Language wakes up in the morning. It has not yet washed its face, brushed its teeth, combed its hair. It does not remember whether or not, in the night, any dreams came. The light is the plain light of day, indirect—the window faces north—but strong enough to see by nonetheless.
Language goes to the tall mirror that hangs on one wall and stands before it, wearing no makeup, no slippers, no robe. In the same circumstances, we might see first our two eyes, looking back at their own inquiring. We might glance down to the two legs on which vision stands. What language sees in the mirror is also twofold—the two foundation powers of image and statement. The first foundation, image, holds the primary, wordless world of the actual, its heaped assemblage of quartzite, feathers, steel trusses, red-seamed baseballs, distant airplanes, and a few loudly complaining cows, traveling from every direction into the self’s interior awareness. The second foundation, statement, is our human answer, traveling outward back into the world—our stories, our theories, our judgments, our epics and lyrics and work songs, birth notices and epitaphs, newspaper articles and wedding invitations, the infinite coherence-makings of form. All that is sayable begins with these two modes of attention and their prolific offspring. Begins, that is, with the givens of experienced, embodied existence and the responses we offer the world in return.
“Image”: The word comes from the Latin imago, a “picture” or “likeness.” An image is not the primary world, though that is its source. It is the constellated, partitioned understanding we frame and know that world by, once it has come into the mind. Once formed, an image of a crow at dusk or a shopping mall storefront, of a pencil or a factory floor thick-bolted with pounding machinery, may remain in the possibility-storehouse of imagination; or it may travel back into the outer world in the form of paint or stone or word.
Some images enter the mind by touch, others are heard or seen. Some are simple, others complex. Here is a simple image: a small fish hovers in a creek, its body exactly the color and variegation of the algae-draped rocks below it. For an instant, the onlooker rests only in noticing that. But it is not mind’s nature to stop with what it first sees. The mind goes on to observe that in its streaked camouflage mottling, the fish—it is a young trout—appears to be itself a rock, but a rock drifting somehow, and a little transparent. It appears to be what a rock would be if a rock could dream itself alive. Then perhaps comes the memory of having seen this before. Generations of trout have made a home in the same deep place in the streambed, scooped to steepness by ten thousand years of winter rains; the watcher recalls having seen more than a few. Then the mind continues further: “Almost big enough to eat,” the mind murmurs. “Two good mouthfuls, if I were truly hungry.”
Our human attention has many ways of engaging the primary world in any moment—perception, identification, comparison, associative drift, memory, the attraction/aversion of fear and desire, the old evaluative habits of predator in the presence of prey. And somewhere in their midst, image-mind becomes the mind of statement—the rock of pure being breaks free from its creek bed mooring in the world and swims off: lithe, muscled, and hungry for what the world tastes of, for what it can make use of, play with, mate. Little splinter of life force looking for something to do, because that is its nature.
As a horse crops grass or a pear tree makes pears, we make statements. They come in different forms—some are propositions, some are suppositions, some are narratives; some are similes, recipes, questions. All are ways we cross more fully into being, plunge into a reciprocal engagement with the scouring, altering outer. Looked at from its own word-history, a statement is how we declare our place in the world. The word’s Indo-European root leads back to “stand”—holding oneself upright on the earth. Standing is the human posture in the body, and statement the human posture in the mind. Its cognates are many, and illuminative. At their heart is the pause of the Greek word stasis: something sufficiently stopped to be physically or mentally weighed. To stare, for instance, requires a stillness of both subject and object: we must be able to look both deeply and long. The root holds also an aspect of display—the stand we put under a statue; a theater’s raised and lit stage. The arranging of standing things to be examined becomes, in late Latin, the concept of system. “Stanza,” at first meaning a “dwelling,” later becomes one of the separate but adjacent rooms in which the parts of a poem reside. The route from “stationary,” unmoving, to “stationery,” the paper carrying words meant to travel, goes straight through a bookseller’s stall in the Roman market. And finally, the verb “to state” refers originally to fixing a thought or object into its detailed particularity, in order to express its definitive condition, its “state” (now noun) of being. All these etymologies point toward an intimate connection between considered language and contemplative pause, meaning wrested from the rush of precipitate experience by the addition of time.
But the mind does not remain rooted in any one statement; it, too, moves ceaselessly from one state to the next. One of the ways it does this is by musing—no accident, that word used to describe the ways in which thought’s more fluid transformations occur. “To muse” implies entering a condition of idleness, outside the responsibilities of the fully adult: a playfulness marks the self-amusing, musing mind. It lifts a thing, turns it over, licks it, sees if it moves; explores in a way that leaves behind both simple preconception and the directionality of strict purpose. Here, too, etymology reveals. “Muse” derives from the Latin mussare, meaning first “to carry in silence,” then “to brood over in silence and uncertainty,” and then only finally “to murmur or mutter, to speak in an undertone.” Musing, it seems, is a thing that happens best in the circumstances of quiet. Undogmatic and tactful before the object of its attention, musing does not impose, but bears witness. It quietly considers, and then, when it finally speaks, does so with the voice, respectful of other presences, that we use in a library, church, or museum—the voice used, that is, when we feel we are in the company of something more important than ourselves. The mind that muses is modest and un-insistent, permeable to what lies beyond comprehension, amenable to some sense of proportion and the comic. Arrogance reserves itself for the more self-involved.
Within the word “muse” reside also, of course, the nine Greek figures of Helicon—Erato, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Polyhymnia, Clio, Calliope, Melpomene, Thalia, Urania. Hesiod calls them the daughters of Earth and Air; others say they were begotten during the nine nights Zeus spent with Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory. Between them the moods and curiosities of human existence are hummed: the stories of historical narrative and epic wanderings; the poems of eros and feeling and landscape; the irreducible buoyancies of music, dance, and laughter; the cautions of tragedy’s examples; the answers we make to the sacred; the questions we ask in awe of the shining stars.
The nine sister Muses are depicted always as virginal, young. Perhaps their youthfulness carries the silence, the doubt, of mussare’s first meanings. The very young animal, when it is learning, begins by watching, by listening, by testing, by taking in. Then it experiments with its body, its tongue, its desires. It is neither self-conscious nor contained. And what is virgin does not yet know, and so stays open. The Muses, in their slender and untested forms, remain strangely unwetted by the enormous floodwaters of creation that pass through their beings. An epic, a tragedy, a concerto, is finished, and the next begins as it must: from the silence preceding beginning, from the condition where nothing as yet exists—not the first word, not the first note, not key or tempo, gesture or subject. Only a template is there, or perhaps even less: a proclivity. This is why the Muses do not age. Only in the realm of the human, earthly existence does knowledge transform the body.
A poem by the Swedish poet and novelist Lars Gustafsson captures the condition of the world as the Muses might know it before they have changed it by their own workings—a world purely image, in which the mind-created realm of statement scarcely exists:
THE STILLNESS OF THE WORLD BEFORE BACH
There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters’ axes,
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child’s ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach.
Lars Gustafsson
tr. by Philip Martin
The landscape of Gustafsson’s pre-Bach world—a world into which art’s disruptions and re-constellations have not yet come—is a country of childhood and fairy-tale innocence, one preceding the complications of adult knowledge. Archetype has not yet been stamped by its own emergence. Daughters of memory, the Muses remember form, remember pattern, remember an arc of awakening and the sleep that follows, but content—even content as transformative as the music of Bach—passes tracelessly through them. Their gaze is always turned toward the not-yet-imagined.
Let us return to the morning bedroom, to the moment when language awakens to rise, looks outward, looks inward, asks its one question: “What might I say?” What does it mean when the answer arrives through the gate of a Muse, arrives, that is, in the form we think of as art?
Thought is thought, color is color, sound is sound. Each becomes recognizable also as art when a secondary awareness, one tuned toward shapeliness, movement, and intention, enters in. The forms we experience as “art” balance between the stilled familiarity of established knowledge and the fluidity of the creative mind at play. The linguistic root of “art” means most simply “skill”: it signals a task undertaken in some particularly effective way. Near it in the dictionary are words concerning themselves with small, ingenious, and movable fittings: words used to denote the body’s physical joints, or the idea of compression, or the condition of things packed tightly together while still maintaining their distinctness. Etymologically, then, an “articulate” person is one who speaks by dividing things into their precise parts, but also with awareness of the precisely geared clockworks on which an argument must turn. The “artificial” is that which has been cleverly maneuvered, altered by the ingenious human hand. The artist begins by fitting one thing into another—a cup to its hand, a lid to its box, a color to its image, a story to its cultural and individual occasion. Once placed into the world, the cup is lifted for use, the lid swivels on its small brass hinges, the story shifts a little with each telling.
A good poem, though, goes beyond its own well-madeness. Even in motionless, time-fixed paintings and sculpture, there is the feeling of hinge-turn we find in poems and often name with the terms of music—alterations of rhythm or key that raise alterations of comprehension and mood. Music, almost undefinable in itself, is delineated by philologists by contrasting it not to silence but to “noise”—sound that lacks structure, intention, and meaning. Music’s self-aware re-orderings bring experience out of randomness and into the arc of shaping direction, into the cross-trusses of what has been made recognizably formal. These shifts are made by patterned departure and return, by dramatic selection, by awareness of cadence shift, emphasis, harmony and useful dissonance—all the progressive unfoldings of sound-rhyme and sound-variation we have come to find useful engagements with feeling and beauty. Language enters artfulness by the same means. But ordinary language, unlike ordinary noise, does already include structure, purpose, and meaning. One way language signals its entrance to art, then, is by the inclusion of music’s intensified awareness and music’s full-ranging, engaging intentions. The sentences of poetry, fiction, drama, attend to their music the way a tree attends to its leaves: motile and many, seemingly discardable, they remain the sustenance-source by which it lives.
The centrality of movement and alteration in any art form can be seen by what happens if the word “art” is given a negative prefix: the opposite of art is inertness. It is the nature of living beings to move—some quickly as that stream-immersed trout when an insect disturbs the surface above it, others as slowly and inexorably as a bishop pine growing the narrowest of annual rings around its two-thousand-year-old heartwood. Art—some part of a life distilled to essential and self-aware gesture—is similarly active and moving, in its enactments and in its effects. And when a work of art is unable to move us—because of some failure in its conception or clumsiness of execution, or because we are too far from its originating circumstances to understand what request it makes of the senses, heart, and mind—that work itself becomes inert, becomes noise, deafened to meaning and feeling.
Art that keeps its heat and breath is quick, alive as a blow. Consider the force of this late, margin-scrawled fragment by Keats. Not finished, not shapely, deeply uncharacteristic, it has preserved nonetheless a place among his most-known poems:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.
John Keats
The heat of life and the ice of death coincide in this poem. The request and implied threat of its words are, in one way of reading them, shocking—but the reader’s ethical response depends upon where in time the poem is placed in his or her mind. Are these words spoken by the living man to his beloved, or from the grave? The grammar and facts of its composition tell us we must see it as the former; yet the poem’s concluding statement cannot help but now be heard in the second way—these words come to us from beneath the shroud. Read in this posthumous and proleptic way, we can forgive their proposition of desperate exchange: their speaker knows it impossible. Still, we should not read these lines for anything less brutal than they are, nor lightly pass over that fact, however heartbreaking we may also find them. “I want to live,” the poem says, “and I would take your life-blood if I could in order to do it.” It offers an unveiled depiction of the way the artist occupies the psyche of others. Aspiring to the immediacy of life, art is rapacious to escape the laws of human transience.
As we saw in looking at Gerard Manley Hopkins, art’s shapeliness baits not only time, but thought itself. Patterned and musical, awake to its own voice, compressive, heightening, any work of art that is not superficial is more than a stylized outward signaling. Art’s desire is not to convey the already established but to transform the life that takes place within its presence. Understanding grows resonant and amplified, as certain plants grow more fragrant in the warmth of the late afternoon, or as an ant surrounded by amber becomes more than simply the relic of an ancient insect. Quickened as well as stilled, the ant is kept in the gesture of its single moment, one leg raised in the attitude of escape. In the suddenness and completeness of its enclosure is the tension between living subject and preservation. The viewer recognizes the same tension in certain Chinese scrolls and Renaissance sculptures. Even the forty-thousand-year old bison of Lascaux seem to shift on their cave walls in the light of a raised-up torch. What is trapped in and by artfulness grows dense, in both habitat and habitation: to enter a work of art is to enter a thicket. Caught itself, it then catches us. And then, equally, releases.
Drop a leaf into water and it will simply be taken, sliding swiftly between rocks and away. But that small fish in the creek, living, both darts at will through the current and resists it. Just so, a work of art resists time while shaping itself to a form that can navigate and answer time’s continual pressure. The alternations and returns of formal rhyme and meter are the most obvious outward means by which a poem combines movement and stillness to outwit time, but free verse’s more subtle architectures accomplish the same end. We can see time netted in the structure of poems across centuries of aesthetic possibility-shifting. Consider the opening three lines of Robert Herrick’s seventeenth-century love poem, “On Julia’s Clothes”:
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Now hear those of Louise Glück’s more recent “Unwritten Law”:
Interesting how we fall in love:
in my case absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often—
so it was in my youth.
The difference in diction, approach, sensibility, sound, is vast. Yet each poem is set in a non-standard form, and each engraves itself upon the mind of the reader by means of an audible shapeliness both exuberant and surely drawn.
Time’s resistance, transformation, and remembrance form a large part of the reservoir of pleasure a good poem contains. And there is always pleasure, sometimes delicate and subterranean, sometimes a large-ribbed exulting. You can hear it in the excerpts just quoted: how each poem comes alive in the mouthing of its words. The rustling fabric of Herrick’s consonants and vowels, the muscular wit not only of Glück’s mind but of her music, are the means by which their lines’ language-joy is taken in. This steady undercurrent of joy is the elixir vitae by which good art revives us, moistening the dry regions of more straightforward thought, more straightforward ways of seeing and hearing.
The existence of pleasure is as strong in art that addresses darkness as in that which unfolds by light, as present in the simple as in the complex. Why does plainness sometimes gleam, other times dull? Even in the world of the visual this is so—some colors saturate with richness and invite the eye, while others close their faces before us, and we in turn look elsewhere. Shaker tables and cupboards can be recognized by the hold they have on our eyes; art defines itself into being. We awaken into and by it, we are moved, altered, stirred. It may feel as if we have done nothing, only given a little time and space of attention; but some hairline-narrow crack opens in the self’s sense of purpose, and there art, there beauty, is. The result is as irresistible as eros, as voracious as the new green weeds in the crack of a sidewalk. Art’s limitlessness awakens in us the sense of the psyche’s own limitless rooms. It is how the inner world grows continually new.
What have we gathered thus far into our fold? The outer world of image in all its mottled shapes and scents, its antlered and stamened densities, its secretions of nectar and sweat. The complex or simple statements that are our reply to that world. The moods and modes of the gatekeeping Muses, their playfulness and also their silences, pauses, and doubts. The necessity for musical shapeliness and its muscular, resilient collaboration with time. Movement. The shivering joy of aesthetic encounter.
Next, perhaps, is experience, is knowledge. The Muses may be virginal, but a realized work requires both skills and materials. Its pieces must be found and fitted together, before it can bring into being the not-yet-known. For this, the sum of a life is needed. Everything we have lived and touched and learned from is the knowledge brought to the moment of creative making—emotional experiences, ethics, yearnings, heard bird calls and tasted breads, the storehouse of learning. A poet needs to know the parts of the internal combustion engine, the histories of Buenos Aires and the Ukraine, the fleeting trace-maps of particle physics, the poetries of South India, Portugal, and Iran. He or she needs to know the close to alchemical processes by which whiskey and honey come into being, the secret look that passes between mother and almost-grown son, the narrow alleyways of rhetoric, the differing fatigues of failure and success. There is no way of telling in advance what part of our knowledge will be needed at any given moment. Hence, Henry James’s apt formulation—the writer must be one on whom nothing is lost.
Neutrino event in bubble chamber (illustration credit 2.1)
Detailed view of early one-inch bubble chamber event (illustration credit 2.2)
Seen from the point of view of art itself, the artist’s life is not the source of the poem, the painting, the drama; it is its servant. Think of the beginning of a poem by Czesław Miłosz, “My Faithful Mother Tongue”:
Faithful mother tongue,
I have been serving you.
Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors
so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch
as preserved in my memory.
But nothing in a good poem is simple, and the poet goes on:
This lasted many years.
You were my native land; I lacked any other.
I believed that you would also be a messenger
between me and some good people
even if they were few, twenty, ten
or not born as yet.
Now, I confess my doubt.
There are moments when it seems to me I have squandered my life.
For you are a tongue of the debased,
of the unreasonable, hating themselves
even more than they hate other nations,
a tongue of informers,
a tongue of the confused,
ill with their own innocence.
But without you, who am I?
Only a scholar in a distant country,
a success, without fears and humiliations.
Yes, who am I without you?
Just a philosopher, like everyone else.
I understand, this is meant as my education:
the glory of individuality is taken away,
fortune spreads a red carpet
before the the sinner in a morality play
while on the linen backdrop a magic lantern throws
images of human and divine torture.
Faithful mother tongue,
perhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you.
So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors
bright and pure if possible,
for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.
Czesław Miłosz
translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky
This poem about the Polish language and the condition of exile can be read as addressing also the place of poetry itself in Miłosz’s life. Poetry, too, is for Miłosz a mother tongue and an education, and it, too, he believed (as is clear from other of his writings) had been debased during his lifetime, put to frivolous, self-involved purposes, or wrong in ways more damaging yet. The convergence emerges from behind its curtain for an instant: surely it is without poetry, at least as much as without Polish, that Miłosz would be “just a philosopher, like everyone else”—merely another of the century’s displaced persons caught in the examination of his own fate. Yet for a poet who continued through many decades of exile in first France, then America, to write his poems in Polish, it may be the two intertwined so thoroughly that they became one. Whether language is the poet’s salvation or the poet is saving the language, the needed activity is the same—bowls of pure color are carried, simultaneously the material of making and a fragment of the incontrovertible Real.
Every good work of art holds something that was not quite knowable before its own existence. Sometimes the knowledge is investigated directly, as in Miłosz’s lyric. Other times it is so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. There are poems, paintings, thoughts that rest in seeming silence a long time, like a turtle at rest on a creekside rock, unmoving but with its neck fully extended. It is hard to tell if its eyes are open or closed, until you move to just the right angle and all at once the sunlight glints in them. Then perhaps you can see: the turtle is watching you as well, from the alertness of its own particular life and being. Such knowledge is infinite and inexhaustible, as the world itself is infinite and inexhaustible—the writer need only look outward to see what looks back. One example of such a poem is D. H. Lawrence’s “The White Horse.” It is a “pansy,” as Lawrence called his brief poetic versions of the French pensée—“a single thought, not an argument … true while they are true and irrelevant when the mood and circumstance changes.”
THE WHITE HORSE
The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.
D. H. Lawrence
Almost nothing happens in this poem, and still it is oddly, strongly affecting. A moment of connection between two beings is described first from the outside, then, perhaps, from the inside. A simple image and act are accompanied by a single statement. What this poem knows seems as ungraspable as the knowledge that comes to us in a dream. And yet it meets Lawrence’s requirement for a poetic “thought”—when we enter its words, a door is felt to open, and a light wind recognizably true blows through the reader. We step, with boy and horse, into a different world. It is the opening into an objective-seeming truth which gives poems of this kind, however slight they may appear to a casual glance, the weight of known life—as the rock-warmed turtle has actual weight, actual consequence, purely by the fact of its existence.
In the realm of art, knowledge carries with it at all times an inevitable flavor—the individuality of the artist is in the work as the physical hands of the potter are in the clay, no matter how smoothed. It may be said this is true of all knowledge, that even a scientific calculation bears the marks of its human and social context. But in a work of art, the signs of personal sensibility are a part of what we look for: with a forensic pleasure in close perception, we distinguish one anonymous Old Master from the rest by the idiosyncratic pose of the hands, by the strange largeness and extra height of a woman’s forehead.
Sensibility in a poem or painting reflects individuality back into the world of larger archetypes, impersonal forms, outward circumstances and currents. What the artist has been shaped by, moved by, soaked through with at some level deeper than consciousness or will, enters the poem as the edge of a metal printing press enters the paper. It is the touch of the actual meeting the actual: particularity’s bite. In recent decades, the aesthetic of pure sensibility has risen to apparent ascendance. Sensibility has become so dominant a means by which metaphysics, psyche, politics, and emotional content are signaled that some artists and writers have tried in turn to erase it completely. Yet a recognizable style of vision and making is close to inescapable, as easily seen in the self-portraits of Rembrandt, the sonnets of Donne, and the haiku of Issa as in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wisława Szymborska, or John Ashbery. Within the most classical forms, there is more than sufficient play for a signature to calligraph itself into view; within modern aesthetic freedoms, “vision” and temperament become themselves the source for what Coleridge referred to as organic form.
Nor is sensibility a matter simply of syntax or of some characteristic emotional response—the capacious equanimity of Shakespeare before his characters is as fully a sensibility as any other. Keats’s description of Shakespeare’s genius as a negative capability, rather than a positive one, reminds us of Virgil’s warning to Dante when traveling in hell: if he is to see rightly, pity is forbidden. The eye that wishes to see human nature complete must be unclouded by tears, unclouded even by allegiance. Pity, William Blake wrote, divides the soul.
For an artist, everything interests, instructs, is put to use. If we are to taste the full range of what is given art to carry, we will revel in Shakespeare’s equanimity and also in works of partisan and partial genius: in Larkin’s acerbic eye, Plath’s rage, James Wright’s or Neruda’s harangues as well as their more permeably compassionate lyrics. Art carries all the flavors and scents of the human. The single, fundamental request of sensibility is that we respond in turn to what we perceive. As strong feeling initiates outer events, it initiates also art.
It was the Greek gods’ pleasure, it seems, to stir up troubling passions; the working out of what then unfolded amused them. It also allowed them to partake of the range and weathers of human feeling, more interesting than their own eternal and essentially unchanging repetitions of stylized follies and feasts. In the human realm, what we make of our feelings matters: has weight, has breath, creates an irreversible fate. And so Antigone’s millennia-old dilemma still moves us, and Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice remains both the story of a heartbreaking surrender to human weakness and a clue—the true musician is the one who sings on, after the second loss. Even when music is powerless, even when it includes failure and shame as well as grief, he sings. Feeling what cannot be borne, he sings. Amidst and past his own dying, he sings. And that brings us to the last of what we will look at here.
Language has been up now for some time. It has showered, made a large pot of coffee, and drained the first blue mug. During the pause before pouring another, it has stepped into some clothes. Having no pressing, practical obligations to attend to, it is almost ready to go to the desk, to begin whatever work the morning may bring. There is one thing more, though, before it is ready—a demand without which language might never go to that awkward, armless, upright chair with its three wheeled feet; might instead lie on the couch and entertain itself with a good mystery, or perhaps step out into the garden and weed, since the day is opening into something warm and fine. The last thing language must know before the day’s work begins is the burr of discomfort.
Dukka: the Sanskrit word appears in the first of the four noble truths of Buddhist teaching. Often translated as “suffering,” its original meaning is closer to “dissatisfaction.” “Life is dissatisfaction”—from this first observation and statement, the rest of the Buddhist path comes forward. Without dissatisfaction and suffering, there would be no path, no necessity for a path. For that reason, in Greek tragedies, in Trickster tales, in early epics and contemporary novels, in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, suffering is felt to be “noble,” not a problem to be slipped away from or forgotten. It is by suffering’s presence that we know there is something we need to address. And without some restless or inescapable dissatisfaction, why would a person spend a life setting one word and not another on a white page?
Surely the maker of a poem is never a comfortable and purely detached observer. The writer is driven, goaded, hounded. A letter Rilke sent to his wife makes his sense of extremity clear: a work of art, he wrote, is the outcome of “having-been-in-danger.” For Rilke, as for many others, the central goad was transience, finding some way to take in and navigate the unbearable knowledge that life will end. In another letter, sent to his Polish translator, he wrote, “It is our task to imprint this provisional, perishing earth in ourselves so deeply, with such passion and endurance, that its reality rises again in us ‘invisibly.’ We are the bees of the invisible. We distractedly plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it into the great golden hive of the Invisible” (tr. by Jim Powell).
The resplendence and longing here are held within images of the earthly, yet this passage sets forth a fundamentally Platonic worldview: the (uppercase, conceptual) Invisible is the thing that lasts, while the actualities of earth exist for the sake of transformative plundering. The description is irresistible, moving—and anthropocentrically pitched toward the transcendent. But what maker of art who works in the modern understanding of that task does not read it at least with sympathy, even if not fully sharing the Rilkean worldview of idealization? Only Tibetan monks and Native American elders create their art of happily scatterable sand. For the rest, the sand is a sharp and alien intrusion that needs to be answered by layered, surrounding, lasting inpourings of pearl.
Transience is only one of the possible goads into poetry. The irritant beginning might be found in the despair or spiritual ardor of Hopkins or in the desire that shook Sappho’s being as wind shakes an oak. It might be Rukeyser’s or Whitman’s rage on behalf of those oppressed by power; it might be finding oneself, as did Celan or Hikmet or Ahkmatova or Ovid, far inside the hands of that oppression. It might be metaphysical disarray, theological puzzlement, scientific awe. It might be what Bertrand Russell described as “a temperamental unhappiness so great that but for the joy the artist derives from his work he would be driven to suicide.” Rarely, it can be an excess of joy itself, an upwelling pleasure demanding expression’s liberation. In whatever realm the artist’s discomfort arises, it tears open the fabric of psyche and universe, leaving a hole the creative impulse rushes then to repair. The artist cannot help this any more than could a spider whose web has been shredded; his or her very survival feels at stake.
This cycle of destruction and repair is not only the writer’s despair and salvation but also his or her dearest wish. As Yeats describes it in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”: “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” To participate in the creative renewal of the world is as close as we may come to touching the cloth of existence’s original daybreak—in that moment, the artist is neither human nor god, neither perishable nor lasting, neither good nor bad. In that moment, when language has come awake, taken its seat in the full light of morning, and begun the tentative, much-crossed-out exploration or sure-tongued outpour, the artist is not even himself, herself. The artist and language and the page are given over to one thing alone—or rather, into no separable thing at all: they have surrendered the condition of noun to become fully verb. They are working. And this working, the creative act of a whole and undivided being, is the one true appetite of the writer’s tongue and mind and heart, with us as long as the trout swims in the streambed while above it, slightly shadowing the surface, floats the faintest, curious glimmer of a watching human face.
River Trout (illustration credit 2.3)