By Reviewer: Geoff Page
Every Time You Close Your Eyes. By Bel Schenk. Wakefield Press. $19.95.
The North American blackouts of 1977 and 2003 have passed into a sort of urban myth – except perhaps for those who experienced them. Everyone knows of the supposed spike in births that followed them nine months later etc. Melbourne poet, Bel Schenk, who has spent some time in New York, takes advantage of this limited canvas to create two interrelated verse novellas which have much to tell about urban loneliness and how it is managed by its sufferers.
Social compact: Every Time You Close Your Eyes by Bel Schenk.
Schenk is interested too in what happened in the 26 years between the blackouts – both to her characters, most of whom are common to both parts, and to society more generally. The destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, is in the background of the second novella in much the same way as Son of Sam (David Berkowitz), the serial killer, supplies a context for the first.
The ill-fated Christopher Reeve, actor in four Superman movies, also provides a somewhat ironic linkage.
As a poet, Schenk's style is mostly low-key and minimal. Her language is not particularly metaphoric but images, when they do occur, are often dense with implication. Some scenes, e.g. the "sex scene" in Inhale to Exhale, is more than vivid through this technique. The episode is made even more dramatic by cross-references to what two of the other main characters are also doing in the darkness elsewhere in the city.
In Part 2, we have mainly the same characters 26 years later. In 2003, Rose, the slightly desperate single mother in the sex scene just mentioned in Part 1, is interrupted in her search for a partner on an internet sight. Her son, Alex, has grown up but is still living with her. This doesn't prevent the almost incidental sexual adventure he has with Martha – an encounter which he almost certainly wouldn't have had had it not been for the blackout.
Robert, the lonely cellist in Part 1, is hardly less lonely in Part 2. Here, at one point, he becomes a brief but legendary traffic policeman. "So it goes that when he steps out from the bar / and onto the road with his arms stretched, cars stop and go. / The mess and confusion, restored for a time. // After a little while of directing, / tiredness comes into the mix / and a police officer asks him to move along ... ".
The common element among almost all the characters is loneliness and even their brief moments of sexual contact do little to assuage it. Interestingly, the poet seems to feel no particular pity for them. Within the confines of these 83 pages, however, Schenk's characters are fully realised and have their own complexities.
Although, to some extent, they are emblematic of certain human types and attitudes, they also project their own individuality and the reader does come to care about them. They are not merely examples for a sociological thesis – though Schenk's views on the bleakness of life in the metropolis and the fragility of its social compact are clear enough.