In this poem, he compares the heart to a house. It is a nexus of coming and going, eaten-away foundations, and wooden supports ready to ignite.
Whatever. You have to think that any grizzled old man writing poetry in his cabin knows rather little about love. And on that note, why is everyone so persistent on the topic? Universal themes are boring, aren't they? Or maybe it's just that they're safe.
The house is a haven. I do not need to reiterate the adage that a man's home is his castle.
And yet, she just did. Do women poets compare their organs to architectural structures as well? Why do all these men feel the need to construct their emotions outside of themselves? Erect themselves in nature somewhere and disappear again back into the woods and, eventually, the dirt. Why make symbols? At what point does representational analogy re-establish itself as paradigm, reasserting itself forever like a defiant statue in the desert?
And besides the direct metaphor, we must think about what is being implied given social context. Men have traditionally built houses; women have made homes. If the heart is a house, then the speaker is perhaps relating to us that he has an unfulfilled space. He requires his mistress to perform the transformational act of house to home.
House and homes have always been dicey for me. I lived overseas for most of my life, with the implicit knowledge that my house was temporary, as if it were written into the walls, "You are here, and you will leave". And the stark reminders every summer when my family returned to my country of birth, of citizenship, chiselled away at my American identity. I didn't really live here. Who was I fooling? My parents came uprooted from across an ocean and stretched their branchy arms into the air and grew money on their fingertips, shaking it down every fall to pay my tuition. And do I live here either? In this dorm? This is no more a home than a hostel, with possessions bolted down, and memories sewn up in mattresses.
What does the reader have to make, however, of the secret chambers of the heart that occur in the third stanza? What do locked rooms in a house denote? On which side of the door must we assume the speaker's love interest is locked? Is she his mistress? or does he have mistresses? If we extend his referral to her as his lifeblood in the first stanza, then we have to contend with two things: the first is that blood occupies the whole heart, and if there are sealed off chambers of the heart, we must assume that they contain blood all the same. And the second, is that the movement of blood through the heart, as the speaker admits, can only flow in one direction. From what rooms is the speaker's love moving, and where to? Is she destined to be expelled altogether?
Living in Saudi Arabia, the law accommodated for up to four wives, a fact that is often recited in Western demonizations of the Muslim and Arab world. In reality, it was rarely fulfilled. Four wives are four wives, and not just four more mouths to feed, but four more voices to hear. And given a few generations, that number grows exponentially. Did these women and their children have their own rooms, as the multiple wives their huts in Achebe's Things Fall Apart? or did they mingle together? Half-brothers, and half-sisters struggling to remember names and social standings. In the Bible, it was the custom for the first son to inherit everything, but it never once happened, at least in the Old Testament. Look for yourself. A rabbi told me.
The heart is the nexus of emotion and passion, as you clearly know, class. But, given the popular modular perspective of human character, where then does the mind reside, if not the house and home? And does the soul encompass the two? or does it too have its own dwelling place? Are these three components defensibly separatable? Can they act independently? And if the answer is yes, do we have to contend with the Self as an amalgamation of discrete identities? And if the answer is yes again, then is the poem setting up a parallel with the Christian model of the Holy Trinity? If we have that parallel to consider, then we, the readers, are in a place where we must decide which parts of the Trinity align with which parts of the Self as presented in the poem. If we accept the Father as the mind, the Holy Ghost as the soul, and the Son as the heart, then we are now left with a situation in which the Son, or the speaker, is the house, which the Father does not reside in, but has created. The question this leaves us with, and the topic of your coming essay, is whether or not the speaker has knowingly created an impossible love scenario for himself, wherein he must abandon reason and rationale - his Mind - in order to inhabit the fragile and empty structure of his house with his mistress. We will discuss the ensuing parallels with Father-Son/family connotations and how the Holy Ghost/soul plays into the dichotomy next class. Don't forget to pick up last week's paper before you leave.
Impossible scenarios indeed, this long distance relationship. And I know that it is only temporary while you are studying in Central America. Or was it working with Habitat for Humanity? Houses, homes, habitats. We live in all of them, but so rarely do I ever feel as if the walls will hold me in. What are we sheltering ourselves from? What elemental forces are so violent that we must shield ourselves inside of ourselves? You were like a tropical monsoon, ripping through all the little buildings inside of me, growing like palm trees. And now we have reached the dry season. Can we make it another year? Are we ever going to feel that cyclonic ferocity again, shaking the beating walls? It tires me, replanting, rebuilding, repairing every season. There is no such thing as progress, only cycles; no linearity, only meandering garden paths. And at the end of the day, when the sun sinks in my head, the heart is still the house to which we return, and I am homeless.
Whatever. You have to think that any grizzled old man writing poetry in his cabin knows rather little about love. And on that note, why is everyone so persistent on the topic? Universal themes are boring, aren't they? Or maybe it's just that they're safe.
The house is a haven. I do not need to reiterate the adage that a man's home is his castle.
And yet, she just did. Do women poets compare their organs to architectural structures as well? Why do all these men feel the need to construct their emotions outside of themselves? Erect themselves in nature somewhere and disappear again back into the woods and, eventually, the dirt. Why make symbols? At what point does representational analogy re-establish itself as paradigm, reasserting itself forever like a defiant statue in the desert?
And besides the direct metaphor, we must think about what is being implied given social context. Men have traditionally built houses; women have made homes. If the heart is a house, then the speaker is perhaps relating to us that he has an unfulfilled space. He requires his mistress to perform the transformational act of house to home.
House and homes have always been dicey for me. I lived overseas for most of my life, with the implicit knowledge that my house was temporary, as if it were written into the walls, "You are here, and you will leave". And the stark reminders every summer when my family returned to my country of birth, of citizenship, chiselled away at my American identity. I didn't really live here. Who was I fooling? My parents came uprooted from across an ocean and stretched their branchy arms into the air and grew money on their fingertips, shaking it down every fall to pay my tuition. And do I live here either? In this dorm? This is no more a home than a hostel, with possessions bolted down, and memories sewn up in mattresses.
What does the reader have to make, however, of the secret chambers of the heart that occur in the third stanza? What do locked rooms in a house denote? On which side of the door must we assume the speaker's love interest is locked? Is she his mistress? or does he have mistresses? If we extend his referral to her as his lifeblood in the first stanza, then we have to contend with two things: the first is that blood occupies the whole heart, and if there are sealed off chambers of the heart, we must assume that they contain blood all the same. And the second, is that the movement of blood through the heart, as the speaker admits, can only flow in one direction. From what rooms is the speaker's love moving, and where to? Is she destined to be expelled altogether?
Living in Saudi Arabia, the law accommodated for up to four wives, a fact that is often recited in Western demonizations of the Muslim and Arab world. In reality, it was rarely fulfilled. Four wives are four wives, and not just four more mouths to feed, but four more voices to hear. And given a few generations, that number grows exponentially. Did these women and their children have their own rooms, as the multiple wives their huts in Achebe's Things Fall Apart? or did they mingle together? Half-brothers, and half-sisters struggling to remember names and social standings. In the Bible, it was the custom for the first son to inherit everything, but it never once happened, at least in the Old Testament. Look for yourself. A rabbi told me.
The heart is the nexus of emotion and passion, as you clearly know, class. But, given the popular modular perspective of human character, where then does the mind reside, if not the house and home? And does the soul encompass the two? or does it too have its own dwelling place? Are these three components defensibly separatable? Can they act independently? And if the answer is yes, do we have to contend with the Self as an amalgamation of discrete identities? And if the answer is yes again, then is the poem setting up a parallel with the Christian model of the Holy Trinity? If we have that parallel to consider, then we, the readers, are in a place where we must decide which parts of the Trinity align with which parts of the Self as presented in the poem. If we accept the Father as the mind, the Holy Ghost as the soul, and the Son as the heart, then we are now left with a situation in which the Son, or the speaker, is the house, which the Father does not reside in, but has created. The question this leaves us with, and the topic of your coming essay, is whether or not the speaker has knowingly created an impossible love scenario for himself, wherein he must abandon reason and rationale - his Mind - in order to inhabit the fragile and empty structure of his house with his mistress. We will discuss the ensuing parallels with Father-Son/family connotations and how the Holy Ghost/soul plays into the dichotomy next class. Don't forget to pick up last week's paper before you leave.
Impossible scenarios indeed, this long distance relationship. And I know that it is only temporary while you are studying in Central America. Or was it working with Habitat for Humanity? Houses, homes, habitats. We live in all of them, but so rarely do I ever feel as if the walls will hold me in. What are we sheltering ourselves from? What elemental forces are so violent that we must shield ourselves inside of ourselves? You were like a tropical monsoon, ripping through all the little buildings inside of me, growing like palm trees. And now we have reached the dry season. Can we make it another year? Are we ever going to feel that cyclonic ferocity again, shaking the beating walls? It tires me, replanting, rebuilding, repairing every season. There is no such thing as progress, only cycles; no linearity, only meandering garden paths. And at the end of the day, when the sun sinks in my head, the heart is still the house to which we return, and I am homeless.
