No one can describe the happiness of others. We’re like dogs barking at hieroglyphs when we talk about emotion. I’ve spent years studying poetry and I know its all a dream, this business of inter-personal connection and comprehension. I hardly know myself. About my life I recognize only a few bare details. I’ve a better chance calming the wind than understanding my life.
I take comfort from Winnie the Pooh:
“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Ah, understanding! The state we never achieve except in small ways.
What is to be done? A few years ago, in a state of both loneliness and wonderment I wrote a poem about Heraclitus, “the dark one” who understood that time is a game with string. Back then I owned a horse named Luigi with my wife. Luigi was a rescued “off the track thoroughbred” and as he aged he was quite soulful in the way of horses. I can’t explain it. He was, in my view an equine phenomenologist. He was the incitement for the poem as one evening when it was late in the autumn I caught him looking—gazing really—out the window of his stall. I was also thinking of the poet Robert Bly who was enormously kind and supportive of me when I was young and confused.
This is the title poem from the book:
“Old Horse, What Is to Be Done?”
—for Robert Bly
I also want to live tonight
My pockets filled with ghost silver
The real coins I spent long ago
There are weeks, whole months
When I read only the ancients
I mean the dark one the river compulsive
A man who made clocks from string…
Time is a game played beautifully by children
Lately this is all I can think of
When I was very small I lived by a meadow
You loved me and I wasn’t confused
**
Its the small way we always must take.
In a July 1965 letter to Tomas Transformer, Robert Bly, writing of his trip to Norway says something which is easy to overlook and yet remarkable:
Dear Tomas,
Here we are, in the old Heimat! old Bleie, whose stones have been stained by Bleie-feet for ten thousand years or so, is still here, supporting apples and cows and some taciturn Norwegians. We are in a magnificent camping place at Lofthus, with the Sørfjord under us, and those wonderful mountains with snow across the fjord. Every day or so I start plunging up the mountain, get halfway up, and then sit down in a sheep-shed for the rest of the morning.”
The remarkable thing is of course plunging up the mountain, getting halfway, and then sitting alone in a sheep shed. The overlooked thing is how skillfully Bly has left the wind out of this story since wind is always present above the fjords. It’s the excision of a constellating factor that marks his best poems and which pulses, unspoken as a source of incitements these poems. Because Bly’s popularity on the lecture circuit was a consequence of his opposition to the Viet Nam War and later, his insistent views on spiritualism and psychoanalysis took prominence one can forget his fidelity to the quiet and often snapped connections between things—what I’m here calling “the wind left out.”
“The wind left out” means nothing is innocent. The grass growing unevenly under apple trees turns the poet’s casual glance from a train window to thoughts of death and dying—it’s in effect Whitman’s grass:
“Passing an Orchard by Train”
Grass high under apple trees.
The bark of the trees rough and sexual,
The grass growing heavy and uneven.
We cannot bear disaster, like
The rocks—
Swaying nakedly
In open fields.
One slight bruise and we die!
I know no one on this train.
A man comes walking down the aisle.
I want to tell him
That I forgive him, that I want him
To forgive me.
This jump from grass “heavy and uneven” to proleptic disaster, to the inevitability of death is not spelled out. The grass is Whitman’s hieroglyphic, suggesting burials or natural graves. Either way the leap to solid rocks, the suggestion that humans sway nakedly, vulnerable, derives from a Whitmanic incitement: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” This is what I mean when I say the wind left out is not innocent. That wind may come from allusions or it can arrive by way of subjective emotional candor—feeling bruised by thoughts of dying and alone on a train the poet wants to tell a stranger that he forgives him, a Christ-like moment of despair and tenderness which in normal society must be left out. There’s a hint of theodicy here: a vindication of God’s goodness made manifest by lovingkindness. Notice that Bly doesn’t say the words. One thinks of Thoreau’s observation: “There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.” Bly fine tunes this to suggest the things we cannot say without intuition.
The details in poems multiply of our perceptions. That each thing may or not be true emanates from the phenomenological imagination.
In his Introduction to Phenomenology Robert Sokolowski notes that where phenomenology is concerned: “there are no ‘mere’ appearances, and nothing is ‘just’ an appearance. Appearances are real; they belong to being. Things do show up. Phenomenology allows us to recognize and to restore the world that seemed to have been lost when we were locked into our own internal world by philosophical confusions. Things that had been declared to be merely psychological are now found to be ontological, part of the being of things. Pictures, words, symbols, perceived objects, states of affairs, other minds, laws, and social conventions are all acknowledged as truly there, as sharing in being and as capable of appearing according to their own proper style.” 1 (p. 34)
Ontology is oddly enough (mixing metaphors) a proper style; lyric findings are constituent parts of being. Proleptic imagination anticipates surprise, refuting commonplace assumptions about our surroundings as a leaden intelligence. This is “the imagination” hardened and yet buoyant, like the figurehead of a sailing ship. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences. This is in the highest degree the case with many of Goethe’s and Byron’s poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of phantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.” 2 (p. 9)
Excerpt From: Arthur Schopenhauer. “The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/CLZo6.l
Proleptic conception is movement and aptitude. It assumes shapes by driving ahead. It is not, however, simply freedom in the service of pleasure—that Western idea of the self as a noble enjoyer of its surroundings or its body. The traditional Enlightenment “self” is a free acquirer of sights, objects, tastes, sounds, and is understood to be a discerning tourist, a Thomas Jefferson in Paris if you will. Speaking of the individual and his happiness Schopenhauer says:
“We have already seen, in general, that what a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has, or how he is regarded by others. What a man is, and so what he has in his own person, is always the chief thing to consider; for his individuality accompanies him always and everywhere, and gives its color to all his experiences. In every kind of enjoyment, for instance, the pleasure depends principally upon the man himself. Every one admits this in regard to physical, and how much truer it is of intellectual, pleasure. When we use that English expression, “to enjoy one’s self,” we are employing a very striking and appropriate phrase; for observe—one says, not “he enjoys Paris,” but “he enjoys himself in Paris.” To a man possessed of an ill-conditioned individuality, all pleasure is like delicate wine in a mouth made bitter with gall. Therefore, in the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met, that is, upon the kind and degree of our general susceptibility. What a man is and has in himself,—in a word personality, with all it entails, is the only immediate and direct factor in his happiness and welfare. All else is mediate and indirect, and its influence can be neutralized and frustrated; but the influence of personality never. This is why the envy which personal qualities excite is the most implacable of all,—as it is also the most carefully dissembled.” 3 (p. 24)
Excerpt From: Arthur Schopenhauer. “The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/CLZo6.l
One can think of Bly in his most delicate perceptions as resisting ill conditioned individuality. “I am alone yet someone else is with me.” Such positions are both a matter of individuality and a directed intelligence precisely because we are aware of the incorporeality of symbolism—whether we’re talking of Georg Trakl, or Wallace Stevens—the former can write:
I am a shadow far from darkening villages.
I drank the silence of God
Out of the stream in the trees.
Stevens writes:
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.
The world is (entirely) our acquaintanceship with shadows and unfixed forms. Hazarded imagining is nearly always providential. We find by indirection the particles of revery.
One may say this is true of all lyric poetry but in the case of Bly the poetics is always a gamble—the discoveries are impossible to have imagined before the poem itself; there is no framing of the scene, no anticipation of vision, but a sequence of astonishments. He relays them back to the reader much in the way a shaman tells a story of something discovered beyond the physical world. This is Romanticism but Bly is closer to Thoreau than Keats. He owes more to Walden than to Wordsworth. Returning to Schopenhauer the wind left out is all that constitutes personality. Thoreau looking down at the bedrock of the pond sees a natural fact but understands something of his soul. Bly writes:
“SOME NOVEMBER PRIVACY POEMS”
I am comforted
by a crack in dry ground
nearly smoothed over with winter dust.
•
How marvelous to look out and see
the boulders
that have been gloomy since the earth began
now with a faint dusting of snow.
•
Mist: no one on the other shore.
It may be the trees I see have consciousness
and this desire to weep comes from them.
•
Most birds have gone south.
Grass heels over in the wind.
The feminine hooves of the horse
stand side by side as he eats.”
Excerpt From
Collected Poems
Robert Bly
This desire to weep is a moral concern. The ethical life, which is concerned with honoring and preserving living things is nearly indescribable. As Tomas Transtromer once wrote:
I come too seldom down to the water. But I am here now,
Among large stones with peaceful backs.
Stones which slowly migrated backwards up out of the waves.
Who are we when we’re set against natural facts? We say we are here. And the poems say this means something. Thoreau: “Draw lines through the length & breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets—and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.”
One can add that intersection is where the wind is left out.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
