BOOKS
III
of associations which moves with great speed, as if it were dangerous to
dwell on anyone emergent meaning:
He heard the engines screaming for more air..
He pushed and drifted-waking smelled like steam.
Below him were the blank and linked-up roofs
Of suburbs .
..
showers, crematoria
...
The john tiles where his father's soft eyes worked
The crossword puzzle jackpots, poetry
Of Jews, ten thousand dollars for first prize.
R ed bullets to the brain, the Seconal.
.. .
The world was turning into dawn, just as
The jet plane's sixteen landing wheels set down .
("A Year Abroad")
Though we can work out why "waking smelled like steam," why
the engines are described as screaming for air, and scream is echoed
in steam, the relation between thoughts remains both "blank" and
"linked-up," just like the roofs described by the airplane passenger. Not
till we understand that the mind represented here is sick in a very
ordinary way does the real dilemma emerge. The mind's disease is the
analogue of aphasia in the realm of meaning: like the stutterer who wants
to say something and can't, so the poet wants to mean something and
can't. And, to complicate things, his eloquence is enabled by his semantic
stutter.
If
his meaning were effable, it would
be
so terrifying or final
that utterance might cease. "Showers, crematoria" must remain in this
relation of disrelation. The collapse of both things into a single meaning
i
the nightmare.
The most apparent sign of the tension I am describing is a claustro–
phobic atmosphere, created partly by a style of sheer aggregation. A
further sign is the absence of ordinary, airy, neutral Nature--of something
outside us, subject to our thoughts yet aloof, and which cannot
be
humanized. Nature, as filtered through these poems, is
contaminated
by
meanings, as if its elemental power to ablute them, to purge us and our
images, had failed. An island that's locked in by the sea is "a case of
vaginismus," the Seine "scratches itself lovingly along the quais," the
moon "brassiered and soap-sleek" seems to "stink" with the allure of a
church-imposed chastity. The formal reason for some of these figures
is that they are part of dramatic monologues, part of specific mental
situations, but they are too alike in their idiosyncrasy not to point to
the author or to a general human dilemma.
These mono.1ogues, in fact, despite Robert Lowell's commendation
of them for creating real and independent people, are not in the least
