My family just gave me an Ipod, which is a little wafer that stores songs, etc. As technology gets smaller and smaller, I and my hands seem to get larger. Microsoft and Apple are Lilliput, and I feel like Gulliver. Actually I feel more like a bear who's been handed a little wafer with earphones attached to it. The bear knows the thing's not edible, so he (in this case) proceeds to try to make the thing work. Maybe some meditation-music, he thinks, for the hibernation. If only, he thinks, my paw weren't so large and the wafer so small. And the earphones! Were they built for a mouse?
Today a colleague mentioned Delmore Schwartz's poem about the bear, a poem I love. I "identify" with it, as we used to say. I also like the way it flips anthropomorphism around, so that a human is framed in terms of an animal, but in a very clever way. Here is the poem (again, by Delmore Schwartz, born in 1913, as was Karl Shapiro, but Schwartz died much too early, in 1966):
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The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
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| "the withness of the body" --Whitehead
The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.
Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water's clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
--The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.
That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
Delmore Schwartz |
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