I think this is the beginning of a longer essay. Not sure yet:
“How can you know the true
salmon’s touch when you cannot
trust yourself alone
like this with yourself”
James Tate, from “The Trust”
Snow’s coming down at last, a semblance of former winters, the yearly erasure of boundaries I look forward to, while dreading actual incursions into the cold. I am sitting by the gas fireplace. It’s very quiet in here, and snow makes it seem more so. Molly is lying on her back in front of the fire, her body spread-eagled, white underbelly and paws balanced in the air. How can she do that—sprawl as if there’s nothing in the world to get worked up over? I get up every day mentally checking my calendar. This is a habit, but also it is a way of placing a few dots in the white space of my day. Nothing is happening here. We aren’t going to concerts or movies. We rarely eat out.
I am a person with resources. I read voraciously. I write. I talk with friends one way or another. But an uneasiness has come to me. No, it’s always been there. I distinctly remember when I was, say, fourteen or fifteen, the growing awareness that work could save me. If I could complete the tasks on my assignment sheets, if I could organize my loose-leaf binders, if I could take meticulous notes, chaos would leave me alone. Meaningless would be subsumed. Purpose would be evident.
It wasn’t about being loved. I mistrusted praise. It was a funny feeling, the red A at the top of the page. Not a simple validation, not pride, more like one more strong foothold cut in the side of a mountain that needed climbing, that only I could climb. If it were a B, the weight of gravity kicked in. A C would send me sliding, grabbing for branches on the way toward meaninglessness.
What my young self meant by that I can only guess. But lately it is as if I know her mind. I am her mind. I suppose she had to make footholds because the vastness has always been here. During the working and raising children phase, there was the long hiatus, practical goals always directly in front of me. No need to look long-term. No time for it, either. Now I have nothing but time, even while I see the end of it, for me.
Sitting here reading the poem by James Tate: how can you know the true salmon’s touch if you can’t trust yourself alone with yourself, not pushing toward a goal, not lost in reverie? The salmon, the brush of the unknown on the skin. I have been alone a great deal. Yet of course I have never been alone. There has been the “goal,” the “purpose.”
What if you lose faith in goals? What if you know nothing anymore about how life should be lived, other than with kindness and generosity. Those, yes, but what about creation? The building, weaving, painting, writing, calculating that comprises the human endeavor: what we call being human?
What if, after many years of hard work, another poem, another essay, another book in the world seems superfluous? Seriously, this is not a death wish, it’s a how-to-live wish. This time, our time (like many before it), is a hard time. Courage is required. That word has come to me lately. You will be particularly aware of it if you are getting old, if you have accomplished all you ever imagined you would and more.
The route I take on my walk through the woods behind our buildings.
This morning has the bright haze of snow everywhere. It’s still coming down. Nature keeps on doing what it does. I look at the photo of James Tate, I think about his Pulitzer, his National Book Award, his last book published posthumously. His 20 books. He was still working to the end. James Wright was arranging the poems for The Journey in his hospital bed when he died. How were they sure their poems were worth all the moments of their lives? Or, did the need to write poems push them past any such thoughts?
“They tell me I have had more poems, total, in Poetry Magazine than any other poet.” David Wagoner once told me, in his typical humble and reserved voice. I loved his poems. He died last month at 95, having written 25 books of poems and eleven novels. You could see his quiet mind always at it, no matter what else was going on. To call this “need” is to trivialize the deep movement of the spirit.
What about that movement? What does it mean to be “in the now” as pop culture, drawing from misunderstood Buddhist teachings—asks of us? If I am in the now, should I be sitting here watching the snow and not typing? Is watching the snow being in the now? Am I now, as in Tate’s poem, ready to trust myself to be alone with myself? If I begin to have a poem of my own forming, is that reaching for a goal? To be in the now, do I have to lose my mind?
There is a “Solitude Float and Wellness Spa” on Front Street. You can encase yourself in a coffin-like shell and close the lid. Would you then be “in the now”?
When you retire, are you more likely to be “in the now?” A writer, I must say, has a particular and peculiar “retirement.” That is, there is no such thing. Editors may retire, young people may take over, with their different sense of a poem, global poets may step into the territory that once dominated by people who look and speak like you. Still, you go on, undeterred.
Yet eventually you the writer may—it’s possible you may—begin to wonder what you’re doing. Why you’re doing it. You might find yourself (what an interesting expression!) sitting watching the snow and feeling the outline of your own body in the vastness of space and its other objects.
The thing is, though, you keep doing it. Writing.
P.S. For the first time ever, I think, an editor took the entire group of poems I submitted, and called me to say how much he admired them. You can read them here: http://www.theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/v12-brown.html
Also, I’m teaching a 4-hour, one day course on Zoom for Interlochen Arts Academy on January 29th. You can sign up for it here. I’m only allowing 12 people, so you might want to sign up now. https://give.interlochen.org/event/crafty-moves-online/e375341