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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 17, 2023 19:23:28 GMT -5
Dear fellow Retallackites:
It's time to turn to our seventh sample of Joan Retallack's writing—a poem called "The Problem of Evil." Here is a link to the text of the poem:
Here are a few questions you might ponder as you respond here in our discussion forum thread:
1. What sort of "evil" does JR mean here? 2. She's playing with various senses—including idiomatic senses—of "light" in the final lines of the first section of the poem. What is she doing with light? What effect do the variations of this term/idea have on us as readers of the poem? 3. Both sections begin with the idea of a game with opaque or indiscernible rules. What's going on there? What does such a game have to do with the problem of evil? 4. Why the quasi-repeating/variational two sections? What effect does this have? 5. What is the overall *tone* of this poem?
I look forward to your responses!
—Al
I respectfully request that we be called Re tallacktites in honor of those of us who feel like we are just managing to hang on as we pursue our goal of reaching the bottom of this cavern of seeking an understanding of Joan and her inspirers. Are we not all at a Retallacka concert this week where “the fans are screaming” and “we are dazed / from the glare of the lights?”
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soni
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Posts: 5
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Post by soni on Jan 17, 2023 19:23:30 GMT -5
Reading the poem, I felt the "evil" was the manipulation and perversion of truth---"strange experimental fiction." Yikes. Truth should be our anchor, right? The YES. I read this poem in a political frame of mind, because that's where I am at, with many of things we are experiencing now in the world, with the rise of disinformation, authoritarianism, silencing of dissent "puts his hand over your mouth". And especially the title, The Problem of Evil, echoing the past, leads me there.
"This is a game where the players have forgotten the rules" = breakdown in society, when politicians, leaders, and citizens stop observing unwritten rules that maintain a semblance of order, and people stop engaging in behaviors that promote trust, community, and independent thought. The fans are THE MOB. When everything starts being a game, and loses meaning..... evil spreads and cannot be isolated or contained. "The past has left you (me, us ) unprepared for" this moment.
Tone/sections questions were related. Part one and part two had differing tones, and I think that had to do with the line breaks vs. lack of line breaks, amount of repetition, what phrases she chose to repeat. I read part two as being more sinister, dark, passionate and climactic. And part one as more removed, narrative, lack of emotion.
Light=truth? god?, but we don't even believe there's such a thing anymore, it's too "metaphysical and suspect." We're too distracted with Miss Pasta ; ) and blimps, and gladiator football games.
a miss --amiss Pasta
A question: before he puts his hand over you mouth...that's not a typo? She changed it in part 2.
That's my take at this moment.
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Post by Carla Stein on Jan 17, 2023 19:45:38 GMT -5
3. Both sections begin with the idea of a game with opaque or indiscernible rules. What's going on there? What does such a game have to do with the problem of evil? I like the way this is phrased. “This is a game” refers directly back to ‘The Problem of Evil’ wherein the “light of reason” only serves to make things opaque. The application of reason itself is “highly metaphysical / and suspect”. Sorry but “a god dividing light from dark” is “like the figure who appears / in your dark bedroom and sneezes / before he puts his hand over your mouth”. Good and evil can’t be separated just as light and dark can’t be separated. You can’t have one without the other. And there is no way to figure it out. There is no discernment to be gained in rational disputation by the light of reason. It’s a reason to let sleeping dogs lie. I.e. trying to figure it out only causes more confusion. Lying like a dog is to lie a lot - to tell many untruths. Best not to wake him up. The way to elucidate the problem of evil is not to shine the light of reason on it but to compose a poem that works as JR has done. Who is Miss Pasta? It’s rather Epicurious. The past has left you Another ominous message. I agree, Miss Pasta refers to previous thinking about good and evil, however, I think there is also another play on words here: The line reads: “a Miss Pasta” which if read quickly out loud easily sounds like “amiss”, In other words the faulty or inaccurate past.
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Post by Judy on Jan 17, 2023 21:46:04 GMT -5
I saw Apocalypse Now too. It was upsetting.
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Post by vijaya on Jan 17, 2023 22:04:14 GMT -5
I am tempted to complete the phrase from JR’s title. The problem of evil is that we encounter it, it has always been there, and yet we do not truly understand it. We are shocked and paralyzed by and take refuge in religion to comfort us. Is life a game? I am thinking of Hitler and Putin and all the oppressors who want to win at all costs, and who ignore the rules. Where does that leave ordinary people like us? We are the ones who tell those sleeping dog lies’ – I love JR’s play on the word ‘lies.’ What games do we all play? We all go along with Wall Street games, Housing games, Imperialistic games, war games, bottom-line games, and insurance and the bottom-line game, Insurance game, etc. and we all go along with those games. Miss Pasta- is that a reference to the Mafia? It is such a hilarious reference and yet ominous. All the players are discarding the rules, and we all are culpable. Are we all evil? Is she saying that this person who is about to kill is just an ordinary human who sneezes? And then there is that line, ‘truth is a strange experimental fiction something for which the past has left you unprepared’ This reminded me of Stein’s Portrait of Picasso. JR is saying history does not help at all. We do not learn any of history's lessons. The last stanza is a flash picture of a game in a stadium where we are all onlookers. We are all caught up in the game. It is denial, escapism, living vicariously, and ‘we are dazed from the glare of the lights’ Takes me to Emily Dickinson’s Tell all the truth but tell it slant. We are losing the ability to see the truth because we are all part of the evil in the world. We are all as much a part of the problem as we are part of the solution too. The last lines give the impression that JR finds religion an unreliable source of solving the problem of evil, religion relies on the binaries which in fact lead us back to playing the ‘game’ that the power-mongers of the world (bullies) want us to play so they can win. These are my initial response to the poem. There is a lot more to unpack here.
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Post by Judy on Jan 17, 2023 22:10:05 GMT -5
"Who is Miss Pasta? It’s rather Epicurious. The past has left you Another ominous message." I quoted from whoever you are writing above here and thought Miss Pasta might be a Paul Auster-like character from name of novel forgotten for the moment but his--Auster's--characters color names of and Robert Browning's awkward referenced but not speaking character inhabiting the poem of named character or it's a livelier Clarissa Dalloway from a high subject mind over a hundred years later or The Beatles'1960's misfit era, lost soul, Eleanor Rigby or her is of name of character in Lot 49 and I am very limited on Pyncheon, to say the least but that short one I read but a long time ago and her (Retallack's) "Miss Pasta" and "epicurious" and the rest of his, meaning previous Learner's quoted part used here is speaks like the Pyncheon (I only read the one short book, just so you know I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow) miniature character's narrativizer like whatever entity I forget and
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leahs
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Post by leahs on Jan 17, 2023 22:30:15 GMT -5
This poem struck me as very noir to begin with -- and that the evil being conveyed in it was kind of noir, which is to mean stylized and campy, but also kind of genuinely scary for me when in the first section the mention is made of the man's hand going over her/the speaker's mouth. In this respect, it struck me a bit as a dream repetition, the two sections; I've had dreams where someone is doing something bad, such as killing someone else, or kidnapping, and I can't yell out or scream -- a different way of being silenced in a dream, maybe -- maybe that is what scared me, maybe part of what can be evil is being silenced, or silencing someone else.
Perhaps part of the way silencing of people can happen is through cliche and through trope and through form. If a form (of film, of narrative, of poetry) does not permit a certain way of speaking, this, too is a kind of silencing. Perhaps another way silencing can happen or has happened of women in general in literary and political history is through being idealized ("you are the light of my life he whispers") at the same time as being silenced/oppressed. And in fact those things going together -- if the/a woman speaks, the idea of her as ideal perfection (at least by traditional Euro patriarchy's standards) is broken, she is no longer "a light" but instead "darkness". This also reminds me of Laura Mulvey's influential writings about the male gaze in film -- that "men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.” However, in darkness, not much can be seen at all. I realize Retallack is a more complicated read than this, but I wonder if she is referencing Mulvey's ideas. In any case, those ideas certainly are evoked for me in reading this poem, which seems so cinematic -- I also think of "the light" now as the projector light that cuts across a darkened cinema, the idea of woman as projection of male gaze, particularly in film. Thousands of women have acted in this light, across a cinema screen, but for most of them the words coming out of their mouths were written and directed by men.
That said, the "evil" could reference classic cinema titles such as "Touch of Evil." It could reference patriarchy, or patriarchal ideas about women, as evil. It could reference violence against women, symbolically or otherwise, as evil.
Before I went down this track in my thinking, however, I was thinking about the "recutting"/"editing"/"intersplicing" between sections 1 and 2 and when I considered the word "evil" and splicing that or rewinding it of course I end up with the word "live" - from this perspective I wasn't sure if it was possible to read this poem as being about some kind of statement on evil being intrinsically part of being a/"live". Instead, perhaps here and now, thinking through this, I read it as another possibly filmic reference -- the action in a film never being "live," after all, always edited, always respliced, always recorded and replayed (I think this could be the referent action Retallack is going for between sections 1 and 2 -- different cuts of the same "film," "shoot," or "scenes") perhaps we can think that if recorded cinema is the opposite of "live" action, it linguistically thus constitutes the "reverse" of life, or "evil."
Anyway, this was fun to think through! Looking forward to reading others comments and thinking more about the other questions Al has posed.
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Post by Judyagain on Jan 17, 2023 22:31:07 GMT -5
The narrator explains the character of Miss Pasta's Pyncheonesque, Bastianich-like analogue (which in my opinion is that partly because of the word title mode but nit a title here of "Epicurious" there and here not a title and as I started saying this narrative moded thing because it isn't really a normal narrator, I don't think anyway, tells of her extreme emotional situation and severe problems and intelligence illegally gathered and criminally acted on and the problems relate to executorship of a will and an outside female role of such a position of estate executor and is in California too before or when she is married in the Pyncheon novel and can then act on this California will in that which is a mystery novel while Miss Pasta is narratively referred to with imagery Chaucerian around her to suggest something negative when pasta is salt supported in the right temperature water to be continued mentally only in that
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Post by Paul K on Jan 18, 2023 0:00:39 GMT -5
1. What sort of "evil" does JR mean here? 2. She's playing with various senses—including idiomatic senses—of "light" in the final lines of the first section of the poem. What is she doing with light? What effect do the variations of this term/idea have on us as readers of the poem? 3. Both sections begin with the idea of a game with opaque or indiscernible rules. What's going on there? What does such a game have to do with the problem of evil? 4. Why the quasi-repeating/variational two sections? What effect does this have? 5. What is the overall *tone* of this poem?
5. The overall tone of this poem is just plain creepy. Close reading needed to see if it might be anything more.
4. This is one of the things she likes to do. Now, instead of rearranging others' words (Stein's, discarded authors'), she shuffles her own. The shuffling follows a definite pattern of interweaving. First she interleaves lines 10-17 with 1-9: 1, 10, 2, 11, etc. to 17, 9. Then she interleaves 18-26 with 10-18. Note that 10-18 have now been used twice. Section 2 still begins and ends with lines 1 and 26, but now has 35 lines.
Perhaps it is a way of mulling things over, or looking at the same stuff from a different point of view--as one shuffles the letters in a puzzle to see if it better helps one find a solution. This poem is, after all, about a problem.
3. The game is opaque because "the players have forgotten / the rules". Did they once know them? Even if this implies there once was an Eden, now we are
(a) unable to hide [no use telling sleeping dog lies];
(b) without purpose, but trying to keep up appearances [trying to look purposeful];
(c) scared [occasionally hopping / to keep from burning up] (yes, this is funny, a reference perhaps to children hopping on green and white squares in the elementary school hallway; followed by Miss Pasta, perhaps a teacher); (d) threatened [by Miss Pasta's ominous message on the machine];
(e) alone [in your empty apartment]; (f) unprepared for the truth of this terrible situation [see lines 10 through 12]; (g) sexually vulnerable and attacked by germs and men [see lines 13 and 14, and yes, the sneeze is funny here, too)]; (h) unable to hear [whether above the screaming of fans of the game or ceiling fans]; (i) unable to see [whatever message the blimp flashes form on high, dazed / from the glare of the lights]; (h) unable to take meaningful comfort from what is dismissed as metaphysical: God, Reason, Hope [see lines 21-25]
Would "the rules" have given us purpose, security, understanding, love?
2. Line 26: you are the light of my life he whispers. Does this point to some type of redemption (good) from the love of another person? It doesn't feel that way. In Section 1, the last "he" was the one who put "his hand over your mouth." Even human love is (if such it is) threatening and silencing: just creepy.
End of Section 2:
the fans are screaming like a God dividing light from dark high above the lights or the Light of Reason a blimp flashes or the Light at the End of the Tunnel a message we can't make out you are the light of my life he whispers
Hopeful interpretation: something there is above the lights (above the Light of Reason), which flashes (or screams a word, like God breaking chaos into light and dark), a message that is as much light (at the End of the Tunnel) as we get, hard to decipher: human-to-human love.
1. The problem of evil is the problem of hope. What is our hope in the face of evil? Vulnerable, lost, scared, threatened, attacked, alone, unprepared, our senses overwhelmed, our hopes beyond the world shattered, to what can we turn? To another human.
Since, with Wittgenstein, Retallack may believe no meaningful question can be stated when no meaningful answer can be given, she may also believe no problem can be meaningfully stated (as she has done or shown) without there being a possible meaningful answer. She may have given it.
-Paul
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Post by sophianaz on Jan 18, 2023 0:20:37 GMT -5
For me the juxtaposition of the physical light ( blinding, indecipherable, ominous) with idiomatic senses of light had the effect of “contaminating” the metaphysical light, making it suspect. Light appears early on in the poem. The “blazing” green and white grid ( could this be suburbia with its white picket fences and green lawns?) reminded me of early video games and there’s something in the repetitive rearrangement of the lines that is akin to moving pieces on a game board. The line about the sleeping dog is a clever inversion of “ let sleeping dogs lie”. I found the tone of the poem akin to a masterful slow reveal culminating in the last line “ you are the light of my life” which we know is a lie. I found it to be chilling. It also reminded me of Mark Antony’s soliloquy in Julius Caesar in which the repetition of phrase “They are all honorable men” is turned into an indictment by the end of the speech. JR does something akin to that with the different ways she uses light. I wonder if JR is saying that the problem with evil that it is subtle and insidious and not a neat binary of black and white as religion would have us believe.
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Post by Paul K on Jan 18, 2023 0:24:16 GMT -5
Perhaps another way silencing can happen or has happened of women in general in literary and political history is through being idealized ("you are the light of my life he whispers") at the same time as being silenced/oppressed. And in fact those things going together -- if the/a woman speaks, the idea of her as ideal perfection (at least by traditional Euro patriarchy's standards) is broken, she is no longer "a light" but instead "darkness". This also reminds me of Laura Mulvey's influential writings about the male gaze in film -- that "men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.” However, in darkness, not much can be seen at all. Leah,
I enjoyed your whole post. As to this specific part of what you wrote, I think you have explicated even more deeply how "you are the light of my life he whispers" reads to me at the end of Section 1.
Soni wrote, quite the reverse of me, that Section 2 was more dire that Section 1. I must admit that my reading of Section 2 is based upon a possible construction of the final eight lines. I have not yet thoroughly wrestled with "beginning" and "middle" of Section 2. And my interpretation could be based on my own philosophy of life, just as Soni said they read the poem politically because that is where their head is right now.
But my hopeful interpretation would involve a re-setting of "you are the light of my life he whispers." I do think that could be consonant with a view of language that turns away from definition and formal logic to the sense that meaning is always embedded in, and for, its context. Rearrangement would have created a new context, changing a line from silencing to sincerity. What would it be for actual humans in relationship to be lights for each other?
-Paul
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Post by dianeld on Jan 18, 2023 2:23:57 GMT -5
To me this a very threatening piece that I find extremely hard to read, I see the references to 'game' but for me this has nothing to do with football, this is a dark game where the players - perpetrator and victim - are using different sets of rules. A figure appearing in a (your / my) dark bedroom through flashing lights - the street outside? - an indecipherable telephone message, being dazed and unprepared, multiple colloquial and religious references to light ending in the final whispered 'you are the light of my life' is so threatening, the punctuating, repetitive 'screaming' creates a theme of fear throughout.
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lidia
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Post by lidia on Jan 18, 2023 2:58:37 GMT -5
I wonder if JR is saying that the problem with evil that it is subtle and insidious and not a neat binary of black and white as religion would have us believe. Sophia, Woman in a Chinese Room also brings up the light and dark thing. In it she refers to 'lexical black and white squares' (a board game?) Binaries might shape thought and promote formulaic writing. In Chinese Room she also says 'there must be a division between light and dark'. Is she saying break the binary? I think your thought about the problem of evil being insidious is very possible - she writes 'suspect /like a god dividing light and dark'
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Lynn Maria Minervini
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Post by Lynn Maria Minervini on Jan 18, 2023 3:23:17 GMT -5
I really like this poem. And really liking a poem does not in any way mean that one has to have a very clear understanding of what exactly the poet wants to say. So my response to the poem and in a vague way to some of Al's questions is that it's shuffling the elements of a story around. And the problem is: truth or lies? "Truth is a strange experimental fiction" The players have forgotten the rules, light flashes, glares, dazes. Things get metaphysical and suspect "like a god dividing Light from Dark or the Light of Reason or the Light at the End of the Tunnel" It's hard to say whether to trust the light or the darkness. And the man who whispers "you are the light of my life..." is he telling the truth? For me the fans are the ones screaming for the game without rules. And that's possibly all of us.
another ominous message on the machine... a message we can't make out something for which the past has left you... truth is a strange experimental fiction a message we can't make out
She shuffles the lines which shuffle the story - it's very hard to see truth as something reliable. We try to look purposeful but are just dazed and unprepared. Truth is a strange experimental fiction
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lidia
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Post by lidia on Jan 18, 2023 3:33:45 GMT -5
4. Why the quasi-repeating/variational two sections? What effect does this have?
I'm not sure what the intended effect is but I can comment on what effect it has on me. I want to put them side by side to see exactly how they are different because my brain can't deal with the subtle shifts. I know there are differences and it is unsettling that I can't pin them down. Traditionally if variations are enacted you work with patterns and the effect is immediate and discernable. If there are patterns here, they are irregular and not immediately apparent.
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