Tag: metaphor

Affirming the Positive, or Fill Me Up, Buttercup

On By jeffreycparsonsIn Parenting, Teaching3 Comments

In 1978, on my way to learning other things in the classroom, I took a ten-day in-service class called “Humanizing the Classroom”  led by Art Combs.

Combs taught us how children become more self-confident and self-disciplined in response to what they learn about themselves in the classroom and at home.

He used the metaphor of a deep well to represent a child’s self-esteem capacity.  The role of a teacher is to raise the water level of each child’s well.  According to Combs, everyone has a reservoir of goodness (the water) in his well. Each day, children collect affirmations; some children, over time, collect more than others. The children who experience many positives over the course of time, find that their water level (self-esteem) rises all the time, and that a child with lots of positives will have the water level almost at the top of the well. Thus, when you bend over each child’s well and drop a rock into it to sound the depth of the reservoir from the top of the well to the water, you will hear the splash right away in the well of the child who experiences lots of affirmations. (The void from the water level to the top of the well is call an “ullage” by the way.) The child who rarely experiences affirmation will have a water level so low (a huge “ullage,” or void in his or her well) that one might have to listen for a long, long time to hear a splash. This may be why children who encounter very few positive experiences, or affirmations may seem to be “distant” from us. By extension, it is our positive experiences that make us attractive to others.

So what is the takeaway for teachers and parents from this analogy?

Combs said that it is a teacher’s job, every day, to structure positive learning experiences that give children  a sense of accomplishment;  that give children the affirmation requirement every child needs every day. Every day, the water level (self-esteem) will rise a bit more.

But most importantly, as you add affirmations (positive experiences and a sense of accomplishment) to a child’s well, regardless of the level, that affirmation can never be undone by anyone: the good you do for a child will always remain with that child.

Long after children forget the facts and figures and dates they learn in school, they will remember how well they were cared for and, most importantly, how they were treated.

Rereading The Liar’s Club for the First Time

On By jeffreycparsonsIn Book recommendations, Uncategorized2 Comments

Last December 2015, I was walking with a friend for the first time in five years. We were walking and talking about writing: writing memoirs in particular. My friend thought she might have a few books in her waiting to get into publication. She was thinking of writing a memoir and was sounding me to find out if I could tell her anything valuable from a literature teacher’s point of view. I’m sure I didn’t.

She asked me if I had ever read Mary Karr’s book The Liar’s Club. I said I had read it. I remembered that I had listened to Mary Karr talk on NPR about her book in 2010, when she re-issued it. I bought the book, didn’t find the immediate enthusiasm to start it and shelved it for a while. One day, again on NPR, I listened to Stephen King profess has admiration for Mary Karr and for her book The Liar’s Club. I dusted off my copy and started to read it due to King’s enthusiasm for Karr and the book. I remember not being too fond of the idea of a Liar’s Club, and I must have dismissed it after a few pages because there is no way I could have read that book then, or now, without simply falling in love with the language, Mary Karr’s style, and her voice. The book is all about voice and that voice speaks to a broad audience.

I could not have read more than three pages. If I didn’t like the book, and didn’t think much of Mary Karr, then I could not have read it. Maybe my problem was that it  was set in Texas…who knows?  Bald fact: I didn’t read the book. Mea culpa.

My response to my friend was that I had indeed read the book a long time ago and that I didn’t think much of it, or much of Mary Karr as a writer. A dark shadow crossed this woman’s face. She was thinking deeply to herself, “This guy’s an idiot.” Her formally good opinion of my literary opinion stock dropped through the floor. I can’t be sure what her exact thought was coursing through her mind, but if I had to guess, it probably went something like this: “You are a pompous, arrogant dumbass, who doesn’t know good writing when you read it.” Or something to that effect. People don’t think highly of ridiculous criticism of obvious good writing, especially writing they personally enjoy. Fact. Been there.

Last week, after I had to cancel what would have been a third walk in five years, and first in three months, I decided to reread The Liar’s Club in order to find out why this book is adored by so many readers, and by my friend.

People read books for a number of good reasons. Some people like the action in a book, others are happy to read a simple narrative; still others like to read a particular genre, or read about an interesting topic; I am happy to read books others find interesting. I will always find a book engrossing, if the language talks to me with interesting metaphors, images, rhythm, tone and sentencing (variation of sentence lengths); I am a hopelessly attracted to novels that read more like poetry, and novels where I can’t distinguish between whether, or not the language has been deliberately chosen and polished, or if the author is just that damn amazing of an artist, and writes beautiful language effortlessly and naturally.

Mary Karr’s particular genius is that she understands that the sense of smell is intimately related to memory. If you are writing a memoir, it makes great sense to use the smells that evoke memories liberally. She is a master of placing an evocative image of a particular smell to introduce her recollection of a place, or event. The entire novel derives its sense of place through her numerous appeals to our sense of smell.

Mary Karr had me from her first image when she connects the sense of smell to her memory of the nutty smell of coffee and the background smell of her hometown: “Somebody had made a pot of coffee that laid a nutty smell over the faint chemical stink from the gasoline fire in the back yard. Every one tries to conjure up the sense of smell to fill out their narrative by using the smell of bacon, or coffee, and then abandons the sense of smell as a tool to evoke a minor image. Karr uses coffee, cigar smoke, Salem cigarette smoke, and then moves on to much more masterful smell images throughout the book. She repeats the coffee image: She remembers picking up her dad at work: “He brought into the cab the odors of stale coffee and of the cleaning solvent he used to get the oil off his hands.” Later in the book, when Pokey reunites with her dad, she uses “He’d been drinking black coffee during his shift, the coffee that pored like tar from the foreman’s beat-up percolator. That coffee brought my whole former Daddy back. I knew the solvent he used to strip grease from his hands and the Lava soap applied with a fingernail brush. (She moves to a tactile image: “His chin bristles scraped my neck.”) then she shifts back to smell to complete the child and father reunion: “And he must have been sweating from damp or work or worry, for the Tennessee whiskey he’d stood on the tarmac sipping was like the fresh-cut oak coming off him.” It bears repeating: Karr’s genius is her use of smell images to build her memoir because memories are richly remembered around specific smells. Karr makes fun of frozen fart smell which appear as her Dad, Pete, tells a story of “about a dozen of these round fuzzy things rolled our his pant leg. Big as your thumb, and white.” Pete continues the story: “And you ain’t going to guess what happens when they thaw. They pop like firecrackers and let off the biggest stink you ever smelled…” “They was farts?” Daddy slaps the laughs at sucking in his audience. And thus, we are introduced to the humor of the Liar’s Club and Pete’s storytelling through the sense of smell.

Another favorite of mine that takes me right in the car with Karr: “The too-sweet smell of Grandma’s hyacinth perfume hung in the car till Mother lit a Salem.” I know that perfume and I know the smell of Salem (menthol) cigarettes and that sentence takes me back to my mother’s smoking when I rode in the car with her as a youngster, about the same age as Karr is at this point in her narrative.

Karr gains memory-evoking strength just a few sentences later on the page when she remembers: “The sheer stink of my hometown woke me before dawn. The oil refineries and chemical plants gave the whole place a rotten-egg smell.” A positive memory: “The right wind could bring you a whiff of the Gulf, but that was rare.”

That smell leads, a couple of pages later, to this revelation about her hometown: “I later learned that Leechfield at that time was the manufacturing site for Agent Orange, Which surprised me not one bit.” She is remembering arriving in her hometown after an all-night car ride: “That morning, when I woke up lying under the back slant of the windshield, the world smelled not unlike a wicked fart in a close room.”

Another example of Karr’s narrative genius is how she parallels the novel To Kill a Mockingbird without even reaching from her own life to do so. Karr is the Scout Finch of Leechfield, Texas. Both Mary Karr and Jean Louise Finch have nicknames: Pokey and Scout. Both tell the backstory of their hometown while writing about how much they adore their fathers. Scout is no slouch at setting people straight, and neither is Pokey. They both speak in the vernacular, both write in a highly literate narrative form that somehow reaches out and includes the speech sounds and rhythmic cadences of the South. Karr doesn’t appear to deliberately make the connections between the two novels, but there are clear connections in her story. Harper Lee has a unique voice that draws the reader in by telling the story with a child persona: Scout. Karr steps back into her childhood and tells her story as her younger self, modeling her seven year old voice when she asks questions of her sister and parents and then shifting subtly to an adult voice to carry the narration.

Karr lends credibility to her memoir by questioning her remembrance of certain events as though she might not be remembering them as accurately as she lived the events as a child. Both Karr and Lee echo the idea that we don’t remember events as they were, but as we were.

Another comparison to TKM I noticed was Pokey’s comment about running away from home: “What I didn’t know until I finally did leave home at fifteen was that, if I had lit our, nobody would organize any posse to sniff me down.”

Dill observes to Scout that maybe Boo didn’t run away because he had no place to run to. Dill was also the product of a mother who remarried and chose to focus more on herself and her new husband than on her child. You can see that parallel in Pokey’s mom when she divorces Pokey’s dad and remarries destroying the family bond. The children are allowed to choose which parent the wish to live with. To me, this shows the indifference of Pokey’s mom to her children. To her credit, Pokey’s mom later reunites the family.

Does everyone in the South drink to excess? Wow! There are the big drinkers: Aunt Rachel and Bob Ewell in TKM. In The Liar’s Club, everyone is a drunk. They probably don’t problem drink any more in the South than in the North, but drinking is definitely a favorite past time that has detrimental effects on both communities. The Liar’s Club makes glad I live boring, non-drinking life, that no one would actually write about.

I noticed that in Karr’s alcoholic family, each sister was willing, at any time to walk away from the other. I think this is the mark of an alcohol-affected family. For example Pokey says of her loyalty to her sister: “I wished Lecia no particular harm, but if there was only one banana left in the bowl, I would not hesitate to grab it and leave her to do without.” On the other hand, when Lecia, Pokey, and her dad were together, Pokey said, “We were just like the three curved boards for the hull bottom of some boat that only needed gluing and caulking together.

If you are still with me, you might like to think about Karr’s use of pacing to add texture to the story. Throughout the narrative, she leads us down a narrative trail, story by story, stopping and digressing occasionally to illuminate a important connection to the narrative.

The rape story demands a under current of pacing to reinforce how craftily Pokey was cut out of the herd and raped by an older boy. She mentions him. She describes him as evil. She tells how he grooms her. Then she describes the rape as it happens. It all seems to build up gradually, to demonstrate how this evil boy planned the rape. Pokey is left without any recourse to address her rape. She concludes her story by describing him walking off to the ball game, he never rushes; he is confident that he is in complete control of Pokey and Pokey’s will, and he is confident that he will never be found out. The pacing of the story reflects his confidence: slow and deliberate.

A particularly touching dramatic story Karr relates is how Lecia, Pete, and Mary enjoy a cookout in Colorado. Mary remembers it as a Halcyon moment before the family’s tight bond is obliviated by their mother’s selfishness the next day. Mary experiences the best day of her life the day before she faces her worst day.

If I filmed this book, I would choose Adele’s “Hello” as the theme song for the for The Liar’s Club. The book has an most plaintive vibe to it. One can hardly imagine a little girl growing up in such a dysfunctional family and still turning out as close to normal as most of the rest of us are (if we all were truthful about our families).

I have a special . If I really like a book I have read, I rate it by how many copies I buy on Amazon and then send to my reading buddies, or give to my friends. So far, I have given away fifty copies of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, forty copies of Gilbert’s, Eat Pray Love, twenty-five copies of Caroline Knapp’s, Drinking: A Love Story, twenty-five, or thirty copies of Ted Kerosote’s, Merle’s Door. I was so taken with Elizabeth Smart’s Story, that I bought fifty copies of a very expensive hardback to loan to my students. Each book was read over twenty times over a two-year period. That was money well-spend. If I thought I had fifty friends that would actually read Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, I would order fifty copies just to start. Sadly, I don’t think I am going to find that level of enthusiasm unless a bunch of folks read this blog and tell me how excited they are about the book.

Thank you, my friend for embarrassing me into reading The Liar’s Club. As with everything else in our relationship, you are right and I am wrong. The abyss will never be bridged except with great book recommendations. I’ll miss those in the future.

This interview and video might pique your interest in reading The Liar’s Club:

http://www.raintaxi.com/feeling-making-machine-an-interview-with-mary-karr/

https://www.facebook.com/MaryKarrLit/videos/945703705138/

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Working Together” An Explication of David Whyte’s Poem

On By jeffreycparsonsIn poetry explicationsLeave a comment

Listen to the poem as you read along: sound is sense!

 

Working Together 

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

passed at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

— David Whyte
from The House of Belonging 
©1996 Many Rivers Press

Written for the presentation of The Collier Trophy to The Boeing Company
marking the introduction of the new 777 passenger jet.

 

“Working Together” Explication

David Whyte

I liked David Whyte’s poem “Working Together” from first glance. Garrison Keillor’s oral interpretation added a dimension to the poem I didn’t hear in my vocal reading. Take a moment and “listen” to the poem by reading it out loud several times to get the first “sound sense” of the poem.

Where to start with this poem? I usually like to decide the subject, or category this poem would fall into. This poem is Whyte’s celebration of “the miraculous.” What is so miraculous? The act of “working together” can be miraculous; the poem is a discussion of the miracle of how we shape our world and in doing so, it shapes us. This miraculous “shaping” happens every day, but Whyte is drawing attention to a specific “shaping” and a particular relationship created by the interaction between what we aren’t aware of and what object, or idea we are creating. There is something of Elizabeth Gilbert’s connection to the “Big Magic” in this poem.

What got my attention in this poem? The title! Look at it. It contains everything the poem discusses in just two simple words. “Together” reveals a relationship; furthermore, the first syllable “To” is sound symbolism for the number “two” which also suggests the simplest of relationships: pairs, dyads, couples. This poem utilizes dyad metaphors to reinforce a special relationship to the miraculous.

Taking this four-sentence poem one sentence at a time, let’s look at “how” the poem builds meaning to show us the “miraculous.” Each sentence uses the repetition of words to shape a visual and an aural dyad. “We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again.” The sentence is built in two clauses subtly reinforcing the dyad. Here we are “shaping” our world and by that act, the world is “shaping” us. In a sentence: we become what we do. The repetition of the words “shaping” and “world” suggest a duality, as does the word “again.” This sentence suggest Gary Snyder’s poem “Ax Handles.”

The second sentence in the poem almost works like a stanza: “The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous.” There is my thesis: the poem is about the miraculous! “The visible” is our world, our experience, our reality, which works with the “invisible” (the miraculous) in “common cause” (alliteration is used to suggest the idea of the pairing of ideas) to produce something miraculous. We create something miraculous every day without even noticing our creative acts. Whyte wrote the poem to remind us that we are in partnership with the miraculous and creative world whether we are notice, or not. Whyte uses dyads three times in this sentence: “visible and invisible, “working together,” and “common cause” (alliteration) to reinforce the idea that we are connected to the “miraculous.” The duality in the very structure of the sentence is stated in two clauses separated by a comma. Form is meaning, and the form is pretty obvious. Whyte intended the form of his poem to reinforce the meaning of the poem.

Sentence three helps the reader move from the abstract idea of “working together to shape the intangible with the tangible” and “the visible with the invisible” to the concrete image of a wing and the physical interaction between the wing and the air. “I am thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight.” Whyte’s idea in this sentence is to show how the concrete (a wing) and the seemingly abstract (the air) form a relationship (work together) to create the miracle of flight. The air is miraculous: it is simultaneously tangible and intangible (pretty miraculous in my book) and it works with the tangible (a shaped wing) to produce something called the Bernoulli effect, or lift which in turn makes flight possible. Even the shape of the wing suggests a duality: it only works because the top of the wing is not the same shape as the bottom of the wing. The very shape (rounded on top) “works together” with (the flat underside of the wing) as “air is passed at speed” to create the miracle of flight. Another, less obvious duality in this sentence is the relationship of “weightless air” “easily” holding “our weight.” Think weightless air holding up the weight of a 777 “easily” and it is not too hard to feel connected to the miracle of flight. Abstract thinking (miraculous thinking, creative thinking) works to create a concrete wing, which in turn, creates the miracle of flight. All of this takes place in “invisible and intangible” air with a “visible and tangible” wing.

Whyte makes his case in the final sentence for how we are shaped by our world. The world works together with us to help us find our true shape in the world: “So may we, in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine and look for the true shape of our own self by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.” Faith, another intangible is suggested by this sentence. Whyte inserts a relationship in the single word “we.” And what do “we” do? We “trust” in this life those elements we have yet to see (the invisible) or imagine (a second invisible)

and look (for the tangible “elements” amongst the intangible that we can only imagine) in order to “see” the true shape of our own self. Thus, when we “create,” we create ourselves as well. The alliteration of “see, shape, and self” addresses “seeing” the relationship between us and the invisible, or the “miraculous.” We are shaping our own self by creating (forming) ourselves to the great intangibles about us! We are shaped by our ideas; our ideas shape the world. Our world is enveloped in the intangible air that is all about us. Our imagination works together with the “intangibles” like air to create the shape of our lives. All of this is based on our “trust” in the invisible, miraculous creative acts that we have yet to see.

This is my take. I’ll own all of it.

David Whyte’s interpretation of his own poem is entirely different. Research will reveal that my understanding of this poem is several imaginings away from Whyte’s purpose for writing the poem.

Google the YouTube video of him reading the poem and you will hear (and see) that “Working Together” was written for a specific purpose: to celebrate the commissioning of the Boeing 777.

This is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXMWjtsdIiU

This is the source of the purpose of the poem:

http://www.davidwhyte.com/english_working.html

Written for the presentation of The Collier Trophy to The Boeing Company marking the introduction of the new 777 passenger jet.

My dialogue with this poem happened before I even knew who David Whyte was. I glad I didn’t have the “back story” of the poem before I had my own opportunity to let it “happen to me.” To wit, if I can have my own dialogue with the poem and David Whyte has his unique dialogue, what might your dialogue be? I would be delighted to hear your criticism if you understand criticism to mean “to bring out sweetness and light” (beauty and truth). Jump in. You might wonder about my definition of “brief” in the title. This explication is “Jeff-brief.”

 

Alcoholism and the Bell Jar

On By jeffreycparsonsIn Life stories, Uncategorized7 Comments

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I won’t gain too many friends by writing my thoughts today, but this topic has been on my mind for years.

 

I grew up in Casper, Wyoming. Wyoming folks, when I lived there, used to measure distances by how many six packs it took to drive from point A to point B. Drinking alcohol was that casual and that socially acceptable.

 

Alcoholism engulfed my family and me as I grew up. Alcoholism pervades every aspect of my life today.

 

Almost all my friends’ parents were alcoholics, or at best, really heavy drinkers. I didn’t know any family that didn’t have a well-stocked wet bar in their home; the majority of my school friend’s parents had a drinking problem. There was a lot of shame associated with our families’ alcoholism; nobody talked about alcoholism openly with their friends.

 

I thought alcoholism was about drinking alcohol; I didn’t understand that alcoholism was a symptom of a deep and powerful substance addiction. Alcoholism was a family affliction to almost every family I grew up with in the fifties and sixties.

 

I was a thirty-something before I even knew that it was possible to communicate effectively about the disease and communicate with an alcoholic; I’d given up trying to talk with my alcoholic mother; I shunned her for years.

 

In my thirties, I discovered a communication skill set to communicate with my alcoholic mother when I discovered a metaphor for alcoholism while watching the 1986 movie The Fly with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.

 

I discovered a metaphor for alcoholism and I found the tool to understand and defeat the alcoholism agenda. I used that understanding to learn to accept and love and reconnect with my alcoholic mother.

 

In the movie, The Fly, Jeff Goldblum is a scientist trying to invent teleportation. In the movie, he steps into teleportation booth A and flips a switch to travel to teleportation booth B. What he doesn’t know at the time he flips the switch, is that a housefly has surreptitiously entered booth A just before the teleportation commences. The machine transports the fly and Goldblum at the dismantled molecular level in booth A and reassembles them in booth B, confusing their genes in the process. Goldblum acquires some of the fly’s genes. His body starts to grow at the genetic level of the fly, changing his body in a most grotesque manner. Fast forward a bit to Goldblum’s hospital room as he tries to explain his perception of his body’s morphing into a fly to Geena Davis, his main squeeze. He sees the metamorphosis as a disease.  Goldblum’s character states: “I know what the disease wants: It wants control.”

 

I had never thought of disease as a sentient entity before, but it made perfect sense to me.

 

Somewhere in my reading, I learned that the objective of alcoholism is to degrade, demean, isolate, and humiliate the alcoholic and the people who are known, and loved by the alcoholic. Alcoholism has its own agenda.

 

The lingo of alcoholism defines the alcoholic as the afflicted and everyone else in the alcoholic’s life as the affected.

 

Everyone in the alcoholic’s life is affected by the disease until the key to extricate themselves from alcoholism becomes available to them. No one ever extricates themselves completely from alcoholism.

 

My mother choose alcohol addiction; and the alcoholism enthusiastically embraced her.

 

She lived the first forty years of her life as a brilliant, powerful, and attractive non-drinking woman who mistakenly thought that life owed her a living. My father inadvertently supported her delusion, not realizing his inadvertent role in my mother’s addictive descent.

 

Mother was so intelligent, so self-possessed, she could have run a small country. Columbia would not have been too big for her energy. Being a homemaker didn’t challenge her talents and abilities. She wasn’t up to avoiding an alcoholic lifestyle, however.

 

 

Alcoholism is not about intelligence, or lack thereof; rather, it is a powerfully negative life force that defeats one’s mind and soul.

 

On her fortieth birthday, my mother didn’t get out of bed. She had an epiphany:

 

The rest of her life became a slow slide into a slough of mental and physical decadence. She believed that she would never be as beautiful, or as popular, or as powerful as she had been in her first forty years. It was a self-fulfilling prophesy.

 

When she chose to drink heavily every day; her fate was sealed for the next forty-one years.

Whatever the cause, the effect was that she became a world-class alcoholic. The power of the disease, and the power of her brain, produced a synergy that outpaced the abilities of everyone in her life to understand, or respond to her disease.

 

In my thirties, I came to realize my mother not as a broken-down alcoholic, but rather as the wonderful person she was and always had been. She required what we all require: love, affection, respect, connection to her family, and friends, and the nurturing of her soul with their presence.

 

Alcoholism is a bell jar that completely encapsulates the alcoholic and thwarts any positive, or nurturing relationships with her family and friends.

 

A bell jar is a bell-shaped cover made of glass used for covering delicate objects, or a clear container used in a laboratory, or an environment in which someone is protected, or cut off from the outside world.

 

My dear, kind mother was a hungry ghost: she was desperate; she was starved for affection; she could never fulfill her needs: she was completely in the thrall of a disease whose agenda was to degrade, demean, isolate, and humiliate her and to degrade, demean, and humiliate everyone that she loved, cherished, or cared about.

 

Her alcoholism was a bell jar isolating her from her world: the disease was invisible to everyone including to her; like the wind that cannot be seen except by its affects on the environment, we could only see the affects of the disease, not the disease itself, or its agenda.

 

My family couldn’t separate the disease from our mother: she was a disease to us.

 

We slipped into the role of being complicit, and being participant in her degradation.

 

She contributed to her abasement by drinking, or so it seemed to everyone outside of the jar: we didn’t perceive an agenda in her drinking, we just saw the effects of her drinking.

 

Belatedly, I imagined the disease process for what it was, I seized the responsibility to respond to my mother as a person rather than to respond to her disease.

 

I fought for her instead of against her.

 

I said kind words to her.

 

I expressed affection for her verbally, and by simple acts of kindness.

 

I ignored her anger.

 

I deflected her rage.

 

I refused to respond angrily to her syrupy voice when she called me on the phone.

 

I no longer upbraided her for drinking.

 

I refused to take her phone calls when she was drunk; rather, I made a point of calling her almost daily, and visiting her in person frequently, when I knew she would most likely be sober and rational.

 

Initially, I accepted all of her ridiculous demands as a matter of course; eventually, her demands became reasonable requests as her needs for affection and positive attention were met.

 

I addressed her desires and her needs promptly and without comment. (To her, her wants and needs were the same thing; there was no need for me to quibble over the distinction.)

 

I became hyper-conscientious around her: I addressed her authentic personal needs, not her alcoholic confusion of those needs. Sometimes, they were the same; I didn’t differentiate, I just worked to meet her needs as she expressed them.

 

The disease hated my conscientious efforts to love my mother and support her growth away from helplessness.

 

The disease slowly lost its powerful grip on me:

 

I no longer allowed the disease to drive my life.

 

I gained power over my life as the disease lost its power over me.

 

I felt great.

 

I developed a positive relationship with my mother for the first time in my life.

 

Slowly, the bell jar lost its implacable grip on my mother and its firm grip on me; it released our family to function as a family.

 

The disease is never entirely absent from our lives: it is always in the background. Mother died an alcoholic struggling every day for the rest of her life with the affects of living half a century in the clutches of alcoholism.

 

I celebrate my creative resolution to an alcoholic relationship with my mother. It seemed a success to me.

 

I know and respect alcoholism for its power over me and for its power over many of my friends.

 

Alcoholism still has a unmistakable hold on me.

 

I ruined a friendship one December when I tried to explain my understanding of the disease process to an alcoholic. She (and the disease) did not take the discussion well.

 

My friend’s alcoholism (bell jar) understood my discussion of her alcoholism as criticism. (It was.)

 

No criticism is ever welcome, especially when it is understood by the disease as a threat to the status quo.

 

When I encounter alcoholic friends and alcoholic acquaintances, I invariably choose the wrong approaching their alcoholism. I still cherish the idea that I can challenge and defeat their alcoholism. I should leave well enough alone. I’ve never vanquished alcoholism completely in my lifetime and I’ve had lots of opportunities to do so.

 

My alcoholic bell jar shouts out to an alcoholic’s bell jar:

 

“Watch out for this guy! He really has an ‘ass-holic attitude’ about alcoholism! Avoid him! Straight-arm him! He’s no fun! Ghost him! Don’t let him play in our sandbox!”

 

As soon as I mention my thoughts about alcoholism and the metaphor of the Bell Jar to an alcoholic, that is pretty much the end of any meaningful relationship with that person… forever.

 

This is how I explain to myself why I don’t have 999 friends lined up to socialize with me: There’s a good chance my dormant alcoholism works to isolate me from many potential non-drinking friends and alcoholic friends.

 

I isolated myself from an alcoholic/psychopath person recently. I cared deeply about that person, a former student. I became addicted to the hope of saving her and the need show my love for her by sacrificing everything important to me to save her from her shitstorm life.

 

I realize now that I fueled a codependent relationship trying to rescue her from her alcoholic life; I became a controlling, crazy-person who was addicted to the hope of rescuing, and loving her as a means of saving her; she didn’t want to be saved.

 

I became the very addict that I was trying to rescue and reform.

 

I’ve moved on now; I have great respect for the addiction process. I escaped from that addictive event; I will always have the scars of addiction on my soul, however.

Lesson learned.

 

You and I

On By jeffreycparsonsIn Uncategorized1 Comment

This isn’t my all-time favorite poem, but it is close.  Below the poem is my explication of how I think the poem and the poet create meaning. Of course, part of it is what I am bringing to the poem, but much of it is the realization of the genus of the poet Jonathan Potter. I’ll bet his wife (or girlfriend) loves this poem, also:

Before you read the poem, or while you read the poem, listen to Garrison Keillor’s interpretation. The sense is always, first and foremost, in the sound.”

Start at 3:30

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/popup.php?name=writers_almanac/2011/02/twa_20110228_64

You and I

Jonathan Potter

 

You are a warm front
that moved in from the north,
a blind spot bearing beautiful gifts,
a garden in the air, a golden filament
inscribed with the name of God’s hunting dog,
a magic heirloom mistaken for a feather duster,
a fountain in a cow pasture, an anachronistic anagram
annoyed by anonymity, a dollar in the pocket
of a winter coat in summer.

And I am the discoverer of you.

 

You and I

Jonathan Potter

Surprise! This poem is built as a cascade of metaphors, falling one over the other, over the other, until the first word in the title and the first word in the poem become the last word of the poem. It is a cascade of air, not water. Each image suggests a discovery. The images start as nebulous air images and then gain substance; they give way to concrete images as the poem progresses, just as the relationship of the poet to his lover gains substance when he recognizes how his love is materializing for his lover: he realizes her beauty coming into his awareness.

“You and I” describes the poet’s surprise as he realizes just how special his love is. The first images evoke surprise: “a warm front that moved in from the north.” Fronts (air and moisture) tend to move in quickly and this front is a surprise because warm fronts don’t usually move in from the north.  

He is surprised as her beautiful gifts materialize, having been hidden just out of his sight, or better, they have been there all along, and he just notices them. Potter uses alliteration (blind, bearing, beautiful) to highlight the growing awareness of her presence as a gift: nothing is apparent (blind), something is coming (bearing), and the gift is revealed (beautiful). The placement of the word “gift” at the end of the line emphasizes the surprise process when he at last notices her.

The poet uses “gift” to start the alliteration of the next two lines: (garden, golden, and God.) The garden in the sky image evokes beautiful star-filled heavens, whereas the golden filament inscribed with the name of God’s hunting dog is the divine connection of loyalty and love between the poet and his love connected by nothing less than the thinnest of connective tissue: a golden filament ties him to the divine and to God’s hunting dog. God’s hunting dog helps the poet find the love and loyalty of his love that the poet can’t discover on his own.

The feather duster transitions the poem to more concrete images. Dusting off the everyday routine of their relationship, he discovers a covert love passed down to him as a magic heirloom that has been passed from her family. She comes from a loving past, and he is surprised by the revelation of that love.

The “fountain in the cow pasture” is a concrete image of the sublime being made manifest from the mundane. There is the surprise at the discovery of water (an image of the presence of God) flowing from the mundane (a cow pasture). 

“An anachronistic anagram annoyed by anonymity” is a fun attribution to the feelings of the “You” in the poem. She is annoyed her presence in the poet’s life is not recognized immediately. He is a little slow on the uptake of her love for him; it takes him awhile to appreciate who she is (the anagram).

The penultimate surprise is the dollar lost in the winter coat (a reference to the warm front surprise), until he discovers it in the warm summer of their love. In other words, as their relationship grows, he continues to be surprised by her love and her presence.

The second stanza’s meaning comes directly from the form of the poem. The poem is about two people discovering love (You and I). The first stanza is the “You” of the poem. It starts with the word “You.” The second stanza is the “I” of the poem. Notice how the title is used in the first words of each stanza: “You” as the first word of the title, “And I” as the first two words in the second stanza. The poet completes the relationship of the title and as the discoverer of “You” (his love).

So what is the back-story on this poem? I have no idea. What is my take on this poem? It is one of my all-time favorite love poems because it reflects how I first discovered my love for my high school girlfriend, and it describes the discovery of when I first knew I was in love with my wife Eva.

If you actually stayed with me this far, let me know how how you liked this poem and this explication.  Don’t be shy: I feel like I am writing in a vacuum.