April 6 - Power

Power

Living    in the earth-deposits    of our history

Today a backhoe divulged    out of a crumbling flank of earth

one bottle    amber    perfect    a hundred-year-old

cure for fever    or melancholy    a tonic

for living on this earth    in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

she must have known she suffered    from radiation sickness

her body bombarded for years    by the element

she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes

the cracked and suppurating skin    of her finger-ends

till she could no longer hold    a test-tube or a pencil

She died    a famous woman    denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

Today’s poem is by Adrienne Rich. It was a great loss when she died just over a year ago. Here’s a link to her page on Wikipedia. Usually, poets have sort of crap biographies on Wikipedia, but hers is pretty good. She’s a real interesting life to learn.

So let’s talk about this poem a bit before I head to Long Beach. It seems to me that one of the primary studies of feminism, and for that matter most -isms, is the relationship we as ethereal neural impulses and frail, flesh-bag bodies deal with the distribution and consequences of power.

How then to begin to talk about it, but to look to the past. The first line, “Living    in the earth-deposits    of our history,” rearranges the usual idea of history, as something we find buried in the earth, I’m thinking Pompeii, for example. Instead, “earth-deposits” are found in history. Using “deposits” also denotes that earth is not present in all of our history, but exists like geodes in the crust.

Then we move on to a backhoe, not something we use normally for archaeological excavation, more of a blunt-force trauma than a brush. Anyway, we can reasonably conclude that this is some situation of earth-moving associated with construction of something new to follow, or of simply sweeping away something old. This means that unearthing the bottle is incidental to what the backhoe is there for.

An amber bottle, not unlike the amber of prehistoric tree sap, which always reminds of Jurassic Park (now back in theatres!). A preservative of whatever is inside, be it a mosquito with dino DNA or a concoction of snake oil meant to cure what ails you, from the physical (fever) to the mental (melancholy).

This panacea held great power for the people buying it, despite the fact that, in all likelihood, it at best was either a mild sedative or did nothing allowing the body or mine (placebo effect) to cure itself. At worst, it would have only exacerbated the original problem or even caused altogether new ones.

Also today, the speaker reads about Marie Curie, the famous Polish scientist responsible for the discovery of radium, radon, polonium and numerous other scientific advances. Here’s how important she,and her French husband, Pierre, are: Curium is the ninety-sixth element on the periodic table. It’s one thing to have a random species of animal named after you, but an element? I mean, that’s big time. She’s up there with Einstein, California and Thor.

Curie made her discoveries prior to our understanding of the harmful effects of radiation, and as such eventually died from radiation poisoning. In fact, her notes, even her cookbook, are still kept in lead-lined boxes because they are still too radioactive for a human to handle without protection. On that note, “suppurating” means discharging pus or festering, that’s makes for an awkward handshake.

In order to maintain her public standing as a great scientist, she had to deny the danger of the discovery she had made. Perhaps because the male-run scientific community would have found a way to refute the importance of the work because she, as a woman, had made a mistake?

So what is power? Does it come from within or without? Are we powerful because others agree we are powerful? Maybe it is a more personal state. We can see from the pairing of the bottle with Marie Curie that there is power in the thing, or external, such as the bottle as artifact and in its own time as remedy as well as Curie’s international renown as a scientist and a person capable of refusing the tragic effects of radiation poisoning.

Power is also internal. It is not the amber of the bottle that was important to patients, it was what it preserved that mattered. Is the same true for Curie and her decimated mortal form?

This is both true and not true, I believe. Rather than get philosophical, let’s take a look at the actual text of the poem. Lines are broken midway by spaces while other words, which can exist independently, are forced together by hyphens to form something new. The language is at once separated and conjoined. OK, I have to catch a train to Compton. Ack! No time for proofreading, but I’ll check it on the light rail.