"Left the House," by Gottfried Benn
(translated by Michael Hoffman)
from Poetry March 2012
On a recent tour at the Eames House (Case Study House No. 8), I learned that Charles Eames would at times hang a painting face-down from the ceiling, so that he could view it while reclining from his chair. This makes me unsettled to think of it. I mean, I get why. It's kind of like the argument for recumbent bicycles: if they put less stress on your joints then why wouldn't you prefer them over the normal bicycle. If Eames were to give himself to this painting for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, it makes sense that he should do so in a relaxed position. For me, I just don't feel like my organs would be in the right place for concentrating. I would feel like my attention was laid out flat, like on an ironing board. I would feel as though my life were askew.
This is the closest semblance I can draw to what I think Gottfried Benn means when in "Left the House" he talks about feeling "shattered." He's not talking impossible devastation. More like controlled delirium. Like if the world were suddenly put at a 15-degree angle, so that no matter where you walked you always had to lean to the right. Or, from the second part of Benn's poem, a world where "at least / this mixture of death and laughter would persist." This mixture leaves a coppery taste in my mouth when I imagine it. Who pairs death and laughter in a poem that's just trying to talk about some guy going out for a walk?
Benn's poem is controlled and cynical. There's always something in this speaker's life putting remarkable yet not untenable stress on his ability to do anything. Problems with a rent check. His uneventful ambitions. A girlfriend back at the apartment who's crying. And it feels as though these things are always going to be happening to him. They are additional links in a causal chain that he's pretty sure will never find resolution. The speaker feels "shattered," but in that strangely resilient way that marks the modern life and, though Benn never saw it, the postmodern life as well. "How far are you allowed to push your I, / and see peculiar things as somehow symptomatic?" Benn's speaker is suspicious of how healthy this kind of life is, and at the same time he is suspicious whether these kinds of misgivings in any way deviate from the natural course of anyone's life.
And with this juxtaposition comes the indelible mark of Benn's poem. The suspicion that a fraught existence has always been our destiny. "Damned evergreens! Vinyl whines!" What else can you curse to make clear your objection to this life? To make clear your resignation that this life will just keep proceeding?
Recommended links:
"Left the House" (available online)
Primal Vision