Farewell

To our loyal readers (all 10 of you):

As you all surely noticed our wonderful blog, sofrigginillegal, has fallen into disuse. While I hate to let go, it is clear to me that the blahg represented an inevitably finite period of both my life and the life of my co-contributor. Thus, there are no more plans to my knowledge for any further posts.

As I pathetically claw my way out of the thick mental fog of an oppressive open-bar-induced hangover and rifle nostalgically through old posts, old elaborately constructed grammatical jokes, and example after example of old, poorly-aimed and entirely unfounded defamation, I can't help but get a warm, fuzzy feeling in my heart. These have indeed been good times. Whether it was Tim's tribute to things he learned from Harry Potter, a post so brilliantly original that should J.K. Rowling ever discover it she will likely giggle with pleasure before promptly calling her lawyers, or me ranting incoherently about some dumb thing or another, I do hope we managed to bring some level of hilarity to new and interesting subjects. Whether it was Tim's angry diatribe against literary critics and their distasteful profession or me ranting again about...some dumb thing or another, I do hope we left you, the reader, feeling confused, disoriented, and mildly nauseated.

But having said as much, I recognize that it is time to move on. I don't want to say that we have outgrown the self-gratifying experience of posting petty and bitter rants, sprinkled with the occasional cheap laugh and/or bodily-function-inspired joke. No, I don't want to say that we've outgrown it, as that would require some conception of maturation. I believe, rather, that we have both simply moved on to different things. Tim is now on his track and I am on mine. Neither of these tracks are by any means stable, set in stone, or even wholly different from each other, but they have diverged and moved elsewhere.

Over the past year, we have both had mornings when rolling over and rubbing the sleep from our eyes we have found ourselves in bed with the naked still-sleeping body of Reality, her long hair slightly knotted and falling over the edge of the bed from the soft white pillow on which she rests her head. We have both looked past her to the condom wrapper on the floor and wondered just how in fuck we ended up here and where we put our pants. And although I, now speaking only for myself, devoted myself to forgetting the memories of these one-night-stands through burying myself in obscure readings from hundreds of years previous and more than occasionally pouring alcohol down my throat with a disturbing sort of religious zeal, they remain timelessly palpable, burned into my brain through some complex biological method which I at one point probably studied.

Reality changes you. She won't make your life for you-- that's still on your shoulders, but the breakfast she serves you once you have finally clawed your way out of the tangled morning sheets has an impressive taste to it.

I stare down at my plate of grim reminders that time is moving on quickly, and while at times you still think it's 1999, biological facts say that your life is, in the most optimistic of projections, a quarter over and no one can change that... served cold on a piece of toast.

But again, our decisions are our own. What might seem like the right one today might seem wrong tomorrow. What might seem right for one person might be wrong for another. But when reality calls, decisions are made. Thankfully for all of us, she'll call again.

So with that, I say goodbye for myself and, if he won't be offended, for Tim too. While it appears that I have taken the Barlow Toll Road and he has decided to raft down the Columbia, risking the sacred lives of his oxen. But while our paths might be different I sincerely hope that whoever happens to be reading this will someday once again be able to track down a new piece of writing by either of this blog's contributors.

So farewell wonderful blog-goers.
May we someday meet happily again in Oregon.

Rise and Shine

Something about Harvard, and I'd wager college in general, is that the pettiest problems in life get magnified to the point of absurdity. In the absence of real-world concerns--for instance, where to eat, where to sleep, how to afford a comfortable lifestyle--matters that would elsewhere be completely meaningless take on disturbing gravity.

For instance:

Why should I care about the cochlea and the basilar membrane? Why should I care whether the world is more or less stable in a bipolar system of state power? Why should I care about the political ramifications of Puccini's Tosca? The most direct answer is that knowing these things is imperative to getting good grades. But why should I care about getting good grades?

For that matter, why should I care about being accepted by a social club? Why should I care about which house I live in next year? Why should I care about gossip, who's fucking whom and who's jealous about it? Why should I care about success in this strange game of college, with its mysterious rules and ridiculous value systems? Soon enough I'll just leave and the only things that will really matter are my friendships and how well prepared I am to work for a living.

Maybe after graduating high school I was just unusual in desperately wanting to go live in the real world. So many of my Harvard friends say they would be living their dream if they could just stay in school forever. This horrifies me. Where have I come, anyway? Is this some sort of refuge from reality? Some dreamworld where the trivial is made serious so that the serious can stay trivial? Everything seems turned on its head, here, and my peers love it.

But I don't. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hate it. I would hate living on the street. I would hate killing people in the military. I would hate working in an office so I can scrape together enough money to own a mediocre bachelor pad and keep up a steady buzz. But I do find it intolerable. I can't wrap my head around it. I can't comprehend the social mores here. I can't seem to cope with this endless lottery of meaning. Here's what I mean by that:

For an hour, or a day, or three weeks, one thing can feel like the most important thing in the world, and then in an instant it's gone. Class ends. The book is finished. The high wears off. Hearts change. And then you grasp at the straws of the rest of the world, which so recently you were content to blur out of focus. You look for something else. Some other fix. Only you know the same thing will happen again; it will up and vanish as quickly as it came. So you grow some brakes, conditioned now to invest yourself less and less in anything. Then you're safe. Then you're numb. Then you're centered around a black hole that is your insatiably hungry self.

Maybe two weeks ago I had some sort of a nervous breakdown. I couldn't write anything. I couldn't think straight. I couldn't focus on a damned thing for more than a few seconds. My memory was shot, my creative reservoirs were dammed or dried up, my speech was erratic and slurred. And I had a paper to write--my final paper--about poetry, of all things.

I went to the hospital. I just wanted to talk to someone. They told me I needed more sleep. Three hours a night was not enough. They prescribed me Valium's little sister. I never picked it up. I managed to get an extension on my paper. They set up an appointment to talk to someone. Then, when the day rolled around, the sewers underneath Harvard Square exploded and all the buildings were shut down. I went out with my friends and got drunk, and found a girl who would lie down with me and not ask any difficult questions. I seemed to be doing all right. But I sure as hell couldn't write a paper about poetry.

Of course, I needed to write a paper about poetry. I didn't want to. I couldn't do it well. But I had to turn something in. And I wanted to leave Harvard. I wanted to get out, catch my breath, and look at it from a distance. I wanted to go to New York. So I just bit down hard on my lip, started banging away at my keyboard, and came up with enough ideas to hopefully fill up ten pages.

Then my computer broke. It wouldn't plug in anymore and the battery had 13 minutes on it. I sent away my most important files, turned it off, and locked myself in an underground computer lab until my whole universe was that LCD screen and the pile of books scattered around the cubby. And I wrote, and wrote, and wrote until I knew I'd be burnt out forever, and then I just kept writing.

Then yesterday morning I was finished. I had a mess. A shameless, meaningless mess. And I handed it in, packed my bag full of some clothes and my journals, and bought a one-way ticket to New York City. On the bus a boy wearing a Harvard t-shirt sat down next to me and worked on homework for the whole five-hour ride. I didn't say a word to him. There was no name on my shirt. I wasn't wearing school colors.

For all anybody knew I could be anybody.

I'm writing this on Eli's computer, in Eli's room fourteen stories above Eli's campus. It seems to me Eli doesn't want his name attached to any of these things anymore, and I don't blame him. I understand. We weren't meant to be cooped up in this dream, and now we're both scratching at the walls, trying desperately to wake up. And sooner or later, it's going to happen.

But first, I suppose, we need to take our exams.

...

Tim Lambert

Nikki Skillman

English 152

5/8/08

Waking from the Dream:

“The Sad Shepherd,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Lapis Lazuli,”

and The Transformative Power of Art

“Art is but a vision of reality,” wrote Yeats in “Ego Dominus Tuus,” but the bulk of his art complicates this seven-word Ars Poetica. Over his decades of composing poems, the nature of this “vision” seems to have changed dramatically, and the relationship between art and reality proved more dynamic than this definitive-sounding statement would suggest. A close reading of three poems, “The Sad Shepherd,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and “Lapis Lazuli,” illuminates Yeats’ developing knowledge of how art and reality affect each other. The three poems trace the lineage of this idea, and their diverse stylistic devices demonstrate its application, from the sad shepherd’s nebulous and misguided perception of art as a dream-tinted filter for reality, to the more sophisticated understanding, discovered in “The Wild Swans at Coole” and at last exercised in “Lapis Lazuli,” of art as a means of waking from the dream of self-fragmentation and mastering reality though self-creation.

"The Sad Shepherd" presents a decidedly unsatisfying relationship between man and art, but the heart of the problem remains elusive. Its sister poem, "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," presents an optimistic view of art's capacity to comfort and heal. The speaker of that poem tells his audience, "words alone are certain good" (43), indicating, it seems, art's ascendancy over action; in practically the same breath, furthermore, he seeks to overturn the dichotomy of dream and reality, as he exhorts the reader "dream, dream, for this is also sooth" (57). In "The Sad Shepherd," however, this optimism breaks down. The title character, evidently following the happy shepherd's advice, looks to a shell to relieve his pain. If we understand the shell, as numerous critics have, as a "symbol for the transformation of reality achieved through art" (Murphy 16), the conclusion of "The Sad Shepherd" demands certain questions. Instead of the promised "melodious guile" (1.39) the sad shepherd finds his words transformed into "an inarticulate moan" (2.27); art has failed completely to fulfill its transformative function. What has caused this failure? One explanation centers on the shepherd himself. Edward Engelberg argues that Yeats, by concluding the poem with the bleak image of an indifferent world, intended to condemn the shepherd and make some implicit normative statement. Yeats, according to Engelberg, does not approve of the shepherd's "simplistic attempt" to push his sadness upon others in "a kind of art-as-therapy" (76). John Unterecker holds a similar sentiment, stating that the shepherd "fails because he is not an artist" (Murphy 19). But the text itself does not bear out such a harsh reading. A softer alternative, proposed by Murphy, suggests that the happy shepherd "represents the dreamer" whereas the sad shepherd represents "the disillusioned realist who is eager to dream but is denied its limited consolation." (19) Perhaps the sad shepherd's attempt to use the shell—that is, to use art—to ease his suffering is not foolish, simplistic, or inherently misguided and therefore doomed to failure; instead, art itself—the dream—is powerless in the face of a persistent, bleak reality.

The sonic composition of "The Sad Shepherd" helps to direct our reading of the outwardly ambiguous ending. Throughout the poem the most dominant and significant sounds seem to be "s" and "w," which, it is worth noting, begin and end the name of the poem's first active character, Sorrow. Early on the "w" sound surrounds the shepherd; indeed, the "s" sound starts out conspicuously absent from his arena. Outside of the title, the main character is never referred to as a shepherd, and is never described as sad. Rather, he is called "a man whom Sorrow named his friend" (in lines 1, 8, and 17) a turn of phrase that not only renders the character the object of his mood, but contrives to place a "w" adjacent to his neutral title. Furthermore, this same curious identifying phrase appears three times throughout the poem, seemingly pinning it together. Yeats' verb choice early in the poem seems dominated by the "w" sound; the shepherd "was" (1) then "went walking" (3) and the "windy surges wend" (4). Meanwhile, most of the other 'characters' in the poem—that is, those objects the shepherd encounters and entreats to listen—all alliterate with a common "s" sound: "stars," "sea," "shell," and even the "sands" to which Yeats reallocates the epithet "humming" that described the sea in "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" (35). The one exception is the dewdrops, which have their own distinct sound—an appropriate choice given their characterization as self-obsessed, "listening…for the sound of their own dropping" (15-16). If it is possible to associate a single sound with a particular quality, Yeats does so in this poem by repeatedly using "s" for untrustworthy and indifferent things.

In the second half of the poem, however, the shepherd begins to resemble, at least sonically, these indifferent objects. It begins in line 9, when the shepherd cries out, "Dim sea, hear my most piteous story!" an appeal which seems to hold a suggestion of kinship—as if the sea should be interested for no other reason than the sonic connection it bears to his tale. The sea, of course, does bear a resemblance to the shepherd—like him, it "cried" (10), but still it does not care. The shepherd's identification with the sea seems to be his fundamental mistake; he confuses a superficial resemblance for a promise of a legitimate connection. In his monologue the shepherd loads his language with "s" sounds—"story" (19), "shall send" (20), "sadness" (21), "shall sing" (22)—but the subjects of these sentences are "words" (20), "whispering words" (23), and he reiterates the word "own" three times, almost obsessively. The reason for the sad shepherd's artistic failure lies first in his mistaking the similar for the sympathetic, as second in the reflexive nature of his efforts; he looks at art as a means of changing himself and his plight in his own eyes. But art is not really capable of that. His looking to art as a way to make reality more artistic, more dreamlike, was always bound to backfire.

Gender comes into play in strange and discomforting ways in "The Sad Shepherd." The shepherd is clearly identified as male, as is Sorrow, who calls him "his friend" (1). The word "her" however, reveals both the sea (in lines 10 and 12) and the shell (in line 28) as female. The stars and dewdrops remain sexless groups, though perhaps due only to the gender-neutral nature of plural pronouns. The rhymes, however, complicate this split. The shepherd's first action—beyond simply existing—occurs in lines 2-3, which feature feminine endings, while Sorrow and the windy surges occupy male lines that embrace the shepherd's couplet. The man is surrounded by nature and supernatural, personified moods, which impose on him a sly sexual inversion. Impotency cripples the shepherd; the female objects reject his advances and the male mood essentially forces himself upon him. He has no stable sexual identity and he consequently suffers at the hands of both male and female forces. The man's passiveness is asserted more concretely in this quatrain by the preponderance of present participles that describe him—"walking" is parallel to "dreaming" (2-3) and subordinate to the fairly weak verb "went" (3)—which contrast sharply against the strong, short, perfect verbs of Sorrow ("named" in line 1) and the surges ("wend" in line 4). Participles help put a subject in a suspended state, continuously acting without completion; the poem is written in the past tense, but we appreciate that the shepherd's problem remains in the present; he is stuck with this undeveloped artistic understanding.

Yeats wrote “The Wild Swans of Coole,” his mediation on love and aging, some thirty years after “The Sad Shepherd,” and the poem not surprisingly strikes a much different tone. Whereas the shepherd of the previous poem finds himself in the throes of passionate despair, the speaker in “The Wild Swans of Coole” grieves precisely because he seems to have lost his capacity for any passionate emotion. He is depressed, paradoxically, because he has grown numb to his former depression. Nevertheless the speaker of the latter poem bears some resemblance to the shepherd of the former, in that both have to confront a seemingly insurmountable kind of sorrow, and both attempt to do so through art. "The Wild Swans of Coole" reflects a more effective approach than the shepherd's so-called "art-as-therapy," and this is largely due to the poet's more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between dream and reality.

The final stanza, in its swirl of dreams, death, and transcendent life, provides a second view into Yeats’ interpretation of art as a reality-transforming device. This stanza is also the most hotly-contested piece of the poem, not least of all because Yeats' drafts show that late in the poem's development he moved it from the middle of the poem to the end (Bloom 191). The final image of the poem is the speaker awakening, traversing the boundary between different types of consciousness, but the nature of each consciousness has confounded critics. According to Harold Bloom, "awakening here is not death but the end of antithetical consciousness" (192), by which he means the perpetual conflict between "soul and self, mind and heart" (12); Richard Ellmann, meanwhile, supposes that Yeats' "awakening would be his death" (192). Murphy argues against Bloom's interpretation on the grounds that the speaker "has already experienced heart-weariness and loss of passion," (148) but still speaks as though his final awakening has not yet happened; "When is it to happen?" he rightly demands of Bloom. No explanation for the speaker's awakening seems satisfactory when it dwells only on the poet's intellectual development, and the tone of the final passage contains more than just a hint of optimism. To focus on what the speaker has lost or outgrown, rather than the delight "other men's eyes" enjoy (29), results in an unnecessarily dark and limited reading.

Despite the tension expressed explicitly and implicitly in the text, many of the poem's stylistic features endow it with a pervading sense of peace. According to Murphy, "the whole mood of the poem is one of incompleteness, or more specifically, of near-completeness" (146). In defense of this reading he cites the numerology of the poem; nineteen years is just short of a round two decades, and fifty-nine swans is just short of a round, even number. As they paddle, "lover by lover," he reminds us, "one swan, at least, lacks a lover" (147). Furthermore, he notes how the swans scatter "in great broken rings" (his emphasis). He skips over still more evidence that could support his view; for example, the swans "all suddenly mount" (10) even before the speaker "had well finished" (9) counting them. Murphy's point is sound; nothing about the setting is satisfying or stable. The speaker even says, hyperbolically, "All's changed" (16). Yet the mechanics of the verse curb and contain this instability. Helen Vendler describes how a peaceful quality is inherent to the particular lyric form, which Yeats created for the poem: "The closing couplet, with its asymmetrical rhyming lines, is somehow deeply solacing, as the "ballad" stanza—overbrimming both its quatrain-base and its tetrameter-trimeter metric—extends itself into completion" (118). The syntax enhances this effect and adds to it a sense of stability and regularity by lining up consistently with the line lengths; the majority of lines end in some punctuation mark, and every stanza ends with a period.

This relationship, in which the poem's structure overrides its semantic content, holds significant implications for the relationship between art and reality. Yet another critic, Jahan Ramazani, weighs in on the final stanza of "The Wild Swans at Coole," but his explanation does not get hung up on forms of consciousness; instead, he traces the transformation of the swan’s symbolic meaning and arrives at a surprising conclusion:

Re-described in aesthetic terms ("Mysterious, beautiful"), the swans come to resemble the very object of mystery and beauty that the poet has just fashioned. Like the poem, they will soon leave the compass of his vision to delight other eyes in ways he could never predict. Overcoming the sad thought of loss, Yeats celebrates indirectly his aesthetic gain….[T]he miseries of self-division have given rise to the joys of self-creation." (145)

This interpretation casts out the vague and troublesome reading of the swans as emblems of youthful passion in favor of a more cohesive reading of the swans as roughly analogous to the "whispering words" of the sad shepherd. The speaker, after all, can still see and count the swans just as he could nineteen years before; he looks forward--with more curiosity than apprehension--to a time when he will no longer be able to do so. His sore heart derives from his inability to identify with the swans, whose "hearts have not grown old" (22) in his middle age; their presence mocks him and aggravates his obsessive thoughts on aging. He will be glad to awake and find they have flown away; he is appreciative at the thought of their delighting "men's eyes" elsewhere. Whereas the shepherd hoped his "own words, re-echoing" could travel through a filter of a lifeless, "hollow, pearly heart" (21), spreading "their sadness" (21), and return to him as a "comforting" (23) song, the speaker of "The Wild Swans at Coole" acknowledges that the swans will leave him forever, and "delight" (29) human audiences. The shepherd hopes to console himself by hearing a more artistic version of his reality; the speaker by the lake will find solace by turning his reality into art and relinquishing it. This is art's true transformative power--not to dress up reality to make it less intolerable, but to convert one's internal reality into an external work--to achieve "self-creation" through "self-division."

By the time Yeats wrote “Lapis Lazuli,” about two decades after “The Wild Swans at Coole” and fifty years after “The Sad Shepherd,” death had overtaken aging as the poet’s principal anxiety. And with another impending World War, Yeats felt compelled to defend art from the prattle of “hysterical women,” the vulgar crowd that minimized its relevance in the face of international catastrophe. The presentation of art in this poem may seem a far cry from that presented in “The Wild Swans of Coole,” but in a certain sense it is its logical extension. Yeats makes a claim that at first glance should strike the reader as strange—that art and characters within art, including the eminently tragic “Hamlet and Lear,” are “gay” (16). He claims, furthermore, that when all features of civilization fall apart, “those that build them again are gay” (36). Vendler describes this final claim as the poem’s “own hysteria of alliance with the new victors” (237), but such a dismissal might be unfair. The term “gay” does not simply denote happiness or merriment, but a lack of—or even incapacity for—seriousness. In the sense that those who rebuild civilization cannot hold any ties to the destroyed predecessor, similar to the sense that an actor does not actually have a personal connection to his fictional character, the rebuilders will actually conduct themselves with some level of detachment—a sort of gaiety. It is with this meaning in mind that we should approach the fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem, in which Yeats switches his focus from the absurdly wide arena of history to the minutiae of a broken lapis lazuli medallion.

This instance of ekphrasis adds a curious twist to the relationship between art and reality established by the previous two poems. If we accept that art is the conversion of a subjective, fluid reality into an objective, stable text, then ekphrasis could be called the opposite—the extrapolation of a subjective reality from a static object. At the same time, however, the imaginative, subjective effort involved in ekphrasis produces its own object. ONE CRITIC argues that Yeats uses ekphrasis to rehearse “death in the ruin of the artifact, as if to master death by repeatedly challenging himself to embrace fragmentation” (158-159). Death aside, “The Sad Shepherd” described a character unwilling to embrace fragmentation, preferring to hear his “own words, re-echoing” (20); the close of “The Wild Swans at Coole,” described the poet’s thoughts just before the moment of fragmentation—before he awakes from the ‘dream,’ the absolutely internal experience of artistic conception. We would expect, then, that the ekphrasis in “Lapis Lazuli” would show the completion of this exercise.

The meticulously ordered world of the lapis lazuli contrasts sharply against the chaos of Yeats grand historical vistas, but Yeats does not emphasize its tranquility to imply that it is a refuge. The structure of the six-line stanza, in which Yeats describes the medallion, more or less objectively, evokes a sense of stability:

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument. (37-42)

Vendler has commented on how the punctuation at the end of each line helps to slow the “tetrameter-advance,” and notes that “the compositional unit of the poem, the quatrain, is ‘reduced’…to end-punctuated two-line syntactic units” (238). Ramazani adds that this breakdown briefly gives the poem “a lapidary stillness and objectivity, each pair of lines built as a complete syntactic unit on the earlier pair” (155). He also points out the orderliness evoked by the use of numbers (“two,” and “third”) and “spatial indices” (“behind,” “over”), and finally argues that “the reliable social and semiotic structures mirror one another: the servingman is subordinate to his masters, the bird subordinate to its [symbolic] meaning” (154-155). The fragmentation of the quatrain is driven home by the stanza’s break after six lines, mid-quatrain. This split also demonstrates the facility and spontaneity with which Yeats launches past objective description and into imaginative creation in the following stanza.

This last stanza shows a remarkable turn on Yeats part, as he uses ekphrasis not only as a means of “rehearsing” death, but as an opportunity for self-creation. The first lines (44-45), point out the deteriorating condition of the lapis lazuli, (“Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent”) and the adjective “accidental” reminds us that these literal fragmentations are the result of pure chance. The following lines, however, transform these accidents into effective artistic choices; each “[s]eems a water-course or an avalanche, / Or lofty slope where it still snows” (46). In the following lines, Yeats’ imagination creates a “little half-way house” (48) from nothing, and he says “I / Delight to imagine them seated there” (49-50). The enjambed verb holds a special significance; “delight” last appeared in “The Wild Swans at Coole,” when the swans delighted other men’s eyes. In “Lapis Lazuli,” Yeats has managed to find some delight for himself in the imaginative act. This delight, perhaps, stems from the gaiety he finds in this exercise of detached fragmentation, this rehearsal of death through another medium.

Yeats’ artistic sensibilities developed drastically over the fifty-years that these three poems span, and this development seems to follow a coherent and continuous strand. Regardless of how much Yeats personally identified with the title character of “The Sad Shepherd,” the man whom Sorrow named his friend exemplifies the immature artist—lost in “dreaming” (2), looking for comfort from his “own words” (20). His search for an audience would inevitably result in feelings of betrayal and “persecution” (12), for his ideal audience is himself. The wisdom of Yeats later poems confirms that the sad shepherd is hardly an artist at all; he has no intention of waking from his dream or transforming his sadness into a song with “melodious guile” by his own devices. The speaker of “The Wild Swans at Coole,” by contrast, looks forward to waking from this dream, when his sorrow, the fuel for his art, shall fly away and delight others. Yeats, as an old man imagining the affairs of other old men carved into stone, finds delight for himself as he simultaneously experiences and creates art. Art possesses great transformative power, but the thing it really transforms is the artist; it takes his internal reality and externalizes it into something he can, ideally, release. Once the artist recognizes this, he can delight in the process itself, and confidently view life and death with a cold, detached eye, knowing art has endowed him with the final authority over his reality.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press. 1970.

Engelberg, Edward. “’He too was in Arcadia’: Yeats and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall.” Critical Essays on W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard Finneran. G.K. Hall. 1986.

Murphy, Frank Hughes. Yeats’ Early Poetry: The Quest for Reconciliation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1975

Ramazani, Jahan. Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1990.

Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2007.

It's Educational

Imagine sitting in the most important lecture of the most important class you'll ever take. The professor has fifty-three minutes or so to run through his exquisitely crafted speech, which runs over such a vast intellectual spectrum, end to end, that you can scarcely believe he ever managed to put it to words. He's talking fast. He's practically frothing at the mouth. You put your pen to paper and try to jot down the ideas, but they're too rapid, too diverse. You can't compress them. Nothing is less important and nothing is more important. You can't sum anything up. You try to write everything and end up writing nothing. All you can do is sit back and listen, pay as close attention as possible and hope you can remember it all.

But you can't. You'll forget it soon enough. Maybe you'll get drunk that night and obliterate the day. Maybe you'll have to read a book on something completely different and it will take hold of your attention. Maybe five minutes after it's over you'll run into someone on the street so fantastic you'll resolve never to think again. Or maybe it just so happens that another lecture will be happening right afterward, and it will seem just as important, just as fiercely fast, and you'll give up on all the stuff from the previous hour and grasp at the fleeting memory of the next.

As far as I can tell this frustrating compromise necessarily defines the life of anyone who thinks too much. For some people, every single moment is the most important moment. Every single thought is the most strikingly beautiful thing that's ever bounded through their brain.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are people out there who think just the right amount to fill up a few pages of a diary every night. Others maybe have just enough thoughts to capture them all in a novel or two. I've heard that a young poet who writes an epic is pouring everything he's got into one mess of a work, and if you really try, you can see the embryos of just about all the wonderful things he'll ever write lurking in those ill-formed lines, waiting to be born once the lad grows some patience or age slows him down. But I don't know about that.

All I know is that there are other people who aren't like that at all. They have so many thoughts that a constant stenographer couldn't capture them all. Constantly composing, constantly reordering, constantly creating, these people just run their minds like a drunkard runs his mouth and they don't stop even in sleep.

I'd like to think most of us are like that. It would make me feel better about myself.

But then: I don't know. I describe this to a medical professional and alarms go off. It's mania. It's psychosis. It's something and it's bad and it's scary and it's got to stop.

I'm not anti-psychiatry. I'm not a Scientologist. I don't think psychotherapy is enforcing psychic conformity. I think people who study the mind in order to help people with odd minds have nothing but the best intentions--though maybe with a small dose of voyeurism on the side.

But I also think they're prone to terrible misunderstandings. For all their studies they don't actually know very much. It's mostly guesswork.

So when I say I'm deep in thought at all times, they assume it's a problem. When I say my thoughts run away from me, they assume its a problem. When I say I can't sleep because my mind just keeps racing, they assume--well, all right. Maybe it's a bit of a problem.

But what's the alternative? Are there really people out there who habitually shift into autopilot for huge segments of the day? What the hell are they doing in those hours? Running on brainstem?

Is that normal? Is the human mind just so advanced and so incomprehensible even to itself that it has evolved failsafe switches that click on and off at random intervals just to give a break to whatever lobe our consciousness is hiding in? Is that really how it works? We're supposed to zone out every so often for our own good?

I don't like that thought at all. So my mind races. That's what minds do! Let it be.

Straitjacket

If it helps: this is fiction.

* * *

Four days ago I'll walk down that brick sidewalk round the bend in Mass Ave with a man in a suit an arm's distance from me to my left, half a step behind. He'll escort me but I'll know where I'm going. Through the goofy glass doors in the Holyoke Center, across the wide geometrical hallway and past the tables and the security guards and the picture of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon grinning about something stupid at this mediocre sandwich shop and then past the pharmacy on the left and through the other glass doors and into University Health Services, fourth floor, take a right off the elevator and head to the receptionist under the Mental Health sign.

God, this was going to be a long story. I had to skip most of it.

On the way, though, he'll make talk that sounds deceptively small.

"So is there anything about Harvard that has been good? How have your classes been?"

He'll have this sort of shy, reserved slant to his voice. It will remind me of early in high school when my friends' voices would suddenly turn deep and they would seem vaguely uncomfortable with the pitch.

I'll take a while answering the question because the voice is so distracting, but after maybe twenty seconds I'll say calmly:

"Actually, not really. Frankly it's been unimpressive. I think I liked my high school classes more, and that's saying something."

He'll be shocked but try not to show it.

"So, so what's been the problem?"

I'll answer straightaway. "The TFs aren't invested, the professors are aloof. They've been too easy and little more than irritating. Overall I think this whole year has been a waste of time."

He'll be quiet for a long moment and I'll practically be able to hear the cogs turning in his head. I'll recognize now just how brilliant he is--Harvard undergrad, Oxford doctorate, and a career spent dealing with schmucks like me out of the pure benevolence of his soul and all that--but it won't be that opaque brilliance everyone finds so fascinating in artists and physicists and schizophrenics, rather that transparent intelligence one perceives while watching an army of ants rebuilding their anthill in fast-forward.

What an interesting dude, I'll think. Too bad this is how I meet him.

All this will happen while we're still out on the street. People will pass by in t-shirts and tank tops wearing flip-flops and carrying bags from the bookstore. The sun'll be shining through a thin weave of white clouds and the ground flashes on and off in the yellow rays and the gray shades that click by like different lenses at the optometrist. I'll still be walking ahead of him, not looking at him. I'll seem contemptuous and I'll feel it, too.

"So if you don't come back next year, do you have any plans for what to do?" he'll say.

"Not really," I'll say. "Might work on the Cape. Might go out West. The important thing is to not be here."

He'll have no response. He'll remain in that loud silence you feel near someone searching for a thing to say until we get inside University Health Services.

We'll take the elevator up. He won't say anything.

At the receptionist he'll explain things. "I'm Dean Cooper here with Tim Lambert."

"Right," the old woman will say, "I fixed that up just now."

In the waiting room I won't pick up any of the literature. I'll have read it all before. I'll look straight ahead and not say anything until spoken to. And he'll speak to me.

"So, did, so have you spent summers on the Cape before?"

"Most of them when I was growing up."

"Oh."

There will be silence. It will drag on.

"You know, I've, uh, only been to the Cape once. It was, ah, I remember I had some oysters, or, I had to pass on some oysters. I didn't know it at the time, I found out later, maybe you know, something about not eating oysters in the wrong season. Something about the months with Rs. September, November, I guess it goes through April."

I won't know what the fuck he'll be talking about. So I won't say anything. He won't bother with words after that.

Ten minutes will pass and he'll get up and go to the receptionist. I'll have noticed the sign already that says "If it is ten minutes past your scheduled appointment time and you are still waiting, check with the receptionist." Now it'll be twelve minutes past. He'll say something to the old woman.

"She still hasn't seen you?" A pause. "Apparently she's running late and is on her way up."

"Ok, ok," the Dean will say, and come to sit again next to me.

The doctor will come in all flurried, wearing cross-trainers and a weird sun dress. Oh boy, I'll think.

She'll introduce herself and so will the Dean. I'll stay silent. She'll stick out her hand. I'll take it, shake it, stand up, and follow her wordlessly.

We'll all sit down in an office with walls covered in children's drawings. Dean Cooper will explain things, badly.

"So Tim here, we're worried about him and we thought we'd bring him in here and have you talk with him and hopefully help him with his problems."

She won't look at him. She'll keep her eyes on me. They'll be kind eyes. Only slightly patronizing.

"Another student came to us and told us he might be a danger to himself, so the College decided to intervene. He's been struggling with depression, and uh, we've talked about the possibility of taking a leave of absence."

"Ah, and how do you feel about that option, Tim?" she'll say.

"I'd like to leave today, if that's all right."

They'll both sit back.

Dean Cooper will say, "Ah, well, then uh, if that's the case we can talk more about that later today and I'm sure we can make that happen."

"Great," I'll say.

The therapist will lean in. "How do feel about all this, the college stepping in and everything?"

"It's ridiculous. Not going to help. The only problem I have can only be solved through exactly the avenue they've closed off."

The therapist will look confused. Dean Cooper will step in: "I assume he's referring to talking with this other student. She's requested that all contact be severed between the two."

"Ah," says the therapist.

"I just asked that she speak with me so that we could sort out this problem, or at least acknowledge me so I can act like the problem is solved," I'll say, "but apparently she decided that was too much to ask, and instead is trying to get me kicked out of the school."

"Now--" both the others will start. The therapist will defer to the Dean.

"That's not--we're just trying to respect everyone's wishes and find a way to keep you safe and comfortable."

"You're saying I can't talk to her, and I need to talk to a shrink or you'll make me leave. That's what you said."

"Yes," he'll say.

"Now, why is it that you want so badly to talk to her," the therapist will ask. The deconstruction will have begun.

"Because she’s standing in the way of my functioning normally and comfortably at the College. The Dean's Office seems to think the best way to resolve this is to support her in this immature behavior and make me jump through these hoops so that I can lie down and accept her abuse."

The Dean will respond: "She has asked not to be contacted and we have to respect her wishes."

"Right," I'll say. "That's her right, not to be bothered even if she's bothering someone else. This is America, after all. And she’s a girl, after all. I'm just trying to sort this out in the most mature way possible, and that means actually having a dialogue with her, since she is the one causing the problem."

"Are you depressed now?" the therapist will ask.

"No," I'll say, too angrily. "Or if I am, so what? I'm not a danger to myself or anyone else. It’s my stone and I have to carry it, and it’s as simple as that. I'm just angry that I'm being forced to come here and miss class because someone else is trying to screw me over. I don't need this."

Dean Cooper will be clearly uncomfortable. He'll have places to be. He'll be a busy man, after all.

"Well, I'm going to head out now and let you talk, but first, I, uh, I'll need you to agree to a, ah, breach of confidentiality, that Dr. Gurier will, ah, be allowed to talk to be about what you say."

I'll be livid. "Sure, whatever," I'll say. 'Just get the fuck out,' I'll be thinking. 'Hell if I'm going to say anything important now.'

He'll stand up and leave, assuming the healing will commence.

* * *

Meanwhile back in that twisted hellhole of a mind I weigh my options. I find a striking lucidity flowing under everything and I can understand exactly what sort of behavior will lead to what sort of a result. I can rank all the possible moves in order of ease, self-interested rationality, clinical pathology, moral legitimacy, and visceral appeal. I can shuffle them. I can alphabetize them. I can juggle them. I can cut the deck and make one disappear in a puff of smoke and reappear behind your ear and then chew it up and spit it out and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Here's my first thought: say the hell with everything and hop a bus to New York. Get my friend there to put me up for a week, meanwhile shoot off an email that secures a leave of absence three weeks before the end of class, erase the past half a year from my record and the past year from memory, buy a ticket to Seattle and from there up to Alaska and fish for crabs.

Why crabs? It's the darkest, most isolated, least glorious job on the face of the earth to fish for crabs in Alaskan waters. It's dangerous as hell but somebody has to do it, and somebody will always do it, because so long as this world is filled with billions of greedy mouths there will always be a demand for any edible product, and whether or not somebody died (or missed the first seven months of his son's life and had his wife leave him for some nomadic environmentalist with a trust fund and too much time on his hands who just wanted to shack up for a night) while on that long thankless voyage in the ass-end ice-water seas of nowhere, you're still going to think it's delicious.

Here's my second thought: track down the bitch who is trying to get me kicked out of school, chew her out, tell her she can go fuck herself and then spray-paint on the front of her dorm that she puts out on the first date and has a dry, razor burnt cunt—which might be vandalism, but not libel. Then proceed with Plan A sans email to the Dean.

Third thought: stop going to class, hang out till exam period, and then tell the Dean I want a leave of absence, say my goodbyes to my friends, meet up with my woman flying in from across the country to see me, buy a one way ticket to follow her back out West, work at a restaurant or library or a national park for a few months and apply to her school for next year's spring term.

Fourth thought: play by the rules, put up with therapy, ignore Ms. Dry-Cunt, ask for a leave of absence and see how a fall on my own feels. Come back in the Spring and hope for the best. Sacrifice my sense of self-worth and disregard my abused sense of justice and accept that the world is a rotten place that favors rotten people and the only thing for it is to make enough money to live on an island in the sun until a long cancerous death undoes everything.

Fifth thought: pretend nothing ever happened, and pray nothing ever will.

Sixth thought: buy a huge bag of weed, light up, and don't stop until I find God or some greater or equal substitute. Accept that whether I'm insane or the world's insane, the fact remains it's much easier to shape my mind to fit the world than to shape the world to fit my mind, and whether I've lied and cheated myself out of myself in order to live in some facsimile of happiness, it makes no difference because I won't be able to tell the difference between the facsimile and the real thing, and that the truth doesn't matter and ought to be cast aside for its inflexibility given the fact that our beliefs are functionally identical and far more comforting if we make them pretty and invest ourselves in them. Call it all growing up and delete all evidence of thinking otherwise.

Seventh thought: stop half-assing self-obliteration and just—

Look at that.

* * *

I come back from all this. I look around the office. Behind me: a dollhouse with felt-covered dog figurines that shake their heads when you squeeze them. Children's pictures everywhere. I especially like one of an iguana eating a bee with its massive curling tongue. Sun's not coming through the window because this crumby place looks out into an alley. Doctor's waiting for me to talk. What has it been? Ten minutes? Twenty? When can I go?

"I'm fine," I say. I look her in the eye.

"Really?" she asks.

"You know I'd come back in if I weren't." I say.

"Would you?"

"Yes, provided I was the one making the decision. Or someone who knows me. Cares about me."

"And you have people like that?"

"More than I can keep track of."

"And what will you do about school? Are you still going to leave?"

"I'll finish the semester."

"And after?"

I sigh. "Ma'am, I don't know what I'm eating for lunch today. Talking about 'after' won't amount to much of anything in the way of truth or honesty. All I can say is that I'll be sure to think it all over."

"Good. That sounds good."

I don't say anything.

"I want you to come in later this week."

"Why?"

"Just to check in."

"Do I have a choice?"

She thinks it over.

"Never mind," I say. "I'll come in."

"OK. Friday at 11:30. I'll see you then."

I stand up. She hands me her card. I thank her. She wishes me luck. I leave.

Ten minutes later I'm in my room. My phone rings. I ignore it. I lie down but I can't keep still. I sit up. I feel sick. I stand. I pace. My phone rings again. I ignore it. The sun is shining through the window. I open it, light a cigarette, blow smoke through the screen. I throw it away after two drags. I contemplate the vodka in my drawer. I look at the clock. It's 1:30 on a Monday afternoon. Hours, hours, hours, hours. Shit.

Pills on my windowsill. I stopped taking them weeks ago. I remember what they did to me. To hell with it, I think, and pop two antipsychotics. Then I pass out and agree to forget how scary it can be living in this skull until the next time I really think about it. In my sleep I’ll wonder whether it’s the skull or the world outside that’s really the scary thing. And I won’t get anywhere at all. When I wake up I’ll still have to bite my lip and stand in line and listen to my sensible friends and grow up straight and narrow and never do anything more meaningful than living up to expectations. And when people ask me what I want to do with my life, I’ll have to say “This, that, and the other thing,” because nobody really gets what I mean when I say I just want to keep it.

On Megiddo

I don't remember when I realized that I had begun to always keep the blinds down. I thought about it for a minute as I looked through them out the single window of my cramped studio. Sometimes I'll go hours without leaving my apartment's lone chair. I'll just stare at the blinds.

Tonight the small slits of 3 AM sky, my only hint of a world beyond the piles of dirty clothes and scattered paper, were bright orange.

"Huh," I said aloud. I always feel self-conscious when I start speaking to myself. Fuck, why is that? There's no one around to hear me talking to myself, yet I'm embarrassed about the fact that I'm talking when no one's around.

I wondered if maybe this was the Rapture. My coffee was cold. When it rains it pours.

Then again, I'm not really sure how the Rapture works. The extent of my Biblical education doesn't cover the apocalypse. The worthy are supposed to ascend into Heaven, I know that. I don't see any bodies blocking out the orange glow, though. Then again, we are in New York.

Maybe I have the whole thing wrong, I think to myself. That really is a stupid phrase. Who else are you going to think to?

The sea turns red with blood, but the sky? The sky reflects the oceans right? No, the oceans reflect the sky. I'm not the science type. Nor am I the religious type. When I am alone at night I like to think about things I am completely uneducated about. I like to draw my own conclusions based on faulty understandings of the most basic elements of the subject being examined. This all occurs in my head. Although I'm tempted to talk it out to myself, to lend it more meaning, I am terrified that the people who are not here when I am alone will see that I am wrong and judge me so. I don't think I could handle that kind of embarrassment.

Fuck it, I thought. I threw the collection of Bukowski poems, which had been sitting idly on my lap for the past half hour, to the floor. I sat up. The blinds hadn't been pulled up in over a month. I wouldn't dare force them out of their established cultural norm. I lifted one of the slats cautiously.

I sat back down. There were no horsemen, no seas of blood, no saintly ascending into heaven, no fire, no brimstone. The clock blinked 5:09. Maybe it was just the sun coming up. It was time to go to bed.

Something Terrible

We were lying together when all of this happened. Our position was mostly out of necessity. The only furniture in her room was a dresser and a mattress on the floor. I’d never complain about the setup, but she kept apologizing for it. I did tease her, though. I told her it didn’t even look like someone lived there. I never told her that when she lit the candles late at night it felt like the only home I’d ever had. I’d never tell her something like that. She’d only laugh.

I stared at the shadows on the ceiling and the quivering circles of light cast by the candle on the dresser. She was turned away from me, lying on her side, maybe eighteen inches away. I tried not to think about anything.

“So,” she said after a while, and abruptly rolled onto her other side and looked at me.

I did not face her. “So what?”

“What are you thinking?” she whispered.

I glanced at her, then fixed my eyes to the ceiling.

“I’m thinking I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Hm,” she said, and looked up at the ceiling herself, as if trying to find what I saw up there more interesting than her. “So where are you supposed to be?”

“Nowhere. I just shouldn’t be here in particular.”

She stretched her arms toward the ceiling and yawned falsely. “Want some gum?” she asked, sitting up reaching for her purse on the floor.

“No.”

I could feel her freeze for the tiniest of moments. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“All right then.” She put down her purse without taking out the gum. Then she lied down and stared at the opposite wall. After a while she said, “Why shouldn’t you be here?”

I hesitated before answering. “I’m not allowed.”

“What does that mean?”

“She asked me not to see you.”

“When?”

“Last time we talked.”

“When was that?”

“A while ago.”

“What did you say?”

I was silent.

“Did you say you wouldn’t see me?”

“I didn’t say I would.”

“So you lied.”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“She asked me not to see you and I just sort of said ‘Hm,’” I lied.

“That must have been a fun conversation.”

“It actually was.”

She stayed quiet for a minute. I could tell she was thinking things over, trying to put it all together. She’d never manage, I knew. Finally she admitted it.

“So if she asked you not to see me then why are you here?”

“She’s got no right to tell me what not to do anymore.”

“Oh.”

At last I rolled onto my side and looked at her. To my surprise I found her staring at me.

“Then you won’t tell her you saw me?”

“Sure I will.”

“What? Why?”

“I haven’t lied to her yet,” I lied, “And I don’t see why I should start now.”

“But it’s not lying if you just don’t tell her.”

“She’ll ask what I did this weekend. I’d be lying if I said I did anything other than this.” I looked back up at the ceiling.

She waited a minute before saying, “Maybe she won’t ask.”

“She’ll ask.”

“But why does she need to know?”

“It’s the truth.”

“But it’s just going to hurt her. She doesn’t need to know.”

“I don’t see why it should hurt her,” I lied. “She made the decision for both of us.”

“Still—”

“Right. Still.”

“I just mean it’s better to be on good terms with—”

“She and I are on good terms. We’re on great terms.”

“Oh.”

Then she fell totally silent and looked away from me. She disturbed the air of the room when she moved and I watched the lights on the ceiling flicker as the current swept over the flame. I could hear cars driving by the house occasionally, and more consistently and quietly on the nearby main road, following their speedy ways home through the night. I could not hear her breathe.

Somewhere else in the apartment, I knew, Sean was sitting alone. I wondered if he was reading a book he found, or eating something, or thinking of music, or maybe listening by an irresistible compulsion to this whispered conversation and wondering what the hell was wrong with his best friend that he should be in this girl’s room and accomplish nothing at all. Whether or not I was wasting my time, I realized, I certainly was wasting his. I thought of getting out of the bed, but the idea quickly faded.

I tried to listen to her breathe. All I could hear were the cars and above them a dull, constant ringing. I sighed and she heard me.

“What does that noise mean?” she said from her corner of the bed.

“Don’t worry about it.”

She rolled over and came closer to me. She rose up to her elbow and held her head aloft and seemed to brandish her chest so that her breasts fell against each other and the dark crevice on her fair skin suggested their full curve under her thin black shirt. I closed my eyes and tried to think about nothing.

“You’re so confusing,” she said.

“I know. Imagine if you had to deal with me every day.”

She laughed softly.

“Let me tell you. It’s not fun.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“See? Are you trying to frustrate me?”

“Look who’s talking.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked as she pulled her dark bangs across her forehead. Beneath I could see her long eyelashes in sharp relief against the pure brightness of her skin. I had long since given up on keeping my eyes closed.

“What the hell are we doing, anyway?” I asked, knowing she couldn’t answer.

“Well, I said two weeks ago I wanted to see how it went.”

“How what went? What’s going?”

She peered straight into my eyes with a new kind of intensity.

“Well?” I asked.

She said nothing.

“Exactly,” I said. “You haven’t got a damn clue.”

I rolled out of bed. Then I stood.

She sat up. “What are you doing?”

“I’m putting my shoes on.”

“Why? Where are you going?”

“Away,” I said.

She moved as if to stand up, but did not. She sat on the bed looking up at me. The candlelight coming from the floor changed her face.

“Why?”

“Because we’re just wasting each other’s time.”

“What?” She contorted her face and shrunk her eyes to slits and in the strange light I could not work out what it meant. Maybe it didn’t mean anything.

“Two weeks ago wasn’t any different except that it was two weeks ago. And two weeks from now won’t be any different except we’ll be two weeks older.”

“I—,” she started, looking down. Then: “What do you want?”

I took a minute to respond. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I just want it now,” I said. “I don’t want to lie with you and just think about lying with you and what else I want. It’s awful. It’s the worst kind of nothing.” I was raising my voice now. Sean could probably hear.

“I don’t think it’s awful,” she said quietly.

“Then I guess that’s the problem. I’m leaving.”

“Don’t,” she said as I turned to the door.

“Yeah? Why the fuck not?”

She was silent. Everything was silent. No cars sped by in the distance. For a moment I would have believed that nothing at all moved or lived outside that room.

Over my shoulder I watched the candlelight play on the bare walls. I remembered the radiator in the corner and thought it was letting out an impossibly quiet buzz. And I considered the candle wicks and could almost sense the miniscule cracks and hiss of fire on wax. And I felt the wood-panel floor under my shoes and imagined the endless argument of groans and squeaks filling out this whole room under me.

But I heard none of those things. All I heard was the faint, rhythmic, nasal whir of her breathing. Then I heard her sniffle. It was the only answer she was going to give me.

I turned around to face her. My hand was on the doorknob.

“How is it possible,” I said softly, “that it feels wrong to stay and wrong to go?”

She shrugged.

“We’ve done something terrible, haven’t we?”

She nodded.

“And neither of us really knows what it is, do we?”

She shook her head.

“Do you still want me to stay?”

She did not look at me. “I want you to do what you want.” Her voice was flat.

“I don’t know what I want.”

“Well, then just…just pick something.”

My whole mind seemed to trip over itself. I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to make up an explanation. I wanted to throttle her. I wanted to sleep with her. I wanted to hold her and feel her breathe and try desperately to fall for her and make all the time before become a distant nightmare. I wanted to stay with her forever and ever and most of all I wanted to leave because that I could do by myself.

I turned the knob and pushed the door open. The air in the hall was colder, thinner.

I breathed deeply. “Goodbye, Eve,” I said. She did not look at me. I closed the door, found Sean sleeping on a couch in the living room, shook him awake, and the two of us walked out to my car in the dark.