Beginner’s Guide to Incarnation
Confusion; the strange
new sensation of light
teaching you darkness.
The panicked paroxysms
of a half-born chrysalid—
the fevered dance,
the skirmish of mottled wings,
still slick from the pupa
& a voice, pleading: Go back!
Back to some suspected
uterine oblivion—
Maya Owen |
levelheaded: Beginner’s Guide to Incarnation
“& a voice, pleading: Go back!”—Maya Owen’s poem climaxes, taking a surprising turn from what you’d expect of incarnation—a great moment of spiritual triumph—and turns into a sober reality.
Rather than a pious description of a sentient taking on flesh, this “Beginner’s Guide” takes an amusing turn (the title’s tone foreshadows it) in emphasizing the regret that must, at least partially, come with the abandonment of the perfect world of immaterial in favor of materialized reality.
The same ambiguity we find in the title, earthly/amateur vs ethereal/divine, continues throughout the poem. “Confusion” ushers this transformation from the very first line. This birth is accompanied by “paroxysms” and is surrounded by the mixup of light and dark. Butterfly imagery, the central (conceptually and on the page) focus of the poem, allows the poet to gently describe this “fevered dance” of becoming. It is a birth characterized by skirmishes, the state of the “half-born,” a struggle that somehow is full of charm.
We enjoy the freedom to decide whether to see the poem’s undertaking as grand (spiritual or even anti-spiritual), or, plainly a poem about a butterfly’s metamorphosis. The birth of a human (and with it the cost of leaving that uterus) or the birth of a deity – each can be read or found in the poem.
That pleading, that moment of recognition that a state of perfection, unconsciousness, should not be given up—remains the strongest impression of our reading experience. Yet given the choice to be born or not to be—what would you choose?
We thought so too.
– The Editors