2008 Time and Materials, by Robert Hass

Consciousness

First image is a blue sky, nothing in it, and not

understood as sky, a field of blue.

The second image is auditory: the moan of a foghorn.

We had been arguing about the nature of

consciousness, or avoiding arguing, talking.

Dean had read a book that said that consciousness was like a

knock-knock joke, some notion of an answering call having

brought it into being which was, finally, itself anticipating

an answer from itself, echo of an echo of an echo.

My mind went seven places at once.

One place was a line of ridge somewhere in a dry Western landscape

just after sundown, I saw a pair of coyotes appear suddenly on the

ridge edge and come to a loping stop and sniff the air and look down

toward a valley in the moonlight, tongues out in that way that looks

to us like happiness, though it isn’t necessarily; I suppose they were

an idea of mammal consciousness come over the event horizon in

some pure form, hunter-attention, life-in-the-body attention.

CD said human consciousness shows up in the

record as symbolic behavior toward the dead.

My mind also went to Whitman, not interested, he said, in

the people who need to say that we all die and life is a suck

and a sell and two plus two is four and nothing left over.

I think I respond with such quick hostility to anything that smells

like reductionist materialism because it was my father’s worldview.

“Bobby,” he was sitting in a chair on the porch of the old house

on D Street, “it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.” I was drawing

with crayons on the stairs. Across the street the Haleys’ collie Butch

was humping the McLaughlins’ collie Amanda on the Mullens’

front lawn, their coats shuddering like a wheat field in August.

Those stairs: there were five of them. I took three in a

leap, coming home from school, and then four, and

one day five, and have complicated feelings about the

fact that it was one of the vivid pleasures of my life.

When I came into the room where he was dying of cancer, my father

gave me a look that was pure plea and I felt a flaring of anger. What

was I supposed to do? He was supposed to teach me how to die.

And a few minutes later when he was dead, I felt such a mix of

love and anger and dismay and relief at the sudden peacefulness

of his face that I wanted to whack him on the head with his

polished walnut stick which was standing against

the wall in a corner like the still mobile part of him.

My mind also went to Paris, steam on summer mornings rising

off the streets the municipal workers had watered-down at the

corner of rue de l’Ecole de Medecin and rue Dupuytren, I suppose

because that city is a product, among other things, of human

consciousness, and whatever else it is, it isn’t a knock-knock joke.

My grandmother used to say what a good baby I was, that

they would put me in a crib on the roof of the house on

Jackson Street in the sunlight and the smell of sea air from

the Golden Gate and that I never cried; they’d check to see

if I was sleeping and I wasn’t; my eyes would be wide open,

I seemed to be content to lie there looking at the sky.

So I think that first image of consciousness in my consciousness

is not the memory of a visual perception but the invention of the

image of a visual perception—the picture of a field of pure blue—that

came into my head when my grandmother told me that story.

Outside the sound of summer construction starting up. From

my window I see a chickaree come out of the dry grasses, pale

gold in the early morning light, and raise little puffs of dust as

it bounds across the road, going somewhere, going about its

chickaree business, which at this season must be mostly provision.

It was years before I understood that my father was telling his

young son that he hated the job he had to go to every day.

It’s hard to see what you’re seeing with, to see what being is as an

activity through the instrument of whatever-it-is we have being in.

Consciousness, “that means nothing,” Czeslaw wrote. “That loves

itself,” George Oppen wrote. My poor father.

Commentary- A lot of Hass’s poems are long, and din’t want to give a partial poem, if I can help it. But a poem about consciousness. Quite a topic to take on; it deserves a long poem. Look at what Hass looks at to see what he’s seeing with: his dad, thoughts, thoughts of thoughts and memories, Paris, nature. we become part of his conversation with Dean and CD, going our consciousness with theirs. And on and on it goes. What does it mean? Are we loving ourselves by loving others?

My opinion: 10/10 Very intelligent poetry