Herr Stimmung on Transparency

H
To those of a certain temperament, there is nothing worse than the
thought of something hidden, secret, withheld from their knowing—
especially if they suspect that another knows about it and has even,
perhaps, connived at keeping it concealed.

D. H. Lawrence seems to have been irritated no end by the thought
that people were having sex and not telling him.

Freud too.

—Ah but then Freud arranged it so that everyone had to tell.

His psychoanalysis lights up the depths, makes our tangled web
transparent, to the point where I can see all the way down to It.

And the process moves outward in increasing rings:

The Master analyses his disciples. Who thereby—transparent
now—become masters and, in turn, take on others, patients or
disciples, to analyse.

So that eventually there are no secrets.

Except, of course, those of the first Master, the Self-Analysed.

Which is to say, the only private One, sole Unrevealed. Opaque
center of His universal panopticon.

While we see only His words, His daughter, His cigar.

Poor Lawrence.
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Tuning by Keith Waldrop
Keith Waldrop
Herr Stimmung—purblind—moves in corporeal time.

Think how many, by now, have escaped the world’s memory.

Think, how all his wandering is only thought. Having once tried to
live in the quasi-stupor of sensation, now he picks his way through
areas of spilth, seeking the least among infinite evils.

His hope: intermittent.

To a person so little conscious, what would it mean to die? Though
he feels, true enough, death’s wither-clench. Thinking always of
Read Poem
0
119
Rating:

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Read Poem
0
108
Rating:

The Giant Yea by Theodore Weiss
Theodore Weiss
... who can bear the idea of Eternal Recurrence? I

Even as you went over, Nietzsche,
Read Poem
0
117
Rating:

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (1 April 1945) by W. D. Snodgrass
W. D. Snodgrass
(Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, once bragged that if one German city were bombed, they could call him “Meier.” At his Karinhall estate, he questions himself and his disgrace.) And why, Herr Reichsmarschall, is Italy
Just like schnitzel? If they’re beaten
Read Poem
0
134
Rating:

Clothes by Edgar Bowers
Edgar Bowers
Walking back to the office after lunch,
I saw Hans. “Mister Isham, Mister Isham,”
He called out in his hurry, “Herr Wegner needs you.
A woman waiting for a border pass
Took poison, she is dead, and the police
Are there to take the body.” In the hall,
The secretaries stood outside their doors
Silently waiting with Wegner. “Sir,” he said,
Read Poem
0
151
Rating:

For Louis Pasteur by Edgar Bowers
Edgar Bowers
“Who is Apollo?” College student How shall a generation know its story
If it will know no other? When, among
Read Poem
0
137
Rating:

The Four Seasons by Henry Carlile
Henry Carlile
*
In the shape of a submarine
frost lengthens on a window.
Outside, winter sparrows perch
in rhinoceros-colored trees.
Mare's tails chase whitely
past brick chimneys.
I have seen those lights before,
Read Poem
0
163
Rating:

Un Citadin / A City Dweller by Jacques Réda
Jacques Réda
The street I walk along I often see
As if I'd long since left the moving surface
Of the world for the endless other side that disperses
Us all some day without return but free

Of care. I apply myself so well to this fragile proceeding
That very quickly my gaze ceases to be
Part of the cloudy clump of hope and memory
I'll have given my name to. But for this to succeed,

A feeling of absolute happiness has to make
Itself felt, as if from outside me, so much
That at that moment the very street has a hunch
That it, the entire city, and its uncertain space

Read Poem
0
120
Rating: