This week's poem, The Seventh Art in the Sanatorium is from a first collection, Knock Knock (Carnegie Mellon University Press) by Heather Hartley. Originally from West Virginia, Hartley has lived and worked in Paris for the last 10 years. Her poems enjoy quirky characters and odd details, the pleasures and perturbations of travel. "The Seventh Art in the Sanatorium" is one of the more serious pieces in the collection, though it, too, has playful touches.
It was the Italian film theorist, Ricciotto Canudo, who first coined the term "the seventh art", thus adding cinema to Hegel's list of six. The traditional association of the number seven with magic adds a further promise to the poem's title. The epigraph is one of those odd, suggestive snippets of information which poets often like to collect, in this case, concerning the inane – or inspired? – appointment of a cinematographer to the directorial board of a sanatorium.
Hartley has organised her free-verse narrative into four numbered and titled segments, creating the effect of focal points. The first sets the historical scene with a collage that humorously summarises patriarchal attitudes to women's bodies and mental health. The alliterative linking of menstruation to Mesmer mocks the irrationality of the scientific establishment with regard to both. The last line seems deliberately prosaic, the speaker's voice factual and restrained so that the reader can better register absurdity. But the subsequent sections, particularly II and IV, challenge some of the easy assumptions we might make about turn-of-the-century medical ignorance.
If the film, Heavy Weather on the Sea, No 2, was shown with therapeutic intentions, we don't know – but the effects are positive. "Heavy weather" not only mirrors the patients' psychic turmoil and confusion; it wakens sensuous private memories. That this is an uncomfortable process, fidgety and sweaty, is suggested by the description of metal chairs scraping and the room getting hot, and culminates in the line, "This film breaks hearts back to where they were once …" The unusual construction combines pathos with the physical sensation of a bone broken so as to be re-set.
The women's memories reveal specific and rather romantic images connected to the natural world. Young men may be present (boating, picnicking). The idyllic litany suddenly darkens in the last line. There are abrupt sounds: "slap", "rape". "The grainy visage behind a veil" is a gothic sort of image that might be out of a film: the word "grainy" unavoidably evokes old movies. Here, though, it's a real memory, perhaps associated with the rape, and a revelation of the horror respectability may conceal.
The third section seems at first to be something of an interlude, adding sound-scape and atmosphere, but the player piano has metaphorical purpose. Its tune repeats like an obsessive thought, maddening and relentless. It evokes the negative aspect of remembering.
Finally, in the Envoi, the hearts that have been broken "back to where they were once" have themselves become camera-like. They have been opened, if only fractionally, and light has entered them. "Now and then" is, of course, an ambiguous phrase. Used idiomatically, it means "occasionally", but, if taken literally, it could embrace a time-frame of present and past, implying that the women have experienced a kind of resurrection. They belong to life again.
The poem seems to suggest that the film has functioned in a Freudian way. It has unlocked past trauma and provided healing, although the hovering uncertainty of "now and then" might keep optimism in check. The insistence on "heart" implies that the "breakthrough" has been accomplished not by skill or knowledge, but by art's direct appeal to the emotions. So scientific rationality, the absence of which was earlier mocked, now, after all, reveals its limitations.
The Seventh Art in the Sanatorium
"Louis Lumière was on the board of directors of a sanatorium near Lyon and most likely donated films including Heavy Weather on the Sea, No 2 to the institution to show patients."
– news despatch from French Consulate.
I Turn of the Century
When menstruation was alarming and Mesmer all the rage,
when hysterical women were locked away –
forced flowers in a hot house, les fleurs du mal –
when one was sane or insane with nothing
in between but a doctor's pince-nez,
the Lumière brothers, gods of the seventh art,
sat on the board of a sanatorium and made decisions about madness.
II Heavy Weather on the Sea, No 2
As the sea swells on a painted screen,
patients sit in the false night
and remember their lives by and by –
the stream by the path, the sea at large.
Metal chairs scrape, the room grows hot.
Clouds move in with thunder and rain. Lightning in eyes.
They could easily drown in thought.
This film breaks hearts back to where they were once –
the afternoon spent on a boat,
the picnic in the park, the feel of rain on bare arms,
the earth soft under foot and flowers and frost –
to the slap in the face, the rape, the grainy visage behind a veil.
III Piano, pianoforte
And the noise is unbearable, though there is little sound,
though the player piano plays on
and begins its stilted jag again and again,
with a tinny ringing in the ears,
out of tune, in the back of the room,
the rolled pages turn over and over again.
IV Envoi
Picture a small opening in the heart –
a valve, a vent, that lets light in –
for now and then,
life is not a foreign element to them.