Self-tuning: The Tonic of Choice Words

I would like to present you today with two poems by Norman Morrissey, which perform very lucidly a dance of change in the spirit of a man. This change concerns a self-healing process, recorded in words, moving from a divided to a more integrated sense of self. 

For me, one of the most remarkable qualities of my late husband Norman – as man AND poet – was his determination to self-examine, to self-edit the tissue of his being and writing alike, in order to enact a continuous transformation of both poetry and psyche into a truer timbre. Self-tuning would be a choice word here.

 

Conscientious nerves

 

You talk

of a life

without regrets

 

– some line walked always true

so you never must

ache for your myriad mis-steps.

 

I’ve never been

that lucky,

there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop:

memories,

conscientious nerves

 

rooting

in

my marrow.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in Sound Piping, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2015

 

I confess that I’ve long felt accused by this poem – of failing to be ‘conscientious’ in examining my wrongdoings – but this is probably due to the fact that the poem models the act of self-accusation by means of the conscience: describing the man’s very bones (“my marrow”) as being strung through with “conscientious nerves”. The lines, which alert the reader to this, are:

  there’s no recall of any day

 

my shoulders didn’t stoop

 

There’s an open display here, a FREE EXPRESSION of feelings of low self-worth and shame as performed by the body. 

Now I remember my father – a self-proclaimed atheist, fervently reverent of life – reminiscing on conversations with a pastor friend, in which he took issue with the Christian term ‘sin’. I can do wrong, he maintained, I can, as a human, do harm – but that does not make me a sinner. 

Hiding in this rejection of a fallen state is the heathen’s freedom, but also his innocence (though innocence is, of course, not necessarily innocuousness). The word ‘heathen’ originates as a designation of the ‘uncivilised’, but probably largely harmless, folk, who populated the rural areas (heaths) beyond the precincts of state and religious control. The online etymological dictionary observes:

It is most probably that the Germanic word haiϸana (heathen) referred to a person living on the heath, i.e. on common land, i.e. a person of one’s own community. It would then be a neutral word used by heathen people in order to refer to each other rather than a Christian, negative word denoting non-Christians.

I don’t see an untouched Bushman with “stooping shoulders” due to a deep, inner “ache” for his “myriad mis-steps”. But, on being told he is a sinner, surely her or his posture will change.

Nietzsche, in his critiques of the tenets of Christian civilization, examined the ominous build of resentment in the collective human psyche, due – if I recall his writings rightly – to unacknowledged guilt and shame over the fact that our species had murdered God;  resentment, then, being a phenomenon whereby negative feelings (grief, horror, shock, rue) are not felt and expressed, but denied and repressed, thus generating a continuous acid reflux (the metaphor is mine) of powerful energies denied the opportunity for natural transformation or –mutation back into the flow of life. 

The miraculous turning-point in the Christian story is, of course, that our wrongdoings, including, I would guess, the murder of God – surely our ultimate crime – are forgiven and, moreover, REDEEMED, through penitence before that same God, resurrected. The orthodoxy (Bible) prescribes words for us, with which to realise that miracle, which I understand even today serves the more non-verbal among our species, who are not given the listening tongue – but, for the poet, there is a different kind of freedom, that is to say, the freedom of conscientiously elected words. Consider the “shift” in the heart of him here:

The story

 

Something has shifted

in the deep of me:

the constant memories

 

– starting like a grouse at my feet –

fly differently,

don’t lurch

 

sickly

into shame and griefs

and thoughts

 

of clumsiness and wrong-headedness

– of ineptitude and folly.

There’s still

 

the whirr at my feet

and the wings beating

at my face:

 

but each visitation

starts to whisper

new words:

 

starts to hint

a new

language of belonging,

 

the replays

start making a movie

that shows the essential me.

 

I still have a script

of bungles and crimes

– but at least

 

it’s becoming a screenplay,

becoming a history

that makes sense:

 

and that changes

the shape of the story

as something to live with.

 

– Norman Morrissey, first published in This Moment’s Marrow, Ecca Poets, Hogsback, 2017

 

What I notice in this poem is the transition from a prevalence of guttural sounds and clipped consonants in the first four stanzas – sh, ch, f, t, c, s – to a lovely in-breeze of gentle w and wh sounds, and even the s in ‘visitation’ is heard as a soft z, in stanzas 5–7 – as if the breath itself were taking command to expel fearful tension in the body. 

The image of the grouse in stanza 2 – which strikes me as strange, foreign, even – suggests itself, to me at least, as an unconscious memory, “in the deep” of the poet, of the German word Graus (horror) – a word, which is pronounced the same as ‘grouse’. In the fifth stanza, this gives way to a softer, much more English-sounding “whirr”. 

“each visitation/ starts to whisper/ new words” we read, as the last four stanzas take on more measured, calmer rhythms and employ longer, soothing vowel sounds; while a prevalence of alliterative s’s snake confidently through – perhaps delivering a shimmer of Hippocrates’ staff of healing? Indeed, that staff is invoked in ‘Grasp’, a subsequent poem in the collection, whose last line names ‘This Moment’s Marrow’.

The poet’s use of the word ‘story’ to mean something he has shaped “to live with” must be firmly distinguished from recent usage of the word in a negative sense as ‘the story you tell yourself, which repeats old patterns’. Norman’s “story” is one which he has built himself, resulting in a sovereign, “essential me” – HIS history and life, which, despite “bungles and crimes”, he CAN live and, by implication, be at peace with. 

The choice of the word ‘crimes’ is particularly interesting, and, in my view, suggests that – unlike the sin-free heathen, or atheist – the poet faces his “essential me” as inextricably entwined into a species NOT FREE OF a violent and sacrilegious past.

Between ‘The Story’ and ‘Conscientious nerves’ lie two years; the last two years of the poet’s life. They record a process that took place inside the man, and allow readers to witness genuine self-healing, self-tuning, as it were, by the tonic of choice words.

For a more indepth examination of the minute particulars whereby Norman tuned, exercised and trained his voice to become the medication it could be for his soul, see John van Wyngaard’s superb Introduction in Gripscapes. This posthumously published book contains two of the three poems referenced here. Reading MORE of my beloved late husband’s carefully crafted poems CLOSELY may be the best thing you could do today, in order to prepare for tomorrow.

– Silke Heiss, February 2023