G R A H A M F O U S T
____________________________________________________________I WOULD'VE LENT YOU SUGAR, MOTHERFUCKER:
POETRY'S NEIGHBORLY ENEMY MIND
Is utterance the end of secrecy? “A Secret told—,” wrote Emily Dickinson in 1862
Ceases to be a Secret—then—
A Secret—kept—
That—can appal but One—A later poem from 1879 supports this assertion and may even go so far as to claim that “secrets” aren't possible:
“Secrets” is a daily word
Yet does not exist—
Muffled—it remits surmise—
Murmured—it has ceased—In an early poem, Dickinson tells us that “There is a word / Which bears a sword / Can pierce an armed man—.” “Time's sublimest target /,” she writes, “Is a soul ‘forgot!'” To have been told that one has been forgotten is to remember having been both remembered and forgotten, but to utter a secret—perhaps even only to know one—is to forget about secrecy so intensely as to eradicate its word. “A secret,” writes Jean-François Lyotard, “would not be a ‘real' secret if no-one knew it was a secret,” which is perhaps to say, along with Dickinson, that even a single keeper's knowledge keeps a secret from being so.
It's useful (to me, anyway) to think of poetry as a kind of meeting place for knowledge and utterance, a place in which both of these activities can come—and more or less keep—together. That said, I like to think of poetry as a place where the unknown, too, can remain more or less intact, and I think that the best poems both collect and do without just enough evidence so as to give simultaneous rise to these events. (“Luminosity,” writes Allen Grossman, “flows from hiddenness.”) Another of Dickinson's “secret” poems—a short, dashless quatrain from 1873—reads to me like an ars poetica:
The Suburbs of a Secret
A Strategist should keep,
Better than on a Dream intrude
To scrutinize the Sleep.Perhaps a poet is a strategist of secrets, an examiner of activity who—in defiance of Heisenberg's principle—wishes not to alter the odd and inevitable byproducts of that activity.
Here's another of Dickinson's later poems:
His mind of man, a secret makes
I meet him with a start
He carries a circumference
In which I have no part—Or even if I deem I do
He otherwise may know
Impregnable to inquest
However neighborly—The mind, claims Dickinson's speaker, makes us strange to ourselves. Akin to the way in which the kept secret in the first poem I quoted is said to “appal” its singular bearer, the mind in this poem “start[les]” the speaker, who seems have lost possession of her mind in the very act of “meet[ing]” it. Having come upon and considered itself, the mind recoils. To be mindful of the mind is to be struck blind.
But one isn't necessarily struck dumb in this blindness; moreover, utterance here doesn't destroy the secretive nature of the mind, but rather renders said secrecy more tolerable. After the flash of the stanza break, the speaker shows us that it's possible to attend to ignorance by way of speech. To “deem” is to declare, and so the speaker admits she can pronounce the mind's circumference as her business, even in the counter-light of her earlier claim that she's incapable of making any transactions there. The poem's second stanza presents us with a less-threatened restatement of the speaker's initial obstacle. When she says she's within range of the mind's limits, the mind “may” well know otherwise, but this is not the same as saying that it does. At this point, the mind is still a tough-guy, unable to be defeated or penetrated by way of the speaker's investigations. That said, the mind is also “neighborly,” which of course refers to its proximity to the speaker (and/or to itself), but which also suggests that the mind, having spoken to itself about itself, is in some way helpful, hospitable, kind.
Just as we might turn to a neighbor to borrow what we don't have, we return to a poem in order to recollect both what we don't know and that we don't know.
In poems, what we don't know won't hurt us.
Chances are, it already has.
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