Poetry as Survival

4. The Edge as Threshold

CHAPTER FOUR The Edge as Threshold Whoever you are: at evening step forth out of your room, where all is known to you; last thing before the distance lies your house: whoever you are. RILKE, "Prelude" In the ceaseless interplay of disorder and order in our daily lives, it is possible (and important) to imagine that there are certain situations where this unstable interaction can be held for a moment in steady state. One such suspended moment is the poem, which freeze-frames the interplay as language so that we can contemplate it, feel it, and concentrate on it. Robert Frost once characterized poetry as "a momentary stay against confusion," and his phrase articulates with eloquent simplicity a poem s power to lift moments of clarified drama out of the ceaseless, discombobulating flow of experience and, by doing so, to restabilize the self. Imagining the poem's suspended moment asa threshold between disorder and order can tell us a lot about poetry and about ourselves. My dictionary defines threshold as "the sill of a doorway"; "the entrance to a house or building"; and, in psychology and physiology, "the point where a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to produce an effect." Taking the last definition first, we can say that in our model of poetry, it is the disorder that "reaches sufficient intensity to produce an effect." That effect is both a sudden awareness of the disorder (the initiating moment of feeling destabilized) and the imagination s ordering response to it. 51 52 THE SELF, JEOPARDY, AND SONG But for the purposes of visualization it can be helpful to go directly to the most physical sense of threshold, that of a doorsill that is both entrance and exit to a house. As such, a threshold is a place of transition, a place where a person might pause. Imagine yourself there for a moment: you are departing and stop briefly on the threshold with the door open. Before you, the wild and varied scene of the outer world unfolds. Whether urban or pastoral, such a scene is fluid in its movements, unbounded, diverse. Behind you, available to your peripheral senses, is the interior architecture of the room you are leaving—its reassuring stability of walls, floor, and ceiling, where, as Rilke says, "all is known to you." Both directions and their implications are part of your awareness,asyou pause there on the threshold. One of the most ancient gods of the Romans and Etruscans (in fact, so ancient that almost nothing was known about him) was Janus, the god of gates and entrances. Janus had two faces, one facing forward, the other backward. His head with its two faces was often carved over arches and the gates of towns and cities. Someone standing on his or her threshold is like Janus, simultaneously aware of the ordering behind them and the disorder before them. THE SHAPE OFa doorframe also represents a powerful architecture— during earthquakes, people are advised to stand in doorways because they are stronger and safer than anyplace else in a house. It's possible to imagine the rectangle of a doorway as the rectangular shape of the page where a poem appears. When we are at an existential or psychological edge, the instability of subjectivity is potentially as dangerous as the chaos of a minor earthquake, and the rectangular shape of the page with itspoem can be asreassuring asthe doorframe in which we seek shelter. The threshold is a place of transition; as such, it is a place of enormous vitality and activity as well as danger. Science provides its own analogue to thresholds—something biologists call the "margin effect," which notes that life energy concentrates and ismore various The Edge as Threshold 53 at places of transition. Most marine life-forms inhabit the edges of the sea; more bird and animal species are found in that area where meadow blends with forest. Likewise, our nerves proliferate at the very edges of our bodies where skin meets world, and even more intimately, within our bodies, the greatest energy of chemical exchanges take place at the outer membrane of each body cell. We also find the concept of the threshold in the social world. Recently a number of anthropologists, led by the late Victor Turner, have focused on the nature and role of liminal states in culture. "Liminal" means "threshold" and is applied to certain transitional states like marriages...