The German Self, The German Soul: Notes on Ambiguity and Translation

One of the things I like about teaching at a liberal arts college is the way the small scale of the place throws me together with people from other departments.  The things I've learned about communications theory and intellectual history from such encountershave always felt like the secret weapons in my critical arsenal. Alvin Gouldner, for example, may be one of the heroes of communications, but hardly anyone in literary studies cites him, and I was able to import his insights into my own field and land an article in a very fancy journal indeed.

Recently, I've been privy to a discussion between a colleague of mine in Asian Studies and a professor of German about the words "soul" and "self" in Hilda Rosner's translation of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.  My Germanist colleague, Richard Fisher, was kind enough to allow me to reproduce some of his comments on the meaning of various German words that might be translated as self and soul—comments that go beyond mere issues of translation to get at the language, and linguistic technique, of German philosophical and theological writings.  Here is how the tremendously learned Fisher addressed the question:

[This is] a perenially interesting and vexed question, as many German concepts are a bit slippery in English, that is they can be ambiguous or ambivalent. This is because these concepts are already multi-valent in German, being lexically 'diverse' and for precise connotation depending a lot on specific context. To communicate intention, connotation and the penumbra of meanings is part of the translator's job, but this will always involve choices and, likely, compromise to render into English. So, atman will be mediated at least twice before appearing in an English context as self or soul.

The German word for soul is 'Seele'; the word for self is das 'Selbst' or 'das Ich' (ego). When it comes to palingenesis [reincarnation] or anything metaphysical, the terms, contexts and meanings are all over the place, depending in part on which aspect is stressed. The word 'Geist' is a good example: it can mean mind (as in the Greek noos or nous), spirit, intellect, sense, ghost, anything numinous or epiphenomenal or paranormal; but, with a bit of literary leeway, it might also mean 'the mind's eye' or 'soul' or 'self' or 'character' or 'inner life' etc. 

This polyvalency is dear to Hesse, and all German writers, because very often more than one meaning is intended, but which particular set of meanings is not linguistically specified--so the term retains, intentionally, a flexible range of meanings not strictly delimited--that's part of what Geist means--but all these meaning explicitly also contain and imply not being their opposites: matter, materiality, corporeality, substance, tangibility, concreteness, sensual reality etc. Importantly, Seele and Geist are also seen as modes of perception or apperception.

All Germans are dialecticians, so das Ich or das Selbst also implicate, by negation, the non-self or not-Self. And these slippery terms and pairings are, of course, everywhere in Hesse, notably among the novels also in Narziss and Goldmund, his medieval incarnation of the spirit-matter dichotomy or polarity. 

As with Hegel and Kant, translators make it easier for non-German readers by making the choice among denotations, and reserving the discussion of ambiguities for learned footnotes. In a way, the German terms do not want to be pinned down (Goethe uses the term 'bephählen' or hitting the bull's eye when talking about Schiller) making the suggestiveness richer, more complex, and less determinate; in English we seem to think and visualize more concretely, and find this cloud of extra meanings a bit vague and unclear, whereas for German readers this haze is part of exactly a not-unclear but multi-dimensional set of references. Seele or Geist immediately confront a reader with the entire metaphysical panoply of existence--a bit like quantum mechanics--but in English the terms are more circumscribed, more on the order of organs in the body or the abstract regions of an otherwise tangible-concrete or substantive hierarchy. 

So yes, the meanings of soul and self in German can often spill over into each other, but the contexts can render the degree or direction of this overlapping quite variously. Specifically Christian meanings can usually be detected by context, and in fact represent a narrowing of the otherwise amorphous, even aniconic use of the term in poetry and philosophy or speculation. For Hesse, the soul is not only that reflective part, capable of transcendence or salvation or communion with the divine, but also an autonomous entity partaking in the dynamic of all existence, phenomenal and numinous, spiritual and corporeal--and the same for the self. These are, a priori, epistemological terms in German, and not static states or entities. 

Some English readers will share this expansive, delimiting German understanding; others will find the terms fuzzy or messy.

They Call it "Grunge": Mid-90s Time Capsule

Rooting around for some documents, I ran across a journal I kept from 1993-1996, when I was in my twenties, living in Chicago and commuting out to Notre Dame a couple of times a week to teach a course and meet with my doctoral committee.  A lot of the journal is wince-making to me now, but I couldn't stop reading it, since it seemed like such a perfect time capsule.  Here are a few excerpts from the first month covered in of the text.  Thrill as our protagonist discovers something called 'grunge,' stare in fascination as he confronts the New Historicism, gasp as neo-traditionalism in jazz makes an appearance on the streets of Chicago!

*

11 August 93

So there I was, flipping through a paperback selection of T.S. Eliot's criticism, soaking in the immense claw-and-ball bathtub that is one of the new apartment's finest features, when it occurred to me—if one wants, perhaps perversely, to swim against the flow, one could say that despite the mantra of diversity and plurality and the petit récit, there is within postmodernity a kind of return to what Eliot laments as the lost "unified sensibility," the cultural code held in common by the thinking courtly wits and the feeling orange-hawkers down in the pit.  For Eliot, this common code is both desirable and lost, a kind of Eden… In Eliot's view the modern condition is that of speaking difficultly, to a few, while the vulgar world takes no heed, neither able nor willing to understand the cryptic, wise, and morbid few.  Such is the curse of democracy, grumbles the possum, watching for fires over London in the nights of the blitz.  In postmodernity, though, the triumph of the vulgarity of the many brings about a new common culture, a new union of sensibility even while we're trumpeting diversity and polyvocality (Babel rises, a single tower).  The oppositional nature of art-the-secret, art as a separate culture (what Helen Vendler rather nauseatingly called the "golden robe" of modernism) is largely gone, and the vocabulary of art, its code, becomes that of the vulgar.  Jeff Koons' artistic vocabulary is that of Las Vegas and porn, the painter John Wesley's is that of the comic strips—which is not to say that they operate without sophistication).  In the detective story as literary novel, in Frederic Tuten's psychological novel of Tintin, or in Gus Van Sant's road movies, we see a knitting together of artistic and popular sensibility, a mending of the rift Eliot lamented, but a reunion he would never recognize or legitimate.  The irony some see and some don't in Brady Bunch art may separate the wits from the orange hawkers in a new way, but the cultural referents are held in common.

13 August 93

I think my mentor J.M. is right: put a number into the title of your course description, your dissertation title, or the title of your book, and no one will ask you any annoying questions about who you're leaving in and who you're leaving out: "Six Modern Poets," "Three Postcolonial Interventions," "23 Modernists."  Practical wisdom for the aspiring academic!

Undated (Summer 1993)

Sitting at a satisfyingly large and solid oak table in the coffee shop and listening in on the philosopher Alisdair Macintyre at the next table, as he explains the nature of understanding to an apostate physicist, who seems to want to make the leap into metaphysics, having concluded that empirical explanations will only get one so far.  Macintyre (who asked to look at my NYRB on the South Shore on the way in to Chicago for and never gave it back) says that most people feel that explaining something means reaching some kind of familiarity and comfort with it but that's not enough for him.  I wish I could have stuck around to eavesdrop more, but I had to run off.

19 August 93

Read an editorial by William Pfaff, who thinks that what we are seeing in Yugoslavia is the death of Europe, with Europe envisioned as bourgeois liberalism, capital, the democratic state, Magritte's man in the bowler hat, etc.

Sarajevo seems to be the place Europe goes to die.

1 September 93

Reading Brook Chandler's The New Historicism and Other Old Fashioned Topics and am pretty much over-awed.  He quotes Leo Spitzer on the historical study of literature that came into being in the late 1940s as potentially becoming "the gay sporting ground of incompetence," and that hits a bit close to home.  Thomas also talks about Spitzer's type of work as relying on the rhetoric of the synecdoche, where one can read from the part the whole of a society's codes or zerigeist.  I suppose this trusting of the text, especially the literary text, to speak for such a broad field is an element of greats like Auerbach, Curtius, and Cassirer as well—indeed, it is part of all of those giants Edward Said calls "idealist historians," those suns of historismus and great-grandsons of Hegel.  The synecdoche allows them to do things like write a history of mimesis in western civilization from a single trunk of books smuggled to Turkey from the Nazi's Germany.  It limits what you need to know to know it all.  Had to stop reading when a young guy on the El decided to ask me about my book.  He got to talking about Heavy Metal and the Loch Ness monster and getting chased down by skinheads.  Couldn't place his accent, so I asked him where he was from "Eng-u-land, actually" he said, "but mum's a Saudi.  Don't know who dad was."

September 5

Reading Tom Wolfe (The Purple Decades, The Painted Word).  He has a great Juvenalian sense of human vanity.  In a way his work anticipates much of what the New Historicism has been all about, but without the footnotes.  That is: he takes little anecdotes and turns them into general statements about the strange negotiations we all go through with forms of status and power.  Saw the results of some of those negotiations down at the Underground Café: M.V. was there, moping over a copy of Oscar Wilde, because St. Martin's had turned down his manuscript and he was no longer sure he was really a writer.

8 September 1993

Saddam Hussein accused of "crimes against humanity."  The phrase feels somehow old fashioned, like "blasphemy" or "heresy"—the notion of universality that undergirds it having been subjected to so much criticism for so long now.  But what other phrase has the same kind of utility and power anymore?

10 September 1993

A strong nostalgia for my teens, when all my laundry was done for me and there was always a stack of hardback Horizon magazines on the end table to browse in, the house silent in mid-morning except for the water boiling for coffee or tea.

In other news, I am suddenly fashionable: everywhere I look people are dressing the way I've been dressing for years: denim, flannel shirts, hiking boots, a palette of dark greens, grays, and blacks.  Like the man in Molière who realizes he's been speaking prose his whole life, I realize I have been dressing in a style.  They call it "grunge."

11 September 1993

Went out to see Spalding Gray last night in Gray's Anatomy. He calls himself a storyteller, not an actor or performance artist or writer, and that seems about right.  The story he told centered on his loss of eyesight and his attempts to cure it, which he knew all along were doomed to failure, but which were a way to avoid confronting the loss directly.  A great scream of HELP—an existential scream at the terrors of aging and death—is at the heart of the story, but the end comforts.  Having left behind the prohibitions and taboos and diets of the faith healers and health food freaks, Gray eats, drinks, smokes and otherwise partakes of "all the things that will make you blind."  D. and V. were there, later met with S. for music on the streets (the jazz fest is on).  A street band played an extended "Purple Haze" while a well-dressed Wynton Marsalis type looked on with disdain, muttering "fucking Hendrix, fucking Hen-drix…"

W.H. Auden and Ecopoetry

A little article I wrote on W.H. Auden and ecopoetics for the good people at Boston Review can now be found on their web site.  It begins like this:

W.H. Auden is a Greek poet, at least when it comes to nature. No, I don’t mean that he is all about olive trees and white sand beaches: I mean there is something fundamentally classical in his attitude toward the natural world, something that puts him at odds with the two dominant modes of nature poetry of our time—something that, indeed, casts light on the outlines of those norms.

The two most common attitudes toward non-human nature in contemporary poetry are the Romantic (or sentimental—if we can use that word without condescension) and the ecopoetic. The first of these dates back more than two centuries, and receives its most powerful theoretical articulation in Friedrich Schiller’s great essay of 1795, “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry.” Here, Schiller begins by describing the longing for the realm of nature among self-conscious and sophisticated people:

There are moments in our life, when we dedicate a kind of love and touching respect to nature in its plants, minerals, animals, landscapes . . . not because it is pleasing to our senses, not even because it satisfies our understanding or taste . . . but rather merely because it is nature.Every fine man, who does not altogether lack feeling, experiences this, when he walks in the open, when he lives upon the land . . . in short, when he is surprised in artificial relations and situations with the sight of simple nature.

The important thing here is how an encounter with the natural world catches us off-guard, and makes us feel the artificiality of our selves and our ways of going about things. We see how our will and our nature are out of sync, how our social relations and ambitions cause us to do things at odds with our inner nature. When we see the simplicity of a stone simply being a stone, or of water flowing downwards to the sea in accordance with its nature, it has a strong effect on us. We are drawn toward it. This urge to leave our own twisted, self-conscious way of being, to ditch our convolutions and artifices, is what Schiller calls sentimentality: an urge for the simplicity of nature. Such sentimentality, Schiller tells us, “is especially strongly and most universally expressed at the instigation of such objects, which stand in a close connection with us and bring nearer to us the retrospective view of ourselves and the unnatural in us.”

This attitude may well give the 21st-century reader pause...

Lou Reed, R.I.P./Glam Rock, the Poem

Lou Reed has died.  He always meant a lot to me, and not just because I met my wife when she was singing backup in a Lou Reed/Velvet Underground cover band in a dive bar in South Bend, Indiana.  Here's a poem of mine about Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie that appeared some years ago in Absent magazine.  It riffs on the photo of all three, above, and I hope it gets at what the nature of my admiration for all three performers.

Glam Rock: The Poem

1

The man who was to fall to earth in four years' time

still floated in his cloud of silvered fame.  His name

was David Robert Hayward Stenton Jones.

He'd been a Kon-Rad, King Bee, Manish Boy,

a Lower Third.  He'd be a thin white duke.

He'd be a Christ, an alien, he'd be a dance club king.

Remembering the self-invented master whose factory

invented selves, he'd play in film the man who

played the soup-can trick on art, he'd play that man (not well).

He'd play the husband of a wife -- she, born Somali,

she, born near Greece.  He, born in Bromley, had one

real wife, she, born in Bromley, her girl's-mouth his,

the marriage bed that sweet narcissus mirror

where he'd play out all his parts.

These fragments has he shored against his gender, so.

His name was David Robert

Hayward Stenton Jones.  Not David Jones, too close to Davey

of the pre-fab four.  He'd change it first to Tom Jones, then again

and then again.  But this year he was Ziggy,

this year he played guitar.

That's him on the left.  The man who'd fall to earth,

camp in his arm-crook, his long neck's arch.  Queer

in his gilded studied falsely vapid stare.

Nervous: glam and poise.

The others?  That year he'd save them both.

2

So New York and yet he's called "L.A."

when he fronts the Eldorados at a dance.  He'd been a Jade,

be mother nature's son, but been a Jade who sang

a doo-wop plaintive "Leave Her for Me."

And she was Lisa and she'd say.  And she was Stephanie

who'd also say.  And she was Jane and Candy too,

or she would be.  But he was Delmore Schwartz's

best student, gone to smack and speed and hell,

and he'd come back.  He'd play the White House

for two presidents, one ours, and one

the velvet revolutionary who'd call him the Velvet Underground's

own JFK, own wild-side walking Mao or Che.

A three-chord Che?  No martyr -- though he'd bottom out.

He'd always be the cracked-id island suburb kid who double-coded

his libido's twists in "CHD," his high school band: the backward-reading acronym

for Dry Hump Club: three boys, a girl, and one guitar.

One guitar lesson's all he'd need, a Carl Perkins 1-4-5 he'd play.

He'd play too much with fire, the kind

his "mashed-faced Negro friend, called Jaw"

sold him, with hepatitis, early on.

He'd play five years with his best band.

He'd leave and play out on his own (not well).

He's on the right, behind his shades, behind the junkie act

in which the junkie hides.

Nervous: cold-edged poise.

Bowie'd helped him make Transformer.

Reed's cracked id made his music well again.

3

He'd write "China Girl," and he'd sing "Shades"

the second time the thin man fell to earth

to scoop him up.  His name was Pop.  Had been Osterberg, had

been Prime Mover, had briefly been Iguana,

would then be Pop.  Twice called by Stooge, first

psychedelic, later (times where changing) not.

The Idiot who'd Lust for Life.  Like the Velvets

but not all cerebellum: all burnout, bastard, broke-ass bum. 

A pack of Luckies in his teeth.  His arms around them both,

a drunken-sailor Jesus carried, his forward thrust

and their support.  His eyes say "yes" his eyes say "now"

his eyes say "no one drives this drunken car."  And they're in love.

The attraction?  The man called Stardust, star-struck, said

"not Iggy in but Iggy and," and the Stooges drop to second bill,

while Iggy's resurrected (still on smack).

The wonder of attraction?  Not his chops --

he tried for ten months, played Chicago blues (not well).

And not his lyrics, his "Mona" or his "TV Eye".  Raw Power.  For this,

Ziggy'd play his management, get Ig a gig, a big release.

Lou Reed gave his producer: chops, technique, tribute, and joy.

The wonder of attraction?

Not nervous, not with poise, not him.

No one to drive the car.

4

Perspective's trick's a little imp behind their shoulders:

Tony Defries.  He, thinking

"Hammersmith Odeon" thinking "aren't they

fun!"  He, thinking, too " but will it sell?"

and then he's smiling,

thinking,

"yes."

That Mona Lisa Snarl: Jehnny Beth as the Gioconda of Rock

Jehnny Beth, who fronts the post-punk band Savages, is the Mona Lisa of rock.  I don't mean that she's got an enigmatic smile—in fact, I can't recall seeing her smile during a performance.  I mean that she embodies whole traditions of rock front-man charisma, rolling them all into one dynamic whole in exactly the way the great critic Walter Pater saw Leondardo da Vinci's "La Gioconda" (the name for the figure and painting we commonly call the "Mona Lisa") embodying the history of many forms of beauty from the history of art.

We see this most vividly in the famous passage from The Renaissance on "La Gioconda," where Pater represents the woman in the portrait as embodying a synthesis of all the different forms of feminine beauty that come and gone in Western art.  “The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters,” writes Pater, of the woman in Leonardo’s paining, “is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire.”  He continues in his characteristically extravagant style, which you’ll probably either love or hate:

Hers is the head upon which “all the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!  All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and molded there, in that which they have the power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.

This woman in Leonardo's painting may have her roots in the beauty of classical antiquity, but he's painted her such that she's come to embody much more than that.  She includes the fleshier, less idealized beauty of Roman art, the mystical enigma of medieval Madonnas, and a worldliness drawn from Renaissance portraits of sly aristocratic ladies, too.

Pater really cuts loose as he continues.  The following passage, the most famous in the whole of Pater's oeuvre, is so purple it would probably embarrass Prince in his Purple Rain period.  But Pater makes his point:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Pater has started writing about the figure in the painting as if she were an actual person, a kind of immortal who has lived through the ages and accumulated innumerable experiences, but what he's really doing is saying that the kind of beauty Leonardo has created is the synthesis of a long historical tradition, a traditin that includes Byzantine influences (those "Eastern merchants"), classical Greece (Leda, Helen), the art of the Christian middle ages (Mary) and of the gothic (vampires).  The coming together of all these forms of beauty into a grand historical synthesis represents, for Pater, a kind of culmination, and the creation of a truly modern form of beauty rooted in a rich and various past.

Which brings us to Jehnny Beth.  Beth, born in France as Camille Berthomier, has for the past two years been synthesizing and embodying a whole history of rock performance in exactly the manner Leonardo's Gioconda embodies a history of artistic modes of beauty.  Critics have caught on to the fact that Beth's is a complex charisma, and one that draws on a lot of sources.  She's been compared to Siouxsie Sioux, to Johnny Rotten in his Public Image Ltd. phase, to Curt Cobain, to Lou Reed, to Serge Gainsbourg, and to many others, even Johnny Cash.  More often than not she's been compared to men rather than women, which I think is significant: the tradition she's embodying isn't so much that of the female lead singer as chanteuse as it is that of the rock front-man—a stage presence as much as, or more than, a voice, and a presence that doesn't rely on a kittenish sex appeal, but on one or another kind of swagger.  Woman have done this kind of thing before (Courtney Love comes to mind) but so far it's been predominantly a boy's sport, though clearly one Jehnny Beth has mastered at a major league level.

Consider this performance of the song "Shut Up," nicely shot by director Giorgio Testi.  I recommend skipping to the 1:15 mark, after the long spoken introduction, and watching Jehnny Beth's arms, posture, neck and eyes.  The angular, restricted poses and arm movements come right out of the repertoire of the late, great Ian Curtis of Joy Division, and have all of that stiff anti-swagger swagger he understood so well.  The foreward projection of the neck and the eyes that shoot to the side are familiar, too, though not in combination with the Ian Curtis moves: we've seen them before as the signatures of Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong:

Or consider this, the John Minton directed video of the Savages playing "Husbands."  If you don't see and hear the influence of Patti Smith's "Horses" when we get to the repeated word "husbands," I'm going to have to send you to the back of the class in the school of rock.  There's a lot more going on than a Patti Smith homage, but Smith is clearly rolled into the mix:

Jehnny Beth's background is in acting and performance, and she was classically trained in these fields at the Conservatoire à rayonnement regional de Poitiers.  This shows, I sense, in the studied way in which she has assimilated the movements and gestures, as well as the vocal styles, of her predecessors.  If it's pure originality you're looking for, you've come to the wrong place.  She's not one of that cadre of artists Ezra Pound called "the innovators"—the makers of new techniques.  She belongs, instead, to the group Pound called "the masters"—those who assimilate and synthesize.  And it is precisely this that makes her the Gioconda of rock.

The World and the Open Sea: Poetry and the Aspect of Infinity

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.