Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

While slicing mozzarella for a meal we were to share, my friend Eva made a remarkable statement, one I’ve lived with for years. She said it is a miracle given our peculiarity, our strangeness, that we are able to connect with anyone at all. Give it to Eva to say the thing that sounds humorous, compelling, and gloomy.

I mostly float in a fog of fragmentary thoughts. How is it possible, she went on, that we communicate and make sense to each other; somehow, we coexist in a tenuous space of shared understanding and joy. She and I laugh a lot. I joked my fog melds frequently with her fog; we are one big fog. She laid white hockey pucks of cheese on a bed of marinara.

Somehow people can be both idiosyncratic and capable of communicating across the chasm of personal differences. It is both one of life’s wonders and one of its tragedies.

Poetry negotiates that space between our inner life and the relational world we share with others. Magically, we make plain what we feel and observe to convey what some might call a soul. I often describe poetry as a mirror that reflects back our interiority. But today’s poem wonders if such perspective is even possible, given that we barely know who we are — making the enterprise of connection through art deeply indeterminate and delicate.

from “The Crystal Text”
by Clark Coolidge

Who were they out there through instruments
in the light? I didn’t know and don’t.
Perhaps I didn’t wonder so much but now I do. 
But then I do not realize who I am either.
Present time makes the stranger of yourself, whom
you do not have the charm of watching walk away.
How do I think of myself, having long had the practice
of never. A mirror? False view, always 
behind the shine of one’s own hands. To write
a long book of nothing “but looking deeply into oneself.”
I feel this sentence turn on the flinch of a laugh.
A scorn, not for oneself probably but for the 
possibility of a self view. Does it wait out there
in the black shine of spateless corridor world.

Large books are not for oval minds.
Handwriting is not a frame for the self.
A shocking caliber of words that would hoof
one off one’s own best known path. 
The prime abstraction of “one” seems necessary
to hold the self in the frame. And a life 
of sentences in rooms one holds no plan to.
I dived at you, self, but you rubbed me blank
in all my own mirrors. Scorn. No one owns, 
can possess, a mirror, the reflecting surface.
If I walk in the hallways I will first see
the light before I can identify what precisely
rejects it. This is not knowledge, but then
what is it?
I can see the largeness of the world in a 
stone ledge I could then place in my pocket
for all the world’s care. How many hunches,
that might prove out, there?
The crystal attains toward a transparency
my mirror approaches, face or no face.

from "The Crystal Text" by Clark Coolidge from THE CRYSTAL TEXT © 2023 Clark Coolidge. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of City Lights Books.