Falling Through Space (9 page)

“It is strange that the artist should have no standards and be constantly trying to live up to other people's standards.”

“This is the supposition. I live and have my being in a world of space and forms which have color and shape. Consciousness of this means being alive.”

“The first poetry is always written against the wind by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and wine drinkers who know a good thing when they see it. The third poetry is sometimes never written but when it is, it's by those who have brought nature and art together into one thing.”

Tomorrow I will visit the house where the genius Walter Anderson slept while he was among us. As he wrote:

“If my ears were functioning properly I would hear, not just the wind in the grass, the two or three different rhythms of insects, the piping of a frog, the call of a nightjar, but an orderly and recognizable harmony, which might or might not have been written.”

“A divine symphony. Wind, wave, wing … wing, wave, wind.”

T
HIS IS
part of a speech I wrote to celebrate Founder's Day at Scripps College in Claremont, California. I liked writing this speech because it gave me a chance to talk about something that is much on my mind right now. How wonderful men and women are and how long we have been wonderful. I wrote the speech four times. It ended up being more like a play in four acts than a speech. Here is Act Four.

I want to leave you with the idea that no theory is too wild to entertain for a while. You can entertain all the ideas you can think up or imagine. Later, in winter, you can decide which ones to keep and which to throw away. All of us are doing the same thing all the time anyway, all probing the same mystery, asking the same questions. Who am I? Where did I come from? What am I doing here? Is this right?

At the moment I have decided that for all practical purposes I can go on and assume that mankind, our species,
Homo sapiens sapiens
, is the only thing in the universe that is aware of itself. Our species, Man, on this beautiful watery planet, in this little piece of space and time, may be the only thing in the universe that ever was or ever will be aware of itself.

I have been reading a book by the scientist and philosopher René Dubos, called
Celebrations of Life
. Dr. Dubos writes about Neanderthal man, who was here on the earth one hundred thousand years ago. It used to be thought that these people were brutish and primitive, but they walked erect just like us and had brains as large or maybe larger. They had a full kit of tools, and, strangest of all, every fifth person in their bands has been identified as being over fifty years of age. This is amazing for a primitive hunting society.

Two of the old Neanderthal people found in the caves at Shandar in Iraq were so severely crippled that they must have been completely dependent on the members of their group for a long time. Also, these people buried their dead in graves lined with flowers. Clearly, we have been human for a long time. Clearly the first thing we did was probe the mystery and the last thing we will ever do is probe that same mystery.

I
TAUGHT MYSELF
to read poetry. Long before I could read prose I could piece together the words of nursery rhymes and poems. Long before I went to school I knew passages of Wordsworth by heart and the lyrics of many songs and would make up my own and write them down.

Sometimes I would leave sibling rivalry as a subject for verse and branch out into metaphysics.

I was mad at God. He had created a world full of bugs to bite me. Why did he make them? It made no sense to me. Later, when I was really angry with him about death, I thought back on his invention of bugs and knew that I had every right to be furious. If God made the world he wasn't good enough for me.

I think I knew early on that poets were as angry with God as I was. Certainly they were angry about death. Humpty Dumpty, what cynicism, what irony. All the King's horses and all the King's men. Thee and thou, the language of the Bible. A lot of sound and fury to cover up what God had done to us. I hated him. I sat up in a magnolia tree getting black from the bark and dared him to make me fall. I threw myself into rivers and dared him to make me forget how to swim. I filled my mouth with water and spat at the sun. Nothing happened. If he existed he was powerless. God reminded me too much of my father to be in good with me.

So poetry took the place of God. The wild cries of a thousand minds saying, Why did you do this, God? Who are you and why have you done this and since you did it, at least I'm going to call you on it. At least I'm going to make you stand up and face what you have done. My Last Duchess, the sphinx in the desert, oh, what are patterns for, Not one deserted dying, on whose forbidden ear, Go, Go, Go, human kind cannot bear very much reality.

On and on and on. Of course, there were also cries of lyricism and of love. I wandered lonely as a cloud, All I could see from where I stood, Oh, world, world, I cannot hold thee close enough. I also emitted great cries of praise, but not of God. It was man I was praising and the beauty of the earth.

Later, thinking over that poem about daffodils, I decided the main word in the poem was
lonely
. God makes us lonely and makes us die and the earth consoles us and gives suck, gives beauty beyond description and we go on another day.

How could men go into churches and praise the thing they call God? I asked myself. How could they praise something that has control over them, that rules them. What a bunch of bullshit. That's a poetic word I learned that came in handy when I was forced to sit in starched dresses and listen to preachers droning on in their sonorous and boring voices with that glazed look that comes over the faces of panderers and inveterate liars. I would squirm around on the seat. I would count the number of letters in the program, not counting punctuation marks; if the sum was an odd number, it meant Dick Lockwood loved me. If it was an even number, he did not. If it was an even number, I would do a recount including the punctuation marks. If it still came out even, I tore the program up and counted the words in a hymn.

That's what came next: after the panderer had put us all to sleep he would bring out a piece of music written by Bach and give God credit for that. The service would brighten up with the first chord of music from the organ. We would lift up our eyes unto the hills where the real world would hopefully still be going on when we got out of church. What was that all about? A poet knew.

That is part of a long poem by Alvaro Cordona-Hine, and I have kept it with me for years and read it to thousands of people and once read it on National Public Radio and once read it late at night to a room full of people at a Book and Author dinner who probably had something else in mind besides hearing me read a long philosophical poem by a real writer. I read the poem and then I got up and left so I wouldn't have to hear the speeches made by the romance novel writer and the country-and-western writer wearing the hat and smoking the big cigar while we ate dinner. After that night my publisher decided it would be best to keep me home and sell the books the best they could without me.

But I was talking about poetry. There weren't any poets at the Book and Author dinner. There aren't many poets anywhere anymore because the poetry isn't lyrical or much good or memorable and besides no one wants to read it but the same bunch of teacher-poets who write it and they are too cornered to allow anything wonderful to happen in poetry. If a good poet begins to raise his or her voice, they kill him with criticism. “Lyrical wheel-spinning,” that's the kind of thing they say to young poets who are letting their hearts sing. So no one loves poetry anymore and no one wants to publish it and no one wants to buy it and all of that has taken the heart out of young poets. If a young poet showed up today with a poem that began, “It was my thirtieth year to heaven,” he would be laughed off the block.

Here are some of the poets it is no longer fashionable to emulate. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who at nineteen could write, “All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood; / I turned and looked another way, / And saw three islands in a bay.… Over these things I could not see; / These were the things that bounded me.”

Anne Sexton is another poet the Academy would like to forget if possible or at least send to the back of the class. Anthologies never do her work justice and she is being passed over as a subject for serious study. Still, while she was writing she spoke to us with a voice as real and lyrical as the sea and my generation of women learned about ourselves from her. “I am torn in two but I will conquer myself,” she wrote. “I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me.”

“The sea is very old,” she wrote. “The sea is the face of Mary, / without miracles or rage / or unusual hope.” And

How I love the wild lyrical language of the poets. I knew a poet once and spent many days and nights with him and took walks with him and went into shops with him and watched the world with him and learned to adore the beauty of the world and despise its sadness. I must write of him someday and tell the world what it was like to know a great poet and be his friend. When he killed himself over some long-buried sadness, I could not bear to remember him and threw away all his books and all his letters and everything that had anything to do with him except an unpublished manuscript that was dedicated to me. It's still around. Even in my sadness and rage I couldn't throw that away.

What else? The Arabs believe there are three causes for celebration. The birth of a son, the foaling of a stallion, and the emergence of a poet. One is emerging somewhere now who will write the poem that will solace and teach me in my old age. I raise a glass to that poet and dedicate my song to him.

F
IFTEEN YEARS AGO
I bought my first real painting. I remember the strange quality of that week, while the painting sat in my living room, and while I pondered the possibility of actually spending
three hundred and fifty dollars
for something to hang on a wall.