[Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me] by Diane Suess
Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me. I didn’t want it.
Believe me, I didn’t want it anymore. Who in their
right mind? And then it came like an ice cream truck
with its weird tinkling music, its sweet frost. I fled
to the shore and saw how death-strewn, all the body
parts washed up and sucked clean like that floor mosaic
by Sosus of Pergamon, Unswept House. Seabirds
flocked and dematerialized like they do. Bees raged
at their own dethroning. Love came close anyway,
found me out, its warped music all the rage. It had
a way, just by being in proximity, of opening
the shells of the bivalves. Disclosing their secret
meat. One doesn’t really suck on frozen sugar water.
One allows it to melt in the oven of the mouth.
Intimacy. An ice cream truck. (Severed?) (human?) body parts. A mosaic. Seabirds and bees. Love. Creepy music. Shells. “Frozen sugar water”. The mouth is an oven.
While reading this poem or the condensed version I just created, I could not for the life of me find the connection that subtly but brilliantly linked these ideas. Maybe intimacy could be represented by the ice cream truck, but why were there body parts on the beach? If I’m being honest, I don’t think anyone associates ice cream with body parts, bees, or bivalves.
My confusion really started the moment I read this poem as I was misreading the first line from the start. In my mind, the words “unhinged” and “unpaddocked” were equivalent in a sense and made me think that intimacy had caused the speaker to go crazy. The assonance used by the poet falsely led me to believe these words were synonyms as I thought the shared “un” and “ed” at the beginning and end of the words was indicative of shared meaning as well. It wasn’t until the third or fourth time that I read the poem that I looked up the definitions of these words to confirm that I was correctly defining them. And low and behold, I wasn’t. My assessment of “unhinged” had been correct as Google described it as a deranged state. My investigation of “unpaddocked” led me to learn that one literal definition of the word “paddock” is an enclosed area where horses are kept. Reading this made me realize that the word “unpaddocked” was used to suggest a newfound freedom or liberation brought on by this intimacy. While a minor “breakthrough” was made by catching my own error, a bit more confusion was actually generated as there was significant contrast between the connections of these once seemingly similar words. “Unhinged” seems to describe an undesirable state that was forced upon the speaker while “unpaddocked” seems to describe a privilege that comes with autonomy and control of one’s actions.
I believe these opposing forces add to the conflict experienced by the speaker during the entirety of this poem. The speaker details this temptation of intimacy that they no longer want and are actively running away from. They could be torn between the potential freedoms intimacy awards them and the possible loss of their sanity. The poet exemplifies this temptation with the use of the ice cream truck as a metaphor for intimacy. The truck’s music, although described as “weird” is also described as “tinkling” and the speaker immediately associates this truck with the “sweet frost” of its contents. The music from an ice cream truck is instantly recognizable and oftentimes powerful enough to elicit a sudden desire for ice cream. Ice cream trucks also tend to come with a sense of nostalgia and comfort due to associations with one’s youth. I think there exists a shared experience of being a child and hearing faint notes of that “tinkling” song, hoping it wasn’t just in their head, waiting for it to get louder until the truck is finally in front of their house.
The next major source of confusion for me was placing the washed up body parts in the context of this poem. I understood that the speaker was running away from intimacy but was left puzzled as to why the first thing they encountered were “death-strewn”, “washed up”, “sucked clean” body parts. I was so caught up on whose body parts these belonged to and why they were presented in the poem the way that they were, that I overlooked what I believe to be the key to this sentence. “Death-strewn”. Death. Three sentences later in the poem, the speaker states “Love came close anyway”. My initial interpretation of the importance of “anyway” was that love found the speaker despite their best efforts of hiding from it. I now believe that the speaker headed towards experiences of darkness and death because they believed it would scare Love away completely. The speaker believed that Love would be so appalled and fearful of contaminating itself with such morbid ideas that nearing this beach of body parts would save them from Love for good.
The moment that Love finds the speaker also seems to be a shift in the speaker’s relationship with this temptation. The “tinkling”’ music from earlier is now referred to as “warped”. The first few times I read this, I was actually convinced that this music was different from the song from the ice cream truck. The difference between the sweet, majestical, familiar melody from before with what I imagine to be prolonged sounds in a different key, possibly with a different melody all together seemed too grand. Thinking back to the very first line of the poem and the effect of unhinge-ness that intimacy had on the speaker, I now believe that once Love reached this individual it began to consume them and begin the process of them becoming unhinged or deranged. In such a state, it makes sense that the speaker is hearing a warped version of the original song but one that is “all the rage”. Intimacy and Love has convinced the speaker that even this strange version of the song is popular and pleasing to the ear as it has taken over the speaker’s ability to fully think for themselves. The poet further supports this idea as the speaker compares their experience with the “shells of the bivalves” opening up. It’s as if the song is that of a siren, serenading its victim into exposing their most vulnerable aspects of themselves.
The final key to the poem as well as one of its most confusing lines, lies at the every end. “One doesn’t really suck on frozen sugar water. One allows it to melt in the oven of the mouth”. I wasn’t sure where to even approach these lines from and doubted its relevance to the poem. I wondered why “suck” was italicized and why ice cream was referred to as “frozen sugar water”. If I’m being honest, I still don’t know the answer to those questions but pondering the latter did lead me to some sort of conclusion. My thought process was if intimacy is represented by the ice cream truck, then that representation can be extended to its contents such as ice cream or “frozen sugar water”. Using the metaphor of the ice cream as intimacy, it can be said that the speaker did not seek out intimacy. The speaker does nothing towards intimacy, while the intimacy itself takes over the senses. While ice cream melts on its own in your mouth, the sweetness and coolness overruns the senses to the point that you become numb to everything around you except those sensations. This description is applicable to intimacy and has essentially already been stated in a different way in the entire poem itself. These last two lines serve as a way to hammer those points in and further immerse the reader into the metaphor of intimacy and the ice cream truck/ice cream.
Despite my best efforts, this relatively short poem has much I do not yet understand. I wonder about the body parts still, if the mosaic mentioned has additional significance than the image it showcases, what the bees were dethroned from and why.
Intimacy. An ice cream truck. (Severed?) (human?) body parts. A mosaic. Seabirds and bees. Love. Creepy music. Shells. “Frozen sugar water”. The mouth is an oven.
While these questions remain, at least I can now see the faint outline of a connection that subtly but brilliantly links these ideas together.
jyoon
February 14, 2023 — 6:24 pm
The difficulty of this poem really drew me into reading your blog post. The obscurity and loose connections between feelings and objects make me also have absolutely no clue about what’s going on. Ice cream with body parts?? Yeah, I don’t even know what some of the words in the first line even mean. The way you started from the beginning really helped me understand this poem better and see your thinking process. I like how you analyzed different poetic techniques such as assonance. It’s interesting how you went to search for the meanings of “unpaddocked” and “unhinged” yet it made you even more confused due to the contrast. You do a fantastic job by holding on to whatever known information you have and building upon it. Despite not knowing anything else but a central theme of entrapment, chaos, and unwanted intimacy. It’s interesting how the common allusions to the objects are quite the opposite. As you mentioned, the ice cream truck’s music is described as “weird” and “tinkling” when it’s known to be loud, joyous, and a fond memory. Here, you have interpreted it as mature themes of temptation and reassurance. Your simile on how love affects the speaker is spot on. Once confused, I can now envision and feel the raw emotions the speaker is exhibiting through your interpretations. It’s so cool to see that there is a mosaic of this deep poem. Although you may not have understood the poem completely, I think your ability to break it down has made contributed a lot to find what the true meaning is.
Rin
February 16, 2023 — 11:45 am
Hi Gabby! I enjoyed your opening of pointing out all the words in the poem that didn’t form a connection to you. I think that really hooked me in and allowed me to connect with your confusion, since when reading the opening, my head was also trying to piece together those words.
If I’m being honest, I don’t think anyone associates ice cream with body parts, bees, or bivalves either. That just seems like such a weird combination. Maybe the author wanted to be edgy and added body parts? I mean when we searched up what she looked like together, it was obviously someone who looked like they own haunted dolls.
I am with you there, that I thought unhinged and unpaddocked were the same. Paddock sounds like padlock which is a lock, but I realize now that the author used the word paddock and not padlock.
I like your analysis of the two words from each other, I didn’t think of the poem from that perspective. The idea of the unppaddocked being a breakthrough while unhinged would mean something negative like insanity was very eye opening.
I like how you paraphrase the poem and give a summary, that really helped contextualize it!
tmbresnick
February 16, 2023 — 6:05 pm
Hey Gabby,
This poem really got my gears turning. For starters, I thought of you and your horror short story blogs. Not to say you’re horrific, but the poem felt oddly fitting. It was quite disturbing though, especially with your shortened version. All over the place and lacking cohesion; truly difficult. It also made me think of the discussion we had earlier this week in Chem; the idea that all the subjects we’re learning are tied together in a haphazard way but still making sense in the end. That’s what strikes me as difficult in this poem; there’s chaos and wildness and I get the sense that we’re disjointed or wandering as I read. But thankfully I have your analysis, which I really enjoyed.
The narrative you lay out helps me understand not just poem, but also how you felt reading it. Too often do we read poems with our own connotations instead of taking the time to impact the true meaning behind words. You took the time to do that with unhinged and unpaddocked, and it was ironically freeing for you as it opened your eyes to the true meaning of the poem. There’s a dichotomy here; unleashing the animal leaves the person a bit wild even as they gain freedom.
The washed up body parts are nothing if not disturbing. But you did a nice job of clearing away the clutter so we could truly understand what was happening there. Despite the chaos, there was love; the key to this sentence isn’t what catches our eye on the first time. The poet here does a good job of playing with that part of the human condition; we latch on to what disturbs us but it distracts us from the true meaning.
I feel better knowing that you also finished this poem largely confusing; it was reassuring even as much as it was frustrating for you. But I think we can turn back to the last line of the poem. It’s hard to take an active role in the understanding of the poem. Sometimes, we let the ice do the work of melting in our mouth. And other times, poetic understanding will come to us even if we’re not actively challenging the words on the page to unlock a hidden meaning.
Thanks for a great read!
Jessica Shao
February 16, 2023 — 8:53 pm
Hi Gabby! First of all, I think the condensed version of the poem that you wrote was great. Although, I 100% agree with not being able to relate to anything that the poem was saying. I actually found your definitions of unhinged and unpaddocked to be quite helpful as I went back to reread the poem, especially because Grammarly keeps telling me that unpaddocked is not a word and underlining it with red. Second of all, what is up with the body parts on the beach?? This was definitely a confusing idea that I did not understand at all, and honestly, your analysis of it was extremely useful in understanding what it was talking about because like you, I also just kept getting caught up in whose body parts they were and why they were on the beach. It made a little more sense after you talked about how the body parts signify the speaking gravitating toward death so that they could avoid love. Even though you said that you were unable to fully figure out the poem, I think that you did a really wonderful job in working with what you were able to find and breaking it down to analyze idea by idea. Thank you for a fascinating blog!
iychen
February 16, 2023 — 11:29 pm
Hi Gabby! When I was scrolling through everyone’s poems, [Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me] really struck me. I like that you discussed the idea of opposing forces, where the speaker seems to be running away from intimacy. Reading the poem, one part I thought was interesting was the way that it almost feels disjointed at times, jumping between disparate images or thoughts: “Who in their right mind? And then it came like an ice cream truck” seemed to me almost strange in how it leaves the previous thought feeling sort of fragmented, almost not quite finished, before it’s interrupted with the idea of an ice cream truck.
The imagery also really stood out to me, particularly the way it couples visceral, almost body horror-esque images with nature allusions: “body parts washed up and sucked clean” and immediately after, “seabirds” and “bees [raging].” I wondered about the idea of body parts; my personal first thought was that it’s almost like a deconstruction of sexual intimacy, breaking it down from something complex and human to just a sum of parts.
It’s interesting that the speaker seems to continually associate love and intimacy with natural ideas, like how in the end love finding the speaker is compared to “opening the shells of the bivalves,” something that seems to evoke the idea of being seen in a state of intimate vulnerability. I really liked your point about the last two lines using ice cream as a metaphor for intimacy, and I think the use of “frozen sugar water” in place of ice cream almost reminded me of the “body parts” idea — deconstructing something into its parts to the point where it loses its essence.
jjhuang2
February 16, 2023 — 11:37 pm
Hi Gabby! I really liked how you started your analysis with a condensed version of the poem and how you broke that apart. I remember reading your poem in class and not understanding it and still not understanding it now. I actually like the vibe of the poem and the way it was written kind of gave off a calm vibe, but the wording was all over the place. I had the same initial thoughts on the two words you analyzed and found it interesting how the definition of a word has so much weight. You do such a great job of describing your thought processes to tackle the confusing parts of this poem. A lot of this I would not have gotten on my first few tries as to me, it’s hard to pick apart because of the organization. I liked how you connected the ice cream truck music and worked through the different adjectives to describe it. Ice cream trucks are usually associated with the joys of childhood but the way it’s used in the poem is very different. The siren analogy is also one I enjoy very much. I also like how you end your essay with the paraphrased version of the poem as it really ties in with the entire essay.