It's a lame failure of language but a bitter enrichment of the self--or what priggish pundits call "the lateral
movements of the head through the world"--to accept the suicide watch without a darling.
The important refutation is that she's often there, despite your lack of attention. Stunt double to a disappearance
of understanding.
But what could it mean--to understand--if the literal mechanics of the word aren't parsed?
What's fascinating is how busy, bristling with concurrent lives, it makes believe. First I'd have you notice, have
you take responsibility for, what's not there or apparent (not quite the same thing): any presence or
concept of Beneath. (ps--an interesting commital of sense in itself, mostly out of sound, a semantic blur.
Like a light drinker three scotches into speech, "Be neat.") But nothing is. Syllogistically two-parted,
in stead of a silent third. The Under in the act of standing. Or a brave, clumsy, largely unconscious attempt
to sculpt everything unaugmented by analysis and intention to welcome the frightening, exposed life
of the erect. A frosty reversal of poles: the charmed head beneath its kingdom.
But then again, how else can a suitor manage to ignore his heart, so steadfastly the opposite of
his affections?
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4 comments:
In your terms, understanding feels masculine.
Misunderstanding, parsed, is feminine.
Not sure if that makes a difference or informs.
Within ten minutes of my writing this poem you had already commented on it. That said, I'm probably as much of an authority on it as you are. I appreciate the challenge you've brought to it, but I wonder.
I'm not sure it's proposing that misunderstanding or error is distinctly feminine. Or that it is so when parsed.
The word 'understand' is being parsed here. Loosened, that is. The play of ideas might be a little stale, but as I read it the poem seems to be equating oversimplification, clarity of purpose, and reductiveness with an oppressive, forceful subjugation of things to one's grasp of them. So, to challenge this, there's a small, ironic exploration of the word itself--understand--and the modes of relation it entails. To understand a thing one must regard it from a position of unassertive inquiry, of receptiveness. I hesitate to assign a gender to this, even. Though typically this gets tagged as a distinctly feminine way of offering oneself to things.
The poem seems to equate the suitor's heart with narcissitic (reductive) self-questing and romance. Whereas the real darling is everything that moves unrestrainted, but implicated, outside of that way of relating to oneself.
I guess this has been a theme for me of late. That our primary modes of demarcating a self, a singularity, a separateness, are often domineering. Analysis, forcefulness, of action dominated by single-minded intention. Of attention that assigns value, instead of welcoming it.
Misunderstanding doesn't appear in the poem, I don't think. What the poem is concerned with, I think, is a revision of our feel for, our commonplace modes of, our ways of presenting ourselves in a condition of understanding.
Or so I think. Let's see how I feel about all this after I've read the thing a few more dozen times.
A better question may be whether or not this is really an interesting thing to write about.
Ouch.
Good God yes this is a theme worth going on about!!!
"the real darling is everything that moves unrestrained"
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