Super-scary poems: William Blake – hold on to the fear!

 

The Tyger

 

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

 

And what shoulder, and what the art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? And what dread feet?

 

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil, what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

 

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

 

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night.

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry.

 

 

 

There is a mouthful! And in this case the historic “mindset” turned out to be really important. I did a bit of that “research”, rapidly processing the adjacent poems in my anthology: “The Rose”, “The Garden of Love”, and “London” – great choice because it kind of covers all the areas of life that poetry might reach: the heart, nature, society, God. I knew exactly where I was then. Surprisingly close to the Middle Ages – I immediately subscribed to the view that “modern” thinking didn’t begin in the 16^th century but the 18^th - or even not then in certain respects because William Blake didn’t KNOW yet that SUBJECTIVITY was coming. He just asked the questions and made the observations that helped to bring it about.

 

This became especially important as to the “status” of the imagery. In short: “The Rose” is still ENTIRELY an allegorical poem – though it is disturbing, it isn’t “modern”. And – even though it is probably important to see that “The Tyger” or “London” aren’t either – it is much more difficult to ignore that they are going where “we” probably still are. It is equally important to be aware, I believe, that the mind at all times was able to process a lot of things that couldn’t yet be expressed in any fictional form available. And “The Tyger” is kind of sitting on that “threshold” -  where people at the time either wouldn’t have understood it or might have dismissed it because it threatened their frame of mind. And - somewhere on the way to this thought - the poem had already become this burning glass for my feelings …

 

It became that when I focused on the thought that – even though in poetry subjectivity wasn’t yet possible and a “direct” approach to nature therefore barred – the tiger is not entirely an allegory but more of a metaphor already because the origin of this poem MUST have been some kind of ENCOUNTER with a tiger. This is probably contestable, but I cannot imagine how else the SURPLUS reality of the tiger might have got in there, which is “beating” through the poem like a living heart. It is pure FEAR. Only GENUINE fear could trigger the ENORMITY of that thought: What would the being have to be like that could have made the tiger? Or contain it, once it was made? It is UNIMAGINABLE.

 

(Obviously, William Blake was also a painter, and he tried to draw these unimaginable beings which appear like the creatures of nightmares and can therefore be dismissed by “sane” people. They were NOT nightmares but reality that just somehow COULDN’T yet be because it couldn’t be thought or expressed with words.)

 

Big leap: A week before I read the poem, on January 20th, “everybody” (except Trump-lovers) posted the American flag fluttering freely in the wind, and even I saw it and thought: EXACTLY! Hold on to this feeling – it already IS the best that will happen this year!

 

I WANTED to celebrate, and usually I don’t have a problem with celebrating on my own. I could easily have toasted to myself and sung the American hymn to myself – if I knew it! Or played it on YouTube … but I knew there would be no point because I didn’t FEEL joy. The joy I thought I should be feeling was just pretence. All these four years I successfully SUPRESSED my fears – as I supress my fears about everything – mostly by focusing on the “little things” that are before my eyes and by emigrating into imaginary worlds. Fears about not having money, about menopause, about possibly going blind, about climate change, about Amazon not sending things from the UK anymore, and Angela Merkel doing NOTHING at all … I do it “automatically” but, for the first time, I realized that it isn’t easy. In this case I had held them down so tightly and resolutely that they couldn’t be dissolved by alcohol just like that and flushed down. It took DAYS to thaw them just a little bit … until I FINALLY allowed myself to think: How could “we” have allowed this to happen? How could we have allowed the world to be held in fear like this?! How was this POSSIBLE???!!!

And, of course: ONE massive reason for fear dissolved … but there already is the next to step into the breach … (If nothing new, there is still Putin to suppress!)

 

Just a few days ago I realized that the sadness I have been dealing with for some time was gone. O, good! I thought. I don’t feel it anymore. Until I read “The Tyger” and focused on fear, and suddenly realized: The only reason it is gone is that I cannot FEEL it anymore. The only thing I can actually feel, is FEAR.

 

In one of my last posts I wrote that the worst damage the corona virus has done is how it has begun to mess with my head. I was wrong. The worst damage is how it has begun to mess with my FEELINGS.

 

That I cannot feel anything anymore doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that was there is gone. The “structure” of love that Shakespeare analysed in Sonnet 116 is a structure that I still find in my life – at least I am still doing the “height-taking” - but there are no feelings. So maybe it is just as well …? The structure may remind me of what was there – and could be found again … But I doubt it. “Dover Beach” already made me aware that my logic was faulty. It was only slightly faulty, but what makes these great poems so efficient is that they are so precise. They leave no margin of error. If the logic is faulty, the truth cannot prevail. And this applies PARTICULARLY to emotions because emotions reveal subjective truth - not thinking. With thinking I can always manage to navigate around something. What I needed was my brain being “cleared” by feelings …

 

(I remember how I stayed with “Ward No.6” for a day recently, NOT enjoying it, because I FELT: Somebody is trying to tell me the truth!)

And what makes poems so efficient in the first place is that they are short. I just couldn’t spend another day in “Ward No.6”, but I can now read “The Tyger” again – or “The Rose”, or “London”; just now I have a feeling I am beginning to understand “The Garden of Love” – all of them available in my Oxford anthology with just one page to turn. And I can focus on them again and understand them better because I have found MY fear. And they make me realize that fear – though often its cause – is not yet THE SAME as depression. It is certainly the one feeling we avoid HAVING at all costs because it is imminently life-threatening. Even in deepest sadness and distress there is – weirdly – this little “pocket” where we can still enjoy ourselves. There is no hiding from fear …

 

I recently watched the 11^th season of Doctor Who again – as the 12^th was a bit disappointing. But I realized that it only felt disappointing because the 11^th is the best one they ever made – the most contemporary they could have made, therefore the 12^th had to be all Cybermen and “The Master” again. The one before it was so good because it dealt so much with REAL LIFE fears and damage – about losing whom you love, about the damage done to the environment, about feeling inferior in a relationship, about depression … and this was the first time I found that thought: It isn’t that much of an achievement to supress fear. It is certainly useful, but the real achievement is to LIVE with it. To deal with it all your live because – unlike Trump – IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY. It is the ONE feeling that will never leave me and – make no mistake! – it will be the last thing I’ll feel still being me.

 

On first impression, there is nothing “good” or useful about it. Nonetheless – as “The Tyger” shows - fear is not just destructive. Like money, it can be such a MASSIVE source of energy. One that – unlike money! - is always available, at least if one finds a creative way of dealing with it, like William Blake. It can make somebody a titan who turns the moral ground upside down, and I am afraid it saved “the world” a thousand times more often than positive thinking did. I don’t envy William Blake – far from it! – I’d rather be in hell than be that strong! But that might be because I cannot imagine hell … (Thomas Harris - who obviously was a fan - could! With Hannibal Lecter he created a character that no reader is in any danger of liking but every reader is in constant danger of UNDERSTANDING …)

 

Therefore I’d better carry on with it and embrace my fears – at least until there is again something less disagreeable to embrace!

Scary poems, part three: Sonnet 116

 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool though rosy lips and cheeks

Within its bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

 

I have now managed to collect three “case studies” of poems, two of them love poems and only one of them a different subject: “Dover Beach” (which also might be considered partly to be a love poem). This seems to demand an explanation. At first, I had the impression that love poems are just easily accessible – and that might just be it. Everybody seems to know what the poet is talking about … and this was the first conscious thought I acquired when I had decided to subject myself to this poem – which might be the most notorious love poem ever written (and I should be impressed with myself for taking it on but am not):

 

Isn’t this the weirdest thing about love that everybody seems to know what it is supposed to be and, at the same time, nobody can SAY what it is?

 

I mean, it is certainly not a feeling – in spite of what “everybody” would say first! – not as compared to “natural” feelings like fear, anger, or joy. Hatred, by the way – as its opposite – IS a feeling, though a more complex one. Love is not, even though, without feeling it, it doesn’t exist. It is not a relationship, though some kind of real or imagined relationship necessarily adheres to it. It is not sexual desire, though a strong desire for another person – maybe not necessarily or primarily sexual – is always involved. But love IS not that desire … So, I could probably go on with defining love by what it is NOT “to the edge of doom”. What it actually IS is one of the most exclusive and important tasks of fiction - and especially poetry – to define. I wouldn’t dream of taking on this responsibility – though, reading this amazing book “Normal People” by Sally Rooney, I’d take a stab at least at an explanation. Love is indefinable because it needs a history. Hatred needs a history too, I suppose, but it is usually brief and uncomplicated. If we hate, we know exactly why. With love it’s complicated. It needs an actual person kind of “happening” to us. And love THEN is this state we enter/are in only when this has definitely happened or is still happening. So, it is extremely difficult to define love without telling the whole story. But would we even know where to begin …?

 

On the other hand, there is a reason why we know what love is BEFORE any of this has ever happened to us. There is this TIMELESS aspect of love, some kind of basic structure that we recognize in this poem. Something that everybody COULD say but nobody quite manages to say. Though, of course, Shakespeare has no qualms when it comes to saying things. In his opinion, love is a “marriage of true minds”. Yeah – doesn’t this sound good? So CONVINCING. At least it convinced millions of readers from his time until today. “Everybody” is sold on the idea – including me. But this is exactly what makes me uncomfortable because: “marriage of true minds” – what does this even mean???

 

Two things first that kind of go together. This time I learnt the poem – and it was easy. I didn’t have to kind of sit down and do it. Just read it a few times. And THIS is something that has never happened to me - as probably the only person on earth that cannot remember a joke that has more than two lines. I think this is already the most important thing that can be said about the FORM of the poem. And I already did the work when I read Barrett Browning and understood why a sonnet is just the thing if you want to express definite and finite things that are in reality infinitely complicated, subjected to doubts and their unfolding in time. It is kind of magic – or exceedingly “clever” like a brain – because it “folds in” on itself and you can store a much bigger number of thoughts and feelings and stuff in this tiny space BECAUSE it is confined by strict rules. We just don’t EXPECT anything more needs saying. So, you can easily put something preposterous like “a marriage of true minds” into the first verse and – as by magic - by the final verse you will know exactly what it means and have convinced everybody else that they do - at least if you are Shakespeare. In this case, the confidence of the act is even more complete than in Barret Browning because of a special feature that is, I think, very rare, even in Shakespeare’s sonnets: the semantic units (with two unobtrusive exceptions) coincide exactly with the verse. It is about the closest you ever come to the “idea” of a sonnet, which - like Platonic ideas – is not supposed to manifest itself – ever! - because it would be too perfect and therefore boring. So, this is significant. It strikes me as if somebody had been exceedingly certain of what he was saying – and isn’t this a provocation!?

 

“Marriage of true minds”??? Strangely, at first I took a really technical stab at it and established that it is not a “straight” metaphor. If he’d just written “marriage of minds” it (almost) would have been, or at least it would go down smoothly – semantically, because it doesn’t fit the verse. (But I discovered that he might have written “marriage of TWO minds” because I accidentally did.)  This certainly is the semantic backbone of the image: a mutual, exclusive, and binding relationship on a spiritual basis. There are clearly no sexual feelings involved – which is, I feel, a provocation. That is, I never felt as if sexual feelings were systematically excluded from “Sonnets” 1 – 126 just because they are about a same-sex relationship at a time where there is a strict code for talking about them. And I doubt that other people do. It’s more like they are about this unquenchable desire for the WHOLE person that sets “romantic” love apart from any kind of crush we might have on people – some of us all the time, some seldom. Sometimes a sexual act would just be an impossible, inadequate, inappropriate, or totally insufficient expression of feeling so much for somebody that we don’t understand, and which only THIS person can make us feel or do. Nonetheless we COULDN’T let this love die! I loved Sally Rooney’s observation about Marianne experiencing a desire just to SEE Connell have sex with somebody – even if it wasn’t herself – and found this totally romantic. Sonnet 116 is like embarking on an explanation for this “total” love AS SUCH.

     

“Marriage of TRUE minds”, though it appears elegant, is much more cumbersome - one of these over-inflated constructions that sometimes makes Shakespeare’s text so hard to read. It might have been some kind of contest at the time about who could come up with the most striking new paraphrase for a well-known concept, and Shakespeare might have aspired to be ahead of the game. But even if this was so, there is a better reason for this kind of competition than to make poetry obscure and exclusive because it brings poetry forward. At the time it might have been the only way to bring poetry forward, to actually say things in a new way and make people look at them in a new way. I am not good enough at it to analyse the complicated kind of poetic image that it is, which is probably a waste of time anyway, but: can anybody actually have a TRUE mind? Or a false mind, come to that? I think it really is a mixed metaphor derived from “true heart” - which makes immediate sense as a heart being true TO somebody. Can a mind be true to another mind? I doubt it. As I said: how can a mind even BE true – or false???

 

Well, I find in a way it can, by being true to ITSELF. The cumbersome image is in fact a great example for explaining how Shakespeare creates the “added dimension and clarity” that Tom Hiddleston described and which is exactly what I am looking for reading his stuff. He makes it HARDER to understand so that I have to look TWICE – and this means I have to look at ME as well. I have to consult MY OWN meaning to make sure that I’ve got it. “Marriage of true minds” is not an experience that presents itself “naturally” – which usually only means that it is warranted by some kind of general opinion, or generalized way of seeing the world. And this is also why I always end up finding Shakespeare encouraging – not intimidating, even though he might intimidate me in the first place. A “true mind” is hard to IMAGINE – much harder than a “true heart” – but this is exactly what I am DOING all the time. It is how I actually judge other people as to the relevance of what they are saying: Do I think this person knows her/his mind well enough for me to actually “buy” what they are saying? The single most exciting instance I recollect is in my blog: the YouTube interview with Tom Hiddleston where I got this impression that I could actually ENTER the room he had made in his mind for these things he was talking about. As if there was REAL evidence for him being genuine.

 

This was certainly special, but I have this partial understanding of somebody’s true mind quite often because I am looking for it. The “full package” – a MUTUAL love pact based on a total understanding of the other person - doesn’t happen in everybody’s life. Literally speaking, it didn’t happen in mine. Nonetheless “we” have an understanding of what it might be like. My own experience is not a good example because it is incomplete, therefore it is great that I can now call Sally Rooney as a witness who writes about love in a totally “flat”, matter of fact, unromantic way. But what she describes is exactly the same: two people who have at one point gotten beyond judging the other person by the prejudices existing about them and realized who they really are. And this communication of their TRUE minds once established, it can never end … I think we have such a need to refer to our “true mind” because this is how we know that we are real. Real as in having an independent existence of what other people are thinking about us. Of what we SHOULD be. Like the protagonists of “Normal People” we know that we are not entirely what we should be, but most people have this effect on us that we do or express what we should be – or deliberately what we shouldn’t be. Both kinds of social dynamics can be useful, but there is so much else we would LIKE to be, or try out, if people just let us. When somebody is GENUINELY interested in us, though, they won’t be repelled or instantly judgemental, and more of what we want to be can come out. It was also when I stopped finding the love plot in “Romeo and Juliet” boring - when I realized that this is what happens to both of them: By experiencing love as a positive CHOICE – established through intense communication that doesn’t really make that much sense to outsiders! - they leave their positions of endless potentiality (of falling in love), respectively being owned and defined by others, and become REAL PEOPLE.

 

I don’t really know if I have done that … I think not. But I still can DO things that I couldn’t do before – like REALLY reading poetry - because they make sense.

 

The poem appears to be such a demonstration of confidence – like love makes us confident about who we are. But I find it is not. Reading on, I find it increasingly scary because even the most perfect “marriage of true minds” is constantly threatened. Of course it DOES alter “when it alteration finds”. There was more than enough alteration where I am concerned, this last year. It is even how I experience my love as real, because I know then that it has been going on. “Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose!” – one of my favourite sayings because I knew I would understand it someday.

 

Love is comforting but not comfortable. It constantly brings us to the edge of our existence. And it is a fundamentally contradictory concept, which is why it is always in danger – and why it always survives. Something that can actually EXIST in a contradictory fashion is really, really hard to destroy.

 

Rough weather and time it will probably survive. Even though not a day passes that I don’t wish for my loved person to prosper and experience good things, and never lose their (hard won) beautiful confidence and peacefulness of spirit. As to ageing – presently I find the changes that time brings rather more interesting than disagreeable. The problem is absurdly more about my own decline which I feel to be “adding weight” to my insignificance … I don’t really FEAR such changes, though. The hardest blow love can suffer is when the other person “removes” their love – or themselves - permanently. Or is removed by death. Most of it cannot literally happen to me, but there is a permanent fear I have to deal with that this person will suddenly become “unavailable” – or will cease to do anything interesting that I can relate to. I don’t really see how love could survive that …

 

It’s all very frightening – but it is also “fate”, and I don’t really fear that. In the same way as it is useless to fear my own unforeseeable future. My favourite line is anyway: “whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken” – probably because it’s the only one that is cryptic (apart from “marriage of true minds” which is cryptic only IF you look twice). I had to think about it … and about me. To question the worth of my love would be like asking: What is the bloody point? And this is a question I have been asking all the time in the beginning – until I realized that, for the “bark” to sail, the “height” of its guiding “star” has to be taken PERMANENTLY. No less cryptic perhaps because it is just an experience. This incessant height-taking already IS the bloody point. Before the star appeared - and I had figured out how to take its height! - I had just been flat in the mud, stranded.

 

The only fear that I constantly have – though I think this to be quite unlikely – is that either my own “true mind” or the true mind of the other person will be revealed as an illusion. That I might somehow find out that it never existed, or became convinced that this initial act of communication never happened. Shakespeare – not in his entirety as a writer, but as the spiritual unit that wrote the sonnets – would IN FACT never have written if this “marriage of true minds” had been found to be “error”. He couldn’t have – because the reason for him to write would have been removed. And this is definitely not an option … The poem folds in onto itself so successfully that it proves the point it makes by its own existence! And this is exactly how I find constant proof of my love in the way it alters my life. I don’t know where I would be without it, but certainly not anywhere near to where I am right now.

 

I know why I wasn’t intimidated by this poem – I unconsciously understood it already and knew that, by reading it, I would “get there”. As I said, love is something that “everybody “ already knows but which only can be established within a context of the utmost absurdity and contradiction. Therefore we need an “unlikely” construction like a sonnet to “explain” it – and a poet like Shakespeare who is totally fearless when it comes to the “unspeakable”. It is, of course, not the least bit of a coincidence if this is the most notorious love poem ever written!