Soul Searching

By Margaret Christakos

To begin, check out: You Sexy Thing, by Hot Chocolate

Do you believe in the future?

Do you believe in the souls of the dead moving among us?

Do you believe in “progress fueled by hope”?

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3 minutes 44 seconds. 1975 Radio. Televideo. Now YouTube. Into your living room.

Directly into your soul. Into your funk. Into your disco. Into your hip hop. Into your

crump. Into your sexy motherfuckin thing.  Into your present muscle. Into your history.

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Miracle of survival. Miracle of creation, destruction, innovation. Miracle of utterance.

Miracle of song. And its route to Commodity.

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Here, we are a public. We are a cultural moment. We are time. We have

time. We spend time. We make time. We undo time. We keep time. It’s a consensus,

time.

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Who wants a date who can’t dance?

Who wants a line without rhythm?

Who wants a line without thought?  (Expressway, 73)

I’m going to draw attention to Sina’s poem “Acceptable Dissociations,” Expressway in which there is a lot, including a telling of a “real” story. It’s a prosey, dowdy segment. Can’t dance, don’t ask it. But maybe it’s “true.”

“Over the course of several weeks developers wiped out all of the trees in a town in A to avoid having them designated as essential sites after a rare woodpecker was found to be nesting in the town. Woodpeckers are not essential. Trees are not essential. Trees are ornamental. Humanity is ornamental. Prophet is everything.” (74)

Here Sina uses the homonym p-r-o-p-h-e-t as a pun for profit. The pun tells us in A commerce is a religion, a regulatory force like religion, and that what cities allow and disallow is arbitrated around this set of primarily economic, commercial values. Decisions are made according to documents that protect the rights of developers over, say, children, and nature. Instead of with grief to a priest, one would have to go to court with a grievance to fight such decisions, one would have to mount a legal argument. There would be a fee structure. Probably a poem would not affect the outcome of nature vs. no-nature, which becomes a complicated negotiation whereby human habitat is forged, forced, formed.

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There’s a bias in us.

What if you don’t understand what’s being said.

And if you think you know what’s being said.

And if you disrupt what’s being said.

Inevitably we do all these things all the time. I think all of us do all these things ongoingly.

Language moves out of our bodies and into our bodies. It is a virtual fuel. We spend it just as we spend time. Just as we decide to use the metaphor of commerce for time, we do this through language, and spend language in the process.

There are times when language is not spent. Before it’s given an account. Before human language accrues to itself, there is human sound. Sound is before and after alphabet. Sound is of each body. Silent bodies are dead. Otherwise there is breath sound. Sleeping bodies sound. Listening bodies sound.

There is a bias in us. Our bias is to express sound, even if it’s the last thing we do. For in truth it is the first thing we do.

What if you are ordered to die and don’t understand the order.

What if you are ordered to live and don’t understand the order.

In the second case, breath wins. But in both cases, breath is expressed.

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If I were lecturing, I'd start this talk by being the speaker, using language. What is it that goes on in the room if I am the speaker. What murmurs do your minds make, your bodies make. What hum. Maybe like “tires, humming like baby birds.” (from the last “A Memorable Fancy,” 93) “What sympathy of sounds” (6) or: antipathy.

In Expressway,  a narrator is dealing with the death of a father, From the third person’s hands, there’s scattering of ashes, dumping, consecrating. There’s selection of site, meaning making. Private ritual. “It is not her first time here, though, in truth,/ it is.” Instead of going back to tell us more, the narrator of “Solitary” moves forward into a kind of juggle with the thingness of everything, “But what is truth? Fact? Body? Idea?/ Word?” (Expressway, 8)

What does she mean, “What is truth?” For in truth, it is her first time here, at the same time as: it is not her first time. “Here” remains open to multiple readings. Here, in this emotion, in this body, in this argument with self, on a French roadway, near a goat path.

Then comes the sole utterance of the first person in this poem; “Do tell me his pain/ Was not in vain.” There’s the royal “we” several times, not to be trusted. There’s the third person “she” speaking of laying her father to rest, sprinkling ashes, an uncle addressing her as “you,” bringing us closer to “who.”

Who is speaking now? The speaker’s/My relative is dying, and has been this year. The speaker/I is waiting for his death to change her/me, because his death will change her/me. I can’t picture it yet, and I am terribly relieved to imagine him on his couch in smalltown Canada watching Much Music. That he could watch “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate and for a moment feel a sprong in his groin. What?! Where’d that come from! The sound of his movement, and the movement of his sound. What sympathy. What truth.

Once the parent is dead, the parent is dead. Our civilization may be dying, on the brink of dissolution, but the personal ancestor dead is a first truth, is a truth.

…If a body is no longer a body,

Where is memory? If a text is no longer a text,

Where is body? If a city is no longer a city, what road?

If future no longer has future, where does it look? (12)

I can tell you that some days, at some moments, I have looked directly into the very groin of grief and, silently, groaned that language could not undo it.

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In the past, every word becomes multiple. One of the Latin root words for groin has this English equivalent: “to grunt like a swine” and can even refer to a pig’s snout or face. Of other animals as a verb it can mean to grunt, growl, groan, murmur, cry. As a noun it traces back to a landform, a depression, or valley, and even a trench or excavation, which makes sense of why it extends to the “fold or depression on either side of the body between the abdomen and the upper thigh.” Wow, talk about a euphemism. The OED gives a good Emerson mention of “the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals.”

In Expressway, “groin” is mentioned as having a “sprong”—a rib-like support that runs into the groin between vaulted spaces. A mention of “spronging” comes first, where a narrator is caught in a dizzied apprehension of industrialized cityscape, the all of the “now,” maybe: “Infinite warships// … Across in blood, steel, lining passing bone, at gazing/ Blue mills, scaling the water another number to in// The above soil by of steel up one and sky at the/ Over Camden, citizens, euphoria nostalgia!/ All along the avenue spronging, tent-like, their attitudes// Way ahead of them. My computer screen, waving. Where/ Is your horse? she said, and there was nothing I could say./ What I want is generally tidy. What I get often can’t dance.” And then come the lines about “Who wants a date who can’t dance”…etc.

Something so submerged here about private relationship, dating, dancing, and desire. The poet’s desire, the poet’s palimpsests. Maybe like Dorothy Wordsworth, who, “Lured by a little winding path,/ Quickly I left the publick road,” Queyras’s book is staking a private self as one of the expressway’s most vital truths, facts, bodies, ideas, words, fancies and silences. We don’t know and it’s none of our account what she will do or undo. Or hers of ours. But there’s something about how to be in two places at once, a poetics of making and of unmaking.

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The essay M. NourbeSe Philip contributes to the discourse around her long poem Zong! disturbs me, because it is one of the best essays that will be written on her book. It is a process document, the kind most poets would not begin to write about their own practice and work, believing against all evidence in the miracle of critical reception, that someone else will do the work. Reception is work. Who does this work, of translating the language of art into the language of conversation about art? Who moves about in the text to find its origins, its soul? Is this embarrassing, to speak of the soul of the text? Any more embarrassing to speak of the soul of the human?  Yet, poets frequently are drawn to the “soul” and a number of books we have read so far in Influency have articulated some place and space in their imaginary for human soul, and poetry’s relationship to it.

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There’s one place that I’m not uncomfortable with the word “soul.” Soul music. Even though I can recognize the complex evolution of a musical form that descends through the survival of African slaves on American soil, through centuries of negro survival and black grief for which there is no telling that must be told, and that this musical form emerged through the twentieth century from gospel and the blues.  It is one of the many innovations whereby utterance was finding its expressway, utterly changing the popular culture of an entire civilization, as it consistently has, as a way to its future.

I also somehow include my own crossover pleasure, my own body, the poetics of the sprong in my own groin, as one of the profits of the presence of “soul.” Its song, its movement, its visual display into the mainstream, into popular culture. Its intense reconfiguration of pleasure in the human body, if you think, if you keep thinking, of the many human bodies injured, suppressed, murdered on this musical form’s journey to your local YouTube—the conjoinment, the coexistence, of spirituality and sexuality, of secular praise, worship and pleasure, of private and public affect, of agency and commodity.

I believe in miracles, we sing in unison, meaning the magic of romantic love, which has displaced in our culture almost all other magics. And then, to the other, to whom we are attracted—why, will we select this other, will this other select us?—You sexy thing. Where did you come from? How did you know that I needed you so badly. I think we’re using the trope of romantic love’s magic to utter something deeper, more profound, more solitary. I think we’re inside music’s poetry and poetry’s music as a way to express and enact survival.

I heard the 1975 song by the British group Hot Chocolate in an Internet café last week, a café filled with stiff bodies lashing ourselves / working over private computers, silent except for the clatter of typing. And the room started moving. The room moved as if our bodies formed the groin running up to support a vaulted bridge, over which a thousand cars an hour carry a thousand solitary drivers to work. There was even some audible humming, and some delirious joy. Everybody was both “working” and “not working” for a few minutes. Where that music comes from has a relevance for the discussion of Zong! And how African music leads through plantation song to gospel and blues and jazz and soul and funk and hip hop and rap and crump and and and. It’s relevant to poetry, and twenty-first century poetics.

Relevant too is Expressway’s unnamed identity of the “large-headed woman, her hair roped and lashed about her head,” with a “yoke around” her “upright neck,” “her nostrils flared, her body strained against it, Al Green in the background.”  How Al Green is a metanarrative signifier. It racializes the scene, clears up any confusion that might have been there, and makes racialization postmodern, ironic. This woman whose ropey hair is lashed—we don’t know anything about the narrator “she”’s hair—is linked to another “young woman whom “a staggeringly blind man in Washington” “hires…to stand in the corner and lash herself all night as he sleeps.”

The woman stands all night lashing herself, in his imagination, but also in ours, for the representation has been built to sprong in our reading groin. It is a kind of Sheherezade image too, but instead of telling stories to save her life she is whipping herself. I mean this is amazing, an amazing idea or thing or truth or fact or body. It’s astounding how the text does not say she is a black woman, but relies on signifiers from the dominant popular imagination about how all black women somehow look like black slave women.

I have been thinking about Expressway’s seemingly intentional allusiveness, its unspokenness about found text, about historical simultaneities, about identities, about speakers. “Who wants a line without thought?” I wonder about the unnaming of that woman in the yoke, and think with great interest about Sina’s writing and its profound desire to handle so much history, so much struggle, so many poetics at once. I think it’s interesting, and that she knows it’s full of pain, and suffering. And that she knows what she’s doing. It’s not her first time here but maybe it is. And me bringing up You Sexy Thing, do I know what I am doing?

There’s another fragment of Sina’s poem “Acceptable Dissociations” that continues to pull me to it, and it begins with “Once again”—as if it’s a continually looping reality, though the text makes sparse mention of feelings. “Once again the feeling comes, like a sprong in the groin, an abundance of feeling that is sharp, almost hostile in its need to overtake.” Earlier on the page, “Occasionally there is anger.” Unattributed, a state. It is a physical feeling, or so its simile offers; but then there’s that word “hostile,” definitely an affect.

The present always is the past in the present. Like every word the word grief has a history. Often it referred to physical wounds, and more gradually to emotional states. From the OED Grief 7. Mental pain, distress or sorrow. Example given: The Scottish born, London-settled Joanna Baillie, in her play Count Basil v. iii 1821, who wrote

Woman’s grief is like a summer storm, Short as it violent is.

It seems that, even then, grief was something expected to pass quickly, to not hold us up. But most people estimate a parent’s death to cause among the highest orders of grief, that maybe a year or two years is not an unexpected duration for its first throes. Then, they say, it can last for centuries.