I walked quietly into the garden toward the fence between the two houses, speaking to it in a low voice. I told it that I thanked it for having come; that I wanted it to be safe. I moved backward again a little to look at it better. Suddenly it was in air, had flapped out of sight.
It would be easy to call this apparition “dreamlike,” but it did not feel so. After some moments I went into the house. I wanted to be sure I could name what I had seen; to stay with what I had seen. I pulled from the bookcase a guide to Pacific Coast ecology. The color plate of the Great Blue Heron confirmed my naming.
Then, as I sat there, my eye began to travel the margins of the book, along the names and habitats of creatures and plants of the 4,000-mile Pacific coastline of North America. It was an idle enough activity at first, the kind that sometimes plays upon other, subterranean activities of the mind, draws thinking and unfiltered feelings into sudden dialogue. Of late, I had been consciously thinking about the decade just beginning, the last of the twentieth century, and the great movements and shudderings of the time; about the country where I am a citizen, and what has been happening in our social fabric, our emotional and sensual life, during that century. Somewhere beneath these conscious speculations lay a vaguer desire: to feel the pull of the future, to possess the inner gift, the unsentimentality, the fortitude, to see into it—if only a little way.
But I found myself pulled by names: Dire Whelk, Dusky Tegula, Fingered Limpet, Hooded Puncturella, Veiled Chiton, Bat Star, By-the-Wind Sailor, Crumb-of-Bread Sponge, Eye Fringed Worm, Sugar Wrack, Frilled Anemone, Bull Kelp, Ghost Shrimp, Sanderling, Walleye Surfperch, Volcano Barnacle, Stiff-footed Sea Cucumber, Leather Star, Innkeeper Worm, Lug Worm. And I felt the names drawing me into a state of piercing awareness, a state I associate with reading and writing poems. These names—by whom given and agreed on?—these names work as poetry works, enlivening a sensuous reality through recognition or through the play of sounds (the short i’s of Fingered Limpet, the open vowels of Bull Kelp, Hooded Puncturella, Bat Star); the poising of heterogeneous images (volcano and barnacle, leather and star, sugar and wrack) to evoke other worlds of meaning. Sugar Wrack: a foundered ship in the Triangle Trade? Volcano Barnacle: tiny unnoticed undergrowth with explosive potential? Who saw the bird named Sanderling and gave it that caressive, diminutive name? Or was Sanderling the name of one who saw it? These names work as poetry works in another sense as well: they make something unforgettable. You will remember the pictorial names as you won’t the Latin, which, however, is more specific as to genus and species. Human eyes gazed at each of all these forms of life and saw resemblance in difference—the core of metaphor, that which lies close to the core of poetry itself, the only hope for a humane civil life. The eye for likeness in the midst of contrast, the appeal to recognition, the association of thing to thing, spiritual fact with embodied form, begins here. And so begins the suggestion of multiple, many-layered, rather than singular, meanings, wherever we look, in the ordinary world.
I began to think about the names, beginning with the sound and image delivered in the name “Great Blue Heron,” as tokens of a time when naming was poetry, when connections between things and living beings, or living things and human beings, were instinctively apprehended. By “a time” I don’t mean any one historical or linguistic moment or period. I mean all the times when people have summoned language into the activity of plotting connections between, and marking distinctions among, the elements presented to our senses.
This impulse to enter, with other humans, through language, into the order and disorder of the world, is poetic at its root as surely as it is political at its root. Poetry and politics both have to do with description and with power. And so, of course, does science. We might hope to find the three activities—poetry, science, politics—triangulated, with extraordinary electrical exchanges moving from each to each and through our lives.1 Instead, over centuries, they have become separated—poetry from politics, poetic naming from scientific naming, an ostensibly “neutral” science from political questions, “rational” science from lyrical poetry—nowhere more than in the United States over the past fifty years.
•
The Great Blue Heron is not a symbol. Wandered inadvertently or purposefully inland, maybe drought-driven, to a backyard habitat, it is a bird, Ardea herodias, whose form, dimensions, and habits have been described by ornithologists, yet whose intangible ways of being and knowing remain beyond my—or anyone’s—reach. If I spoke to it, it was because I needed to acknowledge in words the rarity and signifying power of its appearance, not because I thought it had come to me. The tall, foot-poised creature had a life, a place of its own in the manifold, fragile system that is this coastline; a place of its own in the universe. Its place, and mine, I believe, are equal and interdependent. Neither of us—woman or bird—is a symbol, despite efforts to make us that. But I needed to acknowledge the heron with speech, and by confirming its name. To it I brought the kind of thing my kind of creature does.
A Mohawk Indian friend says she began writing “after a motor trip through the Mohawk Valley, when a Bald Eagle flew in front of her car, sat in a tree, and instructed her to write.”2 Very little in my own heritage has suggested to me that a wild living creature might come to bring me a direct personal message. And I know too that a complex humor underlies my friend’s statement (I do not mean it is a joke). I am suspicious—first of all, in myself—of adopted mysticisms, of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to sniff and taste, uninvited, and in most cases to vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other “exotic” ways of understanding. I made no claim upon the heron as my personal instructor. But our trajectories crossed at a time when I was ready to begin something new, the nature of which I did not clearly see. And poetry, too, begins in this way: the crossing of trajectories of two (or more) elements that might not otherwise have known simultaneity. When this happens, a piece of the universe is revealed as if for the first time.
VOICES FROM THE AIR
On a bleak December night in 1967, I lay awake in a New York City hospital, in pain from a newly operated knee in traction. It was too soon for the next pain-dulling injection; I was in the depression of spirits that follows anesthesia, unable to sleep or to discover in myself any thread that might lead me back to a place I used to recognize as “I.” Turning the dial of my bedside radio for music, I came upon a speaking voice, deep, a woman’s.
“Who am I?” it asked.1
Thou art a box of worme-seede, at best, but a salvatory of greene mummey: what’s this flesh? a little cruded milke, phantastical puff-paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in: more contemptible: since ours is to preserve earthwormes: didst thou ever see a Larke in a cage? such is the soule in the body. . . .
Am not I, thy Duchess?
Thou art some great woman, sure, for riot begins to sit on thy fore-head (clad in gray haires) twenty years sooner, then on a merry milkmaydes. Thou sleepst worse, then if a mouse should be forc’d to take up her lodging in a cats eare: a little infant, that breedes it’s teeth, should it lie with thee, would crie out, as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow.
I am Duchess of Malfy still.
That makes thy sleepes so broken:
Glories (like glow-wormes) afarre off, shine bright
But look’d to neere, have neither heate, nor light.
It does not seem strange to me now—it did not seem so then—that this dialogue, in which the opposition of flesh and spirit is so brutally vaunted, and which ends in the strangling of the Duchess, could, crystallized out of the airwaves on an icy night, solace my consciousness to the point of relief. For that is one property of poetic language: to engage with states that themselves would deprive us of language and reduce us to passive sufferers.
•
Thirteen years later, a different night, another radio. Driving over the mountains from upstate New York into Massachusetts, once more twisting a d
ial, I brought in not music, but a voice, speaking words I had read many times:
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.2
Wallace Stevens, reading his poetry on a recording. And for those moments, on a mountain road on a calm night, for two listeners in a world we knew to be in fracture, the words—Stevens at his plainest and most mantralike—rose in that flat, understated, actuarial voice to bind the actual night, the moving car, the two existences, almost as house, reader, meaning, truth, summer, and night are bound in the poem. For a few moments, we could believe in it all.
But what is a poem like this doing in a world where even the semblance of calm is a privilege few can afford? Another scenario: Your sister, stabbed in the early morning hours by her boyfriend (“lover” is not the word, “domestic partner” is not the word), called you at 1:30 a.m. You were back from the evening shift at the nursing home; your children and your mother, who lives with you, were asleep. You had just looked in at the children, turned to the refrigerator to pack their lunches for morning. As you searched for cold cuts, the phone rang; it was Connie—Can you drive me to the emergency? he’s taken my car. You have had to do this before, you are enraged though differently at both of them; but she’s your sister, and you scrawl a note to your mother, push the food back in the refrigerator, and run for the car. On the highway you twist the radio dial for late-night music. There are words, coming through suddenly clear: house . . . quiet . . . calm . . . summer night . . . book . . . quiet . . . truth. What would make your hand pause on the dial, why would these words hold you? What, of the world the poem constructs, would seem anything more than suburban separatism, the tranquil luxury of a complacent man? If you go on listening, if the words can draw you in, it’s surely for their music as much as for meaning—music that calls up the state of which the words are speaking. You are drawn in not because this is a description of your world, but because you begin to be reminded of your own desire and need, because the poem is not about integration and fulfillment, but about the desire (That makes thy sleepes so broken) for those conditions. You listen, if you do, not simply to the poem, but to a part of you reawakened by the poem, momentarily made aware, a need both emotional and physical, that can for a moment be affirmed there. And, maybe, because the phrase “summer night” calls up more than a time and a season.
•
A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It’s not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it’s an instrument for embodied experience. But we seek that experience, or recognize it when it is offered to us, because it reminds us in some way of our need. After that rearousal of desire, the task of acting on that truth, or making love, or meeting other needs, is ours.
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND VIOLENCE
She’s calling from Hartford: another young dark-skinned man has been killed—shot by police in the head while lying on the ground. Her friend, riding the train up from New York, has seen overpass after overpass spraypainted: “KKK—Kill Niggers.” It’s Black History Month.
But this is white history.
White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness—that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
In the case of my kin the word sprayed on the overpasses was unspeakable, part of a taboo vocabulary. That word was the language of “rednecks.” My parents said “colored,” “Negro,” more often “They,” even sometimes, in French, “les autres.”
Such language could dissociate itself from lynching, from violence, from such a thing as hatred.
•
A poet’s education. A white child growing into her powers of language within white discourse. Every day, when she is about five years old, her father sets her a few lines of poetry to copy into a ruled notebook as a handwriting lesson:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases . . .1
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?2
She receives a written word in her notebook as grade: “Excellent,” “Very good,” “Good,” “Fair,” “Poor.” The power of words is enormous; the rhythmic power of verse, rhythm meshed with language, excites her to imitation. Later, she begins reading in the books of poetry from which she copied her lessons. Blake, especially, she loves. She has no idea whether he, or Keats, or any of the poets is alive or dead, or where they wrote from: poetry, for her, is now and here. The “Songs of Innocence” seem both strange and familiar:
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.
And.
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.
This poem disturbs her faintly, not because it in any way contradicts the white discourse around her, but because it seems to approach the perilous, forbidden theme of color, the endless undertone of that discourse.
She is not brought up to hate; she is brought up within the circumference of white language and metaphor, a space that looks and feels to her like freedom. Early on, she experiences language, especially poetry, as power: an elemental force that is with her, like the wind at her back as she runs across a field.
Only much later she begins to perceive, reluctantly, the relationships of power sketched in her imagination by the language she loves and works in. How hard, against others, that wind can blow.
•
White child growing into her whiteness. Tin shovel flung by my hand at the dark-skinned woman caring for me, summer 1933, soon after my sister’s birth, my mother ill and back in the hospital. A half-effaced, shamed memory of a bleeding cut on her forehead. I am reprimanded, made to say I’m sorry. I have “a temper,” for which I’m often punished; but this incident remains vivid while others blur. The distance between language and violence has already shortened. Violence becomes a language. If I flung words along with the shovel, I can’t remember them. Then, years later, I do remember. Negro! Negro! The polite word becomes epithet, stands in for the evil epithet, the taboo word, the curse.
•
A white child’s anger at her mother’s absence, already translated (some kind of knowledge makes this possible) into a racial language. That They are to blame for whatever pain is felt.
•
This is the child we needed and deserved, my mother writes in a notebook when I’m three. My parents require a perfectly developing child, evidence o
f their intelligence and culture. I’m kept from school, taught at home till the age of nine. My mother, once an aspiring pianist and composer who earned her living as a piano teacher, need not—and must not—work for money after marriage. Within this bubble of class privilege, the child can be educated at home, taught to play Mozart on the piano at four years old. She develops facial tics, eczema in the creases of her elbows and knees, hay fever. She is prohibited confusion: her lessons, accomplishments, must follow a clear trajectory. For her parents she is living proof. A Black woman cleans the apartment, cooks, takes care of the child when the child isn’t being “educated.”
Mercifully, I had time to imagine, fantasize, play with paper dolls and china figurines, inventing and resolving their fates. The best times were times I was ignored, could talk stories under my breath, loving my improvised world almost as much as I loved reading.
•
Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter. There were paper-doll books of her and of the Dionne quintuplets—five identical girls born to a French-Canadian family—and of the famous dollhouse of the actress Colleen Moore, which contained every luxury conceivable in perfect miniature, including a tiny phonograph that played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting. I must have seen her dancing with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in The Littlest Rebel, but I remember her less as a movie star than as a presence, like President Roosevelt, or Lindbergh, whose baby had been stolen; but she was a little girl whose face was everywhere—on glass mugs and in coloring books as well as in the papers.
Other figures peopling my childhood: the faceless, bonneted woman on the Dutch Cleanser can, Aunt Jemima beaming on the pancake box, “Rastus” the smiling Black chef on the Cream of Wheat box, the “Gold Dust Twins” capering black on orange on soap boxes, also in coloring books given as premiums with the soap powder. (The white obsession wasn’t silent where advertising logos were concerned.) The Indian chief and the buffalo, “vanished” but preserved on the nickel. Characters in books read aloud: Little Black Sambo, Uncle Remus—with accompanying illustrations. Hiawatha. The Ten Little Indians, soon reduced to none, in the counting-backward rhyme.
Essential Essays Page 27