by
Ben Lerner
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10:04
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
[...] Part of me said: Do a tiny bump of cocaine and you’ll feel sober, centered, back in control, and probably a little euphoric; the better part of me said, You have a cardiac condition, don’t be an idiot, come down a little and go home. The better part of me easily won the debate: I decided not to do it, but I decided not to do it after I was already looking up from the glass top of the table, having insufflated a small line.
One day he told me his terminal patient, the one with all the classical records, had died.
How many other terminal patients did he have? How many deaths had my hem-onc witnessed? DId he feel like a failure when his patients died? And by that metric, what case isn't a failure, in the end?
What metric is used instead of immortality to judge the success of a hem-onc?
[...] then he broke up with me.
I was very sad, but I enrolled in five classes the next semester nad made a list of goals including run at least twice a week and avoid all time-wasting social engagements.
mood
I grew used to being sick and looking forward to recovering.
Then I grew used to being well again for a short while, knowing I'd be sick again sooner or later.
Then I grew used to having no prognosis at all, because with a mysterious disease, all things are possible.
My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much.
And then one day, my life was a ray again, and the point was gone.
John Ashbery writes in “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” that experiencing a poem is:
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.
Ashbery’s poem points to that feeling of being just on the verge of knowing, and even for a moment knowing, something the poem has told us, something vital. But before you can hold on to that knowledge, it is gone, at least until you read the poem again. The experience of getting close to the unsayable and feeling it, and how we are brought to that place beyond words by words themselves, is the subject of this book.
I have always been viscerally resistant to hitch up poetry to the wagon of utility. As John Keats wrote in a letter, “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Poetry seems to get worse the more it seems interested in lecturing and instructing us, usually about things that we already know and agree with. To think of poetry as useful in a social or political way also struck me as dangerous, in that it threatens to demand of poetry something that prose can do far better, and therefore to argue poetry into extinction.
From the library I procured a book and started reading the poems. There was no reason to think I was going to enjoy them. I was not a particularly artistic kid, and I didn’t work on our high school literary magazine, or write. Nothing was auspicious. I do not remember opening the book. Yet to this day I still remember reading the first few lines of “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along
and something just clicked. I can’t say I felt I immediately understood everything, but the poem seemed to mean something I could not quite put my finger on, something important to me.
Language waits to be released in poetry. Poetry enacts the possibilities and powers that lie dormant in the nature of language itself. Poems are where contradictions and possibilities of the material of this meaning-making system are deliberately brought forth and celebrated, ultimately undistracted by any other overriding purpose.
Unlike other forms of writing, poetry takes as its primary task to insist and depend upon and celebrate the troubled relation of the word to what it represents. In following what is beautiful and uncertain in language, we get to a truth that is beyond our ability to articulate when we are attempting to “use” language to convey our ideas or stories.
Whether or not the poet knew all this about the word “corridor,” I very much doubt she was consciously aware of it while writing this poem. When a poet writes, she feels instinctively if a word is correct. She could easily have written other words there: the daffodils could have brought themselves into the meadow, into the field, into the garden, and so on. But the poet’s brain chose “corridor,” she knew it was the right word, probably because it is in a sense the wrong word, the word we were not anticipating. This is what Aristotle meant when he wrote, in The Poetics, that poets are those who have “an eye for resemblances”; that is, for seeing similarities and connections that others do not.
poem is:
Smart daffodils! They waited
till the cold snap was over, then brought themselves
into the corridor, like lamps of pity—
According to Shklovsky, artistic texts use the exact same language as texts designed primarily to convey information, but do something different with it. The specific mechanism by which language becomes not merely a conduit to convey meaning, but something more, is called, in Russian, “ostraneniye,” most often translated as “defamiliarization,” though a more literal translation would be something like “strangeifying.”
Shklovsky describes how, as we go through our daily lives, our perceptions of things become “habitual” and “automatic.” We start to lose the sense of the actuality of things, and treat them as abstractions.
Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.