About Poems by Stevenson Anne;

Author:Stevenson, Anne; [Anne Stevenson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4821110
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,

and, lulled within, a family with pets,

– and looked and looked our infant sight away.1

Elizabeth Bishop here laments her inability to sustain the kind of simple belief in the Bible and its engraved illustrations that enabled her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia to escape the ills of modernity. Having eaten of the fruit of knowledge and educated doubt, she looked back nostalgically to the ‘infant sight’ to which she was forbidden to return in the Garden of Eden.

As the world shrinks and computer technology enables us to communicate instantly with people anywhere on the planet, such anxieties have become universal. The more sophisticated our techniques of verbal and visual communication, the less easy it seems to adapt to human limitations. It seems to me sometimes that the nature of feeling, the actual stuff of human understanding, is changing under the pressure of technology. Instead of being protected by the limits of our small round lives, we can’t help being constantly thrown out into a world that is real only to two of our senses: to our eyes and ears. Every day, on one screen or another, we are subjected to pictures of happenings in Syria or Egypt or Afghanistan, or maybe even in London or Newcastle, but we respond only with the engines in ourselves that look and hear. However much we enjoy and learn from films (and there is no question that film-making is the most influential art to have emerged in the past hundred years) we can’t help being subject to their persuasions. Hearing without actively partaking in an audial event is not listening; it is being exposed to pre-selected sounds; just as looking at is not seeing, in the sense of understanding but exposing our eyes to a selection of images. Through our ears and eyes, then, our passive imaginations are swept into global situations with which we personally have nothing to do except as we feel curiosity or pity or a kind of impotent concern. The point is that we do not feel in ourselves; we suffer or triumph vicariously. And curiously enough, while vicarious feelings can distract us and fill our time and even convince us we are deeply concerned, they have worrying repercussions. After we’ve spent many hours facing the screen, with our minds receiving messages from two “flat” senses and the rest of us stored away somewhere in the unconscious, when we shut off the screen’s social world, say of YouTube or Twitter, and turn back to the real one, it is easy to pretend it’s not real. And if we try to explain this world in the self-serving chat and glamorously coloured images of the media, we soon find ourselves in trouble. ‘Something must be wrong with me; I’m not happy; I’m not successful. Despite the thousands of new friends I’ve made through Facebook, I feel dubious as Woody Allen!’

All sorts of consolations and cures, of course, are on offer for malaises of the psyche.

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