If you just wandered in and are puzzled, what I'm getting at here is the poem I put up as the previous post on February 7.
In general the way we see and understand any given situation will be conditioned by what we bring to the situation. Reality is filtered through the lenses of our fears, hopes and previous life experiences. So with poetry, each of us will have at least slightly different takes on what a poem is about or means. And that’s fine.
Actually, although I often like to play the game of
explaining what a poem is “about” or what it “means,” the experience a poem
invites a reader to participate in seems to me a more useful thing to talk
about. I notice about this poem that it does not make a declaratory statement
of meaning, instead offering a string of “-ing” verbals – actions, happenings
(or experiences). However, the poem includes declaratory elements, in the title
and in two “like the . . . ” similes, that stand out as important clues to
“meaning.” (More on those elements later.)
So you see my life experience as a college English teacher
makes me likely to take an interest in technical details that most readers would
have no conscious awareness of or interest in. Does this mean that I was
consciously employing such methods as I wrote the poem? Not at all. I remarked
to Judy one morning after building the morning fire, “ I think I saw a poem
lurking in the firewood this morning.” And the next morning I got up before
daybreak, built the fire, sat down at my fireside computer, and sketched out the previous morning's fire-building experience. Looking at the poem later as a reader, I see here and there elements
having significances I had no conscious intention of putting into the poem. So
much for “author intention,” eh?
Of course those things I “discover” there are concerns I
bring to the writing and the reading, whether consciously or unconsciously –
concern and frustration about humankind’s collective failure to grasp the
consequences of the physical laws of thermodynamics or the mathematical truth
of the exponential function. Knowledge that our entire civilization, built on a
one-time gift of fossil fuel energy, is unsustainable and about to come
crashing down around us – unless we can, collectively, slow down and scale back
to a much simpler and less energy-dependent way of living.
While our current concerns focus on fossil fuel energy, I can’t
see or hear the word “fire” in any context without at least some dim awareness
that control of fire was the first advance in humankind’s long march to total
domination of Earth. Instead of being part of nature, we would become its lord
and master. Control of fire provided protection from predators and warmth
enabling humans to spread into inhospitably cold climates; made us smarter (too
smart for our own good) because the ability to cook food freed evolution to put
more energy into brain development than into our jaws and chewing muscles; and
enabled us to clear land for slash and burn agriculture, feeding population
growth.
Getting to the reading:
The title. We’re invited to think of a general subject,
fire, and about the particular instance, a morning ritual, the word “ritual”
suggesting that what’s going on is somehow important, that heating our home
with firewood is an experience that imparts or embodies meaningfulness in our
lives.
So I’m primed for a poem-story describing, celebrating, and
being thankful for this one aspect of The Simple Life: warming ourselves with
natural, locally-sourced, organic, sustainable and free-range firewood! This is
the aspect of the poem that most readers so far have reported seeing,
understanding and liking. I like it too.
But for my reader, that’s not all. I see that our
Fire-Builder is aware that the beings making up his “firewood” might have
purposes of their own beyond serving his needs: “dry buds that will blossom
only to start my fire.” I’m inclined to see in this a tinge of grief or
guilt. He really appreciates those twigs and is “sorry ‘bout that?” But when he
gets to his favorite piece of firewood he makes it a willing volunteer, a “compliant
sacrificial victim.” And I suddenly realize that there are people “Out There”
who believe literally that all of nature is out there, was maybe put there by
God, to be sacrificed in service to our needs. And our appetites. (See
slowdowndirtytruth.blogspot.com post The
Oil We Eat, December 11, 2016.)
Is our supplicant Fire-Builder one of Them? I hope not. But
it seems somewhat ominous that the supplication is expressed not as the simple,
limited and immediately physical “keep me warm,” but the more abstract and
unqualified “serve my need.” I note also that there is tension between those
two “like the . . .” similes I mentioned. “Like the supplicant I am” says I see
myself as an humble petitioner seeking a gift of warmth from Nature (that
particular tree, but also with help from the newspaper, the woodstove, the
chain saw, the matches, etc.). In a sacrificial ritual, the victim is offered
to the deity, or to whatever source of good stuff we hope will provide. The “compliant
sacrificial victim,” however, is not a gift to the Nature deity, but a
gift from Nature. A sacrifice to serve the need of the Fire-Builder.
One more point – The Fire-Builder makes an emphatic point of
dividing Out There, with its Ugliness, from (by implication) the warm and fuzzy
simple-living In Here. Okay, we have in here a little model of the Better Way,
as far as possible uncontaminated by the ugliness Out There. That’s good. But
it occurs to my reader that the In Here of the poem also portrays, without
explicitly acknowledging it, an inside/outside divide. That particular tree is
out there, the chain saw being the tool to bring it in here to the hearth and
the woodstove. Can we be sure, then,
that our warm and fuzzy simple-living here is not also modeling the divide we
know is part of the Ugliness outside: the delusion that we in our built
environment are privileged to treat everything else outside as at least
potential “natural resources” to serve our needs. The delusion that we are not
part of nature, but lord and master of all.
Your reader may by now have thrown up his or her hands,
saying something like “This poem is a mess, can’t make up its mind, pieces
thrown together that don’t fit together, just doesn’t make any clear sense I
can make out.” That’s a reasonable assessment, I think. To me, though, the
disconnects, the tensions and even contradictions simply (or complexly) convey
the two-sided experience of our Fire-Builder. Happy with his simple lifestyle,
but aware that even his lowest-impact, back-to-basics home heating is supported
by the ugliness he opposes, aware of his dependence on that beloved but
fossil-fueled chain saw. So “compliant sacrificial victim” is bitterly ironic,
he knows it isn’t true, knows that feeling that way is a temptation of the
Ugliness. And he hurries away from it with “Then quickly finding the other
right size . . . .” and insisting on his
self-justifying thankfulness for everything that serves . . . .
Back to the title. The “General: Specific” formula suggests
there might be others to come in the Fire series. One might be “Fire: The
Internal Combustion Engine.” I bring that in because this morning I read an
article on the internet that said:
The World-Ending Fire is the title of Wendell Berry’s forthcoming collection of essays,
and in shockingly frank, dark, and prescient imagery, he said, “if you want to
be desperate about it, you can say that the World-Ending Fire is burning in every internal combustion
engine every day.” As someone reliant on an inefficient old pickup, he noted
that this implicated him as well. “We’ve been burning the world up, literally,
since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Coal is the earth. Petroleum
is the earth.” http://civileats.com/2016/12/20/wendell-berrys-radical-skepticism/
I’ll have more to say about that. Google willing, of course.
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