Poetry as Survival

3. The Embodied Self

CHAPTER THREE The Embodied Self All thoughts and actions emanate from the body. . . . Through my small, bonebound island I have learnt all I know, experienced all, and sensed all. All I write is inseparable from the island. As much as possible, therefore, I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe the earthquakes of the heart. Tlic Notebooks of Dylan Ttiomas In order to carry the weight of the existential crises that torment it from without and within, the self in the personal lyric needs to be more than a stick figure "I." It's a pronoun whose formidable task is to incarnate and dramatize a full range of human feelings, thoughts, memories, and sensations even asit faces the past and the present or anticipates the future. Freud tells us that the ego is "first and foremost a body Ego," and D. H. Lawrence has provided a vivid evocation of this complicated embodiment: Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? Or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along,jumps like a grasshopper to dot an /, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and isjust as much me as is my brain, my mind, 37 38 THE SELF, JEOPARDY, AND SONG or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me, which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive. Whereas, of course, as far as I am concerned, my pen isn't alive at all. My pen isn't me alive. Me alive ends at my finger-tips. Whatever is me alive is me. ("Why the Novel Matters") Lawrence's "me alive," with all its awareness of the world, becomes collapsed into the pronoun "I" in language. But that small word "I" is like the narrow passage for sand in an hourglass: on the far side of it there isan opening up to the marvelous richness of consciousness. Howard Gardner, a Harvard developmental psychologist, offers this definition of "self" in his book Frames of Mind. Self, he says, is "an invented figure of speech—a fictional entity of the mind." One that is useful in taking "the inchoate understanding that lies at the core of intrapersonal intelligence and making it public (via symbol systems) and accessible to the person themself (and to others as well)." These symbol systems, especially language, allow the individual to create his or her self—the invented figure of speech—and that self, in turn, is a "model of what that person is like, what he has done, what his strengths and weaknesses are, how he feels about himself, etc." (295). IfLawrence sevocation stresses the body nature of self, then Gardner 's indicates how the selfmakes use oflanguage to create and orient itself both internally and in terms of other selves in the social world. Self-Centered and the Self as Center What a history is folded, folded inward and inward again in the single word "I." WALT WHITMAN, Day Books and Notebooks The personal lyric is "self-centered" not in the sense of conceited but in the sense that the me-alive, embodied self is the nexus of our most important experiences, indeed, of all our experiences. Thus Thoreau, in the opening paragraphs of Walden, The Embodied Self 39 tells us his book will be like any other book we've ever read except that we'll hear the word "I" a lot—but from whom else but the self can we get our essential,existential knowledge? "In most books, the I, or first person, isomitted; in thisit will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, alwaysthe first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well" (i...