A Very Shameful Snowman
...Oedipal? No!
But
a man like me, directing his own film-
biog, should, like a florist
deadheading blooms which'd spoil the show,
re-
arrange some touchier scenes, like this,
cut stems, buds, till the scene's
pristine... Ready? Action! Mum loves snow,
jumps off the last bus, still smiling, strangely 17.10.69. Village in Nottinghamshire
awake to her own weight, 'The Love Bug' still on at The Odeon
her own tensing calves. It's five below...
So. How to write autobiography, which isn't autobiography, which is more of an exploratory, tongue-in cheek psychodrama, a theatricalisation. How to write about one's own mother, while trying to get distance, while admitting the impossibility of objectivity, while realising it's going to be fake and narcissistic... These are the issues I'm facing with '1969', and ones, as you can see from these opening lines, which I'm trying to deal with, to some extent, in the text itself.
How to depict one's own mother?! You don't. You can't. You've got to make her a character. (So henceforth I'll refer to her as the mother. Not my mother!) So far I haven't given her words to speak within the poem. This wouldn't be a noticeable absence if I hadn't already put words into the mouths of other 'characters' in the text, eg. Neil Armstrong, Cherry L'Amour and the Vietnam soldier. Their willingness to speak makes the mother's silence not just noticeable but seemingly significant. The question I need to ask myself is: IS it significant? Do I WANT it to be significant? I've already set her up, somewhat ironically, as The Virgin, miraculously inseminated by a snowflake (hence the Oedipal reference - I'm killing, 'pruning' out, the father) - and hence, the 'director', equally ironically, as The Christ. As such it is perhaps appropriate that she is silent. Silence retains her 'sanctity' and her unknowability - her impenetrability. No one can get to the bottom of her. Not the director. Not the director's father.
I'm writing such weird shit. Sometimes I think: this is too ridiculous! What the hell am I doing? Why is the mother inseminated by a snowflake?! Why does she then give birth to a snowman?! Apart from desexualising her it also suggests randomness, that the birth of the director wasn't planned, while simultaneously setting up a narcissistic, Oedipal and unhealthy family saga. But the planned/unplanned, meant/unmeant is a dialectical tension throughout the whole poem in various guises. The snowflake - and the birth of the snowman - also allows for a further clustering of meanings around the character of the director. It suggest emotional coldness and allows for his transformation into an emotional and 'thawed-out' character at the end of the poem when he outs himself as a human boy. Giving birth to a snowman also emphasises the mother's pain, I suppose... So the snowflake/snowman is a useful narrative device which is both allegorical and ironic - it demonstrates, surreally, dramatically, the director's psychology.
If the mother remains The Virgin, though, and remains silent - which she HAS to do with this snowflake/snowman schemata - then how do I tell the 'real' story? The real story is of a woman's shame at having sex before marriage and of walking down the aisle pregnant. Shame is the engine of this poem.
Shame
banks on punishment, as story its
pay-off, or what is it?
Chopped liver?
