~HILA RATZABI~
BAREFOOT
VOICE: THE INSECURITY OF LANGUAGE
IN LI-YOUNG LEE’S BEHIND
MY EYES
Lee is
not only one of our best contemporary poets
of the sacred; he is
an authentic mystic,
in the classical sense of the mystic who uses
language
to access a realm beyond language. Lee does not merely peer
at
the edge of the unknown; he enters it,
as though it were a familiar
room
in a childhood home, and returns to report.
Li-Young Lee’s lustrous fourth book of
poetry, Behind My Eyes
(Norton, 2009), flickers, like fading lamplight, at the limits of
language. The spiritual center of the book hinges on two axes: the
horizontal (the body’s experience of, and in, time) and the vertical
(the mind’s unbounded access to the realm of dream and, therefore,
timelessness). At the point of their convergence, language attempts to
give voice to the impossible duality of being. Lee is not only one of
our best contemporary poets of the sacred; he is an authentic mystic,
in the classical sense of the mystic who uses language to access a
realm beyond language. Lee does not merely peer at the edge of the
unknown; he enters it, as though it were a familiar room in a childhood
home, and returns to report. Confounding dichotomy, Lee calls into
question the division between beginning/end, birth/death, past/future,
man/woman, body/mind. Borders melt; language opens. These poems
approach the very edge of the ineffable, that which cannot be
articulated.
Though the speaker in one poem claims,
aphoristically, “Thinking is good. / But living is better,” these are
thinking poems, and the preceding lines serve more as a reminder than a
statement of fact. Surreal, dreamlike, anti-logical, the poems in this
collection are suspicious of flesh, and seem to spring out of a
disembodied mind. In “Immigrant Blues,” the speaker, “confused about
the flesh and the soul,” in conversation with his lover over the phone,
asks: “Am I inside you?” This confusion, and subsequent conflation of
body/soul, presumes that speaking to the lover is synonymous with
physical intimacy.
Dialogue between lovers dramatizes the constraints
of speaking. A “he said/she said” motif drives many of the poems,
deeply embedded in a Lacanian framework, in which gender difference
symbolizes the tension between (male) speech and (female) speechlessness.
“Sweet Peace in Time” enacts this difficultly. The male, obsessed with
language’s precariousness, continually asks the female: “What if by …
you mean … but I mean …” The dialogue reads like two simultaneous
monologues in which the lovers talk at each other, unable to find a
common language. The male does not trust language, stating: “To speak
is to err. / Words name nothing. / There are no words,” and later, “We
should give up / trying to speak or to be understood. / It’s too late
in the world for dialogue.” Yet the female never questions language;
she declares faithfully: “Home, speech is the living purchase / of our
nights and days.” Speech, to her, relates to home and time — to being
at
peace with the physical world. The male, on the other hand, emphasizes
the instability of speech. It reminds him of the power of death,
characterized as a muting force: “Death creates a blind spot,” i.e.,
death instigates a temporary forgetting which negates the requirement
to speak and muffles the voice that in life is bound to the body. Only
in death will the man be freed from having to speak. Then, in the most
Lacanian formulation in the book, the male states: “Man is a secret,
blind to himself. / And Woman … Woman is …” The man associates Woman
with pure being; this explains why she has no need, like the man does,
to question language. She speaks out of true self-knowledge of her
physicality; while the man, “blind to himself,” can never get past his
awareness of death, and consequentially, focuses on the faultiness of
speech.
Enamored with the lure of language — its tease of
meaning — the speaker in Lee’s poems sees language everywhere. This
rapture with words figures most prominently in “Lake Effect,” where
nature is equated with language. The “he said/she said” refrain from
earlier poems morphs into the more personal “She said/I said.” The male
and female speakers pile on metaphors: “She said ‘The lake is like an
open book, / day like the steady gaze of a reader.’ // I said, ‘The day
is a book we open between us, / the lake a sentence we read together …’
” The male flips the female’s metaphors (transferring “book” from
“lake” to “day”), extending and unfolding meaning. “Book” later becomes
“voice,” and “The lake keeps changing its mind” (the lake a stand-in
for the speaker). This changing mind ripples throughout the poem like
shifting light on water: everything is a potential metaphor for
something else; meaning is never stable.
The tenuousness of communication embodied by
male/female dialogue also comes into play in Lee’s depiction of
mother/father figures. His formulation of an origin myth underlies his
conception of the human being’s place in the world. Central to Lee’s
personal genesis story, his portrayal of mother/father archetypes picks
up on a trope from his previous collection, Book of My Nights (2001). The
parental figures in Book of My Nights
take on primordial significance, and they reappear in Behind My Eyes as part of a group
of thickly layered symbols and metaphors of the speaker’s inner life.
Like the male/female lovers, the parents signify a breakdown in meaning.
The dysfunction of language becomes most apparent in
poems that illustrate the immigrant experience. “Self-Help for
Refugees” provides instructions on how to deal with the challenges of
being an immigrant, of having a strange name, of “the burden of your
own nostalgia and hope.” Part of immigrant nostalgia includes poignant,
untranslatable memories: “And I bet you can’t say what language / your
father spoke when he shouted to your mother / from the back of the
truck, ‘Let the boy see!’ ” The mother tries to hide her child from the
reality of history, but the father’s insistence that the boy “see” is
expressed in a language the child cannot understand. From the
beginning, the immigrant experience, as Lee depicts it, is
linguistically fractured, as is his complicated relationship with his
parents.
In “Mother Deluxe” the speaker imagines his mother
dealing cards in a game called “Memories from the 20th Century” whose
“object is not to die.” The mother represents both the speaker’s actual
mother and a godlike Mother that holds the cards to the game of life,
some of which include “Dead Baby,” “Exodus,” “Eyes Snatched Away.” She
symbolizes the hand of fate, an indifferent deity rolling the dice.
Caught in this surreal game, where history gets handed out in sardonic
sound bites, the speaker hovers at the border between reality and
imagination: “Maybe this isn’t a game. / Maybe it’s the World Evening
News,” and later, “Maybe this is a dream God is having / and somebody
should wake Him.” Not only does the notion of reality collapse, by the
end of the poem, time itself collapses: “Good boat, first boat, old
boat, Mother, / my first night with you lasts nine months. / Our second
night together is the rest of my life.” The speaker experiences his
mother as an omnipotent arbitrator between life and death, who
compresses life into an instant.
The maternal association with death resurfaces in
“The Mother’s Apple,” where the speaker emphatically utters: “I’m my
mother’s apple and that’s that. / My sweetening draws death nearer, it
can’t be helped.” But on the facing page a twin poem, “The Father’s
Apple,” revises this thought: “Sweetness is a foretaste of words, / he
says.” While the mother links the speaker to death, the father connects
him to language. Between the two poems, only the father speaks; the
mother remains in third person. “The Father’s Apple” begins: “He says I
won’t always be an apple. Descended from a book, / that is my chief
end, he says.” The unnecessary repetition of “he says” further stresses
the father’s correlation with words; yet the son’s true ancestor is
language itself, which transcends the gender distinctions/linguistic
impairment over which Lee obsesses in this book.
Death is the ultimate severer of language, yet for
Lee, childhood, at least in theory, is its antithesis. Structurally,
the book’s beginning and end connect like a circle, from the darkness
of the womb in “In His Own Shadow” to the cryptic imperative in the
final poem, “Station”: “You may board at either end of Childhood.”
Childhood, in these poems, is as short as night (“And my childhood /
lasted all of an evening”), and also as infinite. In “A Hymn to
Childhood,” the speaker asks, sarcastically: “Childhood? Which
childhood?/ The one that didn’t last?” as though there existed a second
childhood that could last. Lee’s vision of childhood draws attention to
the brevity of the body, the strangeness of time, and the omnipresence
of death. Death inhabits these poems like a loyal dog reigned in by the
sturdy leash of speech. The speaker of the opening poem narrates: “While all bodies share / the same fate,
all voices do not.” All bodies die, but some voices (i.e., of
poets) live on forever. Death is a given, but well-crafted speech is a
gift.
The birth-death loop spirals through the halls of
these poems, flashing a light on the seeming absoluteness of endings.
The theme of beginning and ending looms, yet in “Seven Happy Endings”
the speaker admits to the beloved: “I who know nothing about endings. /
I who am always at the beginning of everything. / Even as our being
together/ always feels like beginning. / Not just the beginning of our
knowing each other, / but the beginning of reality itself.” The lovers’
union is in a constant state of renewal, but that renewal signals a
larger one. The lovers are a synecdoche of the cosmos, their love
equated with “reality itself.” If reality extends from love, from the
unification of male/female and the quality of timelessness, then Lee’s
hesitant stance toward endings makes sense — the very concept of ending
offends love. One cannot read these lines without being reminded of
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
“What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to
make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” For Eliot, the end
and the beginning are one; for Lee, everything is in a state of
constant beginning, and the end is an illusion, “Death’s blind spot.”
Lee erases the boundaries between beginning and end, birth and death,
past and future, hinting at a realm of continual creation that has no
end, and is prompted by love.
Like Wallace Stevens, Lee is a philosophical poet
whose systems of meaning are often internally inconsistent. Yet,
incongruity is part of their craft. Instead of espousing a coherent and
logical worldview, both poets layer metaphor on top of metaphor to
complicate meaning and to dismantle the possibility of linear
interpretation. Each analogy does not line up with one thing only, but
with a constellation of analogues that referentially point to further
analogies, in an infinite regress of meanings. Metaphors shift like
ghosts, transposed, unstable — like the poet’s vision of reality
itself.
Aware of the limitations of human knowledge, the speaker in Lee’s poems
often readily admits to uncertainty. In the penultimate poem, “Dying
Stupid,” the speaker repeats the phrase “What do I mean when I say…”
and adds: “What can I say I know for sure?” Language is a necessary
failure, and death highlights its inadequacy. Uncertainty is the most
certain thing that can be expressed in language.
Ethereal, elusive, and lodged in a numinous world
that strangely resembles this one, a Lee poem functions like Emily
Dickinson’s oft-quoted definition of art: “a House that tries to be
haunted.” The houses of these poems are haunted by memory, self-doubt,
and dream. Language bends under the weight of the body, under the
knowledge of its eventual disappearance. Words congregate and disperse
as quickly as mist, as obscurely as fog. They offer a glimpse of the
only world which the poet can authentically attempt to describe: the
world “behind my eyes.” Rent by duality, this inner life struggles to
reconcile itself through voice, through language. Male and female
voices throw words at each other as if at a wall, reaching for a
unification that can only be experienced in transient love and final
demise. But somehow, Lee manages to insist that the notion of ending,
like language itself, is frail, and that beyond each temporary end is
yet another beginning. By the end of the book, male and female
ultimately converge in the female voice: “She opens her eyes / and I
see.” And in the acknowledgment of their unity lies the power of
creation: “Do you love me? she
asks. / I love you, // she
answers, and the world keeps beginning.”
Behind My Eyes,
Li-Young Lee. W.W. Norton, 2009. ISBN 978-0393334814.
$14.95
© by Hila Ratzabi
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