Uncanny Pretending: on Keith Kopka’s Count Four
The uncanny might be slippery and overused, but there’s something inherently poetic about it — its claim on the universal, its lingering effect. It carries an almost supernatural oddness. Like the sublime, it’s a special quality of terror. It contains painful, deadly truths, but is too sickening to be funny. It’s self-reflexive. It’s often comprised of a metaphor’s coupling. Just think of how many of Dickinson’s poems could be described as uncanny.
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One of my favorite lines in The Republic — really just a preparatory axiom – is “no man wants to be deceived in the most important part of him and about the most important things; that is when he is most terrified of falsehood.” In Freud’s 1919 paper on the Uncanny, that “special quality of feeling” results when our terror of being deceived in our “most important part” is transferred to, or “animates,” our perceptions, adulterating them in peculiar ways. Freud’s examples of the uncanny range from “wax-work figures, artificial dolls and automatons,” to “catalepsy and the re-animation of the dead,” to suspected secret powers, to dismembered body parts and vaginas in general (according to “male patients”), to situations approaching déjà vu. His main interest in the paper is the uncanny’s psychological mechanism, which boils down to two main features: repression and animation.
The German word for uncanny is unheimlich. Freud explains that, etymologically, the word is rooted in heim (home). It’s not a big leap from “home” to that which is native, familiar. So that, at base, unheimlich means something unfamiliar or strange.
But a weird thing happens. In essence, unheimlich retains heim, so that its strangeness also feels familiar; meanwhile, heimlich comes to retain the ghost of un-, meaning, in one sense, “concealed and kept out of sight.” Freud concludes with aplomb that heimlich “develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”
In the presence of the uncanny, familiar grounds feel unsettlingly unfamiliar; and unfamiliar grounds, unsettlingly familiar. Freud traces in the language the process by which we think we’ve gotten rid of something (that un-) (or, as he says, “surmounted” it), only for it to appear to have been retained. He calls the prefix un- “the token of repression.”
This animation is so freaky because it flies in the face of our mastery of the real. As Freud writes, we thought we had our old “infantile,” “narcissistic,” “primitive” beliefs “surmounted.” But because of the unconscious’ blindspots, where we ourselves stand in the way of our view in Paul’s dark mirror, we are blindsided. The uncanny is a peculiar kind of scaring ourselves.
What’s real? What’s alive? What’s not? What’s material? What’s thought? The issue, again, is fully facing reality. “For the whole matter,” Freud says of the uncanny’s creeping suspicions, “is one of ‘testing reality,’ plain and simple, a question of the material reality of the phenomenon.”
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Twentieth century countercultures give two main options for this threat to mastery: “drop out” or smash the system. Something in-between, Jim Morrison sings, “break on through / to the other side.” Thirty years earlier, Yeats sang:
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality …
Historically, in western literature, it’s a man diagnosing the “manifold illusion,” while yet being bound to “thought.” It’s a man explaining/excusing “his terror.” And finally, it’s a man, in reaction, “[r]avening, raging, and uprooting.”
Note, too, the masculine cycle of violence — martial, intellectual, [trigger warning] sexual. Those steeped in the British canon might think here of Philip Larkin’s historical, London rapist in “Deceptions” (mid-1950s), “stumbling up the breathless stair / To burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic.” The poem directly addresses the victim of the rape, one of the “London poor,” whose wrenching testimony the epigraph cites. Here’s the second, final stanza:
Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic.
The victim was lured, “deceived.” But Larkin, denying his intent or ability to “console” or convince her, nevertheless asserts that, as the title of the collection indicates, she was “less deceived” than her violator. The rapist deceives himself more than his victim. His fantasy of dominance doesn’t “fulfill,” doesn’t last a minute longer than the short fury of his “ravening,” leaving him feeling smaller and hollower than ever.
Hounded by creeping suspicions of his vulnerability and inadequacy, to prove (Freud’s “reality test”) his mastery over “psychical realities,” the rapist projects his fantasy onto the other. His violent attempt to force the answer, to fill the void, fails. What he thinks he has “surmounted” doesn’t go away. The old beliefs, the doubts still plague him, “ready to seize upon any confirmation,” as Freud writes. So perpetuates what war reporter and critic Chris Hedges calls a belief in “regeneration through violence” — a particularly American, but of course, classically western, compulsion.
The rapist’s “bursting” into the “desolate attic” is a fairly eerie image: the heim of what he expects, what he thinks he deserves, weirdly retaining its un-, as the house of his possession proves an empty attic.
This attic, the poems’ final image, is even more uncanny in conversation with a parallel image at the end of the first stanza. There, Larkin melds a description of the sunlight after the rape with one depicting the victim’s “mind.” “[U]nanswerable and tall and wide,” the sunlight “[f]orbids the scar to heal, and drives / Shame out of hiding.” Then the speaker turns to the victim: “All the unhurried day, / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.”
One closed and “burst” into, the other laid “open”; one empty, the other full of gleaming knives: both attic and drawer are containers for “psychical realities” — we might say, for terror and shame.
An open knife drawer — the image is exceedingly familiar (domestic) and exceedingly unsettling next to the mind, the brain. The idea of the cranium as a “drawer” is revolting: what ought to remain organic and animate (the mind) appears inorganic, inanimate.
Remember how heimlich, retaining the ghost of un-, can mean “secret.” If the home is the realm of the private, what is more private, more secret than the inaccessible bourn of the “mind”? According to Freud, Schelling says that everything is uncanny “that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.”
Of all the drawers in the kitchen, the knife drawer ought to remain most firmly closed. We can follow the etymology from (private) property to propriety. Her shame is so loud and glaring and bladed that that it couldn’t not be obvious to the outside world. She’s been “ruined,” as was said — turned inside-out.
E. M. Forster argues that mastery in The Art of the Novel is the sense that an author can do the impossible and know everything in a person’s (his character’s) mind. The unncanny’s horrid animation here is the illusion that the one thing the victim thought inviolable, private, hers (“her mind”) is suddenly, actually, open for all to see.
Blood is never far from the uncanny.
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The most salient masculine force in Keith Kopka’s first collection, Count Four, is punk rock. But if, as Chris Hedges writes of war, punk is the “force that gives [the speaker and his comrades] meaning,” smashing the system and filling them with adrenaline’s delusions of omnipotence and unity, then organized crime and war itself loom closely in the background.
Indeed, in the third poem, the one time the “uncanny” shows up per se refers not to punk rock but to war — a dream about war (“Cold Pastoral”):
Which leads me to dream number two,
where I am a war re-enactor: Union Soldier
Number Five, blue mosquito charging
bayonet first into Confederate flash,
uncanny, pretending to die
with such precision!
This is a poem about dreams: about fantasy, pretending, re-enacting. About violence and war persistently creeping into the pastoral’s smoothed (in this case, ice) fields — as it did for the ancients in their pastoral verse. It’s a poem about violence as a tool for scything, and as a toy that “[scores],” our smoothed fields, our attempts at perfection, conclusion, peace. Violence that is then renewed to clean the slate again, continuing the cycle.
I’ve always dreamed of climbing
behind the wheel of a Zamboni,
choreographing its smooth concentric ballet,
as the augured ice spins into its dump tank.
Though I know, no matter my effort,
kids would sharpen their skates on the sideline,
blades ready again to score my perfected
rink. But don’t we all want jurisdiction
over what refuses to be mastered?
For me, the image of a presumably millennial speaker (Kopka was born in 1986) making his re-enactor “blue mosquito” charge into the fray is odd, if not exactly uncanny. Although this begs the question: how uncanny can it be if he tells you it’s uncanny? Freud says that “as soon as the author begins to amuse himself at [the uncanny’s] expense,” the image “loses all power of arousing at any rate an uncanny horror in us.”
Still, the parts are strewn about: “psychical” vs. “physical” reality; the resemblance between life and death, real and fake; male violence and the slipping free of that which would be surmounted.
“Cold Pastoral” reads like a spicy food dream, except instead of eating Vietnamese before bed the speaker was reading Natasha Trethewey. Here is Trethewey’s unrhymed and spectacularly uncanny sonnet, “Pastoral,” from Native Guard (2007):
In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
hidden by the photographer’s backdrop —
a lush pasture, green, full of soft-eyed cows
lowing, a chant that sounds like no, no. Yes,
I say to the glass of bourbon I’m offered.
We’re lining up now — Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say “race,” the photographer croons. I’m in
blackface again when the flash freezes us.
My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?
Kopka’s feckless, privileged northern pastoral answers Trethewey’s devastating, compromised southern one. We see that the pastoral’s repressions make it a germane backdrop for the uncanny: the repression of the city, “hidden behind the photographer’s backdrop”; the repression of industry, which was such a bane to the Agrarians (the leveling machinery of Zambonis and bulldozers); and finally, the Agrarian’s repression of the slave labor and violence behind their “back to the earth” southern fantasy.
The gender, like the racial differences, are stark: Kopka’s speaker’s fantasies of control and free play with his instruments, his guns and blades; his bursting, heroic male charge. In contrast, Trethewey’s speaker is forced into a passive position, ordered around by reformed-racist patricians, southern “masters.” Trying, as she’s been raised, to be accommodating, she’s objectified as well as tokenized. Although authenticity is at issue in both poems, the issue Kopka can take for granted — and Trethewey’s can’t — is authority.
The uncanny ekes out of her speaker’s ambivalence, her fear of racist complicity. Her involuntary blackface outs her and, like the victim in “Deceptions,” turns her — a passing Black woman — inside-out.
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But back to the white man and his fear of inauthenticity. In an article in Berfrois, Kopka writes of his youth, “I hated myself for being what I perceived as inauthentic. This self-loathing is what led me to romanticize the mythos of punk rock.”
Time and again, the poems in Count Four tell us it’s all an act. From the proem, when the speaker’s father makes him “re-stage” his uncanny menagerie of forest critters, the poems reveal their stage, that they are staged.
This sense of un-realness carries through the book’s signature punk poems. The reader comes to see that it’s more than the drugs and adrenaline and lack of sleep that make the speaker’s performance (his performance of his performance) feel surreal, like he’s going through the motions, like he’s not even, exactly, in control of himself. Like he’s a puppet, a pawn, a poseur: everything that punk, hewing away with its raw anarchic energy, fights against.
This terror of inauthenticity tinges the persona with an uncanny veneer (think, “wax-work figures, artificial dolls and automatons”). What’s more familiar, after all, more native, than yourself? And what’s worse than when this home base feels off, or like someone else, or unreal? That is to be “deceived in the most important part” of yourself and “about the most important things.”
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In Count Four’s long middle poem, “Tour,” the speaker and his only other bandmate raven, rage, and uproot, again and again bursting into fulfillment’s “desolate attic.” His more hardcore comrade, whom the collection seems to elegize, reminds the speaker, “no one pays attention / no matter how hard we play.” It’s a feeling poets know well.
You start to get the feeling you’re getting something wrong, you’re not the genuine article, but maybe just a witness to punk (thinking, as you play, of poems you’ll write later). It’s not an issue of musical talent, one shouldn’t think, but rather of the sense of being too soft, too delicate, not fully committed to the destruction. Somewhere in your mind you’re thinking about your future, applying for jobs or grad school — a subpunk mentality your bandmate’s reckless antics and eventual suicide constantly remind you of and make you feel, first, inferior, and then, guilty.
It’s like the speaker knows, deep-down, or won’t let himself see, but does see eventually — after the downfall, in retrospect — that he’s really a poet moonlighting as a punk. I suspect this feeling dogs many punk rockers.
How else explain Kurt Cobain’s rabid reaction to the interviewer’s facile interpretation of a Nirvana line, other than that the line came, Cobain reveals, despite himself, “out of a poetry … book … that I’d written”?
The poor sap quotes Cobain the line, “I miss the comfort in being sad” and asks, “is this the price you pay for fame?”
“No,” Cobain answers. And not missing a beat—like when the Grandmother touches the Misfit on the shoulder in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and he “sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest”— says, “[t]hat’s a ridiculous question,” blinking for a nicety of emphasis on the second syllable of “ridiculous” and snickering. Novoselic raises his eyebrows, Grohl looks on unphased, hasn’t wanted to be there the whole time.
Let us not forget that while poetry aspires to music, music also aspires to poetry; that inside many a numbed-out rocker is a vulnerable poetaster.
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- On Stage
We look into our audience
like children dressed as ghosts
scaring themselves
in a mirror. You slam
your custom headstock
into a stranger’s neck
when he touches the sound
board. Under the track lights,
we drip like swimmers.
You chop him down again,
and a tuning peg snaps
off in his shoulder, pokes
through his skin. I think
of the sewing needles
my grandmother left
in the lining of the bedspread
she made up. I keep
playing to the drum machine
while you beat him.
Don’t touch the killer on his sensitive “sound / board”! We’re well-prepared for the uncanny here: the mirror, posturing, scaring one’s self, the repressed inner child/fear of death.
The effect bursts in on us when the “tuning peg” “snaps / off” in the stranger/fan’s shoulder, when it “pokes,” with an effective line break, “through his skin,” like the grandmother’s needle left in the quilt. The shift from broken-off shaft to “needle” evokes the horror trope of a broken-off hypodermic needle, and embeds the destructively wrenched savor of hardcore drugs. But that it’s a “sewing needle,” the speaker’s grandmother’s, a hidden sliver of her feminine labor and care, is what rachets the effect up to the level of the uncanny.
As with Larkin, the effect is evoked with an image behind an image — an unholy coupling that strikes a nerve: the open drawer behind the mind, the knives behind the brain, the attic behind the orgasm. Here, we confront family behind anarchy, the grandmother (her “hard core,” as it were) behind the bad-ass’s hardcore behavior, a matron’s domestic “making” behind punk’s angry young masculine un-making. Sewing needles and grandmothers are distinctly unheimlich on this stage, Dionysus’s altar of sex and death, yet the domestic image hits home and makes us shiver. The association is at once common and as deeply out of place as a needle in a blanket.
The repressed (taken for granted) home, with feminine labor and care deeply embedded within, animates punk’s machinery. We see “the other” slip out and serve as a vehicle for the vicious swipe of punk’s mockheroic battle-axe. In the dark mirror, the “stranger” we strike out at is ourselves, unheimlich retaining its heim. The speaker feels the jagged blow and rupture, and we, with him. Punk, going to smash the system, absorbs its own blow. Because it isn’t actually separate from the system.
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The examples proliferate. In the next section of “Tour,” the speaker back-dives off a roof into snow. We have, juxtaposed, his fiancé’s imagined scream and …
the thick plash [his] body makes
hitting ice scabbed over a foot
of snow.
The uncanny ruptures in the dark, cold, and quiet of this idiotic stunt. We’re reminded of the nightmare of diving into an empty pool. The grim top layer of ice is “scabbed” with repressed, imminent injury.
One of Kopka’s trademarks is his ability to describe sound. He’s tuned into these negligible winter vibrations, this sad, tiny, exhausted sound. Behind it, a repressed cry of female care and concern (which he’s been feigning death for the attention of since he was a boy). Like the charging Union soldier and the tuning peg, he plunges (need I say sexually?) “into the desolation of reality” — his insulation of privilege, the compulsion to keep trying his luck, his failure to feel.
His false sense of self can be traced, in early poems, back to his relationship with his father. In “Vinny the Tailor,” the father takes his young son to get his “first Easter suit.” We come to see, as the speaker’s young self will in time, that the jacket is stolen and that the “tailor” is an infamous criminal.
In the bedroom, Vinny claps my shoulders
like a pair of erasers to size my build, then pulls
a brass buttoned captain’s jacket off a lamp.
It fits. I even admit that I like it,
and on the car ride home my dad
makes me rehearse my story:
I got the jacket second hand.
It was outgrown by the son
of someone dad works with.
What is a suburban child doing in the “Smith Hill duplex” of the “menace of the Jersey / turnpike”? What are erasers doing next to Vinny’s minks, stolen suits, and “Pardon Crucifix”?
Uncannily, the young speaker senses Vinny “behind [him] a moment / before” he drapes the coat over his narrow shoulders. Behind grammar school’s clapped erasers, a murderer. Behind the boy, his father’s violent past: a suit he tries to fill, and which is to be hidden from his mother. Repressed behind and animating the horror of Vinny’s “shop” is not just a violent criminal, but also domestic, feminine caretaking. That this “tailor” “never stitched / a thing more complicated than an alibi” foreshadows the grandmother’s needle. Safety and danger unheimlichly touch where they shouldn’t. Home is absent but present.
“Homecoming,” three poems later, depicts an unhemlich Thanksgiving. The speaker’s “Cousin Danny” shows up in feminine dress, makeup, and a wig — now going by the name Danielle. The atmosphere is strained, Danielle terrified, the uncle rolling his eyes. The speaker’s mind lurches back to a memory of when he and then-Danny were boys, terrified in the backseat while they watched their dads beat up a man who was beating up a woman. “I remember,” the speaker writes,
Danny’s hand, how it turned up the volume on the oldies
station, when our dads jumped out of the car,
and the radio blared “Come Go With Me.”
Danny and I held hands and sang
every stupid dom and every stupid dooby
at the top of our lungs until the grim structure
our fathers made raised up before us,
bearing the sag of another man
like an un-staked scarecrow.
This amazing scene is fraught, charged with repression. Just as Danielle comes out of Danny, the mothers and wives, who probably made Thanksgiving dinner and are washing dishes in the poem, slip out from behind the dominating “grim structure” of the fathers’ masculinity, their violence and heroism. Behind the speaker’s petty criminal and vandal-trying-too-hard coming-of-age is a scared boy LA-LA-Laing away his suburban fear before the streets his father was raised on. Behind noise metal is hokey ’50s doo-wop.
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A few final examples. Following the ravages of “Tour,” one might expect a poem called “Hiding with my Mom” to find our speaker recuperating at home, doing laundry, getting fed, sleeping in. Instead, home base proves estranged in a poem about sitting out a tornado (or hurricane — it’s only called, sinisterly, “It”), drinking Pernod with Mom. He addresses her directly.
We know it’s coming, its engine
amping like a flooded lawnmower.
We don’t board each window,
and we leave the begonias as they are
on the porch. We do deadbolt
the door. In the finished room
above the garage, we drink Pernod
and wait.
It’ll be scarier, you say, if it knocks.
If it knocks that means it has a plan.
Animated, personified, fated, the storm is everything we know nature cannot be — that is, until our “surmounted” anxieties slip free and our “old beliefs” prove robust as ever, like the speaker’s uncle Rudy in “Iki Dugno” taping up the orifices in the house so the dead can’t get in and, as Freud describes, “carry him off.”
Kopka picks up the sounds of “Its” dreadful approach with incredible — nay, uncanny —sensitivity.
It’s closer now,
and it doesn’t sound
like an engine at all. It’s more repetitive —
a rattle before quick suction, a thousand
refrigerator doors opening in a round.
Mother and son are rehearsing a kind of denial, talking around and joking about the danger. It becomes clear that, in their casualness and laxity, each knows more about “It” than they’re letting on.
There is a sense of retributive justice arriving in the storm: that the speaker’s luck has run out, the game is up. In this way, “It” resembles the speaker’s paternal legacy of violence, the repressed and hidden consequences — the trauma, lies, ghosts, and debt collectors, the victims of war and street crime and punk come home to roost. The tempest is pressurized by an internalized inheritance, a culmination of all that a man must swallow and bury and hide from — foist onto — the other.
You nod, asking Do you have any idea
why it’s so angry?
I don’t, I say, afraid
if I tell you the truth
you’ll march me right downstairs
to let the damn thing in.
Such a hermetically-sealed, all-male fantasy — confronting reality’s hard core alone, the rebel going down shooting when the Man comes around — is as staged as the western motifs that crop up throughout the book. Pretending “It” can be kept separate from her, that the violence ever was kept from her, is the last undeception, bleeding through in the poem’s final, infantizing language. Freud would say that what’s repressed, contained in the verb “hiding,” is the fantasy of hiding inside her.
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Count Four’s final poem is diagrammatic about the operation of the uncanny. It describes an ancient torture device called the “Bronze Bull.” From “At Dinner, When Someone Says Reading Poems Is Torture”:
The condemned were locked
in its stomach, then a fire under
the statue heated the metal
until they roasted alive. It bucked
while they cooked, and sound
apparatus turned screams
into snorts.
As a symbol for poetry, the bronze bull touches on Seamus Heaney’s old conflict between “beauty and atrocity.” Consider the tragedies we feed our art, converting it into what Perillos, the architect of the Bronze Bull, calls, “the tenderest, most pathetic, most / melodious flow of bellowings.” Consider the earrings made from the bones of the roasted at the end of the poem.
What are the “condemned” here but repressed “psychical realities,” which animate “physical reality” and leave us creeped by the notion of a statue acting like an animal, an animal acting like a machine? The bronze bull sickens us with the uncanny feeling — like dreams where you can’t stop eating inedible things — that entertainment, beauty even, come from such base materials and methods, from such cruelty.
Exquisitely realized, Count Four makes us “test” not only “the materiality of the phenomena,” as Freud writes, but also the morality of it. It makes us ask where in this life, especially for a privileged white man, beauty and mastery are not the product of repressed, animated atrocity. Like rock, expunged of its nevertheless animating Blackness, the punk’s instrument, the poet’s clever devices, are commodities animated by the invisible labor and devastation of the other.
Thus, the scared boy writhes inside punk’s numb bronze.
[Published by University of Tampa Press on September 11, 2020, 99 pages, $14.00 paperback]