Category: Poetry Koan

RESIGNATION by J.D. McClatchy

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date October 26, 2022

RESIGNATION

I like trees because they seem more resigned to
the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather

Here the oak and silver-breasted birches
Stand in their sweet familiarity
While underground, as in a black mirror,
They have concealed their tangled grievances,
Identical to the branching calm above
But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold
On what gives life to which is brutal enough.
Still, in the air, none tries to keep company
Or change its fortune. They seem to lean
On the light, unconcerned with what the world
Makes of their decencies, and will not show
A jealous purchase on their length of days.
To never having been loved as they wanted
Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation
Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced
To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.

J.D. McClatchy

On Making Room (via Rumi’s The Guest House)

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date September 25, 2019

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
They may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

This old chestnut, right?

I am often surprised when someone tells me they don’t know Rumi’s Guest House as it often appears to be as ubiquitous as all the other chestnuts from the mindfulness creed that has become so dominant in our culture over the last two decades.

If you’ve ever done an 8 week mindfulness course, your abiding memory of that course, other than the meditation exercises, will probably consist of these three things::

1/ Rumi’s Guest House
2/ Examining a raisin for a substantially long period of of time
3/ John Kabat Zinn’s definition of mindfulnessness: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

As with mindfulness which came out of a chiefly oral religious tradition (Buddhism), this poem was not “written” by Rumi. Coleman Barks wrote this poem in the 60s, animated and inspired by the poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī.

Rumi never actually wrote a poem called The Guest House. What he wrote was a whole bunch of stuff, including the Masnavi, a 50,000 line “Quran in Persian” from which Coleman Barks cherry-picked a few lines and images to make his American Buddhist flavoured poems.

The section from the Masnavi that this poem comes from is probably this one:

“Every day, too, at every moment a thought comes, like an honoured guest, into your bosom. O soul, regard thought as a person, since a person derives his worth from both thought and spirit. If the thought of sorrow is waylaying joy, it could also be considered as making preparations for joy. It violently sweeps your house clear of everything else, in order that new joy from the source of good may enter in. It scatters the yellow leaves from the bough of the heart, in order that incessant green leaves may grow. It uproots the old joy, in order that new delight may march in from the Beyond.”

Not quite as snappy and quotable, is it?

That said, let us not look a gift poem in the mouth. I have learnt that this is especially true when it comes to poetry. Because a poem is often a portrait of a fleeting moment or mind-state, even a religious fundamentalist (Hopkins) or an imperialist (Kipling) are able to write the occasional humane, universally wise and true poem.

It is universal because it expresses a fundamental psychological truth: most of the thoughts, feelings, situations, and bodily sensations that irk and discomfort us, we have scant, or even no control over. And for this reason, would be better served by not doing what we normally, neurobiologically (i.e. by default) are inclined to do when upset or irked: avoid, control, problem solve. Avoidance and control can at times be really helpful, but when they don’t work as strategies, time to consider a few other options?

It’s hard to put aside our default strategies. I even ended up using one of them (controlling/changing) on this poem. Because there’s a line in this poem that doesn’t sit well with me.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Meet them at the door laughing?

Can this even be done through free-will and choice, or does it need to be bolstered by a religious doctrine, which in the original Rumi poem, it is? I think we’re all capable, with a bit of practice in meeting these difficult internal states/guests with kindness, curiosity, even acceptance, but laughter?

Rumi’s exhortation to meet the unwelcome guests in a more modulated fashion comes earlier on in the poem in the dual meaning of the word “entertain”, both in terms of providing entertainment as well as giving attention or consideration to (an idea or feeling). I prefer this version of the poem (my controlled/changed version!), which is the one I’ve also learnt by heart and recite on an almost daily basis:

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door with kindness,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Whichever version you decide to learn by heart, I would really encourage you to learn this poem if it speaks to you. This poem is powerful poetic medicine for when the shit hits the fan, but I also find it forcing its way out from my lips when dealing with those things in our experience that fall short of expectation. Which is to say, for some of us, almost everything, almost all the time. Sometimes the old chestnuts are genuinely the most useful reminders.

Coping strategies Feel Better Intensity Meaning Mystery Overexcitability Poetry Koan Poetry Koan (By Heart) Refuge Revelation Spell of The Sensuous Waste and welter

On Living Intensely (via DH Lawrence’s Song of A Man Who Has Come Through)

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date September 25, 2019

A school age D.H. Lawrence (‘Bert’ at home, ‘Herbert’ at school, David for no-one) is sitting one day next to a neighbour’s child. Both of them are looking across the fields and the remnants of Sherwood Forest lying just north of Eastwood, the coal mining town where Bert lives and where his father works in the colliery.

Turning to his playmate, Bert opens his mouth and these words fall out: “Everywhere is blue and gold.”

There is a pause while the comment blows her mind. “Now you say a line,” he goes.

“Of course I could not,” she admits in an interview many years later.

Bert is considered something of a loner by the other children, a sickly child, preferring the company of girls to boys (‘Dicky Dicky Denches plays with the Wenches,’ the boys jeer at him). But he finds in language a protective ally:

“Those years at home, talking to his mother and listening to her, paid off: a schoolmate remembered ruefully how Lawrence started ‘hittin’ back wi’ his tongue an’ he could get at us wheer it hurt’. His brother George remembered ‘that very sharp tongue’ too: ‘it was as our old dad used to say: “to take the skin off your back”.’ Vituperation was a skill Lawrence developed early, to cope with the world.” (Worthen, 2006)

In a very different city, and a different social class, young Sigmund Freud is beginning his work with Josef Breuer on those human animals who experiences life with an at times debilitating intensity. This will be published a few years later as Studies in Hysteria.

Lawrence’s gimlet-eyed focus would also flower into something intense and hyper-elaborated: a preternatural sensitivity to other human beings and the natural environment, as well as the use of angry, and critical language as a defence mechanism.

Nowadays a psychiatrist might give him, and indeed many creatives, a Borderline Personality Diagnosis, sometimes also referred to as Emotional Intensity Disorder. But at that fin-de-siecle moment in the history of our species, amplified and exalted emotional intensity would still be categorised as a personality trait, perhaps akin to being very “passionate” about a certain cause (poetry for example), or as a religious narrative, or an imbalance of bodily humours.

What strikes me when reading John Worthen’s biography, but especially when reading Lawrence himself is Bert’s pedal-to-the-metal ferocity: the nought-to-sixty acceleration of his writing, and by extension, his inner world.

Intensity: a word that has buried within its origins both a sense of an urgent focal point (Latin intentus an aim, a purpose), but also a desire to extend ourselves and that which we interact with, to become more than just ambulatory meat machines. Intensity as a kind of magnification or elongation of our animal selves, an overreaching of the mundane space that our bodies take up.

Exhibit A: this poem, which I recite to myself on an almost daily basis, revelling in the hurricane-like force of its language and rhythms, but still not entirely sure from which direction to come at it, or where it might be coming at me.

SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them

You might decide to stop reading here. Because Lawrence is a marmite writer. You either enjoy and even revel in the ferocious, earnest, salty gusto of David Herbert Lawrence. Or you don’t. If not, you might prefer the cucumber and cream cheese poets of his generation (Lewis, Spender, MacNiece, Frost?) as more palatable existential sandwiches. You might even decide to politely look away when Bert starts huffing and puffing. Most poetry critics in this century now do, responding to Lawrence’s verse like a parent to a child having a temper tantrum: “You’ll need more than hot air to move that, or me, Bert.” If instead you continue reading, it’s probably because the malty, yeasty, umami smear of this poem speaks to your own encounter with the world. It certainly does mine.

I am sometimes surprised by the poems I choose to learn by heart. I have come to realise that they often fall into the category of work that is not entirely arcane and unknowable, and yet they often hold within them some deep, tantalising enigma, some koan that pulls me into their world in the same way that one is mysteriously attracted to a certain individual, or painting, or song, but not another. There is a mystery to this attraction, and to the attraction we have to certain poems. But also not, for can the attraction often be explained as a form of identification, the poet speaking for us in ways we can’t?

I think this is very much the case with Lawrence’s “Song of A Man Who Come Through”, which even though I have now recited it hundreds of times, even though it lives within me like the bacteria, archaea, protozoa and fungi that reside within my own body, making up as much as 3% of the entity I refer to as “me”, I still have no clear idea of what it’s really “about”.

What attracted me to the poem though was I think some kind of personal identification with the blazing pulse of the verse, it’s frenetic excitability.

“Not I, not I,” it begins, with that most elemental of iambs: da DUM da DUM. I love the fact that on the Wikipedia page explaining iambic pentameter, you can listen to a human heartbeat as an illustration of this deep, embodied affiliation we have to the most common meter in English poetry.

I equally love the way the almost martial, combative negation of the first four beats disperses into a more open, aerated release following the conjuctive ‘but’: “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!” (da DUM da DUM, dada DUM dada DUM DUM!)

On first hearing those ‘nots’ we might think that Lawrence is setting himself up in opposition to something (being oppositional is very Lawrentian): “Not I for Brexit! Not I for Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson (as Stewart Lee memorably full-named Johnson after he connived his way, Richard III-like, into taking on the mantle of Prime Minister). That sort of thing.

Instead, this is an inner battle that Lawrence is exemplifying, perhaps the greatest inner battle we can “fight” as language-making and marking, linguistically-conscious animals. Let’s call this “the battle” that between my-ego/my-self (i.e. that part of me that desires and plots and attempts to manipulate other people and my environment into giving me what I want) versus a more contingent sense of self, here represented by the wind. Wind-carried-self is in the world of this poem everything else (other poems, songs, sunlight, my neighbour’s child wailing on the landing) that “blows through me”, shaping my lived experience and narrative about that experience as it does. But it’s a not-me, or rather not-unless-I-make-it-so (perhaps by learning the poem by heart?). We might call this part of us: the contingent self.

In buddhist literature, this is sometimes referred to as no-self, or non-self, but my understanding of this is that although we see ourselves as separate, self-determined entities, our experience of the world is inextricably, at every moment of the day, shaped and circumscribed by our environment, as well as our life course up to this point. This is the context in which we live and are “made”: the weather, the words we read or listen to, the people who populate our existence, and a million other factors that are not even a conscious part of our awareness. It’s not necessarily more more complicated than that.

In Robert Hass’s poem, Measure, Hass catches a glimpse of himself, which seems to stand for an almost phenomenological signature of his life, not in the denizens of his environment (a plum tree, sunlight, a mountain, his writing desk), but in “the pulse / that forms these lines”. Similarly, we find Lawrence embodied in the pulse of this poem, and it’s a ferocious embodiment, an intense life-sucking or broadcasting phenomenon, a yearning, an insistent, ecstatic, turbulent, hopeful, alarmed, importunate Lawrentian pulse.

I start reading a feted biography of Lawrence to experience some of that intensity, and there are glimpses of that therein, but of course to really “be inside” DH Lawrence, one needs to read him. You get that intensity in spades as soon as you enter this poem, or read a few pages of his prose.

To give you a sense of the prose outside that of the novels, let’s turn to Exhibit B, an essay from the vast opus of Lawrentian excitability: “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine”.

This starts as a piquantly observed and participative portrait of a neighbourhood porcupine, words wedged as is often the case with Lawrence into the pungent, clammy cleft of love-and-hate (“He slithered podgily down again, and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail….He was repugnant.”). It then transmutes into another deeply conflicted (compassion vs. frustration? care vs. rage?) report of his attempt to remove porcupine quills from the muzzle of a neighbour’s dog, which thereafter hardens into the resolve to chastisingly kill one of those local porcupines, with all the mixed feelings that follow the murder.

In the hands of any other writer, here the essay might wind to a close. But not for Lawrence. This is only 1/5th of the way into a 6000 word essay. He still has in store for us a wonderful cat-chase-chipmunk tale summation of evolutionary pecking orders (“Life moves in circles of power and of vividness, and each circle of life only maintains its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle. If the lower cycles of life are not mastered, there can be no higher cycle.”), as well as a kind of metaphysics of vivacity (“The ant is more vividly alive than the pine-tree. We know it, there is no trying to refute it.”)

And before you know it, he’s taken us into “the fourth dimension, of being” (!) spelt out in five inexorable laws, followed by an ecstatic, extended grappling and grasping through language, much as I am perhaps doing here, often veering off into a kind of literary version of speaking in tongues, where he tries to pull us into the very nucleus of his intense vision. The short, representational or figurative paragraphs early on in the essay extend and amplify into long, flowing shudders and judders of mystical poesis, similar in energy to the above poem.

We start reading his essay in a place we might recognise as prose, in which meaningful and somewhat measured (for Lawrence) points about the natural world and our response to it are made, but like a rocketship passing swiftly through the lower layers of the stratosphere only to emerge into the cosmos, we are soon blasted along by his fervour into imaginings which all at once slice the tops of our heads off and plunge us into the very yolk of our animate and animal existence, the very existential glue that binds us to every other life form.

We are now in that Lawrentian realm of blood-consciousness, which is to say ““an organic, bodily intentionality that operates outside the realm of intellect, cognition, or mental consciousness and outside of the self-reflective, self-conscious object”.

Ulrike Maud in her essay on Lawrence and Merleau Ponty, shows us how Lawrence’s notion of the unconscious was different to Freud’s in being a bodily modality rather than an attribute of the mind. And perhaps when one lives in a body that from a very young age functions only intermittently, the life of the mind will invariably take anchor in the flesh rather than in the purely abstract realm of language. Although for Lawrence I think it pendulates between the two, as it does for most of us.

“My great religion is a belief in the blood,” he writes in a letter to Ernest Collings, “the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”

Song of A Man Who Has Come Through is a clarion call for this kind of embodied thinking. All the sensations, all the content of the poem (the chisel-like winds of change, the rock-splitting and bubbling-up wonder, the knocking of anxiety), are experienced in the body, or rather the natural-world in which the body resonates as just one element, even though it is the mind chronicling the phenomena of consciousness.

“Before thought takes place, before the brain is awake in the small infant, the body is awake and alive, and in the body the great nerve centres are active, active both in knowing and in asserting. This knowledge is not mental, it is what we may call first-consciousness. Now our first consciousness is seated, not in the brain, but in the great nerve centres of the breast and the bowels, the cardiac plexus and the solar plexus. Here life first seethes into active impulse and consciousness, the mental understanding comes later.”

Although this was written in a 1919 essay on Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur in The English Review, it might happily sit in a 2019 Neuroscience journal (presented in slightly different language) under the title The biological and psychological basis of neuroticism. For to read the latter, which I do, is to recognise the shared quest between Lawrence and the neuropsychologists or psychoananalysts to understand the embodied, inner chaos of our emotional lives that Lawrence writes about again and again

Another word for intensity is overexcitablity, with its associations of children getting carried away with an idea or an emotion, or my canine companion Max with a stick. To say that someone is “intense” is maybe the more mature/adult (?) version of saying that a child is “overexcitable”, or to put it in our current medicalised parenting parlance: ADHD. We see this in a child who can’t sleep the night before Christmas due to overexcitability, or gets carried away by a game to the extent of hurting or frightening other children away. An adult on a dating app responds to another person’s humdrum questions with long, encumbered screeds because s/he is “intense”, and equally scares them away. The “problem” of intensity is as much about behaviour that falls short of socially established norms, behaviour that works in a dramatic frame (films, songs, books) but is sometimes too ornamental for prosaic living. Those who are considered to be attractively intense-but also worryingly or wearily de trop at times- in their responses are often the outliers, falling short of standard narratives of what it means to be or perform “human”. In nature, we often call this supererogatory quality a weed.

Some weeds, the bindweed that is taking over my garden at present, have incredibly beautiful flowers and foliage, but are just too damn intense. Bindweed wants to write itself into every flowerbed, but I don’t want it everywhere. I sometimes get this feeling when reading Lawrence, also Whitman. Their deftness with language makes them delicious in small quantities, but we soon tire of their intensity.

When we bring in a century of psychological scrutiny to this state, we find many terms accompanied by capitalised acronyms, most of them denoting the diagnostic equivalent of “Houston, we have a problem” but with no indication of an etiology or prognosis. There’s classic neuroticism for example (N), which morphs mid-century into borderline personality disorder (BPD), and later in a bid to destigmatise the implicit censure of the label Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD), or Emotional Intensity Disorder (EID).

Even less harsh sounding versions of these terms now exist: Elaine Aron’s Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), and Dabrowski’s “Tragic Gift” of Overexcitability. But all still boils down to pretty much the same thing: a human organism that feels things (emotions, thoughts, its own perceptions) very very intensely, which at times can almost feel too much for the container of that body-mind to hold. And when it spills out, it is usually too much for others to hold too.

I remember at University sometimes being so excited by the potential of reading and writing that I might not even be able to sit down and focus on actually reading something (anything!) and writing something (anything!). We usually had a week to do all our reading for a particular topic and then submit an essay for the following week’s tutorial. We were very rarely given an essay title. More often than not, it was just: “Next week, Dickens. Go!” I would head off with intense excitement to the library and start checking out primary and secondary sources, my head spinning with possibilities and potential. So many possibilities, so much excitement. It was wearying. No wonder I burnt myself out pretty quickly. And this was in relation to by-and-large positive stimuli. Usually when we pathologise intensity, we focus on negative reactivity which is where most intense people come a cropper, but also become conscious of having a “problem”. But I think it’s important to highlight that intensity in any realm is something of a mixed blessing.

Excitability and Intensity, like all personality traits, represent a continuum, which is often represented as a normally distributed bell curve. Most people lie somewhere in the middle of this. Lawrence, as do many other writers and artists, would probably fall on the downward slope where intensity can become unworkable at times in how it manifests in our lives. But Intensity (or Neuroticism) is only one of five key traits recognised by psychologists, and understandably, how we “score” on other traits will affect our overall engagement with our environment. Someone who is very intense, but also conscientious and agreeable, may have an easier time fitting into society than someone who is intense but scores low on pro-social traits like Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion. Worthen’s biography shows that Lawrence has enough of these other traits to balance his neuroticism.

In Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through, we see Lawrence, as with most people who recognise their intensity as signalling and singling themselves out at as personae non gratae, trying on different modes in an attempt to find a more comfortable or amenable way of existing in the world. These are the if-onlys of the poem, pointing to ways in which the speaker recognises his falling short of socially-established and rewarded norms, and techniques. The vision here is one that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern mindfulness class:

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world

Children who are deemed problematic due to their intensity and overexcitability are often encouraged or goaded into towing the line through sticks or “prizes” (the naughty step) and carrots (rewards for being “good”).

There are three “prizes” envisaged in this poem:

1/ something which is challenging to us gets resolved (the rock splits);
2/ we find transcendent meaning and purpose for our lives (we shall come at the wonder)
3/ we get to experience immense peace and pleasure (finding the Hesperides).

The Hesperides is a stand-in here for the good life, eudaimonia, or happiness, the Greek version of The Garden of Eden, with similarly tempting apples. Golden apples, guarded by a dragon (Ladon) who doesn’t require any sleep to function. Hesperides is a place, like heaven, like any of our idealised versions of happiness, which lie beyond the reach of us human animals, a place where we dream about the lives we might have lived, or the people we might be, if we were not so frustratingly living as the people we are. These are also spaces where, as the chorus members of Euripides’ Hippolytus tell us, the Blessed live. In “happiness” of course, feeding upon ambrosia. Or as David Byrne memorably sang: “Everyone is trying to get into the bar. The name of the bar is called heaven.” And even though nothing ever happens in heaven, or the hesperides other than one’s favourite band playing one’s favourite song over and over again, this doesn’t seem to dissuade us.

Heracles was set the task by Eurystheus of stealing some of these apples. We are all, in different ways, trying to steal the apples of happiness. In the Freudian worldview, the golden apples of peace and happiness are only stolen or temporarily savoured in our ordinary human unhappiness via a series of short cuts or “techniques”. But the apples don’t turn us into angels, or our lives into heaven.

Interestingly, this apple-scrumping task was Heracles’ eleventh labour. It was given to him by Eurystheus in addition to the initial ten as it was deemed he cut corners of the others. Even here, the acquiring of the apples involved a ruse: tricking Atlas into doing the job for him while Heracles held up the heavens for a while.

Attic pottery often shows a happy Heracles sitting in the garden attended by the maidens. Perhaps, befitting myths written by men, the virginal Hesperides share some mythological resonance with Islamic houris, those almond-eyed, but “modest gazing” maidens who await the faithful male follower of Mohammed in heaven as a reward for carrying out their religious duties on earth. Heracles is not shown having sex with the maidens though. Perhaps because, returning to that David Byrne song (but also thinking about our own cultural moment where virtual sex is now available 24/7) the tropes of happiness are more about accessing pleasure than a narrative about transfiguration:

Heaven is a place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens
When this kiss is over
It will start again
It will not be any different
It will be exactly the same
It’s hard to imagine
That nothing at all
Could be so exciting
Could be this much fun.

Post-Eysenck we now know that intensity/overexcitability reflects excessive physiological responsiveness (or arousability) of certain brain systems, especially the amygdala, and how it responds to negative or threatening stimuli (that knocking on the door). Again and again, we find in academic papers about emotional reactivity, glimpses of Lawrence, but also of all us neurotics: the exquisite, but at times damning sensitivity of physiological processes (blood consciousness) leading to negative emotion. But equally, and relevant to this poem: information-processing routines (aka mental perceptions) that assign “codes” for threat to certain kinds of triggers, as well as a greater likelihood to experience self-perceptions “characterized by themes of personal inadequacy and insecurity…and social fears such as being criticized or rejected”.

This is all very well and good, but having ever more refined psychosociobiological descriptors for our neurotic states, still leaves us, like Lawrence, exercised by the various “winds” (thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations) that blow through us. Other than drugs to mute our intense selves, or psychological strategies, also known as emotion regulation strategies, which add all sorts of knobs and buttons to our inner amplifiers (many of them impressive to look at, but hardly ever used), what to do if you too experience very intense feelings and reactions to those feelings?

My suggestion would be to learn this poem, and then recite it when you’re feeling tossed about by life, because Lawrence’s injunction in the final verse is still one that underpins any and every helpful psychological therapy currently known to us. Which is that the mind is designed to avoid, fix, or control the winds of change, as well as our at-times overwhelming wonder and anxiety at being contingent human animals in a world that encompasses, but also challenges us. Avoiding, fixing and controlling, quite often do the job. But for certain times and states, they don’t work. Instead we might choose in an extremely counter-intuitive fashion, to at times open ourselves to and “admit” those things which every cell of our being wants to close the door on.

Dabrowski has a wonderful term for this process: positive disintegration.

Overexcitability is a temperamental quality (a tragic gift he would call it) possessed by individuals which enables them to experience life at a deeper level. There are five of these “gifts”: sensual overexcitability, psychomotor, imaginational, intellectual, and emotional.

Endowed with these gifts, an individual reacts much more profoundly to a great number of stimuli, but with mixed results. Experience affects these individuals significantly more and often to a much greater depth. Someone who doesn’t have this quality, might read a poem, smile and go about their day. Another might read it, and feel compelled to write or talk about it. This is great when it comes to essays on the internet, but sometimes can wrongfoot us or others.

The key it seems, as much as anything else, is finding personal meaning in meaningless suffering. As Marjorie M. Kaminski Battaglia explains: the concept of expiative suffering is essential to Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. “Dabrowski appreciates and attaches value to human suffering and crisis. Instead of suffering viewed as a meaningless burden (Why me?), it becomes an opportunity for an individual to develop and grow. Suffering offers the chance to choose to become.”

Expiation. This is most certainy a poem about expiation: as in EX (out of, from within, think of the word “exhale”) + piare (propitiate, appease).

The word in its current usage appears to date back to the Late 16th century where it was used to signify a kind of ending (of rage, sorrow, or some other unsettling emotions) by feeling into that emotion (suffering it mindfully in attempt to appease the emotional “gods” within). Or as Dan Savage often memorably puts it: allowing ourselves to “feel the fuck out of our feelings”, but without becoming enslaved to them. There is an art to this, as well as a skill. Is this not the art or skill all of us intense folk are working with at any given time? I think it is.

But consider also another etymological link to expiation: ‘to appease by sacrifice’. The sacrafice here being perhaps our own rigid and inflexible notions and reactions to what’s going on inside us, or around us, which Lawrence challenges himself and us to make space for.

What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door of our sensitive nervous systems in response to a trigger? If it is somebody/something wanting to do us harm, let us protect ourselves. But more often than not, the harm we perceive is a phantasm or projection of our intensely imaginative minds.

I used to think that the three strange angels referred to at the end of the poems was another reference to the nymphs in the garden, but I’ve discovered that it may also be a biblical allusion from Genesis 18-19 where God and two angels appear to Abraham announcing that they’re going to decimate Sodom. Two of them (Lawrence makes it three) go on to Sodom to lead Lot and his family out of the city before its destruction.

Sometimes, when we get overexcited by a thought or an emotion, it might function like those three angels bearing some news we really do need to take on board and “do something” about.

-We are destroying our planet!
-This relationship/friendship is no longer working for you!
-You are bored with your job and need to find something more meaningful to do with the rest of your life.

Those messages are always worth taking heed of.

But more often than not, our overexcitable stories probably shouldn’t be acted on. Instead, hard as this may be at times (or even always), we might choose to sit or walk quietly for a few minutes, just breathing and feeling into our wounded selves, admitting (literally: giving entrance, allowing to enter; but also metaphorically admitting) our own uninvited guests.

Which might take us to another poem about (literally) making room for uncomfortable feelings: Rumi’s Guest House.

Adam Phillips Poetry Koan Poetry Koan (By Heart) Success

Poetry Koan #11: Writing by Philip Larkin

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date July 21, 2019

WRITING

Quarterly, is it, writing reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of attention and good looks,
You could get them still by writing a few books.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a publisher, good friends, and a wife:
Clearly writing has something to do with life

—In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can’t get writing carefree with all you desire,
And however you bank your scrawl, the writing you save
Won’t in the end make you less of a slave to it.

I listen to my writing singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Writing and keeping count (of money, ideas, goods and services) emerged at the same time in our history: about 5,000 years ago. Both were a response to information overload, rather than as a means for sharing stories, ideas, hopes and dreams with other human beings.

While we still lived in small hunter-gatherer communities of no more than a hundred people, these needs could be met verbally. Just as this morning I might not necessarily sit down to write this if a tribe of human apes were amenable to chewing on and digesting the utterances I presented to them. Twitter is now our haphazard, etiolated shadow of this paleolithic social ideal. Once, my ideas, stories, and beliefs would be added to the collective mythos, just as foodstuffs I’d found or hunted would be shared by the tribe. But with complex communities and the need to communicate with others separate from us in time and space, writing as we know it came about.

“It is telling that the first recorded name in history [Kushim] belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, presenting to us one of the first pieces of writing we know of: a receipt acknowledging that 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months.

This was 5,000 years ago. The information, as you can see in the photograph of this example of proto-writing, was imprinted onto a clay tablet in what is now known as partial script. Partial script would not allow you to write anything resembling poetry or an essay. To do this, we would have to wait for “full script” (cuneiform) to evolve, which today we might recognise as something akin to the writing you’re reading here.

How did we get to the position where we would find our writing “reproaching us”? Perhaps for not publishing, and so failing to adequately meet that primal need that we share with all our hominid ancestors: to have our thoughts and feelings heard and acknowledged (i.e. read)?

Larkin would seem to be suggest that our writing has become a kind of stand-in or a place-holder for privation or our own deficiencies. In this we find ourselves forever falling short of the fantasy of abundance and sufficiency, and so we console ourselves with this proxy of prosperity. “Writing is pure potentiality,” Neil Roberts reminds us in his essay “Philip Larkin and The Importance of Elsewhere”, “as long as you hold on to it, your existence is underwritten by the elsewhere of where your work has yet to be published.”

We indulge in the fantasy that achievements in this field (writing, but any human activity might be substituted here) will result in being rewarded with those things we yearn for. As great apes what we crave most intensely are communal rewards: recognition, social validation, as well as stimulating and loving allies (friends, romantic partners). But also reliable channels through which we can be heard (read) and acknowledged, channels such as books, journals, or newspapers that help us to disseminate our own response to being alive.

Last weekend, walking near Ivinghoe Beacon, trying to memorise this poem, my mind a little super-silver-hazy, it attempted to speak back to Larkin’s poetic downers with a non-deprivatory rejoinder: “Yeah, but why sweat it? Isn’t writing just moving stuff (abstractions) around? We writers are no more than data-mongers really, no more special or important than literate dung beetles.”

It continued to lecture me:

“Wikipedia is the perfect paradigm for this. Nobody -neither prince, pauper, nor university professor- gets their own byline. As one of the top five websites on the internet, it is nothing more (but who would want more?) than a written repository of all that we know. Maybe “fine” writing, as in “fine dining”, is just somebody taking that repository and others like it, and serving it up to us in ways that are aesthetically appealing, thus gaining extra kudos by doing so.

But the ingredients don’t change, and so maybe we should learn to drop some of the consummate, ego-driven significance we attach to this activity? Just as with the relation of food to excrement, all the data we possess about ourselves and our world flows through our minds, spills out of our mouths/pens/keyboards, and is then swilled around in books, on screens, in songs, treatises, and poems. And just like food or excrement, this existential bounty is fed into other mouths, digested by other systems and released back into the world to fertilise and thus keep on feeding other entities? Which is all good and fine, but nothing to write home about.”

“Like Karl Marx,” writes the critic James Booth, “poets are alert to the distinction between life as an end in itself, and life abstracted to a medium of exchange: the paradoxically inhuman resource of writing. Writing may be necessary, but only those sad people who have no real life to speak of live in terms of writing. As Schopenhauer put it: ‘Writing is human happiness in abstracto, consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on writing. It is clear, surely, where Larkin, the poet of ‘living’, must stand on this issue.”

But is it clear? Learning the poem by heart, I am forced to pay particular attention to the three things out of many thousands of things that Larkin could have chosen to mindfully, expansively dwell on in the provincial town where he and we find ourselves situated at the end of the poem:

I listen to my writing singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Why slums, the canal, and churches? All three perhaps have some relation to writing. Slums are symbols of deprivation. Canals carry and disseminate those things we need to live and prosper such as water, food, and information. Churches contain some of our most ardently held belief systems: the foundational rules and regulations upon which our Western culture is based. They are ornate architecturally, as well as liturgically, but why mad? Perhaps because the crepuscular interior of churches is derived to some extent from the irrational penumbra that emanates from us when we kneel down to pray to our invisible sky gods.

But no less “mad” than literary festivals where we go to worship or pay homage to our information-disseminators. There are no festivals celebrating builders, or people who sell cooked and flavoured corn on street corners. But we celebrate writers. And for this reason, for those who feel compelled to write, we also open ourselves to frustration when we are engaged in an activity where the symbolic stakes have been set so high. Hence also the peculiar, almost intimate disappointment of finding ourselves the celebrant but never the celebrated, the bridgegroom never the bride.

Larkin uses the word “sad” to describe this state of affairs, but another word for this, even if opening ourselves to accusations of hyperbole, might be “tragic”. Adam Phillips in his essay “On Frustration” begins with the assertion that:

“Tragedies are stories about people not getting what they want, but not all stories about people not getting what they want seem tragic. In comedies people get something of what they want, but in tragedies people often discover that their wanting doesn’t work, and as the story unfolds they get less and less of what they thought they wanted. Indeed, both what they want and how they go about wanting it wreaks havoc and ultimately destroys the so-called tragic hero and, of course, his enemies and accomplices. Whether it is called ambition, the quest for love, or the search for truth, tragedies expose, to put it as simply as possible, what the unhappy ending of wanting something looks like…. Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.”

Phillips is very good on how this state affairs might hold within it the plangent sadness that Larkin so exquisitely captures at the end of this poem:

“Lives are tragic not merely when people can’t have everything they want but when their wanting mutilates them; when what they want entails an unbearable loss.”

One gets the sense, which is often the case with Larkin, that his frustrations have “mutilated” him to some degree, that there is “an unbearable loss” which he, and perhaps we who identify with the poem, don’t entirely understand. Perhaps this is because “it is extremely difficult to feel one’s frustration, to locate, however approximately, what it might be that one is frustrated by or about”. To dwell on or in our frustrations as Larkin does in “Writing” is to often come across to others as carping or infantile. Which perhaps hints at the developmental challenge we all face with regard to writing, money, sex, or whatever else it is that frustrates us.

Phillips as ever, turns to literature (King Lear) and Freud (‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning’) to make sense of this.

In Freud’s 1911 essay, he presents an image of the psyche in a state of equilibrium which then becomes “disrupted” by the urgent demands of inner needs which unsettle and disturb us. The infant, aware of its hunger, fantasises that which might satisfy its hunger. She discovers however, when the wished for meal is eaten -the book or article written and published- that it is often only an approximation of what she dreamt up in her fantasy. It is this disillusionment though which leads us to making a somewhat uneasy peace with reality, which some would say denotes psychological maturity. Freud called this state of affairs The Reality Principle.

Phillips singles out three consecutive frustrations that lead potentially to The Reality Principle: “the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasised satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasised satisfaction. Three frustrations, three disturbances, and two disillusionments. It is, what has been called in a different context, a cumulative trauma; the cumulative trauma of desire. And this is when it works.”

Intensely sad? Yes, and whether “intensely” so or not probably depends on all sorts of other factors. But it is also “intensely real”. ““And reality matters,” argues Phillips, “because it is the only thing that can satisfy us. We are tempted, initially, to be self-satisfying creatures, to live in a fantasy world, to live in our minds, but the only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating; but only in the sense that they are disparate from, not in accord with, our wished-for satisfactions (the most satisfying pleasures are the surprising ones, the ones that can’t be engineered).”

Phillips then says something which I think curmedgeonly Larkin would have loved him for writing. I certainly love him for writing this, for the validating balm of his response when applied to all our frustrated, not-getting-what-we-want petulance: “How could we ever be anything other than permanently enraged?”

This also points to why Larkin poetry will continue to be read, regardless of the “unwoke” reputation that has now been assigned to him. Larkin’s poetry will persist because he resists in this poem and others the standard narrative of the twentieth century, and of my profession too, which is that you can change yourself from the inside out and vice-versa if only you make the right kind of effort to do so.

Larkin was once asked if he might have been happier, to which he answered: “Yes, but not without being somebody else.” One senses that the intense sadness he experiences at the end of the poem is not however going to result in him establishing a fundamentally different relationship to his writing or himself, but that rather he has decided to throw in his lot with the Freudian reality principle, and so take his chances with “common unhappiness” rather than “hysterical misery”: pragmatically, regretfully, maybe even a little tragically, but with open eyes.

Oh, and by the way, just in case you’re not a Larkin aficionado, Phillip Larkin never wrote a poem called Writing. He did however write a poem called Money. But as I am not as frustrated by the symbolic fiction of money as I am by writing (Harari: “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, or writing, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”) I altered a couple of words to make it more applicable to my own frustrations. I don’t think if Larkin were he here today, he would have terribly minded, do you?

Poetry Koan Poetry Koan (By Heart)

Poetry Koan #10: Self Portrait by Mary Jean Chan

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date July 7, 2019

SELF-PORTRAIT

Tell me what I am, for I
cannot fathom at a glance
why this creature longs
for sunsets it has not yet seen,
or refuses the notion of home,
only to set out in search of it…

I wear skin the way the land bears
its own light. I cry rain, speak thunder,
burn at the core of this being human.
I am tellurian, tethered forever
to this sublunary sphere. Is that why
I am unable to forget you, you whose words
stain the skies at dusk, a flock of swallows
mapping their sorrows with each wing-beat?

Oh, canvas earth, we were never born
artist enough for you. You speak to us
in prophecies now. Your veins are molten
lava, torrential rain, hurricanes, glaciers
drowning in the currents of our undoing.
What do we land-locked souls know
about the ocean? We have a world of ice
frozen within us, and the waters are rising.

—

The process of finding a poem you want to commit to memory and recite every day for the rest of your life is often a circuitous one. I think I started learning this poem as a pro-social gesture towards a poet who I interviewed for a podcast I ran for a year or two called Poetry Pharmacy, which subsequently mutated into Poetry Koan so as not to step on William Sieghart’s toes who has ostensibly copyrighted the former title by using it for his so-so anthology.

The idea behind Poetry Pharmacy/Poetry Koan was to invite a poet I like to have a discussion with me about a poem that they felt was a kind of “medicine” for them, or a self-cure, and so offer this as a sort of “public good” (?) to others.

Here’s how I would “sell” the idea to a prospective interviewee:

“The plan is to share through a close-reading conversation a single poem that exists for you as an existential koan, a kind of “gateless barrier” to some understanding or insight which you sense/hope this poem might lead you towards (even if you perhaps haven’t quite got there yet). Maybe this is a poem you keep on returning to and thinking about, one that (for you) might fit the following description from the medieval Zen monk Wumen Huikai: “reading it is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t.” It can be a poem you’ve always loved, or one you that you’ve read recently which knocked your socks off.”

I think I created the podcast because a part of me thought that by speaking to poets, I might also make some poet friends. Don’t we all want friends who are also poets? I know I do. But I soon discovered that having a one-off conversation with someone you admire, even if it’s a good one, probably won’t ever lead to the close bonds we use the word friendship to denote. If that were the case, lots of creative people would hang out with journalists who interview them, and for the most part, they don’t. People hang out with folk they’ve gone to school or University with, or people they’ve dated, or worked alongside.

This is an extremely well-established social set-up, stretching back millions of years. Most primate communities you may have noticed are closed groups. They are often tied to a particular locale and rarely migrate outside of their home range. Our aloofness from others prevents a high concentrations of individuals which could result in a depletion of resources. There are only a very limited number of concerns willing to publish poetry, and only a few more willing to buy, read and talk about it. Those learning poems by heart as a committed practice are even rarer.

This saddens me – but that’s OK, lots of stuff saddens me. Homonid communities usually avoid each other and are aggressive towards outsiders. As a result, social interactions between members of different “troops” (poets and psychotherapists, say) are not especially common. Chimpanzees are a notable exception. When a group of chimpanzee poets meets a troop of psychotherapists, this often results in an exciting, friendly encounter lasting several hours, following which, some of the adult females switch groups. One sometimes see this occurring in human animals too, but usually only if both poet and psychotherapist have a certain shared status. Adam Phillips’ conversations with poets at Lutyens and Rubinstein (join their mailing list if you’re in London and want to be alerted to these) is a good example of this.

When MJ agreed to do the podcast, I decided I’d learn one of her own poems, and this one spoke to me. Perhaps because both of us are emigrants, both of us coming to the UK to study and then deciding to stay here. This poem earnestly capsulizes that existential displacement, but it also amplifies or extends it to anxieties about climate change, the loss of romantic or companionable ties, as well as a profound meditation on our own fundamental unknowability.

I got the sense that MJ was not pleased with my choice of this poem as a favourite, and one to learn by heart. I felt in her the embarrassment of a writer towards their own juvenilia, or of work that is no longer on-brand. Chan has become known in the last few years for writing woke, sociopolitical poems focusing on homophobia as it manifests in the family, especially in East Asian families, and this poem lacks that autobiographical and zeitgeisty specificity. It is an orphan of sorts, displaced in the poet’s own oeuvre, and not included in her first collection Flèche.

At some level, disowned by its writer, not even available online anymore as it once was, this poem has become untethered to the self it was once a portrait of, which perhaps frees it up to become anyone’s (self) portrait in a way that Chan’s subsequent poems can’t, or won’t? I tell the poem each time I recite it that as derivative, unfledged, and sophomoric as its creator might deem it to be (whether this creator is Chan herself, or some belletristic deity) no reader has committed to memory any of its Faber & Faber-anointed brothers and sisters yet, and maybe never will. Who does this console? Me, the poem? Both or neither of us?

I have recited this poem so many times that it has become my poem now, in a way that a parent of an adopted child sees that child as her child first and foremost. I have not given birth to this poem, but I have loved and cared for it, and brought it to life thousands of times with my own ape breath. At some level, I think the poem knows this, as much as the plants and animals we love and care for know this, as much as any life form might respond favourably when it is seen and cherished, which is to say read or recited aloud.

Feel Better Maslow Poetry Koan Poetry Koan (By Heart)

Poetry Koan #9: The Bright Field by R.S. Thomas

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date July 7, 2019

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

—

Start by-hearting poems and soon you’ll find yourself in a conversation with someone on Twitter wanting to know what technique you’ve been using to commit your 12,000 words of verse to memory.

“Have you tried the method of loci?” enquires Ian (“Poet, Artist, and Writer. @UCBerkeley alum slummin’ in Dublin”) stopping one May morning to inspect a fresh rabbit dropping otherwise known as a tweet in which I’ve mentioned my project.

The Method of Loci (MoL for all you budding cognitive neuroscientists out there) is a mnemonic device that uses visual imagery to link together a series of tangentially related bits of data in a way that the human mind can contain more information than you would expect this lump of meat we call our brains might hold. Data such as a portion of the trillion digits following a decimal place which is used to represent π is an example of this. Milton’s Paradise Lost is another.

The ardent Memory Master or Mnemonist will allocate information such as numbers or words to the loci (locations) of a familiar route or maybe the layout of rooms in a building she knows well, or even to objects and furniture in those rooms. Thereafter, by mentally retracing the route, the Mnemonist will have a series of retrieval cues for this data, “so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves” as the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero explains in De Oratore, a text that first introduced us to this technique 2,000 years ago.

The reason Ian is asking about MoL is not because MoL is particularly useful for remembering a poem. A poem is not a series of random digits or facts, it already has a somewhat cohesive shape and music to it, and even a specifically poetic narrative which might assist us with our memorising.

But as with most exchanges on Twitter, Ian’s main purpose for enquiring about MoL is as a pretext for him to showboat his own use of MoL to memorise Merwin’s 12-line poem Rain Light, which seems to me a bit like using a jackhammer to crack a walnut. I don’t say this to Ian however because Poetry Twitter, unlike the rest of Twitter, is a predominantly supportive and benign environment, populated for the most part by time-wasting neurotics and blatherskites, myself and Ian being two lesser-known illustrations of this, all of us publicly tolerating each other whilst pro-socially backslapping our inconsequential and largely unread outputs in prose and especially in verse.

Of all the memorisation techniques out there, MoL doesn’t seem especially useful when it comes to learning poetry. Not even Akira Haraguchi, who has memorised over 100,000 digits of pi uses MoL. Instead he turns those 100,000 digits into a kind of poem! He does this by associating each number with a syllable and then creates poem-like narratives from the words produced by those syllables.

“I have created about 800 stories, whose lead characters are mostly animals and plants,” he explains. “For the first 100 digits of pi, I have crafted a story about humans. Here is how the first 50 digits, starting with 3.14, reads: “Well, I, that fragile being who left my hometown to find a peace of mind, is going to die in the dark corners; it’s easy to die, but I stay positive.”

His quest to learn as many of the pi digits is not that dissimilar to my own more diminutive challenge of memorising 100 poems. For both of us it is a spiritual practice at best, but also a time-dissipator, a wordy or digity mantra, helping us to focus our wayward minds by calling into being, if only as an echoing abstraction, the whole known and unknown universe, including that of consciousness, through a rotating prayer of atoms and spinning electrons, circumvolving planets and galaxies. Which in one way is wonderful, and in another way completely nuts. Haraguchi’s family are not interested in pi, and my family are not interested in poetry. They see his quest rather, as no doubt do mine, as “an enormously harmless hobby”.

But I think R.S. Thomas would have appreciated Haraguchi’s quixotic focus of interest, which also chimes so well with this poem.

My experience of learning poetry by heart is that the relationship between the words to be learned and the arbitrary psychogeography one might choose for those words to be associated with, functions antithetically to traditional MoL. Often when I am reciting certain poems, the landscapes I had unspooling around me whilst I learnt the poem return as confederates to the words that once inhabited them.

In my mind, Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things will always be associated with the river Chess near Latimer Park farm. Similarly James Wright’s Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota reminds me of walking on a narrow path, hedges on both sides near Leyhill Common, unaware that the route ahead was going to be closed by roadworks, resulting in half an hour of scramble with a small dog in my arms over 3 metre high temporary mesh-fencing panels in a bid to break out. I don’t know why I am telling you this. Maybe just to reiterate that I’m not at the moment using any formal system for learning the 10 or 12,000 words that will eventually make up my 100 poem Poetry Liturgy.

How I learn a poem is like this. I read the first line or two. I repeat it, I repeat it, I repeat it. I think about it, savour it, play with different ways of saying it, often imagine what is being presented a visual image. I repeat the line again and again. I then add another line and do the same. I go back to the first line and notice I’ve forgotten that, so I begin again: repeating, savouring, thinking, visualising, trying out different combinations of emphasis and articulation. I do this for a while until I have a few lines going. I then add a bit more, until maybe I’ve got what feels like one semantic unit. In Bright Field, that first unit might be:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it.

I start to notice the unique physicality of each clause, as you might recognise the ways in which another human being walking alongside you uses their limbs, and how those limbs are shaped.

Thomas’s language is pared down to the bone: it is taut, and wiry and matter-of-fact. You see this especially in “and gone my way / and forgotten it”. The discursive mind wants to add other words to these two clauses, perhaps repeating the auxiliary verb “have” in the first line alongside an adverb to make “and have gone on my way”. The mind is always doing this when learning poems: coming up with more fleshed-out, sociably padded additions (“and forgotten about it”?). The poem reminds its learner again and again, this one certainly does, that it is not a Barbie Doll or Action Man to be dressed up or prettified, but rather exists as a Hepworth or Moore, or Giacometti statue exists: with only the most necessary, elemental contours present to us. Which works especially well for this poem as so much of it is about working out what really matters in our life: those transitory but intrinsically meaningful illuminations which disturb, often serendipitously, the grinding mundanity of being alive.

So I work on that initial unit until each line comfortably cues the next in my memory. Whilst doing this, my mind might wander, so that when I come back I find only a few words have remained. I might get annoyed at myself at this point, at my blob-of-meat mind and start all over again. Because I have already introduced the words before, spent some time with them, the second time around they are more swiftly retainable. I then try and work on the next semantic unit, and see if I can solder it in some way to the first.

But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it.

“OK, so there’s a contrasting preposition here,” I show myself, “remember that the next time you come to the end of the first unit. Notice also,” I tell myself, “the alliterations “pearl of great price”, also hurrying/hankering and Moses/miracle.” Alliterations are a godsend to the poetry mnemonist, as are all conjunctions, often rendering two into one.

While I am caught up with the physicality of each line, its structure and articulation, the act of repetition begins to drive the import of the words deeper and deeper in my mind and heart. These underscore key lines like an exclamatory, concordant YES!!!, a euphoric primal punctuation of core understanding.

But that was the
pearl of great price, [YES!!!]

(I decide to really stress the “that” in this line)

the one field

(ditto with “one”)

that had
treasure in it [YES!!!]

I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.

[YES!!!]
[YES!!!]
[YES!!!]

This is what it feels like (from the inside) to learn by heart a poem that you love. Perhaps, not by mistake, all those ecstatic YESes start sounding like the soundtrack to a disincarnate porn film. And maybe this is not a glib analogy. For just as evolution has shaped us to feel most apropos (literally, to purpose) when we are feeding the animal body, fucking or being fucked with the animal body, moving it in pursuit or play, so the “treasure” of committing words to the heart, words that are closely in sync with our own experience, and maybe even numbers as in Haraguchi’s pi-quest, feels very much on par with the Peak Experiences of both transcendental religious worship and sex, as sketched out by Maslow about 50 years ago.

Peak experience, of which this poem not only seeks to give us a taste of, but also exemplifies in itself and as itself can be described through a number of different variables. Some of these include:

a disorientation in time and space, alongside a non-comparing acceptance of everything, as if everything were equally important
an ego-transcending, self-forgetful, unselfish vision of the natural world and our place in it
a self-validating, self-justifying perception which carries its own intrinsic value with it lending itself to the operational definition of the statement that “life is worthwhile” or “life is meaningful.”

Pretty cool, huh? Which is why I continue to spend at last an hour, 10% of each awake-and-conscious day, “giving all that I have” to possess the 100 words or that make up poems like this one.

Specifically, what I think I give to the process is patience, or an attempt at patience (not my strongest suit), which is perhaps more about tolerating the Sisyphean frustration of forgetting, accompanied by a kind of relentlessly romantic stick-to-itiveness. Stick-to-itiveness, resilience, grit, is a virtues that I possess for only a two or three things in my life. But maybe that is enough to reconcile me to the burden of being alive.

I’m not yet sure if it is enough to take me into a consciously transcendent state akin to the utopian promise of heaven alluded to at the end of the poem. Non-theist that I am, I would prefer to perceive that illuminated eternity as available to me intermittently when I am in the flow of reciting words that have become, through thousands of repetitions, as germane to my lived experience as a glass of water when thirsty, or food/sex when hungry for it. It doesn’t always feel that way, but when it does, this reinforces my desire to keep on doing this.

But like all peak experiences: as the moniker suggests, the only way to know it, is to experience it. Which is why, evangelical-like, I urge you when you’ve finished reading these words to find a poem you love and start learning it by heart.

Poetry Koan Poetry Koan (By Heart)

Poetry Koan #8: Anti-Ambition Ode by Dean Young

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date June 23, 2019

ANTI-AMBITION ODE

Is the idea to make a labyrinth
of the mind bigger? What’s the matter?
You still come out of the womb-dark
into the sneering court of the sun
and don’t know which turn to take.
So what? You’re made of twigs anyway.
You were on an errand but never came back,
spent too long poking something with a stick.
Was it dead or never alive?
Invisibility will slow down soon enough
for you to catch up and pull it over yourself.
No one knows what color the first hyena’s tongue
to reach you will be.
Or the vultures who are slow, careful unspellers.
So go ahead, become an expert in sleep or not,
either way you can live in a rose or smoke
only so long.
You will still be left off the list.
You will still be rain, blurry as a mouse.

—

The problem, if it is a problem, is that language requires we use it. Our minds, which run on language, won’t shut up, no matter what we do. Language is having thoughts; language is saying things about the world; language is writing poems, also writing essays about poems. At some point, surrounded by the latest “crop” of language -its literary confections, its scientific inventions, its interpersonal spinoffs- we become aware of a surplus of intelligence. And surely where there is a surplus of something, we should focus on vending or merchandising this excess in some way, so as to gain the things we want? And what is it we most want? Connection, belonging, mental and physical stimulation.

This is ambition, and there is a kind of ache there too: a need to build a bulwark, with whatever we have at our disposal (our so-called talents) against an as-yet-unspecified death (“the first hyena’s tongue”) or some other form of insignificance – the polar opposite of recognition and renown, to which ambition is directed.

So what a relief, but also a sadness, to have a poem written from the perspective of sub specie aeternitatis, that incredibly powerful cognitive defusion, that asks us to consider whatever drive or initiative we’re hooked into “from the perspective of the eternal”.

Thomas Nagel in his clear-eyed essay The Absurd sees the usefulness of this perspective in “approaching our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair”. Irony is the chief ingredient of this poem, which makes it such a liberating experience to read, learn by heart and recite.

Wittgenstein also signals a place for a poem in this curative perspective:

“The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.”

Jung recognised this too, noting that “What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth.”

This the myth, but also the anti-myth of our own animal selfhood that is often ignored or covered up by our facility with language. Are we not mammals: non-hoofed, non-ruminant, but as-good-as cattle? Walk into a Weatherspoons pub on a summery midweek afternoon and watch the old geezers with their pints transform into a lumbering cow herd next to a stream. If you’re a woman, see them follow your every move with their dull, stolid eyes, every man a biform Minotaur, and don’t we know it.

Even expertise, one of the Gods of our age, is ironised with reference to those who become authorities on socially validated activities, or non-socially-validated activities (like sleep), even though the latter may be more important to our well being and the tenor of our ongoing experience than the former. As with most satire and irony, this reference is also prescient: a number of high-profile books have come out in the last year about sleeping, or not sleeping. Darian Leader, Marina Benjamin, Matthew Walker – just three of many “experts” who have ambitiously put books into the world about this profoundly inactive activity.

William Casey King tracks how ambition has a far more extensive history as a vice than as a virtue. In the Genevan translation of the Bible, there are some seventy-seven admonitions against ambition. It is associated with “crueltie of the wicked,” “malice,” and “all kind of vice.” Indeed, Adam was not fallen by pride but “by ambition.” In Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, ambition is described as “a canker of the soul, an hidden plague … a secret poison, the father of livor [envy], and mother of hypocrisy, the moth of holiness, and cause of madness, crucifying and disquieting all that it takes hold of.”

So how did America, and every country that soon yearned for the confidence and swagger of America (to date: almost all of us) come to put Ambition in pride of place as a virtue? King suggests that the main driver for this were the financial and political benefits of 17th century exploration, colonization, and resource extraction in the New World. The “labyrinth” of national socioeconomic appetites would widen to take on larger domains. In order to vouchsafe this behaviour, the English and Spanish Crowns would need to change their line on ambition, and how it was talked about from the pulpit and in political propaganda, and perhaps even in poetry.

To me this sounds like a post-hoc rationalisation of a drive that is fundamental to our species. “The destruction of the natural world,” writes John Gray in Straw Dogs, is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate.”

Which is not the image of human apes that we take away from this poem. In Dean Young’s imagination, we are far more brittle and expendable creatures: not only “made of twigs”, but most of what we do twiggily negligible: “spent too long poking something with a stick / Was it dead or never alive?” You tell me. Essays like this one seem to fit particularly well into this wasteful category, as does poetry.

I think what I most love about this poem, as jaunty as it is tonally rendered, is its inherently bleak, almost cavalier pessimism: “So go ahead,” Young dares us, “become an expert in sleep or not, / either way you can live in a rose or smoke / only so long.” He then follows this up with a remorseless instance of sub specie aeternitatis:

You will still be left off the list.
You will still be rain, blurry as a mouse

As Tony Hoagland explains, in an essay that line-for-line is as rich and alive with the poetics of ecstasy as any Young or Hoagland poem, Young has often been mislabelled as a surrealist. He is better understood as “a textbook (big R) Romantic” whose well-formulated worldview:

“…testifies to the supreme force of the individual imagination, the opposition of the individual to mass society, the divinity of nature compared to the malfeasance of humanity, and, especially, the tension between the transcendence of the ecstatic moment and the corrosive nature of horizontal time.”

He does this not by writing ponderous, unread critical essays (though do read Hoagland on Young, it’s such a wonderful piece of writing) but by doing everything everything that is antithetical to the ruminative, self-important behaviour that stems from ambition, but by playing with thought and language in a way that is “fast, daffy, tragic, witty, vivid, fabricated by the collaboration of associative and dissociative powers, interrupted at times by epithets of wisdom and grace.”

Hoagland like Young, was also feted in his lifetime (he died recently from pancreatic cancer at the age of 64) with prestigious awards and well-reviewed publications, but is still not a household name for British poetry readers. He too got “left off the list”, even if, unlike most of us he has a Wikipedia page. And even in America for those who don’t read poetry, which is almost everyone, his poems too fall like rain in the culture arena, “blurry as a mouse”.

In which case: we really do need all the anti-ambition odes and reminders we can get. For what purpose ambition? As inherently social primates, keenly aware of our place in the pecking order, literary or otherwise, I don’t think we get to attenuate its drive just by interrogating its overall usefulness in our lives. I am no less painfully ambitious for having read Young’s poem. But maybe it nudges me as I recite it daily a little bit closer to the negative capability of of seeing my settled and by now in middle-age stable “invisibility” as an existential given, a universal given for all but a few, encouraging me and you to keep our eyes open to other ways of making our time here on the List of Still Living count.

Sub specie aeternitatis, baby.

Feel Better Poetry Koan Poetry Koan (By Heart)

Poetry Koan #7: What is the Language Using Us For? by W.S. Graham

Post author By Steve Wasserman
Post date June 14, 2019

WHAT IS THE LANGUAGE USING US FOR?

What is the language using us for?
Said Malcolm Mooney moving away
Slowly over the white language.
Where am I going said Malcolm Mooney.

Certain experiences seem to not
Want to go in to language maybe
Because of shame or the reader’s shame.
Let us observe Malcolm Mooney.

Let us get through the suburbs and drive
Out further just for fun to see
What he will do. Reader, it does
Not matter. He is only going to be

Myself and for you slightly you
Wanting to be another. He fell
He falls (Tenses are everywhere.)
Deep down into a glass jail.

I am in a telephoneless, blue
Green crevasse and I can’t get out.
I pay well for my messages
Being hoisted up when you are about.

I suppose you open them under the light
Of midnight of The Dancing Men.
The point is would you ever want
To be down here on the freezing line

Reading the words that steam out
Against the ice? Anyhow draw
This folded message up between
The leaning prisms from me below.

Slowly over the white language
Comes Malcolm Mooney the saviour.
My left leg has no feeling.
What is the language using us for?

What to do when you love part of a poem, love that part enough to want to learn it by heart, but not the whole thing? This happens to a certain extent with every poem I decide to learn. There is always a part of the poem that seals the deal, those few lines that you think: “YES!!! I want to be saying these words every day for the rest of my life!” And then there is the rest of the poem.

Maybe this is also a way to think about relationships. You might meet someone, go on a couple of dates, and find in that person something that you can’t get enough of: the way they interact with you, a certain kind of humour, their physicality. Whatever it is, you want access to that. And then there is the rest of the person.

It is for this reason that my guru, Kim Rosen, doesn’t parse poems. You will find if you peruse Kim’s poetry liturgy, that Kim has learnt some very, very, very long poems. Some of which really can’t have been line-for-line gratifying to either learn or repeat.

The most perplexing of these is a 1,500 word poem by Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss – Seuss rhymes with “voice” btw; also check out the oedipal tension in Theodor’s bogus Doctor title). Seuss’s poem, I surmise, may have a handful of lines, maybe as many as a dozen that filled Kim’s soul with joy when she first read it, but enough to spend a month or more learning “Happy Birthday To You” by heart?

Then again, if you think about the last thing you dedicated 50 – 100 hours of your life to, aren’t we all, whatever thread we’re following, some kind of demented Roy Neary (that Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of The Third Kind) building mashed potato sculptures of our own Holy Mountain, whose holiness is divined mainly by us alone?

“I’m going to learn 100 poems by heart!”, says I.

“Why?” says you.

“Because,” I reply.

I often think about Kim learning that Seuss poem, line by line, day after day, week after week. Did she learn it to recite at a special party for a friend perhaps? Was this her Happy Birthday Mr President moment, the recipients of her recital in awe of her memory skills in the way that those 15,000 people in attendance at the 1962 Democratic Party fundraiser cum birthday bash were bowled over by Monroe’s saucy creative chutzpah?

I would worry about boring another person with a 12 minute poem recital. But then don’t the easily-bored at swanky parties all stop talking and sip quietly on their champagne flutes for fifteen minutes at a time whilst being serenaded by string quartets, or a rock star who’d been paid a boatload of cash to show up and sing three songs to them? Is it different if you’ve written the interminably long birthday poem yourself? Did anyone ever feel that way when Frank O’Hara stood up at a party to read one of his latest, like the ten page Ode he wrote for Michael Goldberg, a freely-associative noodle about all the things he, Frank, remembers at this juncture in his life about his childhood: porch doors, brown velvet suits, hearing Mendelsshon in Carnegie Hall. No mention of Goldberg, or birthdays, apart from the title of the poem “Ode To Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births)”. That poem just an excuse for Frank to be Frank. As this one feels quintessentially Grahamsian.

Maybe poem parsing in order to learn only the bits you like is a form of egomania too? There is a kind of humility, a surrender to learning a long poem warts and all. It is a kind of marriage, you might say, as opposed to a fling where you get to choose when and how to be in contact with another human being, sampling only their most enjoyable offerings.

Still, what do you do when you love a third or maybe even half of a very long poem, but find the rest of it almost execrable? This is the problem with Graham’s classic “What Is The Language Using Us For” (full poem quoted at the end of this post).

Am I the only reader of poetry who finds the sections beginning “I met a man in Cartsburn Street…” and “The King of Whales” section quasi-doggerel? I understand, in a faintly disinterested way, that the attempts made by this “double-breasted Sam” accosting the poet while he’s out doing his errands, “a far relation on my mother’s West-Irish side” are put there to enact some kind of sociolinguistic turn. As if to say: see how language functions in creating speech communities and social networks, be they loose (distant cousins) or close (human friends, or the literature we love as friends, like this poem).

I understand all this, and yet, I still find myself crossing the road to avoid these sections, as Willie does himself when Sam hovers into view. Can’t we just stay in the weird, heady realms of abstract language, in metaphor, and analogy where the rest of the poem resides? That lonely,” telephoneless, blue / Green crevasse” of our own heads, where we too “can’t get out”, other than through language, which lets us down with its ready-made phrases and silence in the face of ineffable suffering or joy?

Of course one reader’s doggerel is another’s Poetic Ambrosia -a kind of God fodder, libation of quintessence- probably far too refined and subtle for this pleb to appreciate. I feel somehow behoven at this point to go and read some critical writing so that I can present a balanced argument for the memorisable worth of the lines that leave me cold, but I can’t be bothered to do so just for the sake of BBC-like balance [can’t be bothered, but I still do, see below].

I challenge anyone who loves Graham, who loves this poem, to commit a chunk of their lives to learning and reciting the passages that I have chosen not to learn. Instead I decide to learn three sections of the poem (the first quoted at the start of this piece), filleting the poem like a fish, keeping only the juiciest, most allusive, most poetic (?) parts for me to recite until the day I die.

What makes Malcolm Mooney’s plight so moving to me? Many things: his attempt to trail some language, slug-like, across a blank page, which still remains blank even after he has smeared his weary words over it – a literary version of Manzoni’s Achrome painting, or Robert Ryman’s Ledger. The way he shows us language’s constraints and impediments, its dreams of connection and reciprocity belied by a culture where we spend most of our time thoroughly alone, crawling around and through webs of language, rather than directly communicating with each other.

Damian Grant singles out Graham’s genius as being able to “put into words those sudden desolations and happiness that descend on us uninvited there where we each are within our lonely rooms never really entered by anybody else and from which we never emerge’. This is a poem that is “attentive to the chill conditions that isolate us from each other” writes Peter Robinson in his essay “Dependence in the Poetry of W. S. Graham”. Hear, hear.

And even when we do emerge from our lonely rooms, most of us prefer texting to calling. Like a future-gazing sci-fi dream, the poem seems prescient, but also timeless in terms of what it wants to share with us about our fundamental alienation from ourselves and each other as clothes-wearing, language-using hominids.

It is this tension between risky, vulnerable connection and a safer insularity that makes this poem so moving. Graham struggled, as we all do, with the former. In a letter he wrote from the orthopedic ward of the Royal Cornwall Inﬁrmary to Moncrieff Williamson after a drunken fall (“I walked 5 miles into St Ives to attend a birthday party and coming home I managed (don’t ask me how) to fall off a roof 30 feet and land on concrete”), he relates: “All Art is the result of trying to say to an other one exactly what you mean. Because we are all each so diﬀerent from each other inside (diﬀerent even from good friends we think we are extremely sympathetic to), one of the things we try again and again is to establish communication.What a stuﬀy pompous lecture. FINIS.”

It is this tug of war in him between the shame-induced inner-censor and the more modest human-ape wanting to “establish communication” that makes those moments when they occur in his poems so affecting. Perhaps the most memorable phrase from his 1946 “manifesto” (Notes On A Poetry of Release) is this one:

It is a good direction to believe that this language which is so scored and impressed by the commotion of all of us since its birth can be arranged to in its turn impress significantly for the good of each individual. Let us endure the sudden affection of the language.

Let us endure the sudden affection of the language. I love that. We sense that Graham himself endures this sudden affection of intimate contact with another through a poem, in the way a teenager might “endure” a hug from a parent or relative: grimacing, but appreciative nonethless.

This inner-conflict can sometimes appear to be solipsistic. Metaphysically, in this poem at least, that seems to be very much the case. Solipsism, let us remind ourselves, is from the Latin solus ‘alone’ + ipse ‘self’.

I am in a telephoneless, blue
Green crevasse and I can’t get out.

…

The point is would you ever want
To be down here on the freezing line

Reading the words that steam out
Against the ice?

If all we have are our own thoughts and self-experience (“the words that steam out / against the ice”), our own private, cut-off independent world with scant access to other ways of being, then the fallout from that is sure to be alienation and loneliness. This shared, validated alienation and loneliness are certainly two of the chief merits of this poem.

I like these (more hopeful?) words by Neil Corcoran in his essay on Graham in “English Poetry Since 1940” where he remarks that Graham’s “solipsism is mitigated by the sense that consciousness becomes most alive in these written exchanges between writer and reader, that the most alert self-consciousness may be created and shared within the poem’s language, so that the poem is always dialogue, community, intertext, ‘The longed-for, loved event, / To be by another aloneness loved”.”

When I am reciting parts of this poem to myself, I feel love for William Sidney Graham, and a shared camaraderie too. For does not any poem, even one now canonically packaged in a handsome Faber and Faber hardcover with its distinctive teal jacket, share the plight of most writing on the internet: to be unread, unseen, just another instance of white language, cultural white noise? What is the Language Using Us For is alive to this lack.

The irony of writing is that it comes from a place of wanting to communicate, to connect to others and belong through our words, when really its chief company and solace are to language itself. Let us then all endure, or even celebrate, the sudden affection of the language. Or as he says later on in the poem: let’s try and make language “a real place / [for ourselves], seeing [we] have to put up with it / Anyhow.”

Let us make some peace with language, and therein we might start making some peace with ourselves.

WHAT IS THE LANGUAGE USING US FOR (FULL POEM)

FIRST POEM