{"id":1185,"date":"2019-01-12T07:59:20","date_gmt":"2019-01-12T07:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2019-01-12T08:02:14","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T08:02:14","slug":"the-lifeblood-of-consciousness-of-love-and-loss-stephen-massimilla-on-danons-limitless-tiny-boat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/the-lifeblood-of-consciousness-of-love-and-loss-stephen-massimilla-on-danons-limitless-tiny-boat\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lifeblood of Consciousness, of Love and Loss: Stephen Massimilla on Danon’s Limitless Tiny Boat"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lifeblood of Consciousness, of Love and Loss: Stephen Massimilla on Ruth Danon’s\u00a0Limitless Tiny Boat\u00a0<\/em>(BlazeVox, 2015)<\/p>\n

Book Review<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

BY STEPHEN MASSIMILLA<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From the Spring 2018 Issue of\u00a0Pratik<\/em>:<\/p>\n

To read the original article on the Pratik<\/em> bog, CLICK HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ruth Danon\u2019s work may seem to be by turns \u201cpostmodern\u201d and \u201cSurreal,\u201d but the allure of her style never displaces the sense of a living, breathing presence in the sea of fragmentation. This is the paradoxical wonder of\u00a0Limitless Tiny Boat<\/em>: What from a certain perspective is vast, strange, abstract, and ungraspable is, at the same time, spare, heartfelt, and irreducibly human. And the drama and trepidation of the heart\u00a0is\u00a0often conveyed in, beside, or through what is tellingly quotidian\u2014the food slowly chewed, \u201cthe gloves, partly worn,\u201d \u201cbees in the garden and wasps in the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I must say there is a special harbor in my own heart for a book that opens with \u201cdead fish \/ against the pilings.\u201d Amidst such concrete evocation, Danon charts the journey of the self through, to quote the first title, \u201cSomething Larger than the Self I Don\u2019t Understand.\u201d Here all understanding is inseparable from unsettlement. Heading out is an act of fleeing, and arriving is a shadowy, solitary experience. Danon\u2019s boat image serves as a vessel, one that becomes, at different times, a bed, a plane, a cradle, a room. It often morphs into another container or frame of reference, ultimately the poem itself \u201ccarried along by random \/ waves.\u201d Water is the medium of reality, of experience; and loneliness and thirst are part of the passenger\u2019s condition, the human condition. These are in turn expressions of desire, which (in the poem \u201cDesire\u201d) is a vast, unstable structure, like language itself. \u201cI wanted all of it,\u201d the speaker asserts in \u201cDuration\u201d: \u201cA home \/ you could say.\u201d The longing for stability here is almost tangible, but there is something unstable in the structure in and through which it is realized: \u201cthe sentence pushes \/ against the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Still, how can we come to terms with desire? It is both a part of us and not. In \u201cOutward,\u201d where boat imagery and building imagery both figure, \u201cDesire \/ is interfering with me.\u201d And what if that desire is often for the immediacy of experience? The speaker goes on to consider the moment toward which things tend: \u201chow to account for it \/without falsifying the record.\u201d But who is even doing the speaking, given that \u201cI<\/em> is not a name\u201d? Any notion that this poem is an abstract exploration of dis-solution or a heady exercise in deconstruction runs up against the emotional and sensual immediacy of Danon\u2019s work. The apprehension of \u201cThe water still to cross\u201d is too strong to be merely an idea, and there is also the fact of now, the intense reality of \u201cthis. Acute. \/ This certainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What we both can and cannot grasp is not only the self, the sea, and the moment at hand. We move through a variety of times and climes. There are the clouds, which could begin or end anywhere and\u00a0 \u201ccould be below us if we happen to be on a plane\u201d (\u201cWithout Prepositions We Cannot Understand Clouds\u201d), and the sun \u201cbleaching out the scarred and pitted wood\u201d (\u201cBearing the Weight of Snow\u201d). Danon invites us to question where almost anything begins or ends. And are our lives, our desires, as unfathomable as the entire universe?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The second section of the book, entitled Echoes, explores the mythic and \u201cscientific\u201d dimensions of this theme of limitlessness, and of its lovers and discontents. The nymph Echo herself \u201c(a creature of desire and longing, much like ourselves),\u201d is, we are told, now a singularity, a black hole, a phenomenon out of math and physics. This claim is as quirky and funny as it is painful. The mythical lover Echo has become as disembodied as she once was physical, and as contemporary as she once was ancient Greek: \u201cNow she is mapped acoustically and calibrated digitally. She is everywhere and nowhere, and we see that was always the plan\u201d (\u201dPreface\u201d). In the poem \u201cSingularity,\u201d this poor neglected nymph is reduced to the formal components of the poem that describes her diminution\u2014that is, to \u201cAnaphora \/\/ And \/\/ Rhyme.\u201d Even this is hardly the end of her painful transformation. In \u201cEcho\u2019s calling,\u201d her longing returns \u201cas speech fractured \/\/ in air.\u201d An elemental sense of loss also comes through in the short poem \u201cEcho\u2019s Pain\u201d:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Echo is phantom limb. She shivers<\/em>
\nas if she exists. She has never forgotten<\/em>
\nher body or how much she loved it<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Indeed, this whole book is haunted by echoes of an out-of-body experience. Witness the ghostly, inchoate figures hovering in the oceanic realm on the cover (an image by Danon\u2019s husband, the painter Gary Buckendorf). But surprisingly, Echo\u2019s journey is still far from over. In \u201cEcho Over,\u201d she becomes not only sound moving though air, not only memory, but \u201cThe memory of memory.\u201d Her echoing cannot be over, not as long as she is echoing all over again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Entitled Code Blue<\/em>, the third section of Limitless Tiny Boat<\/em> almost takes us under. Here we plummet to the hibernal depths of \u201cLiving in the Cold\u201d and of \u201cWriting the Disaster.\u201d The latter poem (after Blanchot) is full of cold and hurt and desperation: \u201cSomething\u2019s so wrong in the house of birds,\u201d it begins\u2014only later to conclude with little sense of restoration or recompense: \u201cI know myself only for what I was at the time \/ And that was not enough.\u201d Lost opportunity, consternation, and desperation are palpable here, as in the poem \u201cCrossing,\u201d where the speaker recalls her anxious effort to make it to her dying mother\u2019s deathbed in time by flying over the Tappan Zee Bridge\u2014a bridge that she feels is about to collapse. She still swings from it in her nightmares to this day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I love these occasions when the speaker plumbs the abyss. I am reminded of the plea at the end of the earlier poem \u201cPiracy,\u201d where poignancies of mythos, metaphor, and utterance come together startlingly: \u201cI will give you whatever I have. I will return what I took. I will hold out my hands, I will never name names. I will throw down my gloves. I will take you on, I will hoist sails, fly flags, wear white in the dark.\u201d Even if this is an importunate gesture in a dream, it reads as something that had to be said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In fact, insofar as dream-work and word-work are the products of desire, we are always on the verge of returning what we took, holding out our hands, coming full circle. The entire paradoxical journey of life\u2014and of Limitless Tiny Boat<\/em>\u2014is one inseparable from the processes of language and dreams. Words, Danon\u2019s speaker affirms, \u201care the only boat I have.\u201d This journey of paradox, of sensitive intelligence, catches at every impulse, every snag\u2014be it of love, of danger, of pain, of the opportunity and loss glimpsed in every moment. We are carried along amidst objects and narratives that struggle to take shape before they dissolve. This dreamlike process, which defines every waking moment, is not the upshot of a stylistic decision: It is the lifeblood of consciousness, of love and loss, of suffering and joy, of poetry itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lifeblood of Consciousness, of Love and Loss: Stephen Massimilla on Ruth Danon’s\u00a0Limitless Tiny Boat\u00a0(BlazeVox, 2015) Book Review   BY STEPHEN MASSIMILLA   From the Spring 2018 Issue of\u00a0Pratik: To read the original article on the Pratik bog, CLICK HERE. _______________________________________   Ruth Danon\u2019s work may seem to be by turns \u201cpostmodern\u201d and \u201cSurreal,\u201d but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1194,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions\/1194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}