Sharks In The Waters
commentary by Joseph Armstead
"Morn came, and went and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires - and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings, the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forest were set on fire but hour by hour
They fell and faded and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash and all was black."
-- excerpted from "Darkness", a poem by Lord Byron,
a.k.a. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron,
in July of th year 1816, several months
after the eruption of Mount Tambora
in the Dutch East Indies and only months after
the end of Byron's marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke
"Wow. You write some really dark stuff. Why are your poems so harsh and gloomy? I mean, it's poetry, right? Shouldn't it leave me feeling all happy and hopeful?"
Incredibly, at least it's incredible to ME, I get asked that question -- a lot. Inevitably I then think about or even re-read some poem I've posted or had published and I examine it looking for telltale signs of misanthropy, cynicism, agnostic heresy, or wiseass nihilism. And just as inevitably I see only that I've created a poem with subject matter that is part and parcel of the Real World in which we live.
I guess I'm not supposed to do that. It's not polite.
What irks me most is that the aforementioned question is often asked by fellow poets.
.... do you see them? There, swimming slowly in the shadows infecting the deep, moving with sinuous muscularity, primordial and alien, haunting, endlessly patient, their dark expressionless eyes betraying nothing of the ferocity and hunger behind their doll's gaze, avatars of nightmare, forever moving through their liquid limbo with deceptive weightlessness, their powerful bulk buoyed by despair, discontent, envy and vexation, the Lords of Dissentience, the ravening Dogs of Discord. Do you see? They wait... for us.
I’ll start by stating the obvious: there’s a lot of craziness and viciousness loose in the world today – words are weapons and there are a glut of assassinations every hour. We all know this. Anyone who has ever watched the evening news or read the daily newspapers knows this. Anyone who has ever stood at a bus stop or in front of a movie theater where cocky, impudent, mean-spirited urban teenagers have gathered knows this. Sarcasm rules. The art of verbal assassination is ascendant. The endless proliferation of shock-jock Morning Shows saturating the radio airwaves are full of examples of ambush (so-called) “journalism”. Even our multimedia advertising, like television commercials for instance, reflect the wiseacre nature of modern existence. Sales pitches are slanted towards Mad Magazine/Saturday Night Live comedy skits lampooning our suburbanized and homogenized, upwardly-mobile sacred cows.
Many believe that Meanness has been elevated to an art form. Many authors and media critics believe that to publicly acknowledge the rough edges, sharp fangs and ferocious intolerance implicit in human nature is tantamount to beknighting its existence. If you admit its existence you give it undue legitimacy.
And yet, in modern popular literature, which supposedly, at its best, holds up a mirror reflecting the social mores of the times, there seems to be an unspoken collective decision amongst authors and publishers to stay away from those sharp-edged and angry shores. No one wants to be washed up shipwrecked on the beach of anger. Nowhere is this head-in-the-sand, fingers-in-the-ears-la-la-la refusal to see and speak of the unpleasant more visible than in poetry.
Everyone wants to ignore the fact that there are SUPPOSED to be sharks in the waters…
It’s a denial of evolution. It’s a denial of the duality of human nature and human existence.
...there, again, emerging from the inky depths, 420 million years of slumbering fury barely held in check, the order Selachimorpha, survivors of planet Earth's Ordovician Period, outcasts of evolution, not needing to adapt to an evolving world by dint of their innate superiority: born perfect, born hungry, ruling the dark oceans by right of speed and sinew and a maw filled with razor-honed teeth, their super-enhanced tactile senses further amplified by the electroreceptor organs of the Ampullae of Lorenzini, they hunger, they hunt, they kill, they feed, and they keep moving, forever swimming. Do you see? Do you?
Poets, listen up: you can’t have the Light without the Dark.
No, don’t over-think it. Don’t neuter that realization with intellectualized vagaries that blunt the sharp edges and detoxify the venom inherent to the subject. Don’t bore us ad nauseam with bloodless historical citations of classicist examples of irony and weak-kneed, gentile satire.
Yin. Yang. Deal with it.
Get your hands dirty. Dip your pens in freshly spilled blood. Look the animal you’re going to kill right in the eyes and don’t mask your intentions. Draw the knife. Make the cut and make it deep.
Hurt something. Then tell everyone that you did it.
It’s not an academic exercise. It’s not a fit of pique. It’s a responsibility. It’s a Holy Calling.
As a poet, you have the responsibility to occasionally Say Something (capitol letters intentional) that slaps the reader across the face and reminds them that the unpleasant sting they just felt is a gift: a reminder that Beauty is a bouquet adorned with thorns and that’s the way Nature intended it.
It promotes growth, spiritual, intellectual, artistic, moral and societal growth. Without it, that sharp sting, that anxiety-inducing unease, that sensibility-offending stench temporarily polluting the air, we would, as a culture, become little more than dandified, perfumed, overly-polite, politically-correct cattle --- eunuchs at the orgy. We would be at an evolutionary dead end.
Allow yourself and your poetry to hold up that mirror to the Dark Places and let that reflection be its own illumination of the things hiding in those shadows.
Stop being so damn polite. Really.
... beasts, they're beasts, full of the crass meanness and fleshy urges of animals driven to frenzy and look at their aberrant turmoil, so chaotic, so fitful and wicked and frightening, and yet you can see the patterns there, you see the primitive uncluttered logic behind that fury, it's almost mathematical in its non-linear, incongruent, counter-geometric precision and, at some wakeless and abyssal plane of consciousness, in the reptilian core of your brain, it makes sense, this ominous waterdance of aquatic leviathans, you can see why they do what they do and it horrifies you that you can see that because they're beasts and to understand their motivations makes you a beast, too...
How many ways are there to say “I Love You” without the phrase becoming trite and losing meaning altogether? How many odes to the nostalgia of fleeting youth can you craft before those writes become little more than the automatic writing of a trance medium at a carny show? How many times can you suppress your own inner outrage while in the midst of crafting a paen to a passion between fictional lovers whom you know will interest no one other than some snobbish, reactionary literary critic at a magazine no one has ever heard of?
What exactly are you accomplishing? Is this poetry for poetry’s sake, a work of fleeting poesy? Don't you think that is odd? I mean, come on, YOU'VE been In Love... Has it always been postcard sunsets, flowers, candlelight dinners and sweet bird songs for you? And when the inevitable has happened and the affair has ended, when the love has drained away and all that has been left is memory and familiarity and weary politeness, has it always had the golden-glow feel of sweet nostalgia? No anger? No bitter regret? No hot tears of frustration? No urge to break something as you watch them walk out the door for that final time (or as YOU walk out the door for the last time)?
We both know the answer to that. And if you deny that in your writing, then you're cheating. Cheating yourself and cheating your readers.
Worse, you've become stunted. You've rejected the onset of maturity. You've stopped evolving.
Grow. Let the lumps and bumps and gawky angles misshape your Raphaelian/Botticellian loveliness and become a work of art that challenges the perceptions of beauty. Grow and evolve. Stop writing the same technically proficient-but-unmemorable pap over and over.
Remember that, regardless of how lovely and tranquil the beach and how serene and inviting the ocean's azure waters may be, there are SUPPOSED to be sharks in the waters…
It’s the natural order. You can’t have the Light without the Dark.
... Here they come, thrashing the waters with the scythes of their tails, living torpedoes sliding through dream-state, haunting your senses, their images burning through the shield of your intellect and scorching unwanted contrails, flaminmg burrows, into the interior of your mind, the sight of them will not leave you. You start to pant, hyperventilating, and the flop-sweat begins to pour out from your clammy flesh and for the first time in a long time you truly feel alive and you feel so damn guilty for feeling so galvanized. This just might hurt. A lot. You know that. And you try to hide from yourself that you secretly want this hurt. Look at them, so lean, so sleek. They're coming...
So occasionally, write some dark stuff. Unapologetically. Unrepentently. Rant and rail and blaspheme. And no, it doesn't have to be "pretty". Pretty is very over-rated. Just write it well. Just infuse it with honesty and intelligence.
Revel in your Sharkiness. Hurt something.
Yin. Yang. Deal with it.
"Wow. You write some really dark stuff."
Yes. Yes I do.
This has been a public service announcement.
Image courtesy of Dreamstime Photographic Stock: "Shark" by Thedragoo (Marco Cisaria), dreamstime_m_2005403.jpg
