SUCCULENT SHADOWS On Poetry's debt to Obscurity

Geoffrey Hamilton
March 28, 1995

With academia's obsession with making distinctions the numerous similarities between distinct things gets less attention then they deserve. Links of similar qualities exist between all things in the same way that a chosen square inch of dirt on the ground is linked to the whole surface of the globe. By this idea a boarder-blur is recognized and the distinctions that are made are seen as fundamentally arbitrary. Poetry is in this sense integrally linked to all things, but is immediately connected to the longing and need for distinct goals (any goals), within humanity. (This concept explains academia's obsession with distinctions.)

To illustrate how we can come to the idea that there is actually a need for distinct (and arbitrary) goals as opposed to absolute goals, ask what is the absolute goal of every human and notice how rarely people answer the question definitively. The answer is simple but considered too obvious to be the answer (a ruse). Our mortality constantly answers the question: the goal of each life is death. It is essentially the meaning of life. There is no more persistent or absolute answer.

But do we want goals to be so easy and sad? We don't. "Now what?" is our reaction, "What do we do now?" and like Marty on a Saturday night someone will answer "I don't know. What do you want to do?" Whatever it takes to obscure this absolute meaning of life we will do it.

We need to ignore it because the answer both scares and bores us. "I'm going to die, but what do I do till then?" So we look at the alternatives, we decide to play 'distinct' games until our death. Games which divert our attention from the only truly distinct goal, or end, we have.

If a myth game succeeds, we will use it. If an evasion game works, we will do it. These diversions vary from the least frivolous to the most. It may be solitaire, or football (some people are serious enough about them) it may be a career or living in a monastery; it may even be eating. The point is it doesn't matter. We have so many ways to play games that the list is endless.

We can play more than one game at a time and often do. All we need to do is to create or accept rules, establish a game and we may play hundreds, if not millions, of games in one life-time.

The more seriously we take the game the more valuable the potential rewards can seem (can be) -- and it works for as long as the game diverts us. All forms of knowledge are games and all forms of expressing knowledge are games.

Poetry is one such distinct game and as long as poetry challenges someone who is bored, as long as it offers a game to play, then it will offer those playing it the chance to divert themselves from the closest thing to an absolute meaning in life, death.

If anything, the heart of all the games we play is the obscurity factor: the degree to which the goal is obscured, the degree of difficulty, determines how valuable, or sublime, the game is to each player. As one person said about the first time he heard Bob Dylan, "I don't know what he said, but I liked it." Thirty years later breaking the code to Dylan's words is still this man's sublime game.

Saying that poetry is only one game among many may seem too harsh a critique but if a game playing is a pastime that involves rules, challenges and insubstantial (recognizing the goal of life) direction, poetry is certainly a game.
A difficulty with the acceptability of seeing poetry as a game is that so many people cannot see the frivolity of it (next to the meaning of life) and any other 'serious' game, like love, politics or religion. But if we turn to the work of thinkers like Jung, Barthes and Joseph Campbell in the area of myth we come to find evidence of how very little of what we use as criteria for our actions and motivations is based on any kind of fundamental premise (genetic or psychic predisposition are not premises they are like computer programs).

An acknowledgment of death seems to occur but we don't base our myths and their companion rites on it. For example, we write a will. The act means that we want to project our 'will' beyond our death, but what happens after our death is meaningless to us then, yet we think it is important. We know we die, but for most people it is considered a passage to an afterlife. All myths are part of the games we play. They are the rules, 'distinct' goals and the reward for playing. But they are there to obscure the only goal -- death.

The myth of poetic greatness as a kind of 'immortality' is very misleading. This immortality is like a relay race where the poet leads off until she tires then hands the work to the next runner who tires and hands it on to the next runner until there are no more runners left. The work may live on a short while but that fact is meaningless to the dead poet. Death, the only permanent goal an individual has, means all we've done before we die is meaningless to us as individuals after we die.

Another perceived problem with calling poetry a game is the idea that games are entered into voluntarily. But if one thinks of the game of etiquette where one travels to a place like Cambodia and it is impolite to point ones feet at another person -- there, one refuses to enter the game at a cost. For gladiators of ancient Rome it was play or suffer. Or if one decides that the rules of the road for car driving can be ignored the cost can be fines or injury. (Death is never a cost of any action we take because it is inevitable and the amount of time we spend living makes no difference to the meaning of life -- death). So games can be at times involuntary.

Poetry, though, is not usually pressured-on someone, but is another of the many obscuring factors in the larger game of living. We need not play the game of poetry consciously if the game of living requires us to obscure something with artful language.

To illustrate the genetic programming which rewards us with sublime feelings when we play the game of obscuring, there was a special episode of Scientific American Frontiers on kids. It broadcast several behavioral experiments on people from birth to adolescence. The first experiment called 'magic' was meant to determine logical abilities, however they relied on the fascination/enjoyment reaction of the subjects as the ('absolute') determining indicator for logical cognition. If the infant was interested and excited therefore they had not figured out the 'magic' device. If they were bored then they had figured out the device. This experiment (profoundly) allowed one to chart how at different ages we need more difficult games to play.

The overall stages were as follows, at three months (at least) to the age of seven, while the magic must be made constantly more challenging, there is a belief in magic as a fact. From seven to adolescence there is no such thing as magic. From adolescence there begins a willingness to suspend disbelief for the sake of the game. Given that from seven to adolescence a child has not stopped playing other games, then the emotional stimulation and importance of overcoming challenges never stops to be essential to our natures, it's only that the 'magic' stops for a time.

Another experiment showed how rules are not inherited but the desire to use a rule is. A third experiment showed how the first rules we learn in any given situation remain the most fundamental.

In all these experiments the choice of goal was inconsequential. The challenge, the obscurity of the goal, constituted the level of fascination/enjoyment reaction.

Now to yield to the need for defining the game and the game of poetry further, the important aspect is to have a perception that the goal is worth the challenge but that the challenge never exceed the perception of worth. It is important to note that the challenge, or obscurity, feeds the reward's value: the more one invests in time and endurance the greater the projected value. It's like the Darlington nuclear power station: who's going to pull the plug on the whole ten billion dollars invested simply because it may seem to outsiders that it is worth only five billion dollars in potential sales, to Hydro brass it is really worth ten billion -- in their Monopoly money.

Poetry's goal can actually be nothing in the eyes of a player when it's eventually found, but while the game is played the obscurity of a poem can help the player create the belief that the goal is valuable. It is like the example offered in the movie A Christmas Story. A little boy wants the "Little Orphan Annie decoder ring". He has heard about it during a radio broadcast. This ring is couched in mysterious words and inflections: it will have a great truth to reveal. Once he plays by the rules and buys enough Ovaltine, he sends in the labels and gets the ring and decodes the secret message. It says, "Drink your Ovaltine". He is shattered and disillusioned. The sublime aspects of the game are destroyed by the goal.

Poetry offers similar messages at times and like all games the challenges (obscurity) prevents one from knowing exactly how pointless the goal really is. During the game, though, the sublime is obvious. These are it similarities with other games, but what makes poetry distinct? What is its particular challenge?

Poetry's use of words means that overall it plays the language game. An automatic obscurity is there due to language's idiosyncratic relationship with every individual. Carl Jung says on this obvious matter, "Each word means something slightly different to each person, even among those of the same cultural background". This is the first challenge for the reader in the poetry game.

Figurative language is a common obscuring feature of poetry, but it is also similarly one of fiction's attributes. Richness is not unique to it, neither is the power of it's forms, but some of the forms themselves are unique to it.

What is poetry's form? Poetry can be arranged in all sorts of shapes, break any normative language rules, it can even conform to the rules - as long as one noticeable break with normative prosaic rules happens. The one break can be a line break division which cuts up prose by the number of syllables. Another is if the prose is arranged in a loop. Poetry then seems to be a game of breaking the rules. This does not imply that the game is over but instead that a new game with new rules is offered. A fresh game that each of us must enter when we want to read a poem.

Novelty seems then to be integral to the poetry game and novelty is simply a new game that we play with the old material, like a new square inch of dirt to play with. A game is a new context to enter and boredom is relieved each time.

Poetry has such a wide range of forms that the issue of form must be addressed every time a reader plays with or against the poem. In the poem by Whitman given below we have a game that plays with the least challenge to the reader; with a minimum of breaks from the normative rules.

"Bivouac on a Mountain Side"

I see before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the mountain,
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large sized, flickering, And over all the sky-the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.

Without the line breaks this is a fairly normal prose sentence. The difficulty of this poem is mostly due to that which is inherent in the language. The line breaks make it unusual and we ask why it was done. It must be more valuable than prose due to it's novelty - we think. The line breaks set up the extra dimension to the game and that novelty of expectation makes the goal appear to be more valuable. It isn't more valuable in itself, but like Darlington our investment will make it more valuable to us.

At the other extreme is non-sense poetry, but a step back from that brink are poems like Wallace Stevens'

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream".

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Lets the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let it be finale of seem
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

This poem offers novelty but also words associated with importance and a favorite confection - emperor and ice-cream. Then it juxtaposes them to create a subliminally recognized potential for a valuable goal for this ciphering game. But it is only the perception of a valued goal that is created (and not for all people in this case). As long as a reader's perception of that value exceeds the obscurity and difficulty of the goal then the game will be played and the reader's boredom, and subsequent need to find a new game, will be postponed. Novelty and associations with valuable goals then can both offer obscure goals for the game of the poem.

'The Sublime', as a reward (not a goal), is sometimes achieved by means that are different from the free verse offerings mentioned above. Formal rhyming and rhythmical verse offers a more ritualized game -- free verse can play it too -- one where the myth of authority is played out; a mysticism where wisdom is deferred to a more 'divine authority'.

In this 'divine authority' game the reader has in all likelyhood decided that the answer to the meaning of life was so easy to find that others must be stupid. They think there must be a more sophisticated answer to the question -- one that is not quite so simple and negative . The formal trappings say, in effect, "I bow to the wisdom of my precursor because I assume she knew why it should be so," and the reader concurs by thinking, "So many people think there is meaning (a goal) in this poetry so there must be meaning. I will look for it". From this basis the player is fortunate in that the goal is locked somewhere in the wisdom of the ancients so it can never be found - and so found to disappoint.

In addition to the novelty game, Yeats thrives on the traditional wisdom game in this sonnet. (It may seem contradictory to say tradition and novelty can work together to offer obscurity but in the case of poetry, the game is one of ritual novelty. The novelty when compared to normative language, which traditionally formalizes it to justify that novelty.)

"Leda and the Swan"

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engender there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead
Being so caught up,
So mastered by brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Classical allusions, Renaissance sonnet form, novelty line break, one must believe there is something important about this poem. Is beauty the goal one seeks? is knowledge? Do we want his wisdom?

If one could be so bold by not deferring the goal sought and state what the poem seems to be telling the reader, it seems to be telling us to drink our Ovaltine. Of course it is actually saying something like "Zeus uses virgins" or "Life is unfair", but are these ideas actually more profound than Ovaltine is? Does not the challenge exceed the goal here? If we do not defer the authority to decide what a goal is and when a goal is met, what can we do but scream "NEXT!" Boredom has struck. A new game is needed.

If conversely we approach in a 'suspension of disbelief', if we defer our comprehension of the goal consciously then we know the goal is a fraud. But if somehow we don't need to acknowledge that the goal is useless, then the spectrum of the sublime is open to our experience.

Formula poetry is similar to formal in that the deferral of authority takes place so that the 'suspension of disbelief' will not be able to be challenged by personal knowledge. This way the mystery of love or the enigma of the bizarre can challenge one over and over again.

Obscurity, whether as an occurrence outside of ourselves or whether it is in combination with our internal inabilities, is the only way that the valueless appearance of the goals we aim for can be avoided. The goals we aim for are therefore pastimes, games, diversions, from the only aspect of our existence which has any permanent meaning - our mortality. A poem is one small game within the game of poetry - within the game of language - within the game of myth - within the game of existence. Obscurities offer the chance to momentarily transcend this existence. The sublime cannot be achieved without it.

GRH