All told, the name is a pun on a David Bowie album. I don't know why I wrote it.
The last post of this blog is a Sonnet that I memorized. One realizes that in this day and age, cut and paste works wonders, but I had some emotional investment in this one. I memorized it when I lost some friends along the way a couple of years ago. Don't fret! They weren't gone gone. They were just moving away or doing study abroad for the summer or something. At the time, it must have seemed irrevocable in that really serious way; and I must have felt as if a whole ton of them were leaving, and that all of them were leaving forever. This was even after I went to college; which is to say that it didn't feel like this when I graduated High School.
There was a buildup to the actual act of memorizing this sonnet, too. In High School, I read a whole bunch of Shakespearean sonnets on my own. I was on a poetry kick.
I remembered this sonnet like calling up an old friend to talk to; which is to say that I had forgotten it in the mix between when I first read it and when I found it again. I might have the wrong one in mind, but I swear there was this one night of reading it and I just read it over and over. In my mind right now, I see myself getting really charged about it, but in the wrong way; because I thought it was a heady love trip and it sounded nice. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which we had to read for school; and also Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had parts where the authors read Shakespeare to themselves, saying it out loud. This might have had something to do with it.
At one point (not in the time when I was actively memorizing it), I sent it to a girlfriend, not quite understanding what it meant. It combined into a monster: she was a) freaked out by me sending it, b) nonplussed and unsurprised that I had sent it, and c) the sonnet bored her and she did not understand it.
But it was better that she didn't. Are you ready for the reveal? To put away childish things? To put facadesaside?
This sonnet is a resignation. It's after letting go of a relationship. It's a love sonnet, sure. Some online references that I read last year (I'm sorry I can't remember them to cite them) said that this poem is actually about Shakespeare, or the Shakespeare-Sonnet Narrator, after breaking it off with one of his close friends.
In this way, it's not really a love poem in the sense that it praises the lover in that old fashioned way, or even in a way that expects a return. There can be no reconciliation. The final couplet says, "But do not so, I love thee in such sort/ As thou being mine, mine is thy good report." Report is generally, according to the online texts, assessed as reputation, but I think you could interpret it as just keeping in touch. In common language these days, I might say, "What's the report?" and this kind of thing. Between facebook, emails, blogs, cell phones, and everything else, it is very demanding. We want people to report back to us.
What is he telling her (or him) to do? But do not so, I love thee in such sort. The turn of this is from the middle there when he writes, "I may not evermore acknowledge thee, lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame/ Nor thou, with public kindness honor me, unless thou take that honor from thy name," he is saying, "I might not ever (never) acknowledge you, unless my pride fails and then gives you shame," and then in parallel, neither will you. It's like neither of them will come off of their high horse.
But I feel this. It's the spirit, the geist, the uncompromising and intangible weight of normal social structures. People move away. And they are incredibly close. We see them on facebook and we know that they are a phone call away and we can't call them. It has been like this for ages for humans.
And it is pride! It's the shame that we experience when we see these people we miss and it's not the same when we see them again. But the terrible thing is to get caught in that trap in the first place. We have to be divided before we are awkwardly reconnected.
It says, "let me confess," and this sonnet is a confession of the resignation. Resignation is when you are complacent, when you can't do anything about something and you quit. In the office, a quitting letter is a resignation letter. It can also be a resignation from obstacles, as if you are resigned from a task. But we can't even say that as humans, that we are resigned to this division. Jews and Africans talk about each culture's diasporas. Diaspora is a large scale division of culture and people. But talking about this, aren't we all divided on the large scale?
I'm handling the problems that I've got by myself, he says. So shall those blots (problems) that do with me remain, without thy help by me be borne alone, he says. The relationship wasn't about the problems, and needing help. It was about the joy experienced when they were together. The love and the problems are separable (able to be separated), and he says, "In our two loves, there is but one respect, but in our lives, a separable spite" (spite means bad mojo); and even though the Love was great, there was a spite in their lives. The love was good, the spite was bad.
Sure, it's one love, but there is a separable spite. The relationship had to end. Here, this could mean anything. In the previous paragraph I had it as bad mojo, but spite could be anything. It could have been fights, but it also could have been something that the two were working against that finally claimed the relationship.
Burnett's studies of rhetorical theory features an excerpt by Mikhail Bakhtin, who in turn has a footnote that says neo-Kantian philosophy says that the nature of communication reveals objective truth of that which is communicated.
Basically, when someone says 'table' and you understand it, that act of communication, that 'table' was communicated means it was objective. It's weighted down by the two people. In our two loves there is but one respect is this communication, this universal ubiquity. We all know what 2+2 = 4 means; we all know what Love is. This is opposite from our analysis of spite, above.
But the relationship is already over, and we know this because he's talking about never (he says, "not evermore") seeing her again.
So the real conflict here is this letting go process. I feel guilty when I don't see people. We feel obligated. Shakespeare feels guilty, "bewailed guilt". She probably doesn't feel any better about it, either. She's got that pride, that honor to uphold, too.
Don't fret, says Shakespeare. Don't worry, he says. As thou being mine, mine is thy good report. As long as you are good, I am good. You don't even have to tell me, you can know that what I want is what is best for you, and I don't even have to hear that in order to know it; and to feel it.
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