How I Became Known as a Poet
In retrospect, one of the strangest turns my life has taken was becoming known as a poet in Oxford.
Here's how it happened: In November 2006 my classmate Sam C asked me what I'd been doing that day (we were waiting to enter The Bridge, a club). I told him I'd been writing a poem which, actually, I might be able to recite for him. The poem was The Personal.
I delivered it with a complex array of emotions - zipping between passion and angst, bitterness and zest, a fluid engagement and lonely monologue. Sam convinced me later that night to recite it to all my peers studying English at Catz. Some (Tom C notably) were so impressed, they would ask me to read it again and again over the year.
I must have recited it dozens of times that year, including twice in my packed-out room on my birthday. Some people looked on me like something of a legend, which was completely unlike anything I'd experienced before. I've never thought of myself as a star, or really as an artist, but people treated me as such; for which, I was grateful. Basically, most of my reputation as poet that year rested on that poem. I wrote a number of others in 06-07, but barring a line here or there, most of them were rubbish. It wasn't until 3rd year that I would write good stuff again.
It's particularly strange because The Personal is such an odd poem - fragmentary and sometimes so ambiguous as to lack real meaning. But I guess a lot of it - you can basically recognise the sentiment. So here I offer, as far as is recoverable, my commentary on what I meant by the poem.
It Only Makes Incomplete Sense.
The poem was inspired when a girl accidentally touched my hand in class. Though I wasn't attracted to her, I felt a frisson of sensual excitement. Reflecting on the sensation, I thought about how different my situation was from how I expected it to be. I had expected that by now I would be getting somewhere with someone, having more physical contact than I was. Clubbing was fine, but as JM Coetzee describes modern dancing in Disgrace, "she dances by herself in the solipsistic way that now seems to be the mode." Furthermore, men must have been feeling this way - missing physical contact even before they've experienced much - since Adam, since 'the dawn of man'.
Link to poem
Lines 1-2
Like my eczema, thinking about it only made the feeling worse. The more self-conscious about my inexperience I became, the less active I would be in seeking out and finding someone I could personally connect with. Applying this contraction of mutual desire to another, I wrote "I miss physical contact | we retract | " The odd punctuation | was a kind of wall of feeling. It emphasised the intransitiveness of the sensation. The demand for pleasure was impeded by the lack of someone else to be around - hence, "I demand but cannot."
Lines 2-8
At this point, I realised it would do no good to continue in this line of thinking. It was time to change direction. It would be better to imagine the mutual seeking out and finding of someone.
Yet I did not know how you find out enough about someone else to be sure of them. The process of discovering another was inherently incomplete, mediated through the senses and prone to false conclusions about what that other is like. Like a forest, some areas of another person are dark, some light. Lines 2 (+1/2) - 8 describe the mixture of sensual and mental imagining necessary to round out the incompleteness of another person.
The language of this mutual desire is exploratory. 'we' are exploring a mysterious landscape - it could be real or imagined. The boundary between inner and outer is left deliberately vague, reflecting the difficulty of sorting one's feelings about another person from objective facts about that relationship.
"Here" is different for both presences, but felt to be the same; this is visualised in the paragraph break "space inheres // the breath."
Metaphors of exploring places are mingled with metaphors drawn from bodily gestures - 'reaching' (hand/touch), 'sucking' (mouth), 'breathing', 'gasping', being 'shrill' (lungs). The bodily gestures move from out to in, even as the exploration moves from tight, dense places (forests) to more expansive and open places (crossing over a violent natural event, tugging oneself up out of the earth (little bit of rock-climbing imagery)). At the same time, the rhythm goes from long-syllable words to words with more, shorter syllables - increasing its pulse, becoming more heated and more suggestive of climax.
Here I was borrowing Laurence Sterne's technique in Tristram Shandy of suggesting sexual resonances to my language without being explicit. This technique brings the reader/listener in to wonder whether I'm talking about sex or not. The technique creates an emotional pull, a frisson of excitement from the incomplete suggestiveness of the sensual language. (At the same time, I protected myself from describing something I had not experienced. All the physical action refers to the upper body.)
However, there is intimacy without clarity. The audience is in the position of the voyeur, listening in almost to a relationship between people who have no identifying details. The aesthetic experience is borderline pornographic.
The surreal imagery, and ultimate unreality, of this collective voice is further suggested by the fact it is contained in quotation marks. What do these signal? A speech bubble? A speculation of the mind?
Physical presence and mentalness
In the opening line 'I miss physical contact'. What other kinds of contact are there?
Firstly, mental contact e.g. through reading. When you read about people, you imagine them. You mentally connect with the world being written that contains or describes them, and the way in which they make contact with that world. The textual sensation of frisson is an example of a writer recreating contact in the mind instead of in the world.
Secondly, virtual contact. My year at Oxford was one of the earliest Facebook generations. Online you create an image, an impression of yourself that is distinct from you as a physical presence. Sometimes, in creating this online presence, you can become a bit detached from your real-world existence - ignore the pressing need to find love. The poem begins in complaint about our mutual dematerialisation, and ends in affirmation of being "in person" - physically present.
The opening line is also a complaint about the dehumanising effects of technology of which Descartes wrote so eloquently. Descartes dissected a cow's eye, and discovered an image on the back of the retina, demonstrating that the operation of the eye was mechanical. Nothing divine about the soul's action there. If my eyes deceive me into believing an image is reality - if my eye is just a machine for translating images - how do I know the other is there?
Lines 9-15
Lines 9-10 make fun of the senses. The Shakespearian, grandiose "O" creates a loud noise but signifies nothing. The world is compared to an eye - "stuck in its gelatinous orb." Both world and self are bounded by mechanical limits.
The solitary 'I' is announcing his skepticism about the meaningfulness of our bodily experience. In lines 11-15, he exaggerates the fleshiness and self-indulgence of physicality. In doing so, he attempts to affirm the vanity of experience with others, to deny that his integrity can ever be enriched by love. Loftily, he pours scorn on mutual feeling. For him, the language of the collective voice is a 'pact' between body and mind to delude us into ignoring our mortality. Better to be alone than to give in to false desire.
Lines 16 - 21 Flaws and performativity
This stanza is very unclear. Explaining it is difficult because it contains the weirdest, most ambiguous ideas in the poem. I don't blame any reader who gets lost with this next section.
Two half-formed ideas underpin the stanza: -
1. In order to become personally close to someone else, to reconcile your self with the self of another, you must give up something in yourself and become like the other.
I had been reading about JL Austin's and Judith Butler's notion of performativity: - that performative expression involves acts of expression that transform the world. For instance, a novel brings into being characters and their actions, ideas, concepts, things which it names and communicates. A classic example: 'I do' performs becoming married.
Butler suggests this produces gendered-ness - through feminised performative acts, a person becomes more of a woman. Hers is a much more radical version of performativity than Austin's relatively acceptable ideas about, say, 'I do.'
My idea was that, by being with another person, you occupy the same performative space as them. It becomes harder and harder not to act within the rules of performative expression that that person abides by. I myself felt under transition due to all the new people I was engaging with, and finding it harder and harder to reconcile my changed self with my former self.
2. In order to enliven a poem and give it imaginative richness, I had to make my language almost new - in the same way language is new to the developing child or teenager. I did not want to give up the sense of creative language acquisition that comes with youth.
To comment on these lines proper:
The 'I' has a change of heart. He concedes that there is intimacy; but intimacy always depends on an 'estranger.' The 'estranger' is a third person (who either exists within oneself, or theoretically exists as a kind of nemesis to your personality) estranging you from who you had been before.
This loss of self is an exotic experience, wild and terrifying. I tried to convey this through coining strange words with gendered connotations - "unwovenly ganders." 'Unwovenly' - Penelope perpetually unweaving her shroud; 'ganders' - a male goose made verbal; the act of the sexual gaze. [I'm the first to admit the ludicrousness of these solecisms. How was anyone meant to guess what they meant?] Sex is the drive for overcoming this fear of losing yourself, of becoming someone for the other. Sex is both the pleasure-giving exchange between the sexes that reconciles you, and the act of exchanging personality between you.
Line 18: "'s" is either a contraction of 'his' i.e. the estranger, or a reference to the genitive tense, to the possessive aspect of human personality. By claiming another, you foray into who they are as a person. In a way, this describes the action of the first and second stanza from the skeptical position of the "I." Where lines 2-8 had used exploration as a metaphor for mutual desire, here this metaphor is critiqued as a tool for effectively dismantling the integrity and identity of any particular person.
The "I" argues that this creates gaps in your personality, and exposes flaws in you ("clefts in nooks"). As you grow closer, the person you were when you first desired the other person ceases to exist - so that both of you are receding from your mutual starting point. Who you believed you were at the start of your relationship will exist in each of your memories, but the present reality with a person will no longer match up to what you had thought at the start. You'll see more of the cracks and flaws. Neither of you will live up to your early dreams of an ideal love. This idea is reinforced through reflection on the vertiginous extremes of the emotions ("up" "down").
It's a pretty bleak view of relationships - elevating the idealistic highs and lows of a new relationship over the mellow pleasures of becoming comfortable with each other; saying that retaining your individual integrity is more desirable than the strength gained from the shared bonds of loving. It's also the last thing we hear of the "I."
Third part of this post
As you can see above, the poem becomes more complex as it progresses. For reasons that will become apparent, I am going to start afresh commenting on the last lines, which will be a forthcoming blog post.
Apart from the preceding section and the 'Intro', most of this post was written well over 2 months ago; but I was so busy and content in New York that I didn't want to complete the difficult work of commenting on the last fourteen lines. In the meantime, I did rewrite The Personal and the Collective 1, (see below).
