Never Bucking the Word

Geof Huth, "Where a Human Might Live in Dilapidated Splendor" (21 July 2011)Some things are inescapable, and what is most inescapablefor each of us is our own self, the body of our being, the inner intellect thatdirects us. Both may degrade, and all do over time, but we can leave those twothings that essentially define us as who and what we are.
Given this, we are always trapped by ourselves, alwaysexperiencing things as ourselves. The only receptors we have out into the worldare those built into our body. Other devices and other enhancers of perceptioncan become intermediaries between ours elves and what we perceive, but theycannot replace that essential perception, which occurs always within our minds.
For that reason, all art is inextricably tied to the human.Every artform is an expression of the human and a commentary or window on thehuman experiece. Because it is the only experience we know.
Poetry, for instance, is one type of art about and made outof language. It is about letters and symbols and words, but it is also aboutwhat words are: carriers of thoughts and concepts, engines that move ideas outof and back into us. Words are about as human as any thing can be. The visualarts are about visual perception, about the shapes and colors that fill theblack vacancies in the middle of our eyeballs. The visual arts are about thehuman perception of space.
So we are unavoidably human. Replace the parts of our bodieswith metal and plastic, with the hearts of pigs, with stents to keep out veinsopen, and we are still inviolable human beings, as human as someone of nothingbut flesh, blood, bone, and hair. As humans, we are guided by the intellect,but the intellect, the world and matter of thought, is a tricky thing.Sometimes our minds train us to be rational and unemotional, and sometimes ourminds tell us to allow the emotion of the world around us to become palpable,to change us entirely.
In graduate school, Tess Gallagher told me I was thethinking poet, the one whose work was about contemplation (ostensibly, indistinction from emotion). I'm not sure that conclusion was correct, butneither do I believe it was wrong. My work was organized around theconstruction of engines of words, and the enterprise of those engines was toconsider how language could be used. But that, to me, is a human enterprise: topry apart the complexities of language, even simple language, to see thedisorganized structures that many all of our sense (though not all of oursenses).
My poetry was not about sadness or relationships or anythingthat baldly emotional, but I think, still, that there was a wispysentimentality at the bottom of much of it, a cold wind across that landscapeof word, my African harmattan that never quite reached me. And, in thinkingback to those years, now more than half my life ago, I do recall the emotionalin some of the work of my colleagues, like the one woman who used the image of atight wedding ring around her finger to suggest how she was restricted bymarriage (whether she ever truly meant that or not).
I don't think, though I might want it to be true, thatescape from emotion is possible, that the conversion of the human to the Vulcanwould lead to better humans. So many of the least sentimental poets I know arealso among the most emotional in person. By that, I do not mean that they cry,or rend the garments on their chests, nor that they scream at passersby.Instead, they show their humanity, their human frailty, most clearly to me.They demonstrate their fears. They exhibit anger when decrying the use ofemotion in poetry.
Yet the human is inescapable, and it is also emotional.Because emotion is no more than an extension of the intellect, just as the bodyis merely an extension of the mind.
It is within this context that I went to see the documentaryBuck, about Buck Bannaman, the original horse whisperer, theman the character in the novel (which I have never read) is based on, the manwho also served as a consultant on the movie (which I, similarly, have neverseen). So I entered the movie with few preconceptions of the movie, but withsome sense of the emotion of man who suffered a violent childhood to come out theother end a kind and gentle man. And as I walked the 25 minutes to the movietheater, on this hottest of days yet in 2011, I thought about the world ofemotion.
I had, for instance, come out of a day's work, and my workis almost completely of the mind. I am what we call a knowledge worker. It ismeaning and information that guides and is the product of my work. So I work asa bureaucrat, but as an intellectual, as a writer, as a public and privatespeaker, and I work in an edifice of knowledge, within a greater institutionthat is focused on the production and maintenance of knowledge. Yet I wouldfind it impossible to say that my work isn't emotional, and sometimes it isremarkably so. It is a world as I imagine any workplace is, one filled withhappiness, deceit, kindness, real anger, fear, despair, contentment, and everyother strain of emotion that makes up the orchestral music that plays behindthe film that is our life.
So I watched the film, which I'd gone to to escape the heat,and it was touching and funny and sad, and human. At the end of it, I wasalmost relieved to be human. There before me was a man who was fully of thebody and of the mind and of the emotion that flows out of both. His ability totrain an unruly horse was a remarkable feat, one accomplished without anycruelty, with extreme patience, with a light touch, but one learned by thinkingand thinking through emotion, as a human entity must do. And yet it might bewhat I enjoyed most about the film was how well he could ride, how (has he evensaid) the horse had to become an extension of himself, just as everything we domust be an extension of ourselves if we want it to be of any value.
I looked into the face of this man, and there was a softnessborn from a hard life and ruggedness, and created out of long work with his ownpain, the pain of horses (those animals with sad eyes the size of saucers), andthe uncomprehending pain of some of those horses' owners.
In the 1970s, all of which I somehow managed to livethrough, people used the clunky term "self-actualized" to refer to people whohad come to terms with their lives, people comfortable in the skin they hadgrown into, people in balance. And this man Buck seems to have come into thisstate but only after going through a state of extreme unbalance. He had madehimself an extension of himself, just as the horse had become an extension ofhimself.
Just as my words are an extension of myself.
Just as we always must define and give meaning to our ownlives._____
Buck. Directed by Cindy Meehl, 2011.
ecr. l'inf..