The tradition in serious
poetry, of poets anthropomorphizing impersonal forces (Love, Time, Beauty) is a
rich one, even if it fell into disuse in the twentieth century. John Keats, for
example, will always address impersonal forces like Love, Time, and Beauty in a
personalized, I-thou manner. He thusly imposes on the aesthetic context the
resolutely personal (odal) world which is his insignia. The Modernists and
post-modernists found Keats, and Romanticism, naïve for this anthropomorphizing
proclivity; yet, the tunnel vision they imposed on poetry, involving the
hegemonic power of the impersonal, objective, and synthetic, shuts down the
humanistic and the imaginative in a surfeit of emptiness and unmusical
banality. As for how this issue is dealt with in Apparition Poems— if Time, for
instance, is to be anthropomorphized— one compromise solution involves taking
Time and making it a dry iced, impersonal “it” in an I-it chiasmus situation.
Thus, the perceived gaucherie of making everything personal is avoided, even if
a confession is also made that impersonal forces like Time may stand in
Inter-Dialogic relationships with our consciousness, metaphorically jumping
into our brains and making incisions, not out of a conscious will, but out of
unconscious, emanated power (like the God-force adumbrated in 1613). Time, of course, is merely (as Kant teaches us) an
intuition, something our brain imposes on what matter is empirically given to
us, and also an aid to register perceptible changes in matter. The problem, for
the poet swimming in these waters, is that human consciousness generates
emotions about these processes. So, we have Apparition Poem 1067:
I want to last—
to be the last
of the last of
the last to be
taken by time,
but the thing
about time is
that it wants,
what it wants
is us, all of us
wane quickly
for all time’s
ways, sans “I,”
what I wants—
One of the oddities here
is that melopoeia, and melopoeiac tension/release games, compensate for the
frustration of the protagonist’s circular Inter-Dialogic interaction with time
as an impersonal force, impinging on his consciousness. The music manifests in
clusters, which is one accustomed manner/mode of melopoeiac practice, and in
end-rhymes as well. The Inter-Dialogic tension here— the knowledge that
anthropomorphized time “wants,” in an impersonal fashion, to co-opt and destroy
everything I, as an individual, either have or have created— makes it so that
the poem, which begins with “I want” and finishes with “I wants,” has in it a
sense of metaphysical exploration of combined interactions between personal and
impersonal forces, what has perceptible bounds and what does not. The problem
with the poem anthropomorphizing Time is that the poet’s instinct to do so,
though it jibes with his aesthetic intentions, must nonetheless be riddled with
the doubts and inconsistencies of consciousness reaching too far past itself,
and its own empirical understanding. The principles of pure reason— Kant’s top
rung of what human cognition can achieve— can only speak of Time as an
intuitive force in human consciousness, and not strictly knowable past that. We
do not know if Time-forces inhere in the universe which manifest some form of
consciousness or personality (this being a correlative to God-forces addressed in 1613). They might. To the extent that the poem sketches (briefly, and in a poetic fragment) a semantic and melopoeiac circle in space, where the end and the beginning are
rough parallels, what is suggested is a sense of stalemate with an impersonal
force which cannot help but touch us, in both Inter-Dialogic interactions and
out, while also manifesting evidence that no consciousness can inhere in it,
and the personal and the impersonal become so hopelessly intermixed that the
poem gets lost in its own music. To be lost in melopoeia, while also dry iced
by an I-it perspective, makes the poem its own kind of hybrid, built of parts
which ache to transcend their limitations and know what is not readily known,
even as what is shown to consciousness here is frightening, frustrating, and fragmented.
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