is time to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows; but for this life I need a squirrel, his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering, the loud noise shaking him from head to tail. O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel finishing his wild dash across the highway, rushing up his green ungoverned hillside.

I find this a stunning poem, for the wild rush of thought, for the oddly but engagingly crude and intimate diction: this is the way we talk to ourselves. There’s a riveting hold-yourbreath situation, an intense emotionality and, finally, a spiritual triumph. The accomplishment is masterful, making use of 115

two vivid and unforgettable images as metaphors for mind. Interestingly, while there is no formal argument here, an argument is taking place. Stern lets the metaphors contest with each other. “Paper will do in theory”, he says, “when there is time/to sit back and study shadows; but for this life I need a squirrel.” As is characteristic of his poetry, “I remember Galileo” (1998) has a naive, ungoverned, in-process feel. But this is not free association (although surely Stern’s is a mind free to associate). The images—the wind-blown paper, the terrified squirrel— might seem almost to be dream images, but they are not. For all the embrace of wildness, a careful selection has taken place. Take Galileo. Why Galileo? I don’t know if Stern is correct about Galileo actually describing the mind as a piece of paper. My own internet search reveals no evidence of it, although perhaps Galileo does say it somewhere and I didn’t find it. But the history does remind one: Galileo’s mind could be blown about like a piece of paper. Famously, he guessed wrong about which way the political wind was blowing, was hauled before the Inquisition and made to sign the piece of paper put before him—his recantation—under threat and in terror of his life. It is said, of course, that he never really changed his mind. But the Galileo metaphor, it turns out, is a sly one: even for the scientific mind, the “philosophical mind”, the platonic mind studying “shadows”, terror is a subtext. And the squirrel: I’d guess the process started observationally. I imagine him driving back along “Route 80” from New York City to his home in Lambertville, New Jersey. Stern sees a squirrel get caught under and then miraculously escape from the wheels of a truck. He thinks about it the rest of the way home. That is, I suspect the image came first and was followed by the illumination, the recognition of this as a metaphor. For what? For mind! There’s a wonderful, chance freshness here: the poet is as surprised as the reader is. And in turn— and thanks to Stern’s genius—the reader is as breathless, as 116

relieved, as triumphant, as identified with the wild, living, terrified animal as the poet is. The art of the poet starts in perception, noticing precedes understanding—not unlike the art of the working psychoanalyst. Indeed, Stern’s work here is not a bad model for our own: the openness to the accidental, the readiness to be surprised, the willingness to respond freshly, the awareness of one’s own response, the technique for getting it down, the education allowing us to give it a context, the skill to communicate it. And his is a moral stance a lot like the one we aspire to: the willingness to see the world for what it is and to make an honest report. He’s brave enough to say that the mind (even for those of us who think of ourselves as philosophers) is an animal thing, wild, uncomprehending, terrified, lucky to escape alive.

Reference Stern, G. (1998). I remember Galileo. In: Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992. New York: W. W. Norton.2

Notes 1. Gerald Stern has won many honours—including the National Book Award for Poetry in 1998 and the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery of the art of poetry from the Academy of American Poets in 2005. He was appointed a Chancellor of the Academy in 2006. 2. Copyright © 1998 by Gerald Stern. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Originally from The Red Coal by Gerald Stern. Copyright © 1981 by Gerald Stern. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXIX

Negative capability and Wallace Stevens’s “The emperor of ice-cream”

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frequent complaint against modern poetry is that it doesn’t make sense. But making sense in a literal and linear way is not what a poet is trying to do. The ambition is different. Here’s a famous formulation (from an earlier epoch) by the English Romantic poet John Keats—from a letter of his written in 1817: […] at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason […] with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

There’s no better example of a modern master of “negative capability”, of a poet rising above “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, than Wallace Stevens. This is his “The emperor of ice-cream” (1954), published originally in 1922, a puzzling poem, greatly admired in the modernist canon and wonderful for its sense of beauty. 118

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Of course, for a poet to rely on negative capability, means that the reader will be expected to rely on it too (this is not unlike the demand on the viewer to appreciate the conventions of the art that a cubist painting makes). And the reader will need to know and to remember that the textual distortions and discontinuities are deliberate. Here, Stevens’s surprising shifts from vivid image to abstract rhetoric, and his absurd exaggeration (“The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream”) are of the essence. This is an experience he is creating, not an argument he is making. “The emperor …” evokes a feeling-image and a rich sense of time and place. It makes me think of a Hopper painting, of his scenes of America in an age gone by, the familiar “Nighthawks”, for example (and, more contemporaneously and more personally, I think of Eddie’s Sweet Shop, an

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old fashioned ice cream parlour near my home in Forest Hills where you can see Eddie—my own nominee for emperor of ice cream—whipping the cream with a huge wire whisk in a copper bowl). And if one masters one’s own irritability—if not one’s reaching after reason—it becomes apparent that there is idea as well as image in this poem: lust (“concupiscent curds” and “wenches dawdling”), and therefore, life as against death at the wake of an ordinary old woman whose “horny feet protrude […] to show how cold she is and dumb”. And more, one sees that the whole statement is self-consciously theatrical: the poet is creating a tableau—like a stage manager, or a ringmaster. His tone is imperious—but mock imperious: playful and ironic, tragi-comic, mindful of the absurdity. So, who is the emperor? Who rules divine over the circus of life and death? An ice-cream man? A roller of cigars? The poet himself—that is, the poet as the maker of a world? One persuasive reading of “The emperor …” is that it is a poem about making poems—and about making art generally. But who knows? The body of discussion and serious criticism of this poem is vast—a Google search for “Wallace Stevens + emperor” yields 260,000 urls! The point is there’s much, very much, in this puzzling poem—and much that is beautiful. Psychoanalysts should be particularly appreciative of the power of negative capability. Who more than we should value the capacity to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”? You could say our method depends on it. We rely in our daily work on our capacity to sit quietly with the absurd. We expect that this forbearance will take our patients organically to a coherence—that words which make no apparent sense, that ideas in obvious contradiction, that feelings in profound ambivalence will eventually (and in our embrace) lead to truth—and maybe even to beauty.1

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Reference Stevens, W. (1954). The emperor of ice-cream. In: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.2

Notes 1. For a longer discussion of Stevens’s poetry see, Seiden (2004). On relying on metaphor: what psychoanalyst’s might learn from Wallace Stevens. Psychoanal. Psychol. 21, 3: 480–487. 2. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXX

Tracks in the snow: a poem of the Sung dynasty*

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ere’s a lovely image from classical Chinese poetry. The poem (written in the Sung dynasty, that is, around 1,100 AD) advises that in our life on earth we’re like wild geese that land for a moment on the snow and leaving only their footprints fly away … The poem is in the form of a letter from the poet Su Tung P’o to his brother Su Che. It recalls a journey the brothers took together and reports on what the poet finds now at a temple they had visited on that trip. It remembers the old monk. The poem has many contemporary translations. Here’s an attempt by Peter Lin, a Mandarin speaking colleague, and me. REMEMBERING MIN CH’E A Letter to his Brother Su Che by Su Tung P’o

* With my thanks to Peter Lin, who is a Taiwanese-born psychologist and a practicing Buddhist.

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What is our life on earth? A flock of migrating geese Rest for a moment on the snow, Leave the print of their claws And fly away, some East, some West. The old monk is no more. There is a new gravestone for him. On the broken wall of his hut You can’t find the poems we wrote Or anything to show we’d ever been there. Do you recall the steep winding slopes, The road long? I’m tired now And my limping donkey Has been braying all the way.

These lines compare interestingly to those of a familiar Western Romantic meditation, one most of us learned in school, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s great sonnet, Ozymandias, first published in 1818. OZYMANDIAS I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

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Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

It’s interesting how much the two poems have in common— tonally different though they be and arising as they do in such different cultural contexts: the traveller’s report on the past’s decay; the desert sands, the snow; the monument perishable despite being made of stone; the vanity of the attempt at enduring art much less enduring dominion. The Chinese poem is humble, small in its human perspective—one pictures a classical landscape painting (Su Tung P’o was a much esteemed painter as well as a poet): the high mountains, deep gorges, the tiny travellers on a path by the river. Interestingly, the poem was the product of a grand and proud civilisation. The Sung dynasty, which was the immediate predecessor of the Mongol dynasty of Kublai Kahn, saw the invention of printing as well as gunpowder, good economic times and military success, a population boom, a thriving literacy, a stable government, a scholarly bureaucratic class and a three hundred year cultural hegemony. The Romantic poem was written, it could be argued, at a similar proud high point in Western civilisation and during a similar cultural and imperial hegemony. This is broad-brush comparison; I’m aware that historians may quibble. And yet both moments in human history could be thought of as inviting their subjects to an inflated self-regard, a self-importance, partly justified, but in psychological terms grandiose, illusional, and self-convincing. Long before we relied on psychologists, we relied on poets to address and puncture such posturing. There are differences of course. Ozymandias is likely to be read as a political indictment. Like most of us, I suspect, I was taught to read it this way. There’s a triumph at the comeuppance of the tyrant. How self-deluding the pretensions of 124

dictators! But then, how self-deluding too is the notion of an “American century”—as if our “century” could last forever (among other grave threats, climate change is upon us; the image of “lone and level sands” is cautionary). The Chinese poem is more intimate and more personal. It reflects a sad recognition rather than a triumphant one. What we will leave behind is fleeting; and our own disappearance is inevitable. This of course is a Buddhist view—but a useful corrective even for non-Buddhists. Kohut’s familiar notion of the vertical split, so useful in our clinical psychoanalytic work, has a similar lesson in it. Readers will know that Kohut recommends helping our narcissistically inflated patients put the two sides of themselves into contact by empathically acknowledging both the prideful ambition and the emptiness that drives it. What would this mean for those of us a little less narcissistic (and probably one can’t be human and certainly not American without being just a little narcissistic)? Not that we must give up our pride and our pleasure in our accomplishments. Rather it would mean that we hold in consciousness at the same time the ancient Buddhist perspective: we are homeless travellers, we know not where we go—and what we will leave behind will be but haphazard marks on the impermanent surface of this world.

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CHAPTER XXXI

On style: Tennyson and Cavafy, and intersubjective engagement

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lfred Lord Tennyson (in 1833) an English Romantic and C. P. Cavafy (in 1911) a Modern Greek each offer a meditation on Odysseus’s nostos, his long journey home. By contrast with Homer and the ancients, and, as the modern world will have it, both Tennyson and Cavafy value the journey over the destination. Yet the nature of their valuing is so different. And this difference—and the way that it is created—is interesting indeed. Here’s the ending of Tennyson’s Ulysses: Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

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One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And here’s Cavafy nearly a century later. This is the ending of his “Ithaca” in Daniel Mendelsohn’s (2009) translation: Always in your mind, keep Ithaca. But do not hurry your trip in any way. Better that it lasts for many years; that you anchor at the island an old man, rich with all you have gotten on the way, not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey. without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road. But now she has nothing left to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaca didn’t deceive you. As wise as you will have become, with so much experience, you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.

Tennyson and Cavafy write from opposite sides of a relatively recent cultural divide. Tennyson, the Romantic, says: “Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” His Ulysses (Odysseus) is an old man “not now that strength which in old days moved heaven and earth”. Tennyson has us imagining Ulysses standing on a cliff, perhaps leaning on his cane, gazing out to sea, “beyond the sunset”. He dreams of the “Happy Isles” and a reunion with Achilles. Tennyson’s vision urges us to imagine our own still-possible dreams. Cavafy, the disillusioned Modern, urges something quite different: not the quest but remembering the quest! One pictures him writing at a café table late into the morning, cigarette in 127

hand, a half finished cup of coffee on the table, recovering from his excesses of the night before. He is salvaging wisdom—and beauty—out of disappointment. Remember that the voyage was “beautiful”, he says, even if the place you arrive at has “nothing left to give you”. And in any case, be aware of the emptiness of the illusion: you must already have understood “these Ithacas; what they mean”. Tennyson wants us to believe that we can always go further, beyond what has already been accomplished, however fine the accomplishment. Cavafy offers perspective on the let-down (post-coital let-down in particular: Cavafy wrote much and exquisitely in other poems about the exultations of his homosexual love life and their unsustainability). Interestingly both visions, the Romantic and the Modern, are in their own way persuasive. We know that there are many truths—and this may be a Post-modern recognition. But how is it that we’re persuaded of either? How do our poets go about their persuading? The question is relevant for psychoanalysts because our patients are doing this—persuading us of their truth, making us feel what they feel, having us see the world their way all day long and every day. And we, of course, hope we are doing that for them. The difference between Tennyson and Cavafy is not just that Tennyson is looking for beauty in the future while Cavafy is looking for it in the past. Their visions are wrapped in and carried along by something else: so much is a matter of style. Consider the diction. Tennyson: “Tis not too late”, he says. And “smite the sounding furrows”. Who sounds like that? Only Romantic poets. Tennyson’s style communicates a posture, an attitude, education at good schools, the expectation of an educated audience; and most important, a romantic certainty that he and we and human beings in general can be more and better than the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Clinically, and in literary critical perspective, we can see the quixotic grandiosity in this. Still, we stand a little taller reading Tennyson. 128

Maybe, just maybe, we think, a reunion on the Happy Isles awaits us too.1 And how about Cavafy’s style? We recognise his sadder, wiser voice, his ironic sensibility. Ithaca, he says, may be your fantasied “destiny” but you know it has “nothing left to give you”. We’re caught up in the conversational intimacy of Cavafy’s demotic Greek even as it reaches us in translation. And—and this is the greatness in his poetry—he engages us in a sweet, post coital sadness with which as modern people we are all too familiar. Psychoanalysts will know this kind of intersubjective engagement, as it happens in the clinical exchange. As a therapist, one feels the patient’s experience welling up inside one as if it were one’s own. In both the clinical and the poetry process, the engagement, this welling up, has to do with words but, mysteriously, with something more than words. In a poem it depends in part on a kind of music. Perhaps in the clinical exchange it does too. In a poem, that music is in the diction (high flown language or common speech?), in the resonances of the words chosen (“smite”, for example), in the rhythm (natural speech or oration?), in the posture of the speaker (is he instructing, pleading, arguing, confessing, regretting?). It’s in the sense of where the speaker comes from (his or her background, class and culture); it signals the kind of world where people speak such language. And ultimately the engagement grows out of the unique personal style of the speaker. His song, her song, engages us. A thought experiment: think of your two favourite authors. Think of reading a page of each. You’d have very little trouble knowing which was which, who was who. Why is that? They sing different melodies even when telling much the same tale. Which makes each story different. Our poets and writers are the most differentiated singers among us—easier to tell apart than other people. But our patients—and our friends and spouses and children and 129

lovers—all sing their individual songs too. And each draws us into a duet: their voice, our voice, then theirs and ours together.

Reference Cavafy, C. P. (2009). Ithaca. In: Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. D. Mendelsohn (Trans.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.2

Notes 1. Tennyson’s Ulysses is in the public domain and can be read in its entirety on many internet sites. The whole of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” can also be found in its entirety on many internet sites and in English by a number of translators. The translation here is by Daniel Mendelsohn. 2. Introduction, notes and commentary, and translation copyright © 2009 by Daniel Mendelsohn. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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CHAPTER XXXII

Empathic music: a poem of William Carlos Williams

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mpathy is at the heart of what psychoanalysts do—the way we know who it is we’re talking to, the way we know what to say and the way we know what to stay silent about. More than that, as some like Heinz Kohut have argued persuasively, it is only in empathy’s embrace that psychoanalysis cures. We know too that an empathic embrace has little to do with being sweet and sunny. To grasp and engage the experience of another person with both compassion and clarity is difficult and often painful for patient and therapist alike. Empathy is not sentimentality. Winnicott advised famously on the matter a long time ago, “Sentimentality is useless […] as it contains a denial of hate” (1949).1 An empathic stance, as opposed to a sentimental one, is no less important for modern poets: who want to feel their way into things—things of the natural world, the spiritual world, the psychological world—and want to see and have us see the beauty in these things. But they want to do this in a way that avoids false optimism and easy cliché. Beautiful does not mean pretty. Here’s a lovely example of empathic understanding, and empathic verbal music, from the great American Modern poet William Carlos Williams (1938): 131

THE WIDOW’S LAMENT IN SPRINGTIME Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. Thirtyfive years I lived with my husband. The plumtree is white today with masses of flowers. Masses of flowers load the cherry branches and color some bushes yellow and some red but the grief in my heart is stronger than they for though they were my joy formerly, today I notice them and turn away forgetting. Today my son told me that in the meadows, at the edge of the heavy woods in the distance, he saw trees of white flowers. I feel that I would like to go there and fall into those flowers and sink into the marsh near them.

Williams (1883–1963) is a poet whom psychoanalysts can identify with: he was a busy doctor, an obstetrician and paediatrician. He divided himself between his medical practice with working-class patients in his industrialised New Jersey town 132

and his writing life—writing evenings and weekends and spending time with poets and artists in nearby New York City. He had much occasion to study empathy—and to distinguish it from sentimentality—in both his life and his art. Williams had a kind of no nonsense gruffness about him that one sees readily in his writing (poems, novels, short stories, essays, and drama, an autobiography). His poetry sets a standard for unsentimental statement. He writes with a strippeddown diction spare of modifiers. The nouns do the work: no lily-gilding adjectives and adverbs. He rejected the posturing in what he called “European” forms; he wanted to shape his plain-speaking poems to the rhythms of American speech. He was a kind of anti-intellectual too—averse to philosophising and to showy erudition (so unlike his contemporaries, Eliot and Pound). “No ideas but in things”, he would insist. Amazingly and wonderfully, in his straightforward diction there’s a delicacy, a music and an exquisite empathic sensibility. “The widow’s lament …” which was published in 1921, is a poem without end-rhyme but full of the music of rhyming sound (“grass” and “masses”, “branches” and “bushes” and “marsh”; “cold fire”, “thirtyfive”, and “white,”, and “white” again). It’s a poem that breathes with the rhythm of American speech but more important—and its real accomplishment—it moves with the rhythm of its subject’s thought, here the disconnected, almost dissociated, thought of the grieving widow. This is an empathic account of the workings of a sorrowing soul (a sorrowing self-state, we might say today). The new blossoms, usually emblems of optimism and tokens of good cheer, don’t cheer her. What “flamed” before now brings only “cold fire”. T. S. Eliot said it too: “April is the cruellest month.” Williams’s “widow” gives this ambivalence an embodiment and makes it less abstract. The colour of springtime is too much to bear: the widow, so accustomed now to sorrow that it is “her own yard,” prefers whiteness—and at that, a distant whiteness. Indeed, 133

but barely articulated to herself, she wants to sink, gently it would seem, almost restfully she imagines, into the marsh at the edge of the woods—which of course is the marsh not just of grief and mourning but the marsh waiting there for all of us.

Reference Williams, W. C. (1938a). The widows lament in springtime In: The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939. New York: New Directions Publishing.2

Note 1. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the Counter-Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 30:69–74. 2. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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CHAPTER XXXIII

The pathetic fallacy: William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson

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night can be terrifying. But can it be said to be “cruel”? A dark night may hold unseen terrors, but it can’t have sadistic intentions. In what sense does a weeping willow “weep”? A willow is only a tree. Its branches may droop but it cannot have feelings. The attribution of human feeling, experience or intent to inanimate things is, strictly speaking, a logical fallacy, called the pathetic fallacy. It’s not good thinking, proceeding as it does from an implicit but incorrect premise (inanimate things don’t have minds to have feelings or intentions with). And it’s a tactic contemporary poets generally try to avoid because it’s seen as a cheap short cut to creating meaning, usually sentimental meaning. Although older poets, it must be said, the Romantics and Shakespeare among them, didn’t seem to mind it so much. And modern poets do sometimes play to great effect with pathetic fallacy. Here’s a lovely example from William Carlos Williams (1938): SUMMER SONG Wanderer moon smiling a faintly ironical smile

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at this brilliant, dew-moistened summer morning,— a detached sleepily indifferent smile, a wanderer’s smile,— if I should buy a shirt your color and put on a necktie sky-blue where would they carry me?

In “Summer song” Williams seems almost to believe, as almost do we, that the moon is smiling ironically; that daybreak or no, this self-involved moon is going its own way. To be sure, the moon’s smile is detached and indifferent. We sense that something is missing. The “faintly” would seem to signal that. Williams saves things with his last lines; this is his fantasy. We get it: he’s the wanderer (although a wanderer in a shirt and tie! And in a fixed orbit. I guess that’s the way doctors wander, or used to wander. On his day job, Dr. Williams, one of the great modern American poets, was a general practitioner in New Jersey). In the history of the human race, awareness of the pathetic fallacy is a late arrival—the term coined by the critic John Ruskin in 1856. Ancient myth and primitive thought have always seen an animating presence in things: a god in the wind, a spirit in a rock, the face of a man on the moon. And we moderns live in a world where things do seem to speak to us—a speaking that is part of the richness of experience. It would be a flat world indeed if we didn’t feel that the sun on a mild summer morning was shining on us and for us, and with benevolent intent. We don’t want to think the sun 136

only “shines” because there is a thermo-nuclear fire burning out there, our part of the globe is for the moment rotated conveniently and inclined towards the fire, and there is no water vapour in the way (and we don’t like thinking of the universe absent a God who intends it and manages it. Although I’ll leave that to others to argue). And as for the universal experience of night and day, here’s Emily Dickinson, making high art out of a pathetic fallacy: Presentiment—is that long Shadow—on the Lawn Indicative that Suns go down— The notice to the startled Grass That Darkness—is about to pass—

Startled grass? In what sense can she mean that? Surely this is a mixed metaphor and fallacious. And yet, it works—the poet expressing in a surprising visual image our own anxious and startled “presentiment”, our sense of coming darkness—and of course of the coming darkness that is death.1 Interestingly, as psychologists we’ve been trained to look for M responses in our (modern) subjects’ Rorschach protocols. We see the perceiving of human movement or human attitude in inanimate ink blots as signalling a highly developed inner life. Highly developed so long as the subject knows the image could be moving but isn’t really—the way we know that in Williams’s poem the indifferent moon isn’t really wandering. So, the “wanderer” moon, the “startled” grass: Is this primitive thought or mental achievement? It’s both of course. As psychoanalysts we know that what we see is inevitably the projection of our own inner life. And we know that in this process there’s something to be cautious about. But we also know that there’s something of value here. Yes, the physical world we inhabit is nothing but animal, vegetable and mostly mineral. But we know that our way of reading all that, and into all that, is what gives us our humanity. 137

Primitive or modern, it’s always been a way of reading ourselves.

Reference Williams, W. C. (1938b). Summer song. In: The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939. New York: New Directions Publishing.2

Notes 1. Emily Dickinson wrote some 1800 poems in her lifetime, many very short and mostly without title. “Presentiment …” is number 487 in her Collected Works and is in the public domain. 2. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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CHAPTER XXXIV

W. B. Yeats on “Where love has pitched his mansion …”*

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nyone who has been to high school in the Englishspeaking world probably can quote a little William Butler Yeats. “Only God […] can love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair”; or “An old man is but a paltry thing” from “Sailing to Byzantium”; or “Cast a cold eye on life, on death” from “Under Ben Bulben”. But “Crazy Jane talks with the bishop” is a poem no one is likely to have studied in high school. W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) were contemporaries. Yate’s “Crazy Jane talks with the bishop” (1962) gives us a chance to think about the two of them together: the Irish poet, playwright, and politician who addressed himself to the deepest roots of Irish experience–and the Viennese doctor who concerned himself with the deepest roots of all human experience (and to whom, of course, psychoanalysts owe their intellectual and professional lives). There is evidence that Yeats read Freud; although I can find no direct evidence that Freud read Yeats—except that there are references to Yeats

* This chapter is taken from a longer discussion with my colleague K. William Fried which appears in the pages of Division/Review #13. It profits greatly from his input.

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as early as 1921 in psychoanalytic journals, in The Psychoanalytic Review, for example, with which Freud is more than likely to have been familiar. On the matter of received moral hypocrisies their views were remarkably similar. “Crazy Jane” (1962) is the embodiment and personification of earthy Irish peasant wisdom in a series of “Crazy Jane” poems that Yeats wrote in the 1930s, toward the end of his life. CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP I met the Bishop on the road And much said he and I. “Those breasts are flat and fallen now, Those veins must soon be dry; Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.” “Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,” I cried. “My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart’s pride.” “A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.”

Yeats—especially as he grew older—had the gift of being able to boil a dissonant complexity down to its essence. What, in other hands, like Freud’s, would be a treatise, indeed a series of treatises, on the nature of human nature, becomes a short

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rhymed poem. “Fair and foul are near of kin”, the poet asserts. And the good doctor, of course, would only agree. “Crazy Jane …” gives us a concise assertion of the argument against even the possibility of purity: “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” We know Freud would agree: Psychically speaking, and however “proud and stiff” someone may attempt to be, there is no virginity, no innocence. And Yeats gives us an extraordinary capsule image (and in rhymed verse, no less) that debunks the possibility of a love that is pure: “[…] Love has pitched his mansion in/the place of excrement.” For me, this image above all others captures the difference between even the most enlightening prose and the genius of poetry. However developed, however systematic (and of course useful) the theoretical statement may be in the one, the vivid demonstration is in the other. Indeed, it is more than demonstration. While theoretical psychoanalysis may talk about experience, poetry evokes it. Our clinical psychoanalysis, at its best, is somewhere in between. How can one read Yeats’s lines without a feeling of amused and rueful but fascinated disgust? That fascinated disgust is exactly what Freud’s notion of sublimation is all about: that our fundamental animal nature is always there in us, colouring and contributing to even our most elevated sensibilities. And we’re startled at the reminder that that which disgusts us about carnal love may be just what we’re drawn to. I guess there is a bottom line here (I hope the pun is forgivable). As psychoanalysts we want to be able to work all the levels of discourse: to be able to say “sublimation” (for the theoretical clarity it brings) when we speak as scientists; to say “where love has pitched his mansion” when we speak or are spoken to as poets; to find, and to help our patient’s find, language which evokes the ambivalent complexity of experience when we work clinically.

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Reference Yeats, W. B. (1962). Crazy Jane talks with the bishop. In: Selected Poems and Three Plays of William Butler Yeats. New York: Macmillan.

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