boojit

Back in November 2005, I wrote a post where I quoted a poem. It was supposed to be a general kickoff to a bunch of posts about what happened to me that changed my life in October, and how I was dealing with it.

Those posts never came about. At first I felt a little guilty, since I had made a commitment to write about this stuff, and because of the therapy I thought it might provide.

Now, I think that it's probably good that I didn't. As the drama of the events began to soften over time, so did my perspective.

The quoted poem in my earlier post is by Philip Larkin, written in 1974. Here's the poem:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

--Philip Larkin (1974)

When I posted this in November, I received some reaction from close friends, and not all was positive. Some people said they thought my point was that all my problems were caused by my parents, and that I wasn't responsible. This wasn't the case then, and it isn't the case now.

If anything, I find the poem itself contradicts this idea.

In the first stanza, it goes right at the parents with guns blazing, but in the second it almost lets them off the hook completely. The poet tells us there are no demons in this story, only marionettes on strings.

After the second stanza is complete, the poet has established a premise: one describing these marionettes, and their lack of control over their own lives. In the third stanza, the poet uses absurdity to turn this premise upside-down.

The first two lines of the third stanza, "Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf," while true enough in a vacuum, tell a half-truth by not relating the whole story. Of course man hands on misery to man; but he also hands on beauty, and joy, and enlightenment, and everything else--including misery and pain.

The third and fourth lines, "Get out as early as you can, / And don't have any kids yourself," bring the absurdity to full volume, and with it the point.

The fourth and final line is an absurd statement in the extreme: it's simply ridiculous to ask everyone to not have children.

But there's something else here: the poet is asking us to do something; actually, two things. First, he wants us to make the decision to leave home early, and second he wants us to choose to not have children.

Surely, if we can choose to not have children, we can also choose to not pass that same misery on to them.

Going even one step further, we can choose to let go of this misery entirely. Just because it was passed on to us, it doesn't mean we are marionettes on strings.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 3:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.