by C K Williams
The worst of these soul killers, Alzheimer’s and its kin, are believed by many of us who work with our minds to be worse than merely dying. It would be pleasant to be amusing here, to find a tone sufficiently flip to distance myself from the terrible implications of this, the way Philip Larkin did it in “The Old Fools.” It’s a terrifying poem, where old age is characterized finally as “The whole hideous inverted childhood” but in which Larkin still manages to employ his inimitable tone of detachment, irony, self-mocking—stances I find to be utterly beyond me. My own poem about these matters, I suppose, has quite a bit less detachment:
RAT WHEEL, DEMENTIA, MONT SAINT MICHEL
for Albert O. Hirschman
My last god’s a theodicy glutton, a good-evil gourmet—
peacock and plague, gene-junk; he gobbles it down.
Poetry, violence; love, war—his stew of honey and thorn.
For instance, thinks theodicy-god: Mont Saint Michel.
Sheep, sand, steeple honed sharp as a spear. And inside,
a contraption he calls with a chuckle the rat-wheel.
Thick timber three meters around, two persons across,
into which prisoners were inserted to trudge, toil,
hoist food for the bishop and monks; fat bishop himself.
The wheel weighs and weighs. You’re chained in; you toil.
Then they extract you. Where have your years vanished?
What difference? says theodicy-god. Wheel, toil: what difference?
Theodicy-god has evolved now to both substance and not.
With handy metaphysical blades to slice brain meat from mind.
For in minds should be voidy wings choiring, not selves.
This old scholar, for instance, should have to struggle to speak,
should not remember his words, paragraphs, books:
that garner of full-ripened grain must be hosed clean.
Sometimes as the rat-wheel is screaming, theodicy-god
considers whether to say he’s sorry: That you can’t speak,
can’t remember your words, paragraphs, books.
Sorry, so sorry. Blah, his voice thinks instead, blah.
He can’t do it. Best hope instead they’ll ask him again
as they always do for forgiveness. But what if they don’t?
What might have once been a heart feels pity, for itself though,
not the old man with no speech—for him and his only scorn.
Here in my rat wheel, my Mont Saint Michel, my steeple of scorn.
But then, again, after everything, death. How death shape changes over the decades. My own most intimate relationship to death occurred in my twenties. Death then was with me all the time, as a threat, and also, as I’ve said, a companion, a possible savior, but in whatever guise it took, it was there. I remember thinking at one point that the most appropriate title for my first book of poems, the book I never finished writing, should have been The Book of Dying.
It’s different now. Death only takes me occasionally these days, and doesn’t hang about the way it did then. It comes instead in sudden, dire surges, in which everything is infused with death, flooded away. During those times, usually at dawn when I wake too early, death possesses reality, not as fear, but fact, inevitable, unavoidable, complete. And along with this, or just subsequent to it, I’m jettisoned into time in an unfamiliar way. In that early light, I often find myself ranging restlessly over my past as I never used to. I’m back in my twenties or thirties or even before, taken by spookily animated memories. All the thoughtless and stupid things I said, years ago, decades ago, I find have been dutifully stored in some cesspool of conscience that only now has taken to overflowing, so that my selfishness, my awful insensitivity, all which at the time I thought were a portion of how one was in the world, return with distressing clarity.
The journeys I make through time aren’t only in own my life, though. I also find myself traveling through larger cycles as well. I refer a lot in my mind to the far past, to history, and even to pre–Homo sapiens existence. I keep trying to give credence to the fact that my own personal ancestors were these hairier other humans, the possible lives of which I find so engrossing.
Then, again, more often, I find myself spun out into the future. I obsess about the future much more than I ever did before, much more than I’d like to. What terrible possibilities await us, or, more poignantly and painfully, our heirs. I remember the first time I heard the term “global warming.” I felt a chill: it was clear that we, all of us, were involved in a destiny much larger than any we’d ever imagined. The survival of the planet as we know it was going to be our responsibility. These days I think a lot about this, I dwell on its terrible plausibility. Sometimes I can’t think about anything else—I find myself too often writing mostly wretched poems about it.
Galway Kinnell has a poem, “There Are Things I Tell to No One.” A lovely title, to which in my memory I’d found I’d somehow added a phrase, “But the Poem.” Except I find now that there is indeed much, very much, I not only don’t tell the poem but don’t tell anyone else either. I have a wife I love unreasonably, a son and a daughter, three grandsons and a son-in-law, and many beloved friends. I worry about them, and I don’t want to tell those closest to me how dire my vision of the future is for fear of terrifying them. I’m not bringing any news to them, surely, but they respect what I think, and feel, and I’m afraid my anxieties will only intensify their own. There are times I’m almost relieved that I won’t have to live to see the worst of it, and others when I almost wish not to perceive what’s out there right now. Trying to save our world has become, in America at least, a partisan political issue, contaminated by the cynical cultivation by the Right of willful superstition. I find this to be the most atrocious example of corruption that we’ve had to behold in our already harrowing historical moment.
The rest of our communal madness goes on, as usual. Watching the news, realizing again how such and such number of people had been killed in one country then another, I wonder how many times in our media-saturated culture we hear that word “killed” spoken, and how difficult it still is to grasp the reality that each occasion represents a person with a consciousness of the mysteries of existence exactly like our own, which will no longer be a consciousness but a void. Horrible thought.
And in its way a childish one. Children think like that, one thing at a time. It takes us a long time to learn to abstract from the instance. But not that long. When he was three, my grandson Sully asked his mother, “When you step on an ant, does it say ‘ouch?’” “Ants don’t talk,” my daughter answered. “Yes,” Sully said, “but does it say ‘ouch’ in its mind?”
We come to know this thing called mind quite early on, and we also at some point much later come to realize how much our minds aren’t susceptible to being what we’d like them to be. As I’ve aged—“matured” I suppose would be the word—I’ve become more and more aware of the parts of myself that don’t arrive at anything like what’s implied by that grand term. The older I am, the more I’ve become aware of how trapped I am in a mind that in its perceptions, its impulses, its emotions is very much still a child’s. I’ve spent so much time, so much labor trying to tame this thing called mind, trying to cajole it to be more reasonable, more sensible, less absolute, less simply silly. But the task seems hopeless because my child’s mind, the mind that lurks beneath all the others I like to think determine who I am, experiences the world in brute, crude, utterly unsophisticated systems of feeling and thought: it wants, it wishes, it desires—things, feelings, states of being—and when it isn’t granted them to possess, or at least hope for, it becomes depressed, or flies into a tantrum. And, worse, it’s not satisfied with halfway: it admits no partials, no gradations, no compromises or concessions. To it, accommodations are capitulations, failures, precursors to defeat.
Furthermore, that the world beyond me is not as my child’s mind wishes it to be, imagines it can be, is passionately convinced it abso
lutely should be, throws it into a frenzy of frustration, exasperation, indignation, umbrage, so that I, trapped for so much of the time in this, my mind, am offended, embittered; I disapprove, I sulk, I become petulant. When I look out into that world, when I peer out between my petulance and my sulk at that world that at once lacks and is in danger—how can it not be that I am fraught? How can my mind not be frightened—not only of the world but also of itself, this child’s mind that inflicts the imperfect world on itself?
But then, sooner or later, again and again, I ask myself how can the world’s ultimate facticity, the simplicity of it, its purity, not be dimmed, diminished, thrown out of focus, distorted by a surrender to myself, by my helplessness before myself? I see the world as it is, its space, its people, its things; I see it glowing in the astonishment of pure being, yet the emotion I draw from that glow, from that blaze, is worry, concern, anguish; is anxiety, terror, then sadness, then, again, despair, that despair which seems not merely to perceive the world beyond itself but, in its imagination, to consume it.
And so I mostly shut up about my despair. Sometimes perhaps telling a poem about it, but mostly struggling to keep it to myself.
As I will here. And return to death, which, in this context, can sometimes be, as I’ve said, solacing. Not to have to behold the rains stop, the deserts advance, the glaciers melt, not to experience the violence and suffering that may well ensue from such disruptions.
And yet reality, our reality, is here: it beckons, it hasn’t lost a bit of its glorious clarity, its colors, its sounds, its scents, those simple miracles that are more miraculous in the complexities that science has revealed are woven beneath them. I desire this world with the unquestioning, unconditional force of a love that forever wends a way through the interstices of disappointment, dissatisfaction, foreboding.
And poetry. It doesn’t seem absurd after all to have given one’s life to poetry. To have been allowed to participate in the grandeur of its traditions, to have experienced so profoundly so many inspiring poems, so many poet-geniuses, so many glimmers of something greater than anything I could have imagined life would offer, life would be. Even unto death, poetry can go on, will go on.
WRITERS WRITING DYING
Many I could name but won’t who’d have been furious to die while they were sleeping but did—
outrageous, they’d have lamented, and never forgiven the death they’d construed for themselves
being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like rubber gloves
stickily stripped from the innermostness they’d contrived to horde for so long—all of it gone,
squandered, wasted, on what? Death, crashingly boring as long as you’re able to think and write it.
Think, write, write, think: just keep galloping faster and you won’t even notice you’re dead.
The hard thing’s when you’re not thinking or writing and as far as you know you are dead
or might as well be, with no word for yourself, just that suction-shush like a heart pump or straw
in a milkshake and death which once wanted only to be sung back to sleep with its tired old fangs
has me in its mouth!—and where the hell are you that chunk of dying we used to call Muse?
Well, dead or not, at least there was that dream, of some scribbler, some think- and write-person,
maybe it was yourself, soaring in the sidereal void, and not only that, you were holding a banjo
and gleefully strumming, and singing, jaw swung a bit under and off to the side the way crazily
happily people will do it—singing songs or not even songs, just lolly molly syllable sounds
and you’d escaped even from language, from having to gab, from having to write down the idiot gab.
But in the meantime isn’t this what it is to be dead, with that Emily-fly buzzing over your snout
that you’re singing almost as she did; so what matter if you died in your sleep, or rushed toward dying
like the Sylvia-Hart part of the tribe who ceased too quickly to be and left out some stanzas?
You’re still aloft with your banjoless banjo, and if you’re dead or asleep who really cares?
Such fun to wake up though! Such fun too if you don’t! Keep dying! Keep writing it down!
Acknowledgments
“Unlikely Likes: George Herbert and Philip Larkin”: an earlier version was published in the Yale Review 88, no. 4 (October 2000): 121–38.
“Amichai Near the End”: an earlier version was published as “We Cannot Be Fooled, We Can Be Fooled” in the New Republic (July 3, 2000).
“Autobiography with Translation”: originally published as “On Lowell’s Imitations,” Salmagundi, nos. 141–42 (Winter–Spring 2004): 110 –12.
“Lowell Later”: an earlier version appeared as “Listening to Lowell” in the Threepenny Review, no. 97 (Spring 2004): 14 –15.
“Odd Endings”: originally given as a talk at the University of Chicago’s Poem Present series (April 20, 2006).
“Some Reflections on Tragedy”: revised version of a talk, “Beyond Euripides,” delivered at a translation conference, Princeton University (April 23, 2004) and later published in the Yale Review (October 2012), forthcoming.
“Letter to a Workshop”: an earlier version appeared in American Poetry Review 36, no. 4 (July–August 2007): 31–34.
“Two Encounters Early On”: part 1, “Cowboys and Poets,” was first published in the Boston Globe, June 14, 1998; part 2, “Smut,” was published in Lost Classics, edited by Michael Ondaatje (New York: Anchor Books, 2001).
“Literary Models of Adolescence”: revised version of a talk delivered to a meeting of the Philadelphia Society of Adolescent Psychiatry, 1990.
“Paris as Symbol, Idea, and Reality”: revised version of the talk “Poetry and Place,” at Reid Hall, Columbia Global Centers, Paris (1999).
“Letter to a German Friend”: originally published in Salmagundi, nos. 144–45 (Fall 2004 –Winter 2005): 156 –73.
“Nature and Panic”: revised version of a talk delivered at the conference “Human: Nature” at the University of East Anglia (2008).
“On Being Old”: Poetry Society Annual Lecture (May 26, 2011), commissioned by the Poetry Society of London, published in the Poetry Review (Winter 2011) and forthcoming in the American Poetry Review (July–August 2012). The poems in the essay appear in the forthcoming collection Writers Writing Dying (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
Notes
Amichai Near the End
1. This essay first appeared in the New Republic as a review of Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai, trans. Chana Block and Chana Kronfeld (New York: Harcourt, 2000). All quotes are from the translations in the book.
Some Reflections on Tragedy
1. Sophocles, Women of Trachis, trans. C. K. Williams and Gregory Dickerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) and The Bacchae of Euripides: A New Version, trans. C. K. Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).
Paris as Symbol, Idea, and Reality
1. Since this essay was written, and since the great changes in Middle and Eastern Europe, Zagajewski has returned to Poland.
Letter to a German Friend
1. “Now” refers to fall 2004, when this essay was originally published in Salmagundi.