Claudia Keelan's “Continuous Acts”

On "Continuous Acts"

"Continuous Acts" comes near the end of O, Heart a verse-drama rooted in the utterance of an omniscient or all knowing narrator, never named, who speaks on behalf of the woman, the main character in the book. All of the poems posit and argue the main questions in the piece, i.e. what comprises what we call the human heart, how can we know our "heart's truths," and how the answers to those questions by women and men provide differences in kind historically to the question of sincerity. The main "drama" is the dialogue—between what we call the humanities and what we call science, and the inconclusive answers provided from both disciplines. The narrative of this struggle takes place both in the questions posed by the narrator to the woman, in the woman's interrogation of the figure called only "the stranger" and in numerous quotes from literature of all genres, from lyric love poetry, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, as well as in passages from early scientific inquiry into the function of the heart, which was ultimately proven and demonstrated by William Harvey's treatise on the heart De Moto Cordis in 1628. All of this brought into conversation might have just resulted in an interesting exercise, but for the need I had to understand my spiritual malaise, and to write my way through it. My father died of a heart attack at my home, my husband has mysterious heart issues, and my sister suffered a series of heart attacks just as the book was published. About half through Kora in Hell William Carlos Williams remarks "the best work…is always done under stress, and at great personal cost," which has been true in my experience, and O, Heart is a book written under such stress. The woman, as John Berryman said of Henry, has suffered (serial) irreversible losses, among them a direct connection to herself. When I was younger, I took pride both in my life and poems in following a via negativa, a negative way, which resisted identification with the common demographics of human experience—those of family origin, geography, politics, even of friendship—as this kind of self-identification seemed to me to miss, or skip over, the insight that Otherness, in all its strangeness, might provide. My pride now seems misplaced, as I have found time makes strangers of us all, and it's the extent to which one can make room to love oneself, which might give one the ability to love the others. The poem "Continuous Acts" considers this condition of becoming a stranger from a personal point of view, via meditation on women's history as art object, or the "beloved" subject, as well as through my Catholicism, which likewise places women in subordinate position in relation to men, to herself, and to God (not unlike the condition of the "foreigner" described by Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves.) While I have not for many years been a practicing Catholic, I still retain the teaching, good and bad. Writing "Continuous Acts" allowed me to locate the historical and psychic construction of my self-disconnection, which led me to gnostic texts that place Mary, the mother, in equal relation to God the father, and Jesus the son. The poem ends with my own enactment of what Blake called "the human divine," which in my reading is available through what shrinks, or the innocent, call an "open" heart.