Willed Amnesia
The terrorists’ real triumph will come the day that we are all eternally
petrified with fear and wracked with panic at the thought of taking the
train, traveling by subway, or climbing onto one of those beloved, bright
red double-decker buses. These are the images of our normal, everyday
lives. The murderer will taste his victory the day that those images are
something other than normal.
—Javier Marías, “Feeling London’s Bombs in Madrid,”
July 10, 2005, New
York Times Op-Ed page
The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.
—Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Contemporary terrorism is, if anything definitive may be said about
it, a wildcard, an unpredictable monad. With the potential of nuclear
terrorism, we confront, as with something as immediate as the Cuban Missile
Crisis, our own capacities of self-annihilation. Emotionally, this creates
a withering powerlessness. Linguistically, we see every possible fragmentation,
coupled with an irresistible and undeniably false continuity. Only by
emphasizing the verbal overlay on chaos, maximizing it, inflating it until
its surface is as transparent as air, can what’s been removed—what should
have been—be intuited, can we approach the “scene,” or whatever it is,
of loss.
I
In a post-apocalyptic landscape, there is little more than a self-inscribed
obsession with narrative and internal logic. Awash in wave upon wave of
nostalgia, we repeatedly trace the syntax of the claim, the announcement,
the rule. Over and over the world provides us with fragments, but these
appearances are carried off by a relentless tide. What is that tide? In
“A Look and a Voice,” the first section of Overboard, we’re
given our project, our mandate—“break and reconstruct”; placing things
in “corresponding piles”; “hunt[ing] for letters lending themselves to
translation”—and shown a landscape of “shattered talk,” “wreckage,” moving
facts, a flooded and “littered” vicinity. And behind this project and
its context is a grand “interruption,” something that has taken place,
like an explosion, but that’s unavailable to memory even in its barest
detail. The interruption then inspires, in a world already destroyed,
an unending search for the resolution of its mystery. What seems a particularly
Andersonain bind: find what you never knew in a place that couldn’t be
less forgiving.
There was a “misleap of narrative that fell on the car,” and the poems
are based in getting this former world back, making cars run again. “Irons
link me to nostalgia // for freezeframe, for times before my landscape
was littered.” This last quotes "Andromeda," in which the the book's major themes emerge. Hope attaches to mythic narrative even as its figures (or “shifting
figurines”) are diseased. There is never any suspicion that we’ll somehow
arrive at this other time, but what’s left for poetry is to enact the
reconstruction, to pathetically, comically “find the ground.” The mythic
is also the monumental, the statuesque, the memorial, pieces of which
appear and reappear, compromised solidity being one of the streams of
failed meaning, ultimately resolving into the idea of the “wall” (Frost’s)
between the primary narrator (inexplicably there is one) and the loved
interlocutor, whose presence is about 50/50. And again inexplicably, this
wall is built as we “grope toward a future of desserts.”
The first section is closed by “The Scale of Largesse,” with its potential
“last chance,” this time dangling from the ceiling “like mistletoe.” But
Anderson’s last chance is personified: it tests its own “doubt” in a mirror,
one that itself feels “grateful,” paralleling a conversation that takes
place in the first poem of this section, “Tale,” between the two sides
of memory, where one side, with the aid of a flashlight, “tells bright
lies to the other.” Consciousness suffers its foundational split, and
once this is determined our salvation, as Anderson further describes it,
is to “take up partnership in the most dangerous field.” We are adrift,
and images from an apparently nearby wreck float in and out of view. We’re
left with making our accounting, and perhaps not noticing when “death
stops by . . . to greet those on the sea.” One moment we’re drowning,
one moment we have no idea who we are, another moment we’re “inundated
with mess.”
II
What should our question be? Are we left with mapping what is happening
in front of us, or is there something else to do? For instance, should
we find a responsible party somewhere? And would this be any different
from the search for our “former lives”? Overboard’s second section,
the nine “Hearsay Sonnets”—the word “hearsay” immediately asking what
constitutes a reliable source—questions place by titling each unrhymed,
nonmetrical sonnet with what can be taken as a place name—“Atlanta,” “Cleveland,”
and so on—places that might map progress from the “desert town” of Marshfield
to the shores of Juneau. But there is only one truly functional landscape
in the book—the harsh interior sea of disparate images—and it seems none
of the questions will be answered.
The first sonnet, “Marshfield,” rejects geography with its opening line,
“From here we go there, from there I can’t tell where we are.” Like much
else, place is an inconsequential imaginary, buffetted out of reach. It
cannot approach us, nor we it, an idea that is a kind of product of our
internal make-up. Still, while each of the sonnets returns to description
of either the contemporary or remembered outer world, and a kind of crosscountry
drive is going on, more central to these pieces is Anderson’s shifting
symbolism, on an almost line by line basis.
I’ll read all of the “San Antonio” sonnet, in short sections:
A teasing front hovers north. Like jumprope you need
to know when to run in order to get through. This is
a formality we want to establish rather than break down.
Faced with fickle weather—poetic content itself—we need to know, and
Anderson is showing us, how to “get through.” And we accept this “formality,”
poetry being like throwing oneself into a unified space of multiple jumpropes.
The poem continues:
Nothing implicated, just evidence that collecting happened
but you won’t stay and then I will have left my heart
available for nudging.
To judge, nudge, make assumptions based on any given relation to form,
is a mistake. “Collecting,” categorizing, reasoning itself, characterize
any relation we have to the world, even as they compromise our perceptions.
But the poet realizes her acts will be taken for failure, pain will be
inflicted on the vulnerable. Going on:
Worlds of lineage, pulling a line
together from all this text that we’ll hook onto our orbit,
throw out of the maelstrom.
Absorbing tradition redeems, it seems, creating the lifeline, jumprope
as poetic line, returning us to the local, the immediate, from a far orbiting
chaos. We leap back from an extreme of motion to the following statements:
The local who became a judge
is still sitting. We in contrast lease everything. This
plate is not mine. We rent the lawn and mower by the hour
and drive to the right place at a time that could not be
refused.
Yet the leap is far too extreme, and what results is a too ready acceptance
of the status quo: as in being a judge, which may be seen as the existential
equivalent of a corpselike recumbancy. But the “contrast” itself is still
another extreme, this time where nothing is owned, all is leased—leased,
rented things, being at a safe remove, can be used, much like the
sonnet form itself, to place one where all the signs say one should be—even
down to our “plates” and “lawns.” This is obviously no answer and soon
we shift again, back toward the judicial “refusal.” Then what?
We hear palpitations underlying the race, move
together but don’t sing the same way. We stretch carefully
before we work and gradually, like plants finding light.
With the companion who appears again and again, an important alternate
self, the heart is felt and heard. Stretching is invoked as a way, and
it seems there is a way, to stay in one place but not keep still, to get
to our, I guess, natural selves.
The other sonnets trace a similar course: disappointing, contaminated,
tricky landscapes, somehow misplaced; descriptions of engagement with
these places, it must be tragically, through form, narrative, and so on;
the poet’s relating, silly or immature, to the world that is left after
this first failure, what is here, the real, though “interrupted”; simultaneous
reference to the “we” and to a particular, if impossibly subtle, salvation.
Hearsay may in the end come true.
III
“It must be assumed that somebody is telling the truth—else there is
no legitimate mystery, and, in fact, no story at all.” The third section,
“A Locked Room,” for which this sentence from John Dickson Carr’s mystery
novel The Three Coffins serves as epigraph, again looks at the
problem of source, this time from the perspective of story, narrative,
telling. Its parody of the mystery genre, its narrating, even if in fragments,
the actions of a certain “he,” a “she,” a “registrar,” finally an “I,”
is the substructure through which the book’s earlier themes continue to
resonate.
Metonomy for the soul, the room holds the truth, the resolution of the
murder mystery, the reason for writing, real world suspects and what they
stand for, all of them exonerated. “Our words foliate these walls but
eventually erode their own means / of support.” And eventually, Anderson
is left with the inviolable question, placed in italic, “Now who remains
in the room with me?” Vulnerability reemerges: “With that question
I lost control of all / I’d thought secure.” This series, and perhaps
the book, is revealed for what it is, “remnants”:
Clad in remnants of an echoing gallery, the
lady in black
left her voice behind to protect those who would walk under leaning ladders.
We took chances but never were able to find ourselves at home, instead
kept crossing borders and becoming visible.
Anderson’s ethics is to donate her “voice” to those who would keep rooting
out traditional superstition or rationality, even as she predicts constant
failure, nonresolution, exile. The correlary is work such as hers, pervaded
by guilt, content a function of a randomized persona, the only unity left
in an intense newness of syntactic topicality. “Without confidence I agreed
to plan a mysterious journey.”
Finally it is images themselves that we interrogate, myriads handed down
intact. They constitute the floating debris, the mess, the thing in earlier
poems Anderson initially embraces, as in “A Rare Creature”:
Life springs
from objects or at least their observation. No matter
how many methods I use to recount my story [. . .] the audience still
finds
greater satisfaction in shifting figurines.
Part of the pleasure of reading this book is its ability to embrace the
transitory and partial, so clearly the one remnant of available action—though
it is exactly the one true unresolved problematic, a veritable disease,
a regression. This double bind is expressed as the overwhelming and uninterrupted
continuity and flow of sentence after sentence, conveying absolutely nothing
but a succession of otherwise disparate fragments of logic and meaning.
Moments of hope contribute to the overall effect, for instance when “I
/ gently imply that madness will pass from belief through theory to the
silent cavern // containing all that is not held true” (as qualified as
it is, this is a recipe for success), but at last “the conductor announces
a station torn asunder by wind then discarded, / as bereft of identification
as a dress left crumpled on a bedroom floor.” Complete desubstantiation,
the dress without a person in it, is not the same as debris (though the
dress is).
IV
Regression’s symptom is amnesia, just as recognition provides security.
The rhetoric of the statement (the “ravings of certainty”) is the narrator’s
saving grace among “those who trust appearances,” but the inertia of these
accumulated truisms is the true “obstacle to success.” The landscape of
fragmentation is again addressed in the fourth section, “In Passing.”
The first poem, “The Silent Advantage,” references a timeline wherein
memory holds images of whole statues, dream and travel contain “broken
statues,” and actual waking life, or what passes for it, is taken up by
“withstanding” and visions of the “socket” where presumably the statue’s
limbs once were. But we’re then informed that “Obsession with the recovery
of what has been taken from you / manifests itself as an excess of sleep.”
The vengeance of the void interposes, and though there was a past, there’s
not much relevance for it now, at least as it’s remembered. Finally, another
comment is made that seems more Anderson than anything else, recalling
the idea of interruption:
I have admitted that I cannot
tell interruption from metaphor and have been suitably reluctant to
look outside, at the possibilities beyond your life.
The interruption is between what was and what must now be, though there
is no saying what the present is. The interlocutor is here, and there
is a responsibility to them, for honesty and intimacy one presumes, but
the disappearance of continuity is too much to bear. Indeed, there is
no rationale for this gap and only metaphor is capable of approaching
it, that is, the larger metaphor of Overboard itself. Rendered
powerless by inexplicability, we are at the mercy of “archaic indicators
of status.” Not only will the image not be seen through, but there is
no image, leaving us with senseless and continuous propositions. Consider,
from “Rescue”:
I would offer assistance
but the familiar has stricken me still with scenery so clinical
that it plainly conveys how precarious everything beyond must be.
While the poet declines the “beyond,” the “journey” continues, even as
it quickly evolves into an accumulation of habits. The violence of pure
motion coexists with mundane stasis. From “Homing Device”:
At one foot, you feel as if
a tornado is chasing you, with tumbleweeds around and ahead.
On the other, you have just managed to catch the subway,
leapt onto the last, overheated car.
(Subways, in a sort of late 70s way, quintessentially motionless.) But
stasis will have its purposes, Andromeda is rescued from the rocks, and
we see that “In transit / you need quiet to see why it makes sense to
be still. / We dream in order to learn what to do. Once awake, / we’ll
find a way out, dig a tunnel between the first and fortieth days of agitation,
burrow / into the tissue connecting seven wonders.” Lines like these are
certainly visionary of better days. And Anderson does begin to map this
terrain:
We’ll arrive where the hillside flattens out
and rings true only as a facet of comparison.
We won’t imagine guidelines, for example, or
rampant moss. It’s easier to conjure a stretch of sand
interrupted by nothing at all.
This represents another (tentative) journey, though reluctantly taken.
The concrete image of the hillside slips away and becomes a mere “facet
of comparison.” Then the promised land must be negatively defined, internalized,
though there is a return of concreteness in “rampant moss.” Conjuring
is truly a necessity, and superstition plays a large role in the book.
Something has happened “In Passing,” or in passing over, but we are ever
alone in our divining what it was, or where we are without it, beyond
it.
V
The last section, “Hazard,” was published as a chapbook in 2002 and is
dissimiliar to the rest of Overboard in that its lines are shorter,
more lyrical, and since it is the most formally intricate section, couched
within a “cat’s cradle” structure wherein the first and last lines of
one poem are duplicated nearly exactly as the middle two lines of the
next. The opening and closing lines in the last poem of each of the four
five-poem sections serve then as the middle two lines of that section’s
first poem, closing four circles or chains.
This is a formalism that was clearly forgone in the writing, presumably
after “Hazard,” of the rest of the volume. But here too we have a kind
of post-poetic activity, a new poetics attempting to take shape. The floods
and waves referred to earlier are in the past, and, as the title indicates,
there is a considerably new danger, a new reality and attempt to deal
with a disaster.
To confirm that this, as every universe,
moves according to an intrinsic unplanned order
has taken hours. The structured conditions
don’t lend themselves to formal display and
our escape should be arranged accordingly,
to exist simultaneously with chance.
The order has been confirmed, and now Anderson is on to something else,
“escape.” The “conditions” are structured but not in any formal way,
and so must be arranged according to a Mallarméan concept of chance. Precisely
here is the dangerous territory, the reconstruction of seeing in a shattered
world. “Facts” are located at such a remove that relying on them in any
way is a form of melodrama. “Next the facts themselves will become clear
/ in vapor’s dispersal or the speech / obliterated by its passing source.”
Again the pointing backward (perhaps forward) to earlier sections with
the mention of “passing” and “source.”
Another link to earlier sections of the book is the concern
with place, and thus with describing landscape, both the landscape of
disaster and a potential site of redemption. The poet would send us a
message from either or both of these locales, and that message or story
is driven constantly by loss. “The address chosen as terra firma // for
the first telegram turned out not / to be the first. Loss permeates the
story’s / texture. Over time it has been crushed // into a jagged state
of indecision, part / of learning when to stop for water and // which
signs to bypass.” This “indecision” is the originary landscape and the
substantive locus of the rhetoric of fragmentation. The formal continuity
and the continuity of the overall syntax of the poems in this book represent
a return of the repressed, a reemergence of a lost past, and, again, is both our
progress and our regression. Its orderliness is the subject of the first
poem of the second section:
Cycling through mazes, cutouts, perfectly
circular efforts of wind, we make the ribbon
untie itself. Bands of radar onscreen
attest to a given future, and their potential
captivates us, we who are unable to exist
without pins stuck on a map.
Our “terra firma” is simply a “place from which to sweep broken glass,”
but our sweeping motion is a kind of rescue wherewith we pass the time
and set out for something else—the danger. At the center of the following
poem, the couplet echoes, “The address chosen for terra firma / resembles
a place littered with broken glass.”
The images we’ve created for ourselves are certainly not
what they used to be, and the potential for failure is everywhere. At
every moment we seem to think we’re getting somewhere, but much of the
evidence points to the opposite. “Within the flood, debris floats, is
suspended, and has sunk to rest on what is / normally a surface. You may
fall overboard but will remain, unavoidably, yourself.” |
