My few glorious days alone at the lake are winding down. This is the time of year that I try to beat my record on “last swim of the season.” The problem is that I don’t stay at the lake quite as long as it would be possible to swim. Sunday the air was 53 degrees, the water 64 when I went in. It was actually lovely, if gray, and after a couple of minutes it started sprinkling. By the time I headed back, it was raining pretty much, the drops hitting the water and bouncing so that from water level, it looked like bubble-needles bouncing off the surface. Very lively and random. An amazing perspective.
Yesterday was truly lovely, water almost perfectly still, the water 67 and the air 60. How could I NOT swim? While I was sitting on the dock, that darn little muskrat swam right under me, the one that’s eaten every single one of the water reeds down by the kayaks. And digging deep holes beside a couple of trees. What can I do? He seems to be sure he wants to live here, and I’m not about to assert my dominance by killing him.
Friday is my first check-up appointment with my oncologist. Notice how I just slip this in here. Just the sight of him makes me nervous, but I expect this to go fine. If trouble develops, my guess it will take more time. But I feel as confident as possible, considering. I’m not sure if he’ll send me for a scan or what.
I often buy books on the subject of poetry, or writing, thinking I need to keep up with the ones that might help my MFA students, and also I like to keep up with current conversations among poets. But I’m getting tired of essays/lectures-collected-in-books that tell me over and over that there’s no way to talk about or even think about poetry, theme, structure, etc, because the truth of it falls in the cracks between language. And if one is discriminating enough, one can somehow discern something profound about the art from what falls between the clever and decorous lacunae in the author’s essay on poetry.
Also, recent books on prose writing do the same thing. I’m not mentioning titles, because I can also always find dozens of passages I like in these essays. It’s just this tendency that annoys me.
Poets/fictionists are liars. They make things up as they go along. So? Language can never tell the “truth.” So? I’m reminded of the French critics of the past 20 years, who very accurately noted (in ridiculously convoluted language) that language has no intrinsic meaning. That the author is dead. The reader makes up the stories in a negotiation between mind and page. So?
Putting this in Buddhist terms, I’d say “Yes, this is ultimate truth. But talk to me about provisional truth. Talk to me about how to begin this work of seeing. Eventually I’ll reach the limits of language and will see for myself that there’s nowhere, really, to go, and that what I write is, well, provisional.” I’m not talking about simple “craft” books that offer “writing prompts,” or help with form.
Let's not be E.A. Poe and describe our Philosophy of Composition as if we didn’t muddle our way into both our good and our bad work. Let's, those of us who’ve been at this a long time, be honest with our students about our own lack of vision, our own unassailable naivete. Let's stop at the edge of what we know and not cleverly hide there in the water reeds.