Letter 5. The Tinfoil Heart.
There's a difference between a house and a home. Conventionally, we might think that a house is a mere building but a home is something more – by adding personal touches to a house, you can make it feel like home. Being housed or not is a material condition, while home is a feeling. So it would be contradictory, to speak of a strange home, because the home is precisely that place that is not strange – right? And yet what is home to someone might not be home to someone else, or what we thought was home might suddenly, by virtue of a small detail, be revealed not to be home – the uncanny is the conventional translation for unheimlich/unhomely, the not-quite-right or eerily familiar. Home and house might be a step, a shadow apart from each other. However, jayy dodd in 'in(t)elegance: a conspiracy theory' shows that the difference is an illusion:
your house is not your home unless it is secure / this is a lie.
your house is not your home unless it is on fire / this is lie.
your house is never your home, all you have is the fire.
dodd's poem voices, then immediately refutes, two views of the house/home. The first is that it is the house where you feel safe, which fits in with the conventional house/home distinction. In the second, the idea that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone is invoked; only the possibility of losing the house makes us aware of how lucky we were before. But both of these are lies, dodd reveals: the idea of ‘home’, of security, safety, are illusory – there is always the possibility that the fire will come along. dodd's poem identifies that illusion of security as part of whiteness – Black people have ‘already lived through an apocalypse’, but any feelings of safety that white people enjoy are an illusion as well, purchased with the spectacle of the ‘rule of law’ (aka police power, aka Black suffering), and nobody is really safe from the unnamed They of the poem (lizards/empire/capital) as ‘a watchlist grows of those who won't survive’.
[Image description: a model house made of matchsticks burns.]
It’s not just bricks and mortar that are insecure in this way. The idea of language as something close to a house and/or home is memorably codified in Roland Barthes’ essay ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’: ‘It is the word which is the dwelling-place... it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections.’ This maxim inspired a generation (maybe more) of language poets to veer off along some of those ‘innumerable uncertain’ roads. But a ‘dwelling-place’ is no guarantee of either a house nor a home, and the ultimate dead-endedness of the language poetry project derives from the idea that the retreat from reference might be an escape from the commodification of language. David Marriott has shown how language poetics results in ‘a fetishism of the signifier [...] which serves to protect and guard against [...] the encroachment of nameless anxieties and displacements associated with knowledge, power, and agency’. (It doesn’t take much to imagine how this might have led some of its major figures to latter-day crankery and the reactionary side of the ‘campus free speech’ culture war [although it could have as much to do with their professorial class position].) Marriott points out that the retreat from signification means something different to those whose speech has been ‘silenced, ignored, and oppressed’, and a ‘quaint’ small-press movement away from any kind of representationality does nothing to redress this. As dodd puts it, ‘tongues can be cut with the right language / lives can be stolen with the right history’. The infinite potential that this mythic conception of the ‘word’ suggests is opposed, when it opposes a structural power (Marriott and dodd are both speaking of whiteness), with a violence of which ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’ does not appear to conceive.
So the word is not, after all, a node from which frictionless travel to any point in the linguistic universe is possible. It sits somewhere between ‘house’ and ‘home’, never quite sure of its correctness, its appropriateness, its belonging. (This writing tic of listing alternatives – I think I got it from Barthes as well, in my misspent years trying to wring a poetics from him – never settling on a word because the mot juste will always elude, but imagining in our arrogance that if we make enough stabs at it then our meaning will emerge, almost statistically.) Laurel Uziell in 'The amount of brain in the bone' writes about the 'house [that] never had any walls that weren't / stolen from the air'; the house of language isn't an illusion, exactly, but it is borrowed from nonexistence. A sentence doesn't start, as we might imagine, from 'it is', but from 'suppose it were'.
[Image description: a view of houses and the tower of St Anne's Church in the Shandon area of Cork, Ireland in winter, with snow on the ground and rooftops.]
Samantha Walton's poem ‘strange house’ is a ghost story about language and consciousness. Its only repeated line, ‘under the darkness, the street’, plays on the Situationist motto, ‘under the pavement, the beach’, but on its first occurence there isn’t much more to attach to it than that. The poem begins encouraging the reader to ‘make for your love a symbol that can obliterate everything’, and later ‘make your symbol a home in darkness’. This world-annihilating symbol, the means by which the reader and their lover will understand one another, is the troubling of language to the point of inadequacy or non-recongition (‘call me only by what I'm not’). The desire to shed self-consciousness leads us through ‘the house of the body’, which ‘doesn't know contradictions, has corners, is normal’. But as we reach its centre, we meet the poem's main character, the ‘gothic girl detective’, a kind of homunculus inside the body-house who seeks ‘the mystery of the house [...] the lifedeath of the place’. The mystery of the body-mind is that there's something about consciousness that isn't accounted for by the material body, and that's what she is looking for inside the walls and under the carpets.
She is located ‘at the heart of the poem’, not just self-describedly but formally – these lines are in the fourth stanza of eight, of which the last is a single line (and that eighth stanza is the echo of the second line: ‘under the darkness, the street’). The heart, like the home/house has to contend with having different existences when it is material and when it is not. The detective seeks the 'heart-place' of the house, its ‘mystery’, its ‘lifedeath’, as if there is some secret that is going to endow it with a soul, with ‘home’ status, but that is teasingly absent. dodd in ‘in(t)elegance’ also figures the heart as something to be protected: ‘say three Hail Mary’s & cover your heart in aluminum foil. / the communion wine is locally grown from gentrified soil. but, / Bread Inc. has subsidized the body of Jesus.’ Aluminium foil (in the form of a hat) is, in the modern folklore of conspiracy theory, what silver, hawthorn, or the crucifix were in older systems: protective against evil and corruption. In this case, that is capitalism: wine and bread are commodified and sold back to the faithful at manipulated prices, either inflated or suspiciously subsidised. The tinfoil heart is the hoped-for condition of preserving some leftover against the omnivorous world – not the brain, but the more ambiguous heart, which might be the house-home of the soul after all.
[Image description: a heart-shaped ball of tinfoil.]
For Walton’s goth girl detective, not discovering something awful was the real fear; at the end of the fourth stanza, she becomes the addressee, and the poem instructs us: ‘don't let a moment pass without you escaping’ that fear of absence, ‘ride on its small back / with the tenderness of language policing you’ – the poem acknowledges the restrictiveness of language as a project, the ‘fucked-up grammar that holds the world in’, but still hopes that we/she can ‘sing like you never learned it’, returning to the pre-symbolic under-language of babies. In the fifth stanza, we realise that the secret of consciousness is not there, no matter how hard we scratch for it. We retreat again, and the body reasserts its terrible consistency/normality: ‘the body can eat its way out of you / & all the gentle regulation you succumb to’. We’re afraid of our bodies because we know that they can at any time betray us, rebel and, monstrously, destroy the flimsy parable that is consciousness. The penultimate stanza tugs at the desirability of this outcome (the ‘death drive’ of psychoanalysis), as the self is shedded and ‘raptures’ into nonbeing. ‘the throat becomes a thoroughfare’; if it were truly possible to communicate in those ways which language advertises but can never quite deliver, you would stop being an individual and become part of the world. This is the dangerous promise of poetry, besides which language poetry’s liberation from commodity is mere detail.
I first heard this poem five years ago at the SoundEye Festival in Cork, where Walton was poet-in-residence and where the poem (and the rest of the pamphlet it comes from) was written. The part of this poem that has stuck with me since then, and made me want to write about it, was the second stanza:
what is it that poetry can’t do that everything else can
except create a self in each line only to kill it in the next, to make a self possible
cushioned by forgetting, a pilgrimage to deadening
I want to live authentically and kill the me in man
Definitions and theories of poetry hinge on what poetry can do that everything else can’t; the first line of the stanza reminds us of that promise with its grammar, but the question is inverted. It then answers itself by giving us the one answer it doesn’t want: ‘except...’ The poem repeatedly engenders and then sloughs off selves in a way that real life is unwilling to let us do. This difference is what we might find cringeworthy about the individualism of naive poems, teen poems, poems of raw self-expression – but those are the poems which are closest to the poem’s promise to ‘make a self possible’. They are the poems the gothic girl detective might write, fuelled by her secret fear/desire not to be a person, to reach the complete authenticity that is not being part of such violences as ‘man’, ‘humanity’, ‘the world’. These lines yearn for the possibility that you can eat your cake and have it too, abandon memory (‘cushioned by forgetting’) and ‘fucked-up grammar’, while preserving some kind of authentic but non-continuous self. A poem supposes you could wrap your heart in tinfoil and protect it from the world; it won’t, but that’s not the poem’s business.