The Order of Life

...This is a time when even metaphor is being challenged as a falsification of reality...

...the distinction blurs...

...But life somehow evaporates in the analysis, largely, one suspects, because of the shift in emphasis from the unique and unrepeatable to the abstract and universal...

...In still another effort at interpretation, he sees the turtle as "the father, wounded by life but having the power to wound the son (bite off his toes) in the same way...

...Throughout the months of his self-analysis he was, in a sense, competing with his pregnant wife, and just as she, finally, delivered her child, so Nemerov worked through the fears that blocked his writing and produced a journal, which became a sign of his renewed creativity...

...At first he says, "I seem to feel him chiefly as a series of contradictions...

...The reader will find pleasure in watching the poet's acute mind in its efforts to impose a meaningful order upon the materials of his life...

...This dream becomes the focus of a chapter-long self-examination that moves through ever wider circles of association, touching on the author's sexual life, his fear of aging past sexual appetite...

...He demonstrates a similar ingenuity in the analysis of his dreams...

...It is inconsistent with the contemporary sense of reality, which is compounded of the absurd, the discontinuous, and the accidental...

...There are three possible ways of reaching the opera house where Don Giovanni is playing, and he takes the one he has not tried previously...

...He stood in the doorway of his father's hospital room and explained that he could not enter because he was germ-laden...

...he is disarming, he himself says all that can be said against his method...

...This illness also represented my hostility to my father by threatening to kill him, which the cold gave me power to do...

...At one point he acknowledges that "symbolism is insufficiently randomized to give account of the real world in its immense complexity...

...Fraud or not, the kind of intricate association-hunting that this book represents is beginning to sound old-fashioned...

...On the next to the last page of his book he even concedes that "When you test out the method of psychoanalysis so far as you are able to, you find it is mostly a plausible fraud...

...This is how Nemerov explains the cold: "It much shortened a visit I resisted making, out of selfishness and fear...

...He is irritated by this unexpected development and waits impatiently for the bald man (read penis) to come out, but when he does so the poet awakes abruptly and recalls that the girl of his dream is now, like himself, very much older...

...It is actually a very engaging work...

...His reluctance brought on a cold...

...For instance, he confesses that, when his father was dying, he was reluctant to pay him a visit...

...Increasingly, the contemporary writer focuses on stark experience in its own right, its own particular qualities of feeling and color, not on symbols...

...Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Author, "American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey" This fascinating book is the record of an "unproductive" period in the life of poet Howard Nernerov, a time when he sat down to write a novel-after a lapse of several years during which he wrote poetry, chiefly-and found that he could not stir up enough energy for the task...

...Art, life, and dream are parts of the same continuum, to be understood by the same symbols, archetypes, and systems of contraries...

...For example, he describes a dream in which he finds himself in possession of "an extra ticket for Don Giovanni...

...He accomplished this miracle by facing up to what he was, what he had become, and by accepting the contraries, the opposed faces, of reality...

...However, one can't really argue with Nemerov...

...But this is not to say that Nemerov's book is without merit...

...The journal ends with the remark: "Late in this same night, our son was born...

...For in childhood, whenever my father was seriously angry at me the first symptom of it would be his saying, in a voice I learned to recognize quite well, when he came to breakfast, 'Don't kiss me, I have a cold.' " Clearly, Nemerov sees his life as a poem or a dream...

...and his creative work, his vacillation between the pursuits of poetry and fiction...

...Nemerov's procedure can be illustrated by what he says about one of his own poems, "Mud Turtle," which describes a wounded turtle that comes, mysteriously, out of a dark pond, suffers the teasing of boys, and then lumbers off again through weeds toward "another water...

...Nemerov's method was to set down a series of seemingly random observations, on a virtually daily basis, and then allow them to stir circles of free association in his consciousness...

...He comes from hell, he is hell (lordly darkness-the darklord), but there is something knightly (suggested by his armor) about him...

...It is all very plausible, and one can't help admiring the sharpness of the poet's intelligence...

...Finally, by one superb turn of dramatic cruelty...

...These rings of images keep expanding until they touch on his fundamental preoccupations, recurrent themes and feelings that his intelligence keeps relating and ordering, so that the chaos of experience takes on a shape, eventually, like the abyss in Paradise Lost over which the dove of creation broods, making it pregnant...

...the cold was my revenge on my father, whom I punished by not kissing him...

...The period in question covered two months, July and August of 1963, and it took on particular significance for Nemerov because it included the death of his father and culminated in the birth of his son...

...He left in two minutes...

...The cold and cough, which were really rather alarming, and accompanied by a fever of 102, put me absurdly into competition with my father, saying: Look here, I am sick too, you are not the only one deserving of sympathy...

...When he arrives, he decides to call up a girl he knew in high school and offer her the extra ticket, but the telephone booth is occupied by a "tall bald man...

...Intent on removing the block to the free exercise of his imagination, he subjected himself to a thorough self-scrutiny that touched on key events in his life, his dreams, and the archetypal images that recur in his poems...

...Searching for the meaning of his poem, Nemerov discovers layers of it...

...his filth is also a chivalry...

...Reconsidering, he finds that the turtle "is a substitute victim, he is the lost son (sun) who demonstrates immortality by coming again from the mother depths as the real sun does each morning...

...Nemerov applies the same analytic technique to experience, attempting to understand the events of his life in the way he understands poems or dreams...