The poem wants to be intimate utterance overheard. Catullus. Bitter, intimate, INTIMATE, repertorial but with the added interest of that, a saying from a listening to, the movement of both implied but not explicit, with no definite direction one way or another the terms constantly shifting.
When you look at me what do you see? Colors, slogans, a collection of constructs, concepts and attitudes vs. the dog’s simple longing. Can you see the use in the form, the simple presence. What I want to say to you and the seeing heard. Or herd.
Thus one takes such pleasure in agitation or anything that activates the utterance. Hunger? Sex? (Desire.) The eye goes further and further back, the sense gets subtler.
But this goes away from what language seems to want. The saying – surprise – sequence – the way we have all been taught. And even “poetry†seems to teach us this but it was there all along (perhaps) in our mother’s tongue.
That is, look at what anyone really wants to say. Pay attention. Through the thicknesses of distortion there is that simple thing wanting to be understood and also capable of understanding. I wanted to grab a ex-junkie nieghbor and shout into his ear as into a deep well confident that only thus could he “hear†me.
As a test of this call someone up with no definite idea what to say. See how quickly the conversation like a gaze lowers or hardens and what if anything ends up being said. And who is listening if anyone the thing itself.
Because sooner or later one has to speak, to say something. In an empty room who overhears you? To what extent is one conscious of being overheard?
It is not difficult to seem obscure, witty intelligent sincere. How easily is one distracted? Called back to oneself? Perhaps the thing lies down simply because it’s tired?
The verb is the heartbeat but where does it go and in some sense the whole poem is verb, what’s carried over in motion and only coming to rest momentarily inside another.
In other words of all that’s said to you what do you remember and what do you want others to keep of what you said? Can it be reduced to a whisper?
Listen to voice, tone, gesture. Ignore actual terms and make words mean as little as possible. Pay attention to agitation, annoyance, agression in any form. What does it mean to be a man or a woman listening to what’s being spoken or speaking to what’s listening and how much of that depends on what’s looking at who?
It is too painful almost to bear but the saying is always there and once listened to words begin. There was a story in today’s paper about a woman who spent a year as a man, and began to understand e.g. the “intimate silence†of a men’s bowling team, what was being communicated even among them.
The words never do it justice because to listen too long or too hard or with as one would imagine a too earnest expression is just as damaging as not to listen at all. And so one practices not listening too, and merely enjoys the patterns of speech, says the wrong thing, apologizes, makes a bad joke or, even worse, a really good one.
