Poem

O' But The Best

"And all the air a solemn stillness holds"

                                                Thomas Gray

O'  but the best

to capture what is inmost

and feel the rise unknown,

of what is born in the stillness,

that's always hushed at the edge,

of cloaked and cleaved awareness.

This poem was inspired by a line from an 18th century poem by Thomas Gray, The words "solemn stillness"  suggest how  we are brought to a reflective awareness through the analytic experience. At some point there may come a silent sharing, that solemn stillness where out of nothing comes something: understanding.

Ben Feldman

Poem: Witness

Having read the previous post (also found in the TBIPS Spring 2010 Newsletter) on Winnicott and the comment " ... to recognize that we all need, at times, the presence of the effected other to come into being", David Baker, PhD recently wrote this poem (after a party) with a thought to the analytic encounter:

Witness
I know you’ll know what I’m talking about.
You’ve walked out of the house
Into the yard
In the middle of your own party
And looked back through the living room window to see
The outlines of your friends
As they laughed and danced and drank
And you wondered
Among other things
If they knew you were missing
From your own party.
Wondered if they knew you were out there watching them,
If they would look back at you through the window,
Maybe set down their drink and ponder you
As you ponder them.
In the air just above you
Thoughts rise to meet theirs and from that ether is born
a knowing of each other.
It’s hard to know each other at a party.
We play at it, we like a party.
We like to see and be seen,
We like to be known,
Like to be missed.
But the almost-collisions of human-to-human
Never really allows for the deeper knowing.
It’s the depths we crave
Within ourselves and in others.
We need witnesses to our life, in order to really have our lives.
Perhaps that is why you walked outside,
Looked back,
Delighted in them.
In those few moments you were witness to their lives,
Held them, loved them into the eternity of your own memory.
How fortunate they were.
How they may never know about the gift you gave
By stepping out and away
To hold them closer than you ever could
Had you stayed in the room
Politely listening to their laments over real estate.

David Baker

Rimbaud: “Je est un autre” the constructed self

Parents who fear for the future of their rebellious teens might take heart from the life of Arthur Rimbaud who, born in Charleville on this date in 1854, wrote his renowned and iconoclastic poetry before the age of majority and lived, a runaway, his wild, debauched, drugging (to derange his senses) days in Paris, London, and Brussels while still a teen. Rimbaud then put poetry and rebellion behind him to become, for the remainder of his short life (he died in 1891 at the age of thirty-seven), a lucrative coffee and guns trader in colonial East Africa for a French trading company. Not unlike teenagers today, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, before running off to Paris, scrawled graffiti (“Shit on God”) on town walls, smoked, grew his hair long, and mocked a town priest with an homage to his holy bowel movements (the poem “Squattings”).

Teens have been discovering and held anthem the revolutionary works of precocious, adolescent Rimbaud ever since. Marcel Proust, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan (who refers in one of his songs to Rimbaud’s tumultuous experiment with homosexuality and Verlaine); singer-songwriter Patti Smith (who wrote Rimbaud’s Illuminations “became the Bible of my life.”) have all, in some way, cited Rimbaud’s influence. Even the film Eddie and the Cruisers (with its nod to the poetic lyrics of Bruce Springsteen) referenced Rimbaud, with Eddie’s lost album entitled Seasons in Hell.

Rimbaud wrote to his friend and former teacher Georges Izambard: “I'm working to turn myself into a seer: … It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses.” And “It's wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought.” and “I is someone else”. Rimbaud was perhaps the most avant garde in this statement “JE est un autre” ( I am an other) intimating, like Hegel before him, that the subjective self, the “I”, is constructed, the other, constitutive. A useful construct, yes, but within it are multiple components, opposing sameness, what today we call multiple selves.

And with nothing merely as its constructed façade, Rimbaud saw the value of writing not only of internal things but also of ordinary things as experienced through the unique subjective self. This required a new way of constructing poetry, including synesthesia (as Baudelaire had done), such that chaos was captured in correct form (Oh, that my keel might rend and give me to the sea!). Soon after, he contacted the Symbolist poet Verlaine.

Mothers of prodigal sons might also appreciate that Rimbaud returned again and again, after many escapes, to the home of his own stern mother, his father having abandoned them when he was five. At fifteen, Rimbaud sought his fortune in Paris, for the Franco-Prussian war had led to closure of his school and he was too young to be allowed to be a soldier. This runaway, homeless in Paris, arrested, destitute, was, most likely, also raped. His suffering and early losses are reflected in his poetry. (See, e.g., The Drunken Boat below.)

In Enid Starkie's biography, she writes that Rimbaud gave up poetry when he realized it would not bring enlightenment. His mother’s influence, when she wrote to encourage the suicidal Verlaine: “..each of us has a wound in his heart, more or less deep...true happiness consists solely in fulfilling of one's duty, however painful it may be. …you'll see that misfortune will grow weary of pursuing you, and you'll become happy once more”, may be evident in Rimbaud’s choice to become an industrious trader of goods. In a twist of fate, his capitalististic endings perhaps mock his earlier work, just as his poems had earlier mocked French conventional verse, liberating it from its 19th century themes and form.

Rimmbaud's suffering is evident in this excerpt from Oliver Bernard’s translation of The Drunken Boat

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.

Poetry

Reflective, pensive, sad in the week preceding this tenth anniversary, my words seem inadequate. Instead I will post those of Ben Feldman, a colleague, a poet, and a student at TBIPS.


On Compassion

Compassion salvages the heart,
Wounded.
But revenge, vindictive,
Tears and tastes the meat
Like lions.

Practice
If compassion is to create
an antitoxin in the soul
then it must be played and practiced
like a cello in love
under stars with kin in soul
and harmonies woven in heart.

--Ben Feldman

Poet Laureate Philip Levine

Yesterday the former Detroit factory worker, 83 year-old, Phillip Levine was named the 18th Poet Laureate of the United States and will begin his one year term in October. The PBS Newshour last evening replayed its interview, from last year, on Levine. In that profile, Levine credited his shift from the metal press to the pen, as “pure luck,” pure luck to have met his wife on his 26th birthday, who worked to support him while he wrote, and perhaps more importantly, Levine noted, “She honors what I’m doing. And I think that is the most crucial thing-- to be honored as a poet, not by a nation, because a nation is an abstraction, but just to be honored by this person or that person…”

His words “to be honored” struck a deep chord with me as an analyst because, for me,an analytic attitude includes, not interpretation as accusation but, love and acceptance, an honoring of all the patient has been through, utilizes in present day to cope, and will one day be. Levine asked incredulously about his wife of, then, 55 years, “How many women would stay with a guy who has no prospects and wants to write poetry…?” I was reminded of a fine marriage of analyst and analysand, sticking with one another through the rough and ready years, honoring each other and the work as best and as tenaciously as each can in minutes of uncertainty and pain, with the hope that something is in the process, like a poem, of becoming.

Here is an excerpt from Any Night

…I will have to learn
to sing in the voices of pure joy
and pure pain. I will have to forget
my name, my childhood, the years
under the cold dominion of the clock
so that this voice, torn and cracked,
can reach the low hills that shielded
the orange trees once. I will stand
on the back porch as the cold
drifts in, and sing, not for joy,
not for love, not even to be heard.
I will sing so that the darkness
can take hold and whatever
is left, the fallen fruit, the last
leaf, the puzzled squirrel, the child
far from home, lost, will believe
this could be any night. That boy,
walking alone, thinking of nothing
or reciting his favorite names
to the moon and stars, let him
find the home he left this morning,
let him hear a prayer out
of the raging mouth of the wind.
Let him repeat that prayer,
the prayer that night follows day,
that life follows death, that in time
we find our lives. Don't let him see
all that has gone. Let him love
the darkness. Look, he's running
and singing too. He could be happy.

Create Date: Monday, January 13, 2003
by Philip Levine

Poem: Plea to the Water

Reveal your secret to us, water!

Tell us about the fine moss
that borders your margins;
about those dreams of ours
that navigated your liquids;
about all the words of the dead
and all the words of the children.

But tell us, most of all,
why was our life wrecked
and lies now submerged
in your unhurried flow of mirrors?
Why is the anguished spasm
of our screams now settled in your felt?

Ernesto Vasquez, M.D.

Poem: DIALECTICS

DIALECTICS

What do you know sun of the dismal, dreary day
What can you tell me water of the parching drought
What can you say light of the swarthy chilly rain
and you wind of US branches stout
that in your gust rebound
What do you know lingering, enduring flame
of the ashes that will snuff out your reign
What can you ever know of joy, nostalgia,
in your bittersweet might and main

Ernesto Vasquez, MD
January 11, 2011

Poem

A Season that Travels

But light is not only this,
for nothing is just something
anymore, my friends. But everything,
everything is this and light,
and everything.

And there is no way of saying it
but by contradicting and immersing
ourselves in the vertigo, and being
the swirl and the vertigo and the light.
Not only.

For if time is made of coming and going,
then, we, who are in time or above time,
will rest for a few moments,
and be contemplative,
simply beholding how the sun rises,
crosses and flees, and returns
in light everyday.

For we ourselves are truly the miracle –
with one another, we can create
the fountainhead of light
in our pupils and the gardens
of stillness in our hearts.

And there can be no light
without our eyes, old Plato,
nor would there be time, my friends,
but with this patient and heroic
and almost never-ending being alive.

So I come here to sing the day
and the day is this,
boundless.
Inauguration of sun.
Almost Sunday.
Adventure of audacious light.

Onward. Lets continue.
The day is also this, my friends.
A being in light everyday,
under the sky, or within.
A luminescent being in light
someone gave to us
for us to attain.

Behold how the day lugs its cart
of minutes. One after another.
Always. With no repose.
What we had, dispersed in the air.
Ah pain, ah love, what we had!
What descended to silence.
What went from vibrant green leaf
to the garland of oblivion.

And time goes on, my friends,
time continues.
And yet I cannot say it.
This is barely sensed.
Or savored like a sin

or the violet bouquet of old wine.


This day is also a season.

Let’s stay here.
With the day lets travel.

A season that travels, this is.

And we with it, until the hour,
a little gray, a lot somnolent,
the bell tower’s dark corner will sing,
when the sea of stars shivers.

We already know it. To be still. To sleep.
With no light. Tranquilly, my friends.
As in a night train that has lowered
the eyelids, a train with windows like
unyielding guillotines that behead in each
frame the landscape’s enduring reason.

Onward.
Onward.

To another season.
With another light.
The same and different.
To embark again,
on the sun and the air,
the contention and the secret
and the struggle.
Much as a scintillating wave
over another scintillating wave,
in this tide imperturbable and ours.

Ernesto Vasquez, MD

Poetry: A Day is Made of Hours…

A day is made of hours
and of multiple lights.
Of joys. Of storms.
Of small passions.
And the ambit of its white essence
keeps on unfolding until
that hushed field of shadows where
peacefulness resides.

And so it is our cup overflows its minutes
with a precision of page sketched
by invisible illustrators;
with an exquisite, surprising quality,
like that of the crystal of quartz,
or the wellspring’s open eye.

And on this path of points,
on this geometry
of the chronometer,
we go, hallucinated,
fervid, somnambulant,
passing, from crime into miracle
and from voice into silence,
through rare seasons
that not many recognize, not many,
and not many comprehend.

Daybreak, for example.

It is not only a bird singing,
piercing, shelling the essence
of the air.
It is not just a delightful
coolness, or the green pasture,
or the runaway dew.
But also our souls that arise,
if there is a soul
and if there is a dawn,
with a nugget of joy and
a chunk of danger underarm.

It is not only the tree,
bored of standing against
the unchanging horizon.
Or just the soft murmurs
of water, of wind,
of corollas opening.
But also our souls that arise,
if there is a soul
and if there is a dawn,
with the large window
of amazement open
and a curiosity
of pre-pubertal dream.

Something begins,
someone screams,
something or someone
savors arising life again.

And this is daybreak, today.
One season. One of many.
One.

The clocks come rolling later
and you with them and with me,
almost certain that everything
is real, even ourselves.

The light opens our eye’s chalice.
Our eye suffers. It surrenders
its wounds to the seven capital
colors and to the sharp edge of the line.

And in that elementary pain,
in that rutilant violation,
a universe emerges
beyond our world
and a living soul deeper
within our living souls.

Be this initial word, then,
this utterance of love,
a praise to the light early-riser,
from which our universe is born,
brilliant, new,
full-filled with gems
and with mysteries.


Ernesto Vasquez, MD
March 2010