These Calm Things
Mohammed Dib
Did you have to leave?
The children play outside.
They don't stop yelling.
How many girls,
how many boys!
And the people neither eye
nor face to face going up
going down, going up again.
How many people,
how many unhappy fools!
And one staying. One,
that the things looked at,
very calm, in a circle.
How unwise a guy,
how quiet a guy is he!
One, like them. One
in whom a poignant envy
burns to stay calm.
How legless,
how lousy a guy is he!
Devouring isolation,
banana-split lapped up for two.
Remember, Jessa.
I’ll take a shot.
It’s elusive as hell but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.
He seems to be talking to Jessa, who I assume is a woman, and either actually talking to her or talking to her only in his mind.
Jessa, it seems, has left him, and has done so, I take it, permanently. He notes, as against his own loneliness, that children play outside, noisily bothersome. And they’re an indiscriminate mass. They seem to be precursors of the people who ascend and descend, stairs or elevator side by side going up and down, who never look at each other, simply pass each other by.
The same question arises for the ascending and descending people as to the number of boys and girls—how many. It’s the same indiscriminate mass. How many of them are, perhaps like him, unhappy fools, alone and without meaning now that his woman has left him.
But one—the specificity of one contrasting with how many—doesn’t move, just stays. And this one is looked at by the zombie-like people—the things. It seems he’s made a circular space for himself as he sits legless. He is quiet and unwise: why? This seems to be the expressed chorus like judgment of the people looking at him, a legless cripple, mute and dumb he seems.
Then their judgment stops and the voice of the poem continues and observes that the legless man objectifies the people looking at him. He’s like them. In his apparent mute dumbness, is his desire for legs, for motion, to be able to go up and down like the people. That is his envy. It’s acutely sad and regretful that he cannot be like them. And it’s inexpressible.
So the people again, as against his quietness, expressing their judgment, note chorus like his leglessness, how bereft he is. Yet he’s like them: they’re an indiscriminate mass alone in and meaningless in their lives. The chorus like language of “how lousy a guy is he!” then becomes more poetic—“devouring isolation” as we move back into the mind of the narrator. This metaphor of devouring isolation suggests how, in a way, ferocious seems his isolation. He seems to take it into himself, laps it up, as if devouring something pleasurably gratifying—“banana split lapped up for two.”
This is something the poet did with Jessa, “Remember, Jessa,” but no more. The poet, now left by Jessa, can only cling to small memories. In his dehumanizing aloneness he’s not so far removed from the indiscriminate mass of noisy children playing, or the people going up and down without seeing each other but commenting on the legless man or from the mute, bereft legless man himself.
That’s the shot: but I wouldn’t put any money on it.
Addendum:
I read your notes on mine on the poem. I think they’re sensitive and acute and improve on my sense of the poem, particularly that what the poet describes is own perception of what he sees given his own state and not their objective truth.
This poem got inside me. I felt it in my bones. And I’m not lonely even though I don’t eat banana splits for two with anyone—in fact not even for one. And it seems to me natural, uncontrived.
A question that interests me is whether our different senses of the poem, contrived as against natural, can be argued out, with evidence from the poem and arguments based on it as to whether contrived. My sense is that at least in principle one of us should be able to convince the other.
But just as an example, take the image of the legless man ferociously devouring the isolation, a more poetic, high flown image than the just precious colloquialism of what a “lousy guy” he is. I find it evocative of both the shifts in the poet’s mind as he surveys what’s about him and inside him and of the very idea of the legless man seeming aggressively to take it inside him, lapping it up pleasurably, when he’s poignant envious of the very opposite of his isolation.
Addendum:
I read your notes on mine on the poem. I think they’re sensitive and acute and improve on my sense of the poem, particularly that what the poet describes is own perception of what he sees given his own state and not their objective truth.
This poem got inside me. I felt it in my bones. And I’m not lonely even though I don’t eat banana splits for two with anyone—in fact not even for one. And it seems to me natural, uncontrived.
A question that interests me is whether our different senses of the poem, contrived as against natural, can be argued out, with evidence from the poem and arguments based on it as to whether contrived. My sense is that at least in principle one of us should be able to convince the other.
But just as an example, take the image of the legless man ferociously devouring the isolation, a more poetic, high flown image than the just precious colloquialism of what a “lousy guy” he is. I find it evocative of both the shifts in the poet’s mind as he surveys what’s about him and inside him and of the very idea of the legless man seeming aggressively to take it inside him, lapping it up pleasurably, when he’s poignant envious of the very opposite of his isolation.
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