Clinging to the debris April 3, 2013

 

 

Even as she posts a video on her YouTube channel about her work place environment, she posts a poem about almost utter despair.

So, we get two realities, the surface world where she portrays herself as part of the team (she posed for a photo with the rec department all in blue t-shirts) and the other inner reality, a world of lost hope, a place to which she regularly retreats when the world comes to naught.

The pattern of her poetry over the last month displayed huge highs and now, deep lows, due apparently to the high hopes she had for a particular romance and how it slowly fell to pieces – especially over that man’s apparent reaction to someone’s suicide. Tragedy often reveals aspects of character that are not evident in other situations.

There is another duality as suggested in my journal entry yesterday between her personal love life and her ambition for success, and how sometimes, they intermingle, and when one thing fails so does the other. She has been in this situation before, often seeking love and fame, and ultimately coming away with neither.

And in her quest for power, she apparently has hit rock bottom again – if the poem is any indication.

She also appears to have lost control of her life, as the opening lines of her poem suggest: “It’s official, I no longer call my life my own.”

She doesn’t understand and is caught in an oddly surrealistic moment where time moves slow and ye too fast for her to cling to, as she sinks into her subconscious, reality slipping out from her weakened hands.

Using the ocean as a metaphor for infinite possibilities, she says she tried to stare it down when the waves consumed her, and she found herself looking at herself in a kind of out of body experience, still struggling to hold onto time only to have it evade her the more she tried.

This implies her struggle to hold onto her aspirations, and losing herself in the process, the waves washing away what she thought she knew and real, taking these things far away from her.

The definitive line comes when she uses the word “us” when she says she is “floating above the swirling infinite mass of liquid dreams as I saw it pull us down, down, down, unable to stop.”

This alludes back to other poems where the whole situation has grown too complex to control, what had seemed like something vast and wonderful. (the infinite sea) turns into liquid dreams that fade away, and raise questions as to who she is, and who they were.

What is their relationship now? Why is what she thought would something great fading away?

The ocean seems to symbolize the vast power of the world – all of its judgements, its potential, its strata of importance, something she has stood up to, trying to get her piece of happiness and importance, only to have it all wash over her in powerful waves, a drowning image, showing just how insignificant she is after all.

The image of her floating above herself and watching her life take place (out of her control) is a lot like someone clinging to the wreckage of a ship (perhaps another metaphor like the wind blowing pieces of her fractured life into piles), and the harder she tries to hold on, the less control she has, slowing sinking, unable to stop it or breathe – a drowning in what she calls liquid dreams, unable to understand what exactly happened.

But it is important to note that it was “us” that got pulled down, not just her.

Then she wakes up from this liquid dream and wonders who she is, and what they were, meaning a sense of unimportance and well as something important lost – still mourning over the sinking of their relationship.

But she and he are victims of the relentless sea, that overwhelmingly powerful force which has washed away everything, what she thought of as real, but perhaps maybe not, or at best far, far away.

I’m assuming the poem is written to the same man as the last half dozen. She is bemoaning the forced separation and distance between them and regrets the decision that they can no longer be together.

The whole thing as left her with a loss of identity.

The image of clinging to something like floating bits of debris suggests she is still clinging to a relationship that continues to slip away from her, the harder to grasps it, the further away it gets.

She is unable to hold on to him and in some respects control the course of her own life.

 

    2012 menu 


email to Al Sullivan

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hoping for the best June 24, 2013

Image
        I feel sorry for everybody involved in this trickle up game, not just the so called victims (we walk into    these things with our eyes open and are taken advantage of only because we have our own lusts we can’t control), but also our poet, who knows no other way of life, and must abide by the rules of a game she finds herself stuck in – and must do what she needs to do in order to retain any sense of self-worth. This is what she is, and this is what she must do. But even at her worst, her poetry suggests she is hardly the rascal the congressman’s PR person makes her out to be. She plays the hand of cards she gets dealt. She sometimes misreads the deck, such as assuming that her chef friend in New York was competent, when he was anything else but that. She also leaped onto the bandwagon when it came to our former temporary boss, assuming he could do more for her than it turns out he could, his temporary condition making him of little more use than a...
Read more

Ships that pass in the night July 9, 2013

Image
  A mentioned yesterday, there is more going on in regard to her latest poem than just the content. Again, we come to the possibility that our posts are somehow some kind of secret communication, wishful thinking on my part, of course, because I know she really hates me. I suspect I am deluding myself with hopeful thinking that she has maintained this one thin thread of communication between us, though this poem adds increasing evidence to that illusion – since I posted a poem that in some respects foreshadowed the one she posted this week. My poem included a video of me wandering a small beach in Jersey City near Liberty State Park, and was intended as a response to even earlier poem about borrowed lives. The poem goes I find no path among these river stones, so I make my own, turning this way then that, side steps that lead me nowhere, then back, my life made up of clumps like these small eddies filled with seaweed and people I need, but never see again when I move ...
Read more

Take me to the river July 7th, 2013

Image
  I'll go into the possible inspiration later for this poem she posted today for now she is once more delving into the concept of a row isolation and the struggle to retain strength during several years of adversity her geography is located next to a river named after Henry Hudson as she draws on an important metaphor for life as she lives it similar to an earlier poem that had her kneeling beside the sea in order to let things go, she can no longer retain in her life the wide Hudson with its never ending ripples sits on her doorstep a safe place she goes to breathe new life into her war worn bones and hot raw nerves she goes to the river side to keep from bursting what she is full to spilling and to avoid leaking out and wasting the essence of survival she cannot afford to lose the last few years she says have been truly deep and rough like the storms that rip across the river at times I'm strong she writes but sometimes I'm tired on the shore she watches the ships...
Read more