The Eyes Behind Her Eyes
“The poet is the seer,
the poem is the act of appropriation.”
—Joyce Carol Oates.
I
knew I was being called to write a poem as I watched an online interview with Iris
Murdoch on the program Modern Philosophy,
hosted by the erudite and eloquent professor of philosophy and author Bryan
Magee, the topic being “Philosophy and Literature,” but I wasn’t called by what
the Oxford philosophy tutor and novelist Iris Murdoch had to say about
philosophy and literature, but by the beguiling look of her eyes, a look I have
seen often in deeply shadow-afflicted people, but never as pronounced as it was
in Iris Murdoch’s wary blue eyes that inspired my poem “The Eyes
Behind Her Eyes” that I’ve been summoned by my Muse to expand upon in today’s spiritual musing…
She
had four eyes, two eyes
to
look, and two eyes to see,
and
she could not tell which
eyes
were which.
Oxford
Professor, writer, wife,
and
childless by choice, a fluid
woman
like no other, and the
breach
of her eyes grew wider.
Tutoring
young Oxfordian
minds
by day, she stalked the
corridors
of culture by night
to
appease her hunger.
Danger
abounded as she looked
for
what she could not see,
and
the harder she looked, the
more
the danger grew.
Novel
after novel, essay after
philosophical
essay, but the
breach
grew wider and wider
as
her mind grew darker, —
And
she died of Alzheimer’s.
The magic of
poetry is its power to see into the mystery of life, and I had no idea what my
poem was trying to tell me; all I knew was that the first two lines of the poem
came to me unbidden and I had to work out the rest, which I did. And I went
online and did some research on Iris Murdoch’s life, and then I did some thoughtful
editing and rewriting; but this did not alter the essential insight of my poem which
had to do with giving visual clarity to the Jungian concept of the shadow that I
saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes, it only enhanced the poetic imagery. This is how
the cognitive mind works with the writer’s creative unconscious.
Actually, the
first two lines of my poem were not what they turned out to be in the finished
poem; the first two lines that came to me went like this: “She had four eyes,
/two up front, and two in the back.” This is how my Muse captured Iris
Murdoch’s shadow, which was so obvious to me that I could see her shadow as
another persona with its own mind and emotions and distinct identity, hence the
four eyes; and when the first lines of a poem come to me, I have to unpack them to see what my Muse is trying to tell me.
Nonetheless, I had to change the first two lines, because they created the
wrong impression of having a set of eyes at the back of her head instead of
having eyes within her eyes which was more accurate.
This is what
writers mean when they say they write to seek out the truth of life. As I came
to realize after many years of writing, our creative unconscious is infinitely
wiser than our cognitive mind, but the cognitive mind has to do the work, and
when the first lines of a poem come unbidden (sometimes, though rarely for me, a
whole poem comes to me unbidden), I have no choice but to explore the given
lines with thoughtful reflection, because if I don’t I jeopardize my gift for
writing poetry; which only means, really, that I’d have to work a lot harder to
pry out of my unconscious the glimmer of an insight.
But not with my
poem “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes.” This poem was easy to write once I had the
first two lines, because those lines told me everything I needed to say about
the shadow self that I saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes. Which isn’t to say that I
was specifically given a poetic imperative to explore Iris Murdoch’s shadow
self, which I did anyway by going online to research her life, but because the creative
imperative of this poem was to introduce the idea that the shadow can be seen in
a person’s eyes, and I had never seen the shadow as distinctly as I did in Iris
Murdoch’s eyes. That’s why I had to
write this poem.
So, how did I know
that she had such a distinct shadow self? What made it stand out for me? What
was its most distinguishing feature? What gave her shadow away?
This is almost impossible
to answer, but I will try; and the best way to resolve this mystery would be to
provide a context that will allow for the shadow to be seen in a person’s eyes,
a context that took me years to work out and which I creatively explored in my literary
memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and
its sequel, My Writing Life: Reflections
on My High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.
In effect, then;
like a mystery writer who knows the solution to his mystery before writing his
novel, I will resort to the old saying that you can always tell a tree by its
fruit. Let me say up front then, with all the gnostic certainty of personal
experience and all the reading and writing and years of stalking the elusive shadow
(my own primarily), one’s shadow is the
unconscious persona of one’s most private, most selfish nature; and it
follows that the more selfish and self-centered a person is, the more shadow-afflicted
one will be, This is what inspired The
Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and its sequel three years later, and what
gave Iris Murdoch’s shadow away in her conversation with Bryan Magee.
Blind selfishness is
the essential nature of our shadow self, and all of its consequent behavior
(the most bitter fruits of the shadow tree are insensitivity, arrogance, and
self-deception), which I immediately saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes that set free
the first two lines of my poem; so, I wrote my poem while I was in the grips of
my inspiration and then went online to research her life so I could flesh in my
poem with personal details that would confirm and add to the clarity of my intuition,
like the detail that Iris Murdoch had numerous sexual affairs before and after
her marriage to the literary critic and novelist John Bayley, casual and passionate
affairs with both men and women that were later confirmed by her private
letters.
I learned that Iris
Murdoch was “gender fluid,” as they say today, so I added the phrase “a fluid
woman like no other” in my poem to reflect this identifying detail of her
private life, a detail that spoke to her selfish sexual desire that she had to gratify
over, and over, and over again. “Memoirs by her
husband, John Bayley, and Richard Eyre’s film Iris, in particular,
defined her life around the poles of her defiant insistence on following her
sexual desires where they took her,” wrote Sarah Churchwell in her review of
Murdoch’s novel The Sea, the Sea. But this isn’t to judge her morals, that
doesn’t concern me; all that mattered to the imperative of my poem was the selfish
nature of the private self, because the more rapacious one’s shadow is, the
more distinct its identity will be, and I could see Iris Murdoch’s private shadow
self as distinctly as I could see her ego personality.
In my research it
did not surprise me to learn that the basic themes of all her novels were “good
and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious,”
because the more shadow-afflicted a person is, the more morally-conflicted they
will be, and Iris Murdoch was a very conflicted woman which was revealed to me
by the “breach of her eyes,” the distance between of her two sets of eyes that
was later confirmed by my online research into her life, both private and
public. “Iris Murdoch is an odd and difficult
subject. Both in artistic and personal terms, she is a one-off. She does not
fit comfortably into any literary history and her life was a series of
contradictions,” wrote Bryan Appleyard in his review of Iris Murdoch: A Life, by Peter Conradi.
Ironically, I have
never read any of her novels or philosophical essays; but I did see the movie Iris based upon John Bayley’s first two
memoirs of his wife, starring Kate Winslet as the young Iris and Dame Judi
Dench as the older Iris who was ravaged and died of Alzheimer’s, a poignant
portrayal of a philosopher/writer’s life who creatively explored the truth of
life through her novels, as novelists tend to do; and all I wanted to do with
my poem was to give the reader a glimpse into the creative process of
truth-seeking through the act of writing poetry, which can be eerily revealing
when inspired because there is often much more to a poem than even the author
can see, and in this curious poem I
caught a glimmer of an insight into the possibility that Alzheimer’s disease may
be as much psychologically induced as it is biologically based, but that’s an
insight far beyond today’s science; suffice to say that I wrote this poem
because it came to me unbidden, and I’m happy that my poem caught the shadow
out, because the shadow self is next-to-impossible to see.
Our shadow self is
who we are not, the repressed unconscious and unresolved karmic energy of our
ego personality, and what creates the distance between who we are not and who
we are was what my Muse was trying to tell me in “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes.”
——
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