Gaps don't
just happen.
There is a
generative element
inside them,
a welling motion
as when cold
as when cold
waters shoulder
up through
warmer oceans.
And where gaps
choose to widen,
coordinates warp,
even in places
constant since
the oldest maps.
This poem always seemed the odd one out of the three, largely because it doesn’t seem to deal with people as characters or human interactions. Dr Silvey in an earlier rehearsal compared it to the previous set of Kay Ryan poems we have sung as a choir, which featured poems that were ‘observational’: recording the minutiae of water forming in a bucket, or the biological structure of a songbird. However, while this poem does seem to discuss material objects in the same way, I think that these function in the poem as metaphor for much broader and more intangible human concerns.
To start with: the obvious. Gaps are generally associated with loss, with an absence of something specific - a gap in a bookshelf signifies a missing book, for example. But here Ryan embodies the idea of a ‘gap’ with a great sense of presence. The gap is an actor, and agent, moving and growing on its own. It has power, and it has a mentality. In line 12, Ryan notes that the gap ‘chooses’ to widen, as if conscious. We could imagine the poet taking the poem in several different directions following the first line. ‘Gaps don’t just happen’: they could be created by people, in recognizing absence and loss. Instead, humans are excised from the picture, and the gaps, by being given power and mentality, replace them.
This is where the second association with ‘gaps’ comes into play. This is a word also identified as dangerous, a liminal space from which something unknown might appear, or into which you might fall. The gap between the train and the railway platform, for example, or a the gap between two buildings where you have to walk late at night. Ryan also emphasises this sense of menace and danger surrounding the gap, through lines like ‘as when cold / waters shoulder / up through / warmer oceans’ (lines 7-10). While ‘warmth’ is traditionally associated with positive attributes such as comfort, safety and happiness, ‘cold’ is traditionally associated with the opposite.
So far, the poet has described her new conception of ‘gaps’ as overturning the two main ideas we have of them: instead of absence, they are presence. Instead of providing a place from which something might come, or into which something might go, they are themselves that moving force from the outside which threatens to swallow us up. So assuming that Ryan isn’t describing a science-fiction horror scenario, what do these gaps represent?
After having established this new idea of ‘the gap’, I think Ryan suggests a meaning in the last few lines (also the lines which get repeated most often in the solos), where the gaps are charged with disrupting coordinates and therefore the legitimacy of our maps. This is a very powerful image. What do we use maps for? To visualize our world. Domestically, we can visualize specific places, but any attempt to imagine larger areas - your state, your country, your continent - requires imagining how they appear as on a map. And we trust, as we trust to those things which we learnt in childhood, to the constancy of those images. I know my country because I know where it is in relation to other countries, its allies and enemies and the millions of networks which connect and separate us. But if coordinates are no longer stable, if we can imagine gaps as actively disrupting that neat world-visualization, then how can we be certain of our place within it?
Think about ‘the oldest maps’ and how they were first created: by explorers physically moving over the land and waters and recording what they saw. Now we don’t physically discover new territory, but we do constantly learn new, potentially dangerous things about the world we live in. Maturity is a progression from simplistic understanding to complex appreciation, and our understanding of the world, of the political relationships the US has with countries in the Middle East, for example, is always changing. Out of simple faith in stability and the belief that we can know/acquire/keep everything we see, into a frightening awareness that the world is not mentally mappable, and is full of conscious, active forces which we cannot entirely see and cannot at all control.
This poem, as I see it, is an articulation of that understanding.
This poem always seemed the odd one out of the three, largely because it doesn’t seem to deal with people as characters or human interactions. Dr Silvey in an earlier rehearsal compared it to the previous set of Kay Ryan poems we have sung as a choir, which featured poems that were ‘observational’: recording the minutiae of water forming in a bucket, or the biological structure of a songbird. However, while this poem does seem to discuss material objects in the same way, I think that these function in the poem as metaphor for much broader and more intangible human concerns.
To start with: the obvious. Gaps are generally associated with loss, with an absence of something specific - a gap in a bookshelf signifies a missing book, for example. But here Ryan embodies the idea of a ‘gap’ with a great sense of presence. The gap is an actor, and agent, moving and growing on its own. It has power, and it has a mentality. In line 12, Ryan notes that the gap ‘chooses’ to widen, as if conscious. We could imagine the poet taking the poem in several different directions following the first line. ‘Gaps don’t just happen’: they could be created by people, in recognizing absence and loss. Instead, humans are excised from the picture, and the gaps, by being given power and mentality, replace them.
This is where the second association with ‘gaps’ comes into play. This is a word also identified as dangerous, a liminal space from which something unknown might appear, or into which you might fall. The gap between the train and the railway platform, for example, or a the gap between two buildings where you have to walk late at night. Ryan also emphasises this sense of menace and danger surrounding the gap, through lines like ‘as when cold / waters shoulder / up through / warmer oceans’ (lines 7-10). While ‘warmth’ is traditionally associated with positive attributes such as comfort, safety and happiness, ‘cold’ is traditionally associated with the opposite.
So far, the poet has described her new conception of ‘gaps’ as overturning the two main ideas we have of them: instead of absence, they are presence. Instead of providing a place from which something might come, or into which something might go, they are themselves that moving force from the outside which threatens to swallow us up. So assuming that Ryan isn’t describing a science-fiction horror scenario, what do these gaps represent?
After having established this new idea of ‘the gap’, I think Ryan suggests a meaning in the last few lines (also the lines which get repeated most often in the solos), where the gaps are charged with disrupting coordinates and therefore the legitimacy of our maps. This is a very powerful image. What do we use maps for? To visualize our world. Domestically, we can visualize specific places, but any attempt to imagine larger areas - your state, your country, your continent - requires imagining how they appear as on a map. And we trust, as we trust to those things which we learnt in childhood, to the constancy of those images. I know my country because I know where it is in relation to other countries, its allies and enemies and the millions of networks which connect and separate us. But if coordinates are no longer stable, if we can imagine gaps as actively disrupting that neat world-visualization, then how can we be certain of our place within it?
Think about ‘the oldest maps’ and how they were first created: by explorers physically moving over the land and waters and recording what they saw. Now we don’t physically discover new territory, but we do constantly learn new, potentially dangerous things about the world we live in. Maturity is a progression from simplistic understanding to complex appreciation, and our understanding of the world, of the political relationships the US has with countries in the Middle East, for example, is always changing. Out of simple faith in stability and the belief that we can know/acquire/keep everything we see, into a frightening awareness that the world is not mentally mappable, and is full of conscious, active forces which we cannot entirely see and cannot at all control.
This poem, as I see it, is an articulation of that understanding.
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