DEVON BALWIT, FEATURED IN THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Bodily Processes: Notes on Mann’s The Magic Mountain [III]
1. Beneath a portrait of Castorp’s inamorata, the doctor dilates on skin.
2. Three are its layers: horny, reticular, and fatty.
3. Our young hero leans towards the painted surface, lips a hair’s distance from blue-daubed decolletage.
4. Your sensory envelope is your brain made manifest, the doctor muses.
5. Castorp feels desire in his pores, in his skin
6. which blanches and flushes in response to stimuli.
7. Muscles contract. Things rise.
8. He lifts the painting from the wall, carries it into the sitting room.
9. Leaning it against his chair, he enquires about our underlying composition.
10. Water. Protein. Lymph. Blood.
11. Life smells of dying, adds the doctor.
12. Before leaving, Hans returns the portrait to its hook, thumb-tip lingering on the varnish of a bare shoulder.
Notes on Mann’s Mario and the Magician
1. Though it offends our sensibilities, the mesmerist is a physical grotesque.
2. Will adamantine, he cracks his whip, and we dance.
3. To insist on autonomy is to twitch with colic.
4. The faithful wife trips after him, as do the rowdies. A lovestruck lad kisses his cheek.
5. When called, we abandon all propriety over our chairbacks.
6. Poveretto, we declare, seeing ourselves in each victim.
7. Our children think our contortions a game, witnessing to the very end.
8. For days, they ape the magician’s imperiousness.
9. They believe his murder part of the show.
10. We know it a bootless attempt to erase shame.
11. Anche se non vuole…
These two poems reflect my interest in the power of obsession. The reader of Mann’sThe Magic Mountain understands that Castorp has TB long before Castorp does. We expect him to worry about his health, but instead, he replaces fear with sexual desire, deflecting his scrutiny onto the alluring Claudia, a married Slav recuperating at the same sanitorium. Throughout the novel, Mann’s characters pore over details—the brachii of the lungs in their X-rays, one another’s hectic cheeks, the weather, lunch, the minutiae of political and philosophical argumentation. Readers must give themselves over to these obsessions or fight against the very underpinnings of Mann’s world. The same is true in Mann’s short story “Mario and the Magician.” The magician has studied human nature to the nth degree. As a result, he can make adults dance to his tune. The children look on as we do—fascinated—“Is this what it means to be an adult?” “Is this what will happen to us?” To object to being so ensorcelled is to “kill” the tale, just as one of the objecting victims does when he murders the Magician, the puppet-master.
The poems are written as lists to try to give my reader and I some distance from Mann’s work even as I obsessively explore “what he means.” I wanted to bend Mann to my own will, to make his text like the doctor’s oil painting, something whose surface I could scrutinize and even touch. Perhaps, I even desired to make him crow like a rooster as the magician does the volunteers from his audience.
Devon Balwit’s work appears in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, Sierra Nevada Review and Grist among others. Her most recent collection is Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023]. For more, visit https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet