#261

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA261&lpg=PA261&dq=restless,+as+once+in+love,+he+put+pen+to+paper&source=bl&ots=A9h_wLp2Aq&sig=19K1jf8Q5HuxW2yrvJmmfR2s3Q0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAWoVChMI1_mzrfmGyAIVVI6SCh3BxAFB#v=onepage&q=restless%2C%20as%20once%20in%20love%2C%20he%20put%20pen%20to%20paper&f=false

I was big into fencing some fifteen, twenty years ago, and I remember someone in the club talking about the best fencers in the world, as we often did. Most are from Europe, especially France, Italy, Hungary, Germany, and Russia. The line that triggered this recollection was about the experience of Olympic caliber fencers from behind the Iron Curtain before it came down: Once they picked up the sword, they could never set it down again. There is the dedication to the sport that any world-class athlete recognizes—the endless hours of practice, so that the moves and reflexes are automatic, the endless hours of conditioning, so their bodies can withstand the demands of the sport at that level. This all brought some sense of satisfaction, adventure and triumph too. But for a Communist fencer, in whom the State had invested so much into his training from when he was just a kid, there was no option to quit if he got tired of the grueling routine. The political die was cast, and it insisted that you were to keep competing, keep fighting, score points for the state with the ability you were allowed to refine.

This is a poem about the imprisonment of dedication. Writing poetry provides for a far broader horizon than a game played with a simulated sword, to be sure, though it might not seem that way from the outside. There’s the pen—same one all the time, the familiarity of it becoming important—and there’s the napkin or blank sheet of paper. If the horizons of poetry are wider than sports, they still have bounds, and the bounds are the limits of the writer’s experience and sensibilities. I’ll never write a Toni Morrison novel, because her sensibilities as an African-American woman are so different from mine. We both explore and arrange our experience and thoughts, and we create new combinations of stuff from an imagination ultimately bounded by our sensibilities. All our reading and study expand things further, but in the end you’re stuck in your own head.

Henry is asking himself if he can see it through. It’s a reasonable question, partly because on some days—as the poem’s last image confirms—you can get in the air and fly. Then the bounds of the writer’s horizon are far off and beckoning. Other days, it’s just pen and paper, and if those things aren’t creating worlds, if they’re just there on their own, it’s a dull picture. Pen. Paper. Somebody please shoot me. Maybe I’ll shoot myself.

The word “gravid” is interesting. It means pregnant. Stuff is growing inside you, and it needs to be let out and expressed. If it doesn’t get out, it just sits inside, maybe gets a bit funky. Gives you a bellyache. Anyway, it’s not a complicated poem, but it makes sense that someone in the grip of a commitment, and who is coasting through a dry spell within that commitment, would stop and think, What the hell am I doing? Is it worth it? Donald Hall has a pretty wicked take on the whole thing in “To a Waterfowl” where the poet meets someone on an airplane and tells him he’s a poet:

            “My wife, she likes that sort of thing? Hah-hah?

            I guess maybe I’d better watch my grammar, huh?”

            I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

By the end of the poem, Hall calls this guy “creepy,” but his ignorant quip about grammar hit the mark. That hurts. James Wright has a tougher take on it in “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: “I have wasted my life.” That hurts more. Rather than being occupied in the amazing beauties of the moment, he’s been off thinking and writing and all that business. Wasting his life.

There’s an irony to it, because artists are aware that they’re often at their most alive and engaged when they’re working and the spirit is on the move. That’s my experience. But that’s the problem. The work never communicates that experience as well as the artist could wish. When I finish a painting, I love to talk about the experience of doing it—the technique I called into play, choices I made, what I saw, how I saw it, what it was like to be there, the things I learned. Generally talk like this falls pretty flat, although friends and loved ones will usually spare a bit of patience and indulge me for a bit. But we all understand the price we pay, and in the end, you have to keep doing it. You’ve made the commitment. It’s work or nothing. Creativity or bust. In the end, Wright’s poem is pretty good, and it’s certainly famous as it is for a reason, but I wonder if it isn’t too reductive. Isn’t the point of the work to take the ravishing experience of seeing a butterfly or whatever wonder is in front of you and communicate the experience of seeing it? I’m with Wordsworth on this one: Intense experience recollected in tranquility. It’s not one or the other, either revel in nature’s ravishment or decide your life is a waste having thought about it and spoken the experience. No. It’s both. That’s what Henry means with his flying metaphor. I criticize him often enough for having lived in his work rather than living in his life. His life is bookish and academic, with his most intense moments, it seems (outside of sex and a good drunk) coming through teaching and studying. But within the limits of his bizarre, sad exposed selfhood, he finds some crazy stuff. I’ve learned a lot from it. Like I’ve said before, not what I expected to learn, but a lot nevertheless. It hasn’t been a waste.