Motto: Whatever it was has happened.
The
battle, the sunny day, the moonlit
slipping into
lust, the farewell kiss. The poem
washes ashore
like flotsam. (Atwood 2020:3)
The volume under discussion poses the following challenge: whether it can be connected to the Covid-19 pandemic, given that it was published slightly before its full onset. I would argue it can and in fact that it should be, due to the undeniable reality of poetic intuition that is able to foresee what is coming upon us. We must never forget that the poet is a visionary, a maker and seer of things (from the Greek term poiesis, meaning “production” or “creation”). This is valid in Margaret Atwood’s case anyway, since she is a literary genius: Dearly presents us with the “bone face” of “the cold grey moon” - a yet-invisible, soon to be revealed, terrifying truth, which in our case may be construed as the spreading of the ominous virus. The title itself is problematic due to ellipsis: is the one word coming from “dearly beloved /missed” or does it refer to things that cost us “dearly”? Maybe all that into one and even more! From the grammarly viewpoint, the ellipsis suggests a state of dependence upon something else (since an adverb or an adjective is always depending upon its verb or noun). This subaltern ‘something’ can however be subversive since it also determines the thing on which it depends. So who is the ‘dearly’ and who is the ‘beloved’ in this story that Atwood spells through her pandemic verses? Hopefully, the close readings attempted below will elucidate this mystery of condensed narrative that exploits subliminally all the possibilities of fiction while resorting to overpowering lyricism which makes poetry a close relative of music.
As Rae Langton argues in her essay on Love and Solipsism, the Socratic imperative of knowing oneself was further enhanced by Kant’s putting it in relationship to a (dearly) beloved “other” (a true friend or lover). Thus, love would be a way out of the solipsistic tendency of the ego but it depends on the person if they really want to improve their knowledge of themselves with the help of this benevolent other or not. For instance, in Proust’s Looking for Time Lost, the departure of Albertine only serves to trigger a chemical reaction in the brain of the main character – a reaction which brings with it the epiphany of love: he misses her instantly, therefore he knows that is capable of love. But that is all, an instant illumination followed by inaction, he will not chase after her because for Proust’s alter-ego, writing is a much more alluring path to pursue self-knowledge than sexual attraction. I believe that my investigation below is in keeping with the Socratic, as well as Kantian approaches to self-knowledge, yet one may be wondering as one reads Atwood’s verse: is humanity capable of evading the prison of the self and opening up to the other (s)? I would argue that the diversity of instantiations of the concept of love illustrated in the selection of poems presented below may support the above point – and even those poems in which the feeling of love does not represent the main theme are pervaded by such a deep awareness of (human) nature that there is no doubt about the fulfillment of the Socratic/Kantian imperative at least as regards the author herself, whose own words confirm it: “We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”[1]
Ghost Cat is
a poem about identification with a beloved pet which is part of one’s familiar
universe and the inadvertent carrier of one’s anxiety about the specter of
dementia that runs in the family, which leads to fear of being abandoned by
your loved ones in times of need and estrangement from humanity:
Then up the
stairs she’d come, moth-footed,
owl-eyed,
wailing
like a tiny,
fuzzy steam train: Ar-woo! Ar-woo!
So witless and
erased. O, who?
Clawing at the
bedroom door
shut tight
against her. Let me in,
Enclose me, tell me who I was.
[Atwood 2020:4]
Blizzard is a poem about the love for one’s old, sick mother; it doesn’t mention feelings, except those that are obvious from the speaker’s position at the bedside of her parent (“I put my hand on her forehead/stroke her wispy hair” – page 8) and in the final double interrogation, resonant with ambiguity (“Why can’t I let go of her?/ Why can’t I let her go?” - idem)
Coconut, on the other hand, is a poem about the love of
taste, in this specific case – coconut tasted for the very first time:
First taste of
sheer ambrosia!
Though mixed
with ash and the shards of destruction
as Heaven always
is, if you read the texts closely.
[Atwood 2020: 9]
Souvenirs is above love as a form of
piecing back together, as in a dream, the imaged of a dear one. The process
consists of remembering a person by combining fancy and memory with
subconscious fears and desires. Ironically, these personal “memories” are
presented as souvenirs that the one in your dreams presents you with when you
dream of her:
This
is what I’ve brought back for you
From
the dreamlife, from the alien moon shore,
from
the place with no clocks.
It
has no color, but it has powers,
Though
I don’t know what they are
nor
how it unlocks.
Here,
it’s yours now.
Remember
me.
[Atwood
2020: 11]
In this case, the poetic persona
is an active one that travels through dreamland as an explorer would in outer
space and brings boons that surpass the waking wisdom. One is reminded here by
the recent fantasy series on Netflix, The
Sandman, in which the main hero is the Master of Dreams and a God that can
coexist both in the dream realm and in the waking world. And then there is the
connection one can make between watching online streaming videos rather than
going out to a cinema for the movies, so that virtual reality becomes the daily
nourishment for our fantasy.
In The Tin Woman Gets a Massage, Atwood confesses to avoiding any
feeling in order not to get hurt. She, symbolically, lacks “a heart” just like
the Tin Man lacked a brain. But, as we know only too well, a feature that one
hopes to inhibit or thinks that is missing may in fact be denied or
unacknowledged:
Me, it’s the
heart:
that’s the part
lacking.
I used to want
one:
A dainty cushion
of red silk
dangling from a
blood ribbon,
fit for sticking
pins in.
But I’ve changed
my mind.
Hearts hurt.
[Atwood 2020:
12]
Obviously, the persona in the
poem used to have a heart! How else would she know they hurt if not from
personal experience? A seeming continuation of this idea is to be found in the
poem entitled If there were no emptiness,
in which the author’s persona praises
the importance of distance and vacancy as prerequisites for the co-existence of
entities:
It there were no
emptiness there would be no life.
Think about it.
All those
electrons, particles, and whatnot
crammed in next
to each other like junk in an attic,
like trash in a
compactor
smashed together
in a flat block
so there’s
nothing but plasma:
no you no me.
[Atwood 2020:
13]
Another image evoked in the poem
is that of an empty motel room that nobody used for seventy years. Intuitively,
the poetic imagination seems to be anticipating the vacuity created by the
Covid-19 epidemic: deserted malls and parks, empty halls and streets, closed
shops and stores etc. These vacuous spaces only engender an impatient craving
for openness and proximity to the other(s), a desire for happening and plot:
That room has
been static for me for so long:
an
emptiness a void a silence
containing an
unheard story
ready for me to
unlock.
[idem: 14]
Human sexual activity is not
explicitly present in the lines of these poems, except for a few hints.
Instead, there is a rather consistent presentation of the animal world (mainly
insects) teeming with erotic energy and from here follows the logical
comparison with the human world which can be either explicit or implicit. Our
attention is drawn by two successive poems entitled Cicadas and Double Entry Slug
Sex. The former highlights the building tension caused by the seclusion of
at least one of the partners and then the feeling of ephemerality and closeness
to death which intensifies desire and renders the passion paroxistic:
This is it, time
is short, death is near, but first
first, first,
first
in the hot sun,
searing, all day long,
in a month that
has no name:
this annoying
noise of love. This maddening racket.
This - admit it
- song.
[Atwood 2020:
22]
The
second poem is more ironic than melodramatic in describing the particular
mating habits of the snails, but its ending carries a similar existential
despair and anxiety:
By daylight
something’s got to give.
Or someone. Some
one
has got to give.
A given.
That’s how we
carry on.
[Atwood 2020:
24]
In
Everyone Else’s Sex Life, the lyrical
discourse transports us from stark disillusionment to a recreation of magic –
that is, going against the grain, from the sordid realism of sexual promiscuity
to the romantic enchantment that bears the name of Love. However, its final description in the guise of a circus is
meant to serve as cautionary image, reminding one of the twists and turns in
the Dr. Parnassus[2] movie:
So tempting,
that faux-marble arch,
both fun-fair
and classical –
so Greek, so
Barnum,
such a beacon,
with a sign in
gas-blue neon:
Love! This way! In!
[Atwood 2020:
26]
The same bitter aftertaste is to
be found in the following poem, entitled Betrayal.
Here, the disenchantment is equally abrupt in striking the lyrical persona who
is imagined opening the door on a pair of sinful lovers (her partner and his
mistress) and being shocked not so much by the confirmation of her suspicions
as by an invalidation of idealized Love:
Yet,
it was betrayal,
but
not of you.
Only
of some idea you’d had
of
them, soft-lit and mystic,
with
snowfall sifting down
and
a mauve December sunset –
not
this gauche flash,
this
flesh akimbo (…)
[Atwood
2020: 27]
I would like to add a few words
only about the original rhyming in this poem. There are only two instances of
follow-up rhymes which effectively serve to counterpoint the main ideas: in the
first stanza “bed” rhymes with “said” (“When you stumble across your lover and
your friend/ naked in or on your bed/ there are things that might be said.”)
and in the last one, “glare” rhymes with “stare” (“caught in the glare of your
stare”). Caught in between these glimpses of a shameful act, the lyrical
persona is the righteous voyeur for whom the visualization of such intimacy is
akin to physical molestation. However, the simple fact of witnessing this
disgraceful union makes the third party integral to the act which they will be
inescapably performing as a trio in her (guilty?) mind from now on:
Goodbye
is not one of them.
You’ll
never close that clumsily opened door,
They’ll
be stuck in that room forever.
[Atwood
2020: 27]
A
pattern can be said to emerge from poems such as the above or the one entitled Princess Clothing. The author of the
verses takes an almost sadomasochistic pleasure in tormenting her own lyrical
persona in the sense of revealing to (what can be construed as) an innocent
alter ego the fact that, no matter how pure of heart or of high social/moral
ranking one may be, corruption and downfall are eventually unavoidable; hers is
the natural wisdom of the cycle of seasons or the wheel of fortune, if you
like, but the reader cannot escape the feeling that there is something
malicious in the pure relish of lines such as these:
Silk, however,
is best for
shrouds.
That’s where it
comes from, silk:
those seven
veils the silkworm keeps spinning,
hoping they will
be butterflies.
Then they get
boiled, and then unscrolled.
It’s what you
hope too, right?
That beyond
death, there’s flight?
After the
shrouding, up you’ll rise,
Delicate wings
and all. Oh, honey,
It won’t be like
that.
Not quite.
[Atwood 2020:
21]
The Dear Ones
is about the
intensity of loss and longing after the dearly departed. The author alludes to
a legend about a bunch of children that were lured underground by the playing
of a magic flute. This came as a punishment for their parents who had refused
to give a piper his due. The legend says
that they went underground and exited in a totally different place or time. The
poem imagines, in a similar fashion, the dear ones departing from us and
returning only when it is too late, when all who loved them are gone
themselves. The poem reveals how not only the living suffer from the feeling of
loss and despair but also the dead. Death is like an irresistible magic call or
a cruel game, the ones who must die obey the rules and disappear, while the
remaining ones start to resemble ghosts, inhabited as it were by an absence of
song:
Where? Where?
After a while
You sound like a
bird.
You stop but the
sorrow goes on calling.
It leaves you and flies out
Over the cold
night fields,
searching and
searching,
over the river,
over the emptied
air.
[Atwood 2020: 41]
I want to conclude with a rather destabilizing
image from the poem Zombie, which
appears towards the end of the volume. In this poem, a strange similarity
emerges between the act of poetry-making (conjuring up memories) and the
spreading of a deadly virus, both presented as consequences of a faulty dealing
with the past: <“Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts” like a
virus, like an infection.>, says Atwood quoting Rilke. Zombie is a poem about the risks of dealing with unresolved issues
that haunt and infect us when we try to resurrect them. And love itself is part
of the past that comes back to us through the words of the poem:
Stay dead! Stay dead! you conjure,
you who wanted
the past back.
Nothing doing.
The creature
ambles through
the dim forest,
a red weeping
monosyllable,
a smeared word
tasting of sorrow.
(…)
The hand on your
shoulder. The almost hand:
Poetry, coming
to claim you.
[Atwood 2020: 57]
Conclusions
Similarly
to this poetic haunting, the pandemic experience has taken us through an
undesirable journey of self knowledge, placing upon our shoulders, from the
mirror-side, an ice-cold finger which reminds us of the proximity of death or
an imminent separation from humanity. Margaret Atwood’s poems were mostly
written before the onset of the pandemics but they are imbued with an obvious
sense of emergency and glimpses at future prospects that echo many of the
states and feelings that most members of the audience have experienced during
the Covid-19 crisis: anxiety, seclusion, desolation, despair (on the dark side)
and exhilaration, romance, togetherness, even hope (on the bright side). These
are poems that teach invaluable lessons about humanity and warn us regarding
the implications of being all too human: that means a state of exposure and
vulnerability to life’s many pitfalls. From her vantage position of wisdom and
authority, Atwood proposes a lucid, mildly ironic and frequently grotesque
vision that drags humanity bare-naked into the limelight. This sudden awakening
which her verse performs on the reader’s conscience has a double effect: one is
entertaining an adamic notion of the beauty and joy of creation and the other,
experiencing a chilling confrontation with the specters of death and suffering.
The readers of Dearly are therefore
privileged, two-in-one, consumers of a complete poetic experience. And with
experience comes resignation, which we must all have shared in the last two
years.
Bibliography
Atwood, M. (2021). Dearly. VINTAGE, London.
---.https://lovequotes.symphonyoflove.net/margaret-atwood-love-quotes-and-love-sayings.html
Langton, R. https://lovequotes.symphonyoflove.net/margaret-atwood-love-quotes-and-love-sayings.html
Wolf, S. and Grau
C.(Eds.). (2014). Understanding Love:
Philosophy, Film, and Fiction. Oxford U.P.
[1] Quote from The Grave of the Famous Poet,
Dancing Girls and Other Stories.
[2] The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), guest-starring Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp and Jude Law, among others. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054606/
