Mansion of Happiness

Robin Ekiss

The University of Georgia Press

http://www.ugapress.uga.edu/index.php/books/mansion_of_happiness

 

The world for Robin Ekiss is a game animated by machinic processes and populated by automata fashioned always in our images: miniatures and their mechanical innards; animals inside shells; things inside of things; the anatomy of matryoshka describes the circumference of her world (A mother and her “body’s blue kiln” ["First Birthday"]).  These multilayered mind/body dualities function as a site of conflict in(side) her characters, something Ekiss extracts from deep within the instinctual self and shapes into monuments and idols; desires examined from a distance.

 

“Mansion of Happiness” takes its title from the lesser-known precursor to “Milton Bradley’s popular contemporary board game the Game of Life,” according to the Notes Ekiss provides.  In the game, players are rewarded for acting in accordance with “strict moral standards such as piety, honesty, prudence, and humility.”  For Ekiss, life simulates a board game (and vice versa), the instructions to which consist of societal constructions predicated on outmoded and exploitative norms. 

 

Throughout, women are reduced to solely corporeal beings or imagined as inanimate objects brought to life by men alone; the sexes occupy their respective roles: men the puppeteers, women their playthings.  This depiction is familiar and unfortunate, but there is levity in her portraiture, levity that lends the life pictured in “Mansion of Happiness” an uncanny and terrible verisimilitude.  “A Brief History of Happiness” opens: 

 

In the beginning, there was nothing-

      or rather,

nowhere else to start.

 

There was a girl buried

      in the dark silt

of her own heart,

And closes:

          Some machines

     like memory, rewind-

others move forward

 

with mad knowledge,

     uncontrollable want:

there is no other kind.

Here, memory is both something to be consumed and a machine that consumes itself, a kind of temporal ouroboros.  With the measured expansion of an aperture allowing light, Ekiss transforms an object (a girl) into a kind of machine (a woman), in fact, the only kind: that which devours (and is devoured) without regard for time.  Women are objectified and infantilized; made unreal and miniaturized. 

And yet, she questions the unreality of living dolls, of things made.  “Mansion of Happiness” includes cameos by craftsmen of various spectacular simulacra, men remembered and immortalized more for their life’s work than their lives lived: Mozart, Hitler, Houdini.  “Edison in Love” parodies the inventor’s pride:

Thomas Edison loved a doll

with a tiny phonograph inside

because he made her speak.

 

Is there any other reason

to love a woman?

Ekiss levels her critique through her wide-ranging showcase of poetic strengths: clean and clever line breaks, a clinician’s careful sparsity, evocative imagery and vocative, imperative phrasing.  She is also unpredictable.  An object’s examination spirals inward and the speaker becomes introspective to an odd degree, almost to a point of inversion.  The anatomical description of a doll’s inner-workings is simultaneously expected and grotesque:

                                        She could ask,

            How many inhabitants in Paris?

 

            when the brass wedge beat

            the larynx string.  In another room

           

            mother played her clavichord

            while I practiced my infant alphabet-

 

            then, bored, took up the doll,

            which could always stand undressing.

The juxtaposition of strange sounds and familiar domesticities deconstruct the roles to which we’ve become accustomed.  Doll, mother and child assume the same, shared identities throughout (i.e. doll as child, mother as music maker).  “i. Walking, Talking Doll with Flirting Eyes” is the first of twelve sections in the book’s eponymous and multi-page poem. 

“The Mansion of Happiness” traverses familial territory through the overarching themes of identity and (oftentimes silent) struggle, between construct and agency, and introduces localized personas: a famous ventriloquist, a toymaker, a father, doppelgangers each, synecdochic stand-ins for patriarchy and masculinity-at-large.  “Famous Ventriloquist” revolves around a visiting showman and interrogates again the power of speech and the vacuity involved when disallowed to speak, this time with more menace and foreshadow than before:        

      When mother made her usual plea

 

 that we finish this, her dead fingernails

     drummed the stem of a glass

and made no sound.

     No one but I saw her mouth move.

This longer poem elaborates darker ideas than the rest of the collection, and facets of the family slowly emerge, albeit a family of mechanical movements, of artifice and image, symbols.  Some things are salvaged.  In “Question of My Mother,” the mother’s mind is made into a city and imagined also as the catacombs there beneath, but more than that, as entire metropoles inhabited, as if the mind were something so easily occupied.

Sometimes, when we expect another turn in the examination of a scene, another facet of her observation, Ekiss will eclipse or clip an object’s revolution and leave us with only what we’ve already seen, with what we’ve seen so far.  She has the audacity to underwhelm and warrant second, third, and fourth reads, and for this should be (re)commended.  In its multivalent investigation into identity and body politics, its ingenious conceit and well wrought execution, “The Mansion of Happiness” is thoroughly enjoyable, approachable and lovely.

- diego báez

Diego Báez received a BA in English from Illinois Wesleyan University and is currently pursuing his MFA at Rutgers University – Newark. His criticism has been featured in the poetry journal Poemeleon. His poems have appeared in the literary journal The Ampersand Review and most recently in The Little White Poetry Journal.

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Learn more about The Mansion of Happiness, the mid to late 19th century board game, which informs some of Ekiss’s work and from which she drew her title.