CHAPTER 3

Vows Made for Me: Falling in Love with a Work

We can fall in love with a work as easily or as accidentally as we can with a person. Looking at the biographies of many of those who have achieved something beyond the ordinary, we often find in each of those lives, some threshold of realization, some concentrated foundational insight they experienced, often quite young, that acted like a prior announcement of the drama to come. These events are rare and momentous, and can be difficult because they have to be lived up to long after the experience has receded into memory, so much so that we often have a part of us actively working hard to forget and dismiss that rare experience and consign it to the past or to myth. As an antidote to this aptitude for forgetfulness and returning to the ordinary, I am tempted to start this chapter with the rarest of the rare, to start at the very top and only then work down, from the seemingly unreachable, to a place that seems possible in our own workaday lives.

Once upon a time and long ago, in a much simpler time, a young and very uneducated girl walked out into the woods surrounding her home and received instruction from the three saints she happened to meet on her way: Saint Catherine, Saint Michael and Saint Margaret. Their dictates were clear. She must drive out the foreign forces occupying her forlorn land, they said sternly, and she must reinstate the true prince and have him crowned again in the greatest cathedral in the land. A cathedral that still lay in enemy territory. The young girl grew up with a firm persuasion of her task in life from this and other startled meetings. Taking small steps, one after the other, she slowly convinced powerful men further and further up the hierarchy of society to believe in her visions, until she was introduced to the court of the prince himself. On the appointed day, though the prince disguised himself among his followers to test her, the young girl chose him out immediately though she did not know him by sight. Then by whispering a secret into the prince’s ear that only he could know, she astonished the prince into acquiescence and made him listen to her advice. She then led the armies of the almost defeated nation to an astonishing series of victories and saw her prince crowned king in the reclaimed holy cathedral.

We might ask ourselves what this pleasant fairy story has to do with an attempt to look at the practical world of work—a work, we might add, that takes place amid the grit of an everyday reality, except this is no fairy story, and there was a great deal more grit about in her day than any of us are likely to meet in our protected postmodern glass-and-steel workplace.

This girl actually existed in history, and her life and its events are precisely chronicled and verified by the scribes who lived in her time and the historians who have followed the path she trod. She lived from 1412 to only 1431, and her name itself seems to belong to fairy tale or myth: Joan of Arc. We have mythologized that name to the point of nonexistence, which is to say we find her courage and her purity pointless because it is so far beyond us, and being so far from it ourselves, we would rather not think about it, or her, for that matter. Yet she did exist. She was poor. She was uneducated to the point of illiteracy; she knew no one; she had no military training; she had no understanding of politics; she was completely successful in what she set out to do.

The story of Joan of Arc lies at the very far limits of our ability to understand real dedication, in this case the ability to create something far reaching out of a seeming nothing. It goes beyond even that far, far-off limit when we learn that she was betrayed by the very prince she served, and executed by the English she had driven from his lands. Her dedication was based on the exhilarating but frightening conversations she experienced during her religious visions, and during her final trial by the English, we learn, she could have recanted her visions and saved herself. Reading this, we are most likely to say, No, thank you. We want to be happy in our work, not a beautiful and exemplary sacrifice. But her story is the pure template from which many other, much humbler stories of success are built.

She heard something, she saw something, she followed what she saw and heard. It was as simple as that. She listened and had faith in what she had heard even though others could not conceive of what she had experienced. She grew afraid, like all of us, of what she had understood and what she had to do because of this knowledge. Then she was cajoled, strengthened and even threatened by what she secretly knew, and then as the pressure grew, scolded by what she had seen and heard, she drove on through seemingly insurmountable difficulties to see those visions come to life in the literal splendor of a coronation.

Again and again, it seems, it is the memory of the initial encounter that is the currency for all the future transactions involving a work. We might not encounter saints, but all of us encounter something when we are young that is almost like an invitation, a beckoning uncertainty that emboldens us not only into the world but also into a surer sense of ourselves. These visions, like Joan’s, can also have something of the slave driver about them, driving us on through wind and rain to our imagined goal. I remember vividly, at thirteen years old, seeing Jacques Cousteau sailing across the little television set in a corner of our living room in the North of England, and my mouth and my mind dropped open at the sight.

I stood in the middle of the room, looking and looking and looking at that beautiful ship sailing those vast oceanic horizons, and out of that nonstop looking, immediately conceived a notion to follow that vision aboard the good ship Calypso. I spent long hours soaking in the bath each day dreaming myself over blue horizons. I walked over the back fields behind our home and saw myself in diving gear, steering zodiacs along coral reefs; more practically, I gave up all my beloved arts subjects at school and put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry and physics. “I could always pick up a book of John Donne,” I said to myself. I needed help, and as it turned out, a great deal of help, with ecological genetics. Ten difficult, hard-slogging, exam-clogged, rain-filled years later, relieved only by music, mountaineering and a good measure of alcohol now and again, I found myself, just as I had imagined, a hundred feet underwater at the base of a volcanic reef in the Galápagos Islands, running out of air while being threatened by a tiger shark. I was ecstatic; happy as ever I could imagine. Driven on by those original visions, I had come home. I experienced everything I had seen in the compass of that tiny screen in the infinitely broader vista I saw in those islands.

How we respond to an invitation can mark or maim us for the rest of our days. A life can often be measured against how sure we were in responding to the initial beckoning image. Like Joan, on a smaller, less miraculous scale, our ability to follow our star is also a measure of our belief in the original invitation. I have sober memories of friends who passed entrance exams, as I did, for the elite local school that was a sure track to a brilliant education and an invitation to a much wider horizon than any that our modest Yorkshire working-class parents had inherited. Most of my friends made a great deal of the opportunities offered to them. But there were a few who seemed afraid of what was on offer, and to my young mind, afraid of something it called for in their selves. As if they did not feel worthy of the invitation or felt at some essential level they were not equal to that world into which they were being invited. They had no belief in what they had encountered. What they glimpsed seemed too large for them and some part of them eventually became afraid of it. It might have been they were afraid of an ambitious form of falling in love and the commitment to which it might lead.

It is sobering to think especially of two young men I knew. One did well in class but refused all advancement and responsibility, confining his powers to the circle from which he had come, and passed away, to my grief, extraordinarily young, like a poignant character from Dickens. The other turned down the possibility of university but had no other compelling vocation to replace it; he lives out his former intellectual powers in the small world of cross-word puzzles and word games, from which, in a corner of a local pub, he barely raises his head. The great question is: Were they happy? I think not, or I would not mention them in this context. There seems to be a constant visiting dynamic in all stages of life where it appears that we get only the girl, the guy, the work, the job, the sense of self, or a participation in wider creation that we actually feel we are worthy of. If we don’t feel we deserve it, then, like a spendthrift heiress, throwing her patrimony to the winds, we do our best to sabotage and give away what we feel we did not deserve in the first place.

Making ourselves equal to the invitation offered by life often begins early on by walking out in the world, the head literally or metaphorically, held high, looking and listening, cultivating a beautiful kind of youthful self-belief in our own senses. Joan was later put on trial by her English enemies and asked about the original experience that had propelled her into such extraordinary conduct:

 

She answered yes, she had received great comfort from him. “I do not speak of Saint Michael’s voice, but of his great comfort.” Asked which was the first voice to come to her, about the age of thirteen, she answered that it was Saint Michael whom she saw before her eyes; and he was not alone, but accompanied by many angels from heaven. She said also that she came into France only by the instruction of God. Asked if she saw Saint Michael and the angels corporeally and in reality, she answered that she saw them with her bodily eyes as well as she saw the assessors of the trial. And when Saint Michael and the angels left her, she wept, and fain would have been taken with them. Asked, on the same day, if there was a light with the voices, she answered there was a great deal of light, on all sides, as was most fitting.

Proceedings of the trial of Joan of Arc (translation from the original Latin and French by W. P. Barrett)

 

It is moving to hear, in Joan’s testimony, the emphasis she places on the comfort provided by Michael’s voice. It is an intuition of all the times she will have to turn to its memory during the unbearable trials that lay in her future. It is equally moving to read: Asked, on the same day, if there was a light with the voices, she answered there was a great deal of light, on all sides, as was most fitting. It is this fitting, youthful ability to see and follow the light that enables us to live with a sense of anticipation that we are involved with some great undertaking that has not yet quite come about, but which will soon reveal itself. The belief in the light also enables us to conjure it again and again in the dungeons of our later life when our youthful courage will be put to the test. But making ourselves available in first encounters of youth, we have a chance of an encounter with something beyond ourselves. Youth seems to say, “Let humility come later; we will have no choice in any event but to be humbled by what we are called by.” Out in the world looking for good trouble with a solid inner self-belief in what we encounter, we find a robust edge between ourselves and the world, an ability to look for help and an increasing ability to hold a conversation with what comes to find us.

What is remarkable about Joan’s rise from obscure peasant girl to national icon in just a few, very short years, is the way she was able to ask for help again and again. Her ability to ask was magnified by absolute belief that she should be helped, that her cause was just and even inevitable. She was somehow persistent enough with the hard-bitten, dissolute commander of a nearby garrison of French soldiers to cause him to waver in his initial derision. When her self-belief shaded into outright prophecy on the exact outcome of a faraway battle, he was overawed into providing her with an escort for a journey to meet the king of France.

We can only imagine Joan’s sense of anticipation before the meeting. The sense that a moment is ours all ready for the taking is a powerful arbiter of success, whether it is an audience with the king of France or an interview in high office in downtown Seattle. Confidence and self-belief are contagious; they are not a matter of pure arrogance or overweening egotism, they are the sense of being part of a greater story others have not yet discovered and giving off an almost physical sense of invitation to join that story, that disarms and then changes potential enemies into allies.

In order to have a chance of being smitten, of falling in love, we must hazard ourselves on the path that our experiences and revelations open up for us.

Often, we have to fall off a metaphorical cliff. Joan fell in love directly with her God, which is beyond most of us. But Dante fell for his Beatrice, a type of falling in love that most of us have experienced at least once in our lives. Dante also fell in love with his poetry and with the Italian language, and through that falling in love, found a new vocation. Harder to understand is the as yet unknown Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, who ran into a very old, very fierce religious tradition and fell in love with a pure form of void, a vast emptiness that would lead her into her own unusual vocation, and into carrying a very different name, though she could not have known it at the time. Deirdre Blomfield-Brown is perhaps the least-known personality whom I follow in this book. Her name and her ordinary background represent us all in our wish to emerge from the bland, background noise of life into something more unique, more ourselves, more generous and more courageous.

But whether we fall for Beatrice, for a work or for the great void, it does not seem to matter what we fall for to begin with so long as it puts us to dreaming and imagining, so long as it puts us in a real conversation with something other than ourselves and so long as it does us no actual harm. A nephew of mine fell in love, very early in his life and very seriously, with washing machines: their buttons and their dials, their interior belts and drums, the secret ways of their repair and maintenance, how they were made, how they functioned, how they felt to the touch—in short, everything they represented. We may start anywhere and in any way, but the encounter asks the same of us. Those first glimpses lead us into worlds that eventually test, as with Dante following his Beatrice, Joan and her saints, and Deirdre with her desperate void, our sense of worthiness for a task much larger than the initial invitation.

Sometimes the first glimpse is just that: a mere fleeting glance, a touch on the shoulder, a crooked and beckoning finger; the kindly but tough aunt who takes us under her wing and directs us toward something more bracing and risky than our parents are prepared for. It may be in the form of an advertisement in a journal for a really scintillating job for which, at present, we have no preparation or qualifications. It might be found in a certain air of happiness and satisfaction we see in a man we meet in a bar, who is happy to talk about his endeavors and breathes both excitement and contentment as he talks.

Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle, said William Blake, exaggerating like all good storytellers, in an attempt to get near the truth, than nurse unacted desires. Refusing to fall in love with a vocation and thereby refusing the necessary insanities for the path ahead is hardly ever a passive process where everything goes into neutral; it is actually corrosive on the personality and character of the one who repeatedly says no to something that keeps on whispering yes. No more things will happen, says the poet Rilke, No more days will open/and even the things that do happen will cheat him. The child who is done to death in Blake’s poem might be the part inside us that loses its life when we turn away from our own innocent but necessary expectations of the world. We may not meet Saint Catherine, Saint Michael and Saint Margaret in our youth, but the tiniest thing can speak to the alert mind and change its future forever.

PRIMARY IMAGES OF WORK: A DIFFERENT “PLANE” OF EXISTENCE

A friend of mine, one whom I came to know well in my early twenties, when I lived in the mountains of North Wales, fell in love long ago, not with a woman or a saint, but with a tiny, brass, plane used for shaving wood. As a child he had found himself sitting beneath a neighbor’s workbench amongst the drifting wood shavings of a beautifully organized workshop. He looked up at seven years old and saw the older man lift that exquisite little brass object with its perfectly slotted blade above a piece of flat, glowing cherry so that the tiny instrument caught the light.

In my friend’s imagination that plane still hangs there now, forever framed in that light flowing through his neighbor’s workshop window, and to this day, that image still informs everything he does in his work. The sight of that beautifully made plane in that perfectly organized workshop was everything for him. Everything from that moment would be bent to living his future life around that unassuming tool and all its other brother and sister implements. He admired the furniture the man used to make, but most of all he fell in love with all the necessary tools and the care with which they were made and maintained. He also fell in love with all the names: bow and band saw, rasps and routers, oak and ash. I remember, too, that he had a very soft spot for the perfect little bubble in the level. Just as important, he also became entranced with the way his neighbor worked. The man spent one-third of his time preparing, sharpening and oiling the tools, arranging the wood, clearing the way ahead; only one-third actually working; and the last third of his time busily clearing, sweeping, tidying and hanging all the beautiful things back in their proper places.

By the time I came to know him, my friend had grown into a very fine carpenter, and I particularly enjoyed, cup of tea in hand, observing him at work in his own well-organized palace of a workshop. As I drank my tea and watched him bustle happily about the place (one of the more pleasurable occupations of being idle), I would often think to myself that the level of craftsmanship he put into the cabinets he constructed was really just a surface over the real virtuosity he revealed in actually doing the work itself.

When he lifted a chisel up to the light, with its glowing, well-oiled wooden handle and its bright edge, you knew he was holding something that meant a great deal to him. You had a suspicion that preparing the materials and the tools was far more important to him than the mere necessity of actually having to use them. Cleaning, arranging and sweeping were final and daily satisfactions for him. Though he struggled in his marriage and his personal life, in his work he was well matched. He had found a very loving partner. As a young man not yet sure of my future, I always emerged from his workshop with some of that happiness just as happily rubbed off on me and would walk on beneath the purple hills of Snowdonia, thoughtfully outlining a perfect writing studio for myself, a studio I knew waited for me in my future life, with all the books arranged just so, and perhaps, but not necessarily, a view over water or mountain.

PRIMARY IMAGES OF DIFFICULTY

Sometimes our work begins not with a bright plane caught in gold light, but with something darker and more difficult. Something not wanted. Sometimes we begin with images that are the opposite of nourishing and inspiring; sometimes the first image is one of imprisonment and the wish for escape. Yet these first images can form the foundation for a work that is both liberating and inspiring.

Charles Dickens grew a great, long, weighty bookshelf of a life directly out of his childhood struggles. You could say it grew directly and literally out of imprisonment.

Charles’ father had struggled constantly to keep his family above a rising tide of debt. When Charles turned twelve years old, despite his love of learning and books, his father looked to him for help with money. Despite his age, Charles was told to forget about an education, he must do his part and take a job—at Warren’s Blacking Company. Charles was horrified. Warren’s was a manufacturer of boot blacking operated by a family friend in a series of filthy, run-down houses deep in the slums of London. Surely his parents couldn’t mean it?

His father and his mother ignored their son’s distress. They were pleased and excited about Charles’ possibilities for working his way up through the company under the eye of their friend. To the young boy who loved more than anything, time with his books, his prospects suddenly seemed as dark as the jars of polish onto which he had to paste labels ten hours a day. The premises were dismal, the floors rotting, the place full of rats and soon after Charles started work, his father sank under his commitments and found himself imprisoned for debt. From then on, young Dickens’ life seemed to become a kind of metaphor for incarceration. We might be surprised to know that Dickens’ entire family, as was usual at that time, came to live at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison.

Before Charles began his day’s work, he would breakfast with his family in his father’s prison room. Then, after working all day, he found his despairing way back to the same place for dinner. He was deeply impressionable and deeply wounded by the absolute way his talents and his way in life seemed to have been neglected and forgotten.

 

But for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for all the care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

 

He had become invisible, he realized numbly. He had become one of that mass: the poorest of the poor, and like the invisibles with whom he now worked, a member of a teeming working-class community of the unnamed and the unnoticed that until then he himself had barely seen. In the midst of this, doing who knows what, perhaps staring at a label for the thousandth time, perhaps walking out through the gate of the prison into the smoky London air, perhaps lying in bed in the dark of his father’s prison room, Charles Dickens swore to himself he would work his way out of this invisibility. He would fight his way out with words. He would fight with those words for those who had been forgotten, like himself.

 

 

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

 

 

This quotation from Great Expectations stands almost like a vow, a representation of a fierce internal marriage to the seed of his future work, not only as the brilliant storyteller who could turn a pretty penny or two, but one who stood for all those in society we so easily see as expendable. He became not only an articulate representative of the Oliver Twists and Little Dorrits of this world but also, by the time of his death, an arbiter of Victorian social change that would improve the lives of the destitute immeasurably.

Charles Dickens’ singular imagination changed the imagination of a whole society around him. In a sense he enabled the privileged, reading classes to take notice of people they had not been able to see before. He taught them to see something that had already been right before their eyes. This societal revolution depended on Dickens’ having made an initial, unwanted visitation to the underworld of dirt, impoverishment and invisibility. In later years, he would bless his early lack of fortune. He saw it as the seam of ore from which he excavated his characters, his stories and his passion for social change. Dickens reminds us how easy it is to swap the rich struggling particularity of our given life for an abstract, too easy inheritance that would lead to our not seeing, to our not participating and to our refusal to care.

VOWS MADE FOR ME

Good work can begin in the interior of a well-ordered workshop, in the underworld of darkness, imprisonment and poverty or looking at the upper world of mountain and sky, as it did to William Wordsworth, who lived two hundred fifty miles to the north of Dickens’ London. Two hundred fifty miles, and far from all that London smoke and dirt, but not very far from impoverishment, lay the mountains, lakes and wooded valleys of Cumbria. The English Lake District had become home to a coterie of poets, chief among them William Wordsworth, who had grown in those mountains and who, like Dickens, tried to make ordinary things visible to those who walked right by them with barely a glance. Wordsworth’s ordinary things were, in a parallel to Dickens, the men and women who toiled in the fields or walked the roads begging from place to place, but also the cliffs and mountains that stood above them and that used to horrify the educated society of his youth. Wordsworth taught the eye and the intellect to appreciate wildness in a landscape and in a person. He looked at that part of creation that could not be contained by ordinary social conversation. He saw the redemptive in a leech gatherer, and heaven in a mountainside.

Coleridge wrote a masterly sentence describing the effect of his friend Wordsworth’s work on the mind of the reader, saying his work gave “the charm of novelty to things of every day, and so excites a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity . . . we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

Wordsworth was attempting to see, hear and feel for a society that he felt had forgotten certain basic, foundational truths.

 

To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

The Prelude, Book III, “Residence at Cambridge”

 

No matter the multitude of inward meanings, Wordsworth had a long, hard toil of making his name and his poetry tell. He began his adult life under tremendous pressure from exasperated guardians who had looked after him tetchily, from his orphaning at thirteen to his being admitted to university and who, above all, and like any self-respecting guardians, wanted him to get that most necessary thing—a decent job.

Wordsworth’s guardians had paid for him to go to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he found both the teaching and the landscape depressingly flat, especially compared to the richness of his school years among the mountains of Cumbria. Returning home for a summer vacation now seemed to him like returning to paradise. He had that experience many of us have in young adulthood when we return for the first time to the childhood home that nurtured us and grew us and are suddenly able to see it as if for the first time. We get a glimpse of what we took for granted and can see it now as a unique inheritance.

Racing down to the small ferryboat that would take him across Lake Windermere, Wordsworth realized how much the place lived in his imagination like an invisible structure. Back amongst those very visible mountains, he had such a powerful experience of home ground that it seemed to set up an echo that allowed him to understand the right, true ground of his own work and vocation. In this homecoming was his first glimpse as an adult of the love that would stand behind his work.

He describes this moment in The Prelude, the biographical poem he wrote to try and chart the growth of his awareness. It is a moment famous in English literature, and a compelling example of someone falling in love with his future and finding, in that falling in love, a sense of dedication to which, through the rockier moments of his future career, he would return again and again. I can never read this short piece without feeling the sheer physicality of the experience. First, because I walked the same mountains year after year in my own growing, and second, because I used to read him back in my tent in the late summer light as someone who spoke to the intensity of my youth in a way other, tamer authors could not approach. I felt both companionable and conspiratorial with him but also confirmed in my own intense searching. He made me feel as if I had been walking with him every step of the way without knowing it and as if I could follow him to whatever destination he decided on. He was an invisible companion in laying down the foundations of my own future work.

We can join Wordsworth ourselves on this particular walk and witness how the world seemed to ripen around him until it formed into something momentous; something ready to be harvested, something worth his dedication. Wordsworth was on his way from a midsummer night’s dance, walking in the first light of dawn, making his way back to his home village of Hawkshead.

Two hundred ten years later, two terms need a little explanation: grain tinctured, meaning “dyed scarlet,” and empyrean , meaning “heavenly.”

 

Two miles I had to walk along the fields
Before I reached my home. Magnificent
The morning was, a memorable pomp,
More glorious than I ever had beheld,
The sea was laughing at a distance; all
The solid mountains were as bright as clouds,
Grain tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And Labourers going forth into the fields.
Ah! need I say, dear Friend, but to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walk’d
In blessedness, which even yet remains.

 

I made no vows, but vows / Were then made for me is a beautifully wrought phrase that says, in effect, that life comes to find us as much as we go out to find it. Which could be a line from a Hall-mark card except for the radical imaginative step he asks us to take next: life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than your own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn’t based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.

Wordsworth tells us that we put ourselves at the center of the world strangely, by eliminating our concern for the smaller self. When something beautiful and overwhelming like a waterfall or the morning light on a mountainside takes us outside our worries, we are put in a privileged position that is far more than the ability to appreciate a good view.

Hearing and seeing without the filter of interpretation is seen by Wordsworth as the act of reaching the real conversation at last and it is this conversation that does all the work of helping us find our way into the future. Wordsworth is pointing out a marker for us, a milestone. Saying, in effect, that when we have this experience, this is where we are on the map. You have glimpsed your homeland, and the rest of your life now has to do with making that first glimpse into paradise, a living, daily reality.

 

On I walk’d
In blessedness, which even yet remains

 

He says to tell us that he has reached here from there.

Wordsworth’s vows made for me is a moment in time, an experience rarely put into everyday language but one that appears again and again in the mouths of those who have navigated these absolute threshold experiences of dedication.

It is a help to us when someone is able to pass this experience on as a recognized marker for understanding what is happening in the intensity of the moment. It has been said before, by other now glamorous teachers and amongst other, more exotic mountains. Dogen Zenji, a formidable Japanese Zen master, said, “ If you go out and confirm the ten thousand things, this is delusion; if you let the ten thousand things come and confirm you, this is enlightenment.” Dogen Zenji’s statement is a way of describing a dynamic that occurs in very fierce states of attention built up over years of contemplative practice, but closer to everyday life, it has also been experienced in the midst of a depression, getting into the passenger seat of a friend’s pickup truck, and reading the first line of an open magazine that says, “There is nothing wrong with negativity,” as Deirdre Blomfield-Brown did in 1974. Perhaps, in that moment of difficulty, 175 years after Wordsworth, Deirdre saw her depression as a thing in itself, like a mountain or a cloud, with its own life, its own necessities, and therefore worthy of respect, more like a doorway than an obstacle. It was a path to follow, not an error she had made that she should eliminate.

Being smitten by a path, a direction, an intuited possibility, no matter the territory it crosses, we can feel in youth or at any threshold, as if life has found us at last. Beginning a courtship with a work, like beginning a courtship with a love, demands a fierce attention to understand what it is we belong to in the world. But to start the difficult path to what we want, we also have to be serious about what we want.

Following this path through increasing levels of seriousness, we reach a certain threshold where our freedom to choose seems to disappear and is replaced by an understanding that we were made for the world in a very particular way and that this way of being is at bottom nonnegotiable. Like the mountain or the sky, it just is. It is as if we choose and choose until there is actually no choice at all. When the level of attention reaches a certain intensity, as it did for Wordsworth that midsummer’s morning, then the person who has been looking suddenly feels as if he or she has been sought out by the world, sought out, acknowledged, named and recognized. The only question is whether you will respond, whether you will not turn away, whether you will turn toward it—whether, in effect, you will become a dedicated spirit.

This acknowledgment seems to arrive in a multitude of ways: in glamorous, earth-shattering ways, accompanied by a view over the mountains, through the private inner intensity of depression, or it can come about more easily, more subtly, by others noticing something of the way we are made before we have got there ourselves.

THE RECOGNITION OF OTHERS

When I first made my home in the United States and settled in at an educational center near Seattle, I was surprised to find that of all the many titles that people had given me, “poet” was one that somehow seemed to catch the imagination of my new colleagues. It was a surprise to me that they had caught sight of a very private and, in many ways, secret core, but I had said very little about those aspirations; I had not written for years, and there was little corroborating evidence to earn the title. Still, I was introduced as the poet so many times and started to feel so embarrassed about it, that after a while I decided I had better get on with it, so as not to let down those who had seen something I dared not as yet fully acknowledge myself: it was a slow, subtle and secret start line that led to other, more shattering declarations.

The mountains were calling Wordsworth. The impoverished and unnamed were calling Dickens. Three saints ganged up on Joan of Arc for what we would call a good telling-off. Dogen Zenji said the ten thousand things came to find him every day and by extension could, with a little work on our part, find all of us. Everything, our great contemplative and artistic traditions tell us, is waiting for you to take your place in the conversation. Why not follow the path that is beckoning you? Why not acknowledge that you are already on your way home?

I wrote the following piece as if looking in the mirror, as if giving myself a good telling-off, one of those times when we have to remind ourselves about something we may know already but are in danger of forgetting.

EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream ladder to divinity.

 

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation . The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
from D.W., River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007

Conclusions: Falling in Love with a Work

Our great, historical, mythological and contemplative traditions continually reiterate one thing: A good or even great work is never just of our own choosing, though it may not be achieved without our particular gifts.

To glimpse our vocation, we must learn how to be sought out and found by a work as much as we strive to identify it ourselves. We must make ourselves findable by being seen; to do that we must hazard ourselves and make ourselves available to the world we want to enter. Finding and being found is like a mutual falling in love. To have a possibility of happiness we must at the beginning fall in love at least a little with our work. We can choose a work on a mere strategic, financial basis, but then we should not expect profound future happiness as a result.

Further Conclusions

This is not a lonely road; untold numbers of people have gone before us in history. Untold numbers have had the same experience of having things seem to move on their behalf, in what seems, inexplicably, like a compact or an arrangement that has been waiting for them all along. Many of these stories are exemplary and helpful to us in the present particulars of our life, whether we look out from a palatial London office on Canary Wharf or from a depressing bedsit in Pimlico. We can read into the details of those stories and biographies to help us remember the greater dimensions of our involvement.

Final Conclusion

The dynamics that have driven many admired and courageous figures to great works through human history are the same ones we encounter on a lesser scale in our everyday lives. Our first glimpse of what we see may not seem as great, or the eventual sacrifice demanded of us as profound, but then again, they might just become so, because none of us knows the conclusion of the story upon which we are embarked.

Final Final Conclusion

A real work, like a real love, takes not only passion but a certain daily, obsessive, tenacious, illogical form of insanity to keep it alive. Once you have experienced the real essence at the beginning of the affair with a work, the task, as in a marriage, is to keep the work, the company, the initial image with which we fell in love, alive. We want to be surprised again and again by where our work takes us and what kind of person we are becoming as we follow it. Like a love, or a sense of our selves, we can nibble and negotiate at the edges but the central core of the relationship is actually nonnegotiable. A real work cannot be balanced with a marriage in a strategic way, a little bit on that side, a little bit on the other; it can only be put in conversation with that marriage, as an equal partner. All the strategies for making them work together will come from understanding that central conversation. And what is that conversation? What is the thing called the self that drives home from a work and walks through the door into a relationship? Who is it who goes out the door in the morning and leaves a loved one, a husband, a wife, a daughter, a home behind and looks to a new future in the day?