ON INVOCATION
for
Sandra Simonds
i.
To invoke
has its own delay—
as when the individual denies herself the right to shower
or even use the toilet
(speaking hypothetically of course)
until
she has completed some distasteful task.
Seen this
way, denial or withholding is the form of invocation par excellence.
But then,
the act of showering turns out to be so onerous.
Afterward,
one has to select and put on one’s clothes, and dressing itself
is sometimes
an act of invocation to the world
too difficult
to take on.
ii.
The poet
wonders if invocation is therefore the craft of delayed gratification.
“Eat your
creamed mushrooms before you get any dessert.”
and later:
“You can’t
leave the table until you finish your mushrooms.”
and much,
much later:
The child
sits in the shadowy dining room alone with a gelatinous mess of mushrooms
chilling on her plate.
“Just
go to bed.”
Isn’t
the process of making a poem an invocation to
the self,
and invocation to, after a fashion,
giving
birth?
And isn’t
the mother’s art of teaching delayed gratification in fact
a grand
and prolonged practice of delayed gratification?
iii.
The phenomenon
of slamming one’s fingers in the door:
pain that
requires a body to jump up and down just to
live through
it.
But as
the body inclines forward over its pain,
what is
it living toward?
iv.
Luckily,
this writer keeps a 1967 Random House Dictionary of the English Language
beside
her desk,
and opening
it to locate “invocation,” the page falls to the “K”s and
“kiss
of peace.”
Then,
“invocation”:
to call
to call
for with earnest desire
to appeal
to, as for confirmation
the magic
formula used to conjure up a spirit.
Or alternative
and idiosyncratic:
the hesitation
that brings forth
the kiss
of conjuration.
v.
Invocation
is circuitous and indirect, like the mapquest directions
that have
the driver stopping at a gas station anyway to get help.
No one
wants to ask for help.
No one
wants the magical formula to conjure up what can’t be understood or
tracked.
Which
gets us back to withholding.
vi.
To insist:
all of this fits, obscurely, together.
That is
the nature of the calling out.
That is
the nature of addressing all this language to a person whom the author
has met only once in the crowded entry of a bookstore, and that only
for a few moments.
This is
the nature of the holding it in
which,
as we have already established, is
the very
truth of calling out.
That is:
the nature of one author addressing another.
vii.
Another
example seems apropos.
History
records the incident of a younger child biting his older sibling.
(“He’s
a flesh-eater,” his uncle remarked.)
The child’s
preschool teacher suggested that for a pre-verbal child, biting
is one
way that frustration gets exteriorized.
Think
about it: to bite another, to take a piece of their self into one’s
mouth when
one is
not yet able to speak—
well,
isn’t that to invoke speech of a different order?
Isn’t
that also to cause the aforementioned “invocational pain” that must
simply
be lived
through?
viii.
As for
withholding and invocation and delayed gratification—
this may
seem a bit of a stretch—
some mythological
texts suggest that in many cosmogonies a trope of “secretion” recurs.
The gods
create worlds or other creatures by way of bodily secretion: spitting,
shitting, weeping, bleeding.
What then
are we to make of this in light of Freud’s theory of anal retention?
Gaia held
it in until she could hold it no more.
(N.B. Virginia Woolf noted in letter to a friend that she found the
act of
having a bowel movement pleasureably analogous to engaging
in creative
processes.)
The inevitable
conclusion is that certain kinds of retentive behaviors are also richly
evocative,
invocative.
The other
conclusion is that we humans are made up of divine waste.
ix.
Address
is invocation:
“I write
this poem to you.”
Denial
and withholding are indirectly invocational:
“I write
this poem to you while trying to avoid the use of personal pronouns.”
Even with
the use of magical formulas meant to invoke,
we, divine
waste that we are,
can foresee
so little.
Yet it
should not come as any surprise, and in truth is entirely predictable
that
having
showered before commencing this poem, I slowly got dressed
as I wrote
it.
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