In the second stanza, the word hatred repeats, and now in the third stanza, it’s ring we hear twice. It’s an excellent, nearly echoic repetition, it rings, but it’s also a curious choice; every connotation I can think of is almost purely positive. Clarity and resonance, calling, summons, proclamations, talk, producing sound, vibration, sonority—all meanings that counter the unanswerable questions, the testing of silence in the stanza. In my reading the aural quality of the word creates tension, making music of a different tenor than the literal subject. My ear hears something my eye doesn’t quite see. The sound of ring rides on the surface of the stanza, separating from it somewhat. Whereas hatred draws us down into the core of the poem, ring begins to lift us out of it. Down deep in this stanza of questions, we hear a ringing, and it becomes possible to understand that Hugo’s questions, their Orphic summons, aren’t calling for an answer; they’re calling for poetry.
How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?
—critic Theodor Adorno
And how can one eat lunch?
—poet Mark Strand
“Say no to yourself”—if only Orpheus had, if only he’d refused the unsure, doubting, rearward glance, he’d have spent that first night back in the upper air abed with his bride. Instead, his hesitation breaks the lyric charm and condemns Eurydice to death. The temptation, in art as well as life, is to fall back on old forms, to attempt an impossible repetition, giving yourself over to the sort of redundancy that has always been the defining feature of the underworld, where time is either a torment or means nothing because the iterations are endless and unvarying. Hell is crowded not because sinners are commonplace but because incompletion is the norm. Orpheus, descending, charms the underworld, he moves it toward an uncharacteristic stillness and rest, but in ascending, it’s as if his hesitation, his glance back, were suddenly an affliction no different from the thirst of Tantalus or the labor of Sisyphus. Because he looks back, losing his bride, his work remains unfinished, forever, and the sorrow he can’t overcome results in a sort of hypnotic hindsight. “Saying no” is necessary; it too is part of the process of creation. After saying yes to the descent, saying no is how the poet emerges. Perhaps another way of articulating this is to say that a new yes must be found, the courage of the descent sustained until it’s completed. In a poem the future, or the next couple dozen words anyway (which to a poet is the same thing), is the poem. The need is finally aesthetic. Hugo’s final stanza is a return to speech, referenced phrasally throughout: “say no, he says, you tell, you’re talking.” But the return is premised on not looking back, on avoiding the gaze that tempts and paralyzes memory. Unlike Orpheus, the poet here says no and, in true Western fashion, gets the girl, who happens to be slender, with red hair that lights the wall.
It’s not the sort of refusal it might first seem—seemed to me, anyway. It’s not a turning away, an opting out of history, an easy escape. To push the metapoetic reading, the car, that absent term from the first stanza, still runs, as does life, but on this newly accessed level of understanding, I think it’s also fair to say that another of the missing, implied terms is poetry itself. Poetry is the vehicle that broke down and brought Hugo here, to the degrees of gray, but it still runs, and the proof is the poem itself. The poem is what the poet brings back, that’s his fortune, his Eurydice. You can imagine these words lost among broken symbols, dragged off by history, sunk in silence, but that isn’t what we have. Not answers but aesthetic pressure completes the poem. In the end, it doesn’t matter that the light reveals a wall that will likely never come down entirely. “Let us not look for the door, and the way out,” Camus wrote, “anywhere but in the wall against which we are living.” The irony, the slight undertone pulling at Hugo’s last word, tempers the jubilance with a doubt, but suggests that in this prison, shared by all, life is still possible. Fortuna is sometimes depicted wearing a blindfold, and the light in the final line really refers to the act of seeing. It’s about optics more than opportunity. The poem is the light.
Tonight was the Fourth of July, and another order of light was at work, flaring in the sky over these same streets. It was a disorganized display, mostly people in their backyards firing rockets that shot up, burst, fell, and faded, somewhat emptily, in this vast valley. I walked to town because I needed to double-check the streets of Philipsburg and square what I saw with the falling man’s incomprehensible descent. I wanted to think just a little more about Hugo and the place of poetry in the face of terrible things. I stopped by a green house above Main Street where, all last winter, dogs fought over the carcasses of several deer. I remembered the rib cages marbled red and white with blood and fat and the ruts of stained red snow where the warring dogs dragged the bones, but when I passed by tonight I saw the house had been boarded up, the tenant gone in a going that doesn’t really hold much mystery, not here in Philipsburg. What’s another absence, another vacancy? But if this uncelebrated loss means nothing I can’t see how the falling man’s descent acquires true significance either. Consensus isn’t an answer. Mining towns in Montana or Kentucky that have collapsed over the course of a century have suffered a descent as murderous as a moment in New York, but history has hidden those deaths and numbed the witnesses and litanized their loss under the rubric of progress. In the case of Philipsburg, only a poet spoke out, from his own isolation, to say something about the devastating pain.
Still, ruin, nearly as much as a good poem, is strangely enduring. The hills behind Philipsburg are full of things that have failed to remain upright. Poets might not save, but the clichés surrounding September 11 didn’t stop anything either, and in this sense the score, in the game of language, is decisively on the side of poetry. If forced to choose between failures, poetry is probably the better one. The difference between the truth and a cliché is the difference between what we really know and what we’ve all heard about. That diversity is good is a slogan we’ve all heard, but it has expressive limits—it’s not OK to fly jets into office buildings—and so what does it really mean? For me, borrowing from Isaiah Berlin, another writer intimately aware of history, diversity (or plurality) is an answer to the central twentieth-century historical problem of radical subjectivity. Accumulating enough subjectivities—setting them against each other—is as close as we’re going to come to objectivity, and this is why agreement is problematic: What’s the point of being right if it’s only safety in numbers? The history of being right and how wrong it’s turned out to be is a long one. By this measure the terrorists were wrong—such empty holiness is almost too much to bear in mind—but when being right provides comfort, when the sensation of it is pleasant, when it allays anxiety or lends security, then it seems to be doing the job of ignorance. If we’re right, then the nature and quality and burden of being right is our issue. Now it seems time to argue for the tragic or the absurd, for anything that tempers and draws limits. Sometimes contradiction can’t be resolved away and then it becomes the new reality and there’s no way out. The falling man is enormously sad and insignificant; he is everything as well as nothing. The only way into his descent is through our solitude. Patriotism’s just a rag we fly over the silence.
In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach’s book on the representation of reality in Western literature, he talks of the shift from antiquity to a New Testament style of realism. “To be sure,” he writes, “we must not forget that the transformation is here one whose course progresses to somewhere outside of history, to the end of time or to the coincidence of all times, in other words upward, and does not . . . remain on the horizontal plane of historical events.” I wonder, was our understanding of September 11 little more than a Christian homily, an escape from history, a romance secularizing the divine or lifting the legend out of the ruin—is that where it all went? All through the writing of this I thought of Shelley, who at eighteen sent copies of a pamphlet on atheism to every professor at Oxford. He believed a university dedicated to open discussion and the free exchange of ideas would be interested. He was kicke
d out. Next he went to Ireland, planning to begin a major rehabilitation of all mankind by organizing the Irish into a “society of peace and love,” perhaps a doomed enterprise. Next he was off to Wales, again with a pamphlet, this one called “A Declaration of Rights.” He enclosed copies in dark-green bottles that he sealed with wax and cast into the ocean; other copies he floated aloft, to be blown inland on balloons. Is it reasonable to think Shelley was eternally part of mankind in his solitary foolish hope at sea’s edge? That his solitude was the mark of a deeper, broader inclusion? Or is this just poetic fancy? Watching the fireworks made me wonder. In general I don’t care for activities—fireworks or football or movies—where large groups of people gather and look at the same thing. This is probably just a queerness of temperament. Maybe I don’t like crowds. Regardless, the fireworks rose up, pulsing in our local cosmos. On the way home I stopped to watch the show with some kids who were heaped under blankets while the parents handled the pyrotechnics. Each explosion eclipsed the sky with dazzling colors and froze the onlooking, upturned faces like a strobe. All the kids kept pointing up, the way astonished kids will, as if I might not know where to look.
From The Spirit of History
When gold paint flakes from the arms of sculptures,
When the letter falls out of the book of laws,
Then consciousness is naked as an eye.
When the pages of books fall in fiery scraps
Onto smashed leaves and twisted metal,
The tree of good and evil is stripped bare.
When a wing made of canvas is extinguished
In a potato patch, when steel disintegrates,
Nothing is left but straw and cow dung.
I rolled a cigarette and licked the paper.
Then a match in the little house of my hand.
And why not a tinderbox with a flint?
The wind was blowing. I sat on the road at noon,
Thinking and thinking. Beside me, potatoes.
—Czesław Miłosz
1 Where W = weight, Cd = drag coefficient, r = density, and A = frontal area.
The following essays appeared first in The Stranger: “Seattle, 1974”; “Loitering” (as “The Crime That Never Was”); “Whaling Out West” (as “Whaling”); and “Casting Stones” as (“Mary Kay Letourneau”). “Seattle, 1974” also appeared in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy. “Any Resemblance to Anyone Living” and “Misreading” (as “True Believer”) appeared first in Tin House. “Documents” and “Catching Out” (as “Train in Vain”) appeared originally in The New Yorker. “American Newness” (as “Modular Homes”), “Winning” (as “Brick Wall”), “One More Paradise” as (“Biosquat”), and “Orphans” were first published in Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors. “Brick Wall” also appeared in Harper’s. “Doo-Wop Down the Road” was published in Camela Raymond’s much-loved broadsheet, The Organ. “Salinger and Sobs” appeared first in With Love and Squalor, eds. Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller, and was subsequently collected in The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, ed. J. C. Hallman. A portion of “This Is Living” was published in Money Changes Everything, eds. Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell. “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” first saw print in an anthology called The Clear Cut Future.
Copyright Notes & Permissions
“Communion,” from Sherman Alexie’s The Man Who Loves Salmon, used with the author’s permission.
“Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg.” Copyright © 1973 by Richard Hugo, from Making Certain It Goes On: Collected Poems of Richard Hugo by Richard Hugo. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Falling Man” photo © 2011 by Susan Watts / NY Daily News / Getty Images.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to begin by paying overdue tribute to one of the most naturally curious men I’ve ever known, Rich Jensen, for bringing the bold and visionary ambitions of Clear Cut Press to life. Like most writers, I’ve benefited from wise and tolerant editors everywhere, but because I have a weak spot for Seattle’s great alt-weekly, The Stranger, I can’t resist singling out some key figures by name: Matthew Stadler, Emily White, Sean Nelson, Charles Mudede, and Christopher Frizzelle. I’m not easy, and no one knows that better than Mary Evans and Jordan Pavlin, to whom I owe so much. For her quiet behind-the-scenes advice and guidance over many years, thank you, Jody. For offering an open hand, thank you, Lee Montgomery. For her friendship, fierce intelligence, and keen eye, thank you, Sarah Fay. For their generous and always timely support I’d like to thank the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Foundation, and United States Artists. And finally to the whole Tin House family, who make so many things happen, I want to thank each and every one of you—Diane Chonette, Lance Cleland, Masie Cochran, Matthew Dickman, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, Cheston Knapp, Holly MacArthur, Nanci McCloskey, Tony Perez, Thomas Ross, Elissa Schappell, Rob Spillman, Meg Storey, Jakob Vala, Michelle Wildgen, and, of course, Win McCormack—for making this book happen.
PHOTO © SARAH FRYE
CHARLES D’AMBROSIO is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point and The Dead Fish Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the essay collection Orphans. He’s been the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Lannan Fellowship, among other honors. His work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, as well as in Tin House, The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and A Public Space. He teaches fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Loitering: New and Collected Essays Page 23