Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

The Uncanny in the Short Lyric

58 The Uncanny in the Short Lyric Deirdre O’Connor Tomaž Šalamun’s poem “To Immerse the Weight” took off the top of my head, as Dickinson would say, when I read it on the Web site Poetry Daily last spring. And, in the paradoxical way of poetry, it did so quietly, the way a ghost might take off the top of a head: without fanfare, but with great effect. Here’s the poem: Electronic Text Rights Unavailable. 1 The imaginative force of this poem startles me each time I read it. It illustrates what it means to “think outside the box” of socially constructed reality, which is one way of describing the uncanny. The uncanny, according to Freud, is frightening because, among other things, it evokes an uncertainty in the reader as to whether an object is alive or has come to possess humanqualities. Thus, for instance, a dollwhoseeyes flutter openwhenone enters a child’s room will seem uncanny, as might a moonlit night when the the uncanny in the short lyric 59 trees seem to have hands, or an experience of profound empathy in which one seems, despite the self’s boundaries, to understand the thoughts and feelings of another. Freud says that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,” thus linking the familiar, or that which belongs to the house (heimlich), with the unfamiliar or strange (unheimlich).2 Freud relies on examples from German lexicographer Daniel Sanders to illustrate the range of what is heimlich: This is heimlich: “When a man feels in his heart that he is so small and the Lord so great—that is what is truly heimelig.” And this: “You go to sleep there so soft and warm, so wonderfully heim’lig.” On some occasions, however, the distinction between heimlich and unheimlich feels like the difference between raveling and unraveling: purely semantic, or impossible to determine. Again, Freud quotes Sanders to characterize the interchangeability of the terms: “The Zecks [a family name] are all ‘heimlich.’. . .” “Heimlich? . . . What do you understand by ‘heimlich’?” “Well, . . . they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again.” “Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich’; you call it ‘Heimlich.’ Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?” This shiftiness of names for the uncanny may helpdistinguish its creepiness from the more routine artistic device of defamiliarization, or ostranenie, the artistic practice of “making the familiar strange” in order to more intensively focus the viewer’s attention upon it. Defamiliarization can be fun, but there is always something unsettling about the uncanny. In Šalamun’s poem, the uncanny appears subtly but immediately: “the hunger of cathedrals” reveals the cathedral as a creature with an appetite. And pastures, with their “green silk,” have agency to step over the threshold and deliver us to a mysterious and fractured image of “smoke, / a horn, a white mouth.” I picture an animal’s body—a creature of the pasture, maybe a goat or a bull. This animal body is dead, on fire, presumably, and in death the body “drinks up the sun,” darkening what also lights it. )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 deirdre o’connor 60 In stanza two, the speaker claims that “For an instant in the body / of others, we lean, we burn in the field,” here invoking the empathic motion of self into others, who, in this case, burn in the field, resonating with the smoke, horn, and white mouth mentioned a few lines earlier. After this move into the body of others, the poem makes a remarkable turn and claim: “Crumbs drink and become bread, / stigmata find directions. Blackbirds, indifferent, / push aside their prey.” Like the hungry cathedral, inanimate objects (crumbs) imbibe, but blackbirds lose their appetites. Things and birds behave in ways they are not supposed to. The speaker—a disembodied voice, it seems to me—then questions the sensationsproducedbythepoemanditsimagery.“Wherethendoeshunger come from? / The frivolity of mountains, laces, fringes?” This questioning of the essence, the core, along with the frivolous edges, remains unanswered by the poem, but both the essence and the edges contain or exude a “tremendous power” to “drink up / the kernel,” to render uncanny the familiar and expected, and “immerse the weight” of destiny. The seemingly casual...