Why
Bugsy Siegel was a Friend of Mine
by James Lee Burke
Burial
by Cleopatra Mathis
Pushing
and Pulling
by Jay Rogoff |
Excerpt from
Pushing and Pulling
Jay Rogoff
“Oh, to vex
me, contraries meet in one,” John Donne mourned in a
Holy Sonnet, his speaker rueing his vacillations between constancy
and caprice, prayer and hypocrisy, devotion and depravity.
As if to comfort Donne, William Blake’s The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell argued, “Without Contraries
is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy,
Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” For
centuries in Western culture, the concept of psychomachia—the
struggle between opposing forces in the mind—has helped
shape our understanding of what it means to be human and so,
naturally, has pervaded literature. Medieval morality plays
featured stock roles for Good and Bad Angels, the one counseling
Everyman or Mankind to seek redemption, the other tempting
his senses and pride with earthly delight. This externalized
allegory of the conscience at war with itself survives in
popular cultural parodies: Daffy Duck dithers between a miniature
Daffy-angel and Daffy-devil, one at each ear, or a Woody Allen
hero debates his love life with emanations of himself.
We agonize over the aspects of self
battling within us, tugging us in two directions, pushing
us one way and another, as if we were made “of elements
and an angelic sprite,” as another Donne sonnet puts
it. In the Renaissance, the psychomachia began to take up
residence inside the skull. When Christopher Marlowe’s
Good and Evil Angels lobby Doctor Faustus using psychological
strategies unknown to their morality play forebears, they
seem almost conscious of their own symbolic, anachronistic
nature. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare tweaks
the tradition for comic effect by showing Launcelot Gobbo
torn between two devils(Lucifer, who would tempt him away
from Launcelot(s master, Shylock the moneylender, and Shylock
himself, whom Launcelot paints as a devilish Jew. Hamlet
remakes the psychomachia in its fully modern, psychological
interiority: should we revenge, ever? Should we kill, ever?
Should we be or not be? The ghost is not an externalized segment
of Hamlet(s consciousness; rather, that consciousness itself
becomes the theater where Hamlet(s drama plays out in all
its complexity.
Contemporary poets, with a world
of options open to them, often find themselves vexed by contraries—contraries
that might not have the religious force of Everyman’s
or the moral richness of Hamlet’s, but nevertheless
psychical oppositions that create tensions in the poetry.
We can read the record of the agon in the poet(s work when
a particular book unfolds a succession of technical, thematic,
or tonal struggles. When the poet can acknowledge and accommodate
these clashes, the poetry can grow richer, a Blakean progression
emerging from the contraries. Poets don(t always recognize
the nature of their own particular psychomachia, the specific
grappling within their poetry for control of their psyche,
but the lucky and skillful—ones may find themselves,
after wrestling all night, strangely blessed.
These five new books all show their creators
wrestling their own peculiar demons and angels, and in each
case, the psychomachia reveals something essential about poetic
identity as expressed in each particular book. We encounter
their conflicted poetic selves yanked in opposite directions
by such dualities, for example, as speech and song, prose
and poetry, the personal and the social or historical, the
unflinchingly tough-minded and the unabashedly (or unintentionally)
sentimental. When these contraries meet in one book, yea,
even in one poem, the collision may vex but can also shoot
off illuminating sparks. In condemning Donne and his ilk,
Samuel Johnson, who intended the label “metaphysical
wit” pejoratively, complained that “the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together” in an intellectual
assault upon the reader, who “sometimes admires”
but “is seldom pleased.” But pulled by opposites
and pushing to extremes, the contemporary poet can find in
the agon a furthering of understanding. These are multiminded
books, then, haunted by conflicts over just what kind of poet
the author wishes to be. They sometimes try hiding the angry
scars of such psychic violence and sometimes flaunt them.
More rare, and most delightful, is when a poet can shape these
collisions into poetic peaks: irresistible India slamming
into immoveable Asia to create the Himalayas.
Continued
in volume 41, issue 1, winter 2005 |
