Close Reading of “This Line”, sort of

Close Reading of “This Line”, sort of

This week’s reading and poetry really did not come into focus for me until I read Lyn Hejinian’ Against Closure. She articulated perfectly how language fills the void in a person’s mind that is the void of unknowing. We don’t know anything until we can articulate it and understand it. She says that:

Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual condition. This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it, and, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, discuss, or disclose it. (Hejinian 895)

She discusses how language teaches children to distinguish between things as different. The same concept as one cannot know light without darkness seems to be her message with language. One cannot know a ball from a horse without knowing what each of those things are. The void inside humans is the knowledge that they do not know what’s out there and how do they get that knowledge? She says, “the ‘rage to know’ is one expression of restlessness produced by language. I find this idea fascinating. What a perfect way to describe knowledge and the attainment of such. Further, she articulates that “the notion that language is the means and medium for attaining knowledge, and, concomitantly, power, is old, of course . . . [and] the knowledge that . . . language seems to promise, is inherently sacred as well as secular, redemptive as well as satisfying” (896). In a sense, the rage to know as a passageway giving way to knowledge which gives way to knowing and understanding the world and our humanity on a physical level all the way up to spiritual and unconscious. To look at it this way, language is the way to satisfy your very existence—you own soul’s longing and I loved how this article brought that to light.

An interesting example that we read that reminded me of this is Charles Bernstein’s  “This Line” which is ironic because it truly isn’t a poem that would read as anything that would satisfy your soul’s longing and it certainly doesn’t do that. It does, though, highlight the power of the word and how it creates a rage for knowledge and produces boundaries of understanding and framework even in a poem seemingly about nothing really at all.

The poem is everything the line is or isn’t. It’s mostly telling the reader what the line is not: indifferent, inaudible, bereft of a subject, cold, uninviting, etc. The lines are simply put, easy to understand. The sound textures are flat and rigid, exacerbating the void of the line due to the flat reading. The mood of the poem feels apathetic with hints of criticism for this line that is useless and does nothing which is interesting when read through the context of Hejinian and how language can create meaning simply by being. But then, everything shifts near the end. This line that is nothing to anyone until the end suddenly is vamped into something enlightened above most simply by the language the poet has created. At first, the line was nothing.  And then we are told the line is elitist, requiring, / to understand it, years of study / in stultifying libraries, poring / over esoteric treatises on / impossible to pronounce topics. Where this line was non emotional, having no reference aside from the line itself has now made its way to elite status which is the whole point of language shaping meaning, creating a thirst for knowledge and digging into one’s deeper psyche. Simply by reading this poem, I am not invested in why this line is so meaningless. I am hungry for more information about this line despite that the poet says the line is nothing more than the line. I want to now seek the truth under what the poet says and satisfy this “rage to know” that the poem has now awakened in me simply by the language chosen. Why does this line not care for itself or for anyone else? What has made this line so apathetic? What can I gain if I continue to read until the end because surely this rage for knowledge will someway satisfy me if I can understand and make sense out of this line. And then the point is driven home. The line means nothing for the person that believes it means nothing. It takes someone with that rage for knowledge to continue reading and to apply such an abstract idea in a poem to the larger meaning of life, inserting this idea of satisfying our soul with language could even make sense. If you make it to the end and have understood what this poem about a line is really saying in a much bigger than the line way, then you can see the brilliance of the poem and then you are satisfied with such knowledge—a knowing you didn’t even know you wanted or needed to know until you started reading the language in the poem which ties back again to the ideas written in Against Closure. Although the language is simple and straight forward, the ultimate close reading of the poem stretches your mind if you allow it to. In the end, this line refuses reality. It refuses the seen, the tangible, the real words in the beginning of this poem say the line means nothing, but oh, does it mean so much more than nothing by the end when it refuses reality. The poem about nothing is not about nothing at all and it’s a quite magnificent way to show the way language can maneuver the mind, opinion, consciousness of it’s readers.