THE HOMELESSNESS OF WALLACE STEVENS

One of the Pacific sunsets that took the place of all my poems of nostalgia. Photo: Brian Connolly 

*

Aside from his personal life, he was a happy man ~ a colleague of Wallace Stevens at Hartford Insurance Company.

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

I think these are arguably the deepest lines that Wallace Stevens ever wrote. I had to live a while to understand the meaning. We wouldn’t expect a 15-year-old to grasp them — or a 25-year-old. A 35-year-old — still iffy. I am afraid that there is no substitute for watching someone significant decline and die — especially someone who was once powerful, always in charge, brisk, smart, competent, self-assured. And now — how could this outrage possibly happen? — they are in their eighties. That’s when you get to feel how precious and touchingly helpless they are, how unique and irreplaceable, their memories like antique mosaics. 

And that, of course, applies to any old person, a survivor of so much — and now not for long.

There is something touching about the condition of being so old that the person could go any time now. How much swagger we have in youth, when we think we’ll live forever! Aging and dying — we acknowledge that this happens happens, but secretly we think that it won’t happen to us. And suddenly — certain options are closed, giant mistakes can’t be undone, and some important things will now remain unsaid forever; important questions will hang in the air unasked, with no chance of an answer — those who might have answered them now literally “gone with the wind” — we scattered their ashes, we know.

Sure, there are the adorable elderly and the mean, bitter, miserly ones, the hoarders and conspiracy theorists, or the interminable tellers of tales no one wants to hear. But even the mean, bitter ones evoke compassion in the end, often having missed out on love and everything else that truly matters. We can be sure of just one thing — everyone ends up having suffered a lot. And the rich and the mighty — even they end up losing that battle that all of us are doomed to lose. Even the body is not our native land, and will be taken away from us.

I tend to see men as more homeless than women. Women’s domesticity gives them more “agency.” They arrange the environment around them in the literal sense of “making a home.” The simple act of choosing curtains and fruit bowls means creating a micro-universe. Little girl, you’re a queen!

Stevens thought it was acts of the mind that accomplish this transformation of world into home. But I suspect he was closer to truth in “Anecdote of the Jar” (I placed a jar in Tennessee) than in the wishful thinking of the wonderful penultimate stanza of “An Idea of Order in Key West” (which starts with “She sang beyond the genius of the sea” — referring to an unknown woman walking on the beach, singing to herself):

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Most of us would say that it’s the world that shapes the mind. For Stevens, it’s the mind that shapes the world. Both statements are true; it’s a matter of emphasis. Stevens would say that the creative power of the human mind orders, even “masters,” the universe; it names the constellations and domesticates the earth (note that EARTH is an acronym of  HEART), building towns, mooring boats at the dock, affixing “glassy lights” because the moon and stars are not enough. The “blessed rage for order” transforms the world into our home.

Or it almost does. The dark still falls as it will, but we have gained a measure of autonomy, and feel more secure. In “Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour,” Stevens admits that this is at best a partial security and we are deceiving ourselves:

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest, and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

We wrap the man-made comforts around us, and only in that “artifice” (a very Stevensian word) we feel reasonably comfortable:

. . . a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

“We make a dwelling in the evening air.” But the evening falls day after day, a fact which we suddenly find insufferable when we feel particularly cornered by mortality. 

Stevens and Frost, 1940, Key West

*

I think Stevens declined as a poet as he aged, growing both more garrulous and more abstract. I can’t believe that once I was awed by “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”:

A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.

I used to be awed by “the celestial possible.” Now I finally notice the immense loneliness of “Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.” Stevens wasn’t fully at home either in the natural or the human world.

But maybe I’ve also declined as a reader, with less tolerance for abstraction. Many poems of my youth now strike me as not amounting to much, though they used to be praised as my best — “all that passion.” Now the hysterical pigeon-soiled windowsills (ah, nostalgias! even for that) of deluded depressive thinking shine through like the lights of Mobil Oil Refinery at night, not to mention the infernal glow of the torch that burned off excess natural gas. (A literal personal inferno, as if my existential ones were not enough!)

The poems of the young Stevens of “Harmonium” can be wildly inventive. Then the vitality dissipates in favor of arid philosophical statements, most of them completely forgettable. But the shorter last poems of Stevens contain some gems, including this one:

THE POEM THAT TOOK THE PLACE OF A MOUNTAIN

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

~ Wallace Stevens

This is the poem in which Stevens comes closest to confessing his homelessness, his dependence on the mental world to provide him with a dwelling where he could feel he had a right to be there. To feel native in the world, he had to create his own world. One almost wants to tell him not to try so hard and protest so much, to accept a mountain “as is,” without making it his “his” mountain. But that easy acceptance of the world “as is” was not to be granted to this poet. And that urge to build a mental dwelling may have had its start in not really having a physical dwelling that was truly his own.

 *
 
I just watched a documentary, The Griefwalker, that examines our fear of death. One of the unexpected statements had to do with feeling homeless — in particular those whose ancestors immigrated to the current country. The documentary doesn’t even mention the immigrants themselves, I think because it’s trying to be subtle, and it would be too blatant to mention such pretty literal homelessness. I still remember the panic that engulfed me when, while ostensibly already "settled" in the U.S., I received the news that my father moved out of Warsaw. WHAT?!! You mean I no longer have a home? I can’t just suddenly up and go to Warsaw, and walk into “my” room?

My room in Warsaw, that first and true home — my refuge, my sanctuary, the holy place where I unquestionably belonged, and which belonged to me along with my favorite parts of the city — MY Palace of Culture! MY Aleje Ujazdowskie, MY river from MY bridge where I stood and stared until the river appeared to stop, and I rushed backwards to the source . . .   MY little park of Marie Curie, MY ponds at Lazienki Garden! MY swans! MY statue of Daphne turning into laurel! — gone, gone, utterly gone. I was emotionally homeless for many years — decades — after the terrible news. I thought of those ruthless commanders who burned the ship upon landing, so the soldiers could not dream of returning. It took me forever to construct a new home in every sense of “home.”

(A shameless digression: On my first return trip, I learned that some people wanted the Palace of Culture demolished. True, it's hardly beautiful, and it is a symbol of the Stalinist era. There is the expense of the upkeep. All those things are true. But it isn't, of course, just MY Palace of Culture. A whole generation grew up with it -- mocking it, denigrating it, loving it only in secret. The thought of demolition was unendurable to me. And by now new generations grew up with it too. You love what you grow up with. You love the familiar. The brain goes into panic when the familiar is gone -- that's a big part of the immigrant trauma. But the Palace of Culture is standing still, and I don't predict a quick demise . . . )

*

My recent experiences have dramatically shifted my perspective, and I no longer feel homeless. Owning real estate is only a small part of it. The important part of ownership is that you have significant say about this piece of land, as I found out when I opted to keep my sidewalk-buckling 75-foot tall tree, Jurassica, and removed the sidewalk instead (not the city sidewalk, but the sidewalk near the house). My bigger point about having a home is AUTONOMY. Co-ownership can’t give this gift, or at least not fully. “His part of the house” and “her part of the house” is a decent compromise. Yet only when it’s all ours, when we can rearrange a pillow here and a cloud there, then yes, we are at home.

Stevens had a miserable, sexless marriage. They didn’t say a word to each other during the last four years of his life. He’d come home from work and go directly upstairs to his quarters, without even nodding to his wife, Elsie, once the belle of her town — and not actually a dumb bunny, since she was able to summarize Stevens in a precise way: “Mr. Stevens is an excellent poet when he is not affected. Unfortunately, most of the time he is affected.”

He knew, no doubt, that Elsie would outlive him and never mourn him. She’d remove the paintings he loved but she didn’t. She’d fire the gardener and hire a new one, tell him to get rid of the old rosebushes and plant azaleas — anything without those huge spines, for God’s sake. And those old books, one more place for dust. Clean it all out! Toss those old curtains that only made the place dark. Her smile at her freedom would be, to her, like the first glimpse of the crescent moon. She’d fully come into her own being, at home in her own home at last.

Because an older woman needs not a lover, but a home where she doesn’t have to ask anyone if they’ll take her in. A place — not a book — that’s completely her own. It’s perfectly natural to call a woman a “home-maker.” And the home she makes cannot be replaced by a poem. (Certainly the cast-iron skillet cannot be replaced by a poem.)

*

Maybe Stevens never gave thought to how Elsie felt at the thought of being rid of him. She had her separate life, and he had his. And he could write a poem about the opposite of Elsie: Penelope, who preserved a home to which Ulysses wanted to return more than he wanted glory or even immortality.

Besides, he was busy. The act of writing is so devouring that there is no space to think of other matters while this fantastic inner drama is happening.

But there are the times in between. And there is a difference between having a home and having an escape, even if it’s a very effective escape.

*

I used to adore all of Stevens. Now I almost agree with Elsie. But the poems that continue to nourish me remain. The poem I already mentioned, about Penelope waiting for Odysseus (“The World as Meditation”), is one. “Of Mere Being” (“The palm at the end of the mind”) is another.

And there are always the fabulous passages, never mind if from the young or older Stevens (usually the younger):

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

I lean to “just after” — but the “just after” wouldn’t exist without the whistling first.

*

But if there is no actual home in the sense of “Better Homes and Gardens,” poetry can indeed provide some shelter. A poem that continues to nourish us becomes a part of our world, a world in which we have autonomy: “a place to go to in [our] own direction.” We own every word of that poem, just as if we had composed its landscape, its pines and rocks and clouds, so that we can get to the summit and rest, recognizing that we are completely at home. That home is unique and solitary just as each of us is unique and needs solitude simply to discover oneself. And then, having been refreshed by a stay in our home, we can come down and tell our story — if we are secure in the knowledge that we can go home again.

How redundant this little paraphrase seems when the poem has the perfection of the most beautiful quartz — the kind that’s pure white with subtle red veins, or the translucent kind.

*

There was a time when I too thought of books as my home. Or I’d make statements like, “My real homeland is poetry.” Or: “My real home is the republic of the mind, the world of ideas.” The more grand it sounded, the more I thought I was able to conceal my homelessness.

But ultimately there is no substitute for the plain meaning of “home”: your own bed, your lamp, your window. You can travel from there, but you need that harbor where you completely belong.

Not where they have to take you in, but where you have the key to the place, and I don’t mean either a literal or metaphoric key. I mean the garage door opener. Let’s face it, this is America, and you are nobody unless you have a garage door opener.

*

Still thinking about “The Griefwalker,” I was struck how the first interviewee, a woman dying of  cancer, suddenly brought up the fact that she was an adopted child — and that’s when her composure broke. She began crying. She’d never tried to find her biological parents, insisting that she didn’t need to know. “Now, if they came, if they showed up, that would be different.” But they never did, and she was apparently too proud — or too afraid — to try finding the people to whom she’d naturally “belong,” who’d normally give her her first home — but who probably had excellent, praiseworthy reasons for giving her up. At least she didn’t end up in a dumpster. The parents did what they thought was best for the child. And the adoptive parents should be praised as well.

But why did she break down talking about how she never felt the need to know her biological parents? Was she really above feeling abandoned when she was first told? Our very first home is our mother’s womb — what happens if you never meet your mother? Did the adopted girl not feel, at least to some degree, that the home where she lived was not fully her own? That she was not the true daughter of that house, that yard, that street? And now that she was dying, she was going to be homeless again?

https://www.nfb.ca/film/griefwalker/

Why do so many people say that they don’t want to die in a hospital, but at home? That’s rarely going to happen, and besides, what’s so important about dying at home? Why do some immigrants, after more than fifty years in their “new homeland,” go back to where they were born, specifically in order to die there?

Is home, strangely enough, not the place where you live, but the place where you want to die? And what happens if a person can think of no such place?

This is not to say that Stevens took no notice of the beauty of the real world. On the contrary, he said, “The most beautiful thing in the world is the world itself.” And: “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”

And yet his real life was his inner life, the portable paradise within, the only home he had — and he loved it.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange. 

*

And now — and it’s perhaps the strangest thing of all — Stevens lives in his poems, along with the imaginary women who walk through them also. There he gives them outrageous, oxymoronic names (“Blanche McCarthy”) and instructs them how to make a home in the self:

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces –- the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.
. . .
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in a glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.

Ah, the romantic, the yearner. But in spite of his dead marriage, can we be sure that life did not give Stevens what he wanted? To have a home in poetry is no small thing, nor is having a mind that can create such an aerial dwelling. 
 


AGING AND ITS DISCONTENTS — AND SHOCKING CONTENTMENT

Michael:

Until now, I had never met the word “conspiration” [Oriana: a typo that I’ve corrected once Michael pointed it out] and I hope I never meet it again. It's an ugly word. I can't move it across my tongue.

You wrote, "But maybe I've also declined as a reader." I appreciate the observation. I've wondered about my own declines. The ideas, goals, ideals, and dreams that once seemed so important to me, that once seemed existentially essential, have faded to little more than wisps of memory. And I puzzle over this shift. I puzzle over the "decline."

Rilke wrote "I'm too alone in the world but not alone enough to make each hour holy." Maybe I'm in the process of making each hour holy, and maybe this process is necessary to vacate the castles built in my youth. Like you, I no longer think so many of the poems I once valued are interesting. In some cases I no longer understand them. Books read, authors admired, transformative ideas, lofty goals--done. Gone. Cerebral dust.

Maybe the decline is really a search for that final resting place---a home in which to breathe those final thoughts. Your account of Stevens leaves me sad. I know we get our final home where ever we can but I hope mine is better connected to places and people outside my mind. 
 
Oriana:

Of course I meant “conspiracy.” Maybe “aspiration” was trying to insinuate itself like a dead deity? Both history and life are strewn with dead gods. The moment we cease to worship them, they fall. Rilke intuited it, and felt sorry for his “neighbor god.”

Well, talk about decline. Thanks for pointing out the typo. Yes, I’ve become more prone to the kind of typo where one word fuses with another. Not good.

Decline is very much in my thoughts. I’m still not used to it. The onset is more dramatic for women. Menopause is a major death switch. Afterwards, for women, “memory is not what it used to be,” and tell-tale signs of neurotransmitter shortage reveal themselves in ways no one warned me about. Where are the vivid dreams of yesternights?

And, worse, the decline in creative drive (directly tied to the levels of sex hormones, which drive dopamine) and usually, alas, in the quality (with a few glorious exceptions, and all poets hope they will be Yeats — but no such luck). Non-fiction prose has been my savior since it’s a craft rather than art. It’s not one-tenth as demanding as poetry.

Both our brain function and external circumstances change as we grow older, and we realize that the future doesn’t stretch ahead the way it used to when we were younger. To use the most extreme example, a woman who didn’t become a ballerina or a fashion model in her late teens or at most early twenties will never be one. Someone who learns to play the piano in middle age will never become a virtuoso — though that person may still gain a lot of pleasure from playing the piano, and give enjoyment to friends.

Brain function can be rescued to some extent, and I'm close to enraged (but part of the decline is the sheer inability to get truly enraged) when I think that there is very little interest in what should be one of the primary goals of biomedical research. Dopamine sharply declines, while serotonin holds out longer — hence the common “mellowing with age” phenomenon.

But another feature of aging is that we become less inclined toward ambitious and exhausting projects and, with only so many good years left, we begin to prefer enjoyment. My shorter posts may be easier on the reader, but I confess I made the change for my own pleasure. For the first time in decades I'm writing primarily for my own pleasure.

All studies have found that we tend to become happier as we grow older. Since the future isn’t what it used to be, we are finally able to live in the moment and for the moment. The grand passions of youth that we thought would burn forever are now ashes swept away by the wind of time. But look — a great victory! — I'm no longer weeping and lamenting. How ludicrous to waste what life remains on bewailing the past. The ultimate home is the moment, now after now after now. And that’s still an immense wealth.

And in spite of the unquestionable decline, I have a feeling that I have just begun to live. It’s a new phase of my posthumous existence (posthumous in relation to life driven by ambition and vision of the future). The great, wonderful surprise of it is the abundance of joy.
  
Hyacinth:

So thankful for the words you give us and the language and the way you take us into a  poet’s life… you are a gift and I appreciate all the time you take to bringing this to your audience.  I read the Stevens poems you wrote about this morning; haven’t read him since college and was not that impressed then either, though he is good.. but it’s your own poetry I tend to enjoy the most . . . My favorite lines of his are from “The World As Meditation” — Penelope and her pillow.

Not sure what I’m looking for in poetry, only know it when I experience it and this is what I’m striving for in my own poetry: a place beyond where I am at at the present.

Oriana:

The entire Penelope poem is gorgeous. I know you mean this stanza, and it’s central:

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.

This is the kind of poem for which we forgive Stevens all kinds of dull other poems. And, after all, it is the best that remains. “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is another one we think will survive. Possibly “Snowman.” “Sunday Morning” is probably too didactic in the long run. Eventually students will not understand about religion, but Penelope remains a human drama that every woman understands. 

And that's perhaps the ultimate in poetry: to rise above your time, to be timeless.

As I was explaining to Michael, there are ways to rev up the brain function so that more people could be creative in their older years, but we are stubbornly backward and provide those drugs too late, when people already have Alzheimer’s, say, and are past saving. Falling in love is a temporary potent neurological drug — it really potentiates dopamine and other “happy chemicals,” not to mention providing fresh material.

This is a off the subject, but I keep thinking about the man ahead of me in the checkout line at Albertson’s. He was lamenting being unemployed, “and my husband [brief pause] . . . and my girlfriend isn’t working either.” I wonder how long this will continue, this hesitation about being openly gay. I know it’s not my fault, but somehow I was hoping that tolerance was written in my face. I wish I’d said, “To me you you can say, ‘my husband’ but I thought of it too late. That’s a little poem too, those encounters, and I'm glad I can at least write prose vivid enough to give testimony: this is what it is to be living in our time. Only some poems, the best few, are not a “product of their age” with a 50-year span at best. Aging makes us aware how ephemeral 99.9% of everything is. Still precious, like cut flowers. 

ONE THING FOR ONE HOUR EVERY DAY

You cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing. ~ Winifred Gallagher

SHELLEY

Now that it’s over I can bear to think
about my sex-starved youth,
when I read Shelley late at night

in lieu of committing suicide.
I read Shelley in last minutes before sleep,
knowing I would never drown –

the water would carry me
in its cool silk arms. My ambition
was to be loved for my mind.

That was before I found out,
if a man says, “You have a lovely mind,”
it’s the end of hope.

Only Shelley did not fail me,
Shelley with his girlish face,
falling on the thorns of life.

Still I wanted to tell him you never
battle against a wave,
but lie on it as on a beloved body.

I had only Shelley left --
my eyes closing, the lamp shedding
tired shadows, I held back

the sea of sleep
for one lyrical moment of belief.
In the morning I waited for the bus
 
in front of a beauty parlor
called “The House of Joy,”
reading for the thousandth time:

RAISE HAIRLINE.
IMPROVE EYEBROWS.
I went to work

with unimproved eyebrows,
past Golden State Auto Wrecking
and Wilmington Scrap.

Critics despised Shelley.
How can one respect
a poet who died an incompetent death?

My parents were ashamed of me –
I wasn’t getting a Ph.D.
and lived an incompetent life.

Only Shelley did not blame me,
only Shelley would outlast
the stench of oil refineries,

the wheezing pumps, the infernal
night-and-day burn-off flame
over the lovers’ lane on Signal Hill.

From there one could see
ten million city lights, Los Angeles
blazing with desire and despair.

I had only Shelley left, returning at night
to the dreamer who sought A splendour
among shadows, a Spirit that strove

For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
Meanwhile I sent out my brief resumé.
On the backs of rejection slips

I scribbled words like fevered leaves.
Mad brother in the margins of clouds,
yours is not yet a dead language.

That’s why I keep the waves
moonlit, sometimes swim out so far,
I forgive everything,

teach my ghost to sing.
Glorious phantom: whom did you
read before falling asleep?


~ Oriana © 2013

*

I owe my minor success in life to the practice of doing something for one hour a day, every day. It wasn’t always the right choice -- Shelley was not really the right poet in the sense of providing a matrix for modern poetry -- but drowning in the moonlight of Selected Shelley was deep and calming, as opposed to simply flitting through sound bytes in popular magazines.

Now, minor success may not sound like much, but it is, next to being an utter failure with unimproved eyebrows. Seriously, what could be more tragic than squandering one’s unique and only existence? And I know more than one person with a high IQ and splendid education who ended up doing nothing more splendid in life than writing email and cruising Facebook.

(A digression I can’t resist: one ruinous factor is having a trust fund -- even a small one that makes the person live in squalor. I’ve met one life-squanderer who slept in his car! During the day he sat in various cafés like Encinita's "Swami's," reading newspapers and free New Age magazines).

But the practice of “one hour every day” not about “success.” It’s about depth. Given my curiosity and the great pleasure I take in learning about a great variety of subjects, I could browse my way through life, or I could live deeply and learn to do a few things at the level of excellence.

GONE WITH THE WIND, OR HOW I DISCOVERED THE SECRET

Winifred Gallagher, the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, recommends deliberately training yourself to be more focused. In this age of mania and short attention span, try this: “for one hour a day, do just one thing.” This “attention training exercise” really hit home, because that’s exactly how I mastered English (while still in Warsaw). For one hour each afternoon, I plodded through Gone with the Wind, a heavy Polish-English dictionary at my side.

I need to explain that I already had some foundation, some basic vocabulary, even if I was confused by the alien grammar, the odd excess of tenses. That foundation was hardly adequate for tackling a long novel (with stretches of black dialect besides!) But, guess what . . .  I didn’t know that I wasn’t “ready” for Gone with the Wind. No one told me it was too advanced for me.

No one told me -- because I told no one! I read the novel in secret for one hour every day after school, and Sunday at a similar time. Oh those golden Sunday afternoons when instead of enjoying whatever sunshine could be had under Warsaw’s turbulent skies, I communed with Scarlett O’Hara, who was no angel. For the first three months, my reading speed hovered around ten pages an hour, and afterwards I had a tension headache. Every time.

By the end of the semester, I was up to twenty-five pages an hour, the headache was replaced by pleasure, and my reading knowledge of English was near-perfect. But there was yet another effect. That year was the happiest year of my life.

I know that the slow, torturous-at-first reading of Gone with the Wind wasn’t the only factor. But it was a significant one. Without it I wouldn’t have had the safe harbor of that one hour of intense attention. That Scarlett was no angel was astonishing enough; that I could concentrate so totally on phrases such as “white trash” and “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” was also amazing. But the most amazing part was the sheer pleasure that I eventually began to experience when I reached the reading speed of 16-17 pages an hour.

Looking back, whenever I was happy in a reliable manner (I know that “reliable happiness” sounds like an oxymoron), it was always connected with intense mental work. Almost always that work involved very slow reading, as if I were trying to acquire a language (be it English or the terms used in endocrinology). I felt happy in libraries, especially college libraries where the reading was more difficult, forced more slowness.

So I had learned my secret, but the whirlwind of life took me far away, and I wasn’t in Warsaw anymore. I resumed my practice of slow reading only during what might be euphemistically called my “Shelley years.” It wasn’t quite an hour, but I did indeed have a bedtime ritual of reading poetry. For a while it was Shelley, but eventually Wordsworth suited me more, being that rarity among the great Romantics, a poet of tranquility. Later I discovered Dickinson, Eliot, and more. When I discovered Rilke, my life changed. Rilke taught me seriousness -- but that’s a separate topic.

Still, Shelley has remained especially dear to me -- my mad brother, a paradoxically soothing companion through the years of despair. The ungainly wreck of Ozymandias and the glacial pyramid of Mont Blanc loom forever in my mind.

Why this ghostly lingering? Just as a novelist creates unforgettable characters, a great poet creates unforgettable iconic images. Coleridge naturally gives us the Ancient Mariner with an albatross hung around his neck; it takes some intellectual heavy lifting to dispose of the giant bird and see instead the wind harp, and all of humanity as aeolian harps. From Keats I take the Grecian Urn. From Blake I take the Tiger, which makes god not an answer, but a question. 

Definitely NOT Blake’s tigers

Later there was an interlude in which my solitary therapy turned out to be reading a fairly mediocre and soon forgotten book of literary criticism on Hardy’s poetry. The content didn’t matter, only the fact that it was challenging enough to make me sink into slow reading as a nun sinks into contemplative prayer. After much turbulence, the healing sense of peace I experienced while reading that non-brilliant book, fortunately complex enough to provide a mental workout, is all I really remember of the experience.

Later yet I managed to survive a distressful year by reading Wallace Stevens every night. The woman who strolled along the beach singing “beyond the genius of the sea” strolled regularly through my mind, her small but persistent melody reassuring me that at least singing remained. Stevens demanded so much concentration that he saved my sanity when I felt within inches of running out into the street screaming before being dragged off to a locked ward.

HELD BY THE LIGHT

When I first read these lines in “Broom,” a poem by Deborah Digges, I couldn’t get them out of my mind:

I asked myself, when was I happy?
When did the light hold me and I didn't struggle?

The question hit deep. And the answer came in two parts, related in a surprising (at first glance) way. Dear old Sigi [Freud], here we go again: “love and work.” Like most women, I have some romantic memories I treasure, but that realm seems terribly uncontrollable, and ultimately full of frustration. Still, I can say, "Whenever I fell in love, I felt happy.” Ecstatic even, if we omit the agony part.

But not only. I had periods of happiness in my life when I wasn't seeing anyone -- nor did I wish to. Reliable happiness has come from the quieting and centering power of deliberate attention. For me, most serene happiness has come from work, not love.

And that's perhaps where I differ from most women, and I suspect that you fall in the same general category. Romantic love cannot sustain us for long, and anyway, romantic love must die to make room for long-term attachment. And motherhood, I've been told, "is like marriage; it’s not like romance."

Or, as one man described his lover who also happened to be my only and unreliable woman friend: “Sweet, but trouble.”

ONE THING FOR ONE HOUR EVERY DAY

Poetry forces slowness due to its density of images and ideas. If you let your mind drift for even one minute, you have to start all over again. Reading Deborah Digges is slow work since her poems are complex web of interlacing images (in less successful poems such density becomes a clutter). It’s not a transparent narrative that reads as easily as good fiction. “Why would I want to read anything written in such a contrived way?” someone once asked me. The best answer might be: because it’s attention training.

The image I take from Digges? The “greeter of souls.”

Perhaps every poet worth reading is a greeter of souls: a portal to entering depth through slowness.

*

I don't know how to classify writing poetry, as opposed to reading it. I think it's more like being in love -- the uncontrollable aspect is exciting, inspiration is a high -- but the process is also fraught with anguish and frustration. For one thing, writing poetry involves a lot of decisions about word choice -- and choice is stress.

Also, inspiration is often partial. Imagine ten or even twenty years of knowing that a certain ending is weak. Now I'm finally learning to let go, knowing that something better will come later -- and if it won't, that's not so terrible. A friend’s “It’s only a poem" -- rejected by me at first -- is a pearl of rare price. When Megan first said it, I wanted to kill her: what desecration! A few years later, knowing that “it’s only a poem” saved my life again and again.

Contrary to the idea of “poetry as therapy,” writing poetry is NOT therapy. READING great poetry can be very effective therapy; my blog is devoted to this idea. If you need emotional healing, I don’t recommend writing poetry, especially I you are an advanced poet who understands the enormous demands of the art: it’s too devouring. But slowly reading great poetry will create a beautiful calm.

So we are back to the “reliable happiness” that results from intense, deliberate attention related to slow reading. Better than chanting or repeating mantras, it was always slow reading that calmed me down and centered me. Every day I had this refuge, whether Gone with the Wind, Chomsky's essays on linguistics (quiet ecstasy in the library!), The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, or -- I am not making this up -- articles in The Journal of Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology. The subject didn't matter, only the slowness of the reading, and doing it again and again.
 

Whenever I had this center, the rest of my life was easier to take. If I happened to have a relationship, I could ride the ups and downs better than if I didn't have that intense quiet focus (which made everything else less important). In my recent reading of both Deborah Digges and my friends’ work, I saw this meticulous accretion of images, and had to pay intense attention. And I recognized that familiar feeling of peaceful happiness.

CAN YOU DO TWO THINGS INSTEAD OF JUST ONE?

In theory, it sounds easy. Why not even three things? Wouldn’t  it be three times as good?

In practice, just doing one thing for one hour every day is challenging enough. “We manage best when we manage small”~ Linda Gregg.

Listen: it’s hard enough to do one thing every day for just ten minutes. I remember what a lapsed Catholic friend told me: “I decided I’d say this one particular prayer every day for nine days. I thought it would be very easy. In fact it turned out to be very, very hard.”

Yes, doing just one attention-demanding thing every day is difficult enough. Most lives are so cluttered and scattered that nothing is ever done slowly and well, much less at the level of excellence.

Cultivate one garden. Focus on one poet. Choose just one exercise.

Just one. Focus, focus, focus.

Everyone knows the saying, “Less is more.” It goes farther than that: more -- abundance, mastery, peace, happiness -- begins with less. I’m stealing this motto -- 
MORE BEGINS WITH LESS  -- from the life coach Janet Luhrs. 

Let me steal one more thing: 

THE STRAWBERRY JAM RULE: THE THINNER YOU SPREAD YOURSELF, THE LESS GOOD YOU CAN DO.

From Rapt:

Far more than you realize, your experience, your world, and even your self are the creations of what you focus on . . . Targets of your attention are the building blocks of your life.

I still say that in great matters -- who we fall in love with, for instance  -- we have no conscious control unless to run away, but some temptations are so great the only thing to do is to yield to them, as Oscar Wilde said. Factors such as the person's physical resemblance to someone we loved in childhood may be primary. But when it comes to daily activities, the practice of voluntary attention -- doing just one thing for one hour every day -- gives us a certain realm of control.

It was a sheer good luck that Gone with the Wind in English happened to be available to me in Warsaw, and not, say, How to Be a Successful Teenager -- the latter didn’t fall into my hands until I arrived in Milwaukee. Fate spared me blithe simplicity. Let me reiterate: anything that I achieved in life I achieved by doing it every day.

When was I happy? Unreliably and with anguish, whenever I fell in love. Reliably and without anguish, whenever I engaged in mental work requiring intense attention. That's WHEN THE LIGHT HELD ME AND I DIDN'T STRUGGLE.

ADDENDUM, SEPTEMBER 1, 2013

THIS KEEPS COMING BACK: PRACTICE RATHER THAN “TALENT” -- BUT PASSION AND INTRINSIC INTEREST MUST BE THERE

I’m not sure if we can dismiss genetics: my cousin Ewa showed a talent for mathematics already in grade school: she went for beyond assignments and solved math problems for fun. I, on the other hand, read voraciously, played with words, created new ones, dove into the archaic, and learned languages with ease (this became obvious to my first English teacher after only a single lesson). Ewa became a professor of mathematics at the University of Lodz. I can boast of only moderate success as a poet and writer, but given that I’m an introvert who never went after “connections,” I didn’t entirely fail either.

In terms of talent running in the family, my father (Ewa’s uncle) was a mathematician, while three of his sisters had literary talent and did publish; one was more into mathematics.

But patience and persistence have to be there too. I showed some mathematical ability (I loved algebra), but did not have the patience for complicated problems. But I did have infinite patience (and passion) when it came to learning a language. I discovered the miracle of daily practice in my teens (a tad late, but I didn’t have a mentor). 



Below is a quotation from an article that tries to debunk the concept of talent. Practice is all, it says. Again, I don't completely agree with this, but I do know the power of practice. And I agree that you have to do the boring part of practice, not just the fun part. The capacity to sustain boring practice is probably largely genetic.

“People who rise to greatness tend to have three things in common: 1) They both practice and rest deliberately over time; 2) Their practice is fueled by passion and intrinsic interest; and 3) They wrestle adversity into success.

The elite performer’s willingness to engage in hard or, quite often, very boring, practice distinguishes people who are good at their chosen activity from those who are the very best at it.

K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist and author of several landmark studies on this topic, has shown that even most physical advantages (like athletes who have larger hearts or more fast-twitch muscle fibers or more flexible joints—the things that seem the most undeniably genetic) are, in fact, the result of certain types of effort (which I describe below). Even super-skills, like “perfect pitch” in eminent musicians, have been shown to stem from training more than inborn talent.

Elite performers also practice consistently over a pretty long period of time. Ericsson says that “elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount EVERY DAY INCLUDING WEEKENDS.” Spending a half hour jogging over the weekend isn’t going to make you a great runner, but training every day might. Dabbling with your paints every once in awhile isn’t going to make you a great artist, but practicing your drawing every day for a decade might.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/raising-happiness/201308/new-theory-elite-performance-0?tr=MostViewed

Charles:

Favorite lines in "Shelley":

From there one could see
ten million city lights, Los Angeles
blazing with desire and despair.

An hour a day of slow reading is great practice in growth and developing depth.

"No one told me it was too advanced for me" was a very touching line.

Your workouts of concentrating on complex books reminds me of my wind sprint workouts at night. Almost nobody can do that either.

Lot of wisdom here:

"Contrary to the idea of “poetry as therapy,” writing poetry is NOT therapy. READING great poetry can be very effective therapy; my blog is devoted to this idea. If you need emotional healing, I don’t recommend writing poetry, especially if you are an advanced poet who understands the enormous demands of the art: it’s too devouring. But slowly reading great poetry will create a beautiful calm."

Great blog.

Oriana:

Several people singled out the lines about Los Angeles. I know I was projecting my own emotional state on the city, but the city itself seemed to contain the extremes of hope and despair. The “factory of dreams”: great expectations, and then, much of the time, the shattering of those expectations. It rings true of all great cities, as contrasted with little towns (though little towns can be outposts of despair).

But the lights, the lights! There’s something magnificent about a huge field of city lights. Magnificent and frightening, the definition of the sublime.

As for reading complex material, to this day I remember the high I felt after reading Chomsky’s ideas on linguistics. Wading through all the complexity made me almost eerily happy. It’s amazing what intense focus can do. I wouldn’t risk my life the way people who engage in extreme sports do, but I think I understand why they love it.

At the same time I realize that I may be creating some confusion here. There is a high that results from the so-called “hyperfocus,” but ideally “calm focus” is the best and most beneficial mental state. It’s more like meditation, without the obsessiveness and burnout that can be the dark side of prolonged hyperfocus. What I love best is not excitement, but a very deep calm.