Petit Mort

[lazariuk]

If you're going to apply this to real life, how do you decide what the result is?

and I know that in my last post I side stepped your question a bit in that I didn't address what is the final result. The fact of the matter for me is that I can have no way of knowing what will be the final result and I am mainly interested in is how comfortable it is as we get to the final result.

[Manna]

It's OK, Jack. I'm just playing Devil's Advocate.
Reality is pretty messy.

[~greg]

There is a scene (possibly a deleted scene?)
in the movie Cold Mountain. ... The scene is where Inman
has holed up with a young single mother. ...

"Cold Mountain" is a cold movie.
I found it very hard to watch because of the obvious ring
of truth about it, and because I don't think of anything
that's happened in the last 10 or 100 thousand years
as being very long ago. When I was a kid, for example,
there were still several people around who could talk
about the Civil War from first hand experience.

...she takes the baby inside and tries to feed him.
She sings to him in a broken and crackling voice,
but he stops crying and dies. ...

From monkey notes, about the book ...

There is also some irony in this chapter.
Sara sings Fair Margaret and Sweet William,
a centuries old Scottish song popular in southern Appalachia.
The song is about the death of a newlywed
yet it soothes the baby to sleep and calms Sara and Inman.

Second is the almost grotesque irony at the chapter’s end
where Inman eats hog brains scrambled with the egg
formed of nourishment the hen got from eating off a man
Inman killed.
- http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/mon ... tain22.asp

Now that's what I call real "naked lunch".


But here's what Roger Ebert says about the Inman-Sara encounter:

...although there is true poignancy in Inman's encounter
with the desperate widow Sara (Natalie Portman), it is poignancy
that belongs in another movie. Nothing takes the suspense out of
Boy Meets Girl like your knowledge that Boy Has Already Met Star.

Anyway.
Ebert says other things about "Cold Mountain"
which are more applicable to this "Petit Mort" poem:

Cold Mountain" has the same structural flaw
as 'The Mexican' (2001), a movie you've forgotten all about.
Both stories establish a torrid romantic magnetism between
two big stars, and then keep them far apart for almost the entire
movie. Filling the gap in both films is a quirky supporting character
who makes us unreasonably grateful, because the leads take
themselves very seriously indeed, and speak as if being charged
by the word. Hardly anybody but me gave "The Mexican"
a favorable review, and I'm sort of in favor of "Cold Mountain," too
-- not because of the noble and portentous reasons you will read
about in the ads, but because it evokes a backwater of the
Civil War with rare beauty, and lights up with an assortment
of colorful supporting characters....
...
...By the end of the film, you admire the artistry and the care,
you know that the actors worked hard and are grateful for their labors,
but you wonder who in God's name thought this was a promising
scenario for a movie. It's not a story, it's an idea. Consider even
the letters that Ada and Inman write to each other. You can have
a perfectly good love story based on correspondence, but only,
I think, if the letters arrive, are read and are replied to.
There are times when we feel less like the audience
than like the post office.

And that's exactly the feeling I got from this "Petit Mort" poem.
Less like its intended audience than like its intended
forwarding post office between the poet and the
beloved addressed.

It isn't that the poem-letter form isn't common,
or that we don't always suspect that there may
be more being communicated in a poem than we're
privy to. Consider "Famous Blue Raincoat."
But that case is literally in letter-form.
Whereas "Petit Mort" is dialectic, with
a string of logical connectives that we are
obliged to try to reason about:
"No, ...not ... but ...and ... Because".
Only all the premises and conclusions of this logic
are unclear to us. Which is only made all the clearer
by the "explanation":
"I recently made a major decision, and we're still figuring out how we'll deal with it."

That is, it is now at least clearer
that it is not at all clear, and not supposed to be,
to the readers, what's going on.

Why are the two big stars keep far apart
for almost the entire poem?

And what do the supporting cast - drummer, dancer, squirrels,
sun, moon, sky -- really have to do with anything?

There are tangents in this thread.
But it wasn't me that set them off.
It was these five lines of totally opaque reference :

No, love, I am not feeling sad,
but I know the peace
of that final decision
and the danger,
Because it is this incongruity

These seem to be like Ebert said of "Cold Mountain",
"noble and portentous reasons", for something.
And I get the impression that the "leads take
themselves very seriously indeed, and speak
as if being charged by the word."

Manna, I accept your explanation for the line
"The calm and the danger".

You are talking I think about Kierkegaard's
"purity of heart is to will one thing."

But this is so clear --that your use of the word
"incongruity" is --well, - it's incongruous in
the context.
That is to say, there really is nothing at all
incongruous about the sequence: "danger", "final decision", "peace".
You just got the order wrong. Which raises
a question.

A few times I've crossed the line myself.
It was always after way too much ineffectual wondering
about what to do.
Followed by a literal physical shudder.
Followed by the calm of decisiveness.

The only difference is that I didn't feel any sense
of danger after that.

So perhaps your "final decision" isn't as final
as you'd like to think it is. It may be irreversible.
But that doesn't mean that you've accepted it.

And if you haven't, then your whole poem is bluff.
And the first 4 stanzas are a scatter-brained
panicky cover up.
(That the word "incongruous" occured to you
at all means that you don't really honestly feel
any peace about this "final" decision.)

Just remember Watergate. And Scooter Libby.
That it's not the thing. It's the cover up that
they'll get you for. Every time.

~~

The only reason I commented the first time on this poem
is that I was hoping to get a better idea of what you
meant, in a different thread, by:
"If I don't control myself, who does, and how can I kill him?"

And the only reason I'm commenting on it now
is because since then you've written:
"I recently made a major decision, and we're still figuring out how we'll deal with it."

Which sentences, taken together, are really scary.

I think you should consider spliting the poem into two poems.

Develop the first 4 stanzas in some kind of intrinsic way,
letting the images develop among themselves "organically".
(If you can stand that word being used that way.
I myself can't.)

And then try to deal with the issues of the last two stanzas- directly.
-As if you meant it.
You don't have to go all confessional about it.
(In fact I sort of hope you won't.)
Just don't pussy-foot around so much.

But I do like your direct style of writing.
My only criticism has to do with the way the first four stanzas
don't work with the last two.

Anybody can fabricate a connection.
Anybody can fabricate a connection between anything
and anything else. And you must have had something in mind yourself.
(Or maybe not.) It's just that, as it stands, there is no authentic connection.
The first 4 stanzas are not some sort of instances of the last 2.
And the last 2 are not some kind of ironic twist on the first 4.
Nor do any other possibilities hold up, objectively.

If you do decide to make the connection definite, that doesn't
mean you have to make it as obvious as a sore thumb.
It is always good to stretch the reader.
But the reader who tries to stretch across this particular
gap, as it currently exists, between the first 4 stanzas
and the last 2, doesn't find a friendly fire-man's glove
ready to help scramble them up onto the other side.
Nor is there a net under this one. So it would
take the best of our better angels to help us
across this particular chasm, as it currently is.


================================================

you know how Greg can get a person going off on tangents ~ blame it on Greg... blame it on Greg...

Well I wish I could take the credit for the tangents,
-if they're regarded as a positive thing.

And, in so far as they're not regarded as a positive thing,
I wish I could take the blame. The whole blame.
And nothing but the blame. And be crucified for it.
'Tis the season for thoughts like that. Lots of good
endorphins there.

But I can't do it.
I mean really! A moment ago there were 41 replies
in this thread. And just one of those was mine.

So it ain't me, babe.
~~

Which reminds me of a Gurdjieff anecdote.

(It's been a long time since I was really interested
in these things. And I can't remember where I read this.
It's mentioned, tangentially, on the net here:
http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/kevinayers.html
But Kevin Ayers doesn't say where he read it.)

Among the most interesting things about Gurdjieff
were the different ways he could made lots of money,
fast.

(And spend it fast. But not on himself.
He was often the sole support for several dozen people.)

He openly called his ways of making money: "shearing sheep".

Gurdjieff was the Paris Hilton of his day,
--in that he was very famous, but few people knew for what.
So, naturally, lots of upper-crusty intellectual groups
liked to hire him to speak, without having the slightest
idea what they were letting themselves in for.
They would as soon have hired Dylan Thomas,
or the Dalai Lama, or Bertrand Russell, or
Lincoln Steffens, or whoever.

The anecdote that I am trying to remember was about
one of those occasions when Gurdjieff needed money
and went around lecturing for it. Ordinarily he was
a very good speaker. And he began this particular
lecture in his usual way. But something about the
audience gave him a wicked idea.
And so he began to speak more in the way that he
usually wrote. Which wasn't usually at all clear.
(eg, "All and Everything" - "...is less comprehensible
than Finnegan's Wake". And "Life Is Real Only Then,
When 'I Am'" consists, I think, of one single 200
page-long sentence.)

Half an hour of this and the audience was
where he wanted them. Fast asleep.
Cross-eyed and "hair hurting".

Then, sparingly at first, Gurdjieff began to interject
sex-charged words into his dry as bones abstract lecture.
2 or 3 in the first 10 minutes. And then 2 or 3 dozen
in the next 10 minutes.
Until he was talking dirty continuously.

And then of course soon after that
everybody had their clothes off.

And then, when the orgy was over, everybody
thanked Monsieur Gurdjieff profusely for his valuable 'work',
and wrote out enormous checks to his
"Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man."

(If you get the point, you can write your check
out to "the harmonious development" --of me. : )

[lazariuk]

The only reason I commented the first time on this poem
is that I was hoping to get a better idea of what you
meant, in a different thread, by:
"If I don't control myself, who does, and how can I kill him?"

And the only reason I'm commenting on it now
is because since then you've written:
"I recently made a major decision, and we're still figuring out how we'll deal with it."

Which sentences, taken together, are really scary.

So then don't take them together, unless of course you like being scared or want to scare someone.

[Manna]

I like the idea that I control my life and my fate. I am the one making the decisions of my life. But the decision I made recently will effect my family, as it is a change in my career. So the fact that I'm involving them (meaning my husband, since my daughter is four and doesn't have much input regarding my career) in figuring out how to deal with it seems more fair to me, and he can be very helpful with these things too.

That's not so scary, is it?

For the record, I don't think that the fact that the decision is a career change informs the interpretation of the poem.

~Greg,
I also think your analysis of my poem will be very helpful to me when I get around to fixing it. As I said before, I posted it too early, when it was really little more than edited brainstorms. I don't know what I'll do with it, I mean if I'll split it or not. It does feel like two poems now, pulling it into a few directions, but I want it to work as one, at least in this moment. I want it to say something like, "it's rough right now because we're scared and we feel like we're not connecting very well, and the water is choppy and unreliable, but I know that I love you and I know that you love me, and I'll meet you on the other side of this little storm." To do this, it needs a major overhaul, I know, but in writing this I'm starting to get the interest back. Maybe I'll work on it later today, after I do some of the necessary work of my current job.

I really appreciate all the time everyone has been giving this thing-I-wrote-which-is-not-yet-a-poem.

[lizzytysh]

"it's rough right now because we're scared and we feel like we're not connecting very well, and the water is choppy and unreliable, but I know that I love you and I know that you love me, and I'll meet you on the other side of this little storm."

Hi Manna ~

By the sounds of this, it must be a huge, career change.


~ Lizzy

[~greg]

I like the idea that I control my life and my fate. I am the one making the decisions of my life. But the decision I
made recently will effect my family, as it is a change in my career. So the fact that I'm involving them (meaning my husband, since
my daughter is four and doesn't have much input regarding my career) in figuring out how to deal with it seems more fair to me, and
he can be very helpful with these things too.

That's not so scary, is it?

A change in career isn't the kind of thing I thought you might have meant.
But don't kid yourself.
And don't think you can kid me.

Change is scary. It's the scariest thing people ever have to face.
Just look around you. Anywhere in the world.
Every conflict you see is about people resisting change.
And the worse the conflict, the more likely it is
that that's all it's about.

~~

You really ought to involve your daughter in big decisions.
Even if the discussion has to be over tea in make believe
cups and saucers.

To the parents, their decisions are just some things
they have to deal with and pass through.

But to the kids, these decisions are no less
than who they become. They don't pass through them.
They become them.

(Especially if it involves a change in location.
When that's the case, then the parents not only
have to discuss their decisions with the kids,
but they also have to put in a lot more time with them generally,
--in order to make up for the loss of stability in the kids' lives.
Change, if anything, is a lot scarier to kids,
and they are liable to withdraw from life, to some extent,
unless you put as much time and effort into discussing
with them how they feel about things,
as you do in trying to figure out how you happen
to feel about things.
But I don't mean to sound preachy.
I just wanted to remind you of what you already know.)

~~

For the record, I don't think that the fact that the decision is a career change informs the interpretation of the poem.

No it doesn't.
Nor should it.

My first comment on your poem wasn't even tangential.
It was completely flippant and totally irrelevant.
Which is why I had to comment again.
Because I realized that you don't know me.

You don't know that I don't ever explicitly say nice
things about things.
It's a man-thing. You can't understand.
I just need you to know that when I comment
on something, however tangentially, it's my
way of signaling that I like it.

(Except of course in those rare cases where
I really don't like it, --so much so that I just have to
say so. But then I'll say so explicitly.)

I liked your poem, --precisely because it seemed to me
that you wrote it as a way to try to help yourself struggle
with something real. I felt that. And it's a very different
feeling from the feeling I usually get about some other
things that they're just trying to show off.

The first four stanzas seem to be about struggles
between some kind of beauty and some kind of frustration.
And the last two stanzas seemed, to me, to be formal place
holders for making it more concrete and personal.
Whereas instead they fly off in abstract directions,
as if you were trying to avoid saying or dealing
with something.

As if you were trying to convince youself that
"That's not so scary, is it?".

But I certainly don't want to read in the poem
that it's about the beauty and frustration of a
career change decision.

I just want to read a poem that holds together more coherently.

Because I want to see everyone I like hold together more coherently.
It's only the people I don't like that I want to see fly into pieces.

~greg