III. SHAKING HANDS
Susan M. Schultz in the introduction to the anthology of essays on Ashbery (which she has recently edited and which has just been published) complains about the limited scope of the criticism that Ashbery’s work has attracted so far. True, she says, critics has been rather generous in their appraisals but they hardly ever touch upon what according to her lies at the very center of Ashbery’s artistic undertaking. One of the reasons for this is the widespread reluctance to deal with the volume which seems, indeed is, the most obscure of his books, namely, The Tennis Court Oath. Had it been given more attention, Shultz insists, it would have probably had redirected the coarse of the discussion long time ago.
According to her, Ashbery’s work hinges upon the effort to delineate public sphere and to reestablish the sense of communal understanding. Indeed, nowhere is this more evident than in the poem "How Much Longer Will I be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher" which not only describes our isolation but also points to the way how it could, at least, theoretically be overcome. The most striking image of the poem—one, which appears in various forms but which, nevertheless, is characteristically insistent—is the image of human hands. As it is suggested, it is hands that can break an individual’s isolation. "Fingers twist in the darkness" of the sepulcher and its sand sifts through them. Hands water a plant which otherwise would have remained dwarfed forever and "would never be a tree." Human hands also appear in a more disguised form:
Men with orange shovels came to break open the rock
Which encase me
The shovels’ color is arresting. The mechanism is similar to that in Lowell’s description of Hawthorne who, among silver-bearded Brahmins has got a blonde moustache ("Hawthorne" from For the Union Dead) or his description of colonel Shaw who has an angry wrenlike vigilance/ a greyhound ‘s gentle tautness" ("For the Union Dead"). Disturbed by the image of orange shovels, as if taken by surprise, we find ourselves jumping at (seizing) the hope that this may be finally the moment when the meaning is pinned down, when the act of communication is at last fulfilled, and the rock of the sepulcher finally breached.
The extraordinary redeeming power of hands results from the fact that they partake in the most private realm of our life, they are "carrying food to mouth, touching genitals." The gesture of shaking hands is then the last despairing attempt to establish human communion without the medium of language.
. . . The dirt is mounting like a sea. And we say goodbye
Shaking hands in front of the crashing of the waves
That give our words lonesomeness, and make these flabby hands seem ours
The confusion of the last line stems probably from the conjunction "and" which implies a sort of agreement between the two parts of the line, whereas in fact they are clearly opposite. While the word goodbye has become an ossified icon, the gesture itself, the joined hands are truly meaningful.
But these are the same hands that "are always writing things/ On mirrors for people to see later." As soon as the words are put down, they never manage to retain anything of their maker, they’re completely alienated, inverted and dehumanized: "He is not a man /Who can read these signs . . .". They become part of all that hinders understanding between people, of "all that hiss that exists near us." What is human, emotional and imaginative, gets lost in thoughtlessly repeated patterns and cliches. Consider, for instance, how a beautiful Stevens-like image
Behind the steering wheel
The boy took out his own forehead.
His girlfriend’s head was a green bag
Of narcissus stems
gets stifled (suppressed) or ridiculed by what follows:
"OK you win
But meet me anyway at Cohen’s Drug Store
In 22 minutes."
A similar moment occurs when the persona unwarily allows itself to be carried away by the common pretentiousness of intellectuals who like to relish, or, more usually, express in public the thought that they are anti-intellectual as well (which, as they imagine, situates them into a privileged position in relation to both intellectuals and anti-intellectuals):
You would not let me out for two days and three nights,
Bringing me books bound in wild thyme and scented wild grasses
As if reading had interest for me,
. . .
The remark, obviously intended to solicit complementary protests, has its roots not so much in the persona as in the politicized air in which it is immersed. And automatically, the divine sepulcher hardens again.
Darkness interrupts my story
Turn on the light.
Ashbery’s position is then similar to that of modernists. He believes, as we all do, that whatever gets fixed by words has little to do with our true selves, which, we like to think, is always indeterminate and incomparably more important. But this belief too has to be constantly negated, mocked or attacked, just because if it was overtly confirmed it would be irrevocably lost, it would no longer be part ourselves either.