October 4, 2009

Clothing is darkening along with the leaves. Forest green sweaters and navy sweatshirts and gray V-neck sweaters. Beside me in the coffee shop, a man meditates (eyes closed, forefinger and thumb touching forefinger and thumb, deep breaths) until his cell phone rings, at which point he bends forward at the waist, eyes still closed, while the Carleton students at the next table look at him and then at one another with raised brows.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat I read about two patients who, in the late stages of syphilis, are awakened. They become "frisky" and imaginative, full of vitality. One of the patients, asked to imitate a drawing of a square with a circle inside of it instead draws a three dimensional carton with the lid wide open. When asked to do it again he draws a man holding a kite. When given medication and then asked to draw it again he does it correctly, although his drawing is smaller in scale then the original and the lines are more shaky, less sure of themselves. Sacks writes:

What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here--that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease!

Of course, what I wish for you, dear Thisbe, is that you continue to draw cartons and kites for a long time. As a poet, I feel like I am constantly trying to return to that state, the one where, when told to draw a tree, I draw my own vision, complete with lightning bolts flying from the branches and the bark curling into 43 moustaches. [Tree example also taken from Sacks--lest you think I delight in plagiarism]. It is difficult in this world to trust the truth of the carton and the kite, for me this is the greatest difficulty. That should be the end of my diatribe for today but...

In the next chapter, a man called Mr. Thompson whirls though continual amnesia, remembering nothing for more than a few seconds at a time. Sacks observes that in order to construct our own identities we need narrative; that is, we are always placing the events of our lives into a story that ultimately defines who we are. Mr. Thompson becomes something of a creative genius because he needs to create this story of himself at each and every moment in time. Sacks writes:

For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing--and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.

So Mr. Thompson constructs a world filled with details that delight people, that make him call him "a riot" but "what comes out, torrentially, in his ceaseless confabulation, has, finally, a peculiar quality of indifference...as if it didn't really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered any more." Reading that passage made me think of a certain kind of poetry, a kind I have most certainly written, in which the writer leaps from image to image, from world to world or notion to notion but without any real stakes. Sacks talks about bridges over the abyss. This poetry is like bridges over the abyss but without the threat of the abyss...and the truth is that a bridge ceases to maintain its beauty when it is no longer rendered fragile and vulnerable by the water or canyon or riverbed below it. And this whole idea runs counter to the advice I gave you only paragraphs before. Which is to say: imagination only gets you so far. An image must be placed in a precarious situation in order for it to become art. By precarious I simply mean that it has to matter.

Hmmm...my hour is almost up, Thisbe, and you need to be fed.