March 5, 2015 - 15:13
I like the way you shift Marian and Caleb's question from what is more "raw" (btw, do y'all know the famous book, The Raw and the Cooked, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, which is a famous anthropologist's infamous description of what culture is doing: "cooking" what is "raw," "making it 'done'"?).
Anyhow, I was saying....I like your shifting the comparative description of poetry as "more raw" to that of poetry as offering (a more intense? complicated? conflictual?) "contact zone." So when Kanai writes out a legend, first recorded by his uncle, as his parting gift to Piya, he gives Rilke the final word: "In case you should wonder about the value of this, here is what Rilke says" (p. 298).
But of course "what Rilke says" isn't @ all a clear showing OR telling-->
"Look, we don't love like flowers
with only one season behind us; when we love,
a sap older than memory rises in our arms.../
we...love...a fermenting tribe.../all [that] came before you."
--that is, a long history, of 'turtles' (or braids? ) 'all the way down.'
Nothing the least distilled, but incredibly complicating, ramifying.
And what does Piya ("torn always between the one and the other,"
Fokir's voice and Kanai's meaning) do with this message??