Memory, Poetry, and Recovery: Paula Meehan's Transformational Aesthetics

Is the past ever really past? Time propels us ever forward, each present moment eluding our grasp as it falls away from us and we move into what was the future. And yet as we proceed, always negotiating that strange cleft between past and future, each moment leaves within us its trace. These traces connect us to myriad "prehistories" that may not be retrievable, may be only dimly perceivable, and yet persist within us as ghostly hauntings, apparitions, intuitions, pulsations. In both her poetry and in interviews, Paula Meehan's words can act on us as signposts to such intangible yet pervasive regions of existence. Her work is saturated with an awareness of those spaces delineated by the "pre": the prehistoric, preliterate, precolonial, premodern; myths of ur-mothers and originary states of being; the prehistories of the psyche and of the human subject; the fragile and perishable stores of collective, familial, and personal memory. Such ancestral zones are not contemplated as relics of a past that is over, but are rather intuited as persistent energies animating events, relations, and subjectivities in the present.

"History exists in your body" Meehan contends, and she locates the residues of a traumatic colonial history as particularly persistent hauntings within Irish culture (González Arias 196). For Meehan, poetry, rooted in the "preliterary," is uniquely suited to the work of retrieval and transformation, acting as a conduit to a precolonial, even prehistoric state of being (Karhio 2; González Arias 196; O'Halloran and Maloy 12). Meehan locates herself within a transtemporal continuum—"an oral domain" that she associates with both the Irish Bronze Age culture and with the oral culture of her childhood community growing up in Dublin's inner city (O'Halloran and Maloy 8; Brain 115). Poetry is also "prehistoric" in its informing psychic energies; poets "draw on those early visceral perceptions of the world and their understanding of the world, before it's mediated by learned language" (Karhio 3).The force that compels her body when reading aloud is not just preverbal, but prenatal, "a kind of catatonic rock . . . I suspect it goes back to the heartbeat we hear while we're in the womb" (Dorgan 266). Those aesthetic effects peculiar to poetry, its rhythms, its pulsations and play with sound, its attempt to put into words feelings and experiences that are perhaps beyond articulation, are the investment in the aesthetic process of prelinguistic, even intra-uterine, experiences that are the "prehistory" of the speaking subject.

The topos of the archaic is a difficult one to navigate. In a Western tradition subtended by the abjection of the woman-mother and structured by a binary logic that violently splits the masculine Self-Same from the feminine Other, to invoke the archaic is to risk the valorization of some engrained and perhaps dangerous assumptions. It risks the reinstallment of that lethal imaginary cut between the inchoate, unrepresentable, feminized matter of the lost archaic origin on the one hand, and the clarity and precision of a cognizing masculine form on the other. In a cultural imaginary governed by the psychoanalytic models of Freud and Lacan, the archaic as a topos is inevitably informed by that still most horrifying of phantasms, the archaic mother, the magna mater, whose repression is the necessary condition that subtends both the Freudian Oedipal narrative and the Lacanian speaking subject (Coughlan 89). To invoke the archaic as the inspiring source of poetic utterance itself can therefore be problematic. Within a phallic economy, Mother, the origin, is forever and irretrievably lost, and as Moynagh Sullivan has made clear in her work, she must stay lost. Sullivan clarifies the point: "it is specifically in Oedipally structured narratives of the constitution of the subject that the place of the mother and myths of origin have the same function. Thus, the favoring of Oedipal models of identity and historical relationship depend on investing in a notion of lost origins and on keeping the mother 'lost'" ("In-formal Poetics" 126). Sullivan's emphasis here is crucial. As she has frequently demonstrated, the Oedipal narrative is not the only structuring narrative available to us as writers or readers of poetry, and in her work Christopher Bollas and Jessica Benjamin in particular provide access to other ways of approaching the aesthetic. Read through the psychoanalytic narratives provided by Christopher Bollas and Bracha Ettinger, Meehan's work also suggests a reinterpretation of the nature of the archaic. Rather than the archaic as the inscription of the forever-lost mother who becomes, as Sullivan notes of a phallic Irish poetics, the insensate matter from which the poet must extricate himself, the maternal aesthetic in Meehan's work is not insensate, inchoate matter but is rather intuited as the informing structure of poetic idiom itself ("In-formal Poetics" 80; "The Treachery of Wetness" 453).

The psychoanalytic relationship between analyst and analys and works by bringing the earliest and often repressed or unconscious memories of being and relating into language. Against classical psychoanalysis, the object relations tradition focuses on early postnatal experience, maintaining that the pre-oedipal period is decisive and apprehendable, and that the earliest form of relating and being is that experienced by the infant in relation to the mother. Bollas calls these archaic experiences "the unthought known": events and relations that inform and saturate our being and relating in the present, but that remain occluded from cognitive intelligence. In this relation, the mother is not experienced as a "discrete object with particular qualities" but rather as a process (Shadow of the Object 4). For the infant, the mother is a transformational object: she is experienced as the process that transforms the infant's self-experience and her relation to and experience of the external world. In Bollas's view, the quest for the transformational object never leaves us, but rather we continually search for objects that we unconsciously believe will repeat this same metamorphosis that was our earliest experience. While we may imagine that the object of our longing lies in the future, Bollas emphasizes that what is really sought after is a re-experiencing of our earliest memories of being "held," integrated and transformed within the mother-environment or what he calls the "maternal aesthetic" (35). The recollection taps into archaic, preverbal ego memory which, because preverbal, cannot be fully expressed in language, but rather reemerges as a texture of feeling or being that eludes the cognitive "I," emerging when that "I" recedes, for instance in moments of aesthetic reverie (16). Bollas identifies the aesthetic object in particular with this re-emergence of the memory of the transformational object. The aestheticmoment "evoke[s] a psychosomatic sense of fusion that is the subject's recollection of the transformational object," an uncanny re-emergence of the memory-traces of our earliest form of relating and being (16). It is uncanny because it is known, and yet not known: the "unthought known," the essence of the sublime. Thus, for Bollas, the artist fulfills a crucial function for the audience, her work sounding uncanny resonances within us, evoking textures of feeling that we somehow already "know": "In the quest for a deep subjective experience of an object," Bollas concludes, "the artist both remembers for us and provides us with occasions for the experience of ego memories of transformation" (28–29).

Bollas's explorations of the workings of the aesthetic provide a rich context for reading Paula Meehan's poetry and her understandings of how poetry "works."Meehan's understanding of poetry as working on the parts of the self that are "super-irrational," of poetry as tapping into an "extra-literary," even "pre-literary" oral domain that is gendered feminine all resonate with Bollas's connection between the transformational maternal "idiom" or aesthetic and the poem as a transformational object that evokes the memory-traces of this elusive, uncognized yet pervasive and omnipresent early experience (Brain 115; Karhio 2; González Arias 191). Meehan describes her work as a process of making latent unconscious or occluded content manifest, and by this effort the poem becomes an aesthetic space of transformative potential. The poems in Dharmakaya, for instance, work on "recovering things from your own past, or from a collective past. . . . And to achieve change and to be free by the act of recovery" (González Arias 202).The relation between the writing or reading subject and the poetic object can "reach right into the heart" of the writer and the reader of poems and begin to transform trauma into what Bollas calls genera: a new mode of being, a new way of seeing (González Arias 192).

In some of Meehan's early poems, the difficulties of transforming the condensed forms of memory into representation are directly addressed. In "The Apprentice," the speaker strains to hear the phantoms of her others echo up through her to bear witness to a life that is occluded or repressed by a privileged aesthetic and cultural perspective: "The voices of my city haunt me / But always in the telling hover / Just outside my reach" (Return and No Blame 28).These strained, uncanny murmurings lean toward a specific subject matter, but they also bear within them a poetic idiom to bring partially expressible, ghostly intimations into legibility: "A secret to sneak up through chance and time / To make a rhyme, a chant forme" (28). The poem is intuited as an uncanny re-emergence of some almost lost, barely audible trace that issues up from somewhere beneath ("to sneak up through chance and time"). Similar hauntings punctuate "A Decision to Stalk," where the speaker is again inhabited by the ghosts of her obliterated community: "I am haunted by voices echoing, / Voices without bodies, / Ghosts of my childhood dreaming" (Return and No Blame 8). The poem as a transmission that issues upward from an interiorized time and space is described again in "Odds On,"where the poet wishes to write "With no rhyme and no forced metre but / As if it had been hatched years before / And could flutter up through time white and startling / To talk the secret language simply" (Reading the Sky 46). "[H]atched years before," the poem does not move horizontally through a linear time associated with a masculine symbolic order, but "flutter[s] up" in a vertical trajectory, through a time that is in one sense the past, but that is yet present—the structure of the embodied archaic, the strange temporal warp of the event condensed into memory. James Olney articulates these uncanny, obscure spaces where life in many senses really "happens." For him, "the impulse of life . . . is a temporal, committed to a vertical thrust from consciousness down into the unconscious rather than to a horizontal thrust from the present into the past" (qtd. in Benstock 1040).This "impulse of life" is coextensive in Meehan's work with the impulse of poetry. Reading this through Bollas's perspective on the aesthetic object, the two impulses are indivisible. The poetic impulse, an aesthetic shadow of the early relation with the mother as holding environment and transformational object, informs the poem and in turn resonates with that unconscious but omnipresent memory in the reader.

In "Shelter," from Return and No Blame, the poem is figuratively described as "a balance / Of held and holding" (34). Held and holding: the phrase directly invokes the maternal aesthetic, but here the gesture is returned. The poem is held by the energies from which it draws and which it in turn enunciates, while also holding severally the poet, the memories and textures of feeling that animate the poem, and the reader of the poem, who might experience it as a space of self-transformation. The experience of being "held" by the object, and the association of this with the infant held by the maternal environment, is particularly striking and direct in "Train to Dublin" from Dharmakaya and again in "Hectic" from Painting Rain. In "Train to Dublin," Russian poet Anna Akhmatova is the object that holds the speaker in her grief: "I lay my head on Akhmatova's lap, / sob like a child, thumb in my mouth. / She sings me lullabies, eases me into the dark" (33).The repeated refrain, "I lay my head on Akhmatova's lap," soothing in its iambic containment and incantatory repetitions, also "holds" the reader in its consoling embrace.² "Hectic" revisits this same idiom. The speaker returns to the place where she scattered the ashes of a beloved friend, and resolves now to "let you drop leaf by leaf into the void, / let you leave drop by drop in the rain showers" (66). The landscape becomes the holding environment, "The two breasts of Howth beyond / to nestle your poor head against" (66). Performing for herself in the present the same nurturing gesture with which she had laid her friend to rest, the speaker lays "my own demented head / on the two dun breasts of the hill of Howth to hear / as Yeats himself was wont to do when young / the eternal heartbeat of the mother" (66). The speaker is "held" by the landscape, whose evocation of the transformative space of the maternal environment is poetically inscribed in the limning of the contors of the mother's breasts onto the undulations of the hill of Howth, through which the speaker can perceive the "eternal heartbeat of the mother." The maternal is reclaimed from a phallic tradition that it is made to subtend. That wry sally, "as Yeats was wont to do when young," suggests by implication a later appropriative denial of the maternal in the Yeatsian trajectory, as Yeats takes up his position in relation to the place of the Father. In Meehan's poem, however, rather than positioning the maternal as the abjected space from which the speaker-poet must strenuously extricate herself, the maternal-feminine becomes a space where woman-to-woman interrelation is made possible, even across the threshold of life and death, providing a transformational space of "held and holding" in which the speaker can negotiate her loss.

For Bollas, particular objects are evocative. Such objects evoke in us "not so much a memory as an inner psychic constellation laden with images, feelings, and bodily acuities" whose complexity eludes articulation, and can only be fully known in being felt (Being a Character 3). One of the most significant is the mnemic object, which condenses experiences and feelings in the past that the infant or child was unable to process or understand at that time. In "Cora, Auntie," the red sequins that the speaker's female relatives stitch on to her aunt's white satin dress act as evocative objects, holders of memory, and transmitters of interconnection in the feminine. Opening with the word "Sequin:" the emphasis on the word through its italicization and the placement of the colon suggests the entire poem that follows as an elaboration of this mnemic object and the ways in which it functions as a complex space of connection between the women who populate the text and the speaker's own psychic spaces:

Sequins as red as berries,red as the lips of maidens,red as blood on the snow

in Child's old ballads,as red as this penon this white paper

I've snatched from the chaosto cast these linesat my own kitchen table—

Cora, Marie, Jacinta, my aunties,Helena, my mother, Mary, my grandmother—the light of those stars

only reaching me now.

(Painting Rain 39)

Their working of the sequins weaves threads of connection between the women and across generational difference. The poem suggests a link between the red of the sequins and the symbolic associations of red in folk tale, most particularly red as symbolic of the liminality of the girl in her passage from child hood to puberty. As well as evoking the folk tale emblems of the liminality of the girl, the combination of red and white also evokes the maternal relation, a "threshold" state. The red that in the fairytale narrative signifies the appropriation of the young woman into a phallic economy of exchange (she becomes a commodity once the red of menses marks her as having exchange value) is reclaimed as the red and white of a feminine symbolic. Luce Irigaray has articulated red and white as the colors of maternal origin, sexuality in the feminine, and a recuperated, non-oedipal mother-daughter relation: "White and red at once, we give birth to all the colors: pinks, browns, blonds, greens, blues" (207). Irigaray imagines a symbolic relation between women and a female sexuality that is not determined by the "wound" of castration.

Meehan's poem also intuits a stratum of female relationship that is other than those governed by Oedipal structures. The poems pins a connection between the red sequins on the white satin of her aunt's dress and the red ink on the white page on which the poet writes this poem as she sits at her kitchen table. This image weaves through the lines of the poem, a delicate tracing of familial and poetic connection and lineage that is other than or that operates alongside a masculine symbolic economy and inheritance. The intergenerational connections held within the red and white patternings, linking the sequin-work of her grandmother, mother, and aunts with her own working of this connection in poetic form, suggests an important supplement to Seamus Heaney's "digging"with his pen for the roots of his connection to a paternal inheritance. In "Cora, Auntie," it is not the paternal but the maternal line that is retrieved and retained in and through this apparently frivolous, ephemeral, yet glittering object, the sequin:

All that year I hunted sequins:roaming the house I found themin cracks and crannies,

in the pillowcase,under the stairs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .I gathered them into a tin box

which I open now in memory—

(40)

The image of starlight is used in "Cora, Auntie" to figure the connections between generations of women: "the light of those stars // only reaching me now" (39). The strange spatial and temporal shiftings signified by the "light of those stars" suggest a zone of memory that crosses thresholds, that like the light that reaches us from the stars simultaneously emerges and fades, that touches the present and yet originates in a distant past. Light from the stars reaches across unfathomable distances of space and time, a transconnecting of the unimaginably archaic and the here-and-now. Starlight argues against the absolute "lostness" and "pastness" of the archaic, and the figure suggests that the link across thresholds of time between the women in the poem is animated by a similar link to a shared, originary archaic space of connection. The poem becomes a space for the remembrance and reanimation of this feminine connectivity.

Bracha Ettinger, an artist and psychoanalyst, calls such spaces matrixial borderspaces. The matrixial border space is a stratum in subjectivization that is not subsumed within a phallic Symbolic law governed by separation, splitting, and the either/or. It comes before and continues to operate beside the Oedipal subject. For Ettinger, the originary experience of the subject is not one of separation and individuation, but of a coemergence in the womb that happens between the becoming-subject and the mother, whom Ettinger calls the "m/Other-to-be." That is, according to Ettinger, we are from the beginning imprinted with traces of an-other, a "non-I," whom we also cross-imprint. The originary experience is a non-oedipal, prenatal coaffecting co-emergence between partial subjects—that is, I(s) and non-I(s) who are separated not by the boundaries demarcated subject/object, self/other, or even subject/subject, but who instead share traces in a space of connectivity and yet are differentiated from each other. The originary link is "lost" at birth as we enter into a world that is inscribed by separation and splitting, and yet the link is never "lost"; although it may seem to be consigned to a kind of oblivion, both in our psyche and our culture, the traces and potentialities of intra-uterine coemergence yet persist. When two subjects meet, on one level it is ameeting of two discrete identities with their boundaries and defenses. However, in the encounter something else is also happening on what Ettinger calls the sub-subjective and trans-subjective levels, characterized not by differentiation across boundaries between subject and object, or even by the exchanges of intersubjective relations, but by a crossing of thresholds between partial subjects who relate not as "self " and "other" but as I and non-I, actualizing in the encounter the residual traces of an originary becoming with an-other. This threshold space is what Ettinger calls the "matrixial border space" (Matrixial Borderspace 171–97).

Meehan's poetry is a poetry of the threshold. "Liminal" joyfully declares it: "I've always loved thresholds, the stepping over, / the shape changing that can happen when / you jump off the edge into pure breath and then / the passage between inner and outer" (Painting Rain 33). Kathryn Kirkpatrick has explored this "boundary-crossing sensibility" (17). She analyzes "Instructions to An Absent Husband" (Reading the Sky 34) as "a powerful poetic intervention in the politics of transcendent dualism" in which the boundary between human/ non-human dissolves so that "normal" (phallic) distinctions become redundant (Kirkpatrick 17, 16). This crossing of threshold between the "I" and the "non-I" is foregrounded in Painting Rain, where several poems witness a sharing of traces in a space that is other than that of individuation and separation—in Ettinger's terms, a matrixial border space. In "The Wolf Tree," the originary tree ("a kind of alpha tree, with a kind of alpha memory") is barely discernible among the surrounding forest that occludes it from view(Painting Rain 94). It is apprehended as an interruption of a governing structure, its horizontal branches obscured from view by the dominating vertical lines of the surrounding trees:

You'll scan and scan and scan and fearyou can't find the tree for the woodsuntil the moment when your attention snags—a disruptionin patterning: horizontals suddenly when all aroundare verticals.

(94)

A sudden "snagging" of memory or vision recurs in Painting Rain (for instance, in "In Memory, Joanne Breen" and "Peter, Uncle"), investing it with a particular significance in this collection. The "snag" seems to indicate an encounter or shift in psychic state that "lifts" the occluded into apprehension or repressed trauma into memory and representation. In Meehan's poem, the phallic structure of the upright trees that have come after the mother-tree has obscured her from view. Ettinger's description of the shifts between subjective (phallic) and trans-subjective (matrixial) ways of seeing resonates with this: "one can also look at everything from the point of view of the identified subject, and then something else will be visible, something else will take place, something more familiar, and the matrixial sphere will vanish into the margins" ("Working-Through" 55). The dominant formation of the woods obscures the wolf tree as point of origin and occludes her structure, the first structure. Her horizontal branches are "a disruption in patterning" that cannot be easily perceived, but that once viewed attest to an event and a structuring that precedes and persists alongside the dominant pattern. The last stanza shifts again, as the lines dream back through time to the first archaic mother tree, "the original tree, the archeopteris, say," making a connection across the vast distances of time between this and the wolf tree. Although the two are held in mutual distinction, their status as entirely discrete entities is called into question as the lines hoist us up through the "ferny branches" of the archeopteris and ask us to "imagine the field you might survey, / imagine the vista that might unfold, / before the wolf tree's unleaving" (94). Our perspective shifts again as the next lines move us into a space of connectivity with this "unleaving":

like the hours of your life,finds you shivering, naked, unmasked and old:revealed out in your original domainthe "desert sand[s]" moving towards youthe pressure mounting, the original diamond pain.

(95)

Death and oblivion: the poem leads us here, to the edge of annihilation, to the limit of thought. The horror of approaching oblivion, its inexorable advance captured in the relentless movement of the lines that edge us toward it as the "desert sands" move toward us, reanimates the originary event: the originary structural trauma (primary repression) that remains within us as a void in being, inaccessible as the "alpha memory" of the wolf tree, yet all-informing, ever-present—the "original domain," "the original diamond pain."The poem has dwelt on the enigma of origin from the start: the wolf tree, the "alpha tree" with an "alpha memory"; the archeopteris, "the oldest, the original tree," and now us, with our "original diamond pain."This original, originary pain, like the vista unfolded from the ferns of the archeopteris or the alpha memory encrypted in the wolf tree, is fundamentally irretrievable, lies beyond the regions of thought and remembrance. It is an absence that is at the same time ever-present. This binary movement between the either/or of absence and presence is a fundamentally phallic imagining of being. But does the poem unfold another possibility, another potentiality, before and beyond the phallic domain of lack and loss? From the beginning, the wolf tree embodies and evokes an-other mode of being and perception, suggests an-other space that is accessible, not entirely foreclosed and that precedes the phallic. The swerving between the wolf tree, the archeopteris, and us, the readers, suggests an-other space of trans-subjective connection, a matrixial space; although there are painful aspects in this connection (the universality of death, the inevitability of oblivion), it also suggests a vast space of connectivity and something that persists beyond the fact of physical dissolution. It reveals those vibrating threads that connect multiple I's to multiple unknown non-I's, in a shareable, trans-subjective, connective border space where traces of one's others vibrate in the self.

The effects of the aesthetic in elaborating such spaces of transconnectivity are of crucial significance, not just in this poem but for much of Meehan's work, so much of which is involved in the enigmatic, painful and yet, in the poetic inscription, consolatory threads connecting trauma, memory, aesthetic representation, and recovery.³ A motif that returns again and again in her work that expresses these conjunctions is that of winding and unravelling, stitching and unpicking, making and undoing. Often, such motifs articulate a yearning for a return to the origin, for a reanimation of those "pre" states and spaces. A particularly arrested instance of this occurs in "Number Fifty-One," from the "Six Sycamores" series in Painting Rain, where the "unmaking" motif "snags" the reader's attention. The poem opens with what seems like an articulation of the death-drive—the yearning for stasis, for oblivion: "And as the ages pass, the solid world longs / for its own dissolution" (29). But as we read on, it is not dissolution that is yearned after, but the retrieval of a former, primordial state, transcribed as a process of unmaking and remaking:

the iron railings guard the memory of fire,of ore-selves before being smelted and cast and exiledto these unforgiving streets; the shutters ache

for the woods, the greeny light, the sap strongin bole, in branch, the undergrowth quickwith life; linen drapes must crave someone to unpick,to unspin, to be bluest flax blossom all summer long.

(29)

The railings, the shutters, the drapes are all what would be "normally" regarded as pure objects, the products of commodity fetishism. Here, these objects are subjectivized: they guard, they ache, they crave. Wrenched from their original context, molded and distorted into individual units of exchange, the loss and separation that underwrite their present form and condition are inscribed as a primordial trauma. This subjectivization forms a transconnectivity with the reader, whose own encrypted trauma attunes itself to this loss and longing. But there is, of course, a complicating strand of meaning here, in that we, as subject-consumers, are implicated in this primal trauma: we are the agents of the catastrophe. The subjectivized objects of the poem are commodities, products of a capitalist economic system fueled by production and consumption. This weaves another connective strand, trans-connecting these abject objects to the human abject of that same system, the working-class communities whose dislocation, neglect, and loss (as well as vitality and cultural and affective richness) are so often decried, recorded, and mourned in Meehan's work. Yet, the traumatic content does not fulfill the opening gesture of dissolution. The subjectivized objects retain the trace of a mode of being before separation: a matrixial space of connectivity that has been "wounded" and that is reanimated in this longing to be "unsp[u]n," "unpick[ed]."

The final image of the poem, of the blue flax being unpicked to its originary state, resonates with another poem in the collection, "In Memory, Joanne Breen," an elegy which begins:

I am fingering a length of yarnfrom the mill in Stornoway.It is green as a summer meadowthough when I untwine it widdershinsI see, spun into the yarn, fibres of blue& yellow & purple, occasionally orange.

I am undoing the magic of the spindle,Unravelling.

(35)

The unravelling of the wool expresses the speaker's undoing through loss and grief and Joanne's loss of her future in death. The terrible pain of the separation that death interposes is carried in this image of the mourning speaker unpicking the separate strands of the yarn. Yet the separation of the yarn into the separate colors that constitute it has another, simultaneous effect on the reader, for whom those unravelling threads weave a space of connectivity as well as dissolution: the connection to this loss and pain hurts, but in the grains of connectivity, figured forth in the distinct strands that yet connect together in the yarn, there is also deep solace. Such resonances, what Ettinger would call "metramorphoses," are what ultimately and consistently mark Meehan's poetry as a poetics of recovery.