Last night I spent the evening and some bourbon with an old friend and former colleague who has spent a life thrusting himself into experience to such a degree that I come close to trembling at the stories and antidotes of his past. I went outside to smoke and when I returned, from the bottom of the staircase, I could hear him singing with a tremendous baritone voice an old Irish ballad of gain and loss. I stopped in my tracks and leaned against the wall. I came upstairs and we talked art and beauty and, like in so many instances of my life, I longed for time to suspend and observe.
So now I come creeping on the end of a summer filled with many happy memories and places, shared with people very dear to me. I return once more to the structured rhythm of an academic year, leaving behind these experiences as a flicked cigarette butt in the wake of a boat. The water churns over everything and the vista, though discernible, seems impossibly distant.
"I'd like to get away from earth awhile / then come back to it and begin over."
But this is all too childish a dream, an aging Frost pining for a world which no longer is, who's departure from it is one-way and inescapably resolute. It's the curse of the poet and artist to dream up a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unreflective of reality and past. The same curse is wrapped inextricably in an unrequested blessing.
"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
1 comment:
Jack,
Would that I could wax a a hundredth as philosophical and quixotic as you! After reading your searched soul laid bare, I thought of this Whitman poem, little known, yet one of my favorites (partly because, for once, Whitman was economical of words):
SPARKLES FROM THE WHEEL
WHERE the city's ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day,
Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with them.
By the curb toward the edge of the flagging,
A knife-grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife,
Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by foot and knee,
With measur'd tread he turns rapidly, as he presses with light but firm hand,
Forth issue then in copious golden jets,
Sparkles from the wheel.
The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me,
The sad sharp-chinn'd old man with worn clothes and broad
shoulder-band of leather,
Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb'd and arrested,
The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,)
The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the
streets,
The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press'd blade, Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,
Sparkles from the wheel.
In this poem I see you, that nameless narrator who "gets" the innocent, free-from-reality optics of children - who, like them, sees sparkles from the wheel, not hot metal flakes from a grinding wheel. You have a wonderful gift to not only be able to pause your life, but to pause, view, absorb, and lift yourself, weightlessly, into the branches of life.
At the same time, I also see in you the knife-grinder. When you find a task that brings you passion, you embrace it in totality, and all the hubbub of life deflects harmlessly off the shield your passion creates. Like the knife-grinder, you let life pass you by, not in the tradition sense of being left behind, but in the sense that you know when to dig deep and plant roots against the flow.
I have never known if the knife-grinder knew that the children were watching, or if he knew how mesmerized they were by the sparkles from his wheel. Even so, the metaphors abound. To me, there is great hope in this poem; if the adult narrator found a way to keep his innocent "eyes", certainly, at least some of the children watching will do the same as they grow into adults and dip their toes for the first time into the ceaseless crowd.
Don't ever give up your ability to live in both worlds. Those adults, like me, that spend too much time swimming both with and against the tide need the be pulled ashore at times by you, to sit on your sandy beach and listen to all you've experienced.
Post a Comment