The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy

Yelena Bryksenkova, "Breakdown"

The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy

16
The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I'm thinking
how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor's office.
Even those who haven't learned to read and write are precise:
"This one's a throbbing pain, that one's a wrenching pain,
this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain
and that––a dull one. Right here. Precisely here,
yes, yes." Joy blurs everything, I've heard people say
after night of love and feasting, "It was great,
I was in seventh heaven." Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, "Great,
wonderful, I have no words."
The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain––
I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness
and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.

Yehuda  Amichai


“Joy blurs everything.” I remember as a teen talking to a friend going to college, we were discussing poetry, and he told me something that I’ve thought about ever since – “Everyone writes about love. Love is easy to write about. Hate and pain are much more difficult.” My own thoughts are muddy on that point. On the one hand, love (and joy) is more pleasant, but I do think this makes for a lot of glib sloppiness. Pain, by contrast, demands accuracy of a writer. With love we are generous, with pain, exacting. Pain asks a question, pain isolates, and the one who speaks of it has to make her position absolutely clear in order to be understood. The one who speaks of love, however, assumes comprehension. Everyone knows what love is. It’s a uniting, bonding experience, a commonplace. But that’s where we make a mistake. That’s where this poem gets me. “ I learned to speak among the pains.” To use what one has learned in and from pain to speak clearly and accurately of love? Amen to that. May that be what we learn to do with pain. Because we only think we know what love is. 


 

The Work of the Poet

Donald Maier, "Study in White Enamel"

The Work of the Poet

The work of the poet

is to name what is holy:

the spring snow

that hides unevenness

but also records

a dog walked at lunchtime,

the hieroglyphs of birds,

pawprints of a life

tiny but resolute;

how, like Russian dolls,

we nest in previous selves;

the lustrous itch

that compels an oyster

to forge a pearl,

or a poet a verse;

the drawing on of evening

belted at the waist;

snowfields of diamond dust;

the cozy monotony

of our days, in which

love appears with a holler;

the way a man's body

has its own geography -

cliffs, aqueducts, pumice fields,

but a woman's is the jungle,

hot, steamy, full of song;

the brain's curiosity shop

filled with quaint mementos 

and shadow antiques

hidden away in drawers;

the plain geometry

of you, me, and art -

our angles at rest

among shifting forms.

The work of the poet

is to name what is holy,

and not to mind so much

the pinch of words

to cope with memories

weak as falling buildings, 

or render loss, love,

and the penitentiary

of worry where we live.

The work of the poet

is to name what is holy,

a task fit for eternity,

or the small Eden of this hour.

Diane Ackerman 

Another poem about poetry (like Pablo Neruda's "Poetry"of January 3). Neruda says Poetry summoned him and he had to figure out how to say what wanted to be said. Ackerman here explains what the work is about. She sums it up flatly at first, as if she were filling out a government form, but then can't help herself, and makes a list of examples, throws in a whole lot of metaphors and adjectives with a nice little universal and finishes up with a reference to Eden. I sure hope she put that on her tax form.  "To name what is holy". Of course that means everything. And it's not that naming it makes it holy, it was always so. The holiness of everyday things. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, "Earth's crammed with heaven/And every common bush afire with God/But only he who sees takes off his shoes"... Remember Neruda "deciphering that fire"? There's a theme here.) Maybe that's another way to describe a poet - one who sees. If that's true, on some level we are all poets. If we look around and inside ourselves, we have to acknowledge that we are more than the sum of our parts, that there is an underlying truth that ties all things and times and places together, that there are patterns embedded and encrusted and emblazoned within all things. That phrase “deep calls to deep” comes to mind – it’s hard to explain, but what I think Ackerman on some level is saying is that there are depths beyond the surface, and these speak, and call to each other of beauty and love and fullness. To me, that’s God. And, yes, Eden. The place where we were not divided from each other. The time before we got lost ("Lost", David Wagoner, my last post).

 

Lost

Arkhip Kuindzhi, "A Birch Grove"

Lost

Stand still. The trees and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two branches are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you. 

David Wagoner

 

Another side of the lost and disorientated theme. Unlike Stafford's "The Way It Is" from a few posts ago, where the speaker follows a thread through unfamiliar territory and struggles, this speaker counsels someone who has lost their sense of direction. He seems to be a vocal presence rather than a "person", and I love the contrast between this poem and Stafford's. In one the person is holding to something in order to find their way, but here (!) the person is told to be still, to wait to be found.

 

 No frantic searching for the right direction, no anxiety about making the right decision, no, "Stand still." "Wherever you are is called Here." 

 

Isn't that another way of saying there is a difference between not knowing where you are and being lost? I mean, if someone knows where you are, are you lost? And then that phrase, "If what a tree or bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost." In the poem the forest breathes and answers. It's the second speaker, answering the sense of lostness with these most beautiful words - "I have built this place around you." The message is not only that you are found, but, you are known. This place was prepared for you. How beautiful! All sorts of things flood to my mind. Echoes - "Be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10), and,"For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."(1Corinthians 13:12)

Under the Ice

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Under the Ice

Like Coleridge, I waltz

on ice. And watch my shadow 

on the water below. Knowing that

if the ice were not there

I'd drown. Half willing it.

In my cord jacket

and neat cravat, I keep

returning to the one spot.

How long, to cut

a perfect circle out?

Something in me

rejects the notion.

The arc is never complete.

My figures-of-eight

almost, not quite, meet.

Was Raeburn's skating parson

a man of God, poised

impeccably on the brink;

or his bland stare

no more than a decorous front?

If I could keep my cool

like that. Gazing straight ahead,

not at my feet. Giving

no sign of knowing

how deep the water, how thin the ice.

Behind that, the other

question: whether the real you

pirouettes in space

or beckons from under the ice

for me to come through.

Stewart Conn

Similar to my post of December 14, 2016 (The Midnight Skaters by Edmund Blunden), this skater is also acutely aware of how close Death is. He almost courts it - except he can't quite, he's a little too nervous, too superstitious perhaps. He wants to be more "cool", like the skating parson in the painting by Raeburn, but he's not sure that guy isn't posing, pretending not to care about the risks he's taking. The last stanza is the one that clinches it. He's not even sure if he's himself, or if the shadow skating on the other side of the ice is him. Is life is that precarious, that uncertain - it may end abruptly and without us knowing if we're even truly ourselves? God forbid. But what a wonderful way to pose the question.