The Destination of Rivers
 

Imagine having the ability to be two places at once, to be two people at once. In B.H. Fairchild’s Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, that is precisely the situation in which the speaker of these poems functions. “A Wall Map of Paris,” in particular, describes the ability of literature to transport its reader both geographically and figuratively to another land. This poem uses the symbol of rivers to describe not only worlds outside of Liberal, Kansas, but also to indicate the means of reaching these outside lands. That is, the literal, geographical depictions serve as mirrors for the figurative lands to which the speaker’s imagination carries him.

In “A Wall Map of Paris,” the speaker describes his friend’s hand as “falling along a darkening stain that runs from Vaugirard to Palaine and west to Rue Cassette,” as if literally tracing this route occasions the movement of the speaker and his friends to another place, in this case, Paris. Visually, this “stain” is the first representation of a river in the poem. The river imagery on the map shows the transporting nature of the imagination and its ability to take the speaker away from his surroundings. The poem itself acts like the map in this way, because it allows the speaker’s imagination to figuratively carry him to different worlds.

The speaker, or poet, has the ability to exist at the same time in Liberal, Kansas and Paris, or, we might say, to simultaneously exist in literal and imaginative realms. Imagination, inspired by literature, then, is the river that carries the poet to these other realms. At one point, a man in the poem, presumably the speaker, looks into the Seine and sees the reflection of a “glassworker’s son.” This image shows the dual identity of the speaker as “glassworker’s son” and “poet,” as well as his coexistence in both the imaginative and the literal realms. Poetry thus allows for the opening up of a system of dual identity, as well as dual existence.

The end of “A Wall Map of Paris” relates the Greek god Orpheus to a boy in the poem who is presumably the speaker, thereby attributing Orpheus’ qualities to the speaker. Orpheus was a poet, as well as a musician, and had the power to alter the flow and destination of rivers. The poem’s relation of Orpheus to the speaker, then, gives the poet the ability to determine his own destination. The speaker’s friend indirectly refers to Orpheus again when he points to the place on the map where Rilke wrote “The Panther.” Rilke wrote a book called Sonnets to Orpheus, and the Rilke epigraph at the beginning of Fairchild’s poem translates as “a current to carry the head and the lyre.” Thus, the friend’s gesture not only points to a geographical location on the map, but it also figuratively points to the ability of literature to transport the poet to the figurative realm, to follow the rivers of Orpheus.

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest is filled with poems like “A Wall Map of Paris” that lend literature the power to transport reader and writer from reality to imaginative lands. The river may flow to Paris, but as the figure of Orpheus proves, the river may also flow wherever else the poet imagines, even back home.

--Ashley Young