Like mathematics, human life has distinct compensations: there is always another equation to be formulated and parsed, a new slant, novel ways of perceiving realities that are leveled and layered to begin with. And, somewhere in the distance, a miracle always hovers: the promise of a few truly lived moments, in which every narcissistic schema is transcended in the sense that something is being given and received on both sides. If I didn’t believe this, there would be no reason not to commit suicide, because I already feel I’ve done enough work for one life-time, and the growth of my seeds has been more than adequate. But because the deepest truths are social, it cannot be my life-path to give up on my own humanity, and everyone else’s. I have claimed that these miracles usually transpire in a sexual context, but I have learned in writing this book that this does not have to be the case. Our greatest consonance with reality and humanity is expressed any time something moves in an upwards direction between ourselves and someone else; any equation involving legitimate ascension is one worth investigating.
(Click per vedere. Attenzione: può contenere anticipazioni.)
Here’s my equation: sex is more human than everything else. Let me put
sex to the left of me and you to the right of me. In the interstices between me and sex, I have achieved my greatest consonance with humanity. In the interstices between me and you, I can (hopefully) give you a greater consonance with humanity, just by showing you the seams, the zippers, the ruffles, the cuffs, all the accoutrements that dress us up to be naked, in a text with its own nakedness.
The little catalogue (seams, zippers, ruffles, cuffs) gives a hint of the incantatory, as do the parallel structures and semi-chiasmus formations. Meanwhile, the fanciful world of Opera Bufa is free to do whirling dervish tricks that the Equations prose poems cannot, though it also loses solid grounding enough not to be able to hold, harness, and consolidate serious dialectic energies, imperatives, and motivations:
I am beginning an inventory. I am in
possession of songs. I am in possession of
labor, and love’s labors lost. I am capable of
experiencing Mini-Marts. I inhabit an operatic
landscape. I have loved a girl. I have also
loved a Maria. I am noticing a strange poverty
in richness. I am cleaning up the stage for this
to happen again. I am counting on scones to
butter themselves. I am haunted by remorse
for missed notes. I am nonetheless proud to
have escaped the flatted fifth, el Diablo en
musica. I am lucky because the Devil paid for
my stage props. I have torn up our contract. I
have contacted my attorney.
Joyous, comic, operatic noise for its own sake, and for its own amusement: that’s Opera Bufa. It’s light on its textual feet. Equations is heavier, and denser, steeped in prose necessities. Yet both are hybrids, in a new mode of textual hybridity. Sequences of prose poems have never been asked to carry this much cognitive depth before. As always, an educated audience are free to decide for themselves whether hybrids can maintain the same level of gravitas that straightforward poems, like the Apparition Poems and the Cheltenham Elegies do, and also what other hybrid forms might arise out of necessity as the century progresses.