IRENE CAESAR: POETRY MANIFESTO IN LETTERS #1

[irenecaesar]

#1

To WE 10/13/2000

...When young, I usually went to bed with verses sounding in my head. I fell asleep and woke up in a state of inspiration. I passed from my day dreaming into my night dreaming and vice versa without any interruption, without the uncomfortable changing-for-dinner feeling. In my sleep, I literally lived in the time and space of my poems. I completed many events of my daytime life this way. There was noth- ing outside which I was not able to harmonize by my dreaming-through.

As I grew older, poetry, with its funny meticulous conventions, became too narrow for me. But anything I wrote remained poetry for I continued to dream my life through, believing that what I dreamed truly existed. I once wrote something against the Egyptian gods. In the evening there came an awful storm never seen be- fore. Lightning flashed right in front of our window, as if trying to break into our room. I believed that the gods had gotten angry. That night, I had a dream that I was flying right in the middle of the storm, with lightning flashing all around, and that I was able to strike the lightning by the movement of my hands (like those sor- ceresses in cheap Hollywood movies). And I do not really know what the real achievement of my life would be: that unreal flight or my real job this week...

Recently I went to the library to look through the poetry section, and discovered that I hate poetry on the shelves. So far, I have found only Auden capable of living poetically, that is, consciously cultivating blessed madness. Mostly, the so-called po- ets merely try to mimic this state, and because this state is the state of the genuine per se, it cannot be mimicked without becoming a caricature. It was especially gro- tesque in the thick folio by some provincial American professor of English literature who tried to mimic not just poetical madness, but the poetical madness of Ovid, or Byron, and wrote on the mythological passions of some goddesses and gods.

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But the pathetic madness of such down-to-the-earth madmen as Allen Ginsberg, who, by the way, has taught at CUNY his "disembodied poetry" for some time, is also no good. It does not actually matter, what an aboriginal of poetry picks up as his "poetically-acknowledged" objects ñ the garbage cans of the 60s or the garbage goddesses of "the Middle Ages" and "middle years", because the only sense of po- etry is the destruction of stereotype and fetish. And poetry cannot operate via the "poetically acknowledged". It can be neither disembodied, nor embodied; it cannot merely oppose the garbage cans to the goddesses.

Auden proved best because of his desperate attempt to acquire the intimate signifi- cance of garbage cans and garbage goddesses, but still his poetry is a collage of un- digested tokens of culture - from the most unrefined to the most refined. His poetry lacks just one crucial thing, which only Shakespeare has so far in full, i.e., Auden talks in an infinite monologue. And any monologue has the nasty feature of being an infinite regress. I cannot read more than two of his pieces at once. As my friend, Tatiana told me, I am lazy (and this is actually my reason of writing poetry which does not require of me too much), but I hope I am not dumb - while a few times, while reading just one poem, I found myself forgetting what he started with, and where he was in the middle.

Auden is a monologist because only a strong feeling about another person can break one's membrane into the world, while Auden is afraid to feel so strongly (he is not a Shakespeare). Maybe he is right for himself, because a strong feeling, either grief or joy, brings suffering. To suffer or to bite, I found in Auden a lot of toys and dolls with sharp long teeth, and even more of the mechanical toys that move in infinite circles once a master turns a key. I found everything enthusiastically moving around Miniature Mountains with nicely situated porcelain gods, either of the old or the present times. I truly added, with Auden, a scoop of fame to the already famed, so that "being famed", I hope, stuck to my eyes as well, finally transforming Auden himself into a porcelain miniature, not painful and not tiresome. What do you think: could my soup can placed on Auden's play table be bigger than Auden in per-

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son? (my 'can' and my 'could'). Whether Auden's cans were made from porcelain or not, I did not find in Auden strong passions - neither despair, nor ecstasy, nor lust, nor anger, nor yearning, which the Sonnets of Shakespeare are full of. I did not find there any one else beside Auden.

All other people - should they appear on the stage of his persona - are so neatly packed in the "enchanted" trumpery of labeled culture that they lose their presence, as if Auden carefully erases them from his memory.

How can Americans forgive to the poet all these banalities and clichÈs? -- all these "time and fevers burn away beauty", "supernatural sympathy of Venus", "univer- sal life and hope", which I, not being an American do forgive him for just two lines: "soul and body have no bounds", and "from this night not a whisper, not a thought, nor a kiss nor look be lost". But one way or another, Auden still suffers from the universal sin of his poetical time. He places the typical over the individual, proving again that an extreme individualist is forced to substitute imaginary sedative toys for live, tiresome people. The individualistic poet of the 60's differs from the Soviet poet of the 60's only by an insignificant peculiarity. The Soviet poet was "joining" forcedly, as if being raped, while the individualistic poet of the West was "joining" forcefully, as if raping. In both cases, the object of "love" was raped - it was a cold, alienated thing, which had too little with its loud "cultural" names (probably be- cause "it" did not have ears).

That is why Auden is not melodical. But probably my own return to tedious rhymes is just my attempt to last in my landslip of total poetical madness. In my tongue and snow slips, I think Auden did not walk for hours in the woods and along roads with the speed limit of 40 miles per hour, either humming his verses, or opening his mouth without a sound, but humming inside, and forgetting to breathe through his nose, so that in a cold weather, his nose was acquiring a hooting French accent.

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By the way, I was told recently that he went to bed every day at a strictly ritualized time. So all the friends of his lovers, and lovers of his friends, should leave the scene of his persona, as soon as the clock showed the fatal hour and the final minute.

Auden kept his pass, his badge of "the poetically acknowledged" the same way as he kept his fatal hour and final minute, and that is why he was entirely given to the crowd, and was always running away from it. Isn't it a paradox, for should he have discovered that September is the month, and Wednesday is the day, when he could go to the bed at another time, and probably another place, he would have been im- mediately dropped by the crowd, as being too loud. Oh yes, he would have been left alone then, a painful feeling, you know, but he could have become Odin, which means the One.

It is a pity, really, that you can easily decode his W.H. As if even in this, he was not first, while poets are always those who are first.

I am not sure that he seriously believed in his own passionate words that "soul and body have no bounds". And that is why I do not believe the poet Auden.

So aiming at becoming at least a first female Petrarch with a male Laura, I can swear that all American poetry is "disembodied" (like a one-time swimming suit dissolving on your body after the first water, like a condom, or like a word "Venus" in a lullaby by Auden)...

To WE 10/29/2000

ÖLast time we were arguing about that poem by Auden "Musee des Beaux Arts". I told her that in order to recognize if somebody is a good poet or not, it is enough just to open a book to any page, take any line out of any context and see whether this line

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is completely original and beautiful or not. If you had already heard this line somewhere else, or you can take this line and use it in a non-poetical context, for ex- ample in the Sunday New York Times, it is not good poetry - like these opening lines of the poem by Auden, which are quite suitable even for Daily News - "About suffer- ing they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position", etc.

Not likewise the line from the song by some rock group "Picnic", saying, "Angels with bare ankles are dancing on the candles". Or the line from another rock group "Aquarium", saying -- "When I am with you, you are my only home"; or the line "My sister, when you had taken my hand, did you know that the sunrise would stand up between us as a wall?"; or the other line -- "We sleep in one bed, at the dif- ferent sides of the wall"; or the other line - "I lost the connection with the world which does not exist".

The other point of such poetical minimalism is that any line cannot by any chance be replaced by another line, while Auden might have successfully replaced any line in the above-mentioned poem, or added any amount of such structurally and me- lodically insignificant lines. Not only, as the famous father of "Uncle Vanya" said -- "if I have a gun on the wall in the first act, it should shoot in the second act" -- but also the smell of the shooting, the anxious sound of frightened voices should follow. This means that every image should happen in the context and continuity of the poem. For example, in the song, where the sunrise stands up between two lovers as a wall, the line, which follows, is "the sky is becoming closer / the sky is becoming closer every day".

The image should not be wasted. It is precious and should be attentively framed; it should linger, and echo in other images.
The image should be walked around, and seen from all sides. The image should gradually show what it does not show in a frontal view; it is you who see its back -

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the side which this image does not want to see, and to show (the Bakhtin's meta- phor).
The thing should never speak for itself; other things should speak for it; or it should speak through the other things. When many things speak for one thing, this thing is loud enough to be heard.

The image should ripen and fall, heavy, to the ground. Unripe images are unquiet and bitter. They upset stomach.

Not only should the image be stamped in the messages of other images -- it should be woven into the melodic threads of all images in the poem. This means that not only should every image speak, but that every image should sound (you, unfortunately, do not speak Russian). Not only should the images logically, analogically and meta- phorically follow each other, but they should merge into one melody, until they be- come pregnant with each other, and bear each other not only on the level of verbal meaning, but also on the level of sounds. Then the poem as a whole and every line are complete and self-sufficient and meaningful not only by being an aphorism (aphorism containing aphorisms), but by the pure flow of the syllables. The re- vealed constellations of images and consonances of sounds are that cloth of the poem, that body of a fruit, that death from being shot, that makes you finally decide what you can call The Waste Land.

My daughter rebutted that probably this being not original is the originality of Mr. Auden. An interesting point which was the main call for the whole poetical genera- tion of the 60's, but which expired a half century before that, when Mr. Eliot said his "Shantih shantih shantih" at the very end of his compellation-of-quotes in so- called The Waste Land, wasting all away by prophetically saying "I can connect nothing to nothing". So I, in my turn, argued back to my daughter that only the first unoriginal poet could be original. I found Eliot much more a hooligan than Auden and Ginsberg -- in the admirable sense of this word, while walking naked where it is not allowed, and kissing the hands of men. Especially this part of The Waste Land called A Game of Chess, where he starts with exquisite spangles of pure

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art, all these "golden Cupidons", "perfumes ... confused and drowned sense in odors", "the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable voice"; he continues with some Lil paid by her lover to get new teeth, and finishes with the refrained British call-out at pub closing time - "Hurry up please it's time" and with all these rude unrefined unromantic phrases like "nearly died of young George" after taking pills "to bring it off", "Ö had a hot gammon, / And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot" and "Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. / Good night, ladiesÖ" Probably, the originality of Auden was done with when he read The Waste Land at the age of nineteen. It is said that this had a profound effect on him. Too pro- foundÖ

So that he spent his entire life reading profound books which all had a profound ef- fect on him...

To EE 5/22/01

ÖThe major difference between Bakhtin's method and so-called Western poetical conventions is that Bakhtin's method is dialogical, while all modern Western poetry is monological. You tend to aggressively discern between the metaphorical and formal aspects of poetry. Nonetheless, there is a point where these two things should coincide. Language is alive only if it is communicative. You write something down only when you feel the urge to say something to somebody ñ then you understand the importance of your utterance, even if there is nobody near right now to listen to.

This means that language is essentially dialogical.

The thing can be known and realized only though the other thing -- through their mutual differences and similarities. You cannot see your own back, and cannot see yourself in your entirety -- only the other person can see your back and see you in your entirety. Only the other person can go around you, see all your sides and com-

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plete you -- make you whole. This is a telos of poetry -- to help people communicate, to teach people how to communicate -- in such a way that communication preserves its urgency, its importance through time and space.

Monological poetry, written not for a definite listener, does not, cannot, keep this function of language. It is written for itself, in itself, and in this way it arouses less and less interest in poetry, so that 99% of poetry does not have any listeners at all.

Monologues tend to be an infinite regress without a fixed fulcrum -- when con- sciousness cannot exit itself and see itself from all sides, and get lost in its closed space. It loses the gauges of correlations in the world -- it becomes myopic, it thinks of a water drop as a flood, and does not notice a real flood raging outside its capsule.

Such intensity of ego makes it finally blind and even psychotic -- the ego cannot construct rhythms and rhymes of reality anymore, but is carried around by waves of the most primitive impulses of devouring and fear of being devoured. The monological ego in its separation from the world only imagines it creates something, while, in reality, everything "created" is just the most primitive processes which be- came so automatic and habitual that the ego thinks of them as arising from oneís ìnatureî, as being truly oneís own ñ and moreover, as oneís revelations. This is a paradoxical result of a pop-art quality ñ one stops seeing the mechanical nature of soup cans and pop-corn, and contemplates a soup can and a pack of pop-corn as a piece of art. And this soup can and this pack of pop-corn takes a central place ñ a place that should be designated for another live person, an addressee, an interlocu- tor.

This, I think, is a basis for free-verse-poetry, which essentially has this pop-art qual- ity. This kind of poetry is a reflection of the chaos within the monological ego, when it cannot remember, cannot sing its own reality, and cannot make anybody else sing and remember. The most I can ever remember of free verse is the separate sen- tences and phrases, and the whole impression of being flooded by a drop of water in a very closed space, where you cannot breathe to echo with your breaths between

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lines.

In being an infinite regress, this kind of poetry is highly repetitious, in a bad sense of this word. You can add an infinite number of lines to it, and take away an infinite number of lines. It does not create a unique continuum from which you can take nothing and add nothing.

Of course, you're right, it is a formal function of poetry to be able to mold language in such a way that it becomes some new form, inaccessible by ordinary language.

But this form is a reflection of a new content of language, accessible only in poetry - - to be more dialogical than other forms of language.

The notion of dialogue is enriched by Bakhtin with the notion of polyphony. The world is dialogical itself, and is a hidden language. Polyphony is actually a dialogue which reaches the universal level of communication between people and phenom- ena. Things and events rhyme and construct unique rhythms. No thing exists sepa- rately, or monologically. Things and events sound in choruses, compliment each other, and are visible on the background of each other. That is why Eliot who is very monological and regressive in his Four Quartets, and just impressed me as a dilettante, speaking funnily of Heraclitus, is nonetheless, far from being mediocre in his Waste Land, which, though written monologically, preservers the dialogism of the world. But does it really?

If you remember, I told you that I call something bad poetry if, after reading it, I can ask my rhetorical "So what?", and you told me that The Waste Land has its telos -- Eliot wrote it while being depressed. But notwithstanding the fact that his wasted land helped Eliot cope with his depression, I can ask you a very important question - - would it help anybody else cope with his or her depression, or will it create a chain reaction of making more and more chaos of wasted and wasting lands? I can con- nect nothing to nothing, said Eliot in his Waste Land wasting it all. Auden who had read The Waste Land being 19 years old, considered it the major aesthetic influence

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on his poetry. And so connecting nothing to nothing and continuing wasting poetry bit by bit, we finally get to Ginsberg The Great Cock Sucker whose poetry is just a big garbage can.

So Eliot is a great poet only in the way that Hitler is a great historical figure. They are great in themselves, but disastrous for other people. So the purely monological poetry is safe. It is just dead, and is never heard, while the half-monological and half-dialogical poetry is dangerous -- it is a well-constructed mechanism which does not know its telos, and is just wasting it all away on its way.

The other Bakhtinian notion complimenting dialogism and polyphony is ambiva- lence. Ambivalence is dialogism and polyphony on the level of the properties or qualities of things. Things can never be described by only one quality (the point of Heraclitus). The world is a counterpoint not only between things, but also within each thing. Eliot is ambivalent in his Waste Land -- that is why he is much more readable than, for example, Hopkins, who reaches out to the polyphony of the world, but is not dialogical enough to attain the polyphony of the qualitative micro- structure of the world.

Because it is not enough just to try to express the instress of the world. I can ques- tion the instress itself with my rhetorical "So what?" Hopkins' instress only seems to be emphatic -- I do not see any other person there except Hopkins and the anonymous life force flowing crazily around, from thing to thing, without any particular telos. The other persons in Hopkins have the character of newspaper photos -- they are too black and white, like those German nuns-maybe-not-nuns.

Hopkins cannot exit his own impression, he cannot laugh at his own cry, and cry at his own laughter. That is why his last sonnets are called "being written by blood" --

they are called so not because he wrote them with his blood, but because he made his blood the ink. And this is so because of this funny rhetorical question "So what?" Had he addressed anybody, he would be forced to say, like dying Sappho

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addressing her daughter Cleis -- do not mourn, we do not mourn in the house of po- etry.

I am so categorical about poet Hopkins because passing through a terrible depres- sion myself, which went on for a whole year, I saved myself from committing suicide by starting writing poetry again, by opening myself to other people, by actualizing the live necessity for being dialogical. Poet Hopkins, even if it is cruel to say so, is antipoetical in his last poems; he destroys the very telos of poetry -- to survive and to love -- to survive and to love notwithstanding time, space and circumstances.

Ppoetry is not this funny rhyming of words. Poetry is a creating of rhymes and rhythms with other people (again, it is not enough to only express the instress of the world -- let coupling spring squirrels do it). And everybody is a poet at least once in his life. Poets differ from other folks because they cultivate in themselves this state of divine madness of exiting themselves and conversing constantly with the world through their beloved or conversing with their beloved through the world.

That is why the poet should first of all work on his technique to achieve the state of love, when you have an urge to say something to some person. Only then should he work on achieving the verbal techniques. I do not feel too much love in Hopkins, Eliot, Auden, Ginsberg, Yeats, Dickinson and Pound.

Love is that counterpoint where the formal and the metaphorical coincide...

To EE 7/26/01

ÖI wrote in my previous long message that language is essentially dialogical or communicative. Language is born not when the utterance is made, but when it is heard; not when I just express myself in word-sequences, but when somebody is in-

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terested in my expressions. And it only happens when the writer is interested in the person to whom he is writing. Only if he tries to move something and somebody, is he moving.

I oppose the credo of modern Western poetry, beginning with Romanticism and es- pecially postmodernism, which believes that we write down something only because of our belief in the inherent, self-containing or self-sufficient, and self-addressed value of the utterance. I believe we speak and we write because we can acquire and confirm the value of the utterance only by directing it to another person -- by acting via language. Language exists only between people, and its meaningfulness and value is born by both the speaker and the listener. Language is a device for influ- encing people.

From this point of view, language is something more than just utterance -- it is the

very grammar of reality, expression via visual and auditory symbols. The poets of free verse believe too much in words. They think, like positivists in American phi- losophy, that if they say "red", the listener will immediately get the sense datum "red". Nonetheless, the meaning is born by the interrelation of symbols in the ut- terance, which already hints at dialogism. There can be tacit speaking, when your intention is not told, but shown. When it is shown, it exits its narrow continuum of self-containment, and enters the wider context, which cannot be just ego-syntonic.

The act of showing something to another person can be genuine only if you really intend to act. Why should I tell you about my joy and my woe, or why should you listen to my joy and my woe? These are the main questions for the poet. I can say only to myself directly about what I think or feel -- but I cannot just force upon an- other person the intensity and concern of my feeling and thinking. I cannot just say to another person, ìI feel joy, or grief, or despair, or irony, or ecstasy, or melan- choly, or that I think that this is good or this is bad,î to make him or her share with me my feelings or my convictions. I cannot proclaim or prove anything in the utter- ance, but I can show it -- tacit and always to some concrete person, having a very

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definite intention. This makes poetry, which is a quintessence of the utterance, minimalist. It cuts off the infinite regress of the uncontrolled and sluttish pseudo- self-expression of free verse poetry with its circular stream of consciousness. The genuine intention requires the necessary condensation of alliteration between the speaker and the listener. And only in this way, the language becomes effective.

For example, there are infinite varieties of despair, depending on to whom you ad- dress it. Should you be confined within your despair, alone, without an interlocutor, you would necessarily have only one kind of despair, of your own hue.

Now I want to take a closer look at how the intention happens in the language gram- matically. There is an infinite variety of intentional expressions -- promise, threat, praise, scorn, consolation, persuasion, advice, encouragement, request, reassurance, reproach, regret, rebuke, etc. Shakespeare's Sonnets and Sappho can be a perfect guide to them.

Language offers a simple encoding of the intention by the major grammatical struc- tures of utterances. Each utterance is completed by a punctuation mark -- and it expresses respectfully exclamation, question and assertion/negation. The punctua- tion mark is a link between the speaker and the listener; it marks not the end of utterance, but the purpose of utterance. In philosophy, it is called the propositional attitude, implying the disposition. Without an encoded intention, the utterance be- comes just a monotonic piece of indifferent information, which could be written down by symbols and would carry the punctuation between the informational units inside the utterance, but not at the end of the utterance. Punctuation in a purely in- formational speech is a sheer formality (it is closed and indifferent to the listener all the way through). That is why the utterance which is not just informational, and is intended to move somebody by means of language, is never completely closed, as if the punctuation mark is a link to the next, expected utterance of response.

But look how poor monological poetry is in the variety of intentions. Auden is built

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only on the periods and commas. His exclamation marks are so dry and small, that all his poetry is basically just grumbling. Dickinson sounds only in one timbre of the exclamation mark of reproach, regret and aloof excitement, which reminds me the reflected light of the moon -- she does not experience anything directly in the immediate contact with the other person, but passionately speaks with shadows.

I know that I myself am far away from the richness of the dispositional attitudes, from how they are in real life. But I wrote a few poems of encouragement, re- proach, request, questioning, promise, praise, and consolation...

To EE 8/11/01

ÖProbably, I was not clear enough or too verbose, but I myself meant precisely what you expressed in your reply to me, i.e., that (1) the spontaneous language is prior to the written language; (2) the grammar of the written language is deter- mined by the intonation of the spoken language. I analyzed punctuation marks in this way -- as instruments to mark the intonation, or rather, intention of a speaker when he/she writes down the utterance -- punctuation as symbols of exclamation, question and assertion, being the major propositional attitudes. This makes my re- marks applicable in societies without writing.

My remarks were very preliminary, but nonetheless, I think that this line of analysis can be continued by analyzing the interrelation of the syntactical units both within the singular sentences, and between groups of sentences. Then it will become clear that any convincing utterance should have polyphonic undertones within the singu- lar sentence. The assertion should bear the question inside itself, and the exclama- tion, even the most ecstatic, should also bear the assertion inside.

In music -- any major mood should be construed by minor moods, otherwise it will

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be only one primitive melody of a lullaby, march, or the African dance around the bonfire. Just so, we should be analyzing the poem not only from the point of view of how it alliterates sounds, but also from the point of view of how and why it distracts the alliteration -- not only its literal consonance, but also its dissonance. Because the final harmony is born of opposites of consonance and dissonance -- not just by rhyme and alliteration as a means of achieving "likeness" between sounds.

Shakespeare is a paragon of such a skill -- he is never too much -- never too much of grief, or of joy, of the bawdy, or the transcendent. This does not mean that he does not express grief and joy, the bawdy and the transcendent to their extreme limits.

He does. But he is able every time to detach himself from what he experiences, and show, at least, with a hint, that every phenomena has two sides -- the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful (you know, like in Taoism -- everything which is small is bigger than something; and so at the same time, is small and big, etc.).

Shakespeare's ultimate achievement in the Sonnets, in my view, lies in the expres- sion of his ambivalence towards both his youth and his mistress. The boy and the lady are both bad and good, ugly and beautiful, sinful and fair. In the same sonnet, he calls his mistress dark, and says that her "darkness" is fair to him. But there are sonnets in which he has one strong idea and feeling, and which are not recognized as being ambivalent. These sonnets are especially good for demonstrating what I want to say. They show that even the sonnets, expressing one dominant feeling, need am- bivalence of intonation/intention to be convincing -- for example, the famous Sonnet #129.

Over the summer I read a book by some Winny called "The master - mistress". He analyzes this sonnet as a non-compromising attack on lust. Nonetheless, in the very two last lines of the sonnet, Shakespeare writes: "All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell". So indeed, even if lust is "a waste of shame", "the expense of spirit", even if it is "perjured, murder- ous, bloody, full of blame, savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust", etc. and etc., it

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is the heaven, which men cannot shun -- the heaven that leads men to its hell.

I said in my previous message, that all monological poets are very monotonous. Only Hopkins tried to express some variations in the intonations of the very reality. But if we apply the method I offer to analyzing his wholesome pieces of instress --

each one separately -- he will appear to be very monotonous anyway. I do not see in Hopkins the hell in the heaven, and the heaven in the hell, like in Shakespeare. He does not carry the richness of intonation, i.e., intention, into the syntactical units within a singular poem. Speaking in terms of music -- he does not create a counter- point.

You could ask: why should he? I can answer: if he could have done this, he would not have had the depression, which was just his inability to exit this or that instress, to detach himself from his immediate experiences and to laugh at what had forced him to cry and to cry at what had forced him to laugh.

This again stresses that poetry is a means for healing your soul and healing the souls of others. Like Freudianism which is healing by making the patient speak of his hidden and half-conscious intentions. But in comparison with Freudianism, good poetry leaves a beautiful product which can always continue healing souls.

By the way, I came to the firm conviction recently that any depression is just ego- ism, and indirectly a consequence of wrong views in the society. The industrial soci- ety promotes the generic, a scheme, a standard, a template, the monotony, the monologue, which subconsciously expresses the generic as its own exclusive "revela- tion". But people and every other phenomena are unique ñ a world consisting only of unique things and unique moments. And this society forces people to cut their Gogh ears off over and over again -- it forces people to be isolated links in a chain, to be egoistic in their expression of the generic.

Actually, to become the most generic, a person should be absolutely isolated from

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the unique continuums of the true reality, and be satisfied with the most primitive templates of experience (American television is a very good means for cultivating this). Trying to resist, I start my every day by visualizing all people whom I knew and know closely. It gives be a vast panorama of intentions and intonations, as in the 4th symphony by Tchaikovsky. After that, if I felt before any distress or anxi- ety, I do not feel them any more.

You ask me how my views on language can be applied to internal, self-directed lan- guage. I have recently begun to practice the Buddhist meditation every day. It aims at achieving the free control of the mental process with its spontaneous visualiza- tions. By the way, one of the tasks is to destroy the limited boundaries of the ego -- I was told to visualize myself as an 18 years old naked Tibetan beauty with the exotic attributes of a goddess -- in my size, the size of a house, a hill, the earth, the solar system, the whole universe, until I would coincide with the infinite light, and then again of my size, a size of a book, a size of a seed.

At first, I found the exercises very relaxing and quieting -- it is a conscious practice in schizophrenia, when you force yourself to double, but if schizophrenia gives un- controlled relief by the unconscious doubling, these exercises give you the controlled relief -- in the ability to constantly watch and rule yourself from outside. So what I want to say in connection with internal, self-directed language, is, first of all, that any inner discourse needs ego and alter-ego, or "doubling" in a dialogue with one- self, in order to remain human. A monologue needs a communication with oneself. It is a preliminary form of a dialogue.

I was doing these exercises in their traditional form for a while, until I realized that they lose their impact on me. My own self-created meditation of visualizing all peo- ple whom I know, works better (actually, I realized that I know very few people).

The point was that the Buddhist meditations were interesting only to myself, and I realized that if I am doing something which is interesting only to myself, it fails to be interesting to me very soon, and instead of relief, brings torture.

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My conclusion is that internal speech is just a projection of the external speech, or, in other words, I vote for the Aristotelian "man is a social animal". Solitude and sociability are two opposites, and they are meaningless and destructible without one another.

Sometimes I look at the Latinos, who have just arrived from Salvador or Nicaragua, who are poor, ignorant, humiliated by the whites, and very often I am amazed by the wholesome pride and spontaneous serenity of these people, even of those who are ill-favored. Finally, I came to think that their primitive society preserves some unique continuums, while Western society does not (it preserved only unique indi- viduals who suffocate in the generic templates of pseudo-continuums). These people live in big families, communities and clans with their thousand-year culture, which is primitive but dialogical nonetheless. Look at the primitives of music -- folk music first of all -- it emphatically shows that music, as poetry, is intonational because it is intentional. Folk songs are always written for a unique occasion, and performed on that occasion. It is never self-directed -- it is a joyful wedding song, or a sad burial song; it is a song which people sing sitting at the celebration table, or a song which people dance to. And the intonation/intention is always stressed by the syntax of gestures and poses. This is a language of the very reality, emphasized by the people who concentrate energy vectors around, as Kandinsky believed.

When I was a kid, in the summer time, I visited my grandparents living in middle Russia, in the Urals. My grandfather and I went one day to gather wild strawber- ries. He was riding his bicycle, with me sitting behind him -- down the road between infinite humps of low ancient mountains. We passed by some narrow-eyed and yel- low-skinned native. He was slowly walking down the road and singing very loud.

He did not stop or lower his voice when we were passing him by.

He was free and happy in his amalgamation with these camel mountains, with strawberries hiding in the infinite humps together with stars hiding in the infinite

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cloudy humps of the daylight sky. It was indeed a monologue -- I believe, in a free- verse (he sang in his native language), put to the minimalist music like that one of Penderecki. But this monologue was significant for him only because he had air to pronounce it: and just the amazing feeling of having this air in the throat, here and now, made his throat vibrate and spill his spells.

Also I believe that if this song of his was successful, he will remember it, and repeat. And on occasion, traveling with some other yellow-skinned and narrow-eyed guy,

he will share this spell with him, and in this way the poet will be born.

What do you think -- did Hopkins really want to share with anybody his late, ìbloodyî sonnets? Or was he getting more and more psychically sick, and this was his schizophrenic "doubling" -- an attempt to throw away his alter-ego with its most painful experiences of loneliness and despair? He was evidently unsuccessful in do- ing this because an ego cannot do this without another person or persons, so that a schizophrenic constantly mistakes his ego for the alter-ego which he wanted to throw away, and grows more and more gloomy. By the way, Winny tries to prove that Shakespeare was this kind of a "split" or "doubled" personality.

I myself am afraid to write just for myself. I have written poetry since the age of 13, and so have some experience in writing rhymes. And I can tell you that my only successful poems before were poems written to a concrete person and with the defi- nite and not ego-syntonic intention. So that now I write only such poems and always hand them to the person whom they were written to. I have a few muses. All of them accept my poems. I am very lucky.

This kind of poetry made me look at people differently. Now I value it a lot when I find a person willing to have a poem from me, and who, on the other hand, inspires me to write to him or her. And this kind of poetry is gradually changing me. Every time I want to write something that impresses me by its inherent beauty, I think about whether it would be interesting also to another person. And to make me

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really believe that it would be -- I should get some person involved in some contin- uum shared with me. To make my poems definite, concrete, unique, I should first find a definite, concrete, unique -- this and the only one -- person to listen to me.

Please see below are my recent poetical givings to my muses...