Robert MacLean: among what is lost

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occasion in our lives and experienced disorientation. That MacLean should choose to link this to “sins” is interesting. Perhaps here his Western cultural background shows. Are his sins the result of Christian guilt? Are his worries of “impending senility” the by-product of Western culture that places such a premium on youth? The words “sins” and “senility” have quite a heavy impact to Japanese, and their impact on the reader is all the more exacerbated since MacLean expresses them in such a matter-of-fact manner whilst doing everyday things such as “roast coffee and return / to futon window open wide to / dream”. The Christian notion of sin and guilt continues in the next few stanzas. When coming back from a party MacLean resists the advances of “a girl on a swing”. He then wonders, while lying uncomfortably on “bare tatami” whether he made the correct choice or not. Interestingly, his “penance for sins not committed” is the opposite of what one would expect from a practicing Christian. Does this mean that in MacLean’s world Christian moral judgment is reversed? Is this an anti-Christian statement? Perhaps MacLean can answer these questions later.

For me, the most moving part of the poem follows when MacLean sees in “old men passing” his own father. I would like to read it out to you:

It is interesting that in a completely different cultural context MacLean can still see his father, “the world filled with the same ancient men”. This section of the poem is wonderfully touching, not just because of the way it is written but because of the remarkably human sentiments and emotions it so honestly represents. People in Japan, and indeed people anywhere in the world, can identify with wanting to feel closer with their father and ruing distance in their relationship.

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As before in the poem, MacLean mixes everyday musings such as “Salvation Army suits which never fit” and “big framed glasses” with his intended meaning. In this stanza, this technique is particularly effective. The reader feels pity for the “old men with stooped shoulders” whose “eyes holding such sorrow” but the reader feels even more pity so for the poet who wants “to embrace him weeping father father.” This delightfully honest and heartwarming stanza is what made me really want to choose to analyze this poem since it made me curious about the rest of the poem.

Indeed, the rest of the poem is equally interesting, particularly the next few stanzas. MacLean captures the hot, humid, Kyoto summer very well here as he “venture(s) out mostly at night / to walk along the river” out of Arishiyama. Again in this section, it is the attention to little, everyday details that most impress me and make this poem a remarkably easy one to visualize. MacLean is highly observant of “the way these women move / short steps as if still wearing a kimono” and, like the cats he writes of, has his own “highly developed peripheral vision”.

The poem shifts location, indeed shifts continent, moving from Kyoto to “walking through the Montreal snow”. In this sudden shift, MacLean recalls “hugging warm bagels to our bellies” which to him is heart-warming both literally and metaphorically, since he can reminisce about the things he misses from his original cultural upbringing. The quick, jumping movement between locations in this stanza creates a natural disorientation that, of course, is suited to this poem.

MacLean returns to the theme of becoming older in the subsequent stanza. “My hands tell me / I’m getting older”. The tone in this, the middle section of the poem, has changed from the beginning section. In the beginning section MacLean’s loneliness was a kind of happy loneliness from being immersed in nature. This middle section, however, has a much more melancholy, glum tone to it. MacLean frets about becoming older and his relationships and other issues. Yet another example of MacLean’s incredible attention to detail of everyday events is when he notices the subtle change of speech in store clerks “for example the store girl / calling me sir”.

The tone of the poem reaches its low in the next stanza:

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The word “map” is important. A map is a route to a desired place; it is a key, a comfort. That all of MacLean’s maps lead to the same place is, to him, desperate and unnerving. Believing that it will not “get any better” is perhaps a sign of resignation. I am not entirely sure what MacLean is resigning from here. Perhaps it is the inevitability of his aging? Or is it inevitability to the path of life? We all like to think or dream, especially when we are young that we hold the key or “map” to our own destiny. However, like Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, we are much less in control of our own destiny than we might think and the life course of one human individual is remarkably similar to that of another. I would now like to jump to the stanza beginning “Last night I dreamt of Roethke”. For this part of the poem, MacLean shifts attention from looking inwardly towards himself and his feelings to instead observing closely other people. Of course, the reader can only guess whom Roethke “playing with his young graduate student wife” is, or whom Ted is. Perhaps MacLean can tell us more about these people, if indeed they exist, later. Like in his previous descriptions, MacLean is very good at creating the scene in our mind’s eye so that, even though we don’t know these people, we can imagine what these people are like. There is a reflection of MacLean’s inability to connect with his father in this stanza too, upon passing his friend “we merely nodded and his eyes / went back to the sea”. The next stanza made me laugh out loud when I first read it, “pissing in the starlit / snow: ceremony”. It becomes even funnier when a cat, after seeing what the poet did, scrabbles “to dirt to / do the same”. As in the best literature, the complete contrast in tone is strikingly effective. In a mere two lines we are taken from the melancholy, glum tone I described earlier to, instead, a more light-hearted tone. Indeed, the images that MacLean uses in the stanza are much more warm: “eyes glazing / with pleasure”; “warm honeycomb window”; “snow blue indelible dream” and “stars crystals of sparking / piss”. Another hint of MacLean’s seeming struggle between sexual desire and his Christian moral seatbelt occurs in the next stanza with “the woman next door / who likes to flirt”. The suggestion of flirtation from the woman to MacLean is not as obvious perhaps as it is towards the “mailman”, “the tofu man” and the “sweet potato man”. However, it is implied when she hangs her laundry out “bras and panties / pointed suggestively my way”. If MacLean were to follow the technique he used earlier in the poem, we would expect him to follow suppressing his sexual desire by then musing upon whether he was correct to do so or not. Indeed, he does begin to muse, but not in the manner we expect. He writes that he “Burn all the letters / never written”. This is a little vague. What letters does he burn? And who were the letters to?