Little Ease
Aaron McCollough
An author’s statement
I like that the title Little Ease is hopelessly ambiguous, so I guess that is the place to start when describing the project. It’s the name of a prison that promises no comfort (there is “little ease” available here, etc.), but it sounds in contemporary English parlance like a pretty decent state of affairs (a “little ease” would be welcome in my hectic day, etc.). The book—all my work, I guess—is very much about volatile subjectivity. It’s not meant as a postmodern gesture, though, really. I’m imagining something more like a classical rending of self, a real power struggle between good and bad impulses and good impulses which are bad on top of bad impulses which are good. I have no gripe with postmodernist theories of the subject; I just don’t see them as “new” phenomena. Division of the subject strikes me as a fundamental feature of the creation of the subject, and many have been inclined to agree for centuries. With that in mind as a constant problem, my poems tend to be attempts at doing something in spite of or in collusion with the fractures and contrarieties that always seem to be threatening to reduce me to oblivion.
As Little Ease was coming together for me initially, I was thinking of it in terms of two semi-related thematic ideas. First of all, I was thinking about the way social convention (ethical living, in particular) is a form of elective bondage. Secondly, I was fretting a good bit about the ethics of hospitality. More specifically, I was perseverating about the premium put on hospitality in classical cultures. A few touchstones for this would be the Ovidian account of Baucis and Philemon, the story of the Levite and his concubine among the Benjaminites from the book of Judges, chapter 19, and Matthew 25.35-46. All of these stories stress the crucial importance of treating others (and strangers, perhaps especially) with generosity. Historically, hospitality has been about much more than mere social nicety. It is based on the basic assumption that the human race cannot survive its own cruelties and those of its environment. Something has to give, and that something is the mixture of human paranoia and acquisitiveness lying behind the invention of the lock.
On a personal, local, national, and global scale, we seem to have worked ourselves so far away from the hospitality ethic that it is hard to even imagine it as a plausible social reality. In my mind the erosion of this ethic is pretty closely linked to the promotion of the idea of the individual. The only areas where I see any space left for true hospitality are in the relationship between a person and himself/herself, between two lovers, and between a person and god, and all of those relationships are also often like prisons. I was tending to think in the book that the world at large should be more like those prisons. I guess I was working out my sense that living is a prison but that politics tries to pretend otherwise. Politics tries to pretend that there are freedoms out there that aren’t actually there. When a person acts as if he is not living in a form of bondage, the consequences often seem minor. When nations act like such bonds need not be observed, obviously, horrible things happen. The book kind of dilates back and forth between my feelings of attraction and repulsion for bondage and my assignment of such feelings to personal and public habits of behavior and affect.
As always, I was thinking about the domicile, the soul, and love between domestic partners and their God. What if God comes knocking, as he does in the garish illustrations of Revelation 3:20: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me”? Could you let God in that way any more than you could let in a stranger? I think it would be hard no matter how much you wanted to. A person who cannot open his own door lives in a cell. Thus, in Little Ease, the old metaphors of body/domicile and body/prison merged. The voice speaking from these poems is always that of a prisoner, sometimes very happily so.
