JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews
“Self-Stalked” from Shot by Christine Hume
(Counterpath Press, Denver, 2010)
Self-Stalked
I looked in all eight directions then spread out my tiger’s skin. Before the public mind kicked in, I surveyed an inner shore. Its facets operated on me. I lost my lights and began my midnight thus: mental feet, mental lake, little mental pines, mental mile around the muzzle. I aimed my automatic at that outlandish organ hanging in the sky like a dazed stone. Its sea expression wet the evening; I captained the tempest there. Looking too long into the distant human pupil, I sharpened my harpoon. But my hands could not be organized. I wanted to tightrope up there on a mental binge. I reached for my quiver, my bird descended a failure one depth below time. The moment rotated, aggravated. Its color was extreme. In a heavy steel helmet, I matched that orb and tried to tackle it with a million mental muscles. The more I beat it, the more I couldn’t see it. If I could turn it open like a glass knob, feel my way into its diamond cave. If I could tongue out its creamy mouth. If I could tickle it and bounce it on my knee. If I could dress it up. If it would fist me, if I could force it. The more I battered that moon, the more I could be it.
*
The first thing to note is that I am well aware that I am giving “a”, rather than “the” reading of this poem. As if there were such a thing as “the” reading. But that’s not my point. What I’m trying to say is, I am well aware that, if it’s still possible to be wrong vis-à-vis authorial intention these days, I could be way off base. Nevertheless, I must read, and … fail better next time, etc etc.
“Self-Stalked” is a kind of meditation poem, a kind of bring em back alive phenomenological recounting of how it feels to meditate sometimes. I have no way of knowing if it’s a record of an actual experience or a conscious simulacrum of a type of experience which could indeed be aptly titled self-stalking.
“I looked in all eight directions then spread out my tiger’s skin.” The nod to the eight directions clues me that this is Buddhist in orientation; the spreading of the tiger’s skin clues me that it’s an experience in sitting. Since Shiva is the deity most associated with a tiger’s skin, it appears possible that this experience is a bit eclectic, though since Buddhism has deep Hindu roots it wouldn’t really do to make too much of the eclecticism, if indeed there is any. And at this point, I’m not certain I should care, anyway. My real takeaway from this first line is the “I” is about to sit and meditate.
“Before the public mind kicked in, I surveyed an inner shore. Its facets operated on me. I lost my lights and began my midnight thus: mental feet, mental lake, little mental pines, mental mile around the muzzle.” This is a kind of preparative for the meditation. The “I” begins by situating itself in a private place.
I find the beginning and the end of these two sentences very interesting. “Before the public mind kicks in” seems to indicate a belief that “the chatter” a meditator faces is not the personal property, so to speak, of the meditator. I don’t doubt this, but I do question the distinction between public and private minds. In my experience none of mind belongs to me. Nor can I wash my hands of it Public and private are purely illusory notions. But no matter. We each have our own bundle of metaphors …
The end of the second sentence is interesting, too: “mental mile around the muzzle”. What does this mean? I am not going to attempt to pin it down with a precise denotation; I read it, rather, as the meditator’s beginning to lose control, focus; the noise kicks in.
“I aimed my automatic at that outlandish organ hanging in the sky like a dazed stone.” Semantically, the outlandish organ would have to be the mental mile and/or the muzzle (what else could the “that” refer to?), but I don’t think that’s the case. Perhaps the meditator has been given the organ/stone as an object of meditation, and is attempting to focus on it the way one might one the breath, where it enters and exits the nose.
“Its sea expression wet the evening; I captained the tempest there.” Here, I think, we have an identification between the meditator and the object of meditation. If the “I” captains the tempest there, then “there” is “here”, etc. Why “sea expression”? Wetness of some sort perhaps? I begin to wonder: is the object of meditation the “I”’s eye? It’s not important whether that’s correct, but I like the homonym, because the sound effect reinforces the split/not split the meditator seems to be fighting.
Please note: “captained the tempest” is a lovely and wonderful and incredibly apt phrase.
“Looking too long into the distant human pupil, I sharpened my harpoon. But my hands could not be organized. I wanted to tightrope up there on a mental binge. I reached for my quiver, my bird descended a failure one depth below time.” OK, it is an eye. At least temporarily. “I sharpened my harpoon” brings to mind, of course Moby-Dick, and Ahab’s mad quest. It also indicates that the meditator is attempting to bridge the apparent gap between the “I” and the “eye” via violence.
The next sentence, “But my hands could not be organized”, indicates that struggle is just making things worse. The following sentence, “I wanted to tightrope up there on a mental binge”, seems to indicate some awareness of this, especially by foregrounding desire (“wanted”), the tightrope and “binge”. I think tightrope and binge are more or less self-cancelling.
“I reached for my quiver, my bird descended a failure one depth below time.” Wile the first part of this sentence logically follows from the proceeding (the “I” has not yet given up on violence, tho the weapon reached for is smaller this time), the second part depends on its affectivity to do its work. And affective it is. At this point, I believe, the “I” despairs. The goal seems infinitely and eternally out of reach.
“The moment rotated, aggravated. Its color was extreme. In a heavy steel helmet, I matched that orb and tried to tackle it with a million mental muscles. The more I beat it, the more I couldn’t see it. If I could turn it open like a glass knob, feel my way into its diamond cave. If I could tongue out its creamy mouth. If I could tickle it and bounce it on my knee. If I could dress it up. If it would fist me, if I could force it. The more I battered that moon, the more I could be it.” As you can see, the “I” returns to violence as a methodology, and after violence, a kind of parenting, and a kind of seduction (both of which, at least here, are also forms of violence), and grows more and more frustrated.
I think that this is the typical experience of all meditators, to concentrate harder and harder, to attempt every expedient, to force “enlightenment”, and so on. Needless to say …
Nevertheless, wisdom is gained. “The more I battered that moon, the more I could be it” has at least two meanings (I see two, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be more lurking. On the one hand, it means, “I will batter that moon til I and it are one.” On the other, and more important, hand, it means, “Wow, this is what I do all the time. This is how I treat myself. As an object of my own psychic violence.” And: “Not only that, this is how I treat my children and my lovers, too.”
This second meaning is – obviously – important knowledge gained. It is in contradiction to the first meaning, but it only came about through the efforts inherent in the first meaning. It’s a paradox of sorts. Is there a lesson: yes. Just keep sitting.
John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.
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