Courtesy of the website wood s lot, I found this site by the trenchant name The Business of Emotions. “Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers.” Shouldn’t every poet with ambitions to sell books — especially books predicated on sharing emotions and experience, from motherhood to depression — grapple with the question: Am I in the business of emotions?
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Courtesy of an old college professor, I’m reading Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Seven Stories. (How lucky to have just a few people — a handful — in one’s life who can anticipate one’s literary tastes! And on any given day the mailbox may yield a little present.) Ask people to name their favorite Russian writer and usually it comes down to either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy; but for me it’s Gogol. Which Seven Stories descends from — there’s even a hand that detaches itself from a pianist and roams the streets. And (come to think of it) the Eiffel Tower also detaches itself from the ground, terrorizing Paris, and stomps across the countryside before committing suicide in Lake Constance.
(Doesn’t the prospect of the Eiffel Tower terrorizing haughty Paris fill you with immoderate glee?)

All this detachment — this concern with objects taking on a life of their own — must have to do with the experience authors have of their work. Words and characters take on a life of their own; it’s an insight into the autonomy of a force deep down things. Krzhizhanovsky’s bio is limned briefly in the introduction, and it’s another sad story of a Soviet writer hemmed and harassed by the establishment. That texts turn words on a page (think how many times you’ve heard that words on a page are “dead”) into animated objects has been unsettling to even the greatest of writers, unto Plato. So much for materialism.
Those in “the business of emotions” could never see themselves in this passage:
Incidentally, this reminds me of a caricature I once saw in an old English magazine: a girl and a stagecoach. In the first picture, the girl (she’s carrying a basket) has caught up with the receding stagecoach; but to climb up onto the high footboard, she must put her basket down; having scrambled up onto the step, the girl turns around to collect her basket, but the stagecoach has already driven off; in the second picture, the poor girl jumps down, dashes back for her basket then runs after the lumbering stagecoach. She again reaches the step and this time settles her basket on it first; but while she is doing this, the stagecoach picks up speed, and the girl — in the third, and last, picture — exhausted and out of breath, plumps down in the middle of the road and bursts into bitter tears. By this I mean: the literary stagecoach will not wait, which is why the poet with poetry in hand, given conditions today, cannot possibly gain the elusive step: if the poet jumps into literature — then poetry is left behind, left out of literature; if poetry manages to attain the step, to attain an artistic level — then the poet, excluded and rejected, is left completely out. You, of course, disagree.

08.17.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

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