Surrendering to functionality
HOW deep can we dive into a poem? Is it all one consistent depth, or are there various layers? And if there are deeper levels, does the water sometimes get darker and colder, and, if we go deep enough, might it leave us face to face with a disturbing reality?
This week we are going well below the surface to plumb the depths of a bleak, harrowing poem, so check your oxygen and buckle up, this may get uncomfortable, dropping down, down to an unnerving truth.
The poem we will explore this week is ‘The Cage’, by John Montague, pictured below. Although born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929 to Irish emigrant parents, at the early age of just four Montague was sent home to County Tyrone to be reared by relatives in order to escape the poverty of the New World.
‘The Cage’ is a six-stanza poem which builds for us a clear image depicting the ticket grilled booth of a subway station in Brooklyn, in which his father had worked for over 20 years.
What follows is somewhat predictable. Themes of failed father/ son relationships, the plight of the emigrant, and ones of loss and remorse. The vision he constructs for us through the opening three verses is quite stark and not at all pretty. His dad is a hard drinking man who numbs the pain with alcohol of a lost life spent working under ground level among the shuddering noises and restrictions of his subway ticket booth...
‘drank neat whiskey until he reached the only element he felt at home in any longer: brute oblivion.’
On a daily basis, sadly, each hungover morning sees him miserably dragged back into the harsh reality of his subterranean cage.
In the second half of the poem, his father has returned to his homeland near Garvaghey, and even though the image is one of a bright flowered rural scene and summer hedges and hawthorns, it only enhances the loss between father and son.
The time is gone, lost. It is all too late, it’s only a dream. The past, as they say, is a different place where we all did things differently. Finally, in the concluding verse, he reflects with ongoing sadness, as he now descends to the subways and undergrounds of his own life, with and among the ghostly images of his father.
‘Often as I descended into subway and underground
I see his bald head behind the bars of the small booth.’
So, is this the deeper truth in this poem? Which was his father’s true cage? The inside or the outside of the booth? Is Montague himself now trapped in his own cage? Questioning his existence? Has he the pluck to widen his gaze and ask that question and more importantly the courage to admit the answer? Have any of us?
This is no homily. There is no true answer here, no guidance to self improve. No Mindfulness or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy sound bites. Whether we find ourselves pulling the cork from the second bottle of Chardonnay on a Tuesday evening, or the habitual few pints after work, or the mindless rambling for miles around the edges of the town to numb the ticking of the clock, are these examples of the needs we cling to?
If we need them, need them for us to function, we give them existence, and do they therefore enclose us? Our surrendering to Functionality. Perhaps it becomes our own Cage?