In The Verb To Be, the refrain line, I know the general outline of despair, got me thinking about every time someone has said they "understood" what someone else was going through. This happens all the time when people are going through unpleasant/difficult experiences, but it is usually not true. Once I was visiting my younger siblings' friend in the hospital and he said something about how I had no credibility in that situation because I wasn't him. My response was that I knew what it was like to be that seriously ill, I knew what it was like for it to happen when you were 13, and I knew what it was like to think no one knew what it was like. A large part of why this poem affected me was that I can imagine saying to him in that moment, I know the general outline of despair. This feels like it could be true more generally in life, and yet "in its general outline despair has no importance."
It was also striking in the fact that it although it gave a personality to despair, it did not all feel sad. There was beauty for me in lines such as, "...their blood doesn't have the slightest thickness." This image felt oddly comforting, even though it is of blood from fallen birds. Blood without thickness feels less threatening, like you wouldn't choke on it as quickly if it filled your airways, somehow it feels safer. "A pearl necklace for which no clasp can be found and whose existence can't even hang by a thread." This image feels like a description of despair, and yet a pearl necklace for which no clasp can be found feels free, not useless. If its existence cannot hang by a thread it may be less drawn out, but this does not just mean it cannot exist, perhaps it only knows how to exist and just does not know how to almost not exist. "I live on that despair which enchants me" "...the despair with long slender surprises..." The OED defines despair as the absence of hope, "entire want of hope." But these lines make despair feel like something with a life, while despairing not everything has to be bland and dull. In fact, "it's always in despair that I discovery the beautiful uprooted trees of night." This feels like magic, giving despair, the concept, the word, a life beyond hopelessness without betraying the feeling of despair.
Hannah,
ReplyDeleteI really respect the way that you viewed this line. I too feel the same way when someone says they "understand" but they really do not. This made me think about the connection between thought provoking statements in a poem and ones that are simply stagnant. What I believe the best part about poetry is the ability for one phrase to allow each individual to "understand" differently. While simple expressions such as I understand may not be applicable in real life, in poems they hold a larger weight because the understanding of a line is not limited to one confined definition, but rather whatever the reader interprets it to be.
While I understand what both of you are saying when you say no one else can truly comprehend another's emotions, however, what I hate even more is when someone says, "You don't even know" or, "You cannot understand." I want to bellow: Is that a CHALLENGE? Because although I never will be able to understand completely, it is human nature to try to understand, and so using my own experiences like Breton does, I can get "the general outline."
ReplyDeletePayton,
ReplyDeleteYes! I totally agree. The weird thing about being human is that, as someone (Mead?) said: we are all unique, just like every other human on earth. Leading to the bizarre situation that we are simultaneously experiencing life differently, and thus can never be "fully understood". And yet, all experiencing being human, and thus never truly beyond understanding.