Concerning Poems; The Last Month

People may be wondering why it has taken me so long to write another post. A couple of weeks ago I wrote part of an essay in which I made a stab at a better interpretation of The Waste Land by T.S Eliot than I gave in the essay I wrote just before Trump's election. It wasn't a comprehensive interpretation because to set out a totally rigorous reading of this poem would take.a whole book. Rather I intended to just make a few points about a few passages, passages that when properly understood would suddenly make the whole poem a whole lot clearer to readers. My key insight is that The Waste Land should be understood as a confessional poem, a confessional poem written forty years before confessional poetry became a thing. We tend to associate confessional poetry with people like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath; for a hundred years the truth that The Waste Land is really a sort of confessional poem has been either ignored or suppressed; the notes that Eliot published along with the poem are an enormous act of misdirection or legerdemain intended to make his poem seem something mythopoetic when really it was a poem inspired by his situation – that he was stuck in a loveless and sexless marriage and was afraid that he would remain a virgin his whole life. Obviously this truth, that it was a poem written by someone who was effectively an InCel, wasn't something Eliot wanted publicised in his own life, for his own sake and for sake of his then wife Vivienne – even though he wrote a long poem about it.

I then intended to discuss the state of modern poetry and give a better interpretation of Jess's poem Hard Sell then the interpretation I wrote in the previous post. I am actually going to take a stab at it here in this essay. I am not going to give the full interpretation here but only make a few comments about the poem. To give a full interpretation of it would require me to talk about her life, or what I know about it. The reason I wanted to write about this poem in this blog is that I believe the poem is actually intended for me and furthermore is a poem that will make sense to those readers who who have regularly read this blog for years. 

The first lines of the poem, recall, are

There is a robot in this poem,

because I want it, and you get what you want

when you call the shots in a poem.

There is something funny happening with pronouns here. In interpreting this poem I am going to adopt an odd rubric: I am going to claim that whenever Jess says "I" in the poem she means me, that is Andrew, the author of the Silverfish blog, and whenever she says "you" she means herself, Jess, the poet. A line like "I walk the talk and sometimes I worship dogs" seems like a clear reference to me, to the fact that one of items adduced as evidence that I, that is Andrew, am schizophrenic and required compulsory treatment is that sometimes I would go for walks in town at night; the mention of dogs might be alluding to the fact that I have spoken positively of people like Stephen Fry and Michel Foucault. I am claiming that she has deliberately switched us, one for the other. Think of the Kate Bush song "Running Up That Hill" with its lines "If I only could I would make.a deal with God and get him to swap our places"; think also that Kate Bush's fifth album was called "Hounds of Love " and my film about Jess was called "The Hounds of Heaven"; there are wyrd coincidences everywhere. This interpretation is not absolutely rock solid. The line "Soft determinism puts pineapple on my pizza" I don't think applies to me because, generally speaking, in this blog I have presented myself as a hard determinist. I would like to think that it is Jess who is the soft determinist.

If this way of interpreting the poem is at all coherent, then the lines "The pineapple is something you can take or leave / And you will, you will" is actually me talking to her. I would like to suggest that the pineapple might be the girlfriend she got herself in 2014 when she 'came out' as gay or bisexual; she wasn't sure which she was herself at the time. I have talked about this night at The Thirsty Dog before, quite a long time ago. But something I didn't mention in previous posts is that not long before Jess 'came out' to me and others I had written the story 69 and had sent it to her. I had written 69 before I learnt that she had come out as gay or bisexual (whether she is gay or bisexual or now heterosexual currently probably depends on who you talk to I suppose. ) She presumably read this story not long after I sent it to her and after I had met the girlfriend. These lines may also be indirectly alluding to something I wrote a long time ago in this blog concerning the Hole song "Violet", that essentially lesbian relationships tend to be very short lived. Certainly I found out from someone else in the Auckland poetry scene that Jess's relationship with her even younger girlfriend didn't last long. There is another interpretation of course. In this interpretation Jess is the pineapple and she is saying that I, that is Andrew, will leave her – it is this interpretation that led me to conclude that Jess has a fear of abandonment.

The section that mentions quantum physics only makes sense if she is being me because nowhere else in the collection does she talk about "objective collapses" or "quantum superposition"; these are things that I tend to talk about, in this blog, not things she ever talks about. One enormous difficulty I faced when interpreting this section of the poem however is that it begins "I am doomed to put pineapple on pizza". Because, like Freud, I have a dirty mind and see sex everywhere, I wondered if this line was hinting at lesbian sex – but this interpretation cannot be correct if she is being me. This might sound incredibly conceited but I suspect that "I" is still Andrew and that the pineapple is her. You can reach into the top-hat and pull out not a rabbit but the following possibly ridiculous interpretation – that she would like to go out with me but is worried that I think that she is a fruit.

The extraordinary thing about the poem "Hard Sell" is that it is itself a kind of quantum superposition: it seems to be saying at least two quite different things at once.

There are other references to me in the collection. I am going to tell yet another story from my life – I have no idea if my audience find such anecdotes interesting or deadly dull but it is my blog and so I get to talk about whatever I want. I believe this story has already in some manner I don't quite understand gone public anyway. When we hung out in 2011, I told Jess how the inspiration for the song "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream. "Yesterday" is the most covered song ever recorded but unfortunately both Paul McCartney and the song "Yesterday" were very uncool back in 2011 (although Sabine Carpenter is currently trying to rehabilitate Paul McCartney). The next year Jess wrote a poem called "Yesterday", a very angry poem about me although her readers wouldn't have known who the poem was about, which ended with the line "I didn't want to come". I accidentally found this poem on the Internet not long after she wrote it and texted her about it. It upset me at the time. In this latest collection there is a poem called "I forgot why I came" which refers to Yesterday and includes the line "Somebody told me Yesterday knew me inside out". I believe Yesterday is me and that this poem is again addressing me – although it contains references to sparklers and mozzies that I don't understand, feel that she is drawing on memories I wasn't involved in. I sense the lines "I can't remember if I told you this before. I like to dance – /I am home enough to dance the way I remember" are addressed to me and are indirectly referring to the film I wrote about her. There is something a little terrible about this poem. She has been for years trying to put together the jigsaw pieces that make up her life to try to work out what happened to her and obviously felt when she wrote "I forgot why I came" that she has failed. There are the lines: "Here. Every soft motion, every slip of the tongue, / Moves me a little further from your door." I think what she means by this is that every slight reference to what we might here call lesbianism, even jokes, moves her away from my door, drags her out. Perhaps I am again being conceited. Perhaps I am a minor character in this poem and she is really addressing a girl she knew.

There is an aspect of Jess's poetry, particularly the poetry in Naming the Beasts, that is indicative of most modern poetry generally. Like The Wasteland, it is confessional and is drawing on memories that readers unfamiliar with Jess will have trouble understanding. Supposedly when people read poetry today they are not supposed to try to work out what the poet is actually trying to say but rather glean whatever meanings they want from the baroque and vivid if somewhat disconnected images a poet like Jess is presenting.

I am going to shift away from Jess's poems and talk again about Janet Frame's poem "I Am Invisible". This part of this essay may interest readers more because what I have to say is so crazy. I am not going to quote the whole poem again but readers may remember the lines:

I am invisible.

The lovers reach through my life to touch each other,

the rain falls through me and courses like blood upon the Earth.

I think this poem is a prophecy. I think the line "The lovers reach through my life to touch each other" concerns me and Jess. And I have decided that the line about the rain is a line for Jon Stewart. It is about the war in Gaza. I might note here that although during the last ten years I often spoke to Jon and Jess in my head I don't think the real girl ever spoke with Jon Stewart that she knew of – because I believe it was not until last year that she started watching The Daily Show.

There next lines in the poem are:

I am carried in nobody's head as knowledge.

I give freedom to the dancers,

to the telling of truth.

I believe the second and third lines are referring to me and this blog. I don't know why such a clumsily written blog should have been as influential as it seems to have been but it might be because I always try to tell the truth – Jess will remember that when I first met her in 2009 I called myself "a truth teller." I believe the first line refers to Jess. There are fundamental aspects of her life, concerning her family, her 'illness', her treatment, her family, her relationship with me and her relationships with others, that no one knows. She refers to these parts of her life in her poems but in such a way as to be almost indecipherable to outsiders – I can recognise references to me but not those parts of her life in which I was not involved. She didn't always write poetry this way. It is this particular collection in which she abandoned any attempt to communicate with an audience who know nothing about her. I even think it possible that when she was writing this collection she had become totally disillusioned with poetry.

The next lines in "I Am Invisible" are

It is this way. There is no one here to eavesdrop or observe

And I learn things I am not entitled to know.

Before I explain the significance of these lines I want to talk about J.D Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye. A number of years ago I saw a documentary about J.D Salinger. Salinger served in the Second World War and was hospitalised for a period, Supposedly he was hospitalised for 'combat stress' but I bet there was some psychosis involved. After the end of the War, while still in Germany, Salinger, a Jew, formed a relationship with a woman who was rumoured to have been in the Gestapo, a woman called Syvia Welter. The documentary said quite matter-of-factly that Salinger and Welter had a telepathic relationship. Salinger married Welter but the marriage only lasted eight months.

The reason why I mention this story is that for the last month I have been speaking to Jess every day in my head. Yesterday was the first day since New Years that I haven't spoken with her. If I have psychiatrists who read this blog they may think this indisputable evidence of my incurable insanity and maybe they're right. But the experience has not been unpleasant at all. Sometimes I have often felt a kind of warmth as though I know she loves me and she knows I love her. I couldn't pursue her while I was under the Mental Health Act and this 'psychotic episode' followed my declaration of my love for her that I made on New Years Eve. I am now, by the way, completely off antipsychotic medication. Generally when Jess and I spoke over the last month we spoke about about sex and relationships. Jess is interested in (and jealous of) all the sexual partners I had before we met – she wanted to know the details of everything that I have not fully described in this blog. I learnt information about her. I learnt that since 2014 she has had four brief glancing encounters with bicurious girls and no real relationships with either men or women. I assume the encounters occurred because of the circles in which she moved. It seems to me that just as I have been under a curse for the last eleven years or so, so has she, even though she has had some success with her writing, acquired a couple of degrees and made friends with a number of people in the New Zealand writing scene. These conversations felt completely real to me although I also felt I wasn't quite my real self all the time and that neither was she. We got into an argument about her poem "Linnaeus eats the ocean" because I was somehow too blinkered to understand it – I couldn't get around the idea that it was somehow about cunnilingus. Like I say I wasn't fully myself when speaking with her. She said to me about it, "Women aren't shellfish!" In fact I think this poem might be a work of genius but, like John Ashbery's poem "Wet Casements", might require a lot of effort to fully understand.

Naming the Beasts was published perhaps a year and half ago or two years ago. The other impression I gathered from talking to her is that something quite bad happened to her in the period after her book was published. I am not quite certain what it was but it may be that she was hospitalised again. She may be living (and working) permanently in a  Respite Facility. The fact that she is working in a Respite Facility was something I had actually guessed from reading other sources that tell me stuff about her life, but I didn't realise that she was living there and perhaps herself under a Compulsory Treatment Order and is receiving a weekly injection. She is subject to a curfew and spends all her time watching movies on TV and Youtube as I used to do. She told me that the last two years had been terrible and said to me, "Did all your friends suddenly all go away?" I worry that she has been put on Risperidone.

One reason I mention this is that, if Jess actually is real, and if she still reads this blog, she might like to know that if she is indeed hearing my voice in her head, I am real, even though I occasionally say the wrong thing. It hasn't just been your voice in my head, Jess, that made me think you are real but hints I receive from other sources, other sources I believe you have access to as well. In my last essay, I suggested we could curl up on a couch and watch Lost Highway together – but you may have already seen this film and actively disliked it. We could do something else. An alternative possibility is that I could gather together my scant financial resources and we could find some swish bar downtown where I can buy a dry martini and you can get a fruit cocktail because you're a fruit. In other words do something a little fun out in the real world. If you don't want to get into a relationship with me but are indeed trapped in some terrible situation I could try to help you, get you off medication and out of the Mental Health Service in the same way I eventually did myself. Jon Stewart saved my life in 2014 and perhaps I could try to save your life. If I have friends who read this blog perhaps out of friendship with me you could find some way to help her. 

You still need to take the next step to contact me. As I see it, there are three ways you can get my email address. The best, most direct way, is also the sneakiest. 

For those readers who come back to this blog for discussions of physics and philosophy and evolution I may yet return to those subjects. Recall though that I make no money from this blog and it wouldn't be sensible for me to remain on the unemployment benefit for the rest of my life, a benefit I spend mostly on cigarettes, writing a blog for some vast anonymous crowd that I cannot accurately demographically pinpoint. Interestingly, though, someone at the Health Clinic I go to said last week that I should keep writing this blog so maybe there will be a way to both keep writing it and somehow earn some money. I think I would like that.