Form,
in the Cheltenham Elegies series, is meant to elongate an impression of
plasticity. Form itself is, at its most congenial, a mode of implied
Inter-Dialogism with an assumed audience. When the brain registers that a
formal gambit has been made, the elegy (or any piece of writing which might be
formal) at hand becomes something beyond a series of thematic gestures, meant
to evoke sorrow, pity, and compassion; it becomes a way or manner of expressing
that the elegy is being used as a mode of possible innovation, pushed into the
front-lines or avant-garde, as the elegy has not very much been pushed before.
In 702, an implied palimpsest over Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats puts the
emphasis on a tone that mixes the normal elegiac imperative with archness. The
apostate figure in the poem, who is obviously meant to be construed as a writer
himself, casts a spell over the elegy, employing Keats’ formal parameters in a
way that conflates Keats own melopoeiac imperative with a nod to both Modernist
fracturing techniques and post-modern irony. The form becomes a tribute to the
apostate’s vision, as channeled through a Keats lens, and also an implied jest
at his youthfulness, and youthful sense of exultation in the Romantic. The form
itself is fractured lens, because seeing through it as we do a succession of
scenes which we are unlikely to find in Keats or Wordsworth, it manages to
ironize itself:
His
heart ached within a drowsy, numbed trance. Cameras panned to him pacing the
black-top, even blacker
at 3 am, which opens out on the expanse of Mill Road, down the hill, past the
school. Night deepened, he
was lonely enough to cry, heartsick for being the only one of a scabrous tribe gutsy
enough to say the name which even then had rent Cheltenham,
riddled with
bullets like a dog’s corpse, assassins fleeing the site of the hit, where the one kid,
bound for fame, did for himself the trick of ditching
a tepid middle.
He
levitates past himself, flies with bugs into crevices, is the pilot of the few airplanes
wafting by, Pegasus-like for
a mind intent on flight, meeting divinity, heaven’s bliss from a cockpit. Myers’ schoolyard
glistens like spikes. She
knew him then, at her end— saw how the spine imposed truth on empty gesture, feeling on
pretense, vital life on the living death of their
shared enterprise. This,
he could never know; yet without knowing how, why, he strode past her emptied house that
night, tense, sweating in summer’s stew, pallid in
cold surprise.
The
apostate flies around a small room, piles of books, papers scattered, forests of drafts,
faintly heard bird-song. Verdurous
plains suggest themselves; moss-softened nooks; just out of time, to a mind o’er spelled by
word-song. He
can only fly as he reads, over & over, the lays already fastened to moss & flower,
secured above shallow stream. His friend waits, in
stealth. The
early morning ride he caught then, from love given, wasn’t her— she had gone the way there is no coming back— yet he slept
himself back to health.
The
topos which is mixed into the Cheltenham Elegies series— a community
maintaining a shared fixation on ostracizing a threatening or menacing
individual— takes flight here, into a sense that the characters most prized by
the series are the ones who hold out against this impulse, towards a stance of
entrenched rebellion and non-conformity. John Keats, as a poet, is not a
Byronic outcast or a Shelleyan pariah— he tends to present himself as
middle-grounder. Yet, the co-opting of his form to perform a literary task
which raises this topos puts Nightingale in a new space, where Keats is
emphasized as something with, potentially, an explosive sense of rebellion and
non-conformity built into him, beginning with the odal form, invented by Keats
himself. Keats is unwitting here, but everything about the poem leans on the
odal form to make its own obstinate statement of the individual’s triumph over
a community, and the sense of embracing a writerly identity built into the form
itself, which Keats may or may not have intended (but one which one thinks
Byron or Shelley would have smiled on, satanically). Co-opting the individuals
who have supported him into the matrix of the poem, with form embraced as a mode
of punkish rebellion, so destabilizes the Keatsian impulse, perhaps even
deranges it, that the palimpsest over Nightingale makes an awkward fit with the
original model, towards a recognition that the usage of Keats, or at least a
portion of it, leans towards instrumentality. Yet, ultimately, and oddly, the
poem is about love— individuals rising up with certain integrity to defend the
innocent. Because this is the truth, the betrayal of John Keats is not a
complete one. Even if love here is more bleaguered by worldly concern than is
usually found in Keats.
The tensions inherent in Meta-Dialogism— competing voices
vying for a place in a single consciousness— are re-explored in Elegy 427.
Here, self-consciousness fights back against its own power to discern, and the
battle is seen to be a losing one. The drama which attends 427 as a construct
is itself attendant on an edifice erected by an individual, for the edification
of an individual— a self-posited, self-sustaining pact with a place (Glenside,
a borough of Cheltenham Township, and the borough which has the most claim to
reality as an autonomous locale in and of itself), which becomes a rampart
employed by consciousness against a sense of uselessness in the world:
When she starts at Rizzo’s, winds her way around to Easton Road on Saturday night, it's with full control, absolute mastery— here’s where Glenside stands, where it’s going, here’s why. The game continues over to Limekiln Pike— Wawa, Tail of the Whale. Not just the surface, but who’s hiding where, with what, & again why. Yet deep in her heart, the ultimate why, life or death in a sense of purpose, remains barren. The spider in the glass case, frozen in the Humphrey’s Pest Control window, is to the point— Humphrey’s never answers anyway— the spider tells her where the real action is. Then the beauty of it— her sacrifice to/for Glenside— becomes just another heist in the world. Limekiln Pike is too steep to climb.
This individual desires that the voice of the
self-sustained, self-posited pact should subsist as something dominant in her
consciousness. The drama of fluctuations and oscillations, wherein the pact is
either workable or nullified by both the corruptions inherent in Glenside and
in the human race in general, enacts itself in Meta-Dialogic acknowledgements,
an array of voices which command the narrative sense built into her brain. When
what speaks most eloquently refutes the possibility of the pact (or, as in the
poem, sacrifice), and affirms the reality (or spider) of an anti-idealistic
world, predicated on the prevalence of killing, massacre, destruction, the
interior voice which knocks the pact from its perch is about futility, and the
impossibility of sustaining an ideal in the face of spider-webbed realities.
The mimetic process, for the reader, involves itself building up a rampart, wherein
this character (heroine) is someone we can believe in and take seriously,
against the impinging sense of doubt and disbelief that she can be dismissed as
impractical or romantic, or both.
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