I believe we have read the poem Proximity before because I remember being really intrigued by it, but I don’t understand it. I want to write about it, and think about it, even though I don’t quite get how it connects to the political. I think is poem is a very interesting way to present the body. I’m not entirely sure what C. Dale Young is writing about but it sticks with me. It begins with what I would call dissociation, feeling removed from your body. From there it has my attention, when I think of dissociation I think of trauma. Trauma is something remembered in the body. The effects of which can literally alter your body chemistry and physiological responses, even if your mind tries to forget. Tricks of the mind indeed.
But then we move away from not feeling your body, or feeling parts of you that are gone, to a whole different feeling. When the phantom touch is described I am taken to a deeply lonely place. A place where you want connection so badly you imagine you can feel it. The use of ‘ghost hand’ and the past tense of ‘the way you would when you turned over’ make me think the author is longing for someone who is gone.
The next sensation described is of the body disappearing and I have trouble understanding this. Are we disassociating again from the shock of the visceral reaction to the ghost hand? But this imagine of the body slowly dissolving sticks with me.
Then the legs and the chest leaving the heart exposedand beating, the traveling pulses of bloodexpanding the great vessels. The rib cage vanished
This reads as ultimate vulnerability to me. The imagery of heart exposed, beating, the final protection of the rib cage vanishing. This feels raw and scary.
Whisper me a few lies, god, beautiful and familiar lies.
This false sensation is better than nothing.
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ReplyDeleteI loved this one too. I also read it as though the speaker was missing a lost loved one, who had become so close that they became almost a part of the speaker's body. Therefore, losing them was almost as painful and disorienting as losing a limb. The final disappearance at the end struck me as the devastation associated with losing someone and feeling like they were/are an essential part of your life. I also totally agree that there is a deep sense of both vulnerability and loneliness, and the "you" and the speaker blur together at times to seem like one person. I had a hard time finding the political in this one, as well, as (to me) it reads as such a personal, intimate poem about loss.
ReplyDeleteYour reading of Dale C. Young's poem as vulnerability rings true to me. The way you connected it with trauma and disassociation is very poignant. I think that sometimes a lot of folks forget that trauma stays with a person and can manifest itself as physical pain.
ReplyDeleteI think what's amazing about this interpretation you've written is how your impression is one of not understanding or feeling a little confused by what the author is trying to portray. That response is exactly one of the things the poem aims to leave in the reader: a sense of unsureness, a phantom sense of understanding; essentially, the poem's phantom limb. There is deliberate obscurity in this "syndrome" as the poem calls it, the syndrome of feeling touch without really having it. He quotes Mark, one of the four gospels in the Christian New Testament, which exhorts him to cut off his offensive right hand. That's the last thing Young or the narrator would do, miss out on this feeling of the beloved or other's touch. Perhaps that is the political part of this poem, his naming of the desire of the flesh in the hopes that it will be met - even if it is a hope based on lies, he wants to hear them.
ReplyDelete"what syndrome describes this? Not the sense of touch but of being touched." This line makes me think the narrator is attempting to challenge the diagnosis of disassociation as the reason the feeling of "being touched" not simply "the sense of touch" has left the body. This echoes something even deeper for me the reader. What is causing this reverberation effect within the bod? It is not simply the phantom limb, because I argue that even if a limb was or wasn't there, the narrator would have trouble feeling touch
ReplyDeleteSilence, invisibility, disassociation, insensitivity..oh it describes a ghost life
ReplyDeleteYour discussion places a form to the lost body