Knot in My Heart

The American Idiom

Among the aspects of William Carlos Williams' life which I won't be able to discuss in my paper due to length constraints is his desire to capture the American idiom in metrical form. He called this the "variable foot," an irregular response to the strict regularities of English verse. Rather than rigid, he believed that meter should be flexible, yet still mimic the patterns of speech, particularly American speech.

While his later years consisted of experimenting with this concept, he never managed to perfect it. He claimed that even the poems that came close were "too regular." The variable foot is not a precise metrical format, and by definition it must vary with the tone and weight of the poem. Even if he had succeeded once, that would be no guarantee of continued success, because unlike iambic pentameter or hexameter or any other measured meter, it cannot be universally defined and applied.

In concept, a meter that mimics speech patterns, remains flexible but rhythmic, and does all the other things Williams sought in the variable foot would be ideal for poets everywhere. In practice, it is no better than the metrical patterns Williams scorned - merely different.

The American idiom is a matter related to the variable foot, but it is not the same thing. Williams believed that all Americans shared some characteristic speech patterns. His work typically focused on the local rather than the universal, but the American character and the American voice were ever-present themes in his poems and novels alike.

That the vast diversity of the United States America - a country larger than the European continent, and with as many subcultures - has produced one unified voice seems unrealistic and, perhaps, optimistic. Journeying across state lines reveals new dialects and customs. Even schools within the same state develop their own vocabulary of slang terminology. Maybe, with more time, Williams could have distilled the differences and found the common American voice. Maybe he could have helped a disjointed chorus harmonize.

Poem (As the cat)

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

William Carlos Williams mirrors the cat's careful, soft-footed motions in the way it steps from one word to the next, broken but not without form or rhythm. He forces you to pause and consider each word as the cat contemplates its next motion. The syllables fall separately rather than sliding into one another, yet feel more delicate than awkward. Without explicit description, choosing certain words and images but excluding others, he conveys the stillness, silence, and fluidity of a cat in motion.

Again, brief research revealed some interesting interpretations, though few with which I agree. Perhaps in poetry it is safest to see the literal as only a facade, a doorway leading to a far deeper meaning, message, or observation abut humanity. This is the way one online contributor thought, seeing this poem as a metaphor for a young pregnant woman contemplating an abortion, and another who was reminded of Norse legends of  the Midgard Serpent and the apocalypse. Perhaps their interpretations reveal more about the reader than they do about the poem, though that can be said about any way of thinking.

As a cat owner, I do not see an enormous serpent or a potential mother. I picture my own cat, climbing over the things she shouldn't with an oddly careless carefulness. The step into the flowerpot at the end seems unusual, and it inspired many of the symbolic interpretations I read, but I first see it as a wonderfully cattish thing to do. It is a careful, delicate action, as is the rest of the poem, but into a rather indelicate location. Cats see everything as a place to lay, sleep, sit, and step. The concept of a flowerpot being for stepping around, rather than in or on, is alien to them, and within a handful of lines Williams captures that peculiar, particular freedom.

I find it more likely that Williams wrote this poem after watching a cat do this very action, perhaps in his own home or someone else's, than that he

This Is Just to Say

This Is Just To Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

"This Is Just To Say" was the first poem I remember reading by William Carlos Williams, and it stuck in my mind as an amusingly unapologetic apology. Brief research into the poem's critical analysis, however, goes far beyond the relatively simple literal meaning, into a realm of forbidden fruit, sexual desires, and Oedipal interpretations. While I could, at a stretch, fit those terms to the poem - "I learned things that you probably were saving for later; forgive me, they were very interesting things" perhaps, or "I stole fire from the gods which they were probably saving for themselves; forgive me, humanity is so warm now" maybe, or even "I have had sex with you when you were probably waiting for someone special; forgive me, I really enjoyed it" - my favorite reading takes its lesson from the title. This is just to say. This is not rife with symbolism. This is a note left on a kitchen counter, or stuck on the fridge, or on the lid of the ice box in which the plums used to sit. This is to you, my wife, my family. This is an apology, but you should know I'm not all that sorry, because what I stole was tasty and not so important that they can't be replaced. 

If the fruit were something more closely tied to the "forbidden fruit" myths, I might have been more inclined to lend credence to that interpretation. The plum itself has little symbolism associated with it, though the plum blossom seems more popular. 

If the poem were more specific in its allusions or target, I might accept the connections to Oedipus. As it is, I see no indication that the person to whom the poem is addressed is the speaker's mother, nor anything else that would connect the myth and the poem.

If the language sounded more consistently sensual, I might agree that sex is involved. The only two words with any hint of double entendre, however, are "delicious" and "sweet," which, in a more stable context, can certainly take a different tone than that regarding food. Alongside "icebox," "breakfast," and "cold," they remain domestic and homely. 

If William Carlos Williams were more inclined toward extended metaphors rather than the earnest representation of everyday life, from the death of a loved one to an empty icebox, I would be more inclined to scrape up the layered, subtle shifts of tone and simple, vivid imagery to dig for another meaning entirely rather than a new facet of meaning.

It is more than likely that there are essays or articles analyzing this twelve-line poem, showing how far beyond the literal it can go. All interpretations are, to someone, in some way correct. 

For this one, I just so happen to prefer very little interpretation at all.

"Rape Fantasies"

There are two kinds of rape jokes. The ones that make the victim the brunt of the joke should be banned from our collective sense of humor, because they aren't funny unless you are the type of person who considers rape an acceptable action.

There is another way to structure the joke, however, and this is the humor of which Margaret Atwood's short story "Rape Fantasies" makes good use.

The narrator speaks in a rambling, conversational voice to describe an office break in which several female co-workers describe their "rape fantasies." The narrator, Estelle, recognizes that her co-worker's fantasies are closer to an unexpected one-night-stand than rape, complete with a handsome stranger and, well, consensual sex. "I mean, you aren't getting raped," she tells them, "it's just some guy you haven't met formally ... and you have a good time. Rape is when they've got a knife or something and you don't want to." She believes that with rape comes anxiety and fear and uncertainty, not arousal.

And then she describes her own version of a rape fantasy to the group, as well as several other stories and possibilities to the reader.

In one, she tells the man to wait and makes him hold her extra things so she can search through her bag to find a plastic lemon to squirt him in the eyes. In another, the man's zipper gets stuck, and then he starts to cry because he never gets anything right and he has too much acne, so she gives him the number of her dermatologist. In the next they both have a cold and end up watching the Late Show together. She connects herself to her attacker in come way, identifies with him, sees him as more than an animal and talks and acts until he sees her as more than a body. Even in some of her scarier ones, she manages to talk or fight her way out of it with twisted logic or imagined Kung-Fu expertise.

The best kinds of rape fantasies don't end in sex, they end in safety. Both individuals have power; no one is helpless. We aren't laughing at the victim, and we aren't supposed to.

"Silly Things"

A Life in Two Hours?

I have something of a history with Yann Martel's Life of Pi, largely because I have something of a habit of rereading everything I love multiple times, often with years between each read.

Life of Pi divides Pi's life into three segments: Part One (Pondicherry and Toronto), Part Two (The Pacific Ocean), and Part Three (Benito Juárez Infirmary, Tomatlán, Mexico). While during my second reading (more accurately Reading 1.5) I skipped the "boring" Part One (I was in elementary school and I refuse to be held accountable to literary shallowness), it now is as precious to me as the violent and peculiar animal life in the second part and Pi's cheerful enthusiasm contrasting with the other men's irritable disbelief in the third. 

Part One is the story of Piscine Molitor Patel, son of a zookeeper, who was named after a swimming pool in Paris and is mortified by the way his classmates and teachers slur his name in the Indian heat; who renames himself with the help of mathematics and a chalkboard (My name is Piscine Molitor Patel, known to all as Pi Patel. Π = 3.14); who finds not one religion, but three, and clings to each for different reasons; whose mentors are his priest, his pandit, his imam, and his atheistic biology teacher; who loves the certainty of science and the wonder of religion both; whose family must move to Canada to escape when “the New India split to pieces and collapsed in Father’s mind.” Pi is philosophical, intelligent, and still bursting with the innocence of youth. His thoughtful narration flows between young Pi’s immediate, childishly wise thoughts and the nostalgic reflections of his older self as he relates his story to the writer. He is at once young and old, naïve and experienced, but never foolish or cynical.

Part Two begins with the simplest of sentences: “The ship sank.” Those words mean the loss of his family: his brother, Ravi, who had teased him endlessly about his three religions; his mother, Gita, who defended herself from her son’s questions by suggesting books for him to read instead; and his father, Santosh, who called his wife “my bird,” and who showed his sons how dangerous animals could be by taking them to each cage and telling them how its occupants could maim or kill a person. They mean the escape of the animals, the cages somehow unlocked. They mean a tiger named Richard Parker, an orangutan called Orange Juice, a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, and a boy called Pi, all together in a lifeboat “three and a half feet deep, eight feet wide and twenty-six feet long, exactly.” They mean the transformation of a boy who hated to snap the stem on a banana because it sounded too much like the snapping of a neck to one who will gladly drink fresh turtle blood. They mean an impossible island, an impossible encounter, and an impossible rescue.

Part Three is a tape recording. Two men from the Japanese Ministry of Transport have been tasked with discovering the reason the ship sank. Instead, they get two stories: one fantastic and one gruesome. They are lectured on philosophy and discovery and the wonder of the world, because even after his ordeals, Pi remains a staunch and cheerful dreamer. In the end, Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba choose a story to believe, but the reader is free to make another decision.

The book, the author, and Pi himself ask us: Do you believe the first, unbelievable, impossible story? Do you take a leap of faith and trust that the fantastic can be real?

Or is that just a soft, placating lie? Is the second, darker, more brutal tale the true one?

Which do you believe?

Because this is such a powerful novel, and because at last we have the technology to create a reasonably realistic CGI tiger, of course someone was going to make it a movie.

The trailer, for your viewing pleasure:

To be clear, I have not seen the movie. It has earned some fantastic reviews, as well as some less fantastic ones, which I have not read because I want to judge it myself when I do see it. I am hoping for the best--hoping that my fears will be proven groundless.

And I do have fears.

My biggest fear is that they will take a story with cinematic and visual elements that complement and enhance the emotional, spiritual, and physical journey, and they will make a cinematic and visual movie with emotional and spiritual elements. This theory is only aided by the glowing CGI whale. 

My second biggest fear is that they will take a story with zero romantic interests—unless you count the wife we only meet once the couple has married—and throw in a romantic story arc. This theory is aided by the presence of a young woman with whom young Pi—not forty-something-year-old Pi—seems very friendly. I do not know who she is or her role in the story because she is not present in the original novel.

Perhaps the visual scenes and potential romance will enhance the message of the original work since they cannot use every detail. Perhaps they add another dimension to Pi's tale. Perhaps. 

I am not strictly opposed to filmmakers adding scenes as long as they connect the missing pieces that the film cannot possibly include in a reasonable amount of time. I only worry that some of the most important elements in Pi's life--things that shape who he is and who he becomes--will be lost in favor of making something look nice or adding the romance that every move in the world absolutely must include. 

I will watch the movie with an open mind and an open heart, and I hope that it is as beautiful as the book I know and love.