Reasons for reading (continued): the impact of poetry

 

This year I don’t even feel like Halloween - and lots of horror movies … I am in low spirits and somehow cannot look as high as something like “Shakespeare” to build them up again. But I desperately need something to get out of the dullness of endless repetition even of occupations I like … and may have found it.

Last Sunday I was sitting with Claudia on my balcony - in the sunshine! - eating home-made apple pie (which surprisingly had turned out great. I cook, but I NEVER bake, therefore ... and I forgot to take a picture! 😞!) and we were talking about Brexit, the impending lock-down, and worse. Desperately groping for something uplifting (apart from the pie), I reported that I had bought "Classic Love Poems" read by Richard Armitage on Audible, but it didn't download properly so that I can't listen to them when I am not online. And I always forget when I am online ... Therefore: more 😞!

But I find it difficult to listen to poems anyway … “Yes”, she answered, “me too, because you always have to take text structure into consideration.” “Oh, I don’t think it is that,” I said, “It’s what I like. It is that I have to activate so much of MY OWN emotional stuff.”

Now I don’t think that this was a hundred percent honest answer – though it was what struck me at that moment. I think it is both. We always take text structure into consideration, I believe, one way or the other, when we are reading fiction. We are not CONTENT when it looks or feels anything like “real life”. I noticed this once, when I saw this French film adaptation of “Une Vie” by Guy de Maupassant which appeared to consist solely of uniform wide shots. I noticed that this was the main reason it was such a bad, boring film (- though it strikes me now that it MIGHT have been an aesthetic decision! A bad one nonetheless.) “We” just NOTICE the absence of structure and structural choices so seldom because we avidly take any kind of structure we can find and “feed” on it = make aesthetical sense of it. But we do this mostly subconsciously. The first big thing about poetry is what Claudia said: that we are compelled to take structure into conscious consideration. And this is always some kind of inhibition, or hurdle to climb over. In my terminology, poetry is fictional text with a VISIBLE text vortex. (Though “visible”, strictly speaking, is a metaphor. It would be audible, most of the time, if we read it aloud …) The reason why poetry is so intense and demanding is probably both. We have to be so much more active – and precise! – both on an aesthetical and an emotional level.

I think we were mostly on the same plane about this, though, because Claudia said that, even though she rarely reads poetry, she remembers the three poems that struck her to the core. I immediately thought: I know that this can happen but don’t remember that it has ever happened to me - and instantly felt inferior. But would she tell me which poems they were? She did, and I was awestruck because, just in a couple of minutes, she told me exactly about each bit of poetry and her reaction to it – including a recitation of the relevant passages from the poems!

I won’t try to repeat this here. I couldn’t anyway, and I won’t even paraphrase it because it is partly extremely personal stuff. But I was totally delighted to find three entirely DIFFERENT reactions to poetry related to me in a way that I instantly RECOGNIZED them – even though, to my knowledge, I had never HAD them myself … ??? But I might just have forgotten so much about my “past lives” …  

The first was a short poem by Sarah Kirsch which I don’t quote (- it’s completely heartbreaking and, of course, in German) and that kind of fell like a bombshell into a situation of personal distress and expressed this situation as no other kind of comment ever could. I have been thinking a lot, implicitly, that one of my most important reasons for reading – which appear to be like some kind of cluster with lots of the bits playing into each other - probably is to find CONSOLATION. It is seldom or never that strong but it is always there. And in some situations – probably most really bad situations! – we cannot find it in other people because, at that moment, we are feeling so strongly and the other person doesn’t feel anything. So, even though the poem makes the feeling stronger and, therefore, worse, it ultimately makes it better because, at the bottom of this, there must be this other human being that has been through the same and understands me!  

The second one was a long, lyrical poem which is telling us about a voyage and basically says the same as the adage: “The journey is your reward”:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
(…)

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

 

(By C. P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley)

The way it is told, though, activates the reader’s feelings about having taken a voyage like this and how they felt about it. And we suddenly understand what this universal truth means because it becomes imbedded in our own experience. This is something that poetry does like nothing else: to suddenly turn GENERAL KNOWLEDGE in which we believe into TRUTH because we understand what it has to do with us.

The last example was a poem by Georg Trakl – which made me instantly remember how I had felt when I read those. How much I had liked them not because of any personal involvement but just because of the unique sensual texture they have. You kind of recognize what he describes – otherwise it wouldn’t work on us – but it adds so much of an unfelt sensual quality. New sensations. Poetry can make us aware of how much we need – and are able to! – FEEL the world that is around us.

 

Landschaft

Septemberabend; traurig tönen die dunklen Rufe der Hirten
Durch das dämmernde Dorf; Feuer sprüht in der Schmiede.
Gewaltig bäumt sich ein schwarzes Pferd; die hyazinthenen
Locken der Magd
Haschen nach der Inbrunst seiner purpurnen Nüstern.
Leise erstarrt am Saum des Waldes der Schrei der Hirschkuh
Und die gelben Blumen des Herbstes
Neigen sich sprachlos über das blaue Antlitz des Teichs.
In roter Flamme verbrannte ein Baum; aufflattern mit dunklen
Gesichtern die Fledermäuse.

This extraordinary crash course on poetry gave me the idea that this might be what I need, and I set myself a task: ONE POEM A WEEK. The first one will have to be a classic love poem because I will have to figure out first how to find poems I want to read. That’s already a big issue, and at the moment this appears rather like toil, or desperation, actually. But I have had this feeling for some time that I needed to do something different. While I am outwardly really busy on my countless “construction sites”, I must be dying inside, of boredom. I am just always doing the same thing, and even though there is some kind of evolution, and I find new things there all the time, there is nothing genuinely constructive. Something that makes me move FORWARD and might get me to a different place. Poetry will not automatically achieve this – no more than any other reading could. What gave me the idea was the realization that I would have to deal more – and maybe more seriously – with my OWN stuff. And we cannot circumvent our own life when we are dealing with poetry.

I was really happy and thrilled when I discovered my own “mind palace” technique. How I can access my own inner space when I really need to. The most important thing about imagining it as different rooms are probably the doors – because I can walk out and CLOSE them behind me. It was very encouraging, but the only thing I have done so far – apart from completely “updating” one room, throwing things out, dusting, moving the furniture about – is to make inventories of what is there. Now I might have discovered why the technique is so useful in THIS context = for READING. I have a general idea how text works, simplified as “the vortex”. But the simplification works because, if I REALLY read, the vortex automatically reveals itself. It is different for every text and can be described. Therefore the text never remains this BLACK BOX, it becomes the playing field. And what I DON’T find when I am there doesn’t matter. At least for my part I am usually doing very well without any theories about a fictional world cooked up by other people. But the other part of my text production process is more doubtful. The black box that is called MYSELF. I actually feel much more uncertain and “inferior” about myself than I feel about what is “in” the text. Visiting my “mind palace” – even though it has already been this incredible improvement as to the possible content of the black box – has made me more aware of the uncertainty. I have a feeling that it is very difficult to deal entirely HONESTLY with what I find, and I am interested if poetry might help me with that. 

Oh, and I found the room with "Myself" on the door! Accidentally, rummaging through the old stuff. (And this time I won't tell how I found it, and who helped me find it! 😁)

It had to be there, of course, and it was not, as I had expected, something scary. Though I interact with Loki, and concede that he is a part of me, it is not who I am. MYSELF is where I go to feel SAFE. It is an almost empty room, maybe rather boring, but I like to go in there. I think now that I must be going in there all the time because it felt so familiar when I discovered it, though not “resolutely” enough. There are no decorations, cushions and stuff, or DVDs, or music that make me feel good about myself. MYSELF is where I keep my greatest treasure – I think the greatest treasure anybody can have. I once discovered it in “Hamlet” without quite realizing that I did. It is how Hamlet feels – and how I feel, obviously: “If I achieve to be a good person, whatever happens, I am in the clear.” (That’s why “Hamlet” is a tragedy!) - And I believe that “everybody” has this room. (Even Henry VIII had it, I think I agree about this with Hilary Mantel – but not Donald Trump!) We just need to be in this room MORE OFTEN.

What I find in there is this belief that I am what I want to be more than anything: a DECENT HUMAN BEING.  

 

Reasons for reading

 

Having arrived at these “final” thoughts in my last blog, I thought that I might return to “text theory” for a bit. Tie up a few loose ends, but then I found it too boring. I was recently prompted, though, when I re-read “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey and struck upon this interesting bit in the last chapter about historians who write books in which the people they are writing about don’t make sense as people:

 

“Historians should be compelled to take a course in psychology.”

“(…) That wouldn’t do anything for them. A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn’t write history. He writes novels …”

 

I don’t know exactly how, but it prompted me to change my perspective on reading. It served me very well to develop a concept of reading as this DYNAMIC process where the reader is somebody who actively covets the text and is keen to play with it, and the text is an active principle, visualised by a “vortex”. It is not that I think it to be this big, original discovery – though it must appear so from my obsession with it in my blog. As I see it now, it helped me to describe MYSELF as a reader. Now the time has come, as it seems, to look away from it for a bit. Widen my perspective. I have a feeling that all this is probably somewhere in my blog, scattered over various posts. So it is a synopsis and, maybe, yet another introduction.

 

To describe reading AS text production originated from my experience of writing fiction FOR ME to read it, and from the discovery that I always produce some kind text about a film I have seen in the cinema. (In this instance I am often in a position to OBSERVE that I am doing this because there is a way home where I catch myself doing it. And sometimes I even catch myself unable or unwilling to do it, and then I know that my reading isn’t finished or that I haven’t even started.) I became conscious that I only regard my reading as meaningful and successful when I experience myself being ACTIVE, but I became also conscious that this is not “normal” reading. There certainly is an element of activity and construction in every instance of reading, but it is usually not as conscious and “supervised”. I was always aware of this, as well as of the fact that it CHANGES my reading probably as much as it deepens it. “Normal” doesn’t necessarily suggest that I regard my reading as an advanced form of reading – though I know that my technique has improved it. But this is also something everybody does at some point: LEARNING to read. Just, usually, subconsciously. Nobody just KNOWS how to deal with fiction and art from the start. We learn to listen to music, or read novels, or really look at paintings, mostly subconsciously. And this learning process doesn’t have to stop just because we are “grown-up” readers. At least I wouldn’t want it to.

 

I suppose that every reader is different – as well as every individual act of reading, depending on the material the text provides and what the focus of activity is in this special case. But there must be some kind of “normal” level of reading – if only as a statistical entity - consisting of what most readers do with a fictional text. My active text production is probably not something only I am doing, but certainly a significant DEVIATION from this level. The individuality of every reader would consist in their very own significant deviations. In what they want and need most from their dealing with fiction. But there are certainly things everybody does.

 

First and foremost reading fiction is a RECREATIONAL activity. It just didn’t appear important in my case because I have departed from it. There has been a time when I was doing a lot of recreational reading, gobbling up scores of Linley mysteries and novels by Donna Leon. Nowadays reading is not the part of my day where I “drop out” of activity mode. It is largely what I DO. Where I am at my most active and aware. It isn’t just Shakespeare and stuff, of course, but I approach text differently. I get involved with it much deeper, and almost every text engenders its own fictional world and its own kind of activity. I also believe that lots of people are doing this because so many people become huge fans of certain series, for example, which means that they probably have a very active relationship with these fictional worlds which, in turn, must have some kind of influence on how they see their own. But the fact that this is a very active state of mind doesn’t REMOVE the recreation. It probably deepens it, as it doesn’t just END there – a dimension that is already covered by the term RE-CREATION: What exactly is re-created in me when I am reading? Is it just my peace of mind, my equilibrium and lost sense of how I am feeling about myself, or something much more specific? Some kinds of text make me instantly feel better – kind of like alcohol – some not at all. But their influence often proves more decisive in the long run. And I know next to nothing about the reasons for this.

 

This last observation makes me aware that there is the opposite as well: not RE-CREATION but DESTRUCTION. Suffering and torture. I don’t think that anybody would seriously cancel out recreation when it comes to reading, but I think I subconsciously cancel out destruction every time it happens. And I suppose it happens quite often. “Luckily” I had this experience just the other day so that I had no chance to cancel it out yet. It was an experience I like very much now, thinking about it, because it might bring the “Chekhov experience” to a close. I have written extensively about my re-reading his plays and seeing “Uncle Vanya” in the theatre and recently bought Richard Armitage’s recording of some of his short stories on Audible. I listened to “Ward No. 6”, expecting it to be a SHORT story - not twenty-odd chapters of luxuriously dragged out torture. ‘Great!’ I thought, ‘these Russians really knew a thing or two about torturing themselves – and their readers …’ But I might have stopped listening! I couldn’t. I listened to it for what felt like the better part of my day. And this time it wasn’t the reading – though it is beautiful, of course. But I very soon stopped consciously listening to it and consented to being tortured without reprieve. It didn’t feel good at all, but I probably knew from experience that it wouldn’t be NEEDLESS suffering. Taking it in fully that there is no escape from “life”. That there might not even be a point in struggling because there is just no foothold anywhere to be seen for getting “out” … It is just THIS WORLD – or  rather a hundred percent accurate depiction of a world that is not “ours” but somehow so true that we are unable not to recognize our own condition in it. The most vicious form a metaphor can take … But somehow it appears to be important and proficient to be tortured in this way once in a while. I am not at all sure why.  

 

(Great thanks to Richard Armitage for going through with it as I would never have taken up something like this on my own again! When I was younger, I was much more interested in torturing myself. To judge from the preface he wrote himself, he found this story the most significant. I think I got it!)

 

This kind of torture, by the way, is a great description of a “text vortex” – as I am sure everybody knows what it feels like! And, just a thought: Maybe it is BECAUSE we tend to cancel out suffering that it is so important we take it in IN SOME OTHER FORM – kind of like immunization – so that we can integrate it in our system without ACTUAL psychological damage?

 

Although reading for me is mostly not recreational, it is probably hugely ESCAPIST nonetheless. Getting away from THIS world is probably my main motive for reading which I am constantly reflecting, by the way, though not that much in this blog. It is one of my most important hidden motivations for reading – as it probably is for lots of people. But – even though it might be an important part of it – escape is not the same as recreation. And it is not JUST counterproductive as it is getting away by REALLY getting into something else. I am constantly aware – and wary - of the escapism, but if the way into art and fiction would be barred, life would just not seem to be worth living. It might just be an easy and comparatively healthy escape from boredom and dying inside, but I also always thought that this is not all … As in the case of recreation, there is the subsequent question of what it is we are escaping TO.

 

I am still not following anybody on twitter, but the people behind richard.armitagenet.com, which I visit for updates, have linked to his tweets (- thank you!). And he recently tweeted that, during the corona crisis, he used all forms of art “to steady and entertain” himself and “meditate on the world”.

The statement certainly doesn’t contain some mind-boggling insight, but I made a note of it because I find it so comprehensive. I left out ENTERTAINMENT – as the primary purpose of fiction - probably because it is linked to recreation. It contains the most important element of recreation as - apart from work - it is the most important instant remedy against boredom. And boredom, in my opinion - when there are no actual bugs or acute emotional stress - is the most imminent threat to our immune system. I really like it that he put “steady” before “entertain”, but about this later!  “Meditate upon the world” is more specific and, in my opinion, contains the beginning of an explanation why we just cannot do without fiction though we might find other ways to avoid boredom and take care of our immune system. It kind of hooked into what I quoted from “The Daughter of Time” and brought up the central question:

 

Why are we using fiction, or prefer it so often to meditate on the world to the writings of historians or journalists?

 

My own answer disconcerted me a bit although I probably knew it already: because we are TOO SCARED. I realized this when I remembered that Claudia said – repeatedly! -  that one of her most important motivations for reading was that she needed to know how people tick. It is exactly what Josephine Tey is writing about and, as such, certainly not news to me. What made it so interesting was that, when it actually came up in conversation, I got this feeling not just of a strong existential need but – like in Richard’s tweet - of this element of UNEASINESS OR FEAR. Which I had probably just forgotten or supressed. We NEED to know how people tick IN ORDER to be less afraid of them. And, of course, to be more successful in dealing with them. And – even when we don’t like it – knowing the TRUTH makes us less afraid because it removes hidden possibilities that threaten to catch us unawares. This is probably why I listened to Chekhov and couldn’t stop listening: I certainly anticipated how it would end – remembering that I read the story myself ages ago! - but that was not the point. I felt that I had to go through with it FOR MY OWN BENEFIT. I was wondering why I spontaneously grabbed the concept of the vicious metaphor to describe what was happening, but for me a metaphor is not something caged in by a strict definition. It’s more like a living “text vortex” thing. A name for the way fictional text is dealing with me. Metaphor happens to me when I really get something because I see it reflected in a different context. I would never enter a psychiatric ward in my life, but I understood then that I NEEDED to be there. Once I had entered it, I couldn’t just leave. And I have implicitly been searching for an explanation for a long time why the most interesting people in novels are often the most scary. It is the same.

 

If I had a choice, I’d probably still have a chamber in my “mind palace” that belongs to Loki, but I certainly wouldn’t have one inhabited by Henry VIII. I think I actively AVOIDED having one that belongs to Adolf Hitler – but I am not sure I was successful. Ralph Fiennes playing Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth might have undermined this endeavour. In some cases, the most indirect approach turns out to be the most efficient. As was the case with Henry VIII. The scariest people are the most interesting because there is this urgent NEED for an explanation. Of course I hate Donald Trump - mostly because of the annoying fact that such an unsophisticated lump may suddenly crop up and DEMAND an explanation! I didn’t like it when Claudia compared Henry VIII to Donald Trump because, taken literally, that would be getting rid of both the explanations. But she is right insofar as, if both of them were a metaphor, they would be a metaphor for the same thing. A world dominated by people like this frightens us as it threatens our belief that people are basically good, or at least can be contained by some kind of moral principle. (What reasons “we” might have for this belief – if we are not religious fundamentalists - beats me, but it is deeply rooted in me nonetheless!)    

 

As to Henry VIII, I never was interested in him the least bit because of the one thing we usually know about him: that he had these many wives and had some of them killed. Typically, I first realized that I found him interesting when I watched Ray Winstone playing him in the BBC’s TV drama “Henry VIII” -  which I came to refer to as “the cartoon” because they crammed like his whole adult life into two episodes. Which is ridiculous and naturally results in getting EVERYTHING wrong. Nonetheless it was beautifully done, and the acting is amazing. Only when – much later - I read Philippa Gregory and understood how much more there is besides the business of the wives – how many MORE people died! -  I understood why the result of this astonishing feat of psychological investigation into the character turned out so wrong. And none of it is the actor’s fault because what they can do is always the same: put this human being into the hue made up by historical and biographical facts that we know.

 

But even if this is done so amazingly, it might still turn out wrong. It worked, for example, when Ralph Fiennes played Hauptsturmführer Goeth, or when Simon Russell Beale played Stalin’s secret service man Beria in “The Death of Stalin”. How we know that it turned out right is that the “explanation” they create makes these people MORE scary, not less! When I read the three fat novels about Thomas Cromwell by Hilary Mantel, I was totally fascinated by her recreation of this eminent historic figure, the depth she went with him, and the inventiveness and attention to historical and personal detail. Nonetheless I caught myself thinking: I don’t believe a word of it! I never believed for a second that this character in the book had anything in common with the man Thomas Cromwell. But, even though the books are mostly about Thomas Cromwell, the fact that he practically knew everybody and had this intimate knowledge of them and everything that occurred turns the text into a mirror in which this space of time is reflected in unbelievable detail and depth, and from more than one unexpected angle. And this time - maybe for the first time ever! - somebody really nailed Henry VIII. It is difficult for me to admit it, but – reflecting on the failures I have seen – in this case an actor couldn’t have done it. Hilary Mantel was so successful because she chose the right perspective: through the eyes of another person who is exposed to the impact of this eminent figure and, at the same time, got to know him as few other people did precisely because he couldn’t afford to be scared of him. Cromwell is even writing a book “called Henry” to enable himself and others to deal with the complex situation that his monarch presents. And, even though great actors who have this active awareness of an inner and outer person should be the experts, in this case the inconsistency is just too huge to be sustained by a single person, even if the actor was up for it. (Damian Lewis’ Henry in the BBC adaptation has nothing to do with the phenomenon Hilary Mantel describes. He isn’t the least bit scary!) In the book we get this overwhelming impression of a hugely oversized, shiny carapace that could never be filled by any human being, even one infinitely less self-obsessed, deficient, and flawed … And this insurmountable gap between something so impersonal and inhuman and this person trying to cling to his humanity, ultimately unsuccessfully, is really, really threatening. The “text vortex” in this case is that we have to ENDURE the inconsistency, and the threat. As has Thomas Cromwell, whose life and welfare depends on it, and who will lose them because his efforts to control this “monstrosity” cannot but fail. And THIS is what I love about fiction and reading because sometimes – or most of the time? – the world is still so much more complex and threatening – and “in-human”! - than we could allow ourselves to see it.