The Wild Iris

Clear Mornings

Plays with the idea that you can live within someone’s limitations for too long, to speak within registers that are the preferences of other people (Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, linguistic subordination, native language erasure), yet rejecting those limitations, these linguistic habits of coercion, to instead, impart upon your listener the ways of speaking that move beyond the limited constraints that they prefer, not as an attempt to subordinate or oppress or just take up the position of a contrarian, but rather, to impart clarity, to show them things about life and being and existence they may not necessarily know or recognize as a consequence of a limited worldview (a limited worldview that, really, everyone has – there is not “fully encompassing” worldview that exists, I think – everyone understands the world through their own two eyeballs), to break apart the glass inside of someone's mind, destabilize the way they have conventionally understood the world around them, and shatter the fictive mirror they have been staring into their whole lives. 

Maybe that is what poetry is: the act of shattering your worldview to suspend you beyond what you thought you already knew. 

Matins (1)

“Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful // are always lied to since the weak are always // driven by panic”

Idea that if I am telling someone “I love them”, I am lying to them, and, this lie is told because the weak are driven by panic, and the assumption being that if I lie to the weak, i.e., I tell them I love them, they will panic, so they will believe it is true (or perhaps they don’t; maybe the mere posturing of the question causes the panic), and they panic, whereas the powerful recognize the lie beneath the phrase “I love you”, yet it is not something the weak can recognize as a lie? Idk. 

The silence of potential not yet becoming kinetic.

Matins (2)

“at fault, at fault”

As in, whenever I am at a fault, like a division, I am at fault? Or, as in, whenever I am at fault, I arrive at a fault as in a fault, a division? 

What would I be if mirrors did not exist? 

Scilla, pg. 14

“Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we –”

The “you idiot” here is essential – not I, you idiot – conveys that the speaker is deliberate in their negation of themselves, like they are receiving some sense of praise perhaps, but says, no, the belief that there is an “I” that you might think exists is foolish, and this implication, that it is foolish for you to think of me as someone who, in relation to you, possesses an understanding of an “I” – it implies that the speaker deliberately gives up that they have an “I”, that the speaker is willing to acknowledge that to believe that they have an I is a foolish act – it carries within it a particular sweetness, a statement or belief that when I am with you, there is no “I” that exists, there is a conjugal, sublated, yet preserved, “we”. 

I think this line, maybe even better than Hegel, communicates the sublation intrinsic to love – this “you idiot” is masterful in that regard. 

“Why // do you treasure your voice // when to be one thing //is to be next to nothing?

The dialectical relationship between being and nothingness – that to claim that “I am” is to neglect to consider that the construction of the self is dialectically opposed to “nothing”, can only cohere through the existence of “nothing” – the contradiction, in other words, it that to say “I am” rests on and is intrinsically contingent upon the possibility of being nothing – insofar as that is the case, it, maybe, is sublated into some higher notion/understanding of “becoming” that cancels, preserves, and uplifts “being” and “nothing” – not a novel thought, alas, but Glück’s poetic exploration of it in here is resonant. 

“Why do you look up? To hear // an echo like the voice // of a god? You are all the same to us, // solitary, standing above us, planning your silly lives:”

There is a hint of Heidegger in here – there is no division between the "self" and the “world”. The self is always already implicated in the world – there is no “rising above” – there is no “bird’s-eye view”, no sense of “analysis” (the promise of the Enlightenment) that doesn’t already implicate oneself – like what I was just thinking about wrt to the trial – one is always already implicated in the law

→ for context: before I read The Wild Iris, I was at the gym and listening to Todd McGowan’s fantastic commentary on Kafka's The Trial where he argued that there is no “outside the law” – one is always already implicated in the law, no one is necessarily “suspended” from the law. Interesting in the context of Arendt/Agamben.

“your silly lives: you go//where you are sent, like all things,//where the wind plants you, // one or another of you forever // looking down and seeing some image // of water, and hearing what? Waves, // and over waves, birds singing.”

We are thrown into the world, Geworfenheit, and we don’t choose that, necessarily – what do we do, what are we to make of this condition? This condition of thrownness? Perhaps, that in our thrownness, or lack of choice in choosing some of our conditions, we get to see the waves, the birds – thrown into the world without choice, yes, but a world where birds hum and talk to you in the morning, urging you to get out of bed, a world where the sun pings your eyes, telling you that "you can do it", where waves roll forwards and backward, in a coming and going, its glitter illuminating the iris’ every crevice. 

That there is, even in the condition of thrownness, immense beauty to be found – Taste of Cherry (by Abbas Kiarostami). The sun’s glint, the taste of mulberries, something to live for.