Notes on Visions of Johanna, (III)

January 23, 2013 at 1:58 pm (Uncategorized)

Visions of Johanna is a poem that was meant to be sung, and has five verses that describe five parts: an introduction, a description of Louise, a description of Little Boy Lost, a symbolic and abstract account of the theme of the poem, and an eschatological  account of the theme.  We started with the fourth part since it makes the general theme clear: the trial or contest between what passes away and what is infinite. The “vision of Johanna” just is the vision of what is permanent, worthwhile, lasting, and transcending time even while giving meaning to it. This is not to say that Johanna is simply an abstract idea, since poetry (and literature in general) transcends the difference between the concrete and the abstract. Othello is not less of a concrete individual for being all jealous men; and all characters do not cease to be real individuals – and can even seem as more perfect individuals – when they are written as types (in this sense, poetry is more divine than philosophy since God must be understood as both abstract and concrete.)

THE INTRODUCTION

Aint it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?

We sit here stranded, though we all do our best to deny it.

And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it.

Lights flicker from the opposite loft;

In this room, the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft, but there’s nothing, really nothing, to turn off.

Just Louise, and her lover so entwined.

And these visions of Johanna, that conquer my mind.

The poem open with the night playing tricks on us, that is, we are in the presence of something fearful, and threatening  or at least a source of worry that breaks over us. The next line makes it clear that the fearful thing is something we are confronting in a moment of honesty: we’re all doing our best to deny it. The terror or worry is arises from the night breaking through a lie that we are living during the day, namely we’re stranded. Now one only becomes stranded on the course of journey: there is somewhere we are trying to go or at least should be going, but we were stranded along the way. There is somewhere we ought to be going (one can’t be stranded without a fixed goal), but the means we took couldn’t get us there. Our desires, in other words, were to some good end but the means we took were not the sort that could deliver the goods. The opening thus strikes the same note as the Divine Comedy: “midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, the right road lost”. The reason for being lost is given in the next line, Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it. Rain is fertility, and given the character of Louise throughout the poem, the sense seems to be that Louise (though remaining a concrete character) is carnality or promiscuity that we’ve become wrapped up in and unable to distance ourselves from.

The following three lines describe a world of background noises, where there is nothing outside of Louise and her lover so entwined.  The introduction ends with his admitting that the vision of Johanna conquered his mind – that is, it invaded him and he fought against it. He did not want to come to realize that he was stranded in a world of mechanical background noise, where the only action was sex, which Louise uses to hold you right where you are.