Week 4

                                                      Vulcan, Greek God of the Forge

We left off last week, week 3, reading the poem "Kubla Khan" and today we will read "In the Middle of the Road," two very differently constructed pieces. The former was inspired by Coleridge's visions in a dream of a fabulous, sunny pleasure palace "decreed" by the Khan and set around and over an abundant and verdant natural world; including a central sacred river, great caves of ice, violent fountains, and a sunless sea. The setting is wild and forbidding, yet artful and civilized, too, striking an uneasy balance between the two. The speaker hears "ancestral voices prophesying war" and a mad "woman wailing for her demon lover!" Ancient and erotic conflict emerge. The poet-speaker seems a bit mad himself in the image of horrified onlookers whom he imagines saying: "Beware! Beware! / His Flashing eyes, his floating hair!" He inspires "holy dread" and great circumspection, as one imbued with dangerous powers of imagination and artifice.
One clear theme that emerges is the seemingly dangerous power of poetic imagination, and the artist as a figure somewhat possessed by his ideas and visions, however mad they appear. He conjures a beautiful world precariously balanced over darkness and fed by a mysterious river that takes its name from the Old Testament. The Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, creator and destroyer, describes Jehovah in Revelations. But here it is associated with Nature, with non-human realms, elemental forces that cannot be plumbed–"caverns measureless to man"– and that may upset all our plans and hopes. We may see symbolized the unconscious, or Sigmund Freud's concept of the id, site of irrational, uncontrollable energies rooted in our instincts. These may threaten the individual and collective society. The Romantics drew inspiration from nature's unpredictable yet beautiful, beguiling presence, and sought a way of ordering and understanding the human life, energies, and instincts within that world.
Emily Dickinson, another of the Romantic poets, wrote in this regard:

Much Madness is divinest Sense–

To a discerning Eye–

Much Sense–the starkest Madness–

'Tis the majority

In this, as All, prevail–

Assent–and you are sane–

Demur–you-re straightaway dangerous–

And handled with a Chain–

"In the Middle of the Road" enacts remembering, as opposed to forgetting, whatever is at the "center" or in the middle of the road, our journey through life. It develops by a series of repetitions and inversions framing the phrase that focuses on the "life of my fatigued retinas." The poem asks a symbolic reading and so many ideas may attach to this middle or center but certainly it involves the individual psyche. Jung used the term psyche to describe our whole being, conscious and unconscious, seeing it as purposeful and growth-oriented, seeking wholeness and balance.

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Today we look at the short stories we did not get to last week, and next week St. Augustine's Confessions, time-permitting, and some of Bukowski's work. All of these, take as their subject the themes of childhood and growing up and the role of authority, often male-identified, in the protagonist's life. All are stories of initiation into experience and knowledge of one sort or another. The Confessions is the oldest complete autobiographical work we have and describes somewhat the author's religious conversion and confessions of sin and guilt. He is at pains to show to God and man how he has learned to see God's just and guiding hand in his life, even in those times his life was given over to what he calls wickedness. We read excerpts; the full text is available at http://www.online-literature.com/saint-augustine/confessions-of-saint-augustine/.

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Charles Bukowski’s story “Son of Satan,” which is just one of many somewhat fictionalized accounts of the author's own life, tells how a group of boys alleviate the boredom of day in the suburbs by torturing an erstwhile playmate, Simpson, a kid rather quiet, different, the narrator says, perhaps simply weaker than they in some way, “a loner. Probably lonely.” Not so different in fact, we can imagine. But the narrator takes his offhand boast of having lain with a girl under the narrator’s house as a challenge, territorial perhaps, though they know in all likelihood it was just a boast, “a lie” Simpson had come up with in hearing them talk of such things. After a brief “trial” they hang him from his porch.

Before Simpson comes to serious bodily harm, the narrator cuts him down, and then the narrator goes for a long walk, feeling lost, “vacant” and somewhat remorseful. His shoes are thin and “hurt [his] feet.” When he says that the “nails started coming through the soles,” we might imagine the story of Christ, whose feet were nailed to a cross. When he gets home his father is waiting for him, and he wants answers. But the boy, perhaps unable to explain, and afraid, chooses instead to fight his angry father, who for all he knows, might kill him. In the end, the boy is hiding under the bed, hoping to elude the big man’s grasp, waiting.

The power and influence of parents and other authority figures is something we contend with throughout our lives as we come into our own. The story, to me, illustrates something of the cruelty, suffering, and longing for relief that mark a human life. The narrator is coming to terms with these experiences in the only way he knows. The fight between him and his father, their coming to blows, appears a crucial departure in his young life.

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