Susan Howe - Periscope (continued)

Setting sun then Lethe where
ever fabled swan-white Helios
in our own time underground

In this second place we think 
we only think we think though
our ghosts appear in mirrors

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I’ve decided to dig a little deeper into this Howe piece this week. While it is still nowhere near the entire poem, we might eventually get there at this rate.

In keeping with the standards she established throughout, the poem is presented without punctuation and in a fragmented syntax. A sense of finality is established immediately with the opening line, "Setting sun then Lethe where." The introduction of the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology, helps us understand that this setting sun doesn’t signify only the end of a day but is the end of all days for the subject. As a quick reminder in case you haven’t brushed up on your classic literature in a while, Lethe was a river in the Greek underworld that would erase the memories of the dead so that they would be a blank slate ready for reincarnation. The river is the oblivion of self. Ending the line with “where” references this forgetfulness, as if the speaker is caught in their thought after tasting the amnesiac waters.

Howe doubles down on this in the next couple of lines, reinforcing the image of the setting sun with the image of Helios underground, as if the speaker has forgotten that they opened with that image. This second presentation is dressed in denser syllables and greater gravity to underscore the significance of the end. It isn’t just the sun that has set — god has joined us in the darkness.

I’m going to add in some missing punctuation to the last three lines, to help guide the reading. “In this second place, we think /(we only think we think, though)/ our ghosts appear in mirrors.”

In ending that line with “we think,” the speaker reiterates the uncertainty previewed in ending the first line with “where.” This poem is full of doubt and fugue. It is also interesting that she calls this the “second place” instead of something more final. This both incorporates the idea of reincarnation tied to the Lethe but also contradicts the finality worked into the fabric of the piece. Maybe the death of this poem is a kind of death in the way that the end of a relationship, or a job, or moving to a new house/country is a kind of death. A forgetting occurs and we transition to the second place.

I really love the absurdity of "we think/ we only think we think though." It adds so much tension to the poem through this sort of antithetical ridiculousness. The speaker is questioning the authenticity of thought itself, bringing in a different type of death still. This is now about the death of our mental stability, the death of our most human quality — our ability to think critically.

The final line is an interesting twist on the idea that the reflection we see in a mirror is genuinely us in the past. A mirror (a symbol of reflection and self-discovery) is perverted into a reminder of what has been lost: bygone versions of ourselves that were left behind with each death. We’ve just forgotten (thanks to Lethe) that we’ve transitioned to this new version of ourselves.