emotions in motion

There is no sense, I have come to learn, in writing from the heart unless you are also willing to write from the edge. Semantically, it might well seem that there’s little difference between the two, but the difference is between merely writing honestly and, as Annie Dillard wrote, the willingness and courage to:

…spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Something more will arise for later, something better.

I’ve thought often of those words since I bought Dillard’s The Writing Life on April 26, 1992, at the old and dearly missed Woodland Park Bookstore in Lexington (sort of a pack rat like Hemingway, I save everything). Writers, of course, love reading as much about the act of creation as we do the work itself. Writing, by necessity, is lonely work for loners, and it’s something of a comfort to learn how others face the same challenges. It’s a way to not feel so…alone.

But it is also the writer’s solemn duty to control his or her emotions. Tears after writing are good; tears before writing are the quickest means to the god-awful embarrassment of simply writing for therapy as opposed to creating some new and hopefully strange form of art. Keep the former efforts in your personal journal and burn or delete them when you realize how trite they actually are; as for the others, sow them among the world.

Hemingway, it’s said, rewrote the ending of A Farewell To Arms thirty-two times. And yes, there are the manuscripts to prove it (probably with the greatest collection of his manuscripts in the John F. Kennedy library in Boston). He was searching, as we all are, for the greatest emotional control and impact; and of course, he found it, as Frederic Henry leaves the hospital in a daze, Catherine and their baby never to join him in life.

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain…

I Don’t Sleep, I Dream

“After all it is probably only insomnia,” Hemingway wrote in A Clean, Well Lighted Place. “Many must have it.” But that fails to acknowledge the fatigue of going to work day after day after day on only an hour or two of sleep, combined with the hangover effect of benadryl, benzodiazapenes  or whatever other desperate measure you’ve adopted to escape from yourself–if only for a little while (I’m trying to sleep–and failing–with benadryl these days). Who, if anyone, can remain at their intellectual and physical peak while facing month after month, year  after year, of this?

Escape. That, on at least one level, is what sleep is–an escape from yourself and the cares of the world. Hemingway talked of reading as a way of allowing his creative self to recharge itself “from the springs that fed it.” Sleep serves that purpose, also, unless–like me–what sleep you achieve is filled with a disjointed sense of time, distance and place. Sometimes I awake from a brief and restless sleep not knowing where and when I am: I’m still married, or still in school, or I’ve just lost the love of my life–and those are the good awakenings. Sometimes I awake unsure of who I actually am.

I don’t sleep, I dream
I’ll settle for a cup of coffee, but you know what I really need
Leave me to lay, but touch me deep,
I don’t sleep, I dream
I’ll settle for a cup of coffee, but you know what I really need*

And reading. Whether from lack of sleep or simply anxiety, I can’t seem to concentrate–even on the books and writers that I love. In some ways I don’t see the words these days;  it all becomes a sort of blur. Even magazines give me trouble, light reading being not so light anymore.

I will persevere, I suppose, if not exactly endure. I will still pursue sleep, hoping to awake with a sense of energy and a vision of what I want to accomplish. Somehow, I’ll make it through another day. And this evening, when I’m home, I’ll try once more to lose myself in prose and poetry. I will try once more…to read. And sleep.

*R.E.M., “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” Copyright Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe Nightgarden Music

Meditation At Lagunitas

“All the new thinking is about loss,” wrote Robert  Hass. “In this it resembles all the old thinking.” But what does it really mean to lose, when loss is all that you had to begin with? What happens when you lose everything, lose it all,  when you are only seventeen?

Perhaps we’re all given an equal measure at birth, enough loss to last a lifetime. There are some, of course, who spend their loss too early. They die, embittered and alone.  

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands…frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bared flayed head waiting there, faceless.

You read Rilke aloud, and shiver at his voice inside you. It pulls you into that place where your remaining loss is the only currency left. And you wonder: did you spend your loss too quickly?  Did it silently ebb while you lingered between consciousness and sleep?

There is no way of knowing. In loss, as in love, you find many strange currencies. And for you there is no appeal.

“All the new thinking is about loss,” wrote Robert  Hass. “In this it resembles all the old thinking.” But what does it really mean to lose, when loss is all that you had to begin with? What happens when you lose everything, lose it all,  when you are only seventeen?

Perhaps we’re all given an equal measure at birth, enough loss to last a lifetime. There are some, of course, who spend their loss too early. They die, embittered and alone.  

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands…frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bared flayed head waiting there, faceless.

You read Rilke aloud, and shiver at his voice inside you. It pulls you into that place where your remaining loss is the only currency left. And you wonder: did you spend your loss too quickly?  Did it silently ebb while you lingered between consciousness and sleep?

There is no way of knowing (fallen leaves in the night…who can say which way we’re blowing?). In loss, as in love, you find many strange currencies. And for you there is no appeal.

Rilke and the Angels: Agape with love

One thing truly experienced, Rilke writes in the Seventh Elegy, “…is enough for a lifetime.” Enough for a lifetime of memory and inspiration, in the particular Rilkean manner of mystical seeing. This is, after all, the same Rilke who in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge advised that “for the sake of a single poem,” you must accumulate a lifetime of memories (for a writer or creative person, their working capital). No contradictions here, just another indication of the value that Rilke placed on time and distance in regard to the artist’s material.

“And it is not yet enough to have  memories,” Rilke writes in The Notebooks. “You must be able to forget them when are many, and you must be able to have the immense patience to wait until they return.” For return they do, eventually, if they are felt deeply enough–that is, if they settle in your heart. The only hope the artist has is to live long enough for the return of those prodigal experiences, and that they inspire some late flowering of insight and lyricism not possible in youth.

The Seventh Elegy is also distinguished by the return of perhaps the most important of Rilke’s themes, that of the Angel (engel), in the form of the Beloved:

Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation.
And the external shrinks into less and less.

As a result, our own experience and memory grow to fill our inner vastness (or loneliness). Rilke, perhaps more so than any other poet, was acutely aware of the emptiness of the human heart; he compensated for his own emptiness with a lifelong series of seductions, correspondence (sometimes seduction by correspondence), flirtations, friendships, casual encounters, and romance. For some reason just now I thought of the ancient Greek word agape, the word most frequently used in the New Testament to refer to love, spiritual or otherwise. It was “agape” which Paul had in mind writing the Corinthians letters. In our time the word has come to be associated with astonishment, not love. Properly pronounced and understood, it is somehow a reminder of what we’ve lost, especially when it comes to love.

Rilke, I believe, the poet of loneliness and love, would have appreciated the irony even as he dreaded the fate of such a rich and pleasing word. As always, though, he had doubts about our ability to truly love:

Don’t think that I’m wooing, Angel, and even if I were, you would not come. For my call  is filled with departure; against such a powerful current you cannot move. Like an outstretched arm is my call. And it’s hand, held open and reaching up to seize, remains in front of you, open as if in defense and warning, Ungraspable One, far above.

“Be ahead of all parting, he wrote elsewhere, “as though it already were behid you, like the winter that has  just gone by.” Love is attainable, Rilke seems to say. Whether love endures, however, is always a separate matter entirely…

Aristotle and modern politics

In spite of the much depleted condition of my once 2000-volume personal library, I still retain a lovely copy of The Basic Works of Aristotle, published by Random, complete with a now blood-splattered slipcase (thanks to a little slip of my Swiss Army knife). It includes the Politics (Politica), Poetics (De Poetica) and Rhetoric (Rhetorica), of course, along with an introduction written by Richard McKeon in 1941.

McKeon reminds us that rhetoric is, after all, the art of persuasion. And though politics is sometimes broadly defined as the allocation of limited resources, persuasion is inarguably at the heart of any political argument. After all, is political success at all possible without prior success in the art of public persuasion?

According to Aristotle there are three modes of persuasion which a speaker may exercise: the persuasive power of his own character, the excitation of desired emotions in the audience, and proof or apparent proof.

Sounds like politics to me.

As for my favorite work, I find it hard to choose between the Politics and Poetics. As a former speechwriter and political adviser to a governor and attorney general, I wish I had discovered the Politics long ago. Come to think of it, both the Politics and Rhetoric should be required reading for anyone in government or campaign work charged with shaping and crafting what is commonly called “message”–the core communication and values of any politician or campaign. If I found myself in politics or government today, the Aristotle would take its place on my desk along with such essentials as the Associated Press style manual, the collected writings of Lincoln and Jefferson, the King James Bible and my copy of Strunk and White. In other words, essential reading.

One lesson from the Rhetoric that has always stayed with me is that persuasion begins with character, a word heard daily in politics and interchangeable with personal credibility. Now it doesn’t take a political scientist to realize that character and credibility are the prime targets in every political battle–take away your opponent’s credibility and you’ve already won half the battle. Which of course is why any election is not without vicious skirmishing–after all, it’s personal.

So, the question of the day remains: do you want your politicians reading The Art of War or The Prince? Or do you want them reading Aristotle?

I know: not much of a chance. But still, one can always hope…

if you were forbidden to write…

From Rilke, for everyone who is called to write:

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple, “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

From Letters To A Young Poet

Cormac McCarthy’s “world entire”

What would you do  if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay. 

Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American writer been so visible on the big screen (I know…what about William Faulkner? Faulkner is different; he found lucrative work as a screenwriter).       

There’s something of an industry these days for making movies based on the novels of, arguably, the greatest living American novelist, Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, and soon, The Road.

I first read The Road three years ago during a particularly difficult time: I was losing the closeness I had always enjoyed with my sons, and for the life of me I don’t know why (and I’m not sure that I ever will). The Road, with its description of a love between father and son so strong that each was the other’s “world entire” affected me to the depths of my soul; it was a love that I knew and lived for my entire adult life. That’s what made the tears flow so easily as I read: I know the sort of love where a parent feels that life has no meaning without children. I know: you can’t protect them forever. But still you feel the responsibility to prevent or bear any hurt. And so I wonder…will that feeling ever go away? I think not. Somehow, I think not.

So I bought a copy for my youngest son, the one who had seemingly withdrawn from me the most. I wanted him to read between the lines. I wanted him to know that as a father I wasn’t that much different from the man in the novel…that my love was deep enough to assume any sacrifice. I wanted him to know that, if I had to, I could learn to live without his love and respect. But I could not abide a world in which he no longer lived. The Road, as you may know, is a sort of “post-apocalyptic” novel in which the world has been burned over (apparently the result of nuclear war) and covered with ash that, years later, still swirls like snow. All food sources destroyed, the survivors are either scavengers or cannibals–good guys and bad guys, in the view of the boy, who struggles to understand why the pair can’t share their very limited supply of food with the few sympathetic people they encounter. They can’t, of course, because doing so means that they would die.

He looked at the boy but the boy had turned away and lay staring out at the river.
There’s nothing we could have done.
He didn’t answer.
He’s going to die. We can’t share what we have or we’ll die, too.
I know.
So when are you going to talk to me again?
I’m talking now.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.

So they constantly, and cautiously, search for food and supplies as they make their way south, toward the sea. They find a significant cache at one point in an underground shelter, but the man knows they can’t stay more than a night or two because others are looking as well–and for reasons both practical and sometimes sinister, aren’t willing to share either. After all, this is a world without life save for the nomads who wander the land. This is a world where some people have resorted to cannibalism, while others would kill for the sake of a few cans of food.

The Road, although filled with terror and tension, is at its core a love story: a love story of the best kind, that between a father and his son. And just like the man in the book, I’ll spend the rest of my life offering my love, whether it’s accepted or not. Just like him, I’ll spend the rest of my life “carrying the fire.”