Chapter I

Introduction

As a student, you have to go through a lot of subjects that are part of the general
education curriculum in order to graduate in your chosen major. One of those subjects
in the general education Retorika, or in English it Rhetorics. It is offered in every
college in the university. It is a technic of using language for expression. It is used by
man to argue. Furthermore, it is an art of persuasion through the medium of language
as of its classical understanding, dating back to the time of Socrates and probably
beyond. This art of persuading with the use of language is also very much seen in
literature. Thus, in the academe, the subject also aims to acquaint the students with
various types of literature from antiquity to the movements in the contemporary period.
The subject ensues to direct everybody to a concept that is familiar to the common
people.
In Philippine setting, art has played a vital role in shaping the culture of the
Filipinos. In every happening in the lives of the Filipinos there seems to be a
corresponding art form that depicts the event. In the early period there are epics, myths,
and legends. And even if in times of mourning there are dramas being portrayed as well
as with harvest celebrations.1 Filipinos are inclined to share their experiences through
the works of art until the present; Filipinos never fail to incorporate their experiences to
1 Cecilia Rigos Delos Reyes. Echoes (Valenzuela City: JO-ES Publishing House, Inc., 2004), 58
1

an art. One of the forms of art that Filipinos practice is the written literature; They write
poems based from their experience that somehow make their readers have a grasp of
their way of living, or vision of the world.
In this thesis, we are referring to the use of poems of Mark Anthony Cayanan
with the use of Sigmund Freuds framework in the theory of aesthetics.

Statement of the Problem

The main problem of this study is on how the some of the poems in Narcissus of
Mark Anthony Cayanan can be a manifestation of Sigmund Freuds aesthetic theory.
Along with the main problem the following sub-queries will aid in the understanding
of the thesis:
1.) How does Sigmund Freud perceives art and literature?
2.) What is Mark Anthony Cayanans poetics?
3.) How is Sigmund Freuds aesthetic theory manifested in some of the poems of
Cayanan in his first book, Narcissus?

Review of Related Literature

Philosophy and poetry seem to belong in separate disciplines. The philosophy
comes a little later than poetry making philosophy more new than poetry. In Gerard
Caseys article entitled, Hopkins: Poetry and Philosophy, it discusses the perception of
poetry since the ancient Greek up until the modern age. Before Platos time, philosophy
and poetry

are belonging in the same field of philosophy not until Plato, he risked for

pushing out poetry as an intellectual enterprise to make so much room for philosophy.

Plato perceives poetry as an art. Platos key concept of art is mimesis. 2 Mimesis
seems to be vague. He divides the mimesis that exists in the three degrees of reality:
(1) perfect as the world of forms; (2) imitated purely from the world of forms; and (3) an
imitation of the works.3 The artist belongs to the third division of mimesis because the
artist only imitates the works of the craftsmen. Thus, Plato, conclude that mimetic art is
far removed from the reality.
Plato rejects poetry for it does not show the truth. Poetry is an imitation, and he
characterizes poetry as corruption of the mind. 4 In line with this, in the article of
William Chase Greene, Platos View of Poetry, discusses the perception of Plato on
poetry. Plato proposed for the banishment of the poets from the commonwealth of the
state. That he even, suspects the poets as the perverters of morality, mere imitators
and deceivers.5 Because the art that the poet produces is giving regards only on how
the world would appear but not the world of reality. The ground for Plato to critique
poetry is due to its imitation, it is on the third degree of reality. This degree of reality for
Plato is impertinent in the order of knowing. Further, Plato has argued that the artist is

2 Gerard Casey, Hopkins: Philosophy and Poetry.

http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/staff/gerardcasey/casey/Hopkinsfinal.pdf. (Accessed 28 February 2015).
3 Plato, Republic in Plato: Collected Dialogues including the letters ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989),597b-598a.
4 Ibid., 595b.
5 William Chase Greene, Platos View of Poetry. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 29 (1918),
1.
3

ignorant of the things which he imitates and because poetry addresses itself to the
lower faculties of man, that truth cannot be revealed. 6
the poet himself knowing nothing but how to imitate, lays on with
words and phrases the colors of the several arts in such fashion that
orders equally ignorant, who see things only through words, will deem his
words most excellent whether he speak in rhythm, meter, and harmony
about cobbling or general ship or whatever. poetry, and in general the
mimetic art, produces a product that is far removed from truth in the
accomplishment of its task, and associates with the part in us that is
remote from intelligence, and it is companion and friend for no sound and
true purpose.7

Plato regards art nothing but only as a form of entertainment that is dangerously
attractive.
Even if Plato, had critiqued art and the artists in the 10 th book of his dialogue,
Republic, but, he also said that he is not claiming that all imitative poetry does not show
truth at all. There are rare considerations that Plato makes on his view of art.
Socrates says that Homer and the other poets know what they compose. It is
stated that a good poet cannot compose without knowing his subject. However, he
considered those as imitations as the poets may have been deceived by others. Despite
Platos critique of poetry he had never said that he dislike the works of Homer. In fact in
his Republic, he mentioned his love of Homer.
Aristotle agrees that poetry is an imitation. But, contrary to Plato, Aristotle give
regards to the poet as they are able in contributing to thought, to knowledge, as well as
6 Ibid.,
7 Plato, Republic. 601a; 603b
4

he does not regard poetry simply as a mere form of an entertainment that can cause
harm to its readers and/or to people. Cottingham commented that, Aristotle stresses on
the drama, that it must have a certain sense of unity, 8 it has a beginning, a middle,
and an ending. On the same source, Cottingham further explained that the unity justifies
that it is not simply pouring out an event after another but an unfolding of a coherent
story that is relevant to human life, somehow it has relation to the emergence of human
happiness and misery.9

Aristotle claims, poetry is philosophical in nature that it

portrays the nature of men in general.10 Aristotle argues that poetry in general is
originated due to two causes and each of them is a part of human nature. 11
Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over
the lower being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world,
and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in
works of imitation. The truth of this second point is shown by experience:
though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view
the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of
the lowest animals and of dead bodies.12

Aristotle assume that in seeing an art, man learns something and by learning
man gains the greatest pleasure which is not only applicable to the philosophers but
also to the whole of humanity, regardless of how small their capacity is; it is some form
8 John Cottingham ed. Western Philosophy: An Anthology (2nd Edition) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2008), 701.
9 Ibid.,
10 Casey, Hopkins: Poetry and Philosophy. 2.
11 Aristotle, Poetics in Western Philosophy: An Anthology ed. John Cottingham (2nd edition) (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 701 .
12 Ibid.,
5

of learning that is why an art evokes pleasure and at the same time gathering the
meaning of things.13
Aristotle give further remarks on poetry as a philosophical endeavor than of
history. Casey reasons that it is because history is dealing with the singularity that can
never be repeated whereas poetry has this quasi-universality that deals with types of
human beings.14
It is also apparent from what has been stated that this too is not the task
of the poet, i.e., to speak of what has come to be, but rather to speak of
what sort of things would come to be, i.e., of what is possible according
to the likely or the necessary. For the historian and the poet do not differ
by speaking either in meters or without meters (since it would be possible
for the writings of Herodotus be put in meters, and they would no less be
a history with meter than without meters). But they differ in this: the one
speaks of what has come to be while the other speaks of what sort would
come to be. Therefore poiesis is more philosophic and of more stature
than history. For poetry speaks rather of the general things while history
speaks of the particular things.15

It is to say that, poets must write about the possible and not that actual things in order to
make poetry. It is elaborated by Robert J. Yanal in his article, Aristotles Definition of
Poetry, that the possible things refer to which could characterize as types of persons
doing things in which those types would probably or necessary do. 16
13 Ibid.,
14 Ibid.,
15 Aristotle, On Poetics, trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis with an introduction by Michael Davis,
(India: St. Augustines Press, 2002), 1451b1-b10.
16 Robert J. Yanal, Aristotles Definition of Poetry. Nos Vol. 16, no. 4 (November, 1982), 499 Accessed
February 5, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215204.
6

Aside from the differentiation of history and poetry, Aristotle, also pointed out that poetry
and other forms of literature evokes emotions. In Aristotle on Poetry and Imitation.
Simpson argued that in Poetics Aristotle mean by tragedy is that, it should be
pleasurable and enjoyable, that it will bring an excitation of the emotions of pity and
fear.17 On the same source, it is further explained that poetry has the same thing and it
is true in general to poetry. Whatever that excites emotion is primarily, their object,
when some present a fearful object, it excites fear to the perceiver, as well as the
emotion of pity and all other emotions. Thus, Simpson concluded that all the objects of
emotions are all related to the feeling of pleasure and pain.
With the advancement in psychoanalysis, art been also one of its subject of
interest. In the article of Pinchas Noy M.D., entitled A Theory of Art and Aesthetic
Experience, psychoanalysis is trying to understand art in terms of its structures, what
art has that distinguishes it from other mediums of communication. 18 The article argued
that art, has, in some ways, communicates to its perceiver because the art arouses an
effect to the one who perceives it. Even before psychoanalysis, there were already
variety of schools of thought that tried to analyze what that effect is, and they have
agreed to the same line that art, as a medium, can evoke an experience of satisfaction.
The most sublime idea of art is far from being art as long as it remains without the
specific structure in which it is presented. Because every artistic gratification is an
integrated pleasure, there are certain contents in the mind that are evoked with the

17 Peter Simpson, Aristotle on Poetry and Imitation Hermes 116 Bd., H. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1988), 283.
18 Pinchas Noy, M.D., A Theory of Art and Aesthetic Experence. Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 100 no. 4 (
August 2013), 559-582.
7

meanings corresponds an art and understanding the meaning that beholds an art, that
is, when pleasure is being felt.
The idea presented is what Freud had worked on, however he has adopted the
Aristotelian perspective on aesthetic experience discussed in F.J. Sirois article,
Aesthetic Experience which aims to examine the question of aesthetic experience
from the angle of the appreciation of a work of art rather than from the angle of its
creation.19 It explains that Freuds approach to aesthetic experience is that of the
Aristotelian perspective which sees aesthetic experience as an outlet of emotions,
desires and fantasies. Moreover, the article argues that aesthetic experience has its
focus on the three aspects: the economic aspect which is dubbed as the emotional
discharge of the creator; the topographical aspect that in every civilization that is formed
it is always accompanied with an art that represents something significant in that certain
civilization, and , the modification of the ego identity. With the three aspects, as the
springboard to prove its aim, the article had concludes that art is but a medium that
shares the human conflict which is in common to all human beings. Through the piece
of art one can share with the sentiments of the artist.
In A New World of Philosophy20, According to Kaplan, Freuds approach to art is
the access of the artist to his own unconscious that he has the ability to manifest what is
common to humanity. He perceives art as a self-expression. Art has the role to bring
both the artist and the audience the awareness of human desires and the realities which

19 F. J. Sirois, Aesthetic Experience. International Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol. 89 (2008), 127-142.

20 Abraham Kaplan, A New World of Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1961), 129-159.
8

frustrates and fulfills them. Further explained the role of art as a wish fulfillment for it can
make that everything has an importance, they are all of value.
Furthernore, Kaplan also poses that Freuds greatest contribution in philosophy,
if not most direct, influence on the academic philosophy is probably it is in aesthetics. 21
Freud poses the challenge of providing an aesthetics which does equal justice to both
inspiration and skill, inner idea and outer expression, latent content and manifest form
to both wishes and reality. This is further explained in Trillings Beyond Culture: Essays
on Literature and Learning.22 Despite Freud being a scientist, it is not only in the field of
science but as well as in the field of humanities, his interest in humanities led him to his
scientific investigations as based on the humanities. Freud may not be in the least
possessed a literary mind, but Freud contributes on the understanding of literature
through what he says about the nature of the human mind, Freud shows through his
investigations on the human mind that in its greater part is its poetry making faculty. 23
Freud stands that literature is for the self, it is the conception of the self. On the same
source it claims that literature uncovers truth about the self.
In relation, to the aforementioned Freuds posed a challenge, Sunnie Kidd in his article
On Poetic Imagination: Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger discusses the dialectic
relationship between creativity and reality that shows that Freuds structure of the

21 Ibid., 134.
22 Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Hardmondworth: Penguin Books,
1965), 86-110.
23 Ibid., 89.
9

human mind.24 For Freud, poetic imagination is an adults substitution to child play.
Because through the works of the poets he reveals himself to others as his works plays
as an outlet of his emotional tension. This can be presented in two ways: (1) softening
of the egotistical characteristics through a form of disguise; and (2) poet is able to show
materials that the audience as well are able to enjoy their daydreams without shame or
guilt. These two ways will be further discussed in succeeding chapter of the study. With
the poetic inspiration, that can loosen up the mental tension, in an article, The
Mechanism of Poetic Inspiration, discuss the psychological point of view of poetic
inspiration. The on poetry of Freud and Kostyleff are put face to face with each other.
Freud sees poetry as an outlet of suppression. Poetry is a human product that must
play a part in the functional needs of man. In a psychological perspective poetry plays
as the confession of the poet. It is considered that an artist derives its creation from a
muse but, at the end, the art is based on the self experiences of the artist. 25 However,
M. Kostyleff argues that not all poets deal with what Freud had proposed. Kostyleff
retaliated that poetry is not totally a discharge of an emotional excess. According to
Kostyleff, poetic inspiration is due to the external stimulus that affects the author that
becomes the discharge of the words. 26 But emotional impulses still have its place on
poetry. Even though language is the emphasis that Kostyleff provided, it is incomplete. It
24 Sunnie D. Kidd, On Poetic Imagination: Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger.
www.inbetwenness.com/Sunnies%20Publications/ON%20POETIC%20IMAGINATION%20SIGMUND
%20FREUD%20AND%20MARTIN%20HEIDEGGER.pdf (accessed 30 September 2014), 1-8.
25 George Hagman, Art and Self: A New Psychoanalytic Perspective on Creativity and Aesthetic
Experience. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Vol. 1159 (April 2009), 170.
26 Conrad Aiken, The Mechanism of Poetic Inspiration. The North American Review Vol. 45 (December
1917), 918-923.
10

still boil down to Freuds theory that the bottom of poetic creation is something which
plays a specific part in the life of man. This sets poetry in motion.
Through this, Mark Anthony Cayanans poetics and poems are in parallel to what Freud
is talking about on his view of poetry. Poetry is some sort of a confession that is
disguised by the poet. In an interview, he mentioned that majority of his poems are
derived from his experiences as well as his emotions regarding to that experiences. He
cites an episode of his childhood aging around eleven or twelve when it was his first
time to go to a cinema on his own. It is Tim Burtons Batman Returns, he remembers
being enraptured by Michele Pfeiffers performance as Catwoman which as he
described as self-hating, seductive, tragic, malevolent, vulnerable, and also opaque
camp creation.27 This evokes the desire to be unknowable and as interesting and due
to this desire that his first poetry book, Narcissus come to life. Narcissus comprises of
the poems of the I that is in a phase of self examination working towards its selfmastery and self-awareness.

Significance of the Study

The researcher cites some of the reasons for relevance of the topic. First, Sigmund
Freud is always often if not always attributed to the field of psychology. This study
diverts and thereby center on seeing Freud, that even if he is a scientist, he uses
philosophical methods as well as to prove his claims. Second, even if Freud is not really
from literature, he has indirectly influence literature through his thoughts on the human
mind. Third, through this study, psychoanalysis can also be seen relevant to the study of

27 Based in an interview with Mr. Mark Anthony Cayanan on 29 th December 2014

11

art and literature. Fourth, the application of Freuds ideas in the context of poetry as this
study has an application of Freuds ideas to some of the poems in the Narcissus of
Mark Anthony Cayanan. The study does not only in contribution to the validity of Freuds
theory of aesthetics but also exposes the work of a Filipino poet.

Scope and Limitation

The research will be using the Freudian works relevant to the topic and the
secondary sources related to it. Since the works of Freud are originally written in
German thus, the researcher of the study is limited to Freuds works translated into
English which can come from various sources such as: Writings on Art and Literature by
Hamacher and Wellbery, and The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud by A. A. Brill and
others. As for the poems that will be analyzed to affirm the main thesis of the study. The
researcher will use the book Narcissus by Mark Anthony Cayanan. The secondary
sources are composed of books and journal articles.

Research Method and Design

The research is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction to
the study. It exposes the problem of the study, the related studies, the purpose and the
reason for the research as well as the method and the structure of the study that the
research employs. The second chapter presents an exposition and a discussion of the
aesthetic theory of Sigmund Freud. The researcher has read through the selected
works of Sigmund Freud to expose his thoughts and his perspectives with regards to

12

aesthetics especially to poetry. The third chapter of the study is a discussion of the
poetics employed by the subject of the study, Mark Anthony Cayanan in his first poetry
book Narcissus. This is done through an interview with the poet. The fourth chapter
focuses on the analysis of the selected poems of the poet, Mark Anthony Cayanan and
on how Freuds ideas are employed in his poems wherein the researcher focus on the
reception of the poems.

The last chapter of the study contains the summary,

conclusion, and the recommendation of the researcher.

Psychoanalysis
There is only one name that dominates upon hearing psychoanalysis and that is
the name of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis started as a treatment to those who are
sick in the conventional sense and it gradually extends its method to people who are not
considered as traditionally sick.28 On the same source, the people who are not
traditionally sick are those who are feeling a difficulties in living that they are in need to
seek the help of a psychoanalyst. The patient and his psychoanalyst meet. On the
succeeding passages of the same source, explain that the emergence for the need of
psychoanalysis even those who are not really sick come to light because of the century
is the age of anxiety that produces an increase of loneliness and isolation. Furthermore,
it is admitted that psychoanalysis do not really cure the symptoms but it is a relief that
someone is willing to talk and listen.
Sigmund Freud is known as the father of psychoanalysis, he is the one who
created psychoanalysis however, in The History of Psychoanalytic Movement he states
28 Erich Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1970) 12-13.
13

that it was not him that brought psychoanalysis into existence, and it is Joseph Breuer. 29
Thus, psychoanalysis started with Joseph Breuer, since it was during the time of 1880
until 1882, and Freud is still a student and busy working for examinations. 30 During this
time, Breuer is treating a hysteric patient, Anna O., Breuer used the hypnosis as his
method in treating the patient and Dr. Breuer succeeded in freeing the symptoms of
hysteria.31 However, Breuer had not published anything about his findings and not until
years later that Freud has influence Dr. Breuer to have started a joint study of it and this
result to a publication of a preliminary paper on psychoanalysis and a volume, On the
Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena in 1893 and Studien ber Hysterie in
1895.32 On the latter, Freud describes that psychoanalysis started using Breuers is a
cathartic procedure.33 This led to two results: first, that hysterical symptoms have
sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts; and secondly, that the
uncovering of this unknown meaning is accompanied by the removal of the symptoms.
Containing on the same source, hysterical symptoms come into existence when the
mental process are not appropriately discharged; it prevents to give equilibrium to the
discharge to pass along a normal path that will lead to consciousness and movement.
29 Sigmund Freud, History of Psychoanalytic Movement, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud trans.
and ed. A.A. Brill (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 901.
30 Ibid.,
31 Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer Anna O., in The Freud Reader ed. Peter Gay (London: Vintage,
1989), 74-76.
32 Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis, in The World of Psychoanalysis Volume I ed.G.B. Levitas (New
York: G. Braziller, 1965), 21.
33 Freud, History of Psychoanalytic Movement. 901.
14

This inappropriate discharge, will then lead to psychical traumas; that often belongs to
the memories of the individual (that are not had been dealt with). The description of the
hypnosis as cathartic is due to the evident that it is the path to consciousness was
opened and there was a normal discharge of affect. As contained in the same source,
due to the conflicting views of the two authors, they part ways, Breuer supposes that
traumas arose during the hypnoid states. Whereas, Freud is inclined on the idea that
the tendencies and strivings are in contradiction to those of everyday life, and
conceived the psychic splitting itself as a result of repelling process, which leads to
defense.34
Freuds separation from Breuer led to formulation of his own method, free
association. This method refers to the ability of an individual to find straightway the
path inaccessible to his conscious reflection it leads to trace from the symptoms to
the thoughts and experiences that are connected with it. 35 This technique is later
applied to dreams, as mentioned in the same source.

Psychoanalysis and Philosophy

34 Freud, History of Psychoanalytic Movement, 904.

35 Freud, Psychoanalysis, 23.
15

This is not a discussion of the influences that Sigmund Freud has made in philosophy
but a discussion of the implications of psychoanalysis to the different disciplines of
philosophy.
Sigmund Freud was very well considered as a personality alienated from
philosophers. He was regarded as a father figure in the field of psychology, with his
proposition of the Psychoanalytic method. The Freudian concepts were noted as an ally
of the scientific realm, but with the insistence of philosophy, the psychoanalyst is now
hailed as a contemporary philosopher. In the opening statement of his An Outline to
Psychoanalysis, he states, "Psychoanalysis makes a basic assumption, the discussion
of which is reserved to philosophical thought but the justification for which lies in its
results.36
Psychoanalysis has been given many speculations to be hard-core scientific inquiry that
aims to understand the behavior of man in a scientific sense. 37 However, the subject
matter and insights is closely interrelated to the characteristics that involve philosophy,
as mentioned in the same source. Contained in the same source, that psychoanalysis is
in parallel to philosophy for philosophy is a culture working towards self-consciousness;
philosophys business is the rationalization of the revolutions that occur in the culture.
On the succeeding pages of the same source, the cultural revolutions bring challenges
to philosophy as the Greeks did to Plato for creating Geometry, the modern physics for
36 Sigmund Freud, (1940) An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXIII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press
and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964), 144.
37 Kaplan, A New World of Philosophy, 129.
16

Descartes and Locke; the reformation for Kant and the Darwins theory of evolution for
Bergson and Dewey.38
As discussed in Kaplans A New World of Philosophy. Epistemology aims for a theory
of knowledge that concerns with the origin validity and the content of knowledge. This
problem is often seen to be in the field of logic and not of psychology, however, the
foundation and the beginning of logic falls as the presupposition of psychology. That
psychology has an implication on epistemology may it be based on psychology or only
relation, it cannot be denied the fact that the underlying principles of cognition is the
conception of the mind and conduct. It further explains that psychoanalysis and
philosophy both expose the question of the theory of knowledge that concerns on the
distrust of what the people think they know. 39 Containing on the same source, Freud
refuted Lockes tabula rasa as well as the induction that is introduced by Bacon due to
Freuds belief that knowledge is based on experience and not on pure sensation,
experiences are made important through the present needs of the individual and the
learned patterns of the behavior for their future satisfaction.
On the succeeding pages of the same source, it cites ethics as one of the
implications of psychoanalysis. Ethics is often refer to as the ethical behavior that
concerns the way of acting between the good and the right. 40 In the talk of ethics in
terms of Freedom Freud, is in adherence to determinism. However, he brought that it is
38 Ibid., 130.
39 Ibid., 130-131.
40 William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1996), 211.
17

not in reliance to a spirit but on the choices as well as those features of the psychic life
that seem to be trivial and meaningless that its brought by Freud as the determinate
connections to the personal history of man. . This has been the focus of psychoanalysis
in its work towards the self-awareness and self-mastery that will further lead to the
possibility of the liberation of the self. Despite the deterministic freedom, there is still a
place for moral responsibility. Psychoanalysis, perceives that the only the self can make
itself to be morally responsible. Kaplan further explained, the obligations of the moral
agent are not imposed but obligations are only accepted. Through this it makes freedom
and responsibility to in relation to one another.41 In terms of ethics, Freud gives the
perspective of philosophical consideration that morality is evidently seen to be as less
complex than the moral agent or the individual as well as the duty of philosophy to
psychoanalysis to suspend its judgment prior to understanding morality.42
Psychoanalysis has its implication to the social philosophy. According to Kaplan,
Freud asserts that human nature is stable and is constant that makes human to make
possible generalizations that is not only based on individual cases. To which, other
philosophers has been in constant debates. On the same source, psychoanalysis then,
suggests that constancy is based on the regularity of patterns and not on the fixity that
the constancy of human nature is biologically based. On the succeeding passages from
the same source, that Freuds stand on the morality of human nature is neutral due to
individuals socialization that is brought about by development and maturation because
of the revelation of the forces of the personality of suppression and sublimation. Thus,
41 Kaplan, The New World of Philosophy, 137-139.
42 Ibid., 142.
18

the primary interest of psychoanalysis to social philosophy is to suggest the possibility

that instead of leaning into the methodology of social science that aims for interpretation
and appraisal of the culture, it is possible for a replacement of the empirical and
speculative considerations.43
And lastly, the implication of psychoanalysis to aesthetics. The main concern of
psychoanalysis to aesthetics is the psychological processes present in the production or
the reception of a work of art may it be a painting, sculpture or literature. In the article,
Contemporary Art and Hannah Segals Thinking on Aesthetics 44

it points out the

starting point of Freuds point of view of art until its development. The conception that an
art as a manifested form of subliminal sexual objects that extends to narcisissism. The
article also points that Freuds feelings towards an art does not concern on its formal
aspects but on the meaning that beholds an art. It can be taken that he is less sensitive
on visual art but on the literary art. Furthermore, according to the article, Freud,
Sigmund45 by Hutcheon, that psychoanalytic framework leaves its mark on literature.
Because psychoanalysis is not only restricted to dreams and neurosis but it extends
beyond them even up to the highest cultural achievements. Freud admires the writers
and poets as he ranked the poems and plays of Homer, Sophocles, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and William Shakespeare as the most significant works for these works
43 Ibid., 143-146.
44 Adela Abella, Contemporary Art and Hannah Segals Thinking on Aesthetics The International
Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol. 911 (2010), 163-181.
45 Linda Hutcheon, Freud, Sigmund
www.tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/10248/1/Hutcheon1994Sigmund.pdf (Accessed 30
September 2014), 312-316.
19

provide him the best illustration of psychoanalytic theories. 46 Aside from mentioned,
there is such similarity that psychoanalysis and literature has and that is both has the
conception of the reality principle and the pleasure principle as mentioned by Trilling. 47

46 Ibid., 312.
47 Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, 92.
20

Chapter 2
Sigmund Freuds Aesthetic Theory
Have you ever wondered the reason why sometimes a piece of art had captured
your eyes as well as you have the tendency to be attracted to it? Or maybe, that an art
have left such an unexplainable effect on you? It is the same feeling that Sigmund
Freud had the first time he came face to face with the Moses of Michelangelo. He was
left with such awe upon seeing it. 48 Through the impulse that the piece art arouse in him
that he further studies the effect of an art.
The aesthetics of Sigmund Freud has begun with the simple view that he has on
art admiration.49 He posited that an art is a harmless work created by man and
involves man.

Even if Freud aimed to find a concrete source of creative art by

determining its effect upon both the creator and the public. With this purpose, it has
been discovered that the work and its creator share a significant relationship, which was
inseparable in all logical ways. It is for him, an art is both on the artists creativity and
the reception to the art or the aesthetic pleasure that one can get from an art.
Man gives birth to art. It is his form of an escape. Freud likened the artist to a
child at play.

48 This can be implied in Sigmund Freud Moses of Michaelangelo.

49 Ludwig Marcuse. Freuds Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. XVII no. 1
(September 1958), 1. www.jstor.org/stable/428006 (accessed 27 September 2014).
21

every child at play behaves like an imaginative writer (artist), in that he

creates a world of his own or, more truly, he rearranges the things of his
world and orders it in a new way that pleases him better. 50

The difference between an adult and the child is that the child is allowed to play. The
child at play gains pleasure from it. He rearranges things in the world in new ways that
please them. However, children grew up and will eventually become adults, they cease
to play and give up the pleasure gained from the play. It is impossible to give up the
experience of pleasure. The thing man can do is only to exchange it for another, a
substitute that will give man an equal pleasure.
If the objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for love
(our libido) is once more liberated; and it can either take other objects
instead or can temporarily return to the ego.51

He subsequently explained the substitute of a grown up man to the child play:

So when human being grows up and ceases to play he only gives up the
connection with real objects; instead of playing he then begins to create
fantasy. or what are called daydreams.52

An adult or grown up man substitute to the real objects of the childhood play is fantasy
or daydreaming. This is also what the artist does. From the art he creates, he is creating
his own world. With the works of paintings, music, literature and the like, man releases
his fantasies and being satisfied by them. Likewise of the child at play, the pleasure he
gains from this is tantamount to the satisfaction that the artist experiences through his
50 Sigmund Freud. (1908) The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming translated by I. F. Grant Duff in On
Creativity and the Unconscious edited with an introduction and annotations by Benjamin Nelson (New
York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2009), 45.
51 Sigmund Freud translated by James Strachey. On Transience In Writings on Art and Literature edited
by Werner and David E. Wellbery with a foreword by Neil Hertz. (California: Stanford University Press,
1997), 178.
52 Freud, The Relation of the Poet to Day-dreaming, 46.
22

art. The artist frees himself by giving shape and form to the instincts and desires which
drive him.53 An art is the artists release of tensions in the mind that will be explained in
the succeeding paragraphs of the chapter. But, it must be noted that an art is deemed
justifiable, in this purpose. Art is the sense of concreteness that the artist gives. It is an
externalization of the instincts and desires that is controlled by the responsible, realistic,
and logical ego.54
Furthermore, the Freudian theory proposes an anchor to this cause. The assertion of
Freud continues as, the driving cause of this sublimation is one that is least expected
the sexual wish, commonly known as the Libido. 55 One of the foundations of his
psychoanalytic theory is that mans sexual drive, which he points as one drawn from a
persons childhood, is the mother of all drives that causes the desires, thoughts and
acts of man. Sublimation is signified as the transformation of the lower sexual instincts
into higher culture-building activities such as art, literature, and culture. 56 Freud
considers sublimation as the displacement of instinctual impulse into socially useful
activity.
Sublimation is a form of desexualization, a process to purify that brings out an alteration
to the original object of desire into its desire of the self. It plays a part to the ego
53 Marcuse. Freuds Aesthetics, 3
54 Abraham Kaplan. Freud and Modern Philosophy in A New World of Philosophy by Abraham Kaplan
(New York: Random House, 1961), 135.
55 Neil Hertz Foreword In Writings On Art and Literature edited by Werner Hamacher and David E.
Wellbery (California: Stanford University Press, 1997), xii.
56 Jeffrey Adams. Sublimation, Intersubjectivity, and Art Identity-formation, Psychoanalytic Review Vol.
93 no. 5(October 2006), 688. MEDLINE Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed 23 October 2014), 688.
23

formation because it directs the impulses of the id into the service of an achievement
the culture. Since art is culturally accepted and socially useful, it can draw that an art is
an outlet of the artist in that his desires and instincts are sublimated.

It was

aforementioned that art is the release of tensions in the mind. The artist, in this line of
thinking, manifests his toned-down passion in a way that is admissible in the
population.
The writer (artist) softens the egotistical character of the day-dream by
changes and disguises, and he bribes us by the offer of a purely formal,
that is, aesthetic, pleasure in the presentation of his phantasies. 57

Poetic treatment is impossible without softening and disguise. 58 Freud sees

sublimation as the necessary draining and conversion of the libido into the elevated
creative forms of art and culture. It is also considered as a mutual advantage: the artist
was able to discover a demurred way of release, and his audience is assumed to
receive a sense of reward through the appreciation and the pleasure they have drawn
from the work of art. Art brings to artist and audience alike a pulsing awareness both of
human desires and of the realities which frustrates and fulfills them. The sublimation
has the capacity of transforming ones unconscious fantasy into universal art that is
accepted method to express fantasy that is halfway between a Wish-frustrating reality
and Wish-fulfilling imagination.59

57 Freud,The Relation of the Poet to Day-dreaming, 54.

58 Sigmund Freud (1928), Dostoevsky and Parricide , in Character and Culture edited and with an
introduction by Philip Reiff (New York: Colier Books, 1972), 286
59 Linda Hutcheon. Freud, Sigmund
www.tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/10248/1/Hutcheon1994Sigmund.pdf (accessed 27
September 2014), 313.
24

The unconscious part of the mind is inclined for the formation of the fantasies. It is
satisfied with the presence of an art. The unconscious part of the mind is source of the
inspiration, the creative impulse of the artists craft. Art is an independent creation that
does not originate and/or come from what is called artistic soul nor a transcendent form
of beauty. There is no such thing as an inspiration that is outside of the artists psychical
life but only outside of the conscious life. The aesthetic production lies in the realm of
the unconscious.
With the presence of the variety of artworks, Freud gave the highest regard to
literature because painting can evoke such an effect to a person but he cannot
apprehend of what exactly it is. He gives regard to poetry as Trilling remarks:
Freud shows us that poetry is natural to man, to the very constitution of
the mind; the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a
poetry-making faculty. 60

In which Freud expressed in his essay The Relation of the Poet to Day-dreaming, he
states that every man is at heart a poet, and that the last poet will not die until the
last human being does.61

60Lionel Trilling.. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning by Lionel Triling (Harmondworth:
Penguin Books, 1965), 89.
61 Freud. The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming, 44.
25

In his works, Freud was primarily inclined towards critically-acclaimed poets, such as
Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe.62 He even praises the poets as he remarks that
the poets are the ones who first discovered the unconscious. 63
The conception of the make-believe has been his attribution to the Freudian criticism
of poetry. The poet, according to him, epitomizes the self-uplifting aspiration of man. He
coins the idea of the First Poet the one who takes over materials ready made for the
work to be created. Freud remarks:
It is a re-fashioning of ready-made material. The writer retains a
certain amount of independence, which can express itself in the choice of
material and in changes in the material chosen. 64

The poet is said to maintain a certain form of independence from the eventual work by
utilizing the materials already in existence and shaping the works completion by choice
of material. Freud further explains the source of materials that the First Poet uses
material is derived from the racial treasure-house of myths, legends, and fairy-tales. 65
The first poet uses fantasy materials which have come down through time as fairy-tales,
legends, and story of myths. Freud believes the aforementioned materials of the first
poet depicts not only the longing of the artist but also the wishful fantasies the humanity.

62 Marcuse, Freud's Aesthetics, 10.

63 This remark of Freud to the poets can be primarily seen in his work, Jensens Gradiva.
64 Freud. The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming, 53.
65 Ibid., 53.
26

There is another way of being a poet that Freud coined to be the Second poet a poet
who creates material for the work spontaneously.66 The process involved in this way is
that something new is revealed by these poets who undertakes into the dark unknown
of the unconscious. It brings the understanding on the common experiences of human
conflict. Freud remarks:
if they happened in real life could produce no pleasure can
nevertheless give enjoyment in a play many emotions which are
essentially painful may become a source of enjoyment to the spectators
and hearers of a poets work.67

It is that a real life event can bring pleasure to the readers. The artists work reaches
the people through the experiences that are common to man. In the second poet the
spontaneous production, actual experiences of the writer have left an impression on
him. Some actual experience which made a strong impression on the writer had stirred
up a memory of an earlier experience.68
There is a remembrance of a deep and vast space that is without the personal aspect
on the form. The author of the art imposes a biographical charisma on his artwork the
reality where the author lives in is established in the works he creates. The art of the
poet is related to his life. The artist is enjoying access to his own unconscious he can

66 Sunnie KiddOn Poetic Imagination: Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger.

www.inbetwenness.com/Sunnies%20Publications/ON%20POETIC%20IMAGINATION%20SIGMUND
%20FREUD%20AND%20MARTIN%20HEIDEGGER.pdf (accessed 30 September 2014). 4.
67 Freud. The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming, 45.
68 Ibid., 53
27

manifest to his audience their similarities, their common humanity.69 Freud goes further
by citing the famous Leonardo da Vinci, stating that his Mona Lisa and St. Anne and
Two Others are a living narration of his childhood. An art can be used to express
something about the artist. This shows his formulation:
a memory of an earlier experience, generally belonging to a
childhood, which then arouses a wish that finds a fulfillment and in
which element of the recent event and the old memory should be
discernible.70

In this, he states that the simplest and most plain events in life can dictate the most
important attribute of art which is subjectivity while the artist can also objectify it into the
public.

The poets are able to revive the structures involving the development and

fixation of the potentialities of man. The creation or the art is threaded on the periods of
time. It is connected to the past, the present and the future the past is known, the
future unknown and the present is the possibility for both past and present. The artists
have the ability to turn away from reality and returns to it bringing revelations and new
aspects of other possibilities.
All artworks, including its approach to its audience, are the real utterance of its
creators life in lieu with the laws of Aesthetics. This approach to art maintains the core
truth in the conception of art as the way of the artist of self-expression and at the same
time he is freeing himself of the repressed childhood desires and wishes.
Critics of the Freudian aesthetics have found the difficulty in drawing the line
between a legitimate artistic attribute and a neurotic disorder. To re-emphasize, Freud
69 Kaplan, Freud and Modern Philosophy, 137.
70 Freud. The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming, 52.
28

have pointed out that the psychotic suffers from a world of delusions, while the artist
draws the desires that produces his artworks from events in reality. The neurotic person
is unable to utilize the tensions in his mind while the artist is saved from neurosis by his
ability to give expression to the tension through the works of art. 71 The Art should not be
regarded as an obstacle to self-realization; rather, it should be a motivating factor for
man to be able to expound his world by traveling back and forth, from fantasy to reality.
It was mentioned that art is not purely out of the unconscious that the works of art is
ruled and controlled by the factors that is conscious. The formulation of that there are
three mental apparatuses that work in the mind: the id, the ego, and the super-ego that
are constantly related to one another, is in contribution to the aforementioned claim.

Three-fold Personality Structure

The research work on how the personality is organized appears to be the most
well-known, upon hearing the name Sigmund Freud as well as serves as one of his
prominent theories that can easily be remembered. Freud proposed that there are three
structure divisions of personality, the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The three mental
structures of the mind is nothing that is of physical but it is all of the ideally separated,
however, they have relation to each other and often in conflict.

The Id
The id is the oldest and it contains everything that is inherited, including the
instincts, which originate from the somatic organization and which find a first psychical
71 Kidd, On Poetic Imagination: Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, 2.
29

expression here (in the id) in forms unknown to us. 72 The id represent the influence of
the past - hereditary influence. 73 On the succeeding passage, it has claimed that the
true purpose of the individual is in the ability of the id. It heeds to the immediate
satisfaction of what it desire, the fulfillment of what it wants and needs without paying
attention to what the others want and need. The id is also synonymous with the
unconscious which seems to appear as illogical, irrational, and with little ability to
distinguish the real from unreal 74 as it wholly conforms to the pleasure principle more
than that of the reality principle.

The Ego
The ego is a part of the id that had gone development through the direct
influence of the external world. 75 On the same page, the ego in a sense plays as a
midway between the id and the external world; also, the ego has the capacity to control
and make commands.76 The ego is concern to assure the self-preservation of the
individual for both external and internal.77
72 Sigmund Freud. (1940) An Outline of Psychoanalysis , In The Standard Edition of The Complete
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and Institute
of Psychoanalysis, 1964)145.
73 Ibid., 147
74 Susan Debnam. Mines Bigger Than Yours: Understanding and Handling Egos at Work (Cyan
Communications, 2006), 39.
75 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 279.
76 Ibid.,
77 Freud, An Outline Of Psycchoanalysis, 146.
30

As regards external events, it performs that task by becoming aware of

stimuli, by storing up experiences about them (in the memory), by
avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight), by dealing with
moderate stimuli (through adaptation) and finally by learning to bring
about expedient changes in the external world to its own advantage
(through activity). As regards internal events, in relation to the id, it
performs that task by gaining control over the demands of the instincts,
by deciding whether they are to be allowed satisfaction, by postponing
that satisfaction to times and circumstances favourable in the external
world or by suppressing their excitations entirely. It is guided in its activity
by consideration of the tensions produced by stimuli, whether these
tensions are present in it or introduced into it. The raising of these
tensions is in general felt as unpleasure and their lowering as pleasure. It
is probable, however, that what is felt as pleasure or unpleasure is not
the absolute height of this tension but something in the rhythm of the
changes in them. The ego strives after pleasure and seeks to avoid
unpleasure. An increase in unpleasure that is expected and foreseen is
met by a signal of anxiety; the occasion of such an increase, whether it
threatens from without or within, is known as a danger.78

The ego is task to simultaneously satisfy the demands and able to reconcile
the demands of the id, of the super-ego, and of reality. 79 The ego is determined by the
experience of the individual, by accidental and contemporary events. 80

Freud

describes the ego as motivated by the reality principle. It is the representation of

reason and sanity. 81 It is where the pleasure principle is substituted by the reality
principle. Containing on the same page, Freud further explained the ego using the
analogy of the horseback rider; the rider is not to be separated from the horse, he is in
the responsibility to lead it to where it wishes to go. It is in the same way that the id
instincts are being fulfilled, in the reality principle. It was mentioned that the ego is not to
78 Ibid., 145-146.
79 Ibid., 146.
80 Ibid., 147.
81 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 279.
31

abandon the intention to obtain pleasure however; it will take an indirect road to
pleasure. The ego has a regulative function that even if a man desire or need
something, they cannot just easily blurt them out until they achieve them. The ego is in
control on the id and deepen its relations with it 82
The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus
takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a process
of desexualization. It is consequently a kind of sublimation.83

In difference to the id, the ego is initially a body-ego wherein both the external and the
internal perceptions may spring. 84 The ego has an access to both the external reality
and internal world, or to the called fantasy and the reality. Freud further affirms that the
ego is develops first from perceiving the instincts to controlling them, and later on,
from obeying instincts to cubing them. 85 From this, the poet or an artist has the
mastery to go back and forth from the realm of daydreams or fantasy to the realm of the
external world, the reality.

The Super-ego
The super-ego is often described as the moral and ethical foundation of the personality.
While the id is concern on the pleasure seeking principle that an immediate satisfaction
of the desire is required, the ego that ensures the satisfaction of the id is met in proper
82 Ibid., 282.
83 Ibid.,.
84 Ibid., 279.
85 Ibid., 301.
32

appropriation and safely, the super-ego is concerned with the effective operation of man
in the society.
The super-ego is in the same with the id some ways that it also represents the
influences of the past - essentially what is taken from other people. The main task of
the super-ego is to limit the satisfaction of the desires. The super-ego like the ego also
serves as a mediator between the id and the external world it lies in its ability to bring
together the influence of the present and the past that is an example through the
super-ego the present is changed into the past. 86
The three-fold personality structure formulated by Freud explains that even though they
are different and conflicting from one another, they are as well related. These three
parts influence the persons identity as well as his way of acting.
The three divisions of the mind spring the works of art. In Reads Art and Society
he addressed that the work of art derives its energy, its irrationality and its mysterious
power from the id, as the source of inspiration. It is given formal synthesis and unity in
the ego; and finally it maybe assimilated to ideologies or spiritual aspirations which are
the peculiar creation of the super-ego. 87 Art adheres to the norms of the society. The
expression of an art is socially acceptable and justifiable. The greatest accomplishment
of an art is its ability to present a world free of danger or trouble and to cast a
semblance of reality over that which never was on land or sea.

86 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 207.

87 Herbert Read, Art and Society (Pantheon Books, New York, 1945), 92.
33

The Two Mental Functioning

In the last part of the fourth Chapter of An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud had
formulated that there are two processes occurring in the mind, they are the primary
process and the secondary process. 88 On the same page, it is claim that the primary
process abides the laws of the unconscious, while, the secondary process leads the
events that occur the in the preconscious, in the ego. In the Formulations Regarding
the Two Principles in Mental Functioning, the primary process is ruled out by the
pleasure-pain (Lust-unlust) also known as the pleasure principle, this process is
inclined towards the victor of getting pleasure and in avoidance of pain in any ways
possible.89 However, as there is an external world that may hinder the primary process
from gaining pleasure and satisfaction, thus, a new mental functioning is introduced.
The latter mental process is regulated by the reality-principle that adheres to the reality
despite pleasure cannot found as long as it is derived from what is real even if it gives
unpleasure. Even though it may seem that the reality principle has dominated the
pleasure principle, Freud argues that it is not the case is not in reality accomplished
all at once; nor does it take place simultaneously along the whole line. 90 Containing on
the same page, Freud subsequently explains as to why the reality principle has not
completely taken over the pleasure principle. It is because, For while this development
is going on in the ego-instincts, the sexual instincts become detached from them in a
88 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 164.
89 Sigmund Freud. (1911) Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning in
Sigmund Freud General Psychological Theory: Papers on Meta psychology edited by Philip Reiff. (New
York: Collier Books, 1963), 22.
90 Ibid., 25
34

very significant ways.91 It is further explained that is contained on the next passage,
that the sexual instincts which are auto-erotic that finds its satisfaction in the childs
body as to why it do not coincide with the reality principle but during the later years this,
sexual instinct will begin to find its object that is usually occurs during the latency period
up until the puberty stage.
These two factors auto-erotism and latency period --- brings about the
result that the mental development of the sexual instincts is delayed and
remains far longer under the supremacy of the pleasure-principle, from
which many people it is never able to withdraw itself at all. 92

Due to the delayed mental development of the sexual instincts, it results that a closer
relationship is then established between the sexual instincts and the fantasy and, on
the other hand, between the ego-instincts and the activities of consciousness. 93 It is
maintained on the same page, that the reality principle replacement for the pleasure
principle does not necessarily mean the dethronement of the pleasure-principle, but
only a safeguarding of it. But it can only be viewed as delayed gratification of the
pleasure that can be acquired in an indirect road as it will bring greater pleasure. In the
two mental functioning it is claimed that the even the occurrences in an individuals life
is bound on the reality principle it is still inkling towards to what is pleasurable.
In Literary Theory: An Anthology, Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan commented that the
primary process contains an entirely irrational, and it cannot distinguish images and

91 Ibid.,
92 Ibid.,
93 Ibid., 26.
35

things, reasonable objects and unreasonable or socially unacceptable ones. 94

Whereas, the secondary process is occupied in the ego and the superego, it brings
reason, order, logic, and social acceptability to those of in the primary process of the
mind.95
Any work of art operates in the process that is of the two mental functioning. It
reconciles the two principles.96 On the succeeding pages of the same source, an artist
has the ability to turn from reality because he cannot refuse the satisfaction of his
instincts that is first made and later on, an entire play of the ambitious and erotic wishes
takes place in the fantasy-life. Even if the artist is capacitated to turn from reality he also
has this gift to go back to reality and give form to his fantasies a new kind of reality
without changing the external world. As men allows art to be a justified as reflections of
the actual life.97

In the succeeding chapter of the research, the poetics of the subject of the study,
Mark Anthony Cayanan will be studied. As in an interview, he agrees with the Freudian
aesthetic theory that a work of art specifically poetry is a self-expression. The persona,
is addressing to explain himself. 98 Even if in poetry there are leaps or deep images that

94 Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology (2nd edition) (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), 391.
95 Ibid.,
96 Freud, Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning, 26.
97 Ibid.,
36

taps into the unconscious of the persona, yet there is still a full play of fantasy and
turning back to reality.

98 An online interview is conducted by the researcher of the study with the poet, Mr. Mark Anthony
Cayanan held on 29th of December 2014.
37

Chapter 3
Poetics
Mark Anthony Cayanan

Mark Anthony R. Cayanan is a modern contemporary Filipino poet. He is raised

in Angeles City, Pampanga. He obtained his MA in Creative Writing from the University
of the Philippines, Diliman and he recently obtained his MFA degree in Creative Writing
from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
He is a fellow for poetry in English at the UP National Writers Workshop in 2007
and a recent writing fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. Some of his works
have already been published in the Sunday Magazine of Inquirer, Ideya: A Journal of
the Humanities. In 2007, Cayanan is awarded honorable mention at the 3 rd Maningning
Miclat Prize for Poetry and in 2009, he won the Palanca Award. In the book of Patke
and Holden, The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English
(2010), Cayanan is recognized as a young poet to note. 99
He has published two full-length poetry books entitled Narcissus (Ateneo de
Manila University Press) and Except You Enthrall Me (University of the Philippines
Press), and chapbook Shall We Be Kind and Suffer Each Other (High Chair). These
poetry books and chapbook are published in 2011, 2014, and 2012, respectively. He

99 Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden. The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in
English. (London: Routledge, 2010), 177.
38

also serves as one of the editors of the Kritika Kultura: Anthology of New Philippine
Writing in English published in 2011.
Mark Anthony Cayanan teaches writing and literature courses at the Ateneo de Manila
University and an associate editor of the literary section of the Kritika Kultura, an
international refereed academic journal of literary, language, and culture of the Ateneo
de Manila University.100
He is drawn to the influence, of the confessional poetry since he was in his
secondary years however, during those years he was just well acquainted to the works
of the confessional poets especially, Sylvia Plath specifically her Lady Lazarus, later
on, as he was in the graduate school that he had realized he is actually influenced by
the confessional poetry.

Confessional Poetry

Robert Lowell is to have known that introduced confessional poetry movement

though, it is believed that M. L. Rosenthal, a literary critic, coined the Confessional
Poetry in his Poetry as Confession in the November 19, 1959 issue of The Nation.101
In Nelsons essay entitled, Confessional poetry, she called the review made by
Rosenthal as one of the more influential that has ever written. 102
100 http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net/
101 Deborah Nelson, Confessional Poetry. The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945.
ed. Jennifer Ashton. (USA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 31.
102 Ibid.,
39

In the same source, it is Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and W.D. Snodgrass who
has been students of Lowell, and they are among those who used the same literary
technique. Even though this poetic style gives more regard on the autobiographical or
the personal lives of its authors, it still has its structure; it still has paid attention to the
intonation and rhythm of the poems.
Confessional poetry is the style of poetry that emerges in the late 1950s and
early 1960s at the United States. It is widely known as the poetry of the persona or the
I, because confessional poetry is always written from the first person point of view, The
I is used by the poet not to put emphasis on himself but to increase its effect on the
readers, it is for the poem to be felt by the readers themselves.
Only Plath, Sexton, Snodgrass, and Lowell are the poets known of the
confessional poetry, however, in Rosenthals Poetry as Confession, he argued that the
confessional poetry is not considered as only restricted to one group of poets but it is
universal to all poets.103 Rosenthals argument seems to mean, with the confessional
mode, the poets during the period 1950s and 1960s use it as a treatment to personal
experiences.
Deborah Nelson mentioned in her essay that in this poetic mode, the Freudian
psychotherapy has significantly contributed. It is the release of the mental tensions that
denotes as one of the most varying and an intense artistic experimentation as of the
late twentieth century.

104

103 Alex Preminger and T.V. F. Borgan. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 61.
104 Nelson, Confessional Poetry, 33.
40

The emergence of the confessional poetry is more to be treated as a paradigm

shift, a shift from impersonality to emotionality together with the revelations it exhibits
from the most personal and to the shameful. 105 Moreover, Laura de Neravaux explains,
the psychoanalysis contribution to the confessional poetry is that its provision of the
epistemological and the rhetorical background of the confessional poets quest for the
self.106
Mark Anthony Cayanans confessional mode of poetics as he describes it in an
interview as the opening of the self without revealing the most personal secrets, or the
use of exaggeration of the self or it is to an extent a styled confession that veers away
from its artifice of honesty, or that is an organization seems to be unapparent and not
even important due to the schizophrenic version of the self. It lies more on the tension
between disclosure and concealment is the primary aesthetic and the thematic concern
of his poetry.
Cayanans poems enclosed in his books have the determined characteristic that
even it is in a confessional mode it is heavy in terms of its use of rhetoric structure, the
poems are in desire to explain something but not to the extent that the poems are
rational. He still believed that an internal logic is urged to voice out that he describe as
the move form irrational desire/ fantasy to externalization. 107 In the interview, he says
that the persona of the poems are compelled to enact identity, an unstable identity that
105 Ibid., 35.
106 Laura de Nervaux, The Freudian Muse: Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Self-Revelation in Sylvia
Plaths Daddy and Medusa. erea.revues.org/186 (Accessed 10 March 2015).
107 It is from an interview with Mr. Cayanan conducted by the researcher.
41

is an important thing, and at the same time that emerges through utterance and
performance and iteration. He further explain, the persona of mostly of his poems is
the consciousness but then, it goes through a different identities it is the variety of roles
and that is only possible with the use of language.
With regard to this, Frederic Jameson remarks, what might once have been
characterized as schizophrenia as now appears to hover with some complaisance
between joyous intensities and euphoria. 108
Other than the confessional mode of poetry, Mark Cayanans poetics is also influenced
by some philosophers and other literary personas. He mentioned that upon doing his
first poetry book, Narcissus, he has been influenced by Jacques Lacan and Judith
Butler as well as Otto Rank.
Jacques Lacans influence on Cayanan is primarily on his poetry is the
development of Lacans structuralist theory of psychoanalysis through the linguistic
theory of Saussure. Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan in Literary Theory: An Anthology
explain, Lacan posits that the ego is constructed through the precepts of imagination as
well as the narcissitic fantasies, as it remains blind to its determination by the drives,
the unconscious, and its placement and construction by language, the language is that
gives identity to the I.109

108 as mentioned by Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden in Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian
Writings in English, (London: Routledge, 2010), 177.
109 Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology, 393.
42

As for Judith Butler, that deals with gender identity. Butlers influence in Cayanans
poetry is the position of Butlers argument that all gender identity is a performative act.
Rivkin and Ryan explain, that wherein lesbian or gay is rather a neurotic imitation that a
desire is present on the part of a woman or a man. 110 It is an imitation of the ideal.
Both of Cayanans philosophical influences are rooted from the Freudian idea of psychoanalysis. Both
have expanded and clarified the Freudian psychoanalysis in the aid of literature.

Filipinos are known for undying devotion for actors and actresses, and Cayanan
as perceived in his poems that some are titled after the names of actresses such as
Dina Bonnevie, Snooky Serna, Greta Garbo, and Rossana Roces. It shows the
glorification of the beloved actresses through the poems. This exemplifies the cultural
influence that the poet has.
Cayanans poems are not politically motivated unlike that those of other poets of
the Philippines that delve on the political situation of the country. Rather, Cayanans
poetry gives emphasis on the self that despite of the uncertainties brought about by the
the social reality, the self maintains itself to be secured regardless of its gender and
social class.

110 Ibid., 900.

43

Chapter 4
Synthesis

As stated, the Freudian theory of Aesthetics has its regard to the taps and the
leaps of the unconscious. In the work of Mark Anthony Cayanan in his first poetry book,
Narcissus, the poet gives its focus on the unconscious while following the common
literary trend today that is in adherence to the New Criticism that is independent of its
author.
The Narcissus as an allusion to the Greek mythological character is relatively
apparent. The book is divided into four sections, The Main of Light, On Beauty/ The
Thing Itself, Placelessness, and The Narcissus in the City, respectively. In the
interview, Cayanan explained that first part of the poetry book, The Main of Light is the
paradigm for the understanding of the pose of the poetry book which is the Narcissus
who devotes a good part of his life lovingly, longingly, staring at his reflection in the
water, wherein the first part is an extended act of self-examination. In the
Placelessness, the use of the third person point of view to emphasize an omniscient
consciousness to which that the utterances and thoughts are heavy-handed,
tyrannical, that its fallibility, its veiled presence as an I becomes undeniable. 111
As a whole, Narcissus is characterized by its author as a drag show book,
shows the self with varying identities, projections in a way that the self is portrayed
111 From an interview with Mr. Cayanan.
44

becoming to be multiple and relentlessly performative that in the language of disorder

especially of psychoanalysis as schizophrenia.
It makes the book, as admitted by its author, the book to an extent as selfaggrandizing that it almost takes notice only of its existence. Yet, there is the desire of
the author to pursue the distortions that occurs whenever one has to have a close
examination the self.
A. The Main of Light112
The Main of Light is about the persona being the center of the world. The I is
born. It depicts that even the I is still even inside the womb of his mother; he already
exercises being loved and his love for himself. In the poem, the persona remarks of the
unique ways that he can express his desires to the outside of the womb of his mother.
The persona does not only depict the I as being loved even during the times of
his stay in his mothers womb. It also depicts the process of what the mother is going
through in order to give life to the persona. He remarks,
a fist smiting from within
her belly as her legs as her skull about to crack
Into collapse.

This depicts the pain of the mother as she goes through the giving birth, to give
life to the I. The giving birth which is a crucial part to a mother, she has to make herself
be in a situation which is matter of life and death. But, the demands of the persona to be
brought out are the priority to be taken above all the pain. The mother has to bear all the
112 Please refer to Appendix 1.1.
45

pain until as if there was nothing that has been inside her. Rather, I will now alert the
world that he is already here, here in the world. The I that will be the center of his own
world. The I that thinks of no one but his own.
There are some technical languages used in the poem in order to give life to
what it pictures. It has successfully depicts the danger of a mother as she needs to go
through to the edge of life or be death in giving birth as well as the foreshadow of a
newborns mentality that him and him alone shall exist, the world only begins and ends
in him, with him.
The poem describes the feeling that every child has during the first stages of his
life the only one that exist is the I I am the only one in the world, I own the world. The
feeling that every attention must be focused on you that this attention will eventually
decline as the child grows older. The poem also expresses the desire for attention even
if he does not seem to need it anymore because he is already capable of doing things
on his own.
The poem gives its idealization of the narcissism of a child. In Sigmund Freuds
essay On Narcissism, the narcissism that is obviously evident in children to which Freud
called as the primary narcissism that its original form is to direct the desires to the ego.
This is the stage of children that they believe in the omnipotence thoughts which is the
belief in the magical virtue of words and the art of magic that appears to be the
grandiosity in the power of their words.113
113 Sigmund Freud, (1914), On Narcissism: An Introduction trans. Cecil M. Baines, In Sigmund Freud
General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology edited and with an introduction by Philip Reiff
(New York: Collier Books, 1963), 58.
46

B. As Dina Bonnevie114
The I is reminiscing a childhood memory of a summer spent in the province
where he found a Betamax tape of Dina Bonnevies Ang Babaeng Nawawala sa Sarili
inside his fathers cabinet. The fact that it is hidden and he is alone in their house, urges
him that to see the movie would be priceless, it has to be seen.
The I is watching the movie. As he is watching Dina Bonnevies movie, a foreign
desire has hit him the desire of wanting. There was an arousal of desire as the screen
plays the film. The I fantasizes. The fantasy of being felt and touched until it would
come to his own climax coming into terms of the ambitions and desires of the I, it is
the fantasy that desires and ambitions are given to the I.
This poem provides the readers that simple things such as finding something that
are hidden from them. This often mean that it should not be touched or even seen.
However, as humans, the urge to see what is it, the restraint of why it should not be
taken give the urge that may be it is something that should be seen. It beholds
something in itself that makes it to be prohibited, to be hidden. Mans curiosity takes the
best of him. He wants to see, what the thing is. This common experience makes the
reader and the persona relate to each other. Both the reader and the persona share the
same sentiments over hidden things. It makes that while the reader is reading the poem
it is as if he (reader) is also the persona of the poem himself. Through the poem, it
makes him to discover a part of himself as well as a part of the poet sharing himself to
his readers.
114 Please refer to Appendix 1.2.
47

The poem presents the Freudian idea of the object of desire. As the character
that is played by Dina Bonnevie in Ang Babaeng Nawawala sa Sarili. It is also stated in
the poem that it is the eleventh summer which poses to assume that the I is already
eleven of age. According to Freuds The Theory of Sexuality, the age of eleven is the
puberty phase that the infantile sexual aim turns into a definite one. There is already
the presence of sexual excitation that evokes a feeling of pleasure. 115
The Freudian aesthetic, the full play of fantasy that the I becomes Dina
Bonnevie reaching into its orgasm, the I is in domination. Sigmund Freuds Aesthetical
theory: the First Poet. In the description given earlier in the research, the poet, or any
artist, feels the longing for his own part in his work. He plays the role as the protagonist
in his work, which is an image of the artist-work relationship.
C. What Happens Next116
The persona in this poem is stating a story. A story of how life is once you have
already had your departure from the mothers womb.
The first stanza of the poem it shows that what matters most once you are born
is not about if you want to be born or not but about what will happen next. It gives man
the imagination of the future. The second stanza shows mans phases of growing. From
the time he learned how to run and as he grows old he becomes more and more
comfortable with the world he lives in; though, there are times he needs to be told of
115 Sigmund Freud. The Theory of Sexuality, In Sigmund Freud: Collected Writings. trans. A.A. Brill
(United States: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010), 194-195.
116 Please refer to Appendix 1.3.
48

what to do and what not to do. As he continues to run in his life, everything seems to
pass by in a blur. Thus, there is a need to stop to look on your surroundings, a look into
the world. On the third stanza, it gives realization to man that once you have stopped or
paused on running, then a realization will hit you on what you have missed on hurrying.
Something like the rest of your life
Once called to you. When you turned,
it was the wind cooing to the branches.
There must have always been branches.

On the fourth stanza, it is the mounting of the regrets. Instead of letting

opportunities slip, the temporary desires that man wants in his life once satisfied will no
longer be of use nor will still be what you desire for the next moment. You want to go
back to how things are so that you can give it appreciation.
what you want is to stare out the bus
again, at the green unrolling before the green,
not at the blankness you read into it. What
you want is to close this book, or stop
sleeping every time the engine hums
under your feet. What you want is to have
mouthed yes instead of soon. You want
to have felt his neck between your hands,
your fingers discovering one another,
almost an Amen, What you want is reason
for the night; you want to want its morning.

The persona is just lucky enough to have this realization and being to have time
to appreciate these simple things that can make out his life. The things that make him to
be who he really is tracing the events of life from the parents he has to the failed love
as well as the accidents he had been involved with.

49

On the latter part of the poem, the increase of giving value to what seems to
vanish. The Freudian aesthetics gives justification to the poem. In Freuds essay On
Transience, express the limitedness of the things around especially of nature that it will
soon fade away. Despite the scarcity of the time, the increase to its enjoyment
limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the possibility of enjoyment this is
understandable but the effect of enjoyment is the one that should be given emphasis
the interference of joy to the thought of transience. 117 In the poem, as long as the I
enjoys whatever that is offered the more the I becomes itself. As well as to the
development of the I that it is more regulated by the reality principle that it no longer
submits to the desires of the id and through the enjoyment given by the limitedness of
things the I can finally reconcile itself to the id.
D. As Anne Sexton118
The poem is in a character of Anne Sexton as she is in a psychiatric struggle in
her book Bedlam and Party Way Back. Moreover, parts of the poem are directly from
the works of Anne Sexton.
The poem starts with the use of the different phases of the sun as it fully rises;
the sun as the symbol to turn to full nakedness. In the course, having been written the
Bedlam, there is the desire of death. However, the death that is played is not a literal
death but a death to be in a body of another, to have the life of another. The I desires
to be Anne Sexton, to possess her body and all things pleasant that she has.
117 Freud, On Transience, 177.
118 Please refer to Appendix 1.4.
50

As the I tells its story that the I can fit in to the Sextons white lace dress that
refers to Sextons photograph during her modeling portfolio and aside from the fitting of
the dress the I also swears to suck its check to be like Sexton in the likeness of Jane
Russel.
The next stanza portrays the modernization, in the age that everything that
whatever what would do to its own body has always been dictated by the society, it
presented as We turn our body, and its the citys anatomy. It is to an extent that even
the thoughts coming from the person is not well played on who the I really is, it makes
the I to be unsatisfied of itself. With the impact that the modernization and the society
has taken over, there is the burst of fantasy is created that is distinct from the actual.
In the poem, there is the play of the threefold structure of personality that Freud
has created. There is the presence of the id that only desires only the good things as
the I wanted to be Anne Sexton because of the good things that she possesses such
as her physique, her men, and her cigarette as well as the tug of the super-ego and the
id, the play between the body and the city, even the body is in adherence to the societal
influence. The super-ego is in domination of the id however, on the latter part of the
poem, there is the presence of the id in the form of fantasy and the dreams. In order to
give satisfaction to the dreams and fantasy, the I has fixed its attention to thinking in
replacement to masturbating that makes it to be in association to the power that the
poet has.
E. Narcissus in the City119
119 Please refer to Appendix 1.5.
51

The poem begins with an opening of the new day, as a new chance. Each day is
a chance to have a disclosure and conceal that is in the surroundings of the persona.
Everything that is given character, the self, the train, and the streets are all on its own
without taking care so much of the others. They are all separate entity that exists
independent of each other. Then, on the evening there are occurrences that will be
admitted in the morning after. It will soon be concealed in history.
On the fourth stanza, there is the play of dreams that reminds of the Freudian
idea.
of your own sleep in which you are
reminded
in a dream, of course as all remembers were:
You were some other. Not this.

In Freuds Interpretation of Dreams, it expresses that during sleep, dreams

expresses the wishes or desires that cannot be expressed during the waking life. 120 The
same thing is in the poem. The I is behaving differently to what it desires instead it
behaves in accord to sustain the life in the city. Those desires and dreams that manifest
the wishes and desires are forgotten during the day.
As the poem progresses, there is the seeking of the self in the midst of the
modernity represented by the city where the I is living. Because the I has been fed
up by the objects it needed but it does not desire.

120 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud , translated
and edited by A.A. Brill (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1995), 287.
52

What do you see

now that I have been overwhelmed by
what object to mouth what thing to name
whose name to call.

As the poem progresses, it presents an interplay of the id, the ego, and the super-ego.
The version of the self changes as the time goes by.
As if you were about to belong to anothers story.

The seventh part of the poem, gives the story of the self, of how it was before
there is the city. It is like the old version of the self is talking to the new or the current
self, the old self is encouraging the current one to have a look on the surroundings, to
how it has changed without the knowledge of the current for it has too busy to attend to
itself alone. On the latter part, the I have become to see itself on the surface of the
lake.
The Freudian aesthetics, takes the interplay of the threefold structure of
personality in the poem as the id, the ego, and the super-ego are presented as
conflicting personalities of the self. The id presents itself as in the dreams that the I
has during its sleep; the ego is regulated by presence of the fulfillment of the needs of
the I that is given emphasis instead of its desire; and the super-ego in the presence of
the society, the city. Despite of the conflicts it presented, there is the unity attained in the
latter part, the id and the super-ego as it woven the past and the present self of the I.
As well as the presentation of the second poet in Sigmund Freuds aesthetical
theory, that is given in the description in the second chapter as the ability of the poet to
derive his material from simple life events turned to be objectified to the public.
53

F.

Dear Tormentor, (My constant companion, who has seen through) 121

The tormentor of the poem is the one who has seen through its evolution, from
wearing shorts, during the childhood years to having been wearing skinny jeans during
the present years. The tormentor has been always there in assistance as well as that
surprises the I.
On the second stanza, the tormentor has been through changes, which come
in varieties, that it exposes itself more to the external world, with its persistence.
Despite the exposure of the self, there are times that the tormentor seems to be in
silence with itself that most of the time brings cautious to the self as if the tormentor is
having an internal conversation. Moreover, it always happens during rides on the trains
and others, and gives the I pictures of its fantasies.
In a moment you will show
me stars,
as cartoon characters know them.

On the fifth stanza the I has grown fondness to the tormentor but the I is in
doubt to say it. As the tormentor has always been there wherever the I goes and
whatever the I does that there are things that the I questions itself about the
tormentor. It quotes:
On the street to my house,
you retrace
my footsteps, nudge the void my hips
have left
behind. When you wolf-whistle, must I
turn
121 Please refer to Appendix 1.6.
54

my head? Must I open my mouth to

yours? Do I have to think I love you? Must I
confess it?

On the latter part of the poem, the tormentor has raised a question on the I,
Lalake ka ba? to which the I would have replied a yes if it is asked when it was
younger but asking it now, the I would have been brave enough to say the opposite of
what the tormentor would have wanted to hear.
The Freudian aesthetical theory, gives the poem an edge on the personas
drifting to fantasy and coming back to reality, where the poet is in full capacity to play
with it. There is also the presence of the function of the reality-principle and the
pleasure-principle presented on the last part of the poem. It gives the illusion that as the
I is already old enough to know how to deal with the reality-principle in congruence
with the pleasure-principle. Even, there is the bound limited by the reality-principle it is
towards the gain of the pleasure-principle.
G. As Emma Cayanan122
In the Freudian point of view of development, at the age of five, the children
begin the discovery of the difference between male and female. This stage where there
the expression of affection for the opposite sex parent, due to this the I drives to be
like its mother. An attachment to the opposite sex parent is apparent in the poem. The
emergence of the Oedipus complex occurs, wherein the son wants his mother. But, as
there is the presence of the society this complex will be later fixed as the object for the
122 Please refer to Appendix 1.7
55

mother is given up, and strives to be like his father. The poem gives this aura. As well as
the Freudian aesthetical theory of fantasy that the persona wants to like its mother, yet
on the latter part it is coming back to reality that the persona has come face to face that
it is not possible to like his mother .
The poem is a reminiscence of the poet about his mother as a performer in a
grass skirt. It takes place when the I is only at the age of five. The I has seen that in
the future it also wanted to be like its mother, to be on stage. However, the I realizes
on the latter part of the poem that its mother and itself are different. Even if the I
wanted to be like her, it cannot be the same.
H. Dear Tormentor, (And there was that time you saw me dipping my sisters
Barbie doll)123
The poem is in a conversational tone with its tormentor which is in assumption to
be the father.
The poem begins as the father had seen the persona, which is in assumption is a
boy, the persona is dipping his sisters Barbie doll into the acrylic that results to the
Barbies hair become a flamed blonde like that of a Cindy Lauper. The father is in the
state of shock resembling to the mothers shocked face as he can remember it. As the
mother is caressing, tapping the back of the persona due to something that stuck in his
throat, the fathers gaze on him, denotes that he can do whatever he wanted yet it is not
what he is expecting because what he wanted do not simply abide to what the societal

123 Please refer to Appendix 1.8.

56

influences has maintained to be. It pushes the person to think that there is no affection
coming from his father. Not until one day when the person is no longer in his childhood,
and on his way to adulthood that the father talked to him after dinner. The father shares
stories of his own development years, his ambitions, and his life. As it has tinge of boast
as any other to make an impression. One of the fathers stories is that one of his yester
years,
You told me that
back when you had many to spare, you would charter a helicopter
to Baguio to hit the tables, cash in your prowess at poker.

This leaves an image to the persona, an image in allegory to the character of James
Bond, with the girls legs and a rope ladder that only progresses to its doom. It sent the
shrill of absence of fear as a man, which is natural for fear is believed not to be for man.
The talk between the persona and the father fathoms that the father is passing on
something to his son. The son should take the image of his father.
A legacy that wants to be passed on to the persona by his father is especially the
absence of fear to his personality. Because it is the stereotypical characterization of the
society for man, they are not onto fear of anything. However, on the end part of the
poem, the persona, if he had the capacity to have spoken in during the story telling of
his father would have talked back that it is no longer necessary for the observation of
his surroundings have taught him enough apathy which is synonymous to cruelty.
In Freudian theory, the poem depicts the melancholia, the anguish of the
persona. In Sigmund Freuds Mourning and Melacholia, melancholia is described as
withdrawn interest to the external world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition to all
57

activity and culminates an expectation of punishment. 124 In the first part of the poem
wherein there is the gaze of the father that connotes that the persona can do what he
wanted, the persona does not expect this kind of response but he expects punishment
for not adhering to what is expected of him to be. Due to this, he thinks that he loss an
object of affection he had lost the affection of a father, and results to loss of interest to
his surroundings.
I. Body As Air125
The persona is begging the self or the I to stay with it. It is addresses to the
leaving self for the sake of moving to other place. The self remains to be the same for it
one with the body.
(You could have carried me into your body my body,
cloistered in the chambers of your lungs As the plane lifted
you out of your old life I could have been
that which you drew in.

The self could have remained to be the same. The self is changing, but it has the
memories of separation from the home country, the tears that had dried up in the shirt
and the fear to be in a new place and going to the present of the changing I that is
brought about by the new place. To keep up with the pace of life the self changes to be
an unaffectionate one that is often perceived by the others (people).

124 Sigmund Freud, (1917) Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Joan Riviere in Sigmund Freud General
Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology edited and with an introduction by Philipi Reiff (New
York: Collier Books, 1963), 165.
125 Please refer to Appendix 1.9.
58

On the fourth stanza, instead of succumbing to the grief of letting go of the old
self the I channels its energy to some activity. And, on the last part, the water that
drains is used as the allegory of the old self being in a void space as the I is in its
everyday living. As the body refuses to redirect its energy, the I channels it into
writing.
The latter part of the poem wherein the bodily desires which refuses to be
redirected is channeled its energy into writing. It portrays the Freudian aesthetical
theory which is earlier stated that the poet has the capacity to redirect the impulses of
the body into writing that sublimation occurs, the refinement of the desire into
acceptable and justifiable by the society.
The synthesis, have not covered all the poems of the poet, Mark Anthony
Cayanan. In the poems selected, there is the presence of Freudian ideas. There is the
play of the structure of personality acting in relation that helps to relate the id and the
super-ego of the self as well as the development of the self from its childhood to the
stage of adulthood.

The poems evaluated in this chapter give emphasis to Freuds aesthetic theory
on the reception of the work of art. The reader and the poet are having the same
subjectives, while reading through the poems the reader renders the I the relationship
of the reader and the poet is played. It portrays the play of fantasies to reality that is
manifested through the poems: The Main of Light, As Anne Sexton, Dear Tormentor

59

(my constant companion, who has seen me through), and As Emma Cayanan. The
refinement of the desire that is manifested in the Body As Air; the triumph of the
fantasy over the reality which is manifested in As Dina Bonnevie. And, the poems that
present the trivial and everyday occurrences as well as the life events that left an
impression to the I that is manifested through the poems: What Happens Next, and
The Narcissus in the City, and Dear Tormentor (And there was that time you saw me
dipping my sisters Barbie doll).

60

Chapter 5

SUMMARY, CONCLUSION, RECOMMENDATIONS

SUMMARY

Sigmund Freud established and originated the psychoanalysis with the emphasis on
helping the patients of neurotic illnesses. Freud formulated his method after his
separation from Joseph Breuers hypnotic method, that is, the free association. He
revolutionized the ideas of how the human mind works; He challenged the long-standing
identification of the self with the conscious thinking subject. Freud established the
theory of the unconscious. This becomes a controversial one that can be treated as an
extension of the works of Copernicus and Darwin. Freud together with Darwin and
Copernicus, these three had attacked man with regards to the place of the universe in
the cosmos and mans own place in the society and in nature. Freud argued that a large
part of what makes up the mind is often hidden from the person as a conscious
individual. However, it can be made plausible by the account of how the individual can
come to acknowledge those contents through the process of guided self-discovery.
Through psychoanalysis, the parts of the self that are concealed from the
thinking ego is making their influence seen as beliefs, wishes, fears, or anxieties that is
recognized in a certain sense that it is there all along.

61

The succeeding paragraphs will be the summary of the study as what has been
presented on the previous chapters.
The first chapter serves as an introduction to the study. The first part of the
chapter laid out the how the study will come about. It comprises of the statement of the
problem, followed by the review of related literature, then on the significance of the
study, the scope and limitation, and ended with the research method and design. The
main problem of the study which is already mentioned in said chapter, it is concerning
on the aesthetic theory of Sigmund Freud in relation to some of the poems of the
Filipino poet, Mark Anthony Cayanan in his Narcissus. The first sub-problem gives its
focus on the aesthetic theory of Sigmund Freud. The second sub-problem is on the
poetics employed by Mark Anthony Cayanan. The third sub-problem, inquired on the
application of the aesthetic theory of Sigmund Freud and its application to the selected
poems of Cayanan.
The second part of the first chapter focused on psychoanalysis. The beginning of
psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud comes up with psychoanalysis until the time of his
separation with Dr, Breuers hypnotic method that he formulated a new method called
free association. On the latter part, it presents the relationship of psychoanalysis to
philosophy; however, this is a discussion on the implications of psychoanalysis to the
different disciplines of philosophy.
The second chapter of the study is divided into three parts. The first part is an
exposition of Sigmund Freuds aesthetic theory. This discussed the beginning of Freuds
perception of art as an escape to reality. However, of all the works of art, Freud give

62

high regard to literature for it forms some kind of apprehension what exactly it is unlike
those of paintings that affirmatively can evoke an effect or a feeling but it does not have
the sense of apprehension in it. It is also in this part that Freuds formulation that a poet
is regulated by both the fantasy and reality as he proposes the first poet and the
second poet. In the second part of the part of the chapter, discuss the three-fold
personality structure of personality, the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The id is the seat
of the unconscious, it comprises of the desires and the wishes that are seeking for
fulfillment, and it primarily conforms to the pleasure principle. The ego is the rational
conscious part. It acts as the intermediary between the super-ego and the id as well as
strive for the fulfillment of the demands of the id, the super-ego, and the reality. Unlike
the id the ego is regulated by the reality principle. And the super-ego is developed with
the help of the external influences that which is taken from the other people - external
authority. It mainly concerns on the operation of man in the society. And on the latter
part, it states that an art is produced with the influence of the three-fold personality
structure. The id is the source of inspiration, the ego gives an art a unity and the superego makes an art to be a form of sublimation. The last part of the second chapter is the
two mental functioning. The primary process conforms to the id while, the secondary
process serves as a guide to the ego. These two are related to the pleasure and reality
principle, respectively. Any work of art is working towards the reconciliation of the
pleasure and reality principle.
The third chapter deals with the poet Mark Anthony Cayanan. It gives an
introduction of who Mark Anthony Cayanan is. An autobiographical background of the
poet is addressed on the beginning of the chapter. And on the latter part of the chapter
63

is a discussion of the poetics and those who had influence him in making his own
poems. He adapted the mode of the confessional poetry. This gives regard to the first
point of view. It is some kind of a confession in a lyric form. And, at the same time it
does not reveal the self liberatedly. The tension of absolute liberation and the
concealment is still there is the concern of his poetry.
The fourth chapter is a discussion of the selected poems of Mark Anthony
Cayanan from his first poetry book, Narcissus. The chapter begins with an introduction
of what the book; Narcissus is about, that it focuses on the examination of the self.
Followed by the discussion of the selected poems and how Freuds idea is manifested
through the poems. The poems are: The Main of Light As Dina Bonnevie, What
Happens Next, As Anne Sexton, Narcissus in the City, Dear Tormentor, (My
constant companion, who has seen through), As Emma Cayanan, Dear Tormentor,
(And there was that time you saw me dipping my sisters Barbie doll), and Body As
Air. These poems portrays Sigmund Freuds ideas on the play of fantasy to reality, the
refinement of desire, the triumph of fantasy over reality, and the poems that present the
trivial and everyday occurrences as well as the life events that left an impact to the
individual.

CONCLUSION
It is true that Sigmund Freuds theory of aesthetics is not properly explained by
himself as he did not dwell enough on arts or the artist. Due to this it makes the
aesthetic theory of Sigmund Freud to be called as a premature one. 126 However, this
126 Melvin Rader, ed. A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology (3rd edition) (New York: Holt, 1952), 118.
64

study can conclude that Freuds psychoanalysis had more influence on art and
literature. Freud had also drawn a line of separation of an artist and from a patient of
neurotic.
By artist, Sigmund Freud mean that he has the ability to access his own unconscious
that he has the ability to manifest what is common to humanity. Whereas Freud sees
those who are suffering from neurosis, that the illness hinders their creative impulse. As
Kaplan commented, The energies of the neurotic are deflected from the realistic
problems to cope with inner conflict. 127 The neurotic does not have the capacity to
understand himself that leads to his incapacity to understand the human condition as
well wherein the goal of art is to communicate with the human condition. An artist is a
kind of neurotic that victors over the domination of the symptoms of illness through the
presence of art.
There is also the conception of the validity of Freuds theory on aesthetics is on the
surrealist art. It focuses on the liberation of the buried deep desires in the unconscious
mind. It expresses the thought in the absence of control that can be from reason and all
other external influences. It started in 1924 with Andr Breton in his publication of the
surrealistic manifesto that an art should come from the unconscious. According to
Wooden, the surrealist artist should derive the freest possible inspiration from his dream
images and to strive towards the super realism. 128 On the same page, it is maintained,
due to the proposed idea of Breton, an art will then lead to the dissolution of fantasy and
127 Kaplan, A New World of Philosophy, 135.
128 Howard Wooden, Surrealism in The New Book of Knowledge Vol. 17 (Connecticut: Scholastic
Library Publishing, 2006), 518.
65

reality, any censorship from the consciousness is void and the words and images are on
a free play. Through this the artist comes to arrive to the truth that is never known, as
contained on the same source.
Through the poems of Mark Anthony Cayanan, Sigmund Freuds aesthetics theory is
manifested. Even though Cayanans poetry is in confessional mode it is also in line with
the thoughts of Sigmund Freud, as mentioned in the third chapter of the study that
psychoanalysis has contributed to this mode of poetry. It liberates the unconscious, but
only those of the unconscious ideas that can be adjusted to the reality of formal
structures become communicable and its value to others rests at least as much in the
formal structure as in the idea. 129 Furthermore, the poems of Mark Anthony Cayanan in
Narcissus stresses, the aim of the Freudian psychoanalysis to know the self. The
knowledge of the unconscious expands to make the self known,
It is not to say that the aesthetics theory of Sigmund Freud is only valid to the
confessional mode rather, Freuds aesthetics can also be applicable to the confessional
mode of an art and not only on the surrealist movement. Both art movements are
making use of the leap on the unconscious that anchors the aesthetics brand of
Sigmund Freud. This study only serves as an avenue to broaden the perception of the
aesthetics of Sigmund Freud. Because both movements of art aim primarily to further
know the self.

129 E.H. Gombrich, Freuds Aesthetics, Encounter (January, 1966), 36. www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter1966jan_0030 (Acessed 8 March 2015).
66

RECOMMENDATIONS
This study only covers a certain area of Sigmund Freuds theory of aesthetics. It
obtains the goal of the study to expose that Sigmund Freuds theory of aesthetics is not
restricted to only one movement in art as well as the distinction of an artist to a neurotic
patient. The study discuss directly on the theory of aesthetics of Freud. The researcher
would like to recommend some topics for the further studies on Freud:
1. The process of sublimation. The study did not dwell more on Sigmund
Freuds perception of sublimation. This can lead to a further discussion of
Sigmund Freuds aesthetics. As it gives stresses on the sexual energies as
the mother of all desires. In the work of Sigmund Freud on creativity, there is
an emphasis on sublimation as a defense mechanism to deflect from the
forbidden desires of the individual and channel it into a higher form that
produces pleasure and entertainment.
2. A deeper study on the biography of the artist. Psychoanalysis is more
advance on the biographical study. The biographical fact can be seen as a
semiotic manifestation. It is reflected in Freuds essay, Leonardo da Vinci and
a Memory of his Childhood.
3. The relation to epistemology. This is on the implication of psychoanalysis for
the theory of knowledge on the difference between fact and fantasy can be
objective and do not depend on the subject perceiving them. This study can
be delved more on giving emphasis on the importance on knowledge of
meanings, the interpretation made by the knower of the materials of
perception. This study can be viewed in most Freuds works like The
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and The Future of Illusion.
67

4. The relation to ethics. This is on the discussion whether the Freudian ethics
has a standard that is beyond in the prevailing society. The criticism that
views

psychoanalysis

is

trying

to

justify

the

immorality.

Whereas

psychoanalysis is giving emphasis on the adjustment of the individual to the

society, to be capable of morality. This as well can be seen in most of the
works of Sigmund Freud such as The Civilization and Discontents and others.

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%20HEIDEGGER.pdf, 1-8 (Accessed 30 September 2014).

71

72

Appendix
Poems from the Narcissus by Mark Anthony Cayanan.

1,1

The Main of Light130

Then Life must have screamed Now, now
the mouth a plastic compulsion, propulsion, the mouth
must have opened, pronounced thought? how to define
what precedes definition? submarine sounds, the body
must have pulsed in its desire for that
must have been it: amniotic ambition aggressive
and askance, inattentive and without antecedent desire
originary, original.

The mother meanwhile,

must have felt this impulse tug expire, exist her mass
assuaged into waves frissoning into
impression. No: a fist smitting from within
her belly as her legs as her skull about to crack
into collapse. Inside was demand, was duress,
from the narrow dialted vagina: halved
head (promise) (release) must have been that body stretching
her secrets; it must have thought there was nothing
nothing

Then the nothing became

darkness: as hands swung him up in the air,
he must have felt the clamor of what not
darkness was: the contagious light overhead, the woman
he once was sliding out of focus, his cries alerting
130 Mark Anthony Cayanan. Narcissus. (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2011), 3.
73

the world to become itself again for

someone, the world blossoming in its details, I.

74

1.2
As Dina Bonnevie131
Ang Babaeng Nawawala sa Sarili, Betamax tape
unearthed from my fathers cabinet.
It was my eleventh summer; my childhood hung
back like the sticky scent of mangoes
on the table; the outside broke
down in shadowy slats by the blinds; I was
alone in the house. I felt my heart
thud inside my lip: not having viewed
the movie yet, I sensed what it means
when something was hidden. It means it has to be
seen. It means there is a price for seeing.
The screen lit up with Eddie Gutierrezs
mestizo back, his head disappearing into
the vee of Dina Bonnevies tan legs: her feet
were cut off by the camera, her calves
limbered into eternity, stretched from the corners
of the TV set to to my living
room! Someone had stepped out of her
panting mouth, sskipped over her hair
on the pillow, streaked past her arms.
Someone had pressed free of the surface
of that world: she lunged at me, her bronzed
skin, the pixels of her: clutch, capture:
she breathed through my nose. She was being
felt up, touched, his palms dug against
her thighs, the sinews of her
suggestions were rippling through me,
I was what I could become: the universe
dove between my legs, my hand
hosting it: now the honesty of coming
to terms with ambition, now desire
newly sprung, liquid, anxious for definition.
131 Cayanan, Narcissus,, 11.
75

1.3

What Happens Next132

1
This is that point. You did not ask
to be born: this no longer matters.
That you began to exit inside her.
That you heard her voice, dreamed
about it seeping from the outside,
your door a blanket the dark covered
itself with. That his voice was not
hers. That you heard less and less.
2
How you once could run so fast, body
arms, what seemed like legs, blurred
into idea. Do you remember? You
hurried without a pause for cause. Thus
you were stilled. Thus, this, your place
in the universe: shadow, a comfortable
abode. Beyond it, the vines shaped
like the fence. Farther, the street, first
binding then shattered. Then: a street.
From being seen, having to see. Then
there was no longer a need to be told.
3
Something like the rest of your life
once called to you. When you turned,
it was the wind cooing to the branches.
There must have always been branches.

132 Cayanan. Narcissus, 35-36.

76

4
When desire no longer has to leave you
breathless. There are wants and there are.
What you want is to stare out the bus
again, at the green unrolling before green,
not at the blankness you read into it. What
you want is to close this book, or stop
sleeping every time the engine hums
under your feet. What you want is to have
mouthed yes instead of soon. You want
to have felt his neck between your hands,
your fingers discovering one another,
almost an Amen. What you want is reason
for the night; you want to want its morning.
5
Some people can trace their lives back
to certain events failed loves, grisly
accidents, callous parents. You will be
among the fortunate: you will look out
the window of your room, the city giving
your face back to you, and you will not
know how you have come to be yourself.

77

1.4

As Anne Sexton133
August 98. The sun, after having gone
through costume changes garish
tassels, corsets the color of heavy
finally decided to pose naked
in the sky. My fingers were burnt
by Bedlam. I wanted to die.
Which meant, eventually, I wanted
your life: five feet, seven-and-a-half
inches of it. I wanted your cigarettes.
I wanted to sleep with your men.
Dear passionflower tender, I was just
looking out the window at the truck that was
delivering two bottles of whiskey and it was, yes it was
Let me tell you about myself: Ive been hungry
for eight years. Minus my usual
lunch, I can slither into that white
lace dress, my guts cinched into your waist.
I can suck in my cheeks and look
like Jane Russel, look like you.
I seek unity in the play and want
a hymn that follows
the theology
We love our similes, their plastic structure.
We turn our body, and its the citys anatomy.
We are funny that way: We look inside
133 Cayanan. Narcissus, 19-20.
78

our head and see trains jiggling on their tracks,

jiggling the very air. We am sad; We am bad;
our bladders on a platter -- We assents to assonance!
Ha! So I know about being on a so
called pedestal. A fake one that reader creates (perhaps to separate them
from the actual
I who make the desperation
sell. I who invest on madness: the shimmer
in the eye, the fever of my hand raking
through paper, the jerk of my vitals.
Probably masturbating is powerful thinking
today so depressed lay down on the bed, halfway masturbating,
halfway going to sleep this has nothing
to do with power, but Im associating maybe
Ive the dream, Ive the excitable
gift Let me, let me in.
If I could do just what I wanted, Id live

79

1.5

Narcissus in the City134

The day discards night like a used
dress
I had taken to my face, but the day
had eased you out of it. Each morning a new
chance
not because the streets have changed
but because the streets have
covered
what was the rest? The train is on its is its own
way
and I need to know where I am which is to say I need to be witness what I must.
If this evening the pavement is streaked with oil:
What do you see
When the neon lights
admit
the onslaught of morning:
time
go back to your own
history: the present as it has to be concealed:
the leak in the ceiling, the morning guttural
of the outside replaced by the TV then the hum
of your own sleep in which you are reminded
in a dream, of course as all reminders were:
You were some other. Not this. Best you
change
your life, As in all dreams these days
134 Cayanan, Narcissus, 89-92.
80

you awaken to another day

each morning a new chance
what was the rest
How much of it
not
desire: one does not forget easily.
If not for the window of the cab taking in its version
of the night: What do you see
now that I have been overwhelmed by
what object to mouth what thing to
name
whose name to call. I had heard
my name called, once
again and again and then
This was in another other
You might say I am say I
now: where I am allows me no view you
The static whispering sweet nothings in your ear.
The woman asking for loose change.
As if every moment were a test,
As if you were about to belong to anothers story.
There are all stories, you
understand
that you are familiar with
mine for now:
the city: chokehold: caress:
Take off your glasses: Whose eyes are
your eyes: Those are his eyes: If my mouth must kiss:
Take a look at the city and its smoke
so relentless it is its own heaven
this already happened
with its own disfigured stars:
81

How can I make my grief

available and
Why
should I care Not I:
The city creeping towards the leaves the golden petals
You look down and you are stricken
in the way you would be with a disease
or disuse. Whos
to say we have not met just yet? I have
ached to see your voice
It was what was lost to us
which is to say it was taken from us:
we are inconsolable.
You look down, and it is a mans stubbed out time:
How lost the world seems now you understand what it means.
If it is almost the rain, and this is almost the kiss:
What do you know, having been closer
to the edge
not here.
The surface of the lake
just as much an allegory
as myself
and of course:

82

1.6

Dear Tormentor,135
My constant companion, who has seen through
my evolution from gabardine school shorts
to skinny jeans, who offers a hand
like a master quick to fondle a leash, who surprises me
as regularly as a change in weather.
How the air is heavy with you --When you first looked at me, I felt how it was to be
a kitten my smooth fur matted with tire grime:
you were the synchronized gaps of the children,
the hasty retreat of the mother, the occasional
dog paying homage to my own obvious
viscera. Over the years, youve assumed more outfits:
variety: persistence: my similes complain from overexposure.
It is your silence I am most wary of. On the train,
I am the view right next to away. You skip back
to me often. In a moment, you will show me stars,
as cartoon characters know them. In a moment,
you will whisper to your friend beside you, your eyes
newly his. In a moment, you will not speak and I will
take this in my hands, press my ear close to its gilt
wrapper, shake it over and over, hear its contents rattle.
On a jeep, the shadow of your legs
strokes mine. In a public urinal, the promise
of your promise is linked on the tile: you are hungry
for my stare. On the street to my house, you retrace
my footsteps, nudge the void my hips have left
135 Cayanan. Narcissus, 15-16.
83

behind. When you wolf-whistle, must I turn

my head? Must I open my mouth to yours?
Do I have to think I love you? Must I confess it?
Lalake k a ba?, you ask like God, via satellite. You peddle
macho shampoo and show he how real men box
with water, their hair lustrous but not too fancy.
If I were younger, I would have said Yes.
If I were brave, I would have raised a brow or both
and my More than you would have made Mae West
proud. Both as permutations of No.

84

1.7

As Emma Cayanan136
What I remember from Kindergarten
Is its end: my five year old self,
Its scrawny legs, its squeaky
extension, poised before a lectern.
I was about to dive headlong
into the sea, I was going to freeze
into marble, I was being listened to:
every syllable alive: perched
on the shoulder of every boy, fidgety
with his bow tie, on the earlobe
of every teacher, the phonemes leaping
into the thicker of Aquanet hair,
on the lips of my mother,
from whose mouth issued the rehearsed
speech. I didnt care: my voice
had reached my ears, and I thought
I could pursue it, devote my life to it.

It turns out my glory was penultimate,

a synonym for easily forgotten.
The intermission number came on:
a couple of women whose bodies held
the weight their children, husbands,
lives bumbled onto the stage.
My mother glided with them.
The taped ukulele over the owe scratched
away. My mother was what I wasnt:
her thigh peeking from her grass skirt;
her hips swaying, not really needing a rhythm
136 Cayanan. Narcissus, 9.
85

other than her own; her breasts jiggling,

pivoted by her wondrous, wondrous waist;
the klieg lights casting in gold her hair,
her skin, her every shimmy. The lights
pierced my eyes: I had looked long enough.

86

1.8

Dear Tormentor,137
And there was that time you saw me dipping my sisters Barbie doll
into acryclic. How her blond hair flamed, was Cindy Laupers. The
droop of your mouth was Mothers when she overheard me ape the
words to a Listerine as, my British wind unhinged from my palate.
Once I got to gargle, she slapped me on the back, the unmeant
course a fishbone lodged in my throat. But the way your eyes moved
back to Tom Clancy indicated I could do what I wanted, which
wasnt what wanted. By then, I had been alive long enough to
think affection was a business
of theatrics: a shrill voice, litanies that deserved as response
something as conspicuous, something like tears. Years after when
my cheeks were hollowed, my body having digested, disposed of
childhood you cornered me after dinner to explain to me bits of
your life, details given the gravity of secrets because of mothers
silence over them. Like any adult, it was in your nature to impress,
to embellish your life like a window display at a mall: trains
circling the tracks, porcelain girls in bloomers. You told me that
back when you had money to spare, you would charter a helicopter
to Baguio to hit the tables, cash in your prowess at poker. Your
words made me see legs dangling in midair, a rope ladder the only
impediment between you and your demise an image straight out
of James Bond. How much of a man you were, how absent
fear was from your life. I understand now how that moment
between us was meant to be a quiet rite of passage, a torchy relay
as trite, as relevant. If I had been oblige to you to speak, I could
have told you, you didnt need to. From I had learned enough:
the observance of nonchalance, which is kind of cruelty.

1.9

137 Cayanan. Narcissus, 12.

87

Body As Air138
(You could have carried me into your body my body
cloistered in the chambers of your lungs As the plane lifted
you out of your old life I could have been
that which you drew in
I might have been that smell you gave off the brine of my tears
on your shirt the parting kiss of your country the musk
of your fear New
Haven An invisible sea parts then collapses
into itself your presence my hovering self changing it
You look out the window the skeletal elms the bricks
like fire in the ageing sky the spires From somewhere the bells
toll with such clarity How sound can assault more
than one sense the completed picture the sharp intake of breath
I turn as cold for you This is how I am
perceived You jog through streets of orange
and gold your feet insisting
on activity all the while
you let go of me I am proof
of how morning vanishes
into white smoke into scenery
The ease with which warm water pours out
of the taps Your body willingly submits
to it The water pools around your feet Steam
blurs the tiles the room rendered spaceless I would like
to think this is how I move through your days)
The body, dumb, dumb, refuses
to sublimate: how it closes in on the mind, hunches
over the paper, sweats on the pen.

138 Cayanan. Narcissus, 24.

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