metaphors again, with a side of BtVS
So I was part of a poetry reading tonight, and it went okay. I'd hoped to have a chance to revise some new stuff to make it readable, and that didn't happen, so I ended up reading slightly older stuff, including a poem that I initially wrote in praise of jerusalem artichokes (although it ended up going somewhere a bit different later on, and is not nearly as goofy as it sounds).
Choosing which older poems to read was complicated, and was affected perhaps a little too much by the day I'd had. It wasn't a bad day, just a long day, but I didn't quite feel up to reading some of my really heavy older poems. This is partly because they are difficult to read, but mostly because of the way people react to them. And I've been trying all evening to articulate why that is. So here goes...
I am interested in experiences that are intensely private and individual and yet are also points of almost universal connection: emotions like love and grief, physical situations like illness.
And I'm interested in the limits of language, the ways in which we inevitably fail to convey the whole truth about these experiences. I mean, if you think about what's powered the vast majority of the world's novels and poems, you've basically got love and death. But we don't have any way to speak directly about love and death; instead we've got a host of metaphors for them: love is falling, and so on. More and more I feel that the only things I can talk about with precision are small, concrete, mundane things like forks and bottles and carrots and postcards and knitting needles. So: the trick is to use the small things to talk about the big things.
Because of this, I write poems that are organized around the working-out of one or two central metaphors. They sometimes tell stories, but very short ones: the story of taking a shower, or making soup, or watching my mother pluck her eyebrows, or sitting in the car after a doctor's appointment, or talking with the night nurse.
Some of these stories are hard to hear -- particularly the ones about illness. This is partly because the events I had to work with were unpleasant to live through, but it's also, I think, because of the way we want stories about illness to be told. We want to hear that someone struggled valiantly onward and never surrendered and other equally martial metaphors.
The problem is that illness eats all metaphors. In the end I was left with the fact of a body that wasn't working right, and metaphors could neither fix that nor make me feel better about it.
A couple of years ago, after one of my early readings of those poems, someone came up to me afterwards and told me how great it was that I'd made art out of this experience, that I must have learned so much from it. I stared at this person, who seemed to expect to be praised for empathy and insight, and wasn't sure how to respond. Because: what I learned is that it is better not to be sick. And that's just not a Hallmark moment.
I have since realized that I did learn one other thing, which is how to ask for help when I need it. This is part of why I was so very moved by the end of "Sleeper" -- Spike's asking for help really got to me, as did Buffy's reaction. Taking Spike in was not the smart thing to do, as Xander quite rightly pointed out. But it seemed to be the right thing to do, not just in terms of "poor manipulated-by-evilness Spike" (about which YMMV) but in terms of Buffy -- in terms of the kind of person Buffy wants to be.
I think what I liked most about that scene is that it didn't seem particularly Spuffy to me; it had less to do with Buffy and Spike's particular tortured history than with the very simple, very human (!) connection of trusting someone enough to ask for help, and choosing to be the kind of person who will respond to that request. Given the way Buffy reacted to Cassie's death in "Help," it was a gesture that had meaning quite apart from Buffy's ambiguous "feelings" for Spike. I liked that.