While discussing a draft of one of my essays, a college professor once told me that writers should avoid using words that end with “ness.” I have since had suspicion of abstractions, of “ness” words. Perhaps that accounts for my tempered admiration for Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47553/meditation-at-lagunitas], a poem that moves from a consideration of how particulars dim the “luminous clarity” of ideas to a celebration of how some particulars are “numinous.”
“Meditation” is a pleasure to read. Part of the pleasure comes from its apparent grounding in works that precede it. Besides showing a familiarity with both “new” and old thinking,” there seem to be borrowings from other poets. Does that “thirst for salt” perhaps recall the turn along the path toward the sea in Sylvia Plath’s “Blackberrying” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49004/blackberrying ]. Certainly, the reverberant close of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” brings to mind the penultimate line of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” [https://poets.org/poem/fish-2]. And, as the poem ends, to what extent should readers linger over the resonances of “dismantled bread”? While learning informs the poem, its voice is comfortable with friendship, intimacy, and contradictory thoughts. It’s a voice that is adept with phrasing: “a word is an elegy to what it signifies.” It’s a voice that moves deftly from thought to thought—look at/listen to that quick, nearly hidden leap from mentioning the word “woman” to offering an example of a remembered “woman.” It’s an assured voice that seems to assume that we will keep up—or that we may not.
In first twenty-five lines of the poem, the poet rehearses arguments that suggest that our ways of knowing and naming the world leave us at a ‘”loss.” The first notion advanced is “that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea,” that particulars undercut our ability to know the ideal:
That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light.
The second loss-causing notion is nominalism. “[T]alking” with a friend who is “almost querulous” with “grief,” the poet comes under the sway of the notion that words, not being the things they name, displace those things, each word an “elegy to what it signifies.” Using language, we can never be sure—never be clear—that we have a grasp on the things we name. Not only do we lack a hold on abstractions like “justice” but on things we might think of as more particular like “pine, hair, woman, you and I.” With this way of talking, “everything dissolves.”
With this discussion with his nominalist friend in mind, the poet then worries about a particular woman—a former lover—and a particular I—the poet. Even while making love, the couple mentally separated from each other; holding one another was a slipping away. Her shoulders in his hands, the poet’s had felt a “violent wonder at her presence,” “violent” not only because of the wonder’s force but also because it was injurious; it “hardly had to do with her.” It was a profane wonder that replaced the lover with other presences, with other particulars, with thoughts focused on
my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed.
The poet suspects that the woman was having a similar experience of him; her desire, like his, is filled with “longing,” and she displaces him with her own “endless distances”: “I must have been the same to her.” “[E]verything dissolves,” even these lovers.
It is hard not to think, at this point in the poem, that, if “everything dissolves,” then “everything” must include “thinking,” old and new; “idea”; “loss”; that “woodpecker”; whatever the “first world” was; “grief’”; pumpkinseed; the opening “All”; even an insistent repetition of “blackberry.”
“But,” writes the poet at the beginning of the twenty-sixth line, and poem turns to a counter-argument.
“Meditation” ends with a “bramble”—a growth of tangled language that we might take as the poem’s fruit. A lot happens in these lines, some of which I do not fully understand. The “But” seems to deny the previous argument of the poem; notions that are “understood” to undermine the clarity of experience are countered by moments—“afternoons and evenings” of memory. And the poem ends by urging that, to some extent, memories of particulars and the words that help recall those memories undo the “loss” the poem has insisted on. In memory, “body” and “flesh” are “numinous”—the lover had hands that broke bread, a voice that recalled hurtful remarks, a brain that dreamed. Here, he recalls—at least briefly stays focused on—the wonder of their being together. Being with her, if ultimately a “loss,” was also an experience of a number of particulars that gathered into “such tenderness.”
For me at least, these final lines are hard to follow. I am not sure what to make of the phase “days that are the good flesh continuing.” The last two lines are a fragment and I am puzzled about who or what it is that repeats “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” Is it the remembered couple who speak to each other? Or is it the “tenderness”? Or is it . . . ?
And what does it mean to assert—after the opening argument of the poem—that “the body is as numinous / as words”? That is a question that occurs even as the poem’s final lines insist that words shine out of—in a way get said out of—experience.
I am unconvinced by end of “Meditation.” Part my problem is the word “tenderness.” I am suspicious of the move from the particulars—the bread breaking, the memory of the abusive father, the unspecified dreams—to the abstraction, to the “ness” word. Then I worry, as sustaining as I would like to find the repeated blackberry in the final line, because I still recall that “there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds.”
–Bill
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