I've been procrastinating about posting this thesis for far too long, and now that I'm on graveyard shifts, I actually have the time and opportunity to hammer the whole thing out. The paper actually starts out with the poems "song for a cracked earth" and "song from a cracked earth", and I think I've posted those already in this blog somewhere. I'll check later, and if they're not up, I'll retype them and post them up. Should probably do that anyway. Fifteen hour day at work today, so I've got loads of time.
The other reason I've finally gotten around to typing this thing out is because Liverpool turned in a truly dire performance today, and somehow I don't feel like talking about football when a team that Liverpool spanked in the Carling Cup with the junior 'B' squad humiliates the senior team in the Premiership. Barça whipped Réal Madrid, supporting my theory that they'll win La Liga, while being tanked out of the Copa del Rey. And Germany thrashed Cameroon, again confirming that my powers of prognostication are unprecedented. I love being right all the time.
Anyway, on with the thesis. It's a long one, so brace yourself, kids.
Cracked Earth Theory
Judeo-Christian mythology tells us that the first man and woman were derived from the same body. Once, there was human unity and harmony, but in the act of creating the two separate genders, something was lost. Even in this early literary tradition, male and female have not just been separated, they have been severed from one another. The course of history has been a journey of progressive alienation - a series of misunderstandings, misinterpretations and miscommunication between men and women. The lack of understanding which the sexes experience in dealing with one another has now become so great that even their languages have diverged. This paper is a look at two halves of humanity who have lost each other along the way, and the ways in which they plead to be together again.
First, it should probably be emphasized that not all people fit neatly into the essentialist categories of masculine and feminine. It should also be noted that it is not the categories or gender identities which speak, but people, whose psychological compositions are complex manifestations of identities. What is crucial to understanding the issues at stake is the understanding that language, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ, and that words have organized themselves into separate camps associated with gender. The consistency with which certain words or phrases are used in gender-specific circumstances is remarkable. It is this division of language, echoing the division of the human population, which is of interest.
What characterizes the feminine language? What words or groups of words carry an inherently feminine nature? In romance languages, words are inherently associated with gender, but to assume that English has shed this division is to misrepresent the vocabulary of the language. In poetry, one of the first and foremost uses of language is to evoke imagery, and to create sensory appeals for the reader. The first step in examining language of this sort is to form a perspective congruent with the female gender identity, and then to negotiate with the various images which are associated with that perspective.
Women carry babies in wombs filled with water containng exactly the same saline content as natural sea water. Women bleed once a month on a lunar cycle which mimics the ebbing and flowing of ocean tides. Because of the nature of childbirth, women have a higher physical pain threshold, though that does not detract from an acute sense of touch. Women experience painful cramps with which men cannot fully empathize. The female ovarian cycle circulates several more behaviour modifying hormones through women than the male hormonal system, leading to more unpredictable emotional responses to stimuli than men. These biological characteristics have helped to form a linguistic demesne with distinct demarcations.
The lexicon which is symptomatic of this demesne is generally somatic and chthonic in nature. The image patterns are full of appeals to the senses of touch and taste. Bodies and things that directly influence them become the focus of the textual attention. Metaphorical bodies such as earth, oceans and seas become vehicles for emotional appeal. Daphne Marlatt provides a prime example when she describes going
to the heart of
(Ayer Itam, black
water
"all
people know that
the sea is deep."
The sea is placed in direct opposition to later images in the poem, such as "inter- / national finance". Looking at the etymological derivations of the terms in opposition, we can see that the word "heart" is based on the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) word "heorte", "water" is from the Old English "wæter", and "sea" is from the Old English "sæ". The masculine and negative imagery which follows in the poem forms a motif of artificial imposition on nature, particularly from an etymological standpoint. "International is a compositional construct formed from the Latinate roots "inter", meaning "between", and "natio, nation", meaning a race or a people. If one interprets the Latinate preposition as one of separation rather than conjunction, it makes Marlatt's statement just that much more poignant.
The subtext is that the natural, the physical, the tactile are real. You can touch them and swim in them, but abstract concepts are as worth while as "shit." The other important feature of Marlatt's work is the notion of the interior. The insides of a woman are dark, mysterious and warm. Where does the child live before birth? Where does the blood come from each month? Each question, upon being answered, delves into a sea of more questions. And all people know that the sea is deep.
But what of male imagery? What do men experience in "this box you call a world," where "...we cannot touch except through bodies."? Men, unlike women, generally don't have to fret about iron deficiency, or premature osteoporosis. So what do they feel and think about? More importantly, how do they appear to themselves in contrast with feminine perceptions of men? Aristotle wrote that man is a political animal. From whence does this politicization derive? The male question is one of separation. Women belong to the Earth, and their biological cycles echo the tides of the oceans flowing across its surface. Men are adrift, confused and insecure. The cure for insecurity in many cases is simply to create the illusion of being better or above others. Where women tend to co-operate, men tend to compete. Where women seek to feel, men seek to gain advantage. It is speculated that as early human civilizations developed agriculture and depended less on hunter-gatherer skills, most civilizations developed along a matriarchal line, with the women responsible for staple foods and administration, with the males increasingly marginalized. The development of early religious and political administrations were a reflexive impulse to establish a hierarchical system with men at the top.
As the male question is one of separation, the male answer is one of power. With enough power or control, a situation may be remedied through force of will. And as Francis Bacon remarked "Knowledge itself is power." And so we arrive at the perception and presentation of males as figures interested in objectively increasing a quotient of control over scenarios and situations through whatever means are at hand over the course of history - physicality, seniority, and finally intellectual prowess, as Bacon suggests. A potent and tragic example of the assertion of the male ego comes from Beth Goobie, who describes her father as being
"...in that space on the other side of sound.
brahms, weighted with beard, crowds his shoulders
and voices of heavier angels, foreheads lined
with symphonies, introspective fugues,
whisper down the conch shell passage of his ears..."
The complex portrait of Goobie's father which occupies so much of the space in "Scars of Light" is filled with images of brutality and lofty authority. He is "hidden behind a rembrandt beard", distant in his studio, and yet present in his threats and violence. He is musician, rapist, brute, genius, monster, and artist. The only common factor of these facets is the depiction of an individual seeking to triumph over everyone, everything. The father seems to be thinking - I don't understand, so I must conquer it and make it into something that I can understand.
The masculine vocabulary is primarily technical and based in logical and rational traditions. Latinate and Hellenic-derived wordsappear complex and difficult and thus all the more attractive to those frightened to show weakness. Dionne Brand shows her contempt for the masculine predilection for domination not with direct attacks on men per se, but by appropriating their language when she writes, "[t]he malicious horizon made us the / essential thinkers of technology. How to fly gravity..." The horizon is not the oppressor in this scenario, men are. This becomes overtly obvious later, but the first clues are already in place. As in Marlatt's "Ghost Works", the etymology is indicative of the gender associations. The word "malicious" comes from the Latin "malus" meaning bad or cruel, "essential" comes from the Latin "essentia", which means being or existence and technology is derived from the Latin "technicus", which was in turn taken from the Greek "tekhne", meaning craft or skill. The rational and logical nature by which these terms were assimilated into the English language create an image of the gender they portray: man as demanding, as oppressor, as will incarnate. Man as thinker. Man as user of technology.
The image patterns for men generally have visual sensory appeals. Why is this? If one bears in mind the hypothesis that the male psyche is predominantly motivated by insecurity and fear, then it follows that the optimal sense of experience should be the one which allows the greatest distance and the fewest vulnerabilities. Touching something means being close enough that one might get touched in return, which poses problems of defence and escape. In a game where one does not know the rules or the opposition, everything and everyone is a potential danger. So it is that we get references to males as figures and sights. They are too far away to be hurt, but too close to be avoided. Goobie's father cannot be touched, even as he beats her brothers Vince and Mark.
Dionne Brand turns the male language on itself in an altogether hostile fashion. She forces technology to humiliate itself in a twist of bitter irony. She manipulates the Hellenic etymologies of the male lexicon and turns them into a vehicle for female liberation. She has appropriated the language of the oppressor for her own devices when she describes Mammy Prater as having
"... waited until she was one hundred and fifteen
years old to take a photograph
to take a photograph and put those eyes in it
she waited until the technique of photography was
suitably developed
to make sure the picture was clear
to make sure no crude daguerrotype would lose
her image
would lose her lines and most of all her eyes
and her hands
she knew the patience of one hundred and fifteen years"
Mammy Prater is two people: the image captured on film and the woman using the camera to show her patience and strength. The technology of the daguerrotype and the photograph came from the society which had oppressed her and taxed her spirit. The maleness of the nouns, their technical nature, and the artificiality of them echoes a falsity which is underlied by Mammy Prater's hands. Not much is said about the hands, but the implication is that they are worn by years of working with earth and plants. She is authentic and real; the technology that wants to encapsulate her is not. She takes control of the situation with her understated strength, and in doing so, appropriates the masculine device of looking and visual imagery for the very feminine purpose of making connections and forming bonds. not only this, but she does so at her pleasure. "She waited until it suited her."
A good, though again, as in Goobie's case, tragic example of angst pertaining to the distance and lack of contact between male and female is found in Sharon Thesen's "Aurora". She writes often of heartache and separation, very explicitly in this instance where she writes:
"... Big shot
control panel. So like
a satellite she tears around
the outer darkness of his planet
-centrism, translating
pathways of storms -- cloudy
spirals intentioned as a herd of bees
among a mass of blue
hollyhocks -- from a distance. She has
many books to read, one
on what gardens can't help meaning. Eventually
she will fall & all her data
with her. The EKG wire is still attached
to her heart or wherever it is
attached..."
And so despite an inversion of the usual convention which would dictate that the feminine identity is generally the centre, and the masculine identity will choose to orbit at a distance, the linguistic indicators of loss and isolation are still operative. There are words like "outer", "clouds", and most overt of all, "distance". What Thesen has done is discuss a woman who has constructed herself in accordance with a male visualization of her role. In a very artificial and unnatural manner, she circles a male "planet- / centrism". The escape from this false role is hidden in what seems to be a Georgia O'Keefe reference, "on what gardens can't help meaning." which gives an affirmation of feminine sexuality as authentic without external validation.
The imprisonment of the subject of the poem in a self-imposed lonely ostracism is created textually by having the technical terms and male language describe a woman. Of course, there is an immediate discrepancy between the language and the subject, and that disconnect creates the feeling of isolation. The subject of the poem has an EKG wire, but doesn't really know or care what part of her body it's attached to. Her heart has gone so numb that she can't feel it any more. The technological terms seem incongruous with the deep emotional anger and frustration in the poem. The very vocabulary of the verse speaks as strongly as the ways in which they are organized and presented to the reader.
Aside from the literal associations with words as entities, another important factor of poetry is phonetics; the sounds of the words as they are formed by the lips and released by the tongue. Feminine words often have a low resonant tone. Mother, love, womb, blood, touch -- all these words toll with the rhythms and echoes of nature and the earth, and they are all derived from the very sometic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Masculine words are often quick and high and forward of the palate, as is the case with intellect, science, attitude, desert and empty. Whereas the feminine lexicon comes from the Anglo-Saxons, a people very much concerned with the sea and survival, the masculine lexicon seems based in the languages most closely associated with abstract thought, mathematics and philosophy: the Latin of the Romans and the Hellenic of the Greeks.
The effect which is most often generated is for female language in poetry to be slow and dolorous; to resonate deeply and leave a lasting emotional impact. Marlatt uses this to great effect in one poem by repeating the word "broom" in conjunction with words like "kabun" and "noon". The lexicon which finds itself affiliated with the masculine is generally responsible for distraction and diversion. Rather than being candid, the male words play games and conceal meaning and emotion, much as the beard of Goobie's father did. Again, the disparate lexicons produce opposite effects: the feminine attempting to adjoin, the masculine to divide and isolate.
This thesis began with two original poems: "song from a cracked earth", and "song for a cracked earth." Both of them envision a union between the essentially divided groups of male and female, but they do so from two separate linguistic directions. After examination, perhaps these poems will yield further insights, or they may simply discredit this paper's hypothesis from the start. In any event, let us consider the component elements of the two poems and negotiate with the gender identities behind them.
The "song from a cracked earth" is laden with somatic images. There is a great deal of emphasis on the body and the sensations produced by the body. The words which are explicitly about the body travel further to the interior of the physionomy as the poem progresses. "Hands" are followed by "thighs", then "eyelashes" before concluding with references to the heart. The suggestion is one of ever increasing intimacy and closeness. The other image pattern is that of light and darkness, which tends to have some interplay with the weather imagery. The poem begins in "darkened warmth", goes into "shadows", and ends up being "stormy". The development here is one of action. More and more things are happening: the darkness becomes a desire, the desire becomes a consummation, and that consummation is perceived to be stormy.
The "song for a cracked earth" is markedly different in the respect of imagery. There are very few objects in the poem, at least in the literal sense of the word. The poem is rather like the first noun in the second line: "nebulousness". Most of the imagery is devoted to creating fogs, mists and hazes, through which meaning is obscured. The key to the images is the "somewhere", which acts as a conductor of a disjointed orchestra. It begins as the only real place, even if just a hidden or an undiscovered one. Then the images take us through possible places: the sky, sleep, dreams, memories, until they finally give up and say that all places are nowhere and hope is lost.
The vocabulary of the respective poems is interesting to observe as well. The "song from a cracked earth" is filled with euphonious words which connote closeness and love. We find "milky smooth / currents" and "the love of touching / breathing" which are evocative of intimacy and gentle contact. The verbs are very often soft and melodious to pronounce, as is the case with "trembling", "brushing", and "breathing". This pattern of euphony is symptomatic of inclusive language, which encourages contact between the poet and the reader. It is also typical of the somatic language which has already been discussed; the appeals are very specifically tactile.
In "song for a cracked earth", the lexicon is quite different. Out of context, many of the words actually describe the philosophy which directs them to their use in the poem. Words like "distant", "spaces", "isolation", and "solitude" speak of a hollow existence which is unsatisfying and inauthentic. There are also no references to the earth, a significant departure from the other poem of the pair. Most of the words describe the sky, as in "altitude", "clouds", "aloft", and "floating". The overall impression is one of separation and loneliness.
The structure of the two poems is also suggestive of the orientation of their narrative gender identities. The "song from a cracked earth" hugs the left hand margin as though rooted to it. The lines run together in a smooth and fluid fashion, the most notable technique for accomplishing this being the breaking of the word "our / selves" in order to implement a form of free verse enjambment. This occurs on two occasions, adn each time, it is because the sentential construction has begun to break down. In the first instance, the lines "...darkened warmth / of our union / a joining of our / selves", "union" does not seem to be terribly congruent with "A joining of our", which might cause a visual hiccup. Hence the device to speed the reader from one line to the next.
In the other poem, the structure is rigid and inflexible. Here there is a framework which dictates the poem almost as much as the reverse is true. Again, the "somewhere:" acts as a facilitator, turning the first line of every stanza into a continuation of its statement. in addition, one can observe a slow decline in the number of lines and indeed syllables in the stanzas as they proceed toward the conclusion of the poem. As the imagery and vocabularyhave already shown, the progression leads to a fatalistic and pessimistic conclusion. The "somewhere:" acts as a searchlight, illuminating different avenues of expression for the human psyche, and as the locations become smaller and less certain, the hope for finding a route toward unity becomes dimmer and dimmer until the answer lies "in that nowhere that is everywhere" and the "somewhere: / where we /can be / together." becomes a place that cannot be reached. This contrasts directly with the "when we can be together" of "song from a cracked earth". Somewhere creates a scenario that allows room for nebulousness, whereas "when" indicates that the resolution will come, but that it is simply a matter of time.
So we find two poems at the opening of this treatise. One is optimistic and warm, while the other is pessimistic and cold. They are reflections of one another in that they view a similar circumstance with completely different perspectives. One is open, honest and giving, while the other is reclusive and unreceptive. One speaks with assurance while the other hides behind terminology, concepts and ideas rather than exposing weaknesses.
The human condition is about learning how to live and love and last. One factor which affects the way that people do this is through the gender identity that they have acquired, either through biological factors or through social conditioning. Gender is more than just individual people - the notion of gender has filtered into the very words we use to communicate with one another. Physionomy, psychology, psychiatry; all of these are virtually meaningless terms when it comes to defining gender when one considers that the male and the female speak different languages, even though they may be of the same country, race or creed. They are two separated groups with different views of the world, and their means of expression verifies that fact.
Nowhere has the alienation of the two sexes manifested itself more firmly than in the poetic or literary arts. in this realm, language is used consciously and deliberately to achieve effects. When poets cry out for the lonely, the confused or the misplaced, they understand the means by which to express their sentiments. In recent times, recent books, recent poets have shown that something is absent or missing. Beth Goobie misses her brother, Daphne Marlatt travels restlessly without being certain of where she belongs, Dionne Brand anguishes for travesties past while trying to define herself in relation to others, and Claire Harris doesn't trust a future daughter in a projected hostile world.
Somewhere: there is a cry for something better. The world shouldn't need to be so full of isolation and hostility. There should be a closeness which permits friendship and love. In writing poetry, people are expressing a very deep-seated need - the need to communicate, express, and make themselves understood. When both halves of humanity are cut off from one another by the very words that they use, perhaps the only solution is to keep on talking, keep on writing, and keep on trying. Somewhere: perhaps we can all be together.
-mARKUS
So there it is.
-mARKUS
^+ Justice for the 96+^
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