by Kay Ryan
Isn’t it odd to think that in order to listen we must be a little bit relieved of the intention to understand? This, of course, is the danger of notebooks. They are the devil’s bible. They are the books of understanding later.
If you want to understand, it is a good idea not to think of yourself as a professional in the area in which you want to understand; it is just too big a burden. You have to seem to master everything that happens in your professional area. People ask you questions, and they value your answers. You are tempted to take your opinions seriously—sure death to the delicate, translucent stuff they’re made of.
We must be careful what we do because we value our actions so highly. Taking notes, the actual physical act of taking them, along with the resulting document in our own words, lends them a spurious importance. It becomes important to us to determine what we meant by that note because we wrote it. We are very self-conscious and therefore we must be vigilant about what we let ourselves see of ourselves. We can see too much.
III.
Memory is only necessary for those who insist upon novelty, I wrote on a small piece of paper as a note to myself some weeks ago, beginning to think about the danger of notebooks. Now I don’t quite know what I meant. By memory I probably meant notebooks, documents kept in order to hold onto thoughts and experiences, documents intended to create an exomemory like an exoskeleton—notebooks as a shell to protect us from loss. I no longer know exactly what I meant by my epigram at the moment I was writing it to my future self; I have lost it in spite of itself. I imagine that it was an intense and provocative idea at the time, welding many loose stars into a single constellation. Otherwise I wouldn’t have jotted it down. Also I must have believed I would know what I meant later. This is an interesting idea: Notes such as mine are actually promissory notes—when I write them to myself, I can enjoy the feeling that I have something wonderful to express, but I don’t have to spell it out yet. The balloon payment lies far off in the future. This is a nice thing about notes, this promising feeling they give us with no work.
But for the purposes of stimulating or focusing thoughts, anything else works just as well as a note. All you really need is a little nick to the brain. Everyone has experienced this: When you are hungry, everything starts smelling good; when you have an idea, everything collaborates. In short, notes are no more useful than the words on a matchbook—to the prepared mind. Because thinking wants only the tiniest bit of novelty, the tiniest little bit of new per old. Our novelty-obsessed culture disturbs the new-to-old ratio in our minds and therefore makes it almost impossible to think. It is because people are so in the grip of this novelty that they feel the desperate need to keep notebooks against loss; they are convinced they have so much to lose. If people were doing the same thing over and over, rocked in the meditative arms of repetition, they could have some real fun.
Real fun reminds me of the fun-loving British poet Stevie Smith, who celebrated the novelty-free life. Well, not quite novelty-free; it is a great pleasure to say no (“Le Plaisir aristocratique de déplaire”) though you must also occasionally say yes, “or you will turn into an Oblomov. He stayed in bed all day and was robbed by his servants. There was little enjoyment there.” A great celebrator of the “regular habits” which “sweeten simplicity,” she says, “In the middle of every morning I leave the kitchen and have a glass of sherry with Aunt. I can only say that this is glorious.” And because of her life of regular habits, the rare interruption is almost hallucinogenic. She reports seeing The Trojan Women on a friend’s television. She is nearly undone with amusement at the hash it makes of Euripides: “What an earthshaking joke this is. Yet, if my life was not simple, if I looked at television all the time, I might have missed it.”
Memory as a job, as a notebook to be kept, is only necessary for those who insist upon novelty. If you delight in habit as Stevie Smith did, if it is your pleasure to do things in the same way without inviting change, you don’t have to write much down. And when things do change, as they will even without invitation, then you will really notice the change. Your memory will be deep, quiet, undifferentiated as a pool. Change will enter and twist like a drop of ink, the tiniest bit of new per old.
IV.
Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. What a refreshing thing for Milan Kundera to say. He adds, “We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image.” Yes. Like the photographs kept from childhood, our journals do not save but wipe away, or overlay, memory. It is so relaxing to think that we are an endless palimpsest, that the act of trying-to-keep is itself an act of erasure. It is so relaxing to give up the dream of getting back to Eden and to accept the smudges both on the paper and on our notebook-writing hand.
V.
Let me suggest a further extension of Kundera’s law: Kundera says that remembering is a form of forgetting, but what if the reverse is also true, and forgetting is a form of remembering? This is a mysterious and lovely thought, that by letting our memories go they might somehow be returned to us. Here is “Forgetting,” a short poem of mine which begins to nibble at this mystery:
Forgetting takes space.
Forgotten matters displace
as much anything else as
anything else. We must
skirt unlabeled crates
as though it made sense
and take them when we go
to other states.
In this poem we only know that what we have forgotten remains as an obstacle to be skirted and a burden to be hauled around. But this may only be the beginning of the truth. It could be that the very act of negotiating our way through a maze of unmarked boxes—the Etch-A-Sketch path of frustrating and apparently meaningless lefts and rights we’re forced to take—is secretly correct; even, in some larger sense, efficient. If so, we need to show greater tolerance for our own apparent indirections. We may be living more fully than we know, in possession of every single thing that has ever happened to us and every thought we thought we forgot.
VI.
Here is “Forget What Did,” a late poem from Larkin’s High Windows. One of his dreary rock-versus-hard-place poems, it points up the difference between two sorts of diaries. Larkin has given up the habit of the first, the loss of which has left him stunned, and he can barely imagine the second.
Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,
One no longer cicatrized
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.
I wanted them over,
Hurried to burial
And looked back on
Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the windows
Of an opaque childhood.
And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed
Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.
This is not one of Larkin’s best poems. It is too much under the sway of the diary he has stopped keeping. He is afraid that in stopping the diary he has lost his memory, and this fear is making him dull. In his dullness he agrees to the insidious and common idea that whatever bad has happened in one’s life is all there is to reality. His diary recorded the scarring words and actions (his? others’?) that “bleakened waking.” Since he doesn’t want to face this depressing pageant anymore, he stops the diary and therefore enters a “blank.” The only undepressing diary he can possibly imagine is some sort of bland and blameless celestial timetable. It is a barren poem.
VII.
Tantalus, but without the curse.
Tantalus was a king who was cursed by the gods. What he desired receded as he approached. He was teased and tempted but he could never get anything into his mouth because he was cursed.
Many people think they
live under a similar curse, which inhibits them from fully possessing their present or their past. They are maddened because when they try to reach for it, it draws away. But here is the secret: it’s just how things are.
VIII.
I don’t think I can speak at sufficient length about the importance to the poet of avoiding or ignoring Kodak moments. If a poet seeks to make or keep memories, how will she ever know which ones contain true power, which would assert themselves on their own? Perhaps her very definition of memory would change if she didn’t get her Kodak moments developed. Maybe memory would not hold individual scenes at all; maybe it would have no detail; maybe it would not rise up—the pines of that morning in Yosemite scraping the interior of her skull; maybe it would be nacreous, layered regions of pleasure and attraction in the mind. Any sense of tint in the depth of the gleam would arise so slowly as to be imperceptible. I am speaking of the memory that might result from repetition. I am interested in the long ways of knowing, where the mind does not seek strangeness. We must be less in love with foreground if we want to see far.
IX.
When a dog first gets out of the water, he labors beneath the solid, heavy mass of his coat. But the dog knows to spraddle his four legs and violently agitate his body one way and then the other, producing a full-body halo of flung droplets and leaving his fur in alert spikes from shoulder to rump. He looks like a new beast—an in-between beast—not a drenched dog and not a dry dog. A porcudog or a hedgedog.
From Chihuahuas to Irish sheepdogs, all dogs know this maneuver. But we who walk on two legs do not find it so easy to shake off what weighs us down. We believe in the value of gravity: weight is worth. But we must shake weight off to write good poems. A poem, even if it comes up out of the darkest, saddest waters, will be a flung thing, a halo of prisms, the undoing, the dissolution of weight.
It may make some sort of shower. Larkin concludes his gorgeous poem “The Whitsun Weddings” with the image of an “arrow-shower.” In this poem Larkin describes how he gradually realized that the repeated fusses at each local stop on his train journey to London were send-offs for newlyweds. He details the ordinariness of these couples and their well-wishers with such fascination that they grow vaguely grotesque. But gradually, gradually, the oppressive weight of these common couples with their commonplace futures becomes rolling weight, and not simply because they’re on the train. Larkin’s poem is itself a second train that becomes an engine of escape from the small plop ordinary lives make.
The poem glamours us with its “arrow-shower” ending. Here is Larkin, approaching that end but not there yet: As the train slows, nearing London, “it was nearly done, this frail / Travelling coincidence; and what it held / Stood ready to be loosed with all the power / That being changed can give.” The beauty is that because this is Larkin, the reader must remain skeptical of the lyric flourish of “the power / That being changed can give.” She cannot be sure yet that the idea of “being changed” isn’t a trick; she must suspect that these young lumpen couples will soon find themselves less remarkably changed than they hoped and Larkin himself unglamoured—this “frail travelling coincidence” dispersed and proven no more than that. But then Larkin pulls a blessing out of his hat with a bit of pure, transported language. Or better, Larkin himself is pulled through the hat by a rapturous final image far beyond where intention can carry a poet: “And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled / A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” These lines give the reader the dazzling physical sensation of stopping and beginning at once, of seeing beyond seeing—one image transforming into the next—the slowing train and all its modest hopes mysteriously dissolving to a shower of arrows and the arrows falling as rain. We are catapulted out of the world of cautious, local coincidence into … into what? Glory.
This is the shake of a very great dog.
This poem is a porcudog bristling with details. Here details do not drag us down, do not persuade us that the dreariest gravity is the certainest truth; all the notebooks of detail are transformed.
So it isn’t notebooks, or diaries, or spiral hinged objects as such that are ever the problem. It’s getting stuck in them.
Do You Like It?
How a person becomes a poet is a mystery before which one must simply bow down. Perhaps one is born to it. Indeed, genetic preparations may have been underway for generations before the poet’s birth. Snippings and mixings of hereditary materials may have been exactly calculated by some higher hand, one’s hapless ancestors thrust together in otherwise unprofitable unions sheerly to produce the very poet one is. It could be that inevitable. It could be that grand and cruel. A person could be certifiably called, and of course this is an attractive theory, with religious overtones. It would be a ferocious religion, because so many generations would be used opportunistically, mined exclusively for their rhyme gene or their understanding of the caesura. But then, poetry is ferocious and opportunistic.
Or one may become a poet through an opposite process. Perhaps one is reduced to it. Instead of being the result of the refinement and purification of the blood until only poetic ichor runs, the poet may be the product of some cataclysmic simplification, much like the simplification that overtook the dinosaurs, wiping them out and leaving the cockroaches. Both cockroach and poet are hardy little survivors, quick and omnivorous.
But in any case, such speculations regarding the origin of the poet feast upon the antique and the hideous—always a pleasure, but quite unhelpful to the actual poet in youth. For this is a fact: Though a person may be absolutely destined to be a poet, the person doesn’t altogether understand this at first. For a long time the person just feels silly.
It is very like the bewilderment felt by the early evolutionary predecessor of the anglerfish, back before this strange fish had undergone the “five hundred separate modifications” (Stephen Jay Gould’s estimate) that it took to develop the fishing lure it now dangles before its cavernous mouth.
As in the case of this early anglerfish, the young poet feels ill-formed, but with glimmers of something yet to be articulated. This condition can go on throughout life, and, in truth, does. For how can the anglerfish ancestor jump ahead to a more satisfying form where the lure actually works? He cannot. And how can the poet evolve beyond the comical, partial creature she is? She cannot. And still, she cannot live indefinitely without forming an opinion regarding immanence and glimmers.
I wonder if other poets can say how they became poets, not in terms of the imponderably remote sources of the gift or when they got a publishing break, but can they recall a particular moment when they felt themselves say yes to the lifelong enterprise? It always surprises me that I can name such a moment. I don’t see myself as a person who has “moments.” The circumstances were picturesque and dramatic in a way foreign to my desert-bred habits.
In 1976, at the age of thirty, I was bicycling across the United States. I had been feeling all the telltale symptoms of the poetic calling for a number of years, but was resisting it because I didn’t like the part about being utterly exposed, inadequate, foolish, and doomed. Still, poetry kept commandeering my mind. So the bicycle trip was four thousand miles to say yes or no to poetry.
For a long time it didn’t seem to be working.
Then came a morning, many hundreds of miles into the rhythm of riding, going up a long, high pass in the Colorado Rockies, when I felt my mind simply lose its edges. The pines swept through my mind, my mind swept through the pines, not a bit strange. All at once I no longer had to try to appreciate my experience or try to understand; I played with the phrase the peace that passeth understanding like turning a silver coin in my fingers. And with the peace-beyond-the-struggle-to-understand came an unprecedented freedom and power to think.
My brain was like a stunt kite; I held it by only a couple of strings, but I could ask anything, absolutely anything, of it. I tried some sample stunts, and then I asked the question: Shall I be a write
r?
It was the one question of my whole life, but I asked it with no sense of weight, as though it were casual: Shall I be a writer?
I don’t know where the answer came from, but it wasn’t what I expected. I suppose I expected an evaluation of my talents and chances of success. What I heard was, Do you like it?
I had never heard anything so right. Yes; I did like it, that was all there was to it. I laughed and laughed and laughed.
II
The Authority of Lightness
Like her poems, Stevie Smith is a cartoon from any distance at all. She takes very few strokes to draw and is refreshingly black, white, and flat. Both she and her poems are brilliant as singles, but also satisfy as strips. The strips needn’t be read serially, however; they can be put in any order. This makes it hard for would-be critics of her verse and for biographers. But never mind. Jack Barbera and William McBrien, authors of Stevie, bravely march us through her life and works as though she progressed in the ordinary sense from birth to death and from juvenilia to resonant maturity of poetic voice. Occasionally she seems to oblige; the rest of the time she’s the Ignatz of Krazy Kat, an appealing but untender fixed creature with a brick at the ready.
The few facts of her life are quickly dispatchable. Born in 1902, she spent all but her first four years in Palmers Green, since absorbed by London, in the company of a diminishing number of female relations boiling down finally to the exclusive company of her stern and noble “Lion Aunt.” She worked as a secretary for many years until pensioned off for cutting her wrists in the office. She maintained a houseguest relationship to the ordinary run of life—the sexes coupled, children, pets—glad that she did not have to live there permanently (a sentiment shared by her hosts). She wrote three Shandyesque novels, a great deal of poetry accompanied by dashed-off drawings, short stories, radio broadcasts, plus many book reviews to supplement the pension. Her work was very much fancied by smart British people before World War II, then languished, then began to enjoy an international renaissance in the sixties, in time for her to relish it and become an eccentric star of the reading circuit and BBC. Her reputation is still on the rise, with All the Poems out from New Directions in 2016 and her authorized biography apparently in the works. She died in 1971 of a brain tumor, having, with her head shaved, finally taken on a dignified look, “rather like the death mask of John Donne,” one friend noted.