SECOND OPINIONS: Peseroff at Dawn
Most mornings I open the book of today with a few recitations from Buddhist texts. Recently I’ve begun supplementing them with a poem.
In Democracy and Poetry, Robert Penn Warren argues that the “drift” of American democracy inclines to the “abolition of the self.” He then sounds a prophetic note. As the process speeds up, poetry will become “more subversive of the status quo, more alienated from the “specious good” proposed by technology. He adds that this skepticism about what the majority blindly embrace will push “the solid citizen further from all art, except what is ritual or entertainment, and another will be to deepen among practical men a suspicion of anything does not promise concrete profit….” Eventually the word democratic will, in our context become synonymous with “vendable.”
But, he goes on to say, that the movement to mass culture only appears to reflect genuinely democratic values. What is “really democratic” is “whatever works toward making democracy possible.” And that means encouraging the shaping of truly independent “selves.” Poetry is one of those “whatevers.” It’s role? “The dynamic affirmation of, as well as the image of, the concept of self.”
In the title poem of Joyce Peseroff’s rich and gorgeous collection, Know Thyself, the speaker announces a quest: “I’m looking for something I haven’t found.” She then confesses that even should she chance to see that “something,” she might not recognize it as “the soul for whom my soul thirsts.” In the subsequent, complicated image she writes “aura that mixes with my aura/in a Venn diagram of tides,” as the ethereal (“aura”) condenses into water which then gives birth to life itself, as the sea lunges “over granite pools to hatch/a new constellation of sea stars.” The stanza calls to mind a line from Pound’s Cantos: “that the body lives inside the soul.”
The next stanza begins by enacting a confession of radical doubt: “Perhaps what I hunger for doesn’t exist,” she writes. Literalizing hunger, she imagines the poor soul who served as a king’s cook, perpetually under pressure to prepare the kind of dishes that might appease the tongues of “well-fed, muttering dukes.” The cook’s reward for this effort to appease the powerful leads, naturally, to his beheading. Because, at a certain level, power becomes so ravenous, it’s unappeasable: “all history/the failure of human mercy.”
And so we arrive at the provocative last stanza in which the poet reminds us that to the Greeks “Know thyself” meant “you’re not an animal/or a god.” To be human means “taking the middle path/where stones infiltrate your sandals/and violets cower,” as though the compensation for the inevitable physical irritations accompanying embodiment were the abundantly available glimpses of a transient and fragile beauty.
The “middle way” also happens to be the route Buddha recommended: navigating between the extremes of ascetism and indulgence. As it happens, the Prasangika Madhyamika branch of Buddhism, also known as the Middle Way Consequence School, asserts that there is no inherently existent self: that the self arises only in relation to others, other beings and other objects. This fluid and elusive version of the self is palpable yet contingent. It’s greatest strength lies in its ability to recognize, remember, or imagine the reality of others, both those physically present in its immediate environment, as well as those no longer present to the senses, who have passed through time’s door, into history. Another name for this capacity is, of course, compassion.
But the poem ends on a brooding, enigmatic image: “who drills in the cave/under a sea cliff taps the door to hell.” And here I’m stuck — in just the way I long, and expect, to be challenged by the very best poetry, whose mysteries summon the self to greater attentiveness. If accessibility is the hallmark of most mass culture, it’s precisely the resistance to our longing for instant gratification that sharpens our perceptions, concentrates the soul, and abets the evolution of a self strong enough to resist facile spectacle, whose method and message are, however, perfectly suited to the totalitarian temptation concealed below the veneer of a pseudo-democracy.
This contingent and interdependent self now invites you, reader, to come to my aid. How do you read that final image?
