Internal Data

Several days ago my 22-month old daughter, who has taken to occasionally placing tiny imaginary animals in one’s hand by holding her thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart and identifying the animal being handed over (bunny, zebra, kitty), strolled up to me, held her fingers just apart in my palm, and said “daddy”. The feeling of deep amusement generated within me by this interaction has lingered ever since without much of an attempt on my part to examine the experience or even repeat it to anyone other than my wife Karen and one old friend, but I’m wondering tonight if Sylvie wasn’t, without knowing it of course, handing me a potential stabilization of my self, or at least a tiny route towards seeking, to quote my stepfather, the late British poet Douglas Oliver, the “origins of whatever stabilizes myself in space and time”. The quote is from a prose piece of Doug’s that has a companion poem – this is a kind of dual-form that he used several times over the course of his writing life, most notably in his final book of poetry, A Salvo for Africa (Bloodaxe, 2000), and in An Island That Is All The World, the quote’s source (the series is excerpted in a selected poems published by Talisman House, and can be found in its entirety, about seventy pages, in the UK-published Three Variations on the Theme of Harm).

The prose piece details Doug’s experience of nearly drowning while swimming in a quarry on the outskirts of Paris. Discovering that his stamina was shot after swimming to the quarry’s center he struggled wildly, losing breath and convinced he was going to drown, until, as he writes: “It came to me that the mind must have a hidden rescue of its own. There stabilized within me a steady, confident self, which I imagine to be the self I had often speculated about, the unconscious unity of everything we have experienced and incorporated throughout our length of days, an entity that persists, minutely changing, very minutely, as our conscious self goes through its wilder swings of mood. Much modern linguistic philosophy argues this large entity out of all real existence, but I simply don’t believe it. A larger self instructed me to let my limbs do the work while it lay back, almost entirely uninvolved. After great calm–the panic holding off on the periphery–I realized I had ground under my feet, staggered up the shore, and collapsed, as everyday conscious awareness flooded back.”  The poem that accompanies this piece (the prose pieces are untitled in the series) is called “The Oracle of the Drowned” and, despite the title, has nothing much to do with the events of that day. It’s actually a return to a specific set of images from his childhood near the sea as a means of furthering his own exploration of that sense of a larger accumulated self and its beginnings.

I happened to choose “The Oracle of the Drowned” and its companion on Tuesday to bring to a writing class I’m currently teaching. The idea is to find a way to write out of an experience in conjunction with something like a sense or idea of the experience so as to get two pieces that inform one another but cover different terrain without leaning on one another. But in reading through the prose out loud with the class I found myself struck by an intense need to attempt an understanding or at least a wobbly mutual shakedown of a possible “unconscious unity” of experience that Doug speculated about. Information of all kinds – public and private – is and has been striking me as simultaneously fleeting and over-charged on a second by second basis, and I’m constantly looking for a handle or vehicle of some kind within the practice of writing in order to make this useful as opposed to overwhelming. And it’s not gonna cut it for me to keep the line between writing and consciousness anything less than porous and messy. How the moment with Sylvie ­– which preceded the reading of Doug’s work by a day – comes into this tangle of measure is not as paltry personal symbolism (one hopes) but as projection on her part of a lightness that I completely need in order to continue to work without freezing. I’ve been looking for something to help me put a shape around this feeling that my writing has to head in a more intensely self-examining route that can also refocus my humor, and it’s possible Doug’s writing and Sylvie’s gesture in combination will start to bring that shape into sight. It’s a pleasant possibility to begin with, at any rate.

I thought I was going to write about a party in an apartment that came with a reading. Maybe next time.