Something written back in mid April. A poem, a prose, and a praise—which just sounded like a good combination and a good excuse to cogitate.
From Robert David Winterfeld, translated from German by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her biography of Hannah Arendt:
While the other man is in his house
where he is part human,
part mouse,
I stand in wonder permanent
with the doorknob in my hand.
I can’t decide if that’s inspiring or if it’s rubbish. Like that famous quote about those who don’t travel only ever reading one page of the world’s book—it sounds enchanting and revealing, but at some point you realize that the aphorism is mostly trivial and maybe even a trick, if not completely false. (What if it’s the traveler who only takes the time to read a single page of the world’s many books?) I also really don’t know how, or if, it fits with or speaks to a stay-at-home ordered life, but that’s okay.
From Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:
We walked north with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.
But the lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomless with smooth stones and simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life).
As Christian Wiman said of “sweet” in Gertrude Stein’s poem “Susie Asado”, it’s that last “touched” that’s inspired.
Poem anthologies are always a treat. I’ve been picking at Christian Wiman’s Joy a little at a time. (That’s an interesting sentence). I take a poem or two a day and, every few hours, pace the kitchen with the words and paper in my hands, to break away from the computer screen. A favorite one this week is David Ferry’s “Out at Lanesville.” I like several elements of this one. There’s something about a spray-painted and hoarsely uttered expletive being spoken “to the random winds and to the senseless waves” that’s worth both a chuckle and a depth of thought. And like many good poems, the last stanza—that poetic mental ellipsis—reshapes exactly as it should, sending you thoughtfully away and, simultaneously, inviting another reading.
It’s the second to last part that I keep going back to, though, almost with a double vision. I imagine the scene as I suppose I should: a Monet of blue dress pants and white summer dresses, on the rocks and in the boat. But I also see another present and ubiquitous scene, one of empty streets, closed doors, hidden selves—all working it out.
The voices of some people out in a boat somewhere
Are carried in over the water with surprising
Force and clarity, though saying I don’t know what:
Happiness; unhappiness; something about the conditions
Of all such things; work done, not done; the saving
Of the self in the intense work of its singleness,
Learning to live with it. Their lives have separate ends.
Reflecting on the day’s current events, a friend recently asked me what my thoughts were about “all this.” I wish I had a good answer, but the truth is that I have very few thoughts—or too many; I can’t decide. They vary minute by minute, but not because I’m fickle (though I might be). There’s just too much to keep track of and too many different experiences. Sure, my friends and my family and I are still healthy. I still have a job and I’ll still graduate in May. And being shut up with books and studies and reaching out to people when I feel like it is not exactly a bad week, or even month, for introverted me. But for a friend whose AA meetings have cancelled or for difficult relationships that relied on a certain social distancing, before social distancing shut them up together—who’s to say.
Sometimes it’s best to keep our hands over our mouths. In a way, I think this is what poetry is often paradoxically doing.