I saw pork feet on sale at the grocery today. Who the hell would buy pork feet? It looked like they were pickled.

I have a heavy key-ring now: three keys from Qdoba and a little metal gizmo that I don't recognize, that Chris gave me Tuesday. They alone seem to speak of responsibility; I'm unused to their sensible weight. My past key-rings have had one key - at most, two. When I lived at Bromley, it was a single room key, when I went home I carried only a car key - depending on the door being unlocked to get back into the house at night. For this year, I've carried my mailbox key as well as a door one, but it's a small key. Light, carefree. My new key-ring makes me more depended-on, if not more dependable - which I may not yet be ready to be. It makes me feel old.
If you thought that was whiny and self-centered, then you should probably stop reading now...

So we talked about a poem in class today. This in itself is not remarkable, because we've been talking about poems all week. But what is remarkable is that I don't usually like poetry, that I'm usually strictly fiction, and yet I ended up having this experience of profound joy because of the professor's explication of the poem.

Which touched off some ruminations of my own.

Which you are welcome to ignore, because they're both about me, personally, and here more in order to get my thoughts out. Therefore they are quite dull. Let's start with the poem itself:

Sad Steps
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate -
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

The poet, old and with a weak bladder, is struck by the sight of the moon. The absurd juxtaposition of the quotidian, the dirty nature of life with this supposedly-elevated artistic vocation. The entire poem is centered on this bathos - deflating this artistic impulse. The second through fourth stanzas describe the same scene in increasingly ridiculous, grandiose language. The moon becomes a "lozenge of love," the clouds become "wolves of memory" (maybe; who the fuck knows what a wolf of memory is, anyway?). Larkin parodies the language and attitude of the lyrical poetry he feels an impulse to engage in. It's pretty funny, I think. But also provoking, at least to me.

Called to describe the beauty of what he sees, Larkin (or at least, we're supposed to read him as Larkin) can't help but become self-critical, self-parodic. The poem, implicitly, is asking "Is art transcendent? Or is it only a pose?" Larkin sees it as the latter, as something that can't help but become absurd in certain circumstances - but he longs for the time when he was younger and could be certain in his convictions, without the second-guessing he is plagued with in his old age.

My professor described the urge the poet feels as akin to a photographer, her leg bitten off by a rottweiler, lying on the ground and marveling at the beauty of her blood on the grass - wishing she'd brought her camera, so she could take a shot at it. We LOL'd.

But, more than any other poem I've read recently, it made sense to me. It's something I've struggled with - that urge. Both in the way that Larkin describes it and in the way that my professor recontextualized it. There are at least two parts to this, so here's where I go off the deep end and hope it makes sense.

First, this artistic urge or perspective; I've had for a few years now the awareness of how something I'm involved in, something I'm feeling, could be used for the sake of art. Like the photographer in the example, there are times when I've noticed myself stepping back - without even meaning to - and thinking about how what I'm feeling or going through could be used in my writing. This isn't uncommon, I know - I think I've read a Neil Gaiman essay/story where he discusses it, for instance(?) - but it's a damn strange feeling. Because it seems like it negates or invalidates what I am feeling at the time for me to be able to step back and think about it. Yet is it even possible for anyone to be unaware of the cultural meanings and clichés they act into, in 2006? Especially as a writer/artist who has decided to make the interrogation of cultural meanings and clichés a vocation?

So the question Larkin asks remains: is this awareness and self-ridicule/doubt inherent to being an artist? If so, is it possible to combat it or change it? Characteristically, Larkin doesn't provide an answer.

Along with this first part, there's a bathetic element to the feeling I've had. Just as Larkin mocks himself for even considering describing the moon in a romanticized, lyrical manner, I've found myself ridiculing certain emotions or sentiments of my own, because they seem so clichéd, so trite. This was especially true my first two years in college, because I felt (for reasons entirely my own fault) that I had to hide my emotions - had to be strong and solid and logical, because someone needed to fill that position. And so whenever I'd get a sentimental, emotional impulse, I'd feel like I needed to suppress it. To force myself to fit the role I'd forced myself into taking in the first place. It was a very self-conscious, intentional distancing from my own sensibilities, one that didn't end up being positive.

For the past year, though, I’ve felt like I was doing this much, much less. Maybe it’s the change in situation, maybe it’s that I’ve grown up a bit, I don’t know. Paradoxically, though, I do feel that I’m looking at what happens to me much less from a detached, critical, artistic perspective now – now, when I’m writing a novel that’s semi-pseudo-quasi-autobiographical.

But here I am, thinking and writing about my feelings about how I’m feeling about how I’m feeling. Endlessly referential. There’s philosophical discussion about the self-referentiality of the mind, I know, but I dropped the class on that before I got any answers. Maybe there's no solution to Larkin's dilemma, after all. The thing is, now that I’m doing more living and less thinking about living, I’m starting to reconsider my whole attitude to the second-guessing stasis I was in for so long.

To an extent, I still dislike it – it’s a product of the sad, stagnant self-awareness that permeates so much of art and culture that I find dull and pointless. But to an extent, I’m wondering, tonight: I felt paralyzed and unable to act on my emotions, but that was still, itself, a feeling! And therefore just as valid, albeit not as demonstrative of one as might have been expected? Maybe?

But I'm becoming melodramatic, boring even (who would have thought this possible?) myself. I’m do know that I'm much happier now that I’m less of whatever I was a year ago. I also have a story I should be writing. If anyone’s read this far, then know this: my next post will have something actually interesting/musical, I promise.