Inescapable

Feb 10 2015

Even in the baffled room
with its thick absorbent walls, hermetic door
silence is incomplete.
The rush of blood
each involuntary swallow.

In a padded cell
you will not self-harm,
but also can't escape yourself.

As in closing your eyes
you hallucinate,
the default state
of vision.
Or sit reading a poem,
and something he says
makes you uncomfortably aware
of the force of the chair
against your bottom.

Or her scent
attaching itself,
clings
to your skin, and hair, and clothes,
trapped
in your lush nasal mucosa.
As receptive to her pheromones
as ultra-sound,
inaudible, but felt
in the rumble of bone
its rich dark marrow.

Or the metallic, flat, funk on your tongue
you cannot help but taste,
of drugs, or blood
the unction of lust
brushing doesn't get.

You cannot revert
to blank, empty, cleansed.
As much as you try
to transcend the body
its heaviness pulls you back,
animalness
holding you fast.

People find sound-proofed rooms
uncanny,
disturbed
by the deadness of air

the lagging of sound.

So you pound
on the padded walls,
beginning to doubt

your self.

My last poem was about touch. So when I sat down to write again, I thought I might try noodling around with the other senses. (I've done thematic series like this before (although this "series" will probably end up being a grand total of 2!) when I did several consecutive poems under one-word titles of various colours.)

Vision, of course, is everywhere in my poems. And I've very consciously tried to incorporate smell -- perhaps the most powerful, if most neglected sense -- into many of them. Taste is tough; and mostly smell, anyway. And since I've already done touch, that leaves hearing; which is where this poem starts and ends.

And which has, for me, been the most problematic sense: I'm inhumanly sensitive to everything; but I think sound has tormented me most. You can shield your eyes, you can keep to yourself, you can breathe shallowly or through your mouth. But sound penetrates, and follows you. Sound is out of your control. And we live in a culture permeated by sound and loudness, by the drum-beat of music and public noise: as if sound was the only thing counteracting gravity; as if silent contemplation was dangerous.

Although we think of ourselves as primarily visual creatures, and although smell is the most primordial and most viscerally powerful sense, hearing is probably the pre-eminent one. It's fastest. Our reflexive reaction to sound is more hair-trigger. It operates through 360 degrees, as well as in our sleep. Sound keeps us safe.

I think the poem must have been influenced by a fabulous article I just finished reading: The Trip Treatment, by Michael Pollan, in the Feb 16, 2015 New Yorker (http://nyr.kr/1uFnB64). It's about new research into psychedelics (LSD, psylocibin) and end-of-life; into the drug-mediated experience of escaping consciousness, ego, the body. (Which coincidentally recalls my previous poem, the one about touch, where I used the phrase dissolve boundaries.) But this theme makes sense here, since from the very start this poem is about inescapabilty -- first from sound, and then the body: short of death, we're stuck with ourselves!

Apparently, the experience of a sound-proof room is just that -- uncanny. I understand it has to do how most of the energy is absorbed and how what comes back is oddly delayed. So your visual perception is at war with what you hear: the room "sounds" too small for what your eyes are telling you; sound seems uncannily slow. But I also think being in a sound proof room is having to be intensely alone with yourself: something that might be OK for introverts, but not for the rest; and something at odds with the highly extroverted culture in which we live.

I hope the ending isn't obscure. It's simply a reference to the tree that falls in the forest: does it fall if it isn't heard? In other words, in a state of absolute sensory deprivation, what becomes of reality, of your sense of self? Who or what are you if you are not embodied? This is the experience of transcendence, whether by means of LSD, meditation, or religious ecstasy: the permanent and radical spiritual change when you transcend your physical self -- even if you only experience it once. The ending was originally beginning to doubt/ your own reality. I went with your self for two reasons: I like the emphasis on self that comes from splitting the expected yourself into its constituent words; and I wanted it it be directed more inward -- at the body, at self-awareness -- than out at external reality. Other than that, I prefer the short sharp ending: too many syllables in your own reality.

I quite like opening the poem with baffled room instead of "sound-proof". It's the duality of "baffles" that makes this work -- the combination of confusion and uncertainty with actual things that divide and muffle. And shortly after, there's the misdirection of padded cell, which contains a lot more psych ward than sound-proof room.

I like involuntary swallow: as much a nervous gulp as an autonomic reflex. I get the impression of a dry swallow, something stuck in the throat.

I give thanks to the god of English for funk and unction, the sound I was looking for throwing up the perfect words: funk implying foulness and dread and a kind of essentialness (like a funky scent that's hard to wash out); and unction implying vaguely unpleasant bodily secretions. (Of course, the best example of a powerfully persistent taste -- and one I find highly unpleasant! -- is garlic. But not only doesn't it rhyme, it's hardly as evocative as sex!)

It's two other words, though, I think really work best in this poem: animalness and uncanny. Animalness is a very unusual, but attention-getting, construction. I like how it does everything without needing any elaboration. And I don't think I've ever used uncanny. It's also uncommon. Where I've heard it used is in the expression uncanny valley, which describes the gut feeling of something amiss when 3D computer graphics or robots simulate real human faces and movement. And again, the god of English has granted me the perfect meaning allied with the perfect sound. Whenever that happens, a poet gets this intoxicating rush of endorphins, and poetry feels like a drug.

And finally, my obligatory apology for once again breaking the cardinal rule of suddenly (3rd stanza). But try leaving it out, and something essential seems lost. ...Except now I have left it out. And tried uncomfortably in its place. Because I think the reader will experience the sudden awareness, and doesn't have to read about it. It's the uncomfortableness that surprises, not any suddenness: how could something that feels like it could actually cause injury have been so utterly suppressed? (In neurology, this is called "accommodation", and as you can imagine is extremely useful. Especially for a writer who spends far too much time on his ass!)