Marked by clear and graceful prose, this book is a must-read for those concerned about our economic and political future. Hunter -- Northland, a Church Distributed "Brilliant! In addition to its insightful lessons in history, philosophy, culture, government, psychology, and moral theology, this book contains a description of the virtue derived from the proper relationship between self and society. This book is so helpful to me as a pastor because it affirms the basic theme that each person is a valuable creation of God, yet made for relationships.
Some in monotheistic traditions emphasize the former, to the exclusion of the latter; in reaction, philosophies and theologies of pluralism have emerged more recently exploring 'the many, ' but they verge onto political anarchism and consumerist excess. Marcia Pally's Commonwealth and Covenant opens up a broad and generous middle way, one that is interdisciplinarily informed, historically rooted, philosophically robust, and theologically foundational.
Any sustainable program for a common global future will need to heed and implement in some respect this relational vision. Marcia Pally teaches multilingual multicultural studies at New York University and at Fordham University and is a guest professor in the theology department at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is also the author of The New Evangelicals: Princeton University Press, ], And this eliminated element, Benjamin describes as follows: In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: It is this unique existence— and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject… The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity.
Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish its authenticity, just as the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages came from an archive of the fifteenth century helps to establish its authenticity. The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and, of course, not only technological—reproducibility.
Stanford University Press, ] and others. Winnicott, Playing and Reality New York: Kierkegaard is one of the later theorists of romantic irony cf. Garber, 8 and elsewhere. As such, he may be viewed as a bridge between romantic irony and existentialism, the latter emerging from the philosophical current of the former.
The claim of this present chapter is that, if it is an evasion, it is a less conscious act than an unconscious mechanism of anti-introjection. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation Princeton: University of Pittsburgh Press, , Clarendon Press, , In the absence of the real, our work enters the realm of fantasy. The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. And if the poem is more about fictions of mourning than about any consolation it brings, is it even useful to consider such a poem an elegy?
When we reexamine these assumptions, we find that elegies often communicate the unplaceable nature of the feeling of sorrow they attempt to express, in addition to, or sometimes in place of, the feeling of sorrow arising from a specific loss. This inability to trace the pain of loss to a definitive source necessitates a rethinking of the nature of elegiac consolation as, instead, a construct deriving less from a compensation for the lost object than from a creation, through elegy, of the deceased whom one did not feel one could claim to have had, or who felt somehow lost to one even while they were alive.
One of the preliminary points that this present reading of the poem diverges from the previous readings is that it proposes less to read the poem as an elegy for Church than to examine the element of its impersonality and allegoresis more closely. While it is not personal, I had thought of inscribing it somehow, below the title, as, for example, Goodbye H. And a third form, she that says Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there, To those that cannot say Good-by themselves.
I These forms are visible to the eye that needs, Needs out of the whole necessity of sight. Only the thought of those dark three Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire. Paul de Man suggests that language, as trope, is always privative and that death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament. As though to sustain this sense of tradition, Stevens portrays the start of the underground journey in section II with primal imagery and archetypal abstraction without details: Furthermore, the entire section II is written in one sentence as though to avoid a closure of a period, suggesting the same sense of timelessness, stream of consciousness, as well as an avoidance of determinacy or finality that is a metonymy of death.
There he saw well the foldings in the height Of sleep, the whiteness… … Sleep realized Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect, A diamond jubilance beyond the fire, That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye. Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air. There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged, Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves, The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights, Stood flourishing the world… This was peace after death, the brother of sleep, The inhuman brother so much like, so near, Yet vested in a foreign absolute, Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines An immaculate personage in nothingness, With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth… IV.
It reads like a song of a nightingale: The sense of estrangement in section IV manifests not only in its incongruous imagery and disfigured music but also in the brokenness of its sense. And these two visions—of doom and of happiness—are placed side-by-side, as if they were a multiple choice, in which one faces either an A alphabet to spell out holy doom and end or a B bee for the remembering of happiness.
But she that says good-by losing in self The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges Of rose, stood tall in self not symbols, quick And potent, an influence felt instead of seen. She spoke with backward gestures of her hand. She held men closely with discovery, Almost as speed discovers, in the way Invisible change discovers what is changed, In the way what was has ceased to be what is.
The conflation of the self with the other—the inclusion of the other in the self, or the fusion between the two—erases the boundary of selfhood, for a self defines itself through its detection of differences from the other: The first half of section V, therefore, ends with images of privation: It is a discovery of loss, of the change and strange.
It was not her look but a knowledge that she had. O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve And motion outward, reddened and resolved From sight, in the silence that follows her last word— V. Descending into the depths of oneself to find a core of humanity that one shares with others, or finding the other within the self whereby the move inward becomes the move outward, is the Romantic ideal of intersubjectivity: The consolatory allegory of the three figures reaches its conclusion here: In other words, the deceased may be forever lost, but out of his death, out of the depths of our interiority, the prospect of intersubjective connection between the self and the other emerges.
The deceased, then, is not really lost because he lives inside of us for as long as we live. In exchange for the loss of the deceased, we gain a piece of the deceased inside of us, just as Apollo, having lost Daphne, gains a substitutive sign of her in the laurel wreath. Or so it seems. What follows the rosy sublime of intersubjectivity is a statement of bathos that undercuts it: In other words, the promise of intersubjectivity in the allegory of three forms is an illusory fiction.
But when one is aware of the falsity of the narrative of compensatory consolation, one makes a choice: The children of a desire that is the will, Even of death, the beings of the mind In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare… It is a child that sings itself to sleep, The mind, among the creatures that it makes, The people, those by which it lives and dies. The ambiguous image is that of solitude.
As such, the poem can be recapitulated as follows: Then, through his realization that the self contains the self and the other in the depths of its interiority, the speaker arises out of the abyss of his hypertrophied melancholic subjectivity to discover a possibility of reaching redemptive intersubjectivity. The poem leaves much unsaid.
There are various ways to interpret this rather glaring omission for an elegy: But setting aside the authorial intent, which is always a matter of speculation,60 one may instead examine how the poem is presented and what the poem is made of. Allegory, of course, is a kind of cryptonymy—a code language. The allegorical language is, in a sense, a makeshift expedient to grope blindly through the incomprehension of the loss, where meanings and contexts are absent.
The memory is of an idyll, experienced with a valued object and yet for some reason unspeakable. It is memory entombed in a fast and secure place, awaiting resurrection. This segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality—untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual, assimilative work of mourning—causes a genuinely covert shift in the entire psyche. The shift itself is covert, since both the fact that the idyll was real and that it was later lost must be disguised and denied.
And in expressions of loss, we are accustomed to thinking that linguistic expressions are insufficient because, somehow, either the actual pain is quantifiably larger than the linguistic expression of it—despite the fact that we have no way of quantifying actual or linguistic pain—or the empirical pain is qualitatively so different from the linguistic expression of it that the latter cannot match the former—despite the fact that we have no way of measuring this qualitative difference. But what if the real reason for the seeming insufficiency of linguistic expressions to capture an empirical loss is not simply a matter of the qualitative or quantitative difference between the empirical and linguistic?
That is to say, could it be possible that the insufficiency we think of as linguistic may be, instead, cognitive—or both cognitive and linguistic, where the linguistic reflects the cognitive? Fiction-making is a symptom, which constitutes an attempt to hide something one might not want to be cognizant of.
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In that case, linguistic insufficiency or unintelligibility, such as symptomized as an allegory or code language, would be a sign of concealment, an indication that the proximate object of the expressed sorrow—that is, the immediate and readily visible loss of a specific person—is at once a real object of loss and a false screen: This process of screen-concealment suggests that our mind is not wholly settled with its placement of our sorrow, and that our mind is still struggling in its attempt to reach for something beneath the screen: The self- reflexivity points to a potential self-mourning, and more than a few critics have noted that self-mourning is ubiquitously found in canonical elegies.
In order for us to investigate and uncover the real loss behind the screen, the passage we must return to is stanzas 3 through 5 in section V, the climax of the introspective journey before the outward escape takes place in stanza 6, and before the bathos undercuts the vision in section VI: O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve… V.
If Stanza 3 acknowledges the fact of discovery, Stanza 4 portrays the content of this discovery: As previously discussed, elegiac melancholia enacts what it fears the most: The disappearance of the prospect of loss is the profoundest loss, against which one guards oneself by creating a fiction that one has lost something—by inventing an illusion of loss: The consolation is that of creation. In Playing and Reality, D. Winnicott remarks on this aspect of destructive creation in the reality-making of object-relations as follows: The object, in other words, comes into being only as it is destroyed.
In the case of elegy, the mourned comes to exist only as he or she is lost to the mourner. Read in this regard, the ambiguous image of the lone child singing himself to sleep in the closing stanza becomes not only desolate but also heroic. That is the real fiction that this poem proposes, for, if not for such narrative of loss, living becomes a task too cruel. Through this awareness, the poem subverts its design to be a straightforward panegyric and instead betrays the romantic irony that accompanies its elegiac act of fiction-making.
A touch of such subversion seeps through even from the opening stanza, which presents images of perspectival diminishment: But the clash between the form and the content makes an alternative reading possible: If—like apostrophe, the contrivance of which has been read as a sign of fiction aware of its own fictive and optative imperative78—visible artifices in lyric poetry are seen as indications of a fiction aware of its own fictiveness, the excessively artificial lyric moment creates, beneath its superficially sonorous euphony, a subversive realization that whatever moving sentiment the lyricism conveys is an illusion: That the poem is a formal elegy and formal elegies tend to be more traditionally inclined is one plausible explanation.
That a sonorous euphony is an appropriate tone for a tribute to a respected philosopher would likely qualify as another adequate answer. And the hypothesis proposed here, as yet another possibility, is that the affected lyricism is a case of fiction aware of its own artifice. The idealized Santayana offers an example of what we want to be like when we die—an exemplar of how we want to prepare for our own death. The illumined grandeur of vision is undercut by the veritable smallness of our actual existence. Sometimes, however, it takes the keener eye of a melancholic outsider to know the truth of the interiority, and this subversion is how the poem is reflected back in the eye of one saboteur.
For a more sustained expressive attempt to capture the anxiety over a loss of loss, we must wait for the later twentieth-century poets such as Elizabeth Bishop. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark. More important is the theme of the union between the mind and the world: Stevens adopts the language of love, the most intense moment of adulation where the two merge into one another, forgetting the boundary between the two.
The disappearance of the selves—like one that occurs in the fervor of religious devotion—follows the disappearance of the boundary, as one would feel in a perfect union. The idea that the mind and the world are, or can be, one is, however passionate the union is, a wish: Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
It is a fiction whose purpose is to obscure, and protect us from, the harsher worldview in which the mind and the imagination have no power and we are left in utter deprivation. That poem about the pineapple, the one About the mind as never satisfied, The one about the credible hero, the one About summer, are not what skeletons think about. Now, here, the snow I had forgotten becomes Part of a major reality, part of An appreciation of a reality And thus an elevation, as if I left With something I could touch, touch every way. And yet nothing has been changed except what is Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all.
And that is the tenuous territory which interpretations inhabit; interpretations have no power to change the world, but they can change the way we view it, which is the only access we have of the world and can, in some minds, be argued as almost like an equivalent of the world itself, even though nothing is actually changed in the process, except our interpretations, as if nothing had been changed at all.
The same principle applies to elegies: Nonetheless, fictive, interpretive narratives of loss are the only thing left to the living. And elegists are left to make a mythology out of those interpretive creations. But as a fiction aware of its own artificiality, it is a fragile fiction that holds within it a seed of its own destruction: Leggett points out in Late Stevens: The Final Fiction Baton Rouge: Collected Poetry and Prose, University of Michigan Press, University of Wisconsin Press, ], University Press of Virginia, , Knopf, , But if that were the case, Stevens could have added the dedication by the time of the publication of The Collected Poems.
That is to say, the biographical evidence is highly inconclusive. Musing the Obscurity New York: New York University Press, , For a more detailed discussion of the function of repetition in elegy, Sacks pp. Cambridge University Press, ], It is as though, by repeating the allegorical names of death, the poem attempts to raise its spirit from the grave of unintelligibility, to turn it into something more familiar and intelligible, and hence more manageable, containable. University of Chicago Press, , A New Romanticism [Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, ], That is to say, Stevens uses the familial naming of the allegorical figures because it is one template to which the melancholic mind can resort in its attempt to reconstruct its broken world through an allegory.
Vintage Books, , A Mythology of Self [Berkeley: University of California Press, ], — Louisiana State University Press, , My interpretation is that it is the lyric-speaker who goes to the underworldly interiority of himself. Penguin Books, , lines 2, 6: Oxford University Press, ], , and so on. Hamlyn, ], —18, — Melville argues that, by connecting the owl, the figure of wisdom, with elaborate ancient rites and conventions of death, the title indicates that the poem offers wisdom in the face of death Melville 6.
The Poems of Our Climate Ithaca: The phrase, of course, refers to J. Beyond New Criticism, Patricia Parker, ed. That is, any textual mourning contains, to an extent, an element of lyric poetry, in that they both attempt to restore meaning to something beyond our understanding while, at the same time, leaving so much that remains inexpressible or unintelligible. Although investigation of such possibilities may be of future scholarly interest, I am limiting myself here to a conventional reading of Whitman.
William Styron, Darkness Visible: No light; but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed. As other examples of how melancholia has been theorized as a way of seeing, Julia Kristeva considers it to be a failure of perception, loss of meaning Kristeva, Black Sun, And as mentioned earlier, Benjamin defines it as a way of seeing the world through fragmented subjectivity that perceives objects as allegories Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, On Lyric Address Ithaca: Cornell University Press, , 2- 3.
Vintage, , , New York, , In many ways, literary analysis more often than not ends up being an analyzing of ourselves—a self-analysis. The analysis of such memories leads back to indelible childhood experiences and to unconscious phantasies. Moreover, canonical poets had often mourned themselves in elegies while at the same time mourning others: The Modern Library, , Still, it remains true that, in many ways, any human relationship is a construction, and some may find it consoling to know that such a process of construction can continue even after the loss of one party.
But one modern perspective on death that may be particularly pertinent here is that, in the twentieth century since Freud, mourning has become a psychological work that involves interpretive activities. Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film [Stanford: Stanford University Press, ], 6. Edinburgh University Press, ], A Review of Contemporary Criticism 7: Rutgers University Press, ], As far as whether God is the imagined or the imaginer, only God knows. Rage for Order [Portland: Sussex Academic Press, ], In those elegies, the lost object is already lost, absent or nonexistent even prior to its actual loss.
Self-erasure creates a state in which one does not have oneself, and in that state, one encounters no prospect of loss. The present chapter proposes a reading of the poems of as elegies about all-engulfing loss in which one cannot even tell what precisely is being lost. In their attempt to fill the void with a linguistic construction, these elegies show that the consolation to be gained—if there were to be any consolation—comes less from the conventional compensatory apparatus that professes to recoup the lost object than from a construction of the fiction of loss that gives birth to the lost object.
And these three distinct manifestations of self-conscious narrative of loss are elegiac forms developed out of the kind of supreme fiction Stevens constructs in his covert elegies. The shade sang with her; The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing; And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose. The excess of metaphor can certainly be interpreted as an act of universalization, but when coupled with a conspicuous absence of individualizing details, it also points to a possibility that the poet did not know the student well as an individual: Broadly speaking, the function of metaphor is to revitalize language; language is an approximation that expresses one thing by using something else as its representation, and metaphor, through its arbitrary association, aims to expand human capacity to associate an object with a new representation, to imbue the object with a new meaning—a new life.
Barbara Johnson points out that the defect of language resides in the fact that it is just as impossible to say the same thing as to say something different;12 saying the exact same thing with two different representations is a linguistic impossibility. Hence, there is, in metaphor, always a gap between the tenor and vehicle; no vehicle represents exactly the same thing as the tenor.
The inadequacy of language as a system of approximate representation—its essential failure to capture the exact thing it tries to represent—leads to an unending sequence of expressive attempts, proliferating repetitions of failed expressions that simultaneously generate both similarities and differences, and exposes language as a kind of homunculus, a diminutive version of the thing that falls short of the thing itself. My sparrow, you are not here, Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me, Nor the moss, wound with the last light. Nature and its recurrent fertility become the objective correlative of consolatory immortality through regeneration, which elegists try to enact by using pastoral language. In the instances of loss, memory becomes the surrogate for the lost object; elegiac tropes such as repetition, metaphorization and recollection function precisely as means to solidify and amalgamate disparate memories into a linguistic surrogate that replaces the lost object. Generally speaking, rejection of compensatory consolation in modern elegy originates in its accentuated awareness of—or rather, its bluntness in revealing—the falsity of the compensatory mechanism: The absence of the lost object further queries the possibility of its recovery and subsequent consolation: If only I could nudge you from this sleep, My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: I, with no rights in this matter, Neither father nor lover. This dual tendency of the second-person addresses—one that encompasses both intimacy and selfless conflation— mirrors as well the poetic oscillation between the possessive impulse and its abnegation.
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Figure and content, intimacy and emptiness are hardly the only warring elements in this stanza. Tropes such as metaphors, pastoral convention, the Catullian motif of grieving love, or the direct lyric address all fail to capture what the poet-speaker feels compelled to express. The result is an anxiety-ridden speech of cognitive dissonance that approximates unintelligibility. Here, the deliberate, successive shortening of the closing lines creates a kind of decrescendo, a gradual descent into silence, against which this very poem exists to resist; the rhythm simulates the mood.
Silence, after all, is the state from which the first words spring out. If there is anything consolatory in this poem, it is that the poem creates, through those failures, a language to speak of the thing for which we previously had no language—an expression of sorrow that we are yet to locate firmly, as the ongoing interpretive bafflement over this poem suggests.
The object comes into being only as it is lost; it is more a creation than compensation. The loss felt or unfelt upon the death of someone we neither knew nor had in our life may not be the acutest pain we could suffer, but it nonetheless remains unsettling and uncomfortable. While modern medicine has yet to identify the definitive cause of phantom pain, the following theory of the physical phantom pain may apply to the psychic phantom pain as well, as it suggests that all pains: Unlike the loss of the beloved, this phantasmal unsettlement is not the acutest of the pain, but because it is a stranger within the self, it alienates and disorients oneself.
Should every creature be as I have been, There would be reason for essential sin; I have myself an inner weight of woe That God himself can scarcely bear. Each wills his death: I am convinced of that; You were too lonely for another fate. I have myself an inner weight of woe That Christ, securely bound, could bear. This indeterminacy of the addressee, left nameless, turns him or her into a phantom-like absence-presence: We learned to speak, then I became I and others the others.
I have myself one crumbling skin to show; God could believe: I am here to fear. What you survived I shall believe: Unlike a conjunction or subordinate conjunction, however, the semicolon leaves the causal relationship between the two unstated. Although the speaker is not consciously aware of the exact nature of the relationship between the historical suffering and his own inner suffering, he nonetheless feels there is some sort of relation between them that is censored, a link that is absent and yet to be filled—a gap. Seen in this light, the function of these generic elegies appears very much to be an attempt to give shape to the elusive feeling of lost loss by constructing an Abraham-Torokian phantom, whether in the form of someone the poet hardly knew, of an inner turmoil as a sign of some unknown loss, or of an imaginary person.
Her face like a rain-beaten stone on the day she rolled off With the dark hearse, and enough flowers for an alderman,— And so she was, in her way, Aunt Tilly. Elegiac conventions are very much alive in this poem as well, including the practice of intertextuality. This dissatisfaction, arising from the frustrated transcendence, mirrors that of the magi in the Yeats poem.
The images of Aunt Tilly that the poet-speaker sees, in other words, are his own; the elegy becomes a prosopopoeia, in which the speaker speaks through the mask of the dead. What unsettles the poet-speaker is that his own images he sees in Aunt Tilly through prosopopoeia are foreign and unrecognizable. The process is similar to assimilation, or acquisition of a foreign language, an act of turning strange sounds into something familiar and intelligible: Although elegies have conventionally looked to linguistic or cognitive compensation in their search for consolation, self-elegy poses yet another conundrum for this compensatory mechanism of consolation: And if the self, the agent in whose consciousness this redemptive process is to be cognitively worked out, were to be the lost object, what would happen to that process?
Self-elegy signifies a prospect of lost loss: The sequence as a whole investigates the possibility of releasing oneself from the loss- compensation mechanism, even if, in the end, the undertaking results in what one may describe as a terrible comfort: Death, for Henry, is a process of self-erasure. Nonetheless, this inheritance from literary ancestors gives him the voice to sing his prosopopoeial song: The difficulty of accepting a substitutive linguistic sign as a compensation for the lost object lies in the other of the two faces of language: In the prosopopoeia of self-elegy, this privative nature of language becomes even more prominent, since the act of speaking through the mask entails self-erasure as its necessary condition.
It is precisely this discovery of the foreign other in oneself that effects self-erasure: As soon as we understand the rhetorical function of prosopopoeia as positing voice or face by means of language, we also understand that what we are deprived of is not life but the shape and the sense of a world accessible only in the privative way of understanding.
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography the prosopopoeia of the voice and the name deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause. In 78, death becomes a necessary step for the speaker to access the language of self-elegy, but because of his wariness over this privative nature of language, the speaker stops short of taking the final step, and the poem ends without effecting a complete self-annihilation—even prosodically avoiding a sense of definitive closure by leaving an extra, weak-stressed syllable at the end of the final line, almost as though to suggest that the poem will continue, since there has to be at least another syllable to form a foot before the poem could reach its conclusion.
In the language of privation, commemoration becomes synonymous with banishment. Whence flew the litter whereon he was laid? Of what heroic stuff was warlock Henry made? But the act of commemoration recalls the dual nature of language in autobiography as both restorative and privative: In self-elegy, self-renunciation will inevitably remain partial and inconclusive; even if the speaker enacts self-splitting by separating the mourning, speaking self from the mourned, dead self, and renounces the dead side of the self, the speaking self nevertheless continues to be alive.
In other words, this commemoration is synonymous with banishment: Here, language has no compensatory function; it is used primarily as a privative device, to cement the fact of loss. The poem, however, completes neither processes of reintegration nor self-annihilation. The form of despair is: Now when the self with a certain degree of self-reflection wills to accept itself, it stumbles perhaps upon one difficulty or another in the composition of the self. For as no human body is perfection, so neither is any self.
This difficulty be it what it may, frightens the man away shudderingly. Willing to be another than himself, John Berryman willed to be Henry. Unlike conventional epic journeys into the Underworld—which the hero is typically propelled to undertake upon an actual or anticipated loss of something, and from which he reemerges into the world of the living, having made some gains in preparation for his future action—Henry is dug up from the grave and returned to this world against his will, apparently without any gain, only with the desire to go back to the Underworld: In order to return to the state of loss of self—to be released from the burden of living once again—Henry attempts to dig his way back into the Underworld: A fortnight later, sense a single man upon the trampled scene at 2 a.
Moreover, calling the dead by his or her name is one of the crucial elements of mourning. The refusal to synthesize oneself—the refusal to be oneself, in the words of Kierkegaard—means that one stays in the state of despair: Self-disappearance is, nonetheless, a way out of the impossible hydraulics of compensatory mechanism.
The disappearance of the prospect of loss attenuates compensatory consolation along with its problems, since, if nothing is lost, then there is nothing left to be recovered. As mentioned earlier, the problem of loss-compensation mechanism lies in its dialectic: The success of this dialectic hinges on the acceptance of both the product and process of the compensatory substitution as a gain that arises out of the loss.
The dialectic depends on the cognitive movement between two poles, object-presence and object-loss, or grief over an object-loss and consolation of a newly instituted object-presence. That is the condition portrayed by The Dream Songs: Lazarus is a poignant choice of figure in an elegy; after Lazarus was raised from the dead, he was promptly put to death again.
Even a fact of loss can be lost at any moment, such as, in the case of self-elegy, through the disappearance of the speaking half of the self. Although The Dream Songs very much remain in the state of Kierkegaardian despair throughout, there is, to be sure, something comforting, something consoling about its particular language of despair—something akin to the Aristotelian catharsis that one experiences when witnessing a tragedy. According to psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, there are three ingredients in the feeling of relief in catharsis: In a genuinely hopeless condition, self-elegies do not exist, for both the speaking self and the spoken- about self would disappear in that scenario.
They are poems written out of… a state of being in which the speaker… has abandoned the sense of audience and cares nothing about—indeed, is hardly aware of—the presence of anyone but herself. She addresses herself to the air, to the walls…. There is something utterly monolithic, fixated about the voice that emerges in these poems, a voice unmodulated and asocial…. It is as if we are overhearing the rasps of a mind that has found its own habitation and need not measure its distance from… other minds.
The latter excerpt characterizes the disconnection or dislocation, or the absence of telos, in the utterance of the language in those poems. Even in defiance, the Colossus elegies stay within the realm of loss-specific mourning, defined by Lacan as follows: Where the poems of differ is precisely this point.
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Furthermore, the perception of the poems of as a start of a third book enables two more changes in our reading of the poems. If a good criticism reads like a good detective novel, it is precisely because the tasks of literary scholars are to string together disparate elements into a storyline, to present it in a credible enough manner, and to provide a useful fiction that gives sufficient semblance of a form of knowledge or understanding. The scene of the poem, as Plath herself explains, is as follows: In the fog there are sheep. Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. CP , The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. CP , Both tercets feature curious syntactic similarities: In addition to the similarity of their shape, both poems portray a scene dominated by one color: The difference between gold and white is that the former depicts a world that has a color beyond a scene of monochrome, whereas the latter presents an achromatic, lifeless world.
The first poem of a book often sets the tone of the entire book. If the first poem of posits the state of fatherlessness and starlessness, the subsequent poems narrate more losses of things to lose; the poems move further and further into the state of increasing privation. By the second poem of the sequence, the poetic landscape turns into one of fatherlessness, starlessness, and voicelessness. In the penultimate stanza, further effacement occurs: I smile, a buddha, all Wants, desire Falling from me like rings Hugging their lights. The rest of the body is all washed out, The color of pearl.
The size of a fly, The doom mark Crawls down the wall. The heart shuts, The sea slides back, The mirror is sheeted. The poem begins thus: Edge The woman is perfected. We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks cackle and drag. CP A poem presented in the state of privation is written in the most privative, minimalist verse form with the least number of lines per stanza—couplets. At this point, the poem not only expresses but becomes a lost loss, embodying its embracive melancholy. One wonders why the work of a poet who produced only two books of poetry has received as much critical attention as it has.
That may as well be the practice of the readers of the works of writers who kill themselves: These three instances of the elegiacs of Roethke, Berryman, and Plath, and their expressions of types of losses that elude expressions, demonstrate that elegies are used to give voice to things that do not yet have a voice, and that words are invented to point to things that do not yet exist—things that do not exist but are nonetheless needed.
In this sense, loss precedes being: And elegists continue to construct fictions of loss, for the acute pain one endures in the narrative of loss is still more tolerable and somehow more comforting than the vague and pervasive pain one is left with when the loss of such is lost.
Selected Essays and Reviews New York: Persea Books, , Northwestern University Press, , Macmillan, , The University of Michigan Press, , These are the samplings of the critical contexts of this poem. Southern Illinois University Press, , For a more detailed discussion of the function of repetition in elegy, cf. Although, in this poem, what is repeated is not the name of the dead but rather the metaphors that name the dead, Margaret Alexiou comments on the particular custom of repeating the name of the dead: The difference, as critics such as Sacks and Ramazani have drawn, is that the conventional elegies seem ultimately to embrace the compensation despite their doubts— meaning, the act of overcoming the doubts is seen as the crux of elegiac writings—whereas the modern elegies end in melancholic inconclusion because their repudiation of such compensation is final, as opposed to being a part of the process toward a psychological conquest of the doubts.
Randall Stiffler in Theodore Roethke: The Poet and His Critics Chicago: Since the biographical debate is inconclusive, the approach of this present paper is to focus on the critical rhetorical contradiction that occurs in the stanza—the discrepancy between the figure and content of the speech. Strategies of Poetic Redefinition Cambridge: Harvard University Press, , xi. Houghton Mifflin, , Since I have appropriated some of the language of this passage to capture a sensation of the elegiac inexpressible in this chapter, I will provide the fuller excerpt in this space: I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed All I could think was that I could see no connections anymore, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame.
They number many these volunteers They have given so much to us How do we show our gratitude? Thank you for holding my hand last night. You warmed my heart as well. Thankful your here with me in this plight I fear I'm stuck in this shell. I heard you reading and singing to me. I felt as light as air. My body was swaying so freely. Our friendship is so rare. Thank you for spending your time with me.
A choice that you have made. It makes a difference to my family, A memory that won't fade. Lord may you smile upon me That I with an open heart give My time and help my fellow man By doing what I can, with love Lord may you be pleased with me And let me be aware To not judge others But to feel joy in giving care Lord let me always know That each little act of kindness And the small tasks I do Are acts of grand proportions And are reflections of you Thank you Lord for letting me have In my heart, soul and mind The wisdom and the knowledge Of the power of being kind And thank you for the opportunity that I encounter every day To give my smile or kind word To empower anothers' way For we are all linked to each other And with your grace from heaven above Guide me to follow your footsteps And shine through my heart and life Your love.
I need my new dew flowers, Full of fragrance and bowers, Full of silence and towers, Full of devotion with love showers. May Lord bless all! With all blessings to sing long As my journey is full of songs To remain and refrain from thorn. As a volunteer guide, I find that more often than not, that chair seems to be just the right spot. For co-workers, friends, those right off the street but most important of all those who must rest their feet. The volunteers that I have find comfort, compassion, laughter and more, in that chair that I have right by my door.
The stranger, the longer, the more passionate it seems, their stories become with faces that beam. Mary who loves her dog and praises me as her outlet to life and Peter who comes at the behest of his wife. Dave is a youngster, who started out as a teen, and plans on volunteering for all time unforeseen. The chair by my door is a welcome abode to those who give of their time, talent all down the road.
Right by my door for 20 minutes a time, hearing all those volunteer stories with or without reason or rhyme. Though my troubles and my worries are sometimes all that I can see - still I always must remember life's not only about me. Other souls are also hurting and I know that it's God's plan to reach out to help another - to extend them my hand. With this purpose as my focus - to be a comfort to a friend - all my troubles and my worries seem to fade out in the end. It is one of God's true lessons - how my walk is meant to be - true happiness I find when life's not only about me. It only takes a moment to reach out to be a friend, but to the one who needs you the memory never ends.
A simple act of kindness to a person you don't know may plant a seed of friendship that for them will always grow. We sometimes lose perspective of the difference we can make, when we care more of our giving and care less of what we take. So remember that your actions may help change a life someday. Always think about the person that you meet along the way. For it only takes a moment to reach out to be a friend, but to the one who needs you the memory never ends. To help with the elderly the confused or the sick Our volunteers know they have been hand picked!
You wear brightly coloured costumes; you wear blue, coral and red, You even wag your tail when people….. St John Therapy Dog Program. You help brighten lives a little at a time, offering a book, or a candy, lending an ear is all so kind. The patients are cozy thanks to your care, they are all so grateful their feet and their laps are not bare!
Achievements in fundraising, you all should be proud; the goals you have reached rise higher than clouds. Time is precious this is all true, with many other commitments we know we are only a part of what you do. You seldom say no, you often do more……so now it is time to thank you a bunch and enough of me talking lets have lunch! I wrote this poem for our wonderful hospital volunteers at our annual recognition luncheon March I love to help its kindness bringing love and finesse like a rose brings beauty charm and graceful duty giving time is a pearl deep as the ocean with every healing motion to take care of someone in need is a loving seed that grows and grows with hearts filled with loving bows.
Each day as the sun begins to rise The earth is warmed by rays so fine And as we pause and drink warmth in We see our shadows start to begin. As children we tried to runaway From the lingering soul that accompanied us each day As years went by we then understood That to see our shadow was a sign of good.
Now often when we volunteer The impact of our work is seldom near Yet like our shadow that lingers close Our collective efforts continue to bring hope. For 28 years our mission has been met By volunteers who will not forget To be unable to read is a dark cloud in the sky As our volunteers you will not idly stand by. And as the sun in the sky does climb Our shadow lengthens over time Always there, a comfort to see Bringing hope eternal to those in need.
We are the sun, you are the rays Warming life in so many ways You are the reason we continue to be An advocate for literacy. The volunteer received a call from the elderly person who said, "You didn't call this morning. The Source of Her Energy There was an enthusiastic 70 year old woman in Montcalm County who came to the training for volunteers with a smile that took in the world. Other volunteers seemed to gravitate towards her at breaks, and I wondered at her energy that seemed to fill the room. She came up to me at the end of the training on building self esteem in children and said, "You know I get up every morning just glad to be alive.
I go out and work with children for twenty hours a week. I can't wait to get there and be with them. When I'm with those children I forget that I am dying of cancer. For 30 years she would grumble when invited to recognition celebrations. People don't need to make a fuss. She had an open casket,and, to the surprise of all attending, in the casket was a red velvet ribbon with every one of her hours pins that she had accumulated during during her many years of volunteering pinned on it.
So don't give up when volunteers say that they don't want you to make a fuss over them. You just never know. A story I heard recently at a Lions Club meeting: Frequently donated corneas from deceased persons must be specially packed and delivered by bus or train to the donor's location, requiring a volunteer to pick up the package and deliver it to the hospital.
One night, the program coordinator was desperate; she had a package on a bus to Spokane and no one to pick it up. She frantically called the list of emergency volunteers She reached a very sleepy man and explained what she needed. The irritated man told her that yes, he had volunteered to be on the contact list, but had specified afternoons and evenings before 8pm, and in good weather only.
When he learned that dad had to "run an errand", he asked to go along. They drove in silence through the snow to the bus station, picked up the package, and drove it to the hospital. On the trip home, the son asked what the package had been. Dad explained that it was tissue from the eyes of someone who had died, and that tissue was going to help someone else see again.
The boy digested that for a moment, then said, "Gee, Dad, I never knew you did such important things! It suddenly occurred to me, that we could never every pay our volunteers. Beyond Power and Wealth I recently came across this from a speech given by Dr. How much do you have left? One tenth of what you began with. You probably have ten times as much. The more of them I have, the less of them you have, and the more I give you, the less I have.
Therefore governments and markets are mediated arenas of conflict: But those other covenantal areas of love, friendship, trust, marriage, loyalty, faithfulness, they are not arenas of conflict. And now we can say what is created and distributed in our houses of worship, and in communities, neighbourhoods, voluntary organisations, above all in the family: We made a simple, well-intentioned assumption.
But a wrong one. Namely, that there are only two institutions that can deal with social problems, either the state or the market. Some on the left prefer the state, some on the right prefer the market, but on the most fundamental point they both agree, and they are both wrong, namely that the state and market are all there is. To which the answer is, there are families, congregations, faith communities, fellowships, neighbourhoods, voluntary organisations - all of which are bigger than the individual, but smaller than the state.
They operate on a different logic. I call them "third-sector" institutions. And without that third sector, there will be problems that neither governments nor markets can solve. Always Remembered My husband worked many hours as a volunteer at the nursing home where I worked as the recreation director we are caucasian. There was an 86 year-old African-American lady who, despite her dementia diagnosis, had gotten my husband into her long term memory.
Hattie always talked about Cab Calloway, expressing how much she enjoyed his music and telling us that her grandson played with Cab Calloway no, he probably didn't, but who knows. She said, "Oh, Lord. When my husband arrived, Hattie showed him the newspaper. He responded that he knew how much Hattie thought of Cab Calloway and how much she enjoyed his music. Hattie said, "Well, it's time you knew. That's your real father. One of my volunteers is a very dedicated grandmother.
Her daughter works so she has picked up the volunteering at the grandson's school. Both her and her husband volunteer and her daughter volunteers when she can. This woman was in a very serious car accident last school year. She now has to wear a very stiff back brace. She is always in constant pain but she never complains, she is always at the school helping in the office. She is still really active.
It is such an inspiration to me to look at her and see that she hasn't given up. She still knows what she needs to do to make her grandsons education a real success. I was sitting in my office in the basement of the Hospital, far away from patients, when I got this request. I went to the room they were calling from and there sat a women hooked up to her chemotherapy drip.
She was so happy that I had taken time to come and speak with her. Through her battle with cancer she kept wondering how she could give back for all the kindness and caring she had received. This patient was also a professor at the local College, so she was wondering if she could bring her students in to volunteer? We came up with a group project for her freshman class that needed to complete community service requirements. They planned and implemented a weekly activities session for our rehabilitation unit. Evenings of games, refreshments and craft projects were organized.
Patients benefited greatly from the opportunities to socialize and participate in rehabilitative recreation. Through all this- their fearless leader went through more chemotherapy and reconstructive surgery, yet always stayed focused on how she could help others and inspire her students to do the same! She was a dreamer that didn't let her own problems stop her from reaching out and helping others. The Greatest Gift I ever Gave, and Received I sat in Mia's tiny second floor bedroom, as I had every Thursday afternoon for the past year--I, Mia's hospice volunteer, and she, my year-old hospice patient, dying of a rare blood disease.
We talked, as we always did, of Mia's year-old son and his most recent antics. We watched the Young and the Restless. I lit Mia's cigarettes, carefully making sure the ashes didn't fall and burn her T-shirt.
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Mia held her wrist up to her eyes and began to cry. Thank you so much. I'll never-ever-take it off. What was Mia thinking? I gave her my bracelet to try on, NOT to keep. But she's crying, she's so happy; I can't take it from her now I gave Mia a big hug and told her I would be honored for her to keep my bracelet, and wear it, and never take it off. I then turned and left, walked down the stairs and out the front door, never to return again. Mia died before my next visit. That last day with Mia, we gave gifts to each other, though I didn't know it at the time. I gave Mia my most cherished button bracelet, a piece of me, to keep close to her as she took her final steps from this world to the next.
In turn, Mia gave me the gift of Living. For, everyday, when I look at my single gold button bracelet, alone on my right wrist, I think of Mia. I think about how life is limited and can be taken from us well before we are ready to leave it. I remember to live every day as if it were my last, without regrets and to the fullest.
To Mia, I thank you He was with his job counselor, and they were to interview with me for a possible volunteer position. I had previously asked about skills, and this particular volunteer brought a sample of his handiwork. He brandish a huge machete-type knife that he had made out of car bumpers.
Marcia P. Samuels (Author of Tell Hell I Ain't ComingA Spoken Word Poem)
Our Human Resources director was passing by my office just as he held up the knife. Unknown to me, immediately there was a clustering at the end of the hall to decide what should be done. I later advised the job counselor that the next time they visit a public building, they should leave anything that looks like a weapon behind!
The joy I found and the satisfaction I felt was overwhelming. At first it was somewhat scary to be in this environment, never having had anyone compromised in this way in my family circle or circle of friends--but I had a reason for doing this. I learned from this valuable time how to deal and cope with these situations and how to work with them.
I volunteered in a locked-up environment which was also overwhelming at first. To my surprise, I found out that a friend of my parents from many years back was a resident of this facility, and that when I was a baby, this lady had wanted to keep me as she was unable to have children.
I brought this lady up to date with pictures, brought her special items and brought her up to current times. The time came when she was able to piece things together, and she said to me one day "please dear, you should not come here, as this is not a place for you," but I wanted to bring something into this lady's life.