"Meditation at Lagunitas" by Robert Hass
In which Plato, Saussure, and Helen Vendler walk into a childhood river.
Meditation at Lagunitas All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. —Robert Hass from Praise (Ecco, 1979)
I’ve spent more time than I want to admit thinking about the Facebook reactions, especially since I haven’t been “on” Facebook for nearly a decade. It’s the lack of parallelism that confounds me. I like this, one might think, then click the little thumb to signify: okay, sure. I love this: finger, or cursor, to heart. But then: I haha this? I . . . wow it. I sad it, I angry it. I befuddle. I realize there’s an emoji for that. I promise this has to do with poetry.
“Meditation at Lagunitas” is, I will argue near to the death, a perfect poem. Despite its 1979 publication in Praise—it is as old as I am—it remains as fresh and surprising for me as it was the first time I read it, an encounter I feel fortunate to remember; it’s not often you confidently recall, for instance, the moment a favourite person entered your ken. Nor is it necessarily typical to remember an exam question twenty-five years after you closed the blue book, but such was my undergraduate poetry education: singular and enduring. The essay prompt entailed a comparison-contrast between the Hass poem and Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Blackberries” (the audio is the man himself; give it a click). I don’t remember what argument I made—only the feeling of Hass’s meditation opening, the longer I looked, like a lotus.
All I knew of Helen Vendler at that time was her book On Extended Wings, on Wallace Stevens’s longer poems, with which I’d grappled in pursuit of an unwieldy high school essay on “Sunday Morning,”1 but what captivated me in “Meditation at Lagunitas,” I realize now, is embodied by her notion of the speech act2 as a means of accessing a poem. By recognizing the function of each utterance and observing the shifts from sentence to sentence, one gains a deeper understanding of a poem’s tones—its emotional attitudes. In part it’s simple rhetorical analysis. It’s also just being a good listener, attentive to the speaker in front of you, how his effort unfurls with ease or snags, catches or exhales, sets out an assertion or walks it back, tests an idea or insinuates it, waits for your response.
Nor had I yet encountered Ferdinand de Saussure, but that’s where Hass ultimately begins, after a quick trip to the Platonic realm via the clown-faced woodpecker with whom we slum here on this mortal coil. Given that the poem’s next subject is language, the new thinking that resembles Plato’s is presumably semiology, a central tenet of which Hass interprets as the “notion that, / because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies.” Though the word conjures an image, it’s an echo, a memory, an utterance that knows the sound it makes is not the thing itself.
The speech acts thus far are largely intellectual—one might say academic. Hass asserts:
All the new thinking is about loss.
Compares:
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
Illustrates:
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea.
Illustrates through description:
That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light.
Then inverts this structure, first illustrating and then asserting his second, startling claim:
Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
It’s an intelligent, measured opening, these eleven lines, six of them endstopped, nine of them stretching past pentameter to hexameter and heptameter,3 both measures associated with Classical prosody. The utterances are a hair longer than your average Shakespeare monologue, that machine of fluent feeling matched to the natural rhythms of heart and breath, and there is no grammatical person in this opening, no sense of an individual speaker, his mood or sympathies or the fact that he has a migraine or was supposed to leave for work ten minutes ago. Instead the poem presents as a thought experiment. Or more simply, given the title, a koan: a problem to be held up to the light. And what a delicious, daring problem it is in the context of a poem, this reminder that language is always imperfect, in the end, always imprecise.
Hass moves on to narrative as line twelve finally introduces our speaker, though notably we begin, ah ha, with “we.” There’s a nice moment of disorientation here as we are momentarily led to believe we ourselves had this conversation late last night. This shift in speech act is a lovely moment of unassuming intimacy, the speaker seeming to have forgotten we weren’t there, or assuming we already know with whom he was speaking, the way we so often launch into the middle of the story with those close to us. Hass engages metaphor to describe his friend’s tone as a thin wire of grief—here evoking ye olde landline, and a physical distance that undercuts their intellectual closeness—and skips through the discussion casually: “After a while” he comes to the understanding that the interrogation of a sign empties it of meaning. Surely this is a moment of existential terror for the poet, and notice how the list of losses grow larger as the signified grow more specific and particular, from the unwieldy abstraction that is justice to the nearest and most personal: you and I.
The next sentence continues in a narrative mode, but it shifts from the recent past of “last night” to one distant and unspecified. His meditation has given him access to another plane of memory, and a reverie that will make the connection between Plato’s eros and Saussure’s semiotics: as the word stands in for the thing, the beloved’s beauty stands in for Beauty:
There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
For both philosopher and poet, the body of the beloved allows access to something beyond the physical. For Plato, the world of Forms. For Hass, the “violent wonder” he compares to “a thirst for salt, for my childhood river / with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, / muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish / called pumpkinseed.” Hass’s first world contains both desire and its antecedent: the innocence of childhood, its silly music and pleasure boats, its muddy places and delight in nomenclature and innocence of the fact that all of it will end. His glimpse of paradise is also fleeting.
The reverie ends abruptly when the adult speaker, suddenly conscious of the illusion, concedes to both Plato and Saussure: “It hardly had to do with her. / Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.” The line break is impeccable, yoking the losses together: as absence is a requisite condition of desire, imprecision is a requisite condition of language. We can’t ever say what we mean. We can only come close. We can never return to “undivided light.” But we can hear it in the voices, glimpse it in the eyes of the ones we love.
I had this poem looping through my helmeted noggin on a long mountain bike ride last week, appropriate to the twisty, enthusiastically-bermed single track through which I was amusing myself by trying to pedal continuously, when I felt a violent indignation at a line I’d never before questioned: “It hardly had to do with her.” It’s tied for the shortest sentence in the poem at seven words, matching the opening line’s assertion, but where that one contains six beats, this one’s only four, and thus as far as speech acts go, it is the shortest. Simply, it is a declarative sentence, making a statement. In a more nuanced analysis, it might be termed a clarification or negation.
In days of yore, I’d simply nodded and moved along: yes, yes, this is all to do with our Speaker, the sovereignty of his memory and mind; he’d have had this experience with anyone. This time, I got mad! Exhausted by, oh, assorted aspects of digital life, how we’ve learned to shortcut absolutely everything, to categorize and sort, to label, simplify, reduce, and—we like to think—master, not realizing that in doing so we have simplified, reduced, dehumanized, ourselves. Mad! I furiously clicked whilst swerving to avoid an oak, thinking of, as one does, of phenomenological approaches to language. From David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, a holy text:
The enigma that is language, constituted as much by silence as by sounds, is not an inert or static structure, but an evolving bodily field. It is like a vast, living fabric continually being woven by those who speak. [French phenomenologist] Merleau-Ponty here distinguishes sharply between genuine, expressive speech and speech that merely repeats established formulas. The latter is hardly ‘speech’ at all; it does not really carry meaning in the weave of its words but relies solely upon the memory of meanings that once lived there.
Though Merleau-Ponty here makes a fine argument against cliche, the stakes, I think, are far more dire when we consider how fully contemporary human experience is mediated by language, and, less and less, by speech. A proliferation of signs, of signifiers, with the signified, embodied world almost an afterthought. I do it all the time, overwriting an entire human consciousness, even one I love—to say nothing of those who are strangers or opponents of some type, with an idea of my own devising, assuming the worst, only to be chastened again and again by just how wrong I’ve got it.
Dear Reader, I’d forgotten how the poem ends. The sentence is neither clarification nor negation; it’s simply an attempt to stifle grief, a little bit of Bishopian self-talk; that glorious enumeration of Hass’s irreplaceable beloved tells us as much. Let my mistake be your lesson: stay here in the embodied world. Really listen. Whenever you can, say the words out loud.
The first poem to do me the favour of entirely dismantling and then reshaping my psyche.
We learn the basic concept, at least, in grade school, classifying sentences as declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory. Vendler’s truly wonderful textbook Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology contains two+ pages of examples commonly found in lyric.
Counted accentually, lines containing five, six, or seven stressed syllables, respectively.