essay by Brian Charles Clark
Where does history go when we don’t write it down? Where does history go when we’d rather forget it ever happened? Where does history go when we were too stoned to remember what happened? To this plague of impossible questions we might turn to Freud’s idea of the repressed in order to begin forming a response. The response might be, We don’t know where history goes—maybe it goes underground—but it always returns. Which is a useful enough idea for those things, events, or persons for which we have categories of knowledge. For history that lies outside of our epistemological framework, it is simply lost—and if it returns, in the inimitable way of the Freudian repressed, we won’t recognize it as a return, but rather as a new agency of knowledge and transformation. As Octavio Paz writes, “[t]he ruling system of repression in each society is based upon [a] group of inhibitions that do not need to be monitored by consciousness” (5).
Human culture does indeed have an underground historical agency that returns, again and again, like a weed from a rhizome. The agency I’m thinking of is plant life. Vegetation, in one form or another, is our “daily bread,” and gives us our staves of life, to boot. But surely, the reader must be arguing, we have well and truly identified plant life as an essential component of culture, and metaphors extended from our knowledge of plants fill our languages and literatures. We have metaphors of bread-making (e.g., “bun in the oven”) and metaphors of farming (e.g., “You reap what you sow”). But although the English language is full of words and metaphors referring to altered states of consciousness, we rarely base those metaphors on plants (“put that in your pipe and smoke it,” being one possible exception). I might say, for instance, “What blows my mind is that Sor Juana became a nun,” where “blows” signifies some sort of cognitive dissonance. More commonly, we refer to being “surprised,” “confused,” or of “having an epiphany,” without usually reflecting on two epistemological assumptions embedded in what we are saying. Read the rest of this entry »
John Donne wrote the First Anniversarie to commemorate the death of the daughter of Sir Robert Drury (Marotti, 235), but whatever is being eulogized in the poem, it “clearly [refers to] something greater than Drury’s deceased daughter” (236). The poem offers “more affright, then pleasure” (1st, 372) and in that, I think, it is typically Donne. But where the Songs & Sonets are forward looking and testing the ground ahead, the First Anniversarie is dragging its feet like a petulant or fearful child being forced to do something it doesn’t want to. One reason for this petulance is easy to see in a biographical context even though, as Marotti writes, “Critics have largely ignored or taken for granted the patronage context in which the Anniversaries were composed” (236). But what I notice about the poem is the strange lack of logico-rhetorical daring do that characterizes so much of Donne’s (presumably) earlier poetry. The “new Philosophy cals all in doubt” such that “The Element of fire is quite put out” (205-206). 
