Elizabeth Roy - The Bath

I’ve been reading Gary Snyder off and on all semester, and I really enjoy it. I wish we were going to have more time to discuss it in class. Almost all of his poetry resonated with me, but some made me actually think. In particular, The Bath made me think a lot. It’s such an odd poem, I think because it’s not very Western. It’s at once sexual and sensual, loving and chaste. To me it seemed especially odd when he was talking about his son’s genitalia. In general, if someone started talking about a child’s genitalia, we’d call Social Services and slap a pedophile label on the guy. But that also is a rather Western way of thinking. We view sexual organs as a potential for sex, for kinkiness, and for perversion. We don’t view them as instruments of creation or as products of a creator. We don’t regard them with wonder. But they are, in fact, rather wonderful – having the potential to create new life, to create another person, is a mind-blowing idea. But we also see them as mostly perverted and dirty. I think a lot of that is societal, because you don’t really get the same ideas in semi-nudist cultures. In addition to viewing genitalia in a negative way, we also objectify children. A lot of people, when they think about having a child, think about how much it would cost, what other people would think about it, and what kind of concessions they would have to make because of parenthood. It seems strange to me that most people don’t think about the actual person they might create – until, of course, they actually have a child.