The crowd,
as I remember it, consisted of about 200 young women—students of St. Mary's
College—along with the poet John Matthias and a clutch of graduate students
from the nearby University of Notre Dame, including myself. It was the early fall, a year in the
mid-1990s, and we were in the library at St. Mary's, waiting for Paul Muldoon
to arrive. When he strode in, a
little late, with his mop-top flopping, he looked every inch the
much-adored young prep school teacher in his blue blazer and grey flannels, and
he carried himself, then as now, with a studied self-possession, letting the
audience come to him with their attention, and knowing all along that they
would.
But the
first poem he recited, "The Briefcase," had nothing to do with
self-possession. Quite the
opposite: it had everything to do with a kind of infinite dread. On other occasions when I've heard
Muldoon read the poem he's begun by mentioning its dedication to Seamus
Heaney, and his anxiety about writing a poem involving eels since, he says,
when you pick up an eel in Ireland and turn it over, it says "trademark
Seamus Heaney" on its belly.
But in St. Mary's, when I first heard the poem, Muldoon prefaced the
poem with an anecdote, possibly true, about receiving from his father in law the gift of
a very expensive briefcase. Then
he began to recite the poem:
I held the
briefcase at arm's length from me;
the oxblood
or liver
eelskin with
which it was covered
had suddenly
grown supple.
I'd been
waiting in line for the cross-town
bus when an
almighty cloudburst
left the
sidewalk a raging torrent.
At this
point Muldoon pauses, glanced around at the rapt crowd at St. Mary's, and
continued:
And though
it contained only the first
inkling of
this poem, I knew I daren't
set the
briefcase down
to slap my
pockets for an obol—
for fear it
might slink into a culvert
strike out
along the East River
for the
sea. By which I mean the 'open'
sea.
It's all in
that last part of the last line, isn't it? Why, we wonder, does it matter that it's the open sea? And immediately we feel it: the possibility of loss haunts
the poem. It's not quite rational:
one isn't exactly likely to drop a briefcase, even a supple and slippery one,
into a Manhattan culvert and see it drift out to sea in the East River. But the thing about anxiety is that,
even when it's well-founded, it doesn't operate rationally. The open sea is, somehow, much, much
vaster than the sea itself.
Indeed, the notion of openness puts the poem under the aspect of
infinity— of the ever-expanding and endless. The East River is a definite thing—as, for that matter, is
the Atlantic Ocean into which it empties.
But the sea is indefinite, and the open sea promises not only an
undefined vastness (does it refer to the Atlantic? To all oceans? To the connection of all waters
circling the globe?) but a sense of expansion. We glimpse in it the possibility of utter loss. And it's here that we encounter the
poem's profound dread.
What, after
all, is lost? The poem,
particularly when prefaced with an anecdote about an expensive gift, could be
taken as a little parable about the downside of possessions, about how they
make us anxious about the possibility of losing them. But there's much more than that at work here. The briefcase, we're told, contains the
inkling of the very poem we're encountering: the loss of it would be the loss
of the poet's work, and, in a sense, of a part of his life and his distinct
identity. The fact that the poem
lost would be the one we're reading or listening to shows us what's at stake:
the event we're experiencing might not have been, and we—Muldoon, the audience
at St. Mary's, you, reading this—would all have been a little different, a
little reduced. We're brushed by
the outer edge of the garment of infinite loss, of the possibility that who we
are and what we've done might never have come to pass.
The
undifferentiated vastness of the open sea stands in stark contrast to the poet
and his particularity, his specific briefcase and specific poem and specific
plans for getting somewhere in particular on the crosstown bus. The whole world of identity and
particularity brushes up against an infinite blankness into which things are
lost and absorbed. In a way, it's
a vision of death, or at any rate the loss of oneself, and it's not a glorious
mystical vision of oneness with the universe: it's a little shudder at the
possible (no, inevitable) loss of our
own small selves.
The
experience described in the poem isn't the sublime, not quite. The sublime, after all, involves not
only a sense of the vast or infinite, but also of one's own superiority to that
vastness. In the dynamic sublime,
to use Kant's term, we don't just experience the terror of a volcanic eruption,
but also our own insulation from it, our distance at a safe vantage point, and
we feel affirmed at being able to take in the destructive magnitude without
being destroyed. In the
mathematical sublime, which is more like what we get in Muldoon's poem, we
experience the notion of an ever-expanding vastness, an infinity—but we also
experience something that isn't depicted in Muldoon's poem: our own superiority
or privilege with respect to that vastness, by virtue of our ability to
conceptualize it. When we can
write down an symbol or equation indicating infinity, we feel affirmed in our
own small selves, because we have in some way been able to comprehend the
endlessness. We don't get that in
"The Briefcase": in fact, we end with a vision of the small,
controlled space of the briefcase being swept into the openness, lost beyond
all recovery. There's no
superiority to or containment of the sense of dread, unless we consider the
composition of the poem itself as a containment of dread, as I suppose we
might, although that's a containment in the act of composition, rather than
within the events depicted in the poem itself.
Much has
been made about the Americanness of "The Briefcase," which is full of
specifically American imagery. It
is the fate of Irish poets to be read as constantly meditating on their
Irishness, and one can look at the dread of loss in this poem as a kind of
Irish fear of deracination in America, a familiar enough story for Irish
Americans. But the direction the
briefcase follows isn't toward the interior territory of the United States. Instead, we move out from America,
across the water—possibly, if we are Irish, toward our origins, though there's
little to indicate any destination other than infinite openness. For me, the primary theme of the poem
will always be a matter of mortality rather than of national identity—a point
underlined by the presence of the obol for which the poet slaps his
pockets. This isn't an American
coin, but an ancient Greek one.
Specifically, it is the coin put in the mouth of the deceased to pay
Charon to carry them across the water to the land of the dead. We get the idea of a crosstown bus
carrying one on a short trip (it is only a few blocks across Manhattan) in a
highly populated area, and then we get the obol, temporarily not found, that
will pay for our passage over water into an infinite land of death: another
kind of open sea.
In the
private anthology I carry in my head, Muldoon's poem is printed across from a
poem by the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, in which we encounter another kind of
infinity, one that, instead of confronting us with undifferentiated vastness,
gives us an endlessly variegated infinity; one that instead of reducing us to
fear and trembling, extends something like an invitation for us to join it. The poem is called "The World,"
and I first encountered it when, teaching at Lund University, I accidentally
picked up a copy of an English translation of it from the printer in the
English department office (by some strange quirk of fate my colleage Lars-Hakan
Svensson had, it turns out, been working on it via email with John Matthias,
with whom I'd attended the Muldoon reading at St. Mary's). It goes like this:
In my use of the word “world” there is a strangeness
which I have never been able to shake:
the word carries a hopefulness
which has no strict foundation
in the real world.
The world being what it is!
For although I know it cannot be used
in the sense I want to give it
it is the same picture that faithfully
returns in my memory
whenever I pronounce it to myself—
it is the light space over my childhood,
white April sun over a province
whose horizon trembles in the distance:
The world rests over there.
It is the late 1940s. In those days
I went to Sunday school every week
in our northern Galilee. To me
Palestine was still a country
with heights, fields, and rivers such as ours;
and by a miracle
the hills of Rönneberga just outside of town
became the light green mountain
where on one spring day Jesus
had said to his pupils: “Go out into the whole world!”
Languages were buzzing in the air.
Jews, Arabs, Kappadocians, Egyptians!
We were in the Holy Land,
coltsfoots were blooming
along the ditch-banks of the whole world.
And among all the tongues that I heard
was also the sound of my own.
The vastness
here isn't an empty openness: it's an inhabited space, rich and various and
full of life in all it's variety, life blooming, life talking, life buzzing in
the air. And we're not in danger
of losing ourselves, there. We're
invited to take part, to enter this infinite world. Indeed, we're already part of it: among the tongue we hear
is our own.
For me, if
for no one else, "The Briefcase" and "The World" are
companion pieces—one giving us the invitation to participate in the
ever-opening richness of life, the other giving us the intimation of our own
mortality, and the endless vastness beyond our little selves. Both show us poetry under the aspect of eternity.