{"id":21432,"date":"2019-06-03T13:55:07","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T17:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=21432"},"modified":"2019-06-03T13:55:10","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T17:55:10","slug":"the-body-of-us-all-anne-carsons-the-glass-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=21432","title":{"rendered":"“the body of us all”: Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anne Carson’s long poem entitled “The Glass Essay<\/a>” relates how the narrator, having been dumped by her romantic partner, goes home to Canada to visit her mother (a difficult-sounding person–prone to rehashing old criticisms) and her father, now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Being a scholar, this narrator takes with her<\/p>\n\n\n\n

… lot of books\u2014<\/p>

some for my mother, some for me
including The Collected Works Of Emily Bront\u00eb<\/em>.
This is my favourite author.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

She thinks about Emily and Charlotte Bront\u00eb, about herself, about her father and her mother. She feels strong emotions. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart,
pouring up the vents.
Every night I wake to this anger,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

the soaked bed,
the hot pain box slamming me each way I move.
I want justice. Slam.<\/p>

I want an explanation. Slam.
I want to curse the false friend who said I love you forever. Slam.
I reach up and switch on the bedside lamp. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But the poem moves toward something that I can only call transcendence. The narrator concludes with a perspective and a moral concern that goes infinitely beyond herself and her own circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how can you transcend your circumstances if you are a modernist writer who favors concrete images and objective correlatives? How can you transcend earthly pain if you cannot invoke God? (“I am uneasy with the compensatory model of female religious experience and yet ….”) How can you transcend the injustices you have faced if you believe that your identity as a woman matters–that not everyone has the same problems, that differences are important?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One answer, Anne Carson suggests, is time. “Days passed, months passed and I saw nothing.” She finally attains insight, but only after a long wait. Another answer is hard thinking. The narrator probes herself, nature, and other people. She asks the hard questions and debunks her own answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most importantly, you need the courage to believe and say things that are un-ironic, explicitly ethical, and close to clich\u00e9:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.<\/p>

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,
but as I came closer
I saw it was a human body<\/p>

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind<\/p>

was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman\u2019s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is moving because it is so hard-won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See also: on the moral dangers of clich\u00e9<\/a> and on the proper use of moral clich\u00e9s<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Carson’s long poem entitled “The Glass Essay” relates how the narrator, having been dumped by her romantic partner, goes home to Canada to visit her mother (a difficult-sounding person–prone to rehashing old criticisms) and her father, now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Being a scholar, this narrator takes with her … lot of books\u2014 some for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-on-poems","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21432"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21481,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21432\/revisions\/21481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}