The place of being - Chap 2: Poetry as a place

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There was once an upper class girl who went to a good college and felt she lost her religious faith there -- not that she really *could* lose something so intrinsic to her -- something whose whole essence was the not getting lost -- but in any case she'd lost the ability to express it clearly and fearlessly within this skeptical milieu enfolding her and she'd lost the courage to brave the ridicule that would have fallen on her for having what people insisted could no longer be had. Not in this lucid, fluorescent-lit world of ours. Not in a world lit like a drugstore. She'd lost the public face of faith. So it went into hiding and yet somehow became stronger for the tribulation it was passing through, and it waited for the day when it could break out again and be jubilant and noisy, like all strong things. That would be a different story. Meanwhile the girl read poetry by the hour, a candle-burnt substitute, a sort of secret link to what she still sensed but could no longer share.

She majored in poetry if that were possible.

That is, poetry became the place she lived. Or, to turn the trope around, she discovered poetry as a place -- discovered that the true nature of poetry was to be a place. The words for this broke open like bubbles.

So poetry was not a book? Poetry was no longer a book?

It was not a series of lines bright with images, repeated stresses, musical rhymes? Not an incantation with its sound accidentally sawing something open or slamming down the lid of an inward box?

Wasn't poetry a column of fat expressive lines on a page? No indeed. Poetry had become a place. It was better described by a cartographer after a rich dinner than by a linguist whose own skills of wielding a language might be depressingly bare and exposed. Because nothing here was exposed. Everything was hidden. The linguist stood outside the magic circle, the linguist watched a game whose prime rule was to elude him, even became intent on eluding him, designed expressly to baffle him. Poetry was a place. It had an entrance, it had sides. It needed to be walked before you could understand the grounds for its existence, if indeed there were grounds. The throat needed to be placed there first before it could begin to talk or try to talk.

This was a place closed to all the liberalism that, as by definition, resided nowhere and floated over every "place". Here the feelings were not something you had and then ceased to have; rather here the feeling you would walk through and sometimes would find yourself as if lost inside, so that you carried it outside from that point on, from now on a part of you, and a part of "outside", if there really were a place "outside", a place that was not simply of poetry.

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The girl understood the place because its inexpressible dimensions -- its way of only becoming clear to the person who was actually there within the clarity -- evoked that other lost world of faith, that world she felt she'd lost, that world of faith that refused to become clear on a secular tongue, because only residing was really saying, the only way to say was to occupy what was mysteriously said. So she had exchanged one scorned place for another, unless they might have actually been the same place. Were the 2 places kin? Unrecognized, unacknowledged, but sharing all the essential proteins and membranes?

Name this place, the wind said. Do it now, without fear. Ha. The name was like ha or like aha.

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Its borders were damage. Its borders were what the wind blew down. The frail and collapsing structure of its edgeless edge led people to dismiss it, just like that other place. Here one corner was demarcated by a wounded animal, a stray dog with 2 legs, the 4th having been eaten by a passing car. It was not the dog himself but his harrowingly unquenched spirit, his need to live, the way he continued hoping and hopping without his 4th leg -- that was the corner of this world. That was one corner of the Place that was Poetry. No corner at all, no common structure whatsoever. Unless aspiration were something you could call a structure.

The 2nd corner was a grove of trees in a rainforest, a grove inhabited by dissheveled nymphs, ladies of rain from a Ronsard verse, the bureaucrats of dream, no no, it was really just filled with chattering monkeys and bright jagged birds, geckos saturated with paint. The spider webs bent into their backbends, opening their glistening and manly chests to the scented breath of the wind, silly wind, while in the center of each web a little animal lay unplucked, a tiny ripening fruit. Neurotically quivering, the whole grove seemed to twist in avoidance as the strangers approached with their torches, craving the farmland, and this was the second corner of the Place called Poetry. Going gong gone! Sand through the hand. Yet everything inside this dry red-rubbed boundary was so moist and vulnerable and impossible. Everything outside was by contrast healthy and pramatic and to be feared, so it seemed. The bored liberals in their SUVS watching on little portable televisions. The girl walked softly on the softer side of life, holding her breath, afraid to exhale. Babies, be ever watchful!

The third corner of the Place was nothing but a sound. Did it occur? Had it occurred yet? Did it move the air when it moved? One heart and tried to interpret this sort of torn membrane of speech, the song of the reaper that Wordsworth half-heard in the field. It gnawed at the ear and made it the object. It had meaning. The meaning could not be left alone or dismissed or really discussed, you could not say you didn't care what it meant because then the sound would become a trifle and it wasn't that, no, you cared what it was but didn't know what it was. So you follwed it and it eluded you, harbored somehow in some sense of transcendence reminding you that the place you stood was only a placeholder or a pointer, the outward sign of a certain invisible bliss and the emanation of the one who was the cause of all bliss. Do not forget him, whatever else you do! And his hymn filled your life, this hymn that came from another room, where someone else was ecstatically singing. And this sound was the third corner of the Place.

The fourth corner could not be described or encompassed. It loosened the idea of perimeter and left you suspended. It was like wine that had changed from water. Its darkness was like the portal to another place less clearly charted. You were wisely afraid to approach. The words that recurred in rhyme and meter were as if its shadow. When people said that this fourth corner was an illusion, you couldn't refute them. You couldn't just point it out to them. You couldn't even rely on Euclidean geometry, not here. There was nothing here that could be known at second hand. It was not something that could be poured from a box and reconstituted with water. You could not teach it in a class. It was not formatted for download. It did not appear on the schedule. It wasn't an experiment that you could replicate because even having it happen once was somehow for most beyond all hope. You could not just trap it and bring it to the surface because delicate things explode and lightless things burn in the light. You might lose your hands even touching it. So you did not call but responded to the call, that is, you hoped you did and hoped you could.

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She was a girl who found it easier to love her neighbor than to love herself. Herself she did not love. Yet it was a kind of mandate to do so, to try. Poetry dissolved matters of esteem and it softened the self. She found it easier to live there.

At night the old malaise recurred and rocked her. She dreamed of the process of salvation. By definition -- a judgment wedged in the very structure of things -- one's loathsome aspects, in their greasy wrappers, could not be saved. You could be saved but the aspects no. Saying so was silly smalltalk. So if backbiting was a thing you did, that thing would be surgically sliced away. If anything was left it might be saved. In her dream she walked a hallowed place with half of her being cut and extricated, thrown into the landfill of nothingness -- Sheol. What remained was good but could it even stand? Was there even one leg left for standing? Was there enough of the tongue left to talk? "Sharper than a razor", that organ.

When she awoke the poetry stood around her in silence, having somehow dispensed with words.

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