DYING FOR NON-BELIEVERS

When I am, death is not; when death is, I am not. ~ Epicurus

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

WOLF TRAIN

December, a shopping mall,
above the traffic snarl I saw
an empty trolley on the bridge,

its windows lit with moonlike glow —
reminding me how much I loved
taking a train in Warsaw at night —


how I would enter the train’s rhythm,
the knocking of the wheels against
the shifting and dividing tracks;

blind backs of buildings,
unknown streets –- an underworld
passing across my face

reflected in the dark, drizzled glass.
If I had known
what station would be next —

if I had known the doors of life
close quickly, and we watch the past
through time’s prison bars —

in the cramped Warsaw apartment,
at fifteen, when I made up my mind
to live in the West,

would I have danced as if
we never lose anything we love —
just keep adding beauty to beauty.

The trolley flying overhead
like a luminous ghost
brought back an unreal city,

in the same instant of stone and breath
arriving and departing,
falling and rising from its ruins.

The same moon moved between
darkness and light-wounded clouds,
winter’s hungry Wolf Moon,

adding phantom beauty to beauty.
“That is all,” the master said.
That is all but it is splendid.”


~ Oriana © 2015

I hear you, Impatient Reader: “This is not a poem about dying, and this blog post is supposed to be about dying.” But almost all poetry is about loss, and consequently about mortality. And about beauty — a poem without beauty is not really poetry.

Any significant loss prefigures the ultimate loss — and losing Warsaw was a great loss to me. It took me at least a decade to realize that I would never again have the kind of magical intellectual milieu I had in Warsaw, and two more decades to come to terms with that loss rather than live in perpetual mourning. Life teaches, but sometimes we learn very slowly. Suffering is a bad habit, and if not for the shortness of life suddenly revealing itself, I might still be sunk in it like a paralyzed swan. 

 
And what did I learn? That, after all, beauty is precisely that which we do not lose: thanks to memory and the unfailing cycles of nature, we keep adding beauty to beauty.

A time will come when this feasting on beauty will stop. But meanwhile, it is splendid. It is much better to live with gratitude for that splendor than to worry about dying.


Here is a poem that speaks more explicitly about dying:

LOVING THE SKY

This evening, far from here, 

a friend is entering his death, 

he knows it, he walks 

under bare trees alone, 

perhaps for the last time. So much love, 

so much struggle, spent and worn thin. 

But when he looks up, suddenly the sky

is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.

~ Jean Joubert, from “Brilliant Sky,” tr. Denise Levertov

This poem by Jean Joubert is a minor example of what I call the “comfort poem.” You may object that it’s not very comforting, since we are not promised a “better place” — but it’s about the best modern poets manage, and maybe it’s time to admit that better this comfort than none.

First, the magnitude of the loss is fully faced. The setting is desolate:

This evening, far from here, 

a friend is entering his death, 

he knows it, he walks 

under bare trees alone, 

perhaps for the last time.

The consolation of lush nature is absent: the trees are bare, so it’s late autumn or winter. The consolation of sunshine is absent: it’s evening. The speaker’s friend is alone, so the consolation of affectionate human company is absent. This is a minimalist landscape out of Kafka or Beckett. And the landscape seems to match the human element, and the approaching entry into no landscape at all.

Perhaps worst of all, the man knows he’s dying. Perhaps he’s not yet very old and “tired of life” after having lived a long time and done pretty much everything he’d wanted to do and richly enjoyed it, so he’s now filled with gratitude for having had this privilege. He’s certainly still able to take a walk — “perhaps for the last time.” It could be a middle-aged man with the diagnosis of terminal cancer (“thin” reminds me how emaciated cancer patients tend to be in the last phase). The poet is merciless in presenting the loss:

So much love, 
 
so much struggle, spent and worn thin. 


First, we must note that there is something unusual and significant about “So much love” being on the same line with “for the last time.” Love is immediately juxtaposed with the finality of the last walk. The man is dying, but there has been “so much love.” 


But what follows is “So much struggle, spent and worn thin.” Not victory, but the fatigue of being “spent.” In the end, no one wins — we simply exit, spent, worn-out. The reminder that much of life is struggle makes the man not fate’s darling, but essentially one of us: we struggle, we suffer, and it seems that the best we can say is, “There are the good days, and there are the bad days.” So much love, so much struggle, and soon it will all be gone, except for the fickle memories of those who knew him — hardly a “better place.”

Yet just as the poem reaches its darkest point, there is a “turning” (to use the term scholars apply to sonnets):

But when he looks up, suddenly the sky 

is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.

Already “but” announcing a turning point. Now there is the “vertiginous” (stunning, overwhelming, immense — note the suggestion of “vertical” in the word) sky, and the sky is beautiful. It’s beautiful simply by virtue of being the sky, just as it is beautiful to be able to take this walk, to feel the earth underneath one’s feet. The last comfort is having had the beauty of the world, continuing up to the last moment that we can still perceive it.

“Clarity” could be seen also in a negative sense here: it’s clear that this is all. Yet the words around it (especially “arrayed” — true, this is a translation, but “arrayed” is a wonderful choice) suggest a consolation: it is all, but it is splendid.

Imagine: it’s the last walk of your life. Tomorrow you check into the hospital, and you’re not expected to recover. What would that walk be like?

I can’t predict the thoughts I might have. I know only one thing: probably the first thing I’d do it look at the sky. I have always loved the sky.

**

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything. ~ Saul Bellow
Why is so much poetry concerned with dying? Billy Collins said that poetry is “one long funeral.” It’s not because poets are morbid. Rather, perhaps they are the not in denial or mortality to the degree that the rest of us are. Poets more so than prose writers try to deal with the greatest sorrow of life: the knowledge of mortality and our ultimate helplessness in the face to it. How do we manage to carry on without howling in grief and protest against the non-human nature that says, “That’s it, you’ve had your time at the feast of life, and now you’re out of time.”

One common solution has been to imagine that consciousness goes on without the body. You remain Jimmy or Jane, Mark or Michelle, your memories and identity intact — just floating about for a quadrillion years — or else your permanent self enters a new body and reincarnates, going through the same tiresome process of being a colicky baby, then a toddler, a preschooler, etc. Neither scenario is likely or particularly consoling, aside from taking away the immediate terror of loss.

But the interesting thing is that even before religion started crumbling, a lot of poetry did not seem to “buy” the afterlife. Sooner “carpe diem” — or simply mourning the brevity of life. Starting with the Romantics, poets have paid increasing attention to Nature (the Romantics spelled it with a capital N) and to beauty. Modern poets have adopted it as the main answer of sorts: we can’t deny mortality, but we have the consolation of beauty. That beauty has a melancholy cast, but it is the best we can do.

Jack Gilbert states, “you must risk delight” without denying that bad things will happen and life will not last. He himself was counting on old age in which he’d feast on the memories of a rich life — no such luck, as he descended into dementia. We need to enjoy the moment, and the memories of moments, without any hope for joy “later.” Gilbert himself affirms this:

We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
~ ending of “A Brief for the Defense,” from “Refusing Heaven”

“We must admit there will be music despite everything.” That is certainly true. Poetry was supposed to be impossible after Auschwitz, but many magnificent poems have been written since. In fact, the Golden Age of Polish poetry unfolded in the shadow of Auschwitz — you could say “within an easy commute.” Music goes on, beauty goes on — perhaps with more urgency than before, now that we know the fragility of human civilization, and also that which is most precious. 

 

But not everyone would agree with the assertion that concludes Gilbert’s poem:

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Outrageous! some may say. Maybe most people are not so exquisitely attuned to the sounds of the world. You have to substitute our own special delight. Even the morning coffee may be reason enough to go on living.

More seriously, many people see primary value in relationship with others, especially one’s family. For them, it’s not beauty that makes life worth living, but family love.

Freud said that the two most important things in life are love and work. In my observation, for most people it’s “love” in the loose sense of connection with significant others.

*

Recently, another value has come to the fore: living to the fullest — richly, intensely. In another poem, Gilbert asks the gods (who tell him that they’ll grant one more wish):

Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present.

Until we are “frightened into the present,” we remain frozen in the future tense of youth, always fantasizing about the future, even though, like the horizon, it fails to get any closer — until all of a sudden it is much closer, and we can finally read the words out there: THE END. Yes, now we are “frightened into the present.” And as if by magic we “get it.” We don’t have to read vapid New Age books to understand that it’s only by dropping the constant “living for the future” and instead paying attention to the astonishingly vivid present that we can enjoy the richness of experience, which we can later re-live “in the mind’s eye.”

Hayden Carruth admits the difficulty of living with the knowledge of mortality, and then asks for the consolation of beauty (we can’t really expect a poet to ask for the consolation of family love):

Reality is an impasse. Tell me again
How the white heron rises from among the reeds and flies forever
    across the nacreous river at twilight
Toward the distant islands.

(last lines, “Of the Distress on Being Humiliated by the Chinese Poets”)

**

WORK AND BEAUTY

Again, Freud said that the two most important things in life are love are work. For the majority of people, that’s no doubt true. For creative people, however, I suspect that it’s simply work. Not that love is unimportant; it’s just that work is more important by far. This old saying that an artist is married to his or her work? It’s true. An artist is someone for whom his or her creative work is the most important thing in life. That’s the very definition of an artist.

Taslima Nasrin, a best-selling Bengali writer, said, “I do not believe in prayers. I believe in work.”

Rilke said, “To work is to live without dying.” There is simply to time to worry about dying. True, Rilke wrote a great deal on the subject of death, and has even been called the great poet of death, but his own life was about turning out a prodigious amount of writing.

For me, it’s work and beauty. Sometimes I wonder if beauty alone could be enough, in case I lost the ability to write (due to stroke, say). Maybe. I can never have enough of Pacific sunsets, though in memory I also cherish the blossom of Polish winter sunsets, roses in snow. 


Can beauty be enough? The sight of a heron rising into flight, the splash of dark water from an oar at night? Sometimes I am sure it would be enough. But I can state with greater certainty that I feel inspired by stories of how the great achievers worked until practically the last conscious breath — in spite of the pain. They might even refuse pain killers just so they could still finish their last project. Because “when you have the why of life, you can endure almost any how” — even terminal illness.

Recently, Christopher Hitchens died this kind of death: writing for as long as he could, fully engaged with the world and ideas. I wasn’t fond of Hitchens when he was alive; it was only the interviews he did while undergoing the toxic cancer treatments that made me understand his courage and dedication, his warning that any rumor of a “deathbed conversion” will be either false and due to dementia.

But then he was only “pursuing his bliss.” It can take great stoicism to do that.

Finally, here is a fascinating video about how we can (almost) overcome the fear of dying. Not surprisingly, it concludes that living a rich life is the only remedy.

“We are characters in a story. Long John Silver is not afraid that you will close the book. The only thing we should be concerned about is whether we are living a good story.” ~ Stephen Cave

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/23/312544032/should-we-be-afraid-of-death

Charles:

Love quotes by Epicurus and Wittgenstein. So refreshing to talk about death without religion. In fact the word God was not mentioned once in the entire blog.

You have come so far in understanding beauty as God as opposed to God as death and religion.

And the moral of the blog is to take in as much beauty as possible whenever we can.

PS. “Wolf Train” is an excellent title. Talk about the unexpected.
Oriana:

That gives me a shiver, God as beauty rather than God as death. And indeed, if I were to call anything divine, my first choice would be beauty.

The Christian god is basically a kind of Hades, the god of the dead, who are imagined as bodiless entities up there in the sky with him, and down inside the earth, in hell, aware they will never meet him (I'm not sure this bothers the Buddhists, but it might bother the Muslim).

But beauty, yes. One secular answer to religious is “graceful life philosophies,” which cultivate beauty. And work so absorbing that we lose the sense of self and of time is also magnificent. That’s why Rilke said that to work is to live without dying — possibly the wisest thing he ever said. He learned that from Rodin.

P.S. I also like your other definition of god: “God is baggage.” Yes, it’s become that: archaic baggage. A stone around the neck of the modern culture.

P.S. “Wolf Train” used to have a different ending:

The same moon moved between
darkness and light-wounded clouds,
winter’s hungry Wolf Moon,

adding phantom beauty to beauty —
the Wolf Train riding across the sky
with a silent aria of howl.

I am still attracted to this ending, its inaudible protest that perhaps isn’t exactly a protest — the howling of wolves has a pure-voiced beauty. If so, perhaps I could even preserve the uplifting final lines:

“That is all,” the master said.
That is all but it is splendid.”

But the purist in me rebels against it. The greatest positive message is the line “adding phantom beauty to beauty.” If I restore the former ending, the tacked on “master” needs to go. The poem would remain a celebration of life’s beauty amid the inevitable sorrows. 

Michael:

OH DEATH, WHERE IS THY STING,
And oh Grave, thy victory?

Pretty brave questioning from the Apostle Paul. Rhetorical questions to be sure — he wasn't inviting his readers to engage in a discussion. He was certain he had death figured out. He was covered. No need to fear. No worries. Die. Resurrect. Live forever.

Stephen Cave also reduces the issues and complexities of death too much. Surely the good story of life in "The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story" must include our circuitous bumbling toward death, our anticipation of it, and our eventual coming to terms with it (if we ever do). I find his parsing unhelpful.

Some years are for questions, some for answers. The answer I have found, after years of questions, is that it is very useful to have a philosophy of death, not just the years between birth and death. I can't go with Rilke who thought of death as some kind of fruit to be plucked, an accomplishment of sorts. In good yin-yang fashion death is foremost a pole against which to estimate and value life, a sort of "teach me to number my days" kind of thinking, as King David prayed.

Knowing the fact of death has pushed me into the present. Demanded of me that I live meaningfully. And I'm grateful. But there are yet things I fear about death and I see no reason to apologize for these fears. They are not knowing when, how, and where. And there are worries. Who will clean up my unfinished business? How much pain will my mourners feel (I mean I can hope, right?)?

The following is an excerpt from a story I wrote:

               I had noticed that when I contemplated death the most, the world seemed most alive. Taunting, I supposed. Or calling. It wasn't that long ago I had driven into the foothills, the so-called Gold Country, with death on my mind. With a heavy heart and cloudy vision I found my way to Oak Flats Cemetery, a graveyard as old as the gold rush. Now neglected, nearly forgotten, the gate lay to one side in the grass, hanging by a single hinge. There was a sense that the second and third generations, the mourners, the buriers, the weeders, the mowers, the flower bringers, had also aged and died, buried in other cemeteries, families now eternally scattered. The weather beaten stone markers felt cold--mossy cold, lichen colored. I didn't know anyone buried there but it seemed like a good place to contemplate death. I imagined myself in the earth, cold and dark. Silent. Alone. Drawn to that rest of the most final sense, I could hear that first shovel of earth that signaled all is done. On a god perch, I looked down through the years. There would be time for my life to be edited, the final chapter written by my children, the book closed and shelved, and then for memories to fade. My children would think of me less and less often until I was not more than an unread footnote. To the next generation I would be that middle-aged man who took his life. There would be a sad, serious face in the telling, a little speculation as to why, then a moving on. That's it. Life comes, it goes. The world didn't slow its orbit for my arrival and certainly won't miss a turn at my exit. Why do I take it all so seriously?

I continue to take it seriously but in helpful ways. I do measure the probable years remaining. I make certain to treasure and nourish my loves. I work to rid me myself of burdens that are not worthy of taking this journey perched on my shoulders. I try to laugh more, to see more, to name my feelings. I slow to savor food. I pause for fragrances. I record a touch with a conscious thought that I am loved.

So I am making it a good story, but death is responsible for that.

Thanks for a thoughtful piece. Loving what you do.

Oriana:

I'm not sure that St. Paul was entirely free of death anxiety. He staked everything on the factuality of the resurrection. If Christ did not rise, then our faith is worthless, and we are doomed to never living again (apparently life — being sentient forever — was Paul’s greatest value). But the evidence for the resurrection was weak. It would not stand in court now, and probably not then either. There were no eye witnesses. Accounts were contradictory. Paul was smart and educated, and must have known he was not on firm ground.

Cognitive dissonance could have fueled an extra zeal in trying to spread the new religion. Paul didn’t do well among the Greek skeptics, but illiterate Roman slaves and others who suffered from hardship and oppression were open to the attractive promise of the meek inheriting the earth and the last becoming the first. Never mind the lack of evidence . . .

All this rested on whether or not the resurrection actually happened. The Roman custom was to leave the body on the cross to rot. That was an essential part of why crucifixion was regarded as the worst possible punishment. Bart Ehrman and many other scholars presents convincing other scenarios, even assuming an empty tomb, for which the evidence is also weak. Rising from the dead was certainly the least likely of these scenarios.

Only the Second Coming within a generation was even less likely, and indeed it did not happen, nor ever will. Friends have suggested that I go in business selling bumper stickers that say JESUS IS NEVER COMING BACK. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER.

(A shameless digression: Alfred Loisy, a French theologian, remarked, “Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom, but it was the church that arrived.” 1902 was much too early to get away with such insights. Loisy was fired from his teaching posts and excommunicated. But then theologians don’t believe in god; they have defined him away in metaphors of metaphors.)

*

But back to your critique of Stephen Cave’s consolation. Life is a good story, an interesting story — until the years of pathetic decline. “Life is a play with a poorly written last act” — this saying has been ascribed to several writers. Already Shakespeare in As You Like It, in the notorious Seven Ages of Man soliloquy, presented a terrible picture of typical old age: “second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Dentistry has made progress, and now we can have implants as well as preserve most of our own teeth — but otherwise things remain as the Bard described them.

But now the last phase of aging — that bumbling descent you mention — begins significantly later. And that IS progress. In the West, “old” doesn’t start at fifty, or even sixty. Those extra two decades or so, before the accelerated aging inevitably sets in, are priceless. And the pathetic stage  need not be the part of the story if we become enlightened enough to make research on aging a priority. The ideal is maturation without debilitating illness. People would stay mentally sharp and healthy almost until the end, and then die quickly.

What we have right now is the hospice movement, and that too is progress against dysfunctional medicine. Nor is there a stigma attached to suicide after a diagnosis of terminal illness, if the enjoyment of life is no longer possible. Serious thinking about the end of life issues remains to be done, and the hospice movement shows that such thinking has begun.

(For another look at this, please read my blog post http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/immortality-of-influence.html)

As for the existence of death being responsible for a much greater appreciation of life, I have commented on this many times. If I hadn’t been cornered by mortality and realized at long last how little time is left, I’d probably be still stuck in depression, bewailing my shattered dreams.

That why I see the vague promises of afterlife as destructive. If paradise awaits, why bother trying to make much of this life, a brief episode before trillions of years of bliss? Yet out of the corner of my eye I see that even those who claim to be religious don’t seem to bet too strongly on everlasting paradise (now downgraded to “a better place”). They too seem interested in drinking the sweetness of this life down to the last drops, even if it means no more than dozing in front of the TV. Dozing is also sweet, also a message of “I am loved.” 

RILKE: BEAUTY AND TERROR

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
by that greater existence. For beauty is
but the beginning of terror we are still able to endure,
and we admire it so because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.

~ Rilke, First Duino Elegy

If angels and other super-human beings -- providing they even exist -- do not hear us, then, Rilke asks, who can we turn to in our need? That unspecified need ultimately always comes to this: our terror of death, of non-being. Rilke is on that cusp of modernity that’s still willing to let immortals exist, but, as the enlightenment-era deists claimed earlier, the gods can’t hear us.

Then who can we turn to?

Not angels, not men;
and already the knowing animals
guess we don’t feel truly at home
in the interpreted world.
Can we turn to a lover? Are lovers not a great example of giving strength to each other? Rilke doesn’t trust romantic love that way:

. . . Is it easier for lovers? Alas,
with each other they only conceal their fate.
Even the consolations of nature don’t entirely suffice -- not the night, nor the wind that “gnaws at our faces.” Ultimately Rilke settles for music, though some doubt remains:

Is the old tale in vain
that tells how music began
in the mourning for Linos
piercing the arid numbness,
and, in that stunned space
where an almost godlike youth
suddenly ceased to exist,
made the emptiness vibrate in ways
that charm us, comfort and help?

The Greek poets would have said, “a godlike youth,” without the qualifier. But modernity doesn’t dare reach for such certainty. And that’s perhaps why only music, not needing words, can still soar. 
























Why do so many poems dance the dance of death? And why are dark poems [usually] more interesting and powerful? How do we account for the pervasive darkness of poetry -- not just in great poetry, and certainly not just the famous elegies, but 90% or more of poetry in general. When Billy Collins said, “poetry is an unending funeral,” we all nodded in agreement. That poetry deals with death and loss is a truism; even love poetry tends to have mortality as a hidden theme. Why? I once wrote an essay about it, but I don’t remember if I posted it.

How come I don’t remember? Well, adrenaline greatly helps us remember things, and there must not have been enough adrenaline in me at the time . . .  I’m no longer the high-adrenaline babe I used to be (a long sigh here, both of relief and sadness). And look, I inserted “usually” into the second sentence of the preceding paragraph -- a sign of intellectual caution, of the age of mind rather than the age of vitality, as Milosz aptly labeled the two phases in almost (“almost”!) every writer’s creativity.

*

I’m reading Rick Hanson’s Buddha’s Brain. This morning I was reading about how the brain is wired for "bad news" – the so-called "negativity bias." Every paragraph held my interest. The evidence was compelling: yes, of course it’s a hard-wired neural bias. Then, after making us see how we are compelled to remember the bad, the dark, and above all the scary, Hanson turns to the need for positive experiences and emotions. It's a rather boring chapter, and I made this discovery: positive experiences are soon forgotten because they tend to be boring, e.g. a trip to the zoo when everything went smoothly, no one fell into the moat separating the visitors from the lions, and the only controversy was whether to have lunch now or later.

If Adam Zagajewski had turned out to be genial and pleasant, chit-chatting with me about the weather or reminiscing about the problem Milosz had with deer grazing in his garden in Berkeley, how much would I remember about the Vermont experience? The badness was unpleasant while I was there and before it all fell together when I read about Asperger’s Syndrome. Now, with more understanding and the emotional discomfort long over, I find those memories interesting and also quite funny: a funny funeral, if you will. His bursts of narcissistic rage were priceless, as was his low tolerance for upstarts like the the ones gathered at the Vermont Studio Center who dared call themselves poets. And the impressive amount of talent, skill, and serious dedication displayed by at least half of those poets -- would I have noticed it as acutely if not for the counterpoint of Zagajewski’s attitude: “I and I alone am a real poet in this place”?

Also, in a different realm, would I have noticed how friendly Americans are in general if not for the contrast? Would I have found my fellow poets, writers, and visual artists so downright adorable? Perfect strangers smiling at me -- would I have even noticed in a low-adrenaline state?

*

To return to the book and the issue of how interesting and memorable dark experiences are. True, some mainly positive experiences can be interesting, but that’s because there is some tension mixed in: paradise, yes, but with the threat of loss. Falling in love is interesting. I find the very expression: to FALL in love -- unique, I think, to the English language -- to be psychologically brilliant. Likewise, novelty alone produces some tension as the brain is roused up and wildly scanning this new environment to make sure there is no danger to survival. Adrenaline, a flight or fight hormone, makes us remember things. Let me repeat this with more emphasis because it’s so important: ADRENALINE MAKES US REMEMBER THINGS. It's a great aid to memory formation. If you block adrenaline receptors, you block the memory. That’s how we (and other animals) evolved: adrenaline made us remember what leads to danger and what favors survival.

I found Terrence Malick’s 2011 movie, The Tree of Life, boring beyond belief because it has long “happy” sequences of a toddler doing toddler-type things, and then young boys doing young-boy things such as kicking a can etc -- hence the idea that it should be retitled “A Boy’s Life.” The father is authoritarian, needing to be the boss at any price, and that creates some tension, but the tension is not dramatic enough. The mother is just being a loving mother, without a single negative moment. The mother is a saint. There are some arguments with her husband, but we can't hear the words – we just assume she's defending the boys, so you can't blame her. And all ends well -- we are in heaven, which looks just like a California beach at sunset.

As movies go, The Tree of Life is an exception. I think movies in particular cater to our inborn negativity bias by presenting conflict and the drama around it. Any good story has the protagonist dealing with something bad. Even a Christmas movie such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” has plenty of darkness, including an attempted suicide! That’s the standard Hollywood technique: don’t make it all good or all bad, but create interest by mixing the two. Of course novels work the same way -- even pulp romances have the heroine nearly lose her purity.

The need for good-bad interweave also explains why happy-happy poems don’t really work, since even a poem needs some dramatic tension -- or call it A SHOT OF ADRENALINE. That’s why we can re-read Ancient Mariner, but who ever wants to re-read Wordsworth’s Prelude? Yes, even a poem has to have dramatic tension to hold our attention. As Zagajewski (a brilliant man who simply happens to have Asperger’s) said, “Poems are short tragedies.”

I’m thinking of a friend’s statement, “When you’re traveling, even the bad is good.” For a writer, the bad is especially good, a goldmine of material. If someone says, “My mother was a typical housewife,” who wants to hear about it? (This never stopped a certain woman whose name I blessedly forget from writing a four-section poem on the theme: Father liked mother’s apple pie best”?) But if someone says, “My mother was a schizophrenic,” or “On the way to a posh business party, I saw my mother searching for food in a dumpster,” you bet everyone's interested. The memoir becomes a best-seller. It doesn't have to be this extreme, but you get my drift.

Give me a good dark poem anytime. Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband is a work of genius from that perspective: funny in a very dark, brilliant way. Tears turned to diamonds. I loved it on my first reading. Now that I’m re-reading it, I love it even more. I’m awed by Carson’s genius, and I don’t use the word “genius” lightly. I reserve it for poets like Emily Dickinson.

I don’t mean to overstate the case for darkness. Some of my favorite music is an example of a positive experience that never bores me, and there are times I’d rather have the harmonies or Mozart than Beethoven’s drama. The beauty of nature doesn’t bore me, e.g. the Eastern Sierra or the Pacific Ocean. True, those are experiences of the sublime, and there is a threatening aspect to the sublime. In Rilke’s words, “beauty is but the beginning of terror, and we adore it so because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” But I don’t have to fall into the cascades at Whitney Portal in order to appreciate their beauty. The energy, the rush? Yes, but I also love looking at a calm lake.

It maybe true that it’s the outbreaks of the unpredictable and the threatening that stay in memory, the bear at the campground more so than another grand panorama, but I never saw a panorama I didn’t like. Animals don’t bore me. The only thing that makes me more happy than a kitten is two kittens. But some other experiences that are supposed to be positive – after a while I just go numb.

True, poetry readings that carry on and on, one poem darker than another, also make me numb. Ideally, we need an interweave: let the darkness deliver a jolt, a shot of adrenaline, rather than be a constant drizzle. Still, life can have long periods of constant drizzle, not to mention a vehement storm now and then. You have to admire poets for their honesty. They know better than to deliver sunshine, sunshine, sunshine.

What’s the point of poetry? It’s been said that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I hold to the unpopular view that poetry too needs a thread of narrative on which to string its images; it needs both light and shadow to create dramatic tension. A poem is often a micro-narrative, a “short tragedy.” We are so strangely wired that we seem to need to deal with the bad news along with the good news. Our survival depends on it. And poetry is one way of grappling with the bad news. It is a safe container for it since the beauty of language is a victory, however slight, over the darkness. Those who love poetry do not mind the darkness.  

*

In any case, the darkness can’t be avoided if we want to live to the fullest:

You see that I want much.
Perhaps I want it all:
the darkness of every infinite instant,
the trembling light of every ascent.

~ Rilke, The Book of Hours

Rilke was familiar with Nietzsche (Lou Andreas-Salomé probably made sure of that), and Nietzsche’s command to “live dangerously.” Nietzsche, who also named alcohol and Christianity as “the two great European narcotics,” deemed it cowardice to try to avoid the distress that goes with any serious work toward an accomplishment. The hardship and darkness had to accepted and endured.

Nietzsche: The secret of harvesting from experience the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of it is -- to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!

True, some people take more risks while others timidly keep to the well-trodden path. But it seems to me that living is inherently “dangerous”: if you live long enough, the odds are that you will experience a personal tragedy and/or go through one or more periods of great suffering. I don’t know a single person who is an exception.

Creative people are in fact often given as an example of having been molded by a great deal of suffering. They often have to overcome an early trauma. “Overcome” is perhaps an overly optimistic term; in some ways, that trauma is always with them. When asked what a writer needs most, Hemingway famously replied, “An unhappy childhood.” And creative work itself, though a source of joy, also creates tension and frustration, and often the feeling of being a total failure. The light of a dream that an artist carries in her ascent is indeed like a trembling candle flame.

*

At the same time, we need to take care not to embrace the cult of suffering. There is much to be said for the Daoist principle of wu-wei: “not straining.” For all that has been said about the ratio of inspiration to perspiration, too much deliberate effort can interfere with inspiration. One of the most important principles of creative work is not to sweat too much. When an impasse develops, it’s best to walk away from the work. The unconscious will keep working on the problem, producing a solution unexpectedly and often at a notoriously inconvenient time, as when you are in the shower. That’s tough: you end the shower quickly and start scribbling. When the muse knocks, you open. Otherwise the muse will cease to visit.

*

But it won’t do to say that poetry is dark, the darkest of all literary genres. Great poetry tends to affirm life in spite the inevitable fate, in spite of mortality. Though we know that love brings pain and not just joy -- “that which is your greatest joy will also be your greatest grief” -- and even though we know what awaits us -- we’ve seen the cemeteries -- just to live is transcendent. As Rilke says in the Seventh Elegy: “to have been here even once is beyond words.” 

Again and again, though we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frightening silent abyss into which the others

fall: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

~ Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell

POETRY’S WILL TO DARKNESS: LARRY LEVIS, “TO A WALL OF FLAME IN A STEEL MILL”

[Photo: Peyton Chung]

To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969

Except under the cool shadows of pines,
The snow is already thawing
Along this road . . .
Such sun, and wind.
I think my father longed to disappear
While driving through this place once,
In 1957.
Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress
While his thoughts moved like the shadow
Of a cloud over houses,
And he was seized, suddenly, by his own shyness,
By his desire to be grass,
And simplified.
Was it brought on
By the road, or the snow, or the sky
With nothing in it?
He kept sweating and wiping his face
Until it passed.
And I never knew.

But in the long journey away from my father,

I took only his silences, his indifference

To misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief.

Now, I can sleep beside this road

If I have to,

Even while the stars pale and go out,

And it is day.

And I can keep secrets for years,

The way a stone retains a warmth from the sun,

It is because men like us

Own nothing, really.

I remember, once,
In the steel mill where I worked,
Someone opened the door of the furnace
And I glanced in at the simple,
Quick and blank erasures the flames made of iron,
Of everything on earth.
It was reverence I felt then, and did not know why,
I do not know even now why my father
Lived out his one life
Farming two hundred acres of gray Málaga vines
And peach trees twisted
By winter. They lived, I think,
Because his hatred of them was entire,
And wordless. I still think of him staring into this road

Twenty years ago,

While his hands gripped the wheel harder,

And his wish to be no one made his body tremble,

Like the touch

Of a woman he could not see,

Her fingers drifting up his spine in silence

Until his loneliness was perfect,

And she let him go –

Her laughter turning into these sheets of black

And glassy ice that dislodge themselves,

And ride slowly out,

Onto the thawing river.

~ Larry Levis, The Dollmaker’s Ghost

**

Recently I wrote: Poetry is the opposite of fear. Perhaps that was why Primo Levi became incredibly excited while reciting, in Auschwitz, the Ulysses Canto from Dante’s Inferno. I am still amazed that poetry can indeed be called the opposite of fear, considering that poetry tends to be so dark (“an unending funeral,” as Billy Collins said).  And this poem, irresistible to me starting with its title, contemplates nothingness, erasure, as a manifestation of the divine ("It was reverence I felt then, I don't know why").

Larry Levis is an ecstatic poet of the dark sort. We won’t find him dancing with the daffodils. But at one point he could be found working in a steel mill in Syracuse, New York. That’s how he supported himself while getting his M.A. in English. That’s how he got to see that annihilating “wall of flame.”

There is a lot of darkness in both fiction and drama, considering the dominance of tragedy in the literary canon (at least as taught in universities). Still, I think poetry is probably the number one genre when it comes to dealing with mortality. There aren't that many “happy poems.” It's almost a given that mortality/transience has to be present in a poem to give it depth. “We kissed briefly in the deathless spring,” D.A. Powell writes, and we admire the oxymoronic nature of that statement, “briefly” canceling “deathless” (and yet we say that love is eternal and spring is eternal, and that too is true). “To a Wall of Flame” is the most delightful poem about annihilation that I have ever come across.

First, the speaker notes that the snow is already thawing along the road. Then he makes the conjecture that his father, driving on this particular road with his wife asleep beside him, experienced a longing to “be simplified,” to cease being human, to be grass, to disappear. Levis makes this conjecture feel astonishingly real.

This is phantasmagoric poem. After all, Levis only imagines how his father felt, that he "longed to disappear" (but who hasn't had that longing?) Then there is the amazing imagined trembling at that wish, compared to the intimate touch of an imagined woman, her laughter making her a femme fatale, a Snow Queen perhaps (life is a cruel joke?) – or maybe the allegory of the human, since laughter keeps us from crying at all this disappearing. And it’s of course not only "men like us" who own nothing – ultimately no human being owns anything, except for a moment of delusion when we forget we can’t take it with us.

When I first read the poem, I liked it only from the steel mill part on. This is still the part I like best and find awesome, but I wouldn't want to lose the image of the mother sleeping in the car "in a gray dress." It's part of the mystery of poetry that details such as that gray dress are magical, and her sleep, and the father's trembling, and the marvelous accuracy of the sheets of ice being black as the ice is at the point of thawing in the river.

If you are having trouble with this poem, re-read it from

I remember, once,

In the steel mill where I worked

-- and just let yourself be seized by the power of the unfolding images, starting with the wall of flame as a kind of altar, and ending with the sheets of black ice sliding into the river.  

Marjorie:

I liked that poem by Larry Levis so much I sent it to one of my friends who is approaching 80 and is thus concerned about mortality. He is also a poetry lover and would-be poet. All he saw in Levis’ poem was that it was depressing, and he asked why I liked it.  Below is my answer.

**

I respond to a poem not only because of what it means but also because of how it says what it means.  This poem deals with a universal concern:  annihilation, nothingness after death.  For you, that makes it a depressing poem.  For me, that makes it an empathic poem.

Levis is also doing lots of skillful things in this poem.  There’s the early surprise of:  “I think my father longed to disappear . . . ” with its implied question for a reader, “How can anyone do that?” There are two women in the poem — the wife, sleeping beside her husband and thus unable to see. She’s in the early part of the poem. Then we have the ghost woman, who can’t be seen but runs fingers along the father’s spine in the later part of the poem. 

I love evocative images and similes.  In this poem we have:  “ . . . his thoughts moved like the shadow of a cloud over houses.” This is a wonderful image of sadness.  There’s mystery when Levis says, “And I never knew.”  What is it he never knew?  He’s giving us a poem about what transpired in his father’s mind. Is he simply using a superlative “never” to suggest that he absolutely didn’t understand when he was younger but understands now what it was like for his father? 

The ending touch, with the ghost woman who lets the man go, sends chills up MY spine.  And what about this ending image of the ghost woman’s laughter “turning into these sheets of black and glassy ice that dislodge themselves, and ride slowly out, onto the thawing river”?  My Lord!  You know how someone “breaks” into laughter and laughter comes in separate chunks?  The ice is a metaphor for the cold laughter of the ghost woman but also an image of eventual dissolution.  Annihilation as a sort of melting.

Of course, I am partial to father poems and have more than one favorite among them!

**

Oriana: 

Thank you, Marjorie, for the superb analysis.

This poem is an astonishing feat in more than one way, for instance in the dramatic use of both fire and ice. What immediately astonished me, however, was that Levis was inside his father's mind, and rendered all of this in realistic detail, as though it did happen, as though the father indeed "longed to disappear." This whole passage is wonderful, and so startling, I don't think there is any other poem in which anything like this is said:

I think my father longed to disappear
While driving through this place once,
In 1957.
Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress
While his thoughts moved like the shadow
Of a cloud over houses,
And he was seized, suddenly, by his own shyness,
By his desire to be grass,
And simplified.
                                 

     ~ "seized by his own shyness" is a wonderful perception. The father is so shy he doesn't want to live anymore, at least not as himself.

The father is also presented as very stoical, which is confirmed by other poems we'll see him in. He dutifully goes about work, even though he hates his vinyard and his peach orchard

I do not know even know why my father
Lived out his one life
Farming two hundred acres of gray Málaga vines
And peach trees twisted
By winter. They lived, I think,
Because his hatred of them was entire,
And wordless.

I love the phrase "peach trees twisted by winter." The father himself is like winter, and the peach trees (peach being a symbol of sensual delight) are like him too, able to live on hatred.

And then we come to the erotic part, the "love-death" scene of this poem, where the father's "wish to be no one" makes him tremble and he feels the invisible woman's fingers "drifting up his spine in silence." Could there be a more perfect word here than "drifting"? And then the fabulous fusion of laughter and black sheets of melting ice. There is no need for me to add anything to Marjorie's exciting analysis of that final fused image.

This poem bears multiple re-reading. It becomes more vivid each time. And yet, for all we know, none of this happened! Talk about making the imaginary real . . . 

What further enlarges the poem is the existence of a literary and cinemanic tradition of encounter with the figure of Death. Death and the Maiden, The Erlking, conversations with Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal, Death as a beautiful woman in Cocteau's Orpheus . . .  and many more, including a handsome executioner in my own "April Snow" – but nothing quite like the figure in this poem: an invisible woman, intimate as a lover – with the wife asleep next to the man.

Marjorie:

I loved the twist on the two women in Levis’ poem—the woman who can’t see and the woman who can’t be seen.  But Levis is also playing with the opposites of fire and ice.  This made me think of Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice.” I wondered if Levis was thinking of that poem too.

Oriana:

I also thought about Frost's famous poem. Wouldn't it be magnificent if Larry Levis were still alive, and we could ask him? We'd email him, and given the kind of person he was, I think we'd get a satisfying answer.

I met him once at SDSU. He was already quite famous, and yet shy, almost self-effacing in a charming way. He and I talked about Zbigniew Herbert, whom Levis had known from Herbert's year at Cal State LA, having been his assistant. Levis was into vivid details also in conversation. He could drop his shyness and be very emotionally expressive, then hunch up into shyness again, with an almost apologetic smile. He was this big, husky country boy who perhaps felt awkward in academia. You could easily imagine him doing heavy farm labor, or any "macho" kind of work. (He was the opposite of Jack Gilbert that way. Gilbert frequently evokes the steel mills of Pittsburgh, but his slight build and intense intellectuality made me think of someone who frequents Parisian literary cafés.)

From Larry’s reading, I remember only two lines, which engraved itself on my psyche forever, and sent me a dream about being a bride swathed in endless layers of white garments, with a crone-like woman at my side who says to me, “If you wear only white, you are dressed for suicide.” I have no doubt that what the crone said in my dream originated in these two lines by Levis:

The white wedding dress is suicidal,

I know how the bride trembles putting it on.

He made a charming comment about those lines that I wish I remembered. But back then, who imagined that Larry would be leaving us so soon, dying of a heart attack at only forty-nine?

In an important way, though, he is still with us. Every time we read one of his poems, he speaks to us with a living voice.

Michael (from Guatemala)

Vision comes from beyond the words, doesn't it? It's where we stand along Levis's road, isn't it? Or are we riding in the car as Levis's father drives? Because this poem for me isn't about annihilation. Just the opposite. Levis's father is dazzled by the Lure, and feels the desire to live more fully. He is quietly desperate to be seen (as his sleeping, gray-clad wife could not see) and to wriggle free of the vines and peach trees. I felt his grip on the steering wheel, that need to turn from the rutted path, to make that left turn, and never stop driving. Ah, to be free from pruning the peach trees and the dullness of his wife. And finally, knowing the touch of the woman's fingers up his spine will never be realized, he allows the dream to float away, broken black ice drifting, melting into the stream of every man's despair--just as the flames erased the iron. And Levis felt reverence for this, this acceptance.

But then, that's my road.

**

Michael also provided this explanation of “the Lure”:

The Lure is a concept developed in Process theology – I think it's a John Cobb contribution. I equate it with Aristotle's entelechy, the will to thrive, the Moreness, the life that calls, the extravagant, gratuitous beauty of this world and beyond . . .

Oriana:

Thank you, Michael, for a very perceptive comment. Yes, we are riding in the car that the father drives, and we can see that the father is having an anxiety attack, or something close to it. He feels extremely lonely – as you point out, he is not “seen” by his wife. In fact, no one knows him. His hatred of tending the vines and the twisted peach trees remains unspoken. And even if he did speak about it, who would understand? People would likely tell him to count his blessings: his land and his family.

Why is the wife dressed in gray? Why are the vines gray? Especially when it comes to the wife’s dress, note that what we have here is only Larry Levis’s imagination, so he could have chosen another color if he didn’t want the symbolism of gray. A red dress would have an opposite connotation. But this grayness, along with the wife’s sleep, is the dailiness of marriage. So yes, I can easily see the father as “quietly desperate,” and occasionally feeling the urge to escape that gray “life of quiet desperation.”

Most people have experienced the potential richness of life, entelecheia, as opposed to the gray actuality. I call it the Gap. This is the realm in which we badly need to know what, if anything, can be changed. If change is not possible, then a stoic acceptance, exemplified by the father in this amazing poem, can be admirable (imagine if the father constantly complained, or drank, or threatened to commit suicide – or all of the above; or think of Tony Hoagland’s father, who left his family for a flight attendant).

Pondering the Gap and how we learn to live with it reminded me of “To My Ghost Reflected in the Auxvasse River,” and especially this passage:

When you would turn on the radio

And dance alone, in the kitchen

Of the diner,

I kept sweeping.

“Like father like son,” I want to sigh . . .  But we know that later the son did manage to escape into a more fulfilling life.  He says,

But in the long journey away from my father,

I took only his silences, his indifference

To misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief.

~ though in another famous poem, he mentions his father’s listening to Vivaldi – and Vivaldi’s music brims with spirit. Still, the father mainly suffers in stoic silence. His son chose words, chose music.

Obviously, whatever it is that we call spirit or soul prefers music and dancing to mundane chores. The chores must be done, however. We try to have some music and dancing also, because we will not be here forever. Some believe that if we do the chores diligently, we will have our reward in heaven, but there is no certainty of that. Larry Levis does not believe in heaven, except what fragments of it, what moments of beauty and bliss and fulfillment, we can enjoy in this life.

Personally, I am into Less-ness, but then my inner life is very rich, sometimes overwhelmingly so (or so it feels to an extreme introvert like myself).  I need the kind of Less which leads to More.  Sometimes when you concentrate on something very small, a great wealth starts unfolding.  But then I understand that by Moreness, Michael does not mean “more toys” (as in “The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys”). He means a qualitatively richer life, the opposite of father’s loneliness and his unspoken hatred of the gray vines and “peach trees twisted by winter.” That richer life includes glimpses of the sublime – including the wall of flame, even if the meaning of the flame is erasure. The sublime is an encounter with an energy greater than our own. We respond with awe. That is why Levis is an ecstatic poet: he worships the flame, and hears the music (be it of laughter) in the slide of the melting sheets of ice.

Una:

Maybe the reason I haven't commented on this poem is that I found it depressing.

It shows a quiet desperation which many of us feel, and hearing it the way he writes it makes me so sad, How many of us want to chuck it all like Gauguin but like LL's father soldier on.

Oriana:

The victory in this poem lies in its background, so to speak: the father’s “soldiering on” made it possible for Levis to get a good education and enjoy the life of the mind, as well as the closeness to nature he developed growing up in the countryside.

When people speak of chucking it up like Gauguin, they tend to forget that you have to be an accomplished painter first. And that takes a lot of hard work. And what Gauguin did in Tahiti was work. Painting paradise is work. We see only the finished product and it looks so easy and spontaneous.  We see the inspiration, not the perspiration. But take a moment to see Gauguin drenched in sweat, not only because of the heat, but also because of the inevitable frustration. And I don’t mean the frustration because the paintings weren’t selling and he was regarded as a failure; I mean the frustration of getting stuck, of knowing the composition doesn’t quite work, or the colors are not right, but not yet having the solution.  


Any work, any mode of life, requires some “soldiering on.” Maturity means, among other things, the ability to carry on with “grace under pressure.”

But to get back to the poem: as Marjorie points out, its triumph lies in the beautiful language and imagery, in the artistic perfection when the ending fuses the laughter of the ghost woman with the sliding of the sheets of black, thawing ice into the river – river being a also the river of time.

Lucrezia:

"Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress":  this is death.

The snow, the furnace:  the white whale.

I have never felt this way.

Faith is the opposite of fear.

Oriana:

That reminds me of my Aphrodite poem – I think an early version had the line

"Faith is the opposite of fear, says Lucrezia."

-- inspired by you. By the way, I’ve realized that Letters to Lucrezia is a collection I can simply self-publish. It’s dear to my heart.

I think we all have faith in something, in various things, or we couldn’t live. Levis could be called an atheist, but he had a strong sense of the sacred. In one of his essays, Milosz says that the real division is not believers and unbelievers, but those who have a sense of the sacred, and those who don’t – and that probably we are born that way. I think people who have a sense of beauty do have a sense of the sacred. It’s a deep part of the psyche.