Christmas day, snow falling feathery, heaped. Deeply comforting. No sharp corners. It’s stunningly beautiful and one of the reasons we live here. If I could put my skis on or even go snowshoeing, that would be nice, but there’s this hip pain . . . . I did shovel a little, shame on me. Jerry’s recuperating from his back surgery, so we’re not going anywhere for a while. I love stopping. I love that in general, having an excuse to hibernate. I love that about poems, the way they stop. I love the lyric impulse. When there’s stopping, things burst their seams.
We have no family here. Jerry’s daughter Amy’s coming on Friday. Friends have stopped by, brought us wine, jams, cookies, little gifts, and whole meals. For us, 2013 has been a year of being recipients of great love and generosity. I’ve always been wary of sentimentality, which I think I’ve often translated as letting feelings show. Maybe I’d say the right thing, but the feeling of it was tamped down. Plenty of reasons in my past why that might be so, but there seems to be a softening here, now, which even makes me aware of my writing in a different way.
Heart, and how that shows up in our work, prose or poetry: I don’t know. . . . I’ve read some effusions that meant to be heart but made me back off. As with some relationships. I’m thinking the difference is, strangely, maybe, equanimity. There’s an opening, a generosity of the heart that shows up in the writing, the art, the music, that stands on its own, not leaning on anything. It doesn’t say, “Oh, look at how soulful I am,” or “Please love me,” or “Aren’t I generous?” It responds without a lot of fuss about it. It’s as if there’s a vacuum that needs to be filled, so it moves in to fill it. The impulse has an almost impersonal quality to it. In Buddhist terms, I’d say that this is an awareness of no-separation. In Christian terms (the only two traditions I know enough about to speak), there’s always Jesus between the impulse and the action.
Speaking of Jesus, whose birthday is celebrated today, Christmas sermons typically emphasize Jesus as representing hope, a new beginning, in a teleological way. A beginning (birth) and an end (death). There’s a beginning (sin) and an end (redemption) . The idea, generally, is to be good, generous, kind, toward some end. I prefer the sermons that talk about how we’re eternally at a pivot point, always beginning again whether we’re aware of it or not. And the closer we look, are we sure we know what’s good and what’s not? The book of Job says, more or less, “How can you possibly think you know the ways of God?”
What does openness of heart look like in art of all genres? Boy oh boy, I’m not sure how to say. Here’s what I’m pretty sure of: it shows up in a complete, continuous awareness that shuts nothing out. It doesn’t so much “sympathize” (feel for) as it expresses “compassion” (feeling with). That poor boy Pip in Great Expectations, how could Dickens have done any better at the beginning of that novel, expressing compassion? There’s Pip, alone in the graveyard. It’s cold, damp, foggy. He’s only seven, standing among the graves of his parents and his brothers. He names them, each one.
The long first paragraph ends, “The little bundle of shivers, growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip.”
Dickens can be insufferably sentimental, but not here. We are here with Pip, feeling alongside him.
And Yeats in “Easter, 1916”:
I write it out in a verse—MacDonagh and MacBrideAnd Connolly and PearseNow and in time to be,Wherever green is worn,Are changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.
To memorialize is one thing. To name the names of those killed in the Easter Rising in Ireland against British rule, to bring each one to consciousness and to end with that line, “A terrible beauty is born” is about as much heart as can be expressed on paper.
In music and visual art, again, the one quality I can point to is “lack of leaning.” If there is direct seeing, it isn’t leaning one way or the other. If it were, there’d be blurring or distortion. Each note knows only it can speak at that moment, in concert with another, that also only knows itself. A musician might be able to explain what I mean.
This is all very psychological, what I think I’m saying. It seems as if the ego can’t just be held “in check.” it has to be not-believed in. Its self-generated self-importance has to be seen for what it is, to be aware of what’s really there, to sing what there is to sing, to paint what there is to paint.
Jerry and I were listening to St. Olaf’s College Choir coming from Norway. My God, what beautiful voices, what perfect sound. What struck me is how singers stand while singing, their body language. They’re in identical robes, hands at their sides, relaxed, their voices carrying the whole of their individual expression. They’re utterly “being with” each other and the music.
Merry Christmas to you from me, no matter what that may mean to either of us. Merry Christmas from Wally, who is fond of the Christmas tree and its dangling things, each individual one, bright and battable.