The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
The "Golden Fleece"
Fourth, no Discovery —
Fifth, no Crew —
Finally, no Golden Fleece —
Jason — sham — too.
-F910, J870, sheet9, 1865
Our guest poster for this poem is Nate B Hardy. Nate is a frequent commenter on the Prowling Bee and has subsequently become a friend. Here's Nate's take on this poem:
As far as Emily sticking the knife in goes, this is one of my favorites:
Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
The “Golden Fleece”
Fourth, no Discovery —
Fifth, no Crew —
Finally, no Golden Fleece —
Jason — sham — too.
Cold!
It reminds me of a Tom Waits spoken word number called Children’s Story, which is apparently taken directly from a granny in the Georg Büchner play Woyzeck:
Once upon a time there was a poor child
When I read this, what I feel is elation. It’s one delightful surprise after another.
I get that same electric feeling from Emily’s poem. It’s just as fresh and savage.
Maybe Tom Waits would make it a polka, like a wry grin. My ear was saying we needed space. So I aimed the mic at the wall behind the piano, and the crickets behind the guitar. I thickened the crickets with tambourine, and whacked on toms. I sang the poem, and let the harmonica have the last word. It’s like a resigned shrug.
Cold!
It reminds me of a Tom Waits spoken word number called Children’s Story, which is apparently taken directly from a granny in the Georg Büchner play Woyzeck:
Once upon a time there was a poor child
With no father and no mother
And everything was dead
And no one was left in the whole world
Everything was dead
And the child went on searching day and night
And since nobody was left on the earth
He wanted to go up into the heavens
And the moon was looking at him so friendly
And when he finally got to the moon
The moon was a piece of rotten wood
And then he went to the sun
And when he got there
The sun was a wilted sunflower
And when he got to the stars
They were little golden flies
Stuck up there like the shrike
Sticks ‘em on a blackthorn
And when he wanted to go back down to earth
The earth was an overturned piss pot
And he was all alone
He sat down and he cried
And he is there till this day
All alone
When I read this, what I feel is elation. It’s one delightful surprise after another.
I get that same electric feeling from Emily’s poem. It’s just as fresh and savage.
Maybe Tom Waits would make it a polka, like a wry grin. My ear was saying we needed space. So I aimed the mic at the wall behind the piano, and the crickets behind the guitar. I thickened the crickets with tambourine, and whacked on toms. I sang the poem, and let the harmonica have the last word. It’s like a resigned shrug.
I love the song, Nate! It’s got such a great tone of resignation, as you say. The harmonica says it all as it trails off.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to add a couple of things that intrigue me about this poem.
One is that it presents a five-act structure, like a proper play. It’s genre: tragedy.
Act 1 Finding
Act 2 Losing
Act 3 Setting Out on an Expedition
for Something Bigger
Act 4 No Success at All in the Aforesaid Expedition
Act 5 Everyone Dies
The other day, in a passing moment, I pointed out to my daughter, who is 19, that life, whether we like it or not, belongs in the genre of tragedy.
No matter what we do, it always ends the same way: in the death of everyone we know as well as ourselves.
She looked at me and said, “Can we not have this conversation right now, Dad?”
But yeah, Act 5 of life is always going to present some difficulty. Yet, as you say Nate, we feel strangely elated at the end of a tragedy too! There is no other way, we are convinced. This is life. This is how it had to happen.
Which brings me to my second observation on this poem: the genius of the last line. Not only does Jason’s expedition end in “no crew” (that is, death). But also we come to realize, in the play of life, that his very identity as “Jason,” the hero, the Argonaut, the conquerer, the husband, the dad (the wife, the mother, all of our many possible roles) is a sham.
In the end, if we are lucky, we get to see that we don’t have a coherent meaning, but are merely concatenations of experiences and emotions and, I suppose, neural networks (if they are still sending messages at the end and not ineffective). Our names? Are names are merely habits, long-practiced movements of the tongue and teeth and lips, shaping air. The identities these names evoke are various and depend on observers, who see only what they see. Each of us is, as any Buddhist struggles to see, a sham.
It’s cold, this poem. It’s also hilarious. And true. I feel elated by it too. Ha!
Jason — sham — too. I’m going to try to take that in, really take it in.
Thanks, Tom! I think you daughter is right. Nineteen is too soon for wrapping your head around the fifth act. My kids are younger. Whenever they panic about the fifth act I just tell them that's a sign that they're doing it right -- holding life dear. I think this poem is getting at something like "you can't mess it up." Or at least "There are plenty of ways to do it right." Exposing the sham or falling for it, having an adventure, buying in. There's poetry either way. The truth is that it's a sham. But so what!
DeleteI like that. The sham as a laughable ruse for living a full life.
DeleteLove your five act idea, the complete play. From innocence to experience. So bleak as to be enlightening, a tragedy that turns itself inside out into a comedy. If Dickinson’s contemporary Ibsen had written a play based on Jason and the Argonauts. Things get unbearably bad in the second act and then get worse with every chapter, until you have to laugh at the final twist: the sham is up.
ReplyDeleteAll the philosophers belonging to the nihilism and absurdism schools of philosophy wrote tonnes of pages on how pointless and meaningless everything is. Emily explains it to us in just a few lines. Life with its visions, dreams and seeking is pointless, everyone dies and the seeker is also a sham. I am guessing Emily was in a mad mood when she was writing this poem but then finished it with a devilish chortle. As Camus explained in his myth of Sisyphus we may as well enjoy the absurdities while we live.
ReplyDeleteThanks, S! I can hear that chortle. It's as musical as a song bird. What gets me about this poem is how meaningful the absurdity seems. The sham is the truth. And the truth is fun!
DeleteI just want to say how much I love the Prowling Bee project, and how grateful I am to Susan and Adam for making it happen. It's like Dickinson gives small poems with instructions for making bigger and looser poems. I dunno, maybe that's not quite the right way to put it. What I'm trying to say is just that I think it's a lovely thing to do -- picking over the poems and comparing notes. It's a lovely mode of parasociety. So, Thanks!
ReplyDeleteAgree Agree agree
ReplyDeleteA quote came to my mind (as I continue to meditate on this poem). It seems apt.
ReplyDelete“The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter.”
— from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953)
Jason — sham — too!