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The Unseeable Abstraction
“Flying” by Maxine Kumin
The Unseeable Abstraction is the inherent concept or idea imbedded
deep within a poem’s structure, the notion or thought brought
to the reader clue by clue, line by line. A panoply of literary
faculties can be used to accomplish this. A poem, in this light,
is like a looming castle, built thousands of years previous with
a melding of magic both literal and literary. It’s walls,
fabricated of metaphor, rise through the clouds, and it’s
stained, towering windows are melded of a rare, rhythmic, epiphanic
glass. Surrounding this castle is a cavernous moat, filled with
allegory and simile, and the proud banner that waves at the peak
is made with the fine, durable wood of allusion.
Maxine Kumin is lord of a citadel much like this one. Her fort,
known as “Flying” by many in the land, is constructed
using materials of metaphor, time and mystery. The baron of this
manor, the Unseeable Abstraction, is housed within. In “Flying,”
this abstraction is of story and event, and the blurred, indistinct
shape they can take over time and after many accounts.
When the narrator was younger, her mother told her of an event that
occurred during childhood. The daughter recounts the story, and
carves her mother’s experience in to the poem with metaphor
and objectivity, though it remains ambiguous. However, one thing
we can be sure of is that, whatever her mother said that rainy,
dark night, it had offensive and disturbing content. In the poem’s
fifth stanza, Kumin writes, “under eaves heavy with rain /
and the rue of a disbelieving daughter.” This melancholy couplet
tells the reader she heard something she did not enjoy. Earlier
in the poem, the reader is told that the event goes to the length
of effecting the daughter vicariously, where [she] “woke up
each morning groping / as for a lost object lodged perhaps / between
[her] legs, never knowing / what had been taken from [her] or what
/ had been returned to its harbor.” This emphatically clues
the reader that the event was both negative and sexual in nature,
perhaps abuse, molestation, or even assumptions of rape. The daughter
was affected by hearing the story just as the mother was traumatized
for living it. This notion is later clarified within the poem’s
closing stanzas, where the speaker recounts, “…a pious
man whose red beard had never seen scissors, // who planted his
carrots and beets / in the dark of the moon for good reason.”
“A pious man” tells us the grandfather was devoutly
religious, possibly old, weathered, and commanding. “…Whose
red beard” and “…who planted his carrots and beets”
provide us with more than enough phallic imagery. And then, “
who planted his carrots and beets / in the dark of the moon for
good reason” is a clever way of stating the grandfather raped
the mother after her menstruation cycle, while her egg is the least
fertile, and there’s little worry of pregnancy.
As Kumin uses metaphor to describe literal events, she’s also
using it on a more profound level. Kumin shows how events are relative
to the comprehension of the person living them, so history is written
depending on how people understand and adapt to these events. Here,
we’re told a story that’s passed from the mother to
the speaker, and we’re led to believe the story is true. But
when the reader explores “Flying” more in depth, s/he
begins to question the story’s legitimacy, thus raising questions
inherent to the Unseeable Abstraction of the poem. The second half
of the first stanza, which draws suspicion, goes:
…her bearded grandfather told her:
every night your soul flies
out of your body and into
God’s lap, He keeps it under
his handkerchief until morning.
Kumin hopes the reader will begin to question the story by using
the extended metaphor of “flying in to God’s lap”
as an allegory for the mother’s escape. This metaphoric connection
becomes apparent as we’re told of the mother drinking on the
plane: “…she consigned her soul to the Coco- / Chanel-costumed
stewardess / then ordered a strait-up martini.” Here the action
of drinking is linked with the mother’s “soul”
which is “consigned” to the stewardess. As the plane
makes an unsettling landing in the following stanza, alcohol is
effective in separating her from the experience, “…Some
people screamed. / My mother was not one of them.” And then,
“…her shoes—she had slipped them off…”
signify the mental state of the mother while intoxicated. Her shoes
are not needed as she’s flying, and furthermore, as she “flies
in to God’s lap,” there’s little capable of penetrating
the shell she creates.
From this, we can understand Kumin’s use of “flying”
as representing an avoidance of a bad situation, an escape to a
more tranquil place in the mind. Because this means an evasion of
reality, we can begin to suspect that the story the mother told
the daughter may have been slightly, if not entirely fictitious.
Another red flag is Kumin’s employment of time. As we contemplate
this, we begin to see an underlying structure to the poem that was
not first visible, in which truth is possible illusion and facts
are meant to be questioned. We see this structure through memory
coupled with changing tense, where the second stanza is spoken in
present tense, and the first and third stanzas are recounted as
memory of a past experience. We can also notice this structure as
we understand the event, which the mother told the daughter and
the daughter tells us, has been recounted two times. Trauma was
indeed present as the mother lived the event early in her childhood,
and likely with the daughter as well. Furthermore, both retellings
of this event were told by individuals whom experienced trauma associated
with it.
With these perspectives, the mystery to the poem is resolved. The
“unseeable abstraction,” in it’s clearest form,
is not of mother and grandfather, but of story and event. Kumin
uses this particular story as an example of a story with many layers,
and asks us to identify those layers. In this light, Kumin’s
“Flying” is ultimately didactic, as she teaches us ways
in which to better understand and measure the integrity of stories
we hear.
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