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I hate myself for not being a machine:
For not being in control:
For “She makes me mad,
so I'll chew on your soul;
She makes me smile, so
I'll act like a saint
And ask you 'Why you,
so gifted with life,
ain't?'
(Die.
You will, you
Little non-machine:
They will barely try
to lift up your folds
of sagging crust and start
The stalling tension
of your pompous, sallow heart
of your pompous, sallow heart
Again:) Thump-thump; thump-thump: D'you
feel what I mean?”
With great powers of observation and analysis come no guarantees of perceptual openness or emotional neutrality. Thus our perceptions and interpretations cannot help but be anthropomorphically skewed personally motivated: there is so much truth in the world that we are always finding ourselves faced with the dilemma of whether to speak or be silent; to create another story (for better or worse) or leave space for others to continue their own experiences. It is a special and humbling power that we, as rationally speaking creatures have: to distort, but never to create, reality by our awareness of it.
ReplyDelete*Thanks to Julie (magic saw box, circulatory system, “We have beer as cold as your girlfriend's heart”) Dani (pearl girl), David (Greek butcher hooks) Danny Lyon (view through the wall, 89 Beekman Street) & the Devil's Advocate (“Deaths are coming”) along with Deborah Cameron, Anthony Weston, Howard S. Becker, and Wayne C. Booth (rational communication quotes) for making this collage full.
I find this poem to be pretty relatable. I think people always want to be perfect, but perfection is subjective and you'll almost never be completely satisfied with anything you do or any one person in your life. You may even try to change yourself for that one special person, or even try to become perfect, but it's all in vain and you come to the realization that you're just you and you CAN change yourself, but it's not something you should do for the sake of another person, but rather for yourself.
ReplyDeleteYou also may be angry with yourself for not being perfect. As we humans are gifted with life, why are we not perfect beings even though we have the ability to conceive perfection and acknowledge what it is? Why is it not attainable? So maybe you try to find perfection, but it's already too late and then you're dead. You were so arrogant to believe that you were perfect. Within your heart (as represented through the "thump-thump" [heartbeat]), you acknowledge your failure, the common failure of all humanity. You reach out to others and ask if they can ever understand you as a final question. As in, "Do you feel this way too?" or "Do you understand what I'm trying to say?"
I think the connection of the title of the poem stems from this: the sympathy is undeserved because the speaker of this poem is trying to reach for/achieve something that is impossible from the beginning so any pity they receive is undeserved as they knew from the start that whatever they were trying to accomplish was impossible from the beginning. A really roundabout way of thinking about it.
Somehow I shifted into second person... Well anyway, from the start, I really enjoyed it. I could be totally skewed on my interpretation, but hey, I'm not perfect! Lame jokes aside, I totally admire you for this poem. I hope what I said makes a grain of sense since I eventually started rambling. Thank you for your time and it was a pleasure.
~Erin Yokote
I wouldn't say that trying to become perfect is "all in vain" - but I would say that a lot of people try to attain perfection before they really define for themselves what perfection is/can be (within the bounds of being human ... e.g., our emotions precede our thoughts - our logic is only as stable as our hearts, that is, often not very stable at all).
ReplyDeleteAnd so - as you say, it's in the title - "don't beat yourself up over it" (I'm paraphrasing to put a smile on "they were trying to accomplish the impossible"). But yeah, I think I read it about like you do.
I think what strikes me the most about this poem is its shape. What I’ve noticed and enjoyed about many of the poems you have written are the uniquely abstract shapes you mold from words. In this poem for example, I see the words forming a funnel of sorts, and the funnel as a representation of restraint, limiting who you are, and a strive to be what others want, kind of like in lines 3-6 “For She makes me mad, so I’ll chew on your soul; she makes me smile, so I’ll act like a saint”. Doing what you think others want is a binding limitation to being yourself. I imagine this poem would have been written as a way to vent frustration, frustration from having felt like you weren’t being your complete and honest self all the time.
ReplyDeleteI'd think of it more like an embolism in a blood-vein: this poem is less about "Doing what you think others want" than about the fact that "being your complete and honest self" means accepting that your rational mind is held in service to the whims and fluctuations of your emotions
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(" She makes me mad, so I’ll chew on your soul; she makes me smile, so I’ll act like a saint").
Before even reading the poem, the picture really caught my eye. It is such a strange picture that I could not even think what kind of poem could come after it. Furthermore, the shape also struck my eye when glancing at the poem, but after reading the poem several times I still was not able to understand the shape of the poem. When I first read the first line of the poem, I immediately thought of the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey. The speaker says, “I hate myself for not being a machine” (1). While in this poem the speaker is confused about not being a machine, in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” the narrator, Chief Bromden, is convinced everyone is a machine and wishes they were not one. Therefore, after reading this poem I was not completely sure what the meaning of the poem was, I was only able to compare this work with other works I know. Going back to the picture, because I was not able to interpret the picture, because I could not interpret the poem.
ReplyDeleteI think this is the kind of poem that you are not likely to understand in the brain first -- it starts from the heart. (Thump-thump, thump-thump ... how do you control that?)
DeleteThe first two things about this poem that drew me in was the illustration, and the shape of the poem. The first line with the reference to the “machine” created an immediate connection for me to the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. This novel focuses on the idea that society molds people to conform and makes all people uniform. Society is a machine that creates the same type of product. Where it says “I hate myself for not being a machine,” I think refers to hatred of oneself for not being perfect or good enough. The line “For not being in control” talks about self hatred for not being able to control the parts of yourself that society dictates. Instead of you shaping your own personality society shapes it for you. The shape of the poem emphasizes this idea of not being a part of the machine or a part of uniform society because it is not how you would typically think a poem would be shaped. Instead, the poem is curved inward and not consistent in it’s shape, like a non-machine would be. This poem also highlights the idea that those who are non-machines are useless when it says “Die you will, you little non-machine.” But I think this statement is false. Those who are different with unique tendencies and quirks are beautiful and make society diverse, regardless of their inability to conform to the machine.
ReplyDeleteWell, fortunately that's not what the poem was implying at all.
DeleteYou've skipped literally all the explanatory details of the poem in your explanation of it, which could explain your interpretation of it.
We are all "little non-machines" (thus the author hates itself for "not being a machine"). It's something to accept, but also something that's a little frustrating when emotions leak over into rational thought ... which is ALWAYS.
I was instantly intrigued when I first read this poem for its references to the idea that people are machinery, similar to the concepts in the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The speaker starts off by displaying an attitude of self-loathing and hatred. He is angry that he is not able to be in control his own emotions and is at the whim of his girlfriend and her moods. His girlfriend, on the contrary, twists and plays with his feelings, and is able to cause his mood influctions. When she chooses to act affectionate and endearing towards him, he is taken aback, and his whole mood transitions to being more positive. The speaker not only resents himself for getting caught up in her opinions, but also for her own blatant disregard for his feelings. Through the visual depiction of the poem, displayed above, shows a photo of a baby, representing the life and innocence, however the photo has an overwhelming amount of colors going in all directions, characterizing the overpowering moods of the speakers girlfriend. There are many broken up fragments and phrases within the photo as well, which create clear images and similes of the emotions which the speaker feels at the hand of the woman he loves. One of the phrases reads, “[...] have a beer as cold as your girlfriends heart”, showing how maniacal and evil his girlfriend is, and his hopeless attitude towards being able to please her. There are also a lot of contrast words throughout the picture, such words like “positive” and “negative”, which serve to contrast the hopelessly devoted and endearing sentiment of the narrator towards his girlfriend, and her selfish attitude. The picture enables the reader to be able to get a sense of what we should envision ourselves, and that makes the message of the poem a lot easier to understand. Is this an accurate interpretation of the relationship between the speaker and his girlfriend and their depiction through the photograph?
ReplyDeleteThe girl is not the focus in this poem, really (and it's no one girl, more like whichever girl happened to effect the speaker that day or week -- the world of dating is not a reassuring or consistent one). It's more about the influence of others on one's overall mood; the influence of one's mood on one's thoughts and actions and outlook.
DeleteThe girl in the picture, though, is the daughter of a high school friend of mine (and the red colors ripping apart in the background are from the mirrored image of a slaughterhouse).
Thank you so much, that makes the message of the poem a lot more clear. I really enjoyed it!
DeleteI really like this poem because of its reference to machinery. I think many of us try to be "machines" and conform with the rest of the machinery to create this working of interlocking parts. However, in machinery, there is no individuality, no passion. I feel many of us are afraid of being "little non-machines" and expressing ourselves because we fear judgment by the "machines." I just really liked how you connected passion, expression, and conformity to the concept of machinery.
ReplyDeleteI hate getting upset over stupid little things. It’s quite honestly the worst. I know I shouldn’t be upset, or have no good reason to, but I still do. And this poem captured that perfectly for me. So often I desire complete control over my emotions, or a stronghold on who I am as a person, but sometimes I can’t help my innate reactions. Like the thumping of the heart beats that end the poem, many times my emotions and their surfacing are involuntary actions which my rational thinking is unable to restrain. I enjoyed this poem a lot; thank you for painting my mindset with words.
ReplyDelete...as long as it's not lead-based, you're welcome.
DeleteI feel like this poem represents the inner struggle that people feel. In one aspect, a lot of people have been raise in a society where one is meant to react to things in a certain way, and say the right words at the right times. But on the inside when we start to think about ourselves and the natural behaviors that are ungoverned by a societal pressure, we come to realize that we have moments in which we do act irrationally and without thinking about the invisible structure imposed by the general public. This poem encompasses the conflict between a yearn to be mechanical and without worry of status as the poem includes we have an inner rhythm of “thump thump” that everyone has. Its our mere existence relies on a mechanical repetition yet at the same time, we also react to things in uncontrolled ways where we cannot control the effect that an action may have. I think that people in general confront this problem daily and attempt to make sense of it when there is none to be made and when they realize that there is no reason to blame, they wish to not act upon the irrational thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThis poem reminded me of a quote by Mark Twain: “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” Essentially, all human beings are subject to pain, sorrow, and death itself because we are painstakingly mortal. These are all things that we could easily escape if we traded beating hearts for steel plates, but then again, a monotonous life would be quite dreary, wouldn’t it?
ReplyDeleteI agree. But I guess we're both biased.
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