comment on aiken

This poem probably looks pretty dark. It just sort of turned out that way.

It started when I found a to do list that had a note to try to find Conrad Aiken's short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." I think I added that to the list last winter and forgot about it. I had read it years ago as assigned reading in high school, and remembered liking it.

Anyway, I came across that note on the day we had our first snowfall. And it clicked. It took several days for the whole poem to form.

Here's how I recall having written it.

I started with a game I enjoy: hiding messages. The first word of each line should start out like this:

silent
snow
secret
snow

Then I added some free-association words:

silent night
snow in moonlight
secret ????
snow in sunlight

The "silent night" was likely due to Christmas music. The "moonlight" came from a memory of seeing moonlight on snow (see light). The "sunlight" showed up as an opposite of moonlight.

I had nothing for that "????" except it ought to rhyme with "night."

Then I expanded on what I had so far. I'm not sure exactly how it formed, but it went something like this:

silent night
???? darkness
snow in moonlight
full-time job
secret ????
????-ness
snow in sunlight
????

I think "darkness" simply came from "night." And I know that I looked up "moonlight" and found a definition meaning "to work a second job, often at night." That led to its opposite, full-time job.

The poem stayed in this state for a few days I think.

Then other things during life's interactions made me realize that lots of people all around me have various ailments that they generally don't talk about. If you don't pay attention, you might not notice. I started to think there are hidden maladies we are unaware of. (There's also my increasing awareness of senescence and its inevitability.)

These thoughts filled in more parts of the poem:

silent night
???? darkness
snow in moonlight
full-time job
secret ????
unspoken illness
snow in sunlight
????

Somewhere along the way, I realized that joining the lines and using commas just looked nicer. Besides, the first word on each line returns to the original game, so I got:

silent night, ???? darkness
snow in moonlight, full-time job
secret ????, unspoken illness
snow in sunlight, ????

I thought about rhymes for "night" and "-light." I eventually came up with "blight" I guess because of "illness" and because I feel that the economy is still not really in very good shape regardless of the upbeat news we seem to be being fed by the media and/or the administration or whatever. This also resonated with the "moonlight" and "job" ideas. And I feel that this is a hidden, dark side of the state of our country that is being pretty much denied by many people. So that led to "well hidden."

silent night, well hidden darkness
snow in moonlight, full-time job
secret blight, unspoken illness
snow in sunlight, ????

I think it stayed in this state for a while; I had no clue how to end it... And I had no title either.

I started researching Conrad Aiken, looking for ideas. It's spooky to find out that he was into psychological concepts. Reading what I had so far seemed very dark and deep, although that wasn't my purpose per se.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that "aching" was a great silly pun for a title. Once I thought of it, that notion stuck. Nothing else seemed as good. "aiken" - LOL I still laugh when I think of it!

And as a counterbalance for the dark mood, I thought that "turn the knob" was appropriate as an ending. Change your state of mind, turn the page, move on to the next phase, turn over a new leaf... maybe with a bit of yearning for the future. (In retrospect, maybe it also means something even darker, like suicide(?) by turning on the gas? Yikes! That's really spooky. I was trying to add an upbeat concept... language is just so hard to control!)

So now I had:

silent night, well hidden darkness
snow in moonlight, full-time job
secret blight, unspoken illness
snow in sunlight, turn the knob

You'd think that would be the end of it, but no, I can't leave well enough alone.

I did a bunch of web searching about "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." I found a good site summarizing who Conrad Aiken was. I found a strange site talking about whiteness as an atavism. I found that a Rod Serling TV show had done this story. I vaguely remembered seeing it once.

Anyway, I still wanted to lay out the text in a nice way. I experimented and found I liked justifying the text to both the left and right sides, using the commas as a split point:

silent night, well hidden darkness
snow in moonlight,   full-time job
secret blight,    unspoken illness
snow in sunlight,    turn the knob

So it stayed that way for a day or two.

Then I noticed the white space after the commas.

It reminded me of the lightning bolt shape from "Joe Versus The Volcano."

So I did some more web searching. I found the page with the image of the volcano. With a little adjusting I could form the text to look very much like that image:

   silent night, well hidden darkness
  snow in moonlight,     full-time job
 secret blight,        unspoken illness
snow in sunlight,          turn the knob

Cool. I really liked it at that point. The white space in the middle is like the path up the volcano. The caption on the picture on that webpage is "JOE: Joe's crooked road to doom." Oh man... that fits too well. This poem is just plain DARK.

And the ideas in JVTV fit in several ways as well. Too good to be true.

So there it is. This morning I suddenly realized that there was yet another layer of meaning: "The Book of Job."

Yikes! Where *did* this writing come from? Muses perhaps?

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