early infant life, of love in that terrible period before the "I" is an
"I," but instead is a schwarmerei of part objects, nameless fears, and feelings
with incomprehensible aims. And these stages, peeling the onion of the situation of visual
entrancement, lead us to the empty core, the "I" that wishes to die more than
death itself can allow, to "deeply drown," beyond all recovery.
As we view the Mona Lisa, our eyes stray from her eyes to her enigmatic smile, waiting
below. Just so, the lower half of the poem offers us the sentential equivalent of a smile,
over and over and over. Between the desire in the eyes that make up part I and the
questions in part II that make up the smile, the poem itself has a kind of structural
homology to a human face. Noting this homology reinforces our tendency, or opportunity at
least, to say that in a sense, in writing this poem, Grimk? has "painted a
face" and perhaps even "painted a Mona Lisa."
Accepting that homology depends upon being able to recognize the resemblance between
the "I"’s desires as they enter the eyes of the first half of the poem, and
upon being able to recognize the resemblance between a question and a smile. The
resemblance between a smile and a question is in the social structure of the situation in
which they occur, and the events that follow. In the poem, "unrippled" water is
repeatedly disturbed, from a bubble popping, to waves spreading outward on the surface to
"wavering…in the depths." The smile, the question, the waters, are all
disturbed. The "I confronts the impossibility of that reunion with the seamless
prenatal bliss of the autistic-contiguous experience, and as the "I" agonizes
over the loss of self that the drive pushes it toward, the disturbances that will be
present in the waters are successively stronger disturbance, greater in scope with regard
to the metaphorical pool and greater in implication for the "I" in life.
First, consider smiles. Someone asks you a question. Are you not bound to respond? The
question may be real, a plea or demand for information. Or the question may be rhetorical,
one to which you know you are to supply mentally the expected response, whether you agree
with it or not. (This operation is how rhetorical questions can function as if they were
declarative sentences.) Or, finally, the question may be an open one, designed to provoke
you to ponder it, perhaps ultimately to find its answer. In any case, the question,
whatever the question is, incites a response. Similarly, a smile is always a gesture, not
just an expression. That is to say, one does not smile unless one is smiling for someone
to know about it. One smiles, as a baby smiles, in response to a smile (after about the
age of one year). Experiment: try and stop yourself the next time someone innocently
smiles at you, wanting only a smile in return. Or one smiles like that innocent who
encounters you does, simply hoping for a smile in return. A smile measures a degree of
presumed intimacy: an unwanted smile is the sign on the salesman’s face of the sales
pitch, on the pick up artist’s face of the pick up line, on the boss’s face of
the meaning of the little talk where one receives the pink slip and hits the street to
look for work. We say such smiles are "forced," but they are no more forced than
the silly faces we make at the baby: It is the fact that they are unwanted, intrusive,
demanding, violent, defensive, that makes us notice their forcedness. Try smiling
at someone you know well and have cordial relations with then next time you meet. Your
forced smile can be (not necessarily has to be, though) received and appreciated,
answered in some way. You may smile deliberately to enrage an enemy, to tease, to hurt. Or
you may smile to yourself, finding yourself smiling. But the smile itself, even if you nor
no one else ever noticed it, would have the structure of a provocation, just as a question
does, even if it is written down on a scrap of paper, placed in a bottle and tossed into
the sea. The mere fact that as long as the question exists, it has the structure of a
demand, for information, for agreement or for speculation, is the way in which a smile is
always a provocation by nature, whether anyone notices its existence or not.
What are the questions this Mona Lisa asks? How are they her smile? Again the poem
proceeds in stages of desire, through the logical hierarchy of the ends of desire, or
rather of the fear that seduces, the drive toward death. The point in the second section
seems to be, in part, something like the repetition compulsion, standing midway between
thanatos and eros, where a trauma is reproduced to provoke sufficient energy for cathexis,
in a vain struggle between the life drive and the death drive, vain because the death
drive always wins in the end but there must be another episode as it cannot complete its
trajectory. And, small as the start is, "a bubble breaking," still, it a
disturbance of the "unrippled waters"–and subsequent disturbances will
increase in spread and depth. (What the trauma is may be a subject of speculation: the
oppression of homosexuals, of African Americans, of women, of the thus triply belated
artist who sets out to "paint a Mona Lisa," the fundamental injury that makes
for the artistic temperament, or some more intimate detail of Grimk?’s life.)
The scene is a further extension of the metaphorical pool that represents the eyes that
are the dark end of desire in which the "I" wished to "deeply drown."
Each stage will be end in a kind of death. This time the staging is ordered by the
temporal scope of the end the drive seeks, from the immediate to the indefinitely
deferred.
The first question is that of immediate achievement of the drive’s end: "the
bubble breaking" is clearly what the "I" fears. But the question is
"Would I be more?" than that instantaneous extinction that leaves behind no
trace. In asking such a question of the Mona Lisa, who will only smile, we feel the force
of the smile, as it answers a question only with its own silent question, which might be
any of many: "What do you think? Why do you ask? What difference would it make? Why
ask me?" and so on. But the I, faced with this unanswering answer, as
"unrippled" as the "glimmering waters" with their faint mirroring of
darkness in darkness.
But, because it wants to know "Would I be more?" the "I" is not
satisfied with the easy destruction of its object, itself, and reels it back from
"fort" to "da," to reconsider and yet only reiterate the question. Yet
the form of the question shows a certain development of a capacity for deferral of the
end, perhaps almost indefinitely, as "an ever-widening circle / ceasing at the
marge," ending only at the very brink at which the "I" stood wanting poise
and hoping from which to cleave cleanly to the bottom of the strangely attractive
"leaf brown pools" of the beloved’s eyes. And even here there is the
inescapable finitude, death, for unless the pools were boundless in extent, the last inch
of the last ripple would eventually hit the furthest shore and die. The "I" is
asking about something like a legacy, a remembrance of itself after death, as much as it
is asking about an extension of the process of dying, an extension that would prolong
life. This escalated recapitulation of problem of the disturbance in the waters made by
the once presumed to be undisturbing "soundless cleav[ing]" of the waters is
also then a failure, though a more ambitious one.
The third question is the longest question, and the most troublesome. The sequence of
questions escalates not only in scale of implication but, quite simply and
correspondingly, in length: the first is a single line of eight words; the second is two
lines, but still only eight words, and that equivalence may signal the special way in
which the third instance, the repetition of the repetition, is something more than just
another repetition in a sequence that could go on forever with equally important
questions. The third is four lines, made up of seventeen lines: twice as many lines, an
one more word surplus to doubling the number of words. If words were all of equal weight
in the freight of potential meaning they carry, the increase here would signal a
categorical shift upward in scale, for it could not be accounted for even construing
"repetition" as "repetition of all that came before," which would have
yielded a quatrain of sixteen, not more, words.
The third question is more troublesome than the first two for several reasons. It
finally unequivocally indicates a fear of death as such. If one could assume that
"deeply drown" were mere hyperbole, there is no mistaking "my white
bones" as a sign of imagined real physical death, rather than simply some feeling of
being overwhelmed, such as lovers often enough feel. (To argue that that feeling of being
overwhelmed is also exactly equivalent to imagining real physical death, an
argument I would assent to, seems unnecessary here; and that argument would not entirely
erase the difference between the indirection of "deeply drown" and the blatancy
of "white bones" in any case.)
The "I" is concerned about fidelity, in two senses. The bones are "white
bones" and "my white bones" at that. Now, if the whiteness of the
bones is significant beyond the fact that bones denuded of their flesh may be exposed as
at least pale and perhaps bleached full white by the water, the specific form of the
question the "I" asks may be important. "I" wants to know if "my
white bones / Be the only white bones." (The undertow toward dialect use of "to
be" enriches my speculation here.)
First, consider "the only white bones": Every lover wonders about
being the only one for the beloved. Cultural imperatives may construct upon and within us
a tolerance for infidelity, but the basic form of bondage that love involves requires an
anxiety about the partner’s fidelity. (As an evolutionary psychologist might explain
it, your DNA does not want anyone else’s DNA getting its resources, whether you are a
man jealous of a woman, fearing she may have intercourse with another man and leave you to
invest your resources in someone else’s offspring, or a woman jealous of a man who
may be committing himself and his resources to the upbringing of his offspring, or a
homosexual man or woman experiencing equivalent emotions about commitment from a partner.)
If this is a lesbian love poem, directed at a fatally attractive woman, the lover may
wonder if she is the only lover.
Second, considering "the only white bones." The "I" is
anxious about race positioning. Here it is worthwhile to reconsider the entire erotic
narrative as an allegory of writing, of the artistic act, where the addressee is the work
of art and the speaker is its creator. With that consideration forefront, the tinge of
anxiety about being the only white artist to create the black masterpiece, to "paint
a (black: "leaf brown…shadowed") Mona Lisa" is evident enough. But even
if the poem is not an allegory of writing, but rather a lesbian love poem, directed at a
fatally attractive black woman, who may by her fatal attractiveness be suspected of having
brought many lovers to their "death" in her, or even literally to their death
over her, the lover may wonder if she, the lover, is the only one with a reason to think
of herself as white, having "white bones."
The bones have a chance to live on, in a sense, too, longer even than the slow end of
the "ever-widening circle" which eventually must always exhaust itself "at
the marge," but "wavering back and forth, back and forth." (They will of
course, however, eventually dissolve, leaving no notable trace.) This wavering is a
deepest disturbance of the "unrippled waters," for the disturbance goes down
nearly as deep, or altogether as deep, as the bones themselves, left where the
"I" will have "deeply drowned," depending on whether you attribute the
wavering to the refraction of light through disturbed water or to the motion of the bones
disturbed by the moving water. So while Grimk? may have been drawn to "paint a Mona
Lisa" as a black artist, Grimk? may have wavered, or been aware of necessarily
appearing to waver, in her sense that she could not be considered a black artist but one
with "white bones."
Interpretations of poems may allow no certain conclusions about their meanings, just as
some paintings allow no complete account of their subjects. The Mona Lisa is a case in
point: Traditionally, art historians say that Francesco di Bartolommeo di Zanobi del
Giocondo commissioned a portrait of his third wife, Lisa di Antonio Maria di Noldo
Gherardini. But the tradition of the name M(ad)o(n)na Lisa de Gioconda is doubtful, as Da
Vinci customarily kept the names of his models in his notebooks, and that name does not
appear. Moreover, Leonardo kept the painting himself for several years after completing
it–an unlikely event in the history of a commissioned portrait. Computer technology
has even demonstrated that the Mona Lisa may be "morphed" into a perfect match
with Da Vinci’s own self-portrait, leading some to some wild speculation that the
artist crafted a deliberately disguised self-portrait, or a portrait of his narcissistic
"ideal of beauty" in some conscious way. (See "The Morphing of Mona: a
Computer Detective Solves the Mystery of the Identity of the ‘Real’ Mona
Lisa," a seven and a half minute video produced by Lillian F. Schwartz at Bell Labs,
1990.) Another wild theory, based solely on the evidence that Da Vinci’s
mother’s name was Lisa, claims the painting is an image in which the son flatters the
mother with a portrait "as she must have been" in the lovely April of her prime.
The concept of projective identification, however, may provide a more direct answer, and
one that would account for both the idea that the painting is a self-portrait and a
portrait of the mother, in suggesting that the self is always result of an introjection of
the mother and that mother herself is subject to the projection of the self onto her; and
that later, any lover’s object is in the same predicament; and that for the artist,
the work of art is always a projection of the self, however complicated by the history of
introjection and projection that self is; and that for the partisan of some group with
which one identifies, such as women, African Americans, lesbians, artists, one is always
in a precarious relationship of mutual self-projection with those groups; and that for the
viewer of the painting, or the reader of the poem, one is in a related predicament,
projecting one’s self-image and all its investments and received projections onto the
object, which, as an artifact, a communicative event directed at least potentially at us,
projects all its freighted projections upon us, subjecting us, though we go willingly, to
its vision.
I want this poem to be a work of art, to be poetry. I want this poem to be an African
American poem. I want this poem to be a lesbian love poem. I want this poem to be a poem
worth all the attention I have given it. Is it no more than an image? Or only an unfolding
of partial images confined within the words that hold it? Am I just reading into it no
more than my own doubts, wavering over whether my own critical intrusion is what appears
at bottom, through all this attention, over my privilege to discuss this poem’s race
identification, over my own anxiety about the attraction of lesbian love poetry for the
male libido, over my confidence in my aesthetic judgment as it tells me this is a
beautiful poem?