Some Ether captures the reading in a dizzying spiral of deeply personal anecdote and volatile analysis of the same. The inspirations for this collection is quickly evident in Flynn's work: the absent, alcoholic bum of a father, the endearing but ultimately suicidal mother. The writing is full of the paradoxes that come with psychological trauma, especially when the trauma is experienced so young.
For example, Flynn's writing shows clearly that he is impassioned by his childhood and his relationships (or lack thereof) with his parents. (He wrote almost fifty poems about them!) One senses his urge, as their child, to be able to connect with them. In "My Mother Contemplating Her Gun" he attempts to enter the conscience of his mother, as if to try to experience what she felt when she held the weapon that would lead to her ultimate demise. He imagines,
"...Look at this, one
bullet,
how almost nothing it is–
saltpeter sulphur lead Hell
burns sulphur, a smell like this."
However, Flynn also gives the reader the sense that he sometimes wishes that he had none of these experiences at all, or that he would rather just not delve into the re-experiencing of it. In fact in "Momento Mori", he states his frustration with the plaguing memories rather explicitly:
"I'm sick of God and his teaspoons. I don't want
to remember her
reaching up for a kiss, or the television
pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom."
Continuing on this idea, another one of Flynn's mental conflicts seems to be over whether or not his is/ was equipped to handle the trauma his experienced. Through several of his poems, it becomes apparent that while he was perhaps not at an appropriate age when these events occurred, he is able to deconstruct and deal with them better now, as an adult. He writes in "Cartoon Physics",
"Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum...
...A ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries
will crash into the rock."
Flynn is saying that up until some age, (perhaps 10), we are too young to experience the real world with its daunting facts. We are, and should be, wrapped up in the play-pretend world, the world which runs on “cartoon physics”, created for us by adults, to protect us from the harsh realities that lie ahead. If they are to come across disaster, they should be
“burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down– earthbound, tangible
disasters, arenas
where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships
have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump
you will be saved.”
These disasters are unlike the ones Flynn himself was forced to experience. What control could a child even pretend to have over an alcoholic, criminal father, or a mother suffering from depression so deep that she eventually ends herself to end it? What understanding does a child even have of such things? Almost none. A child only knows the pain that comes with these, things, not the understanding of them. Flynn describes one such pain (of one of his mother’s successive boyfriends) in “You Ask How”:
“He lets me play with his service revolver
while they kiss on the couch.
As the cars fill the windows, I aim,
making the noise with my mouth,
in case it’s them,
& when his back is hunched over her I aim
between his shoulder blades,
in case it’s him.”
Now, however, Flynn is a grown man. He is able to begin understanding and dealing with the pain of his childhood. He can start to learn about the expansiveness of the universe, and how one galaxy can consume another. He can study the storm, instead of just feeling it. He describes this in “Flood”:
“In grade school I heard
clouds could weigh three tons & wondered
why they didn’t all just fall to the ground. Lately
I study rain, each drop shaped
like a comet, ten million of them, as if a galaxy
has exploded above us.”
Flynn has created a metaphor for the way in which he approaches the troubles in his past. When he was young, he considered simply the weight of the whole event, the three ton cloud, and wondered why it did not cause his whole world to come crashing down around him. Now, as an adult, he is able to study the individual causes (the raindrops) that lead to the creation of the event. He realizes that although the whole world did not come crashing down, every raindrop coming from that cloud hits you and the world around you, leaving its dark stain upon your earth. In this same way, each minute detail that lead up to the event did in some way affect his being. It is these details that Flynn (or anyone who has experienced some trauma in their lives) must deconstruct, to fully understand what has happened to them.
“Some Ether” is a fascinating read because, while Flynn is desperate to connect with and get inside the heads of his parents, the reader is just as desperate to find understanding of Flynn’s conscience. Unlike other poetry anthologies I have looked at, where the poems seem to be random snippets of from the poet’s experiences, these poems flow together like the dramatic novel of one man’s life, while still leaving enough disarray to please the artistic conscience. Through his own journey to unravel his traumatic past, Flynn shows us that the way to deal with our own pain is just like this– bit by bit, little by little, piece by piece.
