Paging Doctor James

a review by Nora Delaney

The surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, director of the eye-slicing Un chien andalou, famously said in a 1960 interview, “I’m an atheist, thank God.” This quotation is memorable not for its being provocative as such, but for its paradoxical quippiness. It is fun to turn over in one’s mind for a moment and funny to repeat at just the right moment. We sense the filmmaker’s own tongue playfully lodged in his cheek. More than a decade later, Buñuel redressed his statement in The New Yorker:

I'm not a Christian, but I'm not an atheist, either. [. . .] I'm weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine, “I'm an atheist, thank God.” It's outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called Mexican Bus Ride, about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It's guilt we must escape from, not God.

In changing the focus of his disbelief from God to guilt, Buñuel revises and recreates what had become mere aphorism: “dead leaves.” He first unbalances a common phrase and then gives its essence a new life. The living arts, as Buñuel knew, must constantly be revised if they are to remain alive.

In her second book, The Irrationalist, published this year by Canarium Books, Canadian poet Suzanne Buffam conjures up the ghost of Buñuel along with many of his early 20th century contemporaries — including French surrealist poet Paul Éluard and the American-born psychologist and philosopher William James — in order to stir up some more dead leaves. These iconic figures — sage, surreal, and quixotic — materialize in Buffam’s poems with little more to do than get a word in edgewise, to add an intellectual heft to the verse that would otherwise be, and sometimes still is, missing. Buffam herself is content to play the role of medium, or talk show host. Frequently, she even plays the teacher. In one of the more interesting poems in the book, “Placebo,” Buffam offers a mini-lecture on James:

William James writes that often enough our faith beforehand in an
uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

This opening gambit is the poet’s entry into a discussion of faith and uncertainty, two themes around which The Irrationalist perpetually turns. Not content to leave us with James, “Placebo” continues with Buñuel declaring his atheism and thanking no God; then, as if to moderate the conversation, a narrative voice asks “Will faith alone finish this poem?” The poem then finishes by asking: “Who sees the black dog running through the night?” While this ending is somewhat facile, and demonstrates no great poetic virtuosity, it is at least consistent with Buffam’s modus operandi: provide no answers; blur the boundaries; allow paradox to stand; and be content with digression that may reveal itself to be relevant upon closer examination.

Buffam’s works in The Irrationalist are less poems than aphorisms and short proddings at ideas of faith and knowledge, perspective and relativity. Their language is unbeautiful, the verse free of obvious technical flourishes. They recall Neitzsche more than Rilke. Always, the weightiest sentiments and phrases are borrowed. Just as we contend with William James in “Placebo,” we come upon Plato and Aristotle in later poems. The philosophers are also joined by scientists: Galileo and Copernicus hold court in section two. And her chosen cadre of artists — Buñuel, Éluard, Picasso, Borges — appear throughout.

This chorus of voices, however, is used to particular effect, revealing with each maxim and axiom how limited human knowledge is. Buffam delights in playing an anti-Enlightenment game: we are truly doomed if we think we can reason through things. The irrational trumps the rational. This motif is most assured in a number of short prose poems that fill out the last third of the book. In her long prose poem “Trying,” for example, Buffam meditates on the strangeness — the irrationality — of a couple trying to conceive a child. Her speaker wonders,

If procreation were a matter to be decided purely on the basis of
rational thought, would the human race still exist? Schopenhauer thought not.

A page later, in the same poem, Buffam’s speaker plays philosophic medium again, this time channeling Aristotle:

The human soul, wrote Aristotle in his treatise on ethics, has an irrational element which is shared with the animals, and a rational element which is distinctly human. In order to live a virtuous life one must try to achieve some sort of balance between them. In his Poetics, however, Aristotle points out that it is exclusively the irrational upon which the wonderful depends for its chief effects.

How didactic our speaker is! Out of context, one might mistake this snippet for some lecture notes from an introductory class on Aristotle. The prose only accentuates the essayistic tone of the collection: utilitarian, distinctly and emphatically unpoetic. The style itself is paradoxical, almost perverse, since so many of the poems consider inexplicable beauty, awe, and wonder. There is a sharp tension between the iron-tool language of the collection and its anti-utilitarian, anti-rationalist themes. Mysticism trumps reason time and again in these didactic prose poems. James lectures on faith in “Placebo” and God, or the idea of God, looms large in many of Buffam’s poems, including “Trying”:

People who believe in God will tell you that “trying” to believe will not work. And yet some believers insist that simply wanting to believe is enough. I keep flipping back and forth between trying and wanting to try.

Whether Buffam’s speaker is a believer or a non-believer here is irrelevant. Perhaps she is like Buñuel: an atheist, thank God. What is significant is that she wants to believe. She desires the sense of wonder that would allow her to transcend the rational, if only for a short period.

Using cognitive dissonance, unusual juxtaposition, and non-sequitur, Buffam delights in what is not rational. Her poems, particularly the very short pieces in section two, are aphorisms built on jarring juxtapositions. Take, for instance, “On Invective”:

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on
Is often just another way of saying come back.

Or “On Vanishing Acts”:

The magician says watch closely.
The lover says close your eyes.

The clever quippiness of these small pieces is their redeeming feature. Those lacking this refined wit, though, are less kōan-like than they are trite. “On Ghosts v. Zombies,” for instance, is triviality masquerading as profundity:

Soul without a body or body without a soul?
Like choosing between an empty lake
And the same empty lake.

The faith-prodding dualist raises her head here, but the element of juxtaposition is less powerful. When not relying on her ghosts — James and Plato, Buñuel and Éluard — Buffam is far less successful than when she engages them, absorbing not only their unique eloquence, but the weight of their intellect as well. The aphorisms in section two, however, do reiterate that longed-for sense of wonder, the sense of not being able to grasp things in their entirety, which permeates the book. Buffam opens The Irrationalist with an epigraph by Éluard “There is another world, but it is inside this one,” and this idea is repeated, in various forms, throughout. The small piece “On Borges,” reads:

Put one dream
Inside another.

Even “Trying” evokes the infinite nesting of child within womb: the mother who has a child who then goes on to have a child, ad infinitum. This idea of recursion, an endless nesting of things like matryoshkas, is mirrored in the collection by the housing of thinkers in poems about ideas by other thinkers.

And what is harder for a reasoning mind to grasp than the idea of infinitive recursion? How does one make sense of the infinity of irrational numbers, which, of course, make an appearance in Buffam’s “On Irrational Numbers”?

Ahoy cries the sunrise
To the sea’s flagging captains
Among whom you number
Infinity plus one.

How do our feeble brains understand the vastness of the universe? Buffam, channeling Emily Dickinson now, informs us that the “brain is a small grey tissue afloat on a wave. Everything / we know and can ever know about existence is there.” Buffam asserts here that all scientific discoveries, all artistic breakthroughs, end in befuddlement. Fittingly, she begins her second section with an epigraph by Copernicus: “There is no one center of the universe.” In these poems, the center will not hold, will not remain central, will even evade crystallization of the idea of a center.

Writing a century after Yeats (and several centuries after Copernicus), Buffam sets herself in that same mystic gyre where history repeats itself, where the future and past are nested within each other. One of the more disorienting moments of the collection recounts Picasso looking at the cave paintings of Lascaux, and the speaker realizes that to “be ahead of one’s time may be the same as being very far behind it.” Decentralization, paradox, and recursion fill the pages of Buffam’s irrational universe. It is fitting, then, that one of the last poems in the collection turns to the paradox and mysticism of the Old Testament:

I am the unburnt Bush! […] I am Burning but Flourishing! I am Swallowed but I am not Consumed!

If the reader is left perplexed, Buffam seems to say, that is how it should be. Swallowed but not consumed — James and Buñuel smile from the wings.