Title: Bodyhood
Author: Leon de Kock
Publisher: Umuzi (2010)
ISBN: 9781415200995
Bodyhood (Umuzi, 2010) is Leon de Kock’s third collection of poetry. It is divided into four sections, each designated as a separate “journal”, which is indicative of the collection’s autobiographical tendency. As in the conversation of the “[s]cholars in a Johannesburg garden” who are “[c]onvened by critical agenda”, the collection expresses
A … modicum
Of confession
Yes, confession
Something about the body
Something about pleasure
Or pain, perhaps
Or desire. (12)
As the book’s title indicates, these poems are concerned with embodied being, material bodyhood rather than abstract selfhood. The title is taken from Humberto Maturana, Jorge Mpodozis and Juan Carlos Letelier’s article “Brain, Language and the Origin of Human Mental Functions”, an extract of which serves as an epigraph to the collection: “We human beings are ‘languaging’ beings and our humanness takes place in language. Therefore … we human beings exist as systemic entities in the dynamic mutual modulation of our particular bodyhood” (6). It is particularly our dynamic bodily existence which De Kock’s poetic language explores.
This theme is most overtly explored in the balanced, back-to-back pair of poems “Apollo” and “Dionysus”. Fittingly, in “Apollo” the rational, analytic mind is foregrounded:
Perfect geometry of ambivalence
Every angle drawn out
Elaborately
Every possible doubt shaded in
Every advantage weighed up
Every emotion given its due
All prognosticated, foreseen. (35)
However, in the second half of the poem, where its human subject is first depicted, this individual rationality is rejected for a lower, communal emotionality:
And he sits there
He sits
Wondering how
He will ever fall
Fall away
Into feeling
And lose his mind. (35)
“Dionysus” reflects this desire as accomplished, thus presenting a mirror image of “Apollo”:
Perfect geometry of feeling
Every flexed shift of limb
Every forward thrust
Ignited by his heart
His fire, his burning.
Impatient with thought
He knows he must act. (36)
The second half of the poem resolves the questions about human nature posed by “Apollo” and “Dionysus”:
It is when he moves
When he steps forward
That he knows
Who he is
Why he is
It is when he moves
That he is at rest. (36)
This idea that knowledge (of “[w]ho” and “[w]hy he is”) comes with bodily motion, and that one is therefore secure in one’s self-knowledge and thus “at rest” only when one “moves”, runs through the collection. Bodyhood asserts that “knowing/ [is] [i]n every step” (46). One needs to “[run] for life, for the trace of if/ [t]he smell of it” (15) because it is only in the “moments/ [w]here self can spin out” that it can “catch itself/ [i]n brief interruptions” (26).
The knowledge which the collection most intensely catches and captures is that of longing and loss. “Journal 4” is explicitly titled “Only in loss”, but much of the collection seems to be composed from “[t]he margin of loss” (10). De Kock writes achingly about “[t]he hunger of loss” and “[t]he valleys of … longing” (61); he entreats his “heart” to “[b]ear [its] longing silently” (51); he exhorts:
Cut your losses
You say (to yourself)
Minimise damage
Make the most of things
Others have it a lot worse.
Cut your losses
Hack them off
Or clean-slice them. (14)
In contradistinction to this violently (un)emotional response to loss, Bodyhood also treats this subject philosophically. The blossoming of the jacaranda trees in “tough Tshwane, pert Pretoria”, their “violaceous pointillism” and “plum flowering”
Tells [the poet] the most simple thing:
All that is held is lost
And all that is lost is held
In the embrace of a lilac remembering. (49)
But despite this philosophical acceptance, loss is necessarily accompanied by a longing “remember[ing]” of “[t]he far shore/ [t]he other side” which is now lost (17). You therefore need to “[l]et it go/ [l]et it go, now” (53), even if this “letting go” means drifting further and further from the “far shore” and losing yourself
Into the dark swim
Into the dark
Dark the current
Deep the flow
Strong the deep
Into the dark swim
Taken away
Taken
The far shore
Let go. (28)
The poems in Bodyhood traverse a range of attitudes towards their subjects: the caustic caution of “The meat hook”, the scholarly explication of “The Biology of Love”, the blind rage of “Anti-Oedipus”, the glorious tenderness of “Lay your heart down”. However, the predominant poetic mode of Bodyhood is a dynamic lyricism. “The boatman” is exemplary in its demonstration of this quality. Using repetition and the slow, graceful rhythms of boatman and river alike, the poem becomes almost hypnotic. From the lulling alliteration of its opening to its final refrain it is exquisite:
Loose and long-limbed
its belly still and flat
the river raises a misty hand
an early sigh, wind and steam
ozone stream, and in its wake
in its deep, mud and dream
shift and slow, shift and slow
in its deep, mud and dream.
And the ozone stream
slows the boatman
slows the boatman
into the sound, the days
the days and echoes of time
and time again, and then
the river parts before him
before him the river parts
and the boatman sighs for home
the boatman sighs for home. (23)
In Bodyhood loss is thus balanced with lyricism, just as traditional intellectual enquiry is balanced with dynamic bodily knowledge. De Kock’s poems, like the conversations of his “[s]cholars in a Johannesburg garden”, combine the wordsmith’s “wit” and “self-awareness” of his formulations with “confession[s]” “about the body/ … pleasure/ [and] pain” (12). And just as his academics are illuminated by “small touches/ of radiance” (12), these poems “like stained glass/ invent their own radiance” (26).