Nightmares and Poetry

Last night before I drifted off to sleep, I had the kind of dream that doesn't let you go back to sleep. In the dream I was laying in bed, much like those waking dreams go, and the phone was ringing next to my ear. I answered it, and a man's voice asked, "Is this Marlon Brando?" And I giggled, thinking what sort of nut is calling asking for Marlon Brando? I was trying to get Todd to listen to this, and in the dream I was nudging him in bed, like, babe, listen to this... and then when I turned my attention back to the phone, the voice, after a long pause, said, I have had a tape sent to me...

I woke with a jolt. The tape the man was talking of was typewriter tape. I have a couple of old typewriters, and the voice was talking about the ribbon being sent to him, like a roll of film, with all of my words imprinted. The dream was very frightening. I have tried since to figure it out. I know writing is a very interesting and deeply personal process for me. I sometimes feel anxiety about having a blog, or letting other people read my writing. A thought racing through my head was that I should erase all of this blog, and go into a shell (you think I'm kidding). I know something about the dream threatened me with accountability.

Of course, everything was rosier in the morning...

I'm sick. It's a virus and there's not much to do about it. I'm fatigued and feverish and the cleaning ladies are coming in the morning.

I have been researching my (late) paper for American Lit, when I just couldn't take it anymore. I have a new topic, and I have to write about it. It goes something like this -- writers often write about people who write, but poets write about life. Poets, can, through the ambiguity concerning persona and poet, own the exploration of life. Plath, and Ginsberg, and Brooks, [Isn't it amazing what our brains do? I went to class Tuesday night, and outside the 500 building there was Angie, and Blythe, and Tom, and that other guy, and Drew, and I went in to the cafe to get a diet energy drink, and I came out, and Angie was saying, "Oh, I like Brooke's." And I was like, "You like my what?" And she said, "I just like you dear, do I have to get specific?" And a few more lines exchanged, and I was so confused. Yesterday it hit me, because my brain, disconcerted with the chaos presented it, had figured out that the group had been talking about Gwendolyn Brooks, whose poems we were to have read, and Angie was saying she liked "Brooks" not "Brooke's." So self absorbed! So egomaniacal!] they write about the sorrows and the pain, so much less than fictional characters experience them, but more directly, yet, less obviously. Oh, dear. I had it. I promise.

I want to write about how even though we feel that we are in the Post Modernist age of literature in America, we really aren't. We are still trying to deal with the aftermath of WWI. America is still trying to find its soul. America went on an adventure to find a home, and lost its soul. It tried to find its soul by saying, look, now we have the room to breathe and buy, we will surely find our souls in all this space and cash! But look, we have no soul. Plath -- she is so souless that she can't even die. She tries to kill herself twice, and it just won't happen. Doctors who are trying to patch her up think they are saving her soul when she tells them, look, you big moron, it's just a show, this body, this life, what you think is so important. Brooks takes one of the most inflammatory and controvertial subjects of the twentieth century and rummages through the darkest sides of it -- she writes about a woman who has abortions who has feelings for her fetuses, who imagines them growing up, and owns her actions, neither judging herself or chalking her decisions up to rights and sciences. And Ginsberg. Ginsberg. The hairy elephant in the room. I can almost smell him. He writes of the poet, of the failure to find the soul, of the process of creating a poem in America, like ripping the deepest organ from your body like the bravest Aztec, the bravest Mayan, the most courageous soul-surgeon, driving home the point that if the world had introduced a horror to Kurtz, a horror to Jake, a horror to Addie, a horror to the invisible man, it hadn't stopped, it hadn't slowed, the horror was now unstoppable, unslowable, indefatigable, and the fiction writers could try to write about people who were trying to write while experiencing the horror, but the poets were bleeding on the altar of language, of English, of the imperialist toungue that would don so many costumes, so many names for the cause of the capitalist, freedom being the dirtiest word ever coined, they were spreading their arms and saying, here, I am the murderer of my children, here, I am a Jew who loves a fascist, here, I am a madman who lives in beauty. They were wallowing and frollicking, and sometimes laughing and mostly screaming in terror at America.

America. The road to America. The path is cleared -- the scary monsters dead. And we sit alone with the horror, sometimes the crickets chirp, and the poets forever shout into our ears -- don'tforgetdon'tforgetdon'tforget. Even Sylvia, don't pity her! she knew all about America. She knew that even when it seemed like America couldn't recover, America would rise. She knew what America meant. She knew that ideas can't die. Brooks knew, she knew that someday America would have to face what it had been trying to conceal with scientific data, something about language and euphamisms, and dealing with what hurt you caused others from their perspective. And Ginsberg, telling us what we thought impossible, that madness is genius trying to exist in the 1950s. If their genius wasn't aiding the government in oppressing the rest of the world, then it was madness, and there was no cure.

So what's my thesis, you ask? I don't know. i just know that I have to write about Modernism, how these poets are exploring modernist themes, how American culture is really anticulture, and how they take responsibilty for expressing the horror of the times and magnify it by puting themselves in the mix. It's the poets who tell us who we are.