Does the Elegiac Protagonist deal? One of the mysteries attendant
upon the Cheltenham Elegies is this— the Elegiac Protagonist is surrounded by
dealers and dealing energy, and the extent of his participation in the deals around
him seems to vary from elegy to elegy. Dealer or not, the Elegiac Protagonist’s
ambiguous participation in dealing rituals makes clear he is no naïf in the
world, and never was. He knows what it means to be Outside— outside the law,
outside acceptable social norms and societal bounds, outside the narratives and
mythologies which, from the Academy to the media, tell us how human lives
should be lived and run. Old York
Road at midnight is outside; so, also, is the curb
in 413:
All piled into
the house on Woodlawn. They had me do all
the old jokes, as though I were a wind-up
toy. Most of them had never been in the
house before. It was about to be abandoned
anyway; but my mind still clings
to it. I smoked pot there for the first time.
I got on the road to my first hook-up at
a party, & I punched a Hulk Hogan
poster’s crotch. Now even this pile-up was
fifteen years ago. The shed in the back was
filled with smoke, as were we—
& no one who was there that night, high, hasn’t been abased. Wisdom has its
palaces that look more like park benches.
Youth’s privilege is to be in love with
life. I was in love with life that night, too—
the crush of strange kids in an Abington
house, movements towards more weed.
We sat on a curb and planned more
mischief. The Universe had some mischief
planned for us, too. For those of us who
live on the curb and nowhere else— a requiem.
Whether a dealer or an accessory to dealers, the Elegiac
Protagonist has a profound sense of his own status outside an interior that,
from Cheltenham on out, may or may not even
exist. The dichotomous energy between inside and outside is active in the Gyan
chap— the Elegies configure and represent, more often than not, an eternal outside, frozen and
static, individual consciousness unsheltered; while the Odes configure and
represent an eternal inside, frozen-in-fertility, individual consciousness in
relation to music and its synecdoches. Thus, the reader response model to the
Gyan chap— through the outside of the Elegies to the inside of the Odes and
back again— has a hinge to the potentiality for destabilizing consciousness
towards redefinitions of literary interiors and exteriors, transcendentalism
and phenomenology, music and drama moving in and out of each other’s territory.
The cumulative effect can be both spectacular and phantasmagoric. As to what
necessitates a collision between these dichotomies— the collision may not be
considered a literary necessity, but (like music itself) an illuminating
luxury, which (also like music) configures a transcendental, abstract reality,
posited above standardized, singular textuality, in an autonomous, erogenous
(fertile) space. How music and drama fertilize each other: music demonstrates
for drama the pleasures of abstraction, while drama enacts for music the
complex levels and interstices of the concrete. The music and drama inhering
between the Elegies and Odes elucidate the irreconcilable differences between
poetic approaches, while also elucidating the richness of the potentialities of
serious poetry towards the creation of new aesthetic worlds and mind-scapes,
negatively capable within themselves.
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