BEST OR (TENT) SHOW: LATE NITE SERMONETTE

On the Appeal of Fragments and Loving Shakespeare Too Much

Fragments are often more tantalizing and evocative than an entire work. Many ruins look better bleached and broken than they did when new and whole. I think this is why reconstructions and restorations are so often unsatisfactory even if absolutely accurate. Restoration robs the ruin of its power to conjure the ages it has withstood, to ensorcell our imaginations as we walk among the the scarred reliefs and tumbled stones. Rock of ages, cleft for me.

Sappho beguiles us so because her work lives in fragments. In little mysterious phrases. "[ ] to melema tonon* [ ]" The transcriptions of papyrus and vellum fragments from classical times often have more brackets than words. All that austerely beautiful pentalic marble in the Parthenon was painted in bright primary colors, after the sculptors and stonemasons finished up. Giantess Athena tricked out in ivory and gold like a right tart.I say this even tho' I know our ancient heritage is being degraded by pollution, defaced or destroyed by fanatics and thugs, and loved to death by tourists. Preservation and restoration are absolutely essential. But when I held a broken piece of Etruscan pottery in my hand, or when I was walking down a little sandstone canyon in Nevada, and suddenly saw like a blind man regaining sight the petroglyphs on the walls all around me, weathered by time and defaced by vandals, that is when the ghosts began whispering up my spine.

Fragments appeal because we ourselves are great jumbled collections of fragments. The unity of human personality and memory is an illusion, and the part is often greater than the whole. The pseudonyms we adopt for ourselves in our blogs are the little fictions that belie the greater fiction that we are integrated unambiguous whole persons. If we don't have multiple personalities we have multiple personas, and we rearrange our mental furniture to suit the current passion play. Sifting the detritus and mementos of a stranger's life, whether at an estate sale or in the pages of a blog, is a way of trying on another history, playing all the parts in someone else's miracle play.

Our brains are built for pattern recognition, to an evolutionary fare-thee-well. Human beings are as overspecialized in this regard as cheetahs or impalas are for speed. This hardwired trait to seek meaningful pattern and integration is the driver of all religion, art, poetry, conspiracy theories and physics. It is a cruel joke we play on ourselves due to an endowment of natural selection, a gift of survival from our hominid ancestors. That is what I say, until I doff my reductionist's pith helmet, and put on my mystic's sombrero.

Since our nerve tissue extends to every part of our bodies, it seems to me that our minds are most likely conterminous with our bodies, and that congress of the confederated states of consciousness known as the self receives not just sensory impressions but thoughts from all parts of the body; not just the cerebral tissue, but from memories from muscles, meditations from the marrow in the bone. Most men have been accused of letting their private parts think for them at one time or another.

I have a weakness for using fragments, lines and phrases from Shakespeare (and other venerable bards and bardettes) as a kind of poetic shorthand for a particular mood or idea, and also a weakness for employing bible verses as a kind of punctuation, often at the end of a poem, as with the quote from the prophet Micah at the end of Lachesis. It's old fashioned to say so, but Shakespeare and the scholars who translated the King James Bible virtually invented the English language as we now have it, between them. Eradicating their pervasive influence from our language would be like removing the oxygen originally created by ancient cyanobacteria two and a half billion years ago from the air we breath. There are, however, several problems with my working tidbits of these titans into my poetry like a bowerbird insinuates foil and bits of ribbon into his palace of grass and twigs. The first difficulty is that people for the most part do not read Shakespeare or the Bible anymore. Many Xtians I know are surprised and appalled to hear some of the things I can quote chapter and verse from their "Good Book." I have been to many a poetry reading at which I heard a "pote" read a "pome" stuffed with tropes or conceits from Shakespeare or even Chaucer that said "pote" when questioned insisted that he (and mostly they were he) had just thought up himself ten minutes ago or the day before yesterday. I consciously write in these borrowed words as if I thought my reader or listener would immediately catch the reference when I know perfectly well it's not true in most cases. The second difficultly is that they are borrowed. Unless I can put a new twist in the tail of a scavenged word, phrase, or metaphor, I don't think I'm doing it poetic justice or my job as a poet. But I love my shiny bits of language I have stolen from the trash heap of human culture. That's third difficultly; I love them, too much.

*"The beloved one"

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 11.7.03)