Author: Loren

Blame it on Sexton and Plath

or maybe you can just blame it on the fact that I’m slowly but surely feeling less depressed. Now that I have a plug in my tracheotomy I no longer violently expel bodily fluids out of my throat, I can talk without first fumbling to find the plug in my trach, and I can finally go out without breaking into violent, uncontrollable coughing spells.

So, I went out shopping for MacIntax, now absurdly called TurboTax for Mac, in order to see if my luck has finally changed and I am blessedly due a refund due to outrageous medical bills.

As I was driving by the Barnes and Noble bookstore I suddenly heard it call my name, loudly enough I could even hear it over Bruce Cockburn’s “Mighty Trucks of Midnight.” Perhaps it was those sirens of the sixties, Sexton and Plath, calling me onto the rocks of broken resolutions.

No, I told myself. I said I wouldn’t buy another book until I had finished reading all the poetry books I have already bought but haven’t read yet, and, though I’ve been reading poetry at an alarming rate recently, there are still books stacked everywhere, around my bedroom, next to my computer, and patiently in the bookshelf.

I almost managed to drive by, but suddenly a voice, an inner voice, I assume, appeared from nowhere, saying, “Does’t thou not remember how depressed thou werst when reading those demonic sisters? Surely thou must findeth new sources of inspiration or perish in darkest despair.”

“Darn right,” I thought, as I swung the car into the B&N parking lot.

Now, anyone likely to read this blog probably realizes just how dangerous a bookstore is, with or without a Starbucks attached. By the way, do you really think a mocha latte will keep you awake through the dullest book?

At first I promised myself I would buy just one book, an anthology of modern, nay “current”, poetry to help me find new, uplifting poets. I found the very book, New American Poets of the 90’s. What could be newer? Of course, as long as I was in front of the poetry section I had to browse a bit. Just to see what was new, of course. While browsing, two books of poetry by Margaret Atwood nearly leapt from the shelves into my arms, had to take them, no choice. Then I was struck by a hardbound copy of Alan Dugan’s Poems Seven. I buy paperbacks, but I love hardbounds, another must buy.

Afraid for my pocketbook, I nearly ran to the checkout stand.

$84.95?!! My gosh, I’d better be feeling better. I’m sure not going to die until I’ve finished them, and considering it took me twenty years to get the books I just finished…

To Thine Own Self Be True

Synthesis the other day wrote:

“You can make aesthetic and critical judgments about politicians, current events, art, literature, and most everything else.

Why not people?

That’s the inevitable conclusion. If your life is a story, you can be judged. If it’s found to suck, well, let’s just say nobody will read your blog.”

I was so offended by that argument that, despite the fact I’ve been preoccupied with finishing up writing on Anne Sexton, the idea has been swirling in my head all week.

To complicate matters, this idea keeps bouncing off another current hot topic, self-esteem. And, of course, both of these made me recall Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.”

If thirty years of teaching high school taught me anything, it taught me not to trust group opinions. Popularity in and of itself is not a proof of worth. The most popular students in high school had nothing, except popularity, over students who are hardly noticed, or who were even made fun of. Another obvious example is the media. Is a popular movie written for teenage boys really better art than a less popular play written by Samuel Beckett? Popularity is not proof of much but popularity.

Perhaps the most annoying part of the argument, though, is the implication that other people have the right to judge you as a person on the basis of your blog. I doubt that anyone has the right, or the ability, to judge another person’s life, particularly based on something as superficial as a blog. Society as a group is no more capable of judging the worth of a particular individual then they are of resisting the pressures of the mass media that make their lives a living hell by convincing them that material possessions can somehow fill the void in their lives. Emerson isn’t far from right when he says, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

Maybe self-esteem is important in our society because it allows us to make our own decisions, allows us to stand up to those who would make us conform to their standards and impose their ideas of right and wrong on us, whether those standards are truly applicable to our lives or not. Everyone, parents, teachers, friends, class mates, claims to know what is best for us, but it is an illusion. In the end, no one can live your life but you, and no one, no matter how many blogs you blog, truly knows what you feel inside.

Though I’m less than certain there is a clear connection between a lack of self esteem and a need for praise from others, a lack of self-esteem seems to make some people, at least, seek affirmation from others instead of trusting themselves. I suspect that people like Anne Sexton craved attention to fill a void in their lives. Their lack of self-esteem makes it necessary to seek outside confirmation that they are “okay,” even though they can never truly be okay until they themselves believe they are okay.

Increasingly in our society people need to feel “popular” to be happy. Some seem to even feel a need to attain their “15 minutes of fame.” They will do anything to be noticed, to be “somebody.” If they produce a blog and are desperate enough, their blog might very well become “popular,” or at least get an amazing number of hits. Does that mean that their life “doesn’t suck?” Does this kind of popularity have any meaning at all, except, perhaps, to confirm that an amazing number of people have bad taste?

On the other hand, another person might produce a web page that appeals to a limited audience. As a result, the page gets only a limited number of hits, but it draws the people the blogger was looking for. Does that mean that his life “sucks?” As far as I am concerned, if the person has produced the page he wants to produce, it doesn’t require a certain number of hits to validate the worth of that page. As Emerson says, “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”

Sexton’s Spiritual Poems

Anne Sexton’s religious poems present some particular problems for me. In some ways, they are my favorite of her poems. In the best poems her use of images remind me of the metaphysical poets in their use of unusual, disparate, images, while her rhetoric reminds me of Walt Whitman’s, with its repetition of key phrases and cataloging.

There is undoubtedly power in these poems. They are in-your-face poems, challenging your very perception of Christ. The God she describes in these poems is not your mother’s, or your father’s, God. There is an angst and anger in these poems that threatens to overwhelm not only Sexton but you, the reader.

Perhaps that’s part of the problem I have with the poems. The truth is that angst and anger are not enough, can never be enough. They are necessary and inevitable, perhaps, but they are not sufficient to carry me across to the other shore.

Personally, I prefer Sexton’s poems like:

The Fury of Sunsets

Something

cold is in the air,

an aura of ice

and phlegm.

All day I’ve built

a lifetime and now

the sun sinks

to undo it.

The horizon bleeds

and sucks its thumb.

The little red thumb

goes out of sight.

And I wonder about

this lifetime with myself,

this dream I’m living.

I could eat the sky

like an apple

but I’d rather

ask the first star:

why am I here?

why do I live in this house?

who’s responsible?

eh?

The coldness in the air, the “aura of ice” suggests to me the loneliness and isolation that all of us have felt throughout life, but the ultimate isolation is that of death. Though we struggle to survive each day and to build a meaningful life the sinking sun seems to represent the end of things. At night, awake or asleep, this lifetime seems like a dream, insubstantial. Instead of living we reflect, like the moon reflects the sun , on the day that has passed. Who hasn’t asked the universe, perhaps best represented by those cold, distant stars, “why am I here?” And such doubts ultimately lead to the more basic question, “who’s responsible” for my life, for this feeling of emptiness that comes at the end of each day? Eh? This is the ending that I most fear, a meaningless death after a long meaningless life.

When Sexton says In “Frenzy,” “I am, each day,/typing out the God/my typewriter believes in./Very quick. Very intense,/ like a wolf at a live heart,” I begin to question the very essence of these poems. Why is it “the God my typewriter believes in” rather than the God “I believe in?” What kind of God does her typewriter believe in? A melodramatic God that looks good on the page?

Now, Sexton had great taste in borrowing the title of Kierkegaard’s work, and it fits nicely with the idea of sin that pervades her poems:

The Sickness Unto Death

God went out of me

as if the sea dried up like sandpaper,

as if the sun became a latrine.

God went out of my fingers.

They became stone.

My body became a side of mutton

and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

Someone brought me oranges in my despair

but I could not eat a one

for God was in that orange.

I could not touch what did not belong to me.

The priest came,

he said God was even in Hitler.

I did not believe him

for if God were in Hitler

then God would be in me.

I did not hear the bird sounds.

They had left.

I did not see the speechless clouds,

I saw only the little white dish of my faith

breaking in the crater.

I kept saying:

I’ve got to have something to hold on to.

People gave me Bibles, crucifixes,

a yellow daisy,

but I could not touch them,

I who was a house full of bowel movement,

I who was a defaced altar,

I who wanted to crawl toward God

could not move nor eat bread.

So I ate myself,

bite by bite,

and the tears washed me,

wave after cowardly wave,

swallowing canker after canker

and Jesus stood over me looking down

and He laughed to find me gone,

and put His mouth to mine

and gave me His air.

My kindred, my brother, I said

and gave the yellow daisy

to the crazy woman in the next bed.

Who wouldn’t be struck by images, metaphors and symbols like these? The sun becomes a latrine, polluting all. The narrator becomes a mutton to Jesus’ lamb, and the slaughterhouse is filled with despair. God is even in Hitler, the Satan of the modern world? He must be if the Holy Spirit is everywhere, right? Surely that’s an assertion that tests our very faith. I know sometimes people “feel like shit,” I’ve felt that way myself at times lately, but how does one feel like “a house full of bowel movement?” It may make sense to destroy yourself “bite by bite,” but “canker after canker?” For me, at least, this all becomes too melodramatic, too hysterical, to be believable.

As much as I am moved by Sexton’s poems, I wouldn’t want to use her rowboat as my pilot ship to God. I fear she may well be rowing in the wrong direction. If I were looking for a poetic guide to the unknown, at least a Christian guide, I would prefer John Donne’s holy sonnets or Gerard Manly Hopkins’s poems.

If the truth be told, though, at the moment I am looking to the Zen poets for solace, and perhaps their calm reflection on life and death has biased me against Sexton’s railings against a merciless world that often asks more of us than we are capable of giving.

A NAFTA Break

After watching the Moyer’s special on NAFTA’s Chapter 11, I’m even more enraged about Chapter 11’s effect on the environment than I was before. Hopefully, the program will inspire increased coverage of Chapter 11 in the mainstream media, though I haven’t found any mention of it so far.

When I first heard about Moyer’s special, I was a little shocked that I hadn’t heard anything about a billion dollar suit against California previously. I’m not a news addict by any means, but I do follow the news, especially environmental news, and I hadn’t heard about the effects of Chapter 11 before, particularly the negative effects it has had in Canada. (As a recent victim of throat cancer, I was outraged to hear that American cigarette producers were able to use Chapter 11 to prevent Canada from putting stronger health warnings on their cigarette packages.)

One of the few mainstream newspapers that has given any coverage to the issue was The Christian Science Monitor. On April 3rd, 2001 they wrote an article entitled “Does NAFTA trump countries’ laws?” The article argued that the Chapter 11 needed to be refined, but that none of the parties wanted to re-open discussions on NAFTA as a whole.

Other than that article, though, I have been unable to find any major media that has covered Chapter 11. Perhaps that’s not surprising when networks are owned by large corporations who might well be taking advantage of Chapter 11 for their own gains and when ratings are pushed by coverage of newsworthy events like the Gary Condit story.

The online Public Citizen offers the most coverage of Chapter 11 I’ve been able to locate so far. Their front page today, (Feb. 6) provides an opportunity to email or phone your representatives in Congress. After heavily editing the canned letter they provide, I emailed all my representatives!!

The Multinational Monitor has an informative article on the effects of Chapter 11. WTOaction.org has an extensive article discussing the NAFT ruling on Metaclad versus Mexico.

While it’s difficult to feel optimistic about attempts to fight business interests on an international level, there does seem to be a growing concern about the actions of large businesses in general despite, or perhaps of, an Administration that is heavily stacked in favor of big business.

Doing nothing simply ensures that business interests will prevail, while taking action at least makes you feel better for the day.