Signifying Pain Chapter Five

Chapter 5: Carving the Mask of Language: Self and Otherness in Dramatic Monologues

There is a challenge I face in responding to Harris’ work. Her literary allusions, quotes, citations, are thrilling because they are familiar. When she discusses Plath’s Lady Lazarus I am reminded of a time when I read it at an open mic, of memorizing the lines, and of knowing Plath’s own history and where the poem overlapped with and digressed from her life.

This is the mask that language allows. To use the “I” but to see differently yourself. The façade, the face, the mask—that which we present to the world.

I am always and have ever been uncomfortable with my confessional poetry. I feel that even my most intimate and honest poems have never been deep enough to be honest. “I” can write about myself in a particular moment but I am not longer in that moment, I am no longer experiencing it. As I write about it, I do so through a filter of time, that relentless 20/20 hindsight that knows better, and hopefully some grace of forgiveness.

Still, I learned early that others would read what I wrote and make assumptions. I could write about Person A and when Person B read the poem he would think the poem was about him. Or I could write a love poem to myself, about making love to my body, and know, when I am done, that someone else reading the poem would someday question my sexuality.

And when I write a poem of fury at someone I can just as easily sit down and write a poem of love for them. Emotions simmer in the same inferno, fire up and flare creativity in the same way. A love poem will have lines of doubt and apathy. A poem of anger will have pain and hope. There is no one “I” inside about which I can write.

Harris suggests, “[t]his fictional speaker expresses emotions that are not directly attributable to the author himself or herself. Such dramatization, or ‘play,’ can be a therapeutic aid to self-understanding and self-reconciliation” (109). I cannot but agree. When I was not in counseling, I used poetry as a means of journaling. I found ways to express my confusion, anger, desire, hopes, in the safety of poetry. What I could not expose in a journal, I could disguise in the “I” of a poem.

Harris further contends that “[t]hrough adopting a mask, poets find a representation for volatile emotions in order to master them” (120). I think of the dreams I’ve had in which I have murdered someone I love. Not through some passive means like poison or even disconnecting a lifeline plug. I have dreamt of cutting flesh from muscle, then muscle from bone. I have dug my hands elbow deep in the viscera of a lover and then run their blood over my face, masking myself in red heat. I have held a throat in my fingers and looked unblinking into the slow dying of light in their eyes and not let go until I could no longer hold my breath after they had stopped breathing.

Such rage enters my dreams and lodges there. Some of these dreams find a new life on the page, either in a poem or story. But what doesn’t ever quite make it onto the page is my real “I,” my complete “I.” Like Walt Whitman’s self-contained millions, as soon as I stop writing I have not already become some other but am not even sure I have managed to write about myself at all. It’s all so fragmented and incomplete. I don’t have time to do more. I don’t even aspire to do more. I just wonder sometimes, when I am dead, what will others think about me when they have read what I have written. Wonder and pray that they have the sense to know that this is just a small piece of who I really am, who I ever was, and far removed from the “I” I hope to be.