Harold Carr

Harold Carr

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home :: writing :: 2004-08-01-bewilderment.html

Mon, 02 Aug 2004

bewilderment

Death, a confrontation with the unknown - with the past, present and future - with your small place in the universe. I feel myself rushing back and forth within a seemingly irreconcilable set of imperative: poetry, music, science and technology, nature - each demanding a total commitment I can only cycle through.

Reading scientific articles one is reassured of the exact deliberations enacted to obtain and exercise knowledge. But the messy details of life are hidden in the background. That's where poetry comes in - revealing false starts, confusions, desperation - a beating heart.

Paraphrasing Fanny Howe's The Wedding Dress: written science foregrounds narrative movements around courage, discipline, conquest and fame. Whereas poetry can be open to the whole of life, with multiple "I"'s, where error, errancy and bewilderment are the main force that signal a story. In place of conquest we have weakness, fluidity, concealment and solitude in a kind of dream world. In dreaming, there is a dimension of plot, but with a greater consciousness of randomness and uncertainty - in other words, like life, at least the way I have lived my life.

So, what has this got to do with death? Once again, Fanny Howe: "God's mercy can often seem too close to neutrality for comfort." Or, the materialist-skeptical me (the scientist) trying to coexist with the invisible-faithful me (the poet). Or, letting go, making music - sound without words - or hiking the hills in a perpetual now. The spiral of my life.

The trouble with writing about bewilderment is that it puts order into chaos - "language fails to deal with confusion."

"The whirling that is central to bewilderment is the natural way for the lyric poet. A dissolving of particularities into one solid braid of sound. Particularities crushed and compacted and redesigned to produce a perplexing music."

I'm quarreling with myself - searching for something that cannot be found. Long live the multiple!

Death is coming, so why bother? Be a curious moving being or die sooner rather than later.

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Harold Carr

Harold Carr