What does meaning mean? (7.31.22)

I was washing the dishes yesterday morning after breakfast (yes, we do them by hand around my house, it's a Zen thing) when this thought struck me.

At Wednesdays@One each week, we talk about what somebody's poem means. People weigh in with their versions of a poem's meaning, a debate ensues once in awhile, and we can get vigorous in our defenses, downright dogged in our points of view.

And that's what meaning comes down to in a poem, after all, a point of view. When we read a poem, each of us brings a personal history--our beloved bedeviled baggage--to what we engage with on the page and from the tongue.  That personal history is informed by so much experience beyond the technical, the academic, and the intellectual.

You can argue that anyone's meaning is still valid meaning is just relativism.  If everybody's "right" about the meaning of a poem, then . . . what does the poem mean?

Well, that's the wrong question to begin any discussion of meaning with, isn't it? The question you want to start with is what do we mean by "meaning?"  And whenever you read a poem, no matter whether you're reading it for the first or the eleventh time, before you start you ought to ask yourself, "What do I mean by 'meaning'?"

Is meaning something you find outside of a poem, like some kind of parallel universe of value and understanding?  Most people think so because most of us were taught from the first poems we encountered that there are poems and there is what poems mean, explanations that can be rendered alongside the text of a poem in other words.  Every essay your teachers ever asked you to write about a poem, right up through your doctoral dissertation, turns on this notion that meaning is what can be paraphrased out of the text itself.

That, of course, leaves the question, what is the text of a poem, then?  What's it there for?  

And if a poem "has meaning" which can be paraphrased, then my paraphrase should be as valid as the next reader's, right?  Even if that reader happens to be Northrop Frye or Susan Sontag.  Meaning is point of view.  Points of view may be more or less informed and professional, but they are all valid.

We're back to relativism.

Is meaning a cultural understanding?  That is, if you grow up in the West, in America, in the Middle West, in a small town, in a neighborhood where doors are never locked and church bells ring on Sunday morning and Friday nights are for football and fish fries . . . etc . . . is a certain set of value standards--what counts and what doesn't--instilled in you?  And if you never leave that place, never "broaden your horizon," . . .

Emphasis here on your truth.  We're back to point of view and relativism.  Of course, your truth can take on the trappings of The Truth when you find yourself gravitating toward other readers who've grown up in the West, in America, etc.  But this is just relativism as power--a particular point of view that's ascendant. 

And so the title of this posting, What does meaning mean?

In my experience, meaning means nothing at all.  Poems don't mean because they are art, and therefore self-referential.  Meaning is the red herring your teachers relied on in order to have something "intelligent" to say about a poem, it's a feint for your inability to "understand" a poem.  Which is why modern literary pedagogy is so fascistic, a game of power relations between those in the know (teachers and other experts) and those not (students and lay readers).

A poem can't be paraphrased.  By paraphrasing a poem, all you do is to make a new and lesser draft of the text as you found it.

So then, how does one talk about a poem, in one's own mind or with other readers? If we can't talk about what a poem means, then what do we talk about? How a poem is constructed?  How it operates?  How a poem makes you feel? Whether a poem is sincere art?  Good art?  Accomplished art?  Whether a poem is hip, with it, cool, au currant?  

We run into this problem every week at Wednesdays@One.  The first thing anybody has to say about a poem that's just been read to us by its author and then by another in the group, usually verges on no-talk.  No-talk is saying something about a poem without really saying anything at all.  "I like it!"  "This poem so so classically YOU!"  "I don't understand this poem but it's beautiful!"  

What I try to do each week when we discuss a poem is to steer us out of the no-talk and into the relativism of personal point of view.  I want to know not what the poem means but what it means to each of my W@1 colleagues.  It may be the old teacher in me, but each week with each poem I want to learn again what a reader reads in a poem and why that reader reads it, that is, the experiences and thinking and feeling that brought that reader round to what he or she has just said about the poem.  In this way, I hope to open my fellow readers' eyes and ears to two things: 1) what other things the poem can mean to them, and 2) the value of each of those meaningful options in relation to each other and to each reader's experience.

What is meaning?  Nothing.  What does a poem mean?  Nothing.  What can a poem mean?  Nothing.  Nothing, that is, until we talk about it.  A poem is itself and that is all it is, as any work of art is just and only what it is.  The rest is just point of view to be shared and considered.

And man, were those dishes done!

On critters and other poetical transferences (7.25.22)

This is a follow-up to yesterday's posting on conceits and what makes them so powerful in a poem. Elio Soldi, one of our W@1 writers, shared a poem last week with these lines in it:

I have a mind and it tickles my toes

when I am distracted by life as advertised,

a critter making strident noises

when I start being properly occupied.

It's the fairly complex critter metaphor that interested me at the time, that spurred this week's project on conceits.  Likening the mind to a critter?  Genius!  But why?

A conceit is what the critics call a "trope of transference."  It brings together two very unlike things or ideas into an expression or an image.  The attributes of one thing become applied to, transferred into, the attributes of the other, thus creating a third thing or idea.  The more foreign the two things or ideas are in relation to each other, the more powerful that third thing or idea.  Theoretically.  In this case, mind and critter.  

The more you think about critters and critterdom, what you know and feel about these, the better this metaphor becomes.

So, what do you think of when you think of critters?  Wild animals.  But not lions and tigers and elephants and whales, and not butterflies and bees either.  A critter is much closer to home.  A critter is dull and crawly; if it bites, it won't kill you and eat you, and it would prefer not to come near you at all.  A critter is no happier to be in your living room than you are to have it there.  We don't confer upon them our grander human values, like king of the beasts, plough of the ocean, trumpeter, etc.  It's all animal and all wild.  

It's also undifferentiated.  One critter is pretty much like any other.  

So, when a writer likens his own mind to a critter, all sorts of transference take place.  And the less he does so in the form of a direct comparison, more as an implication, the more powerful the transference.

Would this transference have worked had Elio deployed "steel trap" instead of "critter"?  Of course not! Well, maybe if he'd been the first writer to make that connection, as somebody surely was. But the expression lost that power to surprise somewhere in the misty past, after the millionth use of it.  He'd have just copied a cliché that has lost all its ability to surprise, to arrest, to expand our associative horizons.  No, the transference requires a fresh set of terms.

Here's another transference at work, from a short poem by Bennett Myers, also shared at last week's W@1.

Vagrant

Held in Jerusalem Rikers

No shekels for bail or fine

Waiting list for a cross

Charge

Impersonating God

We all know about Jesus and the crucifixion.  And we're all (too) familiar with Rikers Island, the bureaucracy of waiting lists, and the crime of appearing to be who you aren't.  One a story with mythical elements; one a common piece of reportage, from your local police blotter.  You wouldn't normally think to put the two together, they seem so alien to each other, but this poet does.  Transference ensues.

Just to repeat myself, that transference works partly because the terms of the comparison are so alien to each other.  But also because the comparison is not made explicit by the poet.  Nowhere does the poem say "Jesus is like a common criminal in a holding cell on Rikers Island, charged with impersonating somebody else for profit."  Part of what makes a good conceit work is that you, reader, have to complete the transference by yourself.

The conceit (7.24.22)

For reference, scroll down to "Conceits and extended metaphors" in the June 20, 2018 post of this blog.

Let's circle back to the conceit, that tough intellectual and emotional nut you need a tool or two to open up whenever you find one in a poem.  And again, we'll try a project--to write a conceit.  Only this time, let's not worry about extending or developing it through an entire poem, but just concentrate on coming up with one good, inventive, innovative, unusual application in a line or even just a phrase.  We'll turn that phrase on the lathe of our imagination and verbal dexterity, and see (or smell, or hear, or feel, or taste) what comes of it.  Read on to the end of this blog post for the project in detail.

What is a conceit?  Rule of thumb: a conceit is always an equivalence, usually implied, between two unlike things:

• a bed of roses
• a bed of nails
• a crown of thorns
• a sea of trouble
• grab bag of ideas

Conceits belong to the same class of figurative language as simile, metaphor, and analogy.  But they are a special case: conceits aim to link (to yoke) two essentially unlike things that you would not ordinarily put together to form a new whole.  What's more, a conceit aims for surprise (as opposed to mere cleverness); it is intellectually stimulating; it demands that you unpack it.  A conceit opens up new frontiers in meaning, and in this sense, a good conceit is expansive, never restrictive.  The metaphors listed above fall short of "conceit"; the relationships between their two parts are too transparent, and they are shopworn (clichés).

There is a certain "violence" and complexity to a conceit.  In a metaphor, which is the broader category for "conceit," the attributes of a known thing or idea (like "bed" above) are applied to another but fundamentally different known thing or idea (above: "roses," "nails").  I say above that a conceit is an "equivalence," but this is not really accurate.  Nor is a conceit, or any metaphor, for that matter, a comparison of two unlike things or ideas.  A metaphor is a "transference" from one thing to another, or better yet, an identification of one thing/idea as another.

Metaphors can be fairly "transactional" and simple, as the examples above are: bed/rose, crown/thorn, sea/trouble, bag/idea.  Or they can be more complex, much more.  Here's an example, which comes from my copy of A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams:

                    Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer;

                    Drinker of horizon's fluid line.

The lines come from a poem by Stephen Spender, a Modernist poet who, like T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, A.R. Ammons and others, borrowed from the great practitioners of the conceit, the Metaphysical Poets.  Let's unpack it.

                    [The] Eye [is a] gazelle [is] delicate [and a] wanderer; 

                    [It is a] Drinker of horizon [is a] line [is] fluid.

Spender identifies the idea of an eye with a gazelle (speed, grace, nimbleness) which is in turn identified as a creature that never rests, has no particular destination (i.e., it wanders).  That's all one thought.  Then the semi-colon, making way for a second complex of ideas: the eye drinks (as a gazelle might from a stream or pond) the horizon (as a gazelle might, scanning for danger). And of course there is the further complication or complexity of relationship between the attributes of line (fixedness) and fluidity, which is the feature we are meant to attribute to "horizon" which is "drunk" by the eye.

Not that we would normally unpack the metaphor to this degree, nor should we, normally.  Not consciously, at least.  What our subconscious minds do is another matter, and precisely the point of the "difficult" metaphor.  What we read in or into or out of the two Spender lines is considerably more expansive than what the actual words describe.  That's the associative power of metaphor and poetic language in general.

Spender's metaphor is "taut," "difficult," "packed," "yoked by violence together."  It approaches the special case of metaphor that we call conceit: it's a complex of images that appeals to our intellect and to our emotions (what we feel when we feel freedom, danger, safety, beauty, flight, struggle).

Now let's look at a very famous conceit that "yokes" together the idea of two lovers and the two parts of a cartographer's compass:

        A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

        As virtuous men pass mildly away,

        And whisper to their souls to go,

        Whilst some of their sad friends do say

        The breath goes now, and some say, No;

        So let us melt, and make no noise,

        No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,

        'Twere profanation of our joys

        To tell the laity our love.

        Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

        Men reckon what it did and meant;

        But trepidation of the spheres,

        Though greater far, is innocent.

        Dull sublunary lovers' love

        (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

        Absence, because it doth remove

        Those things which elemented it.

        But we by a love so much refined

        That ourselves know not what it is,

        Inter-assured of the mind,

        Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

        Our two souls therefore, which are one,

        Though I must go, endure not yet

        A breach, but an expansion,

        Like gold to airy thinness beat.

        If they be two, they are two so

        As stiff twin compasses are two;

        Thy soul, the fixed foot , makes no show

        To move, but doth, if th' other do.

        And though it is the center sit,

        Yet when the other far doth roam,

        It leans and hearkens after it,

        And grows erect, as that comes home.

        Such wilt thou be to me, who must

        Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

        Thy firmness makes my circle just,

        And makes me end where I begun.

This is John Donne's wonderful poem exhorting his wife not to fret as he prepares to travel from England to the Continent in 1612 (she was pregnant at the time, and suffered a still-birth while he was away).  If you consider the last two lines, you might wonder who Donne is really trying to comfort!

This poem is of course packed with tightly woven metaphors: the relatively simple metaphors of tear/flood and sigh/tempest near the beginning of the poem, which were clichés even in Donne's time; the more complex metaphoric pairing of the privacy of the marriage bed as a kind of priesthood and the workaday world (drawing Donne away) as a kind of uninitiated "laity."  The more implied the connection between the two parts of each metaphor, the more complex/taut/tensioned the life of it in your mind when you read it.  (And of course, the more difficult to parse out.)

But the main metaphor of the poem is the idea of two lovers as the fixed and movable feet of a cartographer's compass.  Donne expresses this relationship initially in the form of a simile, thankfully, for isn't this poem complicated enough already?  In fact, what makes the metaphor so "conceitful" is this insistence on surface clarity in which he spells out the relationship: this is like that.  And there's a reason for this "transparent" approach: Donne means to sustain the identification lovers/compass in every detail over the final three stanzas of the poem.  That's a lot of real estate over which to pack an image!  He needs to make clear as possible, in detail, the connections between parting, traveling, waiting at home, returning and the operation of a highly technical drawing tool; otherwise, the poem might become clever and precious, and sentimental, but will never become art.  And the beauty of the poem is in how tight these connections are, not in how heart-felt the message.

What makes this lovers/compass relationship a conceit are two things: 1) the arresting linkage of human love and technology; and 2) the point by point specificity of the identification--love works in every instance in the poem just as the tool operates.  You have to pay attention, or you'll miss the power, the poetry, of the poem.  The more you read the poem, the more expansive it becomes in your own experience of love and technology, the ways of the bed and of the world.

So.  On to our project.

For this Wednesday, write a poem in which you develop at least one complex metaphor or conceit-like construction.  Don't worry about extending it beyond a line or even just a phrase, though you're welcome to give that the old Metaphysical try if you like.  But make it fresh, arresting, expansive, that is, likely to send us as your readers into our own lockup of experience and worldview for ways to "take your meaning."

This is not a license for cuteness, sentimentality (as opposed to sentiment), cleverness, jokiness, mere weirdness and cliché.  It's a request for innovation, the unexpected, the strange-at-first-sight-but-actually-new-and-startling.  As for cliché, just look at the metaphors at the very top of this post.  Not a bed of roses, please; but maybe a pillow of noise?  Not a mind like a steel trap, but a mind that is a critter.

The fun of this project will be to come up with associations between unlike things that you would'n't ordinarily put together in the same thought, wouldn't normally relate to one another.  The trick, though, will be to make the relationship meaningful, to make it expand in your reader's consciousness either by going against expectations or by opening up to the unexpected (Well!  I sure didn't see that coming!).

Okay?  Okay.  Get busy.