 As
Reviewed By: |
Wakka
Wakka
The Long Meadow, by Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf Press. |
As
Reviewed By: |
Wakka
Wakka
The Long Meadow, by Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf Press. |
“Moving on to the next slide,” says Seshadri,
in a put-on lecture about a genius painter done in by his own powers of
self-abnegation: we can see, twisted and deliberately coarsened as it is, the exact same theme, revisited now with an ambition and gigantism made all the more monstrous by the still soaring line, instinct with delicacy and intelligence, by the palette still fresh and strange, the siennas and umbers and crimsons and yellows seasoned with
the crushed carapaces of iridescent damselflies. We
aren’t told what the theme is, but we do gather that the artist is
driving towards some monism even as the lecturer moves in the opposite
direction, reducing the painting to its constituent insect carapaces. The
more freakish and distracting the artist’s gestures, the clearer his
motives become: The anatomical tenderness is apparent still in the rendering of the sexual disjecta membra, which serve at the same time both
the impulse to drama and the need for structure. Seshadri
himself has an impulse to drama and a need for structure, the former
prodding him towards the colloquial and contingent—pop culture,
doggerel, spoken idiom—and the latter towards big, timeless issues where
his ambition and gigantism lurk: the reverberations of history, the
individual in the mob, cognizance of evil, and existential anxiety. The
two tendencies balance in the sense that each keeps the other from
becoming embrittled and narrow, but the pairing of them in The Long
Meadow is, like the sexual disjecta membra, something
outlandish and arresting in itself. Seshadri’s
1996 debut Wild Kingdom was extraordinarily accomplished, and with
each reading its profligate imagination, human warmth, and verbal acuity
strike me more clearly. The predicaments that Seshadri brings into The
Long Meadow are already at play there; dominantly, a conflict between
the imperative of understanding, which is to disperse and wander off in
search of first causes, and the imperative of love, which is to
concentrate on the matter at hand. He is fascinated by the inadequacy and
inevitability of reductive thinking, and also by the city’s
opportunities for and frustrations of intimacy. He juggles summary
explanations and grand, annihilating forces, asking, in effect, with
respect to what a representation of experience (in a fable, say) may be
said to be distorted. The poems are full of giddy changes of gestalt and
scope, and traverse the mirror, the yard, the park, the globe, deep space.
Seshadri’s pitch of voice and conceits of indirection (like the art
history lecture) are largely driven by these dynamics, and because he
mediates between very antagonistic principles he tends to move briskly.
This makes him come off as a wit—his impulse to drama strikes you before
his need for structure. A poem begins Arriving early at the limit of understanding, I
managed to find a good seat But
the joke dissipates as it sinks in that the concert (at which Nothing
happens) is a metaphor more apt than clever for our limited (but real)
ability to apprehend the infinite. The effect is not terminally wiseass in
the sense that Paul Muldoon and Frederick Seidel are, often, terminally
wiseass; the poem has in fact been rescued from the self-seriousness that
one might have thought was inevitable given the abstractness of its
subject. If I said that poems on similarly large themes contained cameos
by Rocky and Bullwinkle, Superman, Drambuie ads, and Dr. Dre, you might
conclude that Seshadri had given himself over to trivia, but he has only
done so in calculated ways. Many poets are interested in the problem of
the general cacophony and what to do with it, but rarely does a solution
strike me as truly buoyant, and not a peevish response to an imposition.
Seshadri successfully subordinates the trivia to artistic intention; as
with Picasso’s recycling of bicycle parts into a bull’s head, the
junk, qua junk, recedes, its existence neither denied nor worshiped. Seshadri
has other habits to bring his poems down to earth: he uses a sort of
wakka-wakka sing-song, ironic inversions and archaisms (“Older than the
rocks is she”), and tongue-in-cheek spoken American (“I messed up my
leg something fierce,” “excuse me for living”). These do not result
in sarcasm because sarcasm is an affliction of the laconic, and Seshadri
is incorrigibly excited. These do not result in overwrought monotony
because they are not expected to hold interest in themselves—they are
deployed in the service of a well-disguised but old-fashioned quest for
meaning and the resolution of doubt. They mitigate, and are mitigated by,
kernels of mystery in his narratives, which often take the form of alien
myths set imperfectly on the template of familiar ones (an
“encryption” is what he calls his version of “The Three Little
Pigs”). It is strange and somewhat winning to so consistently find his
poems susceptible, crudely speaking, to paraphrase, but to find them
resistant to interpretation at certain points, to find certain
metaphorical details hovering between allegorically significant and not.
The taste of wolf is “unguent, farinaceous, brittle, and serene.”
“Witch Elegy,” a pretty clear meditation on the extent to which one is
able to empathize with evil, begins Over at the battlements of this misshapen edifice, part skyscraper and part ziggurat, I can hear them singing, “Ding dong, the witch is dead.” They’re dancing the dances they danced before she got here from who knows where, and feeding a two-story bonfire with her inflammable detergents and salves, her furs skinned from extinct, mythical, and unheard-of animals, her ivory-inlaid
teak credenzas and chiffoniers. The
poet proves to have been her assistant, and the edifice, I think, her
dwelling; what is one to make, precisely, of its resemblance at once to
structures of commerce and worship? That both spheres of human activity
are implicated? What about her taste in furniture? In “Baby Baby,”
Seshadri tries to explain to his infant son that human mortality was not
his idea: “Death has been served tea and fresh figs. / I was not present
in that room, / at the table polished with citron oil.” The citron oil
is allegorically questionable but sensually indispensable, and turns
something close to a commonplace or convention into a minor feat of
invention. Wild
Kingdom contains two long poems (“The
Lump” and “Lifeline”) that perform, in that collection, an important
role: by requiring Seshadri’s talent to operate at the level of
meat-and-potatoes narrative, they show his irrepressibility and
baroqueness are not compulsions, but are introduced as necessary to
demonstrate and solve particular problems. In The Long Meadow this
role is filled by “The Nature of the Chemical Bond,” a prose memoir of
Seshadri’s father: particularly, his immigration from India, his
salvation by science (physical chemistry, in the event), and his obsessive
interest in the US Civil War. The piece whittles away to find the causes
of the father's apparent quirkiness, and Seshadri realizes very young the
appeal that the normative, amoral interpretation of the war, such as you
find on roadside information kiosks and in visitor center literature, has
for his father. This nonpartisan narrative gave
scope to his instinctive empiricism and his discomfort with generalities,
which were suspicious with hidden and untenable assumptions. The Civil War
was as fundamental, as immutable, as the submolecular realm, a modernist
war made for the modernist he was then, and still is, as clear and
impenetrable as a line by Wallace Stevens or a Calder mobile. It referred
to nothing but itself. Wrapped in its structures, though, was a human
heroism pure and appalling and desperate, so pure and appalling and
desperate that it, too, seems immutable. The
father does his best to pique the boy’s interest, but Seshadri is busy
imagining Robin Hood and submarines and has no interest in the
stories—as he puts it, “Their ontology was all wrong.” Well into
adulthood their ontology was all wrong for me too, and although Seshadri
is right about the hermetic quality of the official history, I am still
not entirely sure why, as a well for the popular imagination, hero-thirst,
and moral orientation, the Civil War is not gone to more often. That is, I
am not sure what makes one become a modernist—what causes that
immutable, appalling, and desperate heroism to go from blankly meaningless
to grievously beautiful. I was teaching at the time I came across this
piece and, by way of approaching these questions, showed it to my
students. They were inclined to see the father’s interest in terms of
peculiarity or weakness and, like the young Seshadri, were embarrassed for
him and “the drunkenness of his intellectual obsessions.” They were
less able to appreciate the subtleties where I think the piece’s
achievement lies—its eventual insight into the father’s considerable
resources, the steadiness and intellectual generosity behind his
psychological transparency. In the memoir Seshadri comes as close as he does to using a lyrical I, and the prose expands the rhetorical capacity of the collection in the one direction, perhaps, that poetry couldn’t take it. Both “A Fable” and “The Long Meadow,” narrative poems closing the book, employ Seshadri’s dexterity with the notional and the actual to achieve sharp and emotive turns, bringing myth into contact with our fallen outward circumstances in a way it seems many contemporary poets have failed at, like the Union soldiers throwing themselves against the revetments at Cold Harbor, or given up on in favor of an aggressive profaneness. Seshadri finds in The Long Meadow a supple and lyrically plausible voice for the most serious things it is possible to think about, and this voice does not deny itself any of the luxuries modern poetry has accumulated—its capacity for digression and variance of register, its plastic logic and metaphorical license. With respect to this achievement the book seems to me superlative—but I’ll wait for his next one before I say for certain.
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