Seamus Heaney’s last words

At the Celtic colloquium, some hot young scholar, flexing the biceps of his intellect, presented a thesis on poet Seamus Heaney and synesthesia, insisting that Seamus was unaware of what he was doing. that it came naturally. Everyone nodded their heads sagely as if in agreement. I spluttered. The air was dancing with the images of Klee and Kandinsky, tight little figures dueling in the air, musical notes taking flight. The sharp odor of oranges, a pungent wake-up call. 

But mine was the lone voice of dissent,  the presenter’s words grated like a nail-file, full of grit and dust. The pale afternoon light was a seething beast of contradiction. I said, But all poets mix their senses. It comes with a turf, thinking outside the box. Tools of the trade.  It’s a territorial imperative of sorts. My voice twirled into scarlet ribbons, and bled out on the floor, I thought of the barber’s pole spinning madly. No one was listening.

Just today, I was working on my car and as I jabbered to myself, I realized I was automatically rendering my inane actions into prose, it’s something that goes on in the background, sub rosa, like that orchestra of tinnitus in my ears. No off switch. But the prose began to take on a life of its own, mixing the senses as if trying the idea on for size, dressing metaphor in the aisles at the thrift store. Do I remember any of them? Of course not. It happens on a subliminal level and then I unwind the process later. 

So, besides coming into the writing workshop late, I can’t seem to create an environment where synaesthesia will flourish naturally. Today, I am a bystander. Late late late. But when someone reads about Provincetown, I think of Fire Island, a place I’ve never been, and Frank O’Hara in Why I am not a Painter, wrote a dozen poems on oranges—he doesn’t mention the word orange once, while his friend Mike painted the word sardines on his canvas—and then obliterated it until all that was left was a few  letters. And he called it Sardines. I think of those elusive silvered fish of thought, wishing it was another kettle of fish altogether. I wanted it to be salmon, the fish of wisdom.

I imagined Seamus Heaney in an old dressing gown, and tattered slippers rundown at the heel, squatting  over a mossy pond like Bashō, as if in benediction, feeding the fish hazelnuts. But I am allergic to hazelnuts. The epipen is my lodestone. Wisdom ululating in the sacred well with haloed words ripening on the wind. And language becomes a palimpsest of lost thoughts. Words begin to blur on the edges of the canvas until they swim away into the air.

The fish seeking the secrets of the air, all those wayward words nibbling at the shore of cyberspace. I would’ve written more, finally I was in the zone, but my iPad shut down mid-sentence with a warning that it was too hot to continue. The screen turned black as night with no stars in sight. The thermometer bled down the screen. Not even Andromeda could rescue me now. It timorously asked, Would you like to make an emergency call? I thought of Seamus’s last words: Noli timere. Be not afraid, as a black dalia of blood blossomed in his brain.

1/2/24 WOW Writes, with Dulcie Witman

A SHORT STUDY ON SYNAESTHESIA

A SHORT STUDY ON SYNAESTHESIA

Like a writer unable to translate ideas into words,

the composer Ravel, awoke stricken with aphasia—

he could no longer translate patterns into symbols.

His new music, trapped forever in his head.

Notes descend, an angry rain piercing his skin.

La Valse, a premonition of madness coalescing

into the dimensionless existence of a Cartesian point.

We dance around the emotions.

                                                            Remnants of earlier fires.

Is it love or lust? he asks. Think of the blind man

who saw scarlet as a sounding trumpet, or the woman

who heard chromium light & turquoise when the wind raged,

and the walls between the senses come tumbling down.

Decide the dual physics of light: wave pattern

or photon particle? All shadows contain the color

of the object casting the shadow, and its opposite.

Separate emotion from logic & fully understand neither.

In a dark room, Newton reduced light to its true colors

& sought alchemical algorithms to equate the frequency of sound

with wavelengths of light, then blamed Pythagoras,

only to imprism himself: a small boy at the seashore distracted

by metaphysics of smoother pebbles & poetics of prettier shells,

while the great ocean of undiscovered truth lapped at his toes.

Aristotle wrote emotions carry their own logic.

Why was he afraid of metaphor; how did he dream?

He’d deny the music of daylight at sunrise, or the taste of sunset.

The idea of color constancy is an illusion. The artist seeks the truth

of light. Ask Kandinsky about the optics of fretted chords.

Or Nabakov of the long “O” of the alphabet at orgasm.

The logic of emotion is beyond our control.

To approach a paradox: one hand clapping with the intellect

is to either see       or to not see                        in the dark.

Try to write an objective definition of love, rearrange

memory, mix metaphors midstream. Drive Aristotle crazy.

Ask what the stars sound like.

                                                    Describe the taste of darkness.

Plato was right: we are prisoners of our feelings.

Plato was wrong: sometimes it is better to let go

the sacred chord of reason. To be lost. To surrender

            is to find your self again.

no idea when first draft was written 1999?
rev. 10/2001 2001 Transfer Magazine, #82, fall issue