Mahasukha Halo
Scott Michael McClellan (smm6q@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU)
Wed, 14 Feb 1996 02:19:16 -0500
The ideas surrounding a poetic work are usually fixed and
determined lines set on a page, following some set of rules, ranging from
rule-bound forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.) to unbounbound forms (e.g.
free verse). The hypertext poem, Mahasukha Halo, raises many specific
questions about itself as well as several questions about poetry written
in electronic space.
Mahasukha Halo as a work catches the reader in a collaged
atmosphere where meanings, settings, phrases, and forms shift
constantly. The text fragments and congeals at various points, and feels
much like a "debris field" as it is put in The Electronic Labyrinth.
This field however is ordered by the map which provides a stable
framework within which to read a work which is inherently unstable. The
map appears at times to function in several ways. First, as already
stated, it provides order in a chaotic text. This order however brings
to mind the question of whether such a text, which thrives on
disorienting a reader, should have an overarching scheme. Secondly the
maps very presence implies that it is an elememt of the poetry. With its
inclusion the author provides the reader with a meta-text, one which
circumscribes the poem and recognizes the complexity of the work. Is the
map therefore a poem unto itself, a found object? If it is so
considered, then what are its features as a poem?
Following from the map, the word halo in the title carries several
plays within the context of the poem. The sacred image of the halo,
connoting angelic purity, contrasts with the Mahasukha, which the
Electronic Labyrinth describes as the Buddhist concept of orgasm. These
two ideas are mirrored in several ways throughout the poem with such pure,
objective, styles as bibliography and definition, and the profane items of
the subjective, poetry and conversational styles. What effects does this
mirroring have on readers of the poem and is it an effect device to provoke
emotions in a reader? Secondly the halo's donut shape acts metonymically
in how the text is organized; all meaning and form moves around the torus
shape inverting itself and being replayed, yet at the same time falling
inward toward a void space in the middle where the reader loses form and
content. This leads one to ask what occurs in the voided middle space
created by the poem?
Finally, the poem becomes a point to ask the question of whether this
form of poetry, that of hypertext, constitutes a genre of its own. The
sporadic formation of images and meanings places it in a crossover point
of television commercials, poetry, philosophy, research essays, and many
other forms. As an organic whole, the work seems to be a catalogue
wherein are contained sound-bites of various forms and content. How
effective is this conglomerate at producing a text is the question though?
At what point does the work pass from coherency to confusion, and how does
this affect a poem's interpretability? Lastly is this work hostile to
reader, critic, and poet?
Scott