Tomas Tranströmer: The Great Enigma

I owe several things to Rebecca LaRoche.  First among them is a string of apologies for being a complete twat; I was the very model of a self-important undergrad, and she deserved better from me.  The second debt is for a great many ideas about teaching itself, rather than about specific literature.  The third is for moments of clarity with regard to my own writing, and I still don't know how she found the stomach to deal with me considering the aformentioned twatness.

Among those insights that fall under the third category is a something she said about a poem that I thought very good, but she described as "about something I don't feel I have access to".  What was to me perfectly clear was, to someone unfamiliar with my internal workings, opaque and meaningless.  I have precisely the same reaction to many of the poems contained in this volume.  Tranströmer is clearly conveying something very meaningful and clear to him, but to me it fells like a description of an artwork, rather than the work itself.  Without access to what is being described, the description itself is beautiful but meaningless.

This effect is likely a result of Tranströmer's habit of transcribing dreams into poems.  Often, this is explicit, but more often he forgets to mention that what we are reading arises from a fugue state and is correspondingly unbeholden to reason, and immune to understanding.  These moments are not unlike art by Miro or Kandinsky, where the arrangement of shapes and colors itself is the work, and meaning is not a factor.

But in those moments where the dream brushes against reality, where whatever Tranströmer was thinking overlaps in some way with my own spirit, the result is magical.  It is the perfection of synaesthesia, where not only do all sounds have colors and vice versa, but everything is perceived by all senses at once.  Everything in these poems has a color, a voice, a scent.  It is no great feat for a poet to draw connections between two or three things in a simple metaphor.  But Tranströmer goes so far beyond metaphor as to render the word meaningless.  And not only does he give every thought a texture and a flavor, but also hands and lips and eyes.  We can see and feel and taste these poems, but they can also do the same to us as we read them.  Tranströmer captures ideas like bugs in jars, revealing to the reader that even "the ground [is] alive, that there [is] an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us", and he didn't stop there but "caught a fraction of a fraction of that world and pinned it down in [his] boxes" (Museums).