Poetry Koan

At the end of the 19th Century, art, and the study of art known as aesthetics, became a common point of convergence for two other new disciplines: Psychoanalysis, with its focus on unconscious/indirect experience, and Phenomenology, which in contrast to psychoanalytic psychology, sought to investigate consciousness and direct experience.

Psychologists at the time began to see how looking at people’s emotional responses to art, and the motivations that drove some to create it, could help explain aspects of human nature that had never been fully grasped before. One of these psycho-spiritual conundrums might be conceptualised by the follow question: What is a Self - which is to say: an “I”, a conscious, as well as self-conscious Ego? Also: what universal or variable factors might lie at the heart of such a phenomenon?

A crucial piece of this puzzle, in terms of understanding ourselves and others, arrived in the shape of something that the German philosopher Theodor Lipps called Einfühlung (“feeling into” or empathy). Freud used this notion of empathy in trying to “feel into” the inner world of himself and his patients in ways that had never been attempted before, and so did the young (26 year old) Rainer Maria Rilke, who had studied with Lipps, and was now setting out to apply these ideas in his writing.

Rilke would also learn about empathy at the knee of the sculptor August Rodin, who suggested he might like to empathically “regardez les animaux” (look at the animals) at the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris, where they were kept for this purpose. In applying himself to this special kind of looking, beginning with the task of watching a panther and writing about it, Rilke would learn not only something essential about himself, but also about the nature of the Egoic Self in general.

In this episode, we get a little bit closer to that understanding.

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Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/

On the 1st of May 1889, the young (33 year old) psychoanalyst-on-the-make Sigismund Schlomo Freud took on the case of a “a lady of about forty years of age”, a Frau Emmy von N., who we now know to be the Swiss noblewoman Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart. 

Baroness Fanny had married 29 years previously at the tender age of 23 the 65 year-old Swiss watchmaker and industrialist Heinrich Moser, who died 4 years after the marriage from a heart attack. In the minds of Moser’s five children from his previous marriage, the idea got around that Fanny might have toe-tagged their father after having him sire her two new Moser offspring with birthright claims to his vast fortune.

This is the first time that Freud decides to give his friend Josef Breuer’s technique of “investigation under hypnosis” a try-out as he attempts to help his new patient with her suffering somatizations (resembling very much the symptoms of Fibromyalgia today). Freud starts using techniques which will in time become (after he has ditched the overt hypnosis angle) his own special contribution to human animal therapeutics.

What have these initial forays into our so-called "hysterical" human Egos (Freud's word for the Ego was simply "Ich", I) got to do with a poem that Rainer Maria Rilke would write a decade or so later about a panther he'd spent a day watching behind bars in the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris? 

This first episode (part of a trio) begins exploring this koan, trying to join up some of these dots between one of Freud's first talking cure patients (Emmy/Fanny), with Joseph Mortimer Granville's invention of the medical vibrator (the percuteur) in 1880 and its uses by male doctors on their female patients' genitalia; James Strachey's mistranslations of Freud's Ich into Ego and the effect this would have on psychoanalytic thought and practice, and David Attenborough being chased around the Scottish Highlands by a large, angry grouse called The Caipercaillie.

Poems discussed in this episode:

THE PANTHER

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly–.

-Rainer Maria Rilke (English translation by Stephen Mitchell)

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FIRST FOOTNOTE ON ZOOMORPHISM

It seems we have said too little about

how it sits in its chambered nub

listening for movement in the farthest

love being interspecific, here,

If anything, I’d liken us to certain

than how we’d look

yet now and then, I’m on the point of

that cry across the marshes like the doom

so readily for love, each heart becomes

distinctive, one more descant in the dark,

-John Burnside

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Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/

What does it mean to be real. REALLY real? To be telling each other alive about each other alive etc.

I look to Mary Oliver’s Ten Commandments for living the good life, as well as her very Enneagram Nine-ish poem I Want To Write Something So Simply. Rilke’s Book of Hours also gets a look-in, as does WS Graham's Language Koan, Becker's Denial of Death, and Lizzo (avec Sasha).

Part of this must surely involve a very real "coming into Presence", which R.S. Thomas calls in The Bright Field,  “that pearl of great price”? And what better way to do that than through the Incomparable Cosmic Verve of Cheryl Lynn circa 1978.

My mother is ageing. Her cognitive capacities are declining, but her wisdom and life experience are at their peak. In my Poems for Ma podcast, I try to tap into the latter, whilst being aware of the former. 

Every few days, on my Poems for Ma podcast, I send Ma a poem I think she might like with some questions I have about the poem which I'm interested in talking about with her. I read the poem aloud and then we chat about the themes in this poem, enjoying each other's company. 

The first poem we embark on together is Mary Oliver's Wild Geese.

Please consider subscribing to Poems for Ma if you'd like to hang out with us occasionally: [iTunes link] [Spotify link]

An exploration of The Tower via Frost's Fire and Ice.

This particular exploration of The Tower, we make together via the following cultural stepping stones: 

Some say the world will end in fire,

ALL IS ARDOUR

Hello, hello! 

Just wanting to touch base with you if you are still subscribed to this feed to talk about two new poetry-related projects I'm working on at the moment:

-The Tarot Cure: 

Is the elusive "cure" of our (unwanted) selves, promised to us by therapy, possible through the archetypes of a Tarot deck?

-Poems for Ma: 

Chatting about poetry with my mother as she faces dementia and her own demise in the next few years.

Accepting the mixed-bag Now of our lives. Hard.

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THE THING IS

-Ellen Bass

Full text of this episode can be found here: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/amor-fati/

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Audio used in episode (in order of occurence): 

-Jon & the Nightriders - Rumble at Waikiki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41YvSrk5paQ&t=81s

-Can't Stop The Feeling (Justin Timberlake) - Original Piano Arrangement by Maucoli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MpOfn4rDcU

-ET: https://open.spotify.com/album/1Wcggztq9SspsBeXcrnHZo?highlight=spotify:track:3VVilIGlUJ6tIirr7GGCHs

-Night Flight - Say Yes (Elliot Smith Cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ0ac8A8hk

-A Day In The Life (Orchestra Overdub): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecybFp71bnc

-Reading of The Thing Is (Ellen Bass): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JONWgsZ6vm8

-Steven C. Hayes talking about Feeling & Experiential Avoidance: https://www.soundstrue.com/collections/authors-steven-c-hayes/products/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy

-Extract from Bernard Malamud's A New Life: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Penguin-Twentieth-Century-Classics/dp/0140186816/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=a+new+life+malamud&qid=1624180687&sr=8-1

-Jane Hirshfield reading her poem Amor Fati: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92039/amor-fati 

-Extract from The Gay Science: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Gay-Science-The-Joyful-Wisdom-Audiobook/B01EWAXDI4?qid=1624180836&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=c6e316b8-14da-418d-8f91-b3cad83c5183&pf_rd_r=ZN7BMAJ44S0DHR5PPNXE

-Susan Buffam reading her poem Amor Fati: https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/amor-fati-4435

-“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, A Poetry Film by Ana Pérez López: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFLQOOiAqxQ&t=15s

-Elliott Smith ~ Say Yes (Live in Stockholm): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOnHEApbjV0

-Itzhak Perlman plays Fiddler on the Roof (John Williams Los Angeles Philharmonic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h745la-Lo1I

-Neil De Grasse Tyson giving an overview of our 65 million year-old hominid evolutionary history: https://samharris.org/podcasts/252-alone-universe/

-Can't Stop The Feeling by Justin Timberlake Live (Downbeat LA Cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGz7Nbaavgg&ab_channel=DownbeatDownbeat

-Hakeem Oluseyi waxing lyrical about astrophysics: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/a-quantum-life-with-hakeem-oluseyi/

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This episode is proudly sponsored by the poem Amor Fati by Susan Buffam.

So I had this idea for a new strand on PK called Voice Noets With Poets. An audio gratitude (delivered as voice note) to some of my favourite makers about their work. In each episode you might hear my voice-note to them, and their voice note back, accompanied by other pleasant bleeps and bloops as part of the sonic package. I did one of these with Bryony Littlefair, and then ran out of steam, but I still like this one!

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TOPICS COVERED (In Order of Appearance): Tara Miller (poem); “hooks” in songs and poems; the workings of desire (what is desire using us for?); interruption in poetic narrative; affectionate abuse / ambivalent intimacies; the (un)blemished truths about ourselves/others; long-legged vs short-legged happiness; Jane Hirshfield’s giraffes (Articulation, An Assay); many-jointed expressive structures in poetry; conceptual untidiness; Colette Bryce’s giraffes (The Hopes); random influences & unhinged delight; the post-depressive giraffe of serendipitous happiness; Tully (spoilers); suburbia (no spoilers); “I could speak and I was happy. / Or: I could speak, thus I was happy. / Or: I was happy, thus speaking." (Louise Glück; nostalgic anxiety; the joy of inconclusiveness; terrible at pub quizzes; And it was at that age … / Poetry arrived / in search of me." (Neruda poem); identification with Dorianne Laux's After Twelve Days of Rain; I have always loved too much,

This episode is proudly sponsored by the poem CHANCE DARKENED ME:

Chance darkened me

THE MOTHER

The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

-Lydia Davis

THIS BE THE VERSE 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

-Philip Larkin

THE OPTICAL PRODIGAL

A man sees a tiny couple in the distance, and thinks they might be his mother and father. But when he gets to them they're still little. You're still little, he says, don't you remember? Who said you were supposed to be here? says the little husband. You're supposed to be in your own distance; you're still in your own foreground, you spendthrift. No no, says the man, you're to blame.

-Russell Edson

With additional audio clips and references to: 

Love, Love, Love By Mike Bartlett. The Lyric Hammersmith Theatre production (recorded under lockdown): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000k26n

Astor Piazzolla's Las Estaciones - Otono Porteno, Violin. Arabella Steinbacher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms1BR55bOmg

This American Life, Episode 672, "No Fair!": https://www.thisamericanlife.org/672/no-fair

Nadine Labaki's Capernaum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUo0048xZE

Sam Harris's Free Will: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405

Peter Strawson's essay "Freedom and Resentment: http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/P._F._Strawson_Freedom_&_Resentment.pdf

West Side Story - "Gee Officer Krupke!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7TT4jnnWys&t=2s

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/My-Name-Is-Lucy-Barton-Audiobook/B01AX00OH0

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

-James Wright

Shook as we all are at the moment by global pandemics, and social protest, perhaps this is a good time to think about what wasting our lives and those of others might look like. And what about not-wasting? How to define as well as apply that to our lives? I reflect on this koan via Mike Leigh's 1993 film Naked, Jean Renoir's 1932 film Boudu Saved from Drowning, Harold Brodkey's short story "Dumbness is Everything", and the philosopher Robert Kane's ideas about three dimensions of value that stack up or make up the landscape and inscape of our lives. 

Transcript and shownotes (including links to films discussed which you can watch for free online): http://stevewasserman.co.uk/am-i-wasting-my-life-are-you-wasting-your-life-james-wrights-lying-in-a-hammock-at-william-duffys-farm-in-pine-island-minnesota/