by Kay Ryan
Have I said Annie Dillard is hilarious? She is. Here is the terrible child experimenting upon the innocent parental flesh: “Loose under their shinbones, as in a hammock, hung the relaxed flesh of their calves. You could push and swing this like a baby in a sling. Their heels were dry and hard, sharp at the curved edge. The bottoms of their toes had flattened… . I would not let this happen to me. Under certain conditions the long bones of their feet showed under their skin. The bones rose up long and miserably thin in skeletal rays on the slopes of their feet. This terrible sight they ignored also.”
Annie Dillard uses her hypervision on everything. She has to; it’s death to hide. This is a force we’re dealing with here, a live cable whipping around. The ground is hot, and she’s barefoot, and it means a lot of dancing. She can usually only manage to set us down in one spot for a few pages; then it’s off to the next branding. Like all great writers, she is fresh, jarring, passionately dedicated to her subjects and attached to them only by a gossamer. It is earnest, the one and only, the real thing; it is a joke, it is arbitrary, it might as easily have been something else.
Or somewhere else. The setting of her childhood is thoroughly American—the totemic baseball mitt, the Pittsburgh steel mills, the confluence of great rivers with their freight of child-inflaming French and Indian history, the country club, the public library in the poor black section of the city, the free Carnegie art classes at the museum. But there is that ecstatic Annie Dillard ring off everything. She could get high C out of a potato. It is this ecstasy, or, more accurately, the management of this ecstasy, which seems the native ground of the book. “‘Calm yourself,’ people had been saying to me all my life.” She is not calm. She is always asking—the question is born large in her—what does it feel like to be alive? “Living, you stand under a waterfall… . Can you breathe here … where the force is greatest …? … Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this.” Let me revise; there is an attainable calm for Annie Dillard: in absolute attention. In the first essay in Teaching a Stone to Talk she locks eyes with a weasel; her mind mixes with his wild mind, and she knows his way for a moment: “open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.”
There is always a feral scent to Annie Dillard’s writing, and always a little spatter of blood—from birth, the kill, the dissection, the thorn of the rose. There are jaws, literal, figurative, and more figurative, gripping on past death. The terrible and the beautiful are studied with the same unblinking eye. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, we see a frog sucked hollow from underneath by a giant water bug. In An American Childhood, the young Annie Dillard watches a great moth hatch in a Mason jar. The jar is too small for it to spread and dry its giant wings, and they are welded half-furled. Her teacher releases it with a flourish. She watches it hobble down the school drive. This image never stops haunting her.
But what image does? In another essay in Teaching a Stone to Talk she eats a dish containing the same sort of delicate deer which at that moment is struggling against a rope in the clearing before her. She eats with appetite and with the knowledge of suffering. She does not turn away from it or claim to understand it or deny that the meat is good. “It is a fact that the high level of lactic acid, which builds up in muscle tissues during exertion, tenderizes.” She keeps it all before us, as she keeps the photograph of the twice-burned man’s face before herself, tucked in her dresser mirror. “These things are not issues; they are mysteries.”
Childhood is natural material for such a fierce spirit, whose words do not hope to correct, but to clarify—to praise as light does. And the headlong quality of her prose was surely bred in the bone. This girl meant to fly. In a wonderful passage in the autobiography, we see her flapping full gallop down Penn Avenue—to use up the joy inside her, to strain the ligatures of faith, to test the draw of courage, to fly through the face of dignity. It is quite a success. It has carried her all the way to now. And is she really flying? It feels like it.
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row, 1987)
The Abrasion of Loneliness
Marilynne Robinson’s Lila describes the abrasion of loneliness, the scrubbing a person can take to all the surfaces of desire; it is the history of the hypersensitivities and bluntings that result from an almost but not quite absolute absence of nurturing. It demonstrates, as only such extremity can, the quick availability of kinds of salvation: it takes just a smidgeon of love to land on the starveling’s tongue and the starveling is fed-enough, one more time. The smallest gestures, the most ordinary objects, are triggers to these salvations. The wine and wafer are all over the place.
Lila is about outsides and insides and how poorly they’re matched up most of the time and how much we want that fixed. But at the same time Lila is just as much witness to the strange privileges of the outsider: the tolerance—which actually becomes an appetite—for wandering; the radiance holding its breath in any old thing; the looseness of the self, or the loosening of the self, I might say, that fits with the looseness out there. It approaches an apprehension of namelessness—which is terrible and a relief.
So maybe we don’t want outside and inside matched up, or we don’t trust that they could be without something too important ignored. The wild thing—Lila—is taken in, is saved, as completely as Marilynne Robinson knows how to save her, with love and community, becoming a preacher’s wife and a mother, living inside the preacher’s spiritual house, which is very unconfining. He is keen to the mystery of the nothing we know about anything, but he is convinced of a final or ultimate or original goodness or benevolence which he has domesticated into a neighborly god because it is comforting and useful to do that, if also comical.
Lila is baptized like other savages the world over, understanding hardly a speck of what’s going on, but sensing an improvement of circumstances. The preacher knows that. Maybe really that’s the very thing that has allowed her to unlock his locked life of faith and good works and examinations of conscience; she is a breath of fresh air. She has no assumptions he shares. He can in a way be reborn, before language, as much as he wants to be, in Lila. She doesn’t know what to expect of anyone or anything beyond being run off. The preacher, on the other hand, was born into a line of preachers.
So Marilynne Robinson has dropped two extremes into one box and lets them have at it. I don’t wind up at all sure that Lila will stay in Gilead once the old preacher (I should be saying reverend) dies, even though it seems like all she could do, since she has the boy and he won’t be wild-hearted like Lila. But Robinson has—as always—kept the cosmos open in her book. She’s apparently interested in Calvin’s god, whatever that would mean, but it must be a very big god that doesn’t hold her back from wandering us out to the last dots on a disk of snow.
Lila, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014)
III
On a Poem by Hopkins
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
As with so much Hopkins, this poem is preposterously beautiful. Its difficult syntax compels its reader to submit to its world almost immediately. Well, even before we get to the improbable “man, you—can you?” the neologisms have altered our minds: �
�Goldengrove unleaving.” I don’t know if Goldengrove is an actual stand of deciduous trees or not; I vote for Hopkins having invented this tract name to carry all the beauty of loss in a single word. Hear the sounds of “go, go” in Goldengrove; simply to invoke a golden grove is to say it is going. The poem reminds me of Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—both poems so immense and sad to the point of peace. There is no escape from loss—unless the pure beauty of the poems provides one, as it does for me.
But back to “unleaving.” The new word is generated, I would imagine, by the unstudied opening line, “Margaret, are you grieving?” That’s something Hopkins might have written quickly, and it would have given him—always ready to forge new words—the rhyming word “unleaving,” which of course just means ordinary losing-its-leaves, and is a convenience. But it also happens to operate as a pun on leaving’s other sense—going away. Here it is unleaving, of course, but the “leave,” like the “go” in Goldengrove, is planted in our mind’s ear.
This couplet, “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” is as easy on the tongue as the following couplet is impossible: “Leaves, like the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?” Let me just say that my hat is off to Hopkins for this. I’ve never really examined this poem before, having submitted to it utterly at the age of nineteen. This is the point at which Hopkins compels us to take off our clothes and enter his river. It is wildly strained, forced, manipulated, and—we already feel—worth it. If we are not compelled to submit in some way to a poem it cannot change us. That makes perfect sense, now that I’ve written it, but I don’t think I ever thought of it before. So this is not a tormented couplet that we forgive for the greater good of the poem, averting our eyes discreetly from that howler, “man, you—can you?”; this is the couplet of our entrance, of our acceptance of Hopkins’s terms. He can continue from here. He has made aesthetic decisions so aggressive—the “you” after “man” hanging at the end of line three; the postponement of “can you” (with the help of lots of commas) to the end of line four—which just in sorting out the sense sends the mind rummaging back through the couplet, while at the same time moving forward. We’re converts here, or we’ve quit.
But let me pause at the pair of words “fresh thoughts” referring to the grieving Margaret. Hopkins is surprised at Margaret’s grief at the falling of the leaves of Goldengrove. How can she care for them, or for “the things of man”? Aren’t we at some early point immune to the knowledge of loss? I wonder if the little prick of added sadness when Hopkins sees that Margaret is not immune wasn’t itself what provoked this fifteen-line poem dropping all the leaves in the world.
It is so interesting how the first few lines of a poem do the hard work. We are now prepared for the development of the feeling of division in these next two couplets. First, division within the self—that is, Hopkins’s own loss of his original knowledge of loss, which always comes in a specific circumstance, as it has for Margaret seeing Goldengrove unleaving. Hopkins feels the separation of his child self from his older self. I feel, although I don’t see exactly what’s doing it, something like the pain of cell division, with its strange stretching and weird afflictions.
A chill and distance enter lines five to eight. You will grow accustomed to things like this, the lines say. By now we are used to the rhymes, the syntactical inversions (worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie) and the new words he’s created. The compressions of two words into one—wanwood; leafmeal—don’t cause a ripple; they’re perfect for something that makes natural and emotional sense to us. Wanwood: vivid Goldengroves reduced to colorlessness; and the knowledge arrives on the little blowing-out w’s—worlds of wanwood—the color is blown off. Leafmeal: no longer leaves, just as no longer golden. The leaves are ground to meal. They aren’t crisp and rattly and gold; they are a pale paste. We see this in crushed leaves, how they go grey, how they are undone. And in ourselves, how brightness is so bafflingly lost and how edgeless (worlds of wanwood) the diminishment is.
Here in line nine is the turn of this not-sonnet: “And yet you will weep and know why.” Now the separation of Hopkins from the young girl is reversed. Hopkins embraces her (and with her, his own child self) as he inducts her into the endlessness, the bottomlessness of loss. It is magnificently beautiful, the oneness Hopkins paradoxically generates among all of us in describing how we will lose one another. Here is the lesson: You’re not wrong to weep, and “will weep.” All sorrow comes from the same spring.
Now comes the achievement of the unachievable when Hopkins’s syntax goes all squirrely with the “nor, no, nor” thing. This is useful, I would even say necessary, this incomprehensibility of the grammar. We do read it, and we are moved out of our grammar into something that could be spiritual if there were a spirit beyond this readiness to know the spiritual. But the great openness generated by these strange words is absolutely smacked; there is nothing to receive the spiritual vulnerability. This is emphatically not a Christian poem; it is as dark as Frost. All that our greatest sensors, our farthest probes, are met with is in the final couplet: “It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” The world “blight” is a thrilling achievement. It incinerates, it blackens, it curses and damns. All will die, and there is no consolation. You are mourning for yourself, and when I say you, Margaret, I mean me (says Hopkins). See how Hopkins has increased the tenderness in this lesson: “Now no matter, child, the name.” His voice is holding us tenderly to him, instructing us: he bewitches us with the sorcery of “nor,” “no,” “nor,” then he clubs us with “blight.” If the word had been, say, “fate”—“It is the fate man was born for”—I think the whole poem would collapse. It is the word “blight”—absolute, harsh, and natural; a natural evil, something that wipes out what was living—that charges the poem backwards.
And that is one of the particular beauties of poetry as opposed to, say, the novel. A poem really has no beginning and end, although it does appear to. All the parts of a poem exist as a sort of plasma, simultaneously apprehended, existing in the mind all at once, as soon as we have become familiar with them. The word “blight” constantly and forever charges every word in the poem, shores every word in the poem. It is Indra’s net, everywhere is the center, reflecting all. This great capacity of poetry is seldom so well exercised as it is here. The fact that the mind can move around in a poem—is asked to do this—is why poetry is considered the supreme art. Poetry is the shape and size of the mind. It works the way the mind works. It is deeply compatible with whatever it is we are. We dissolve in it; it dissolves in us.
This poem, “Spring and Fall,” has reminded me of why I want to continue to try to write poems. I am grateful to it.
Postscript
In such great poems, there is always so much more left to say when you have said what you thought you wanted to say. Now I am thinking of Hopkins’s beginning and ending with “Margaret” and the great transformation of what we come to understand to be Margaret. At the beginning, Margaret is a child, seeing something sad, addressed by an older person. She is discrete, separate. By the end it is difficult to express all that Margaret is: she is still one—one person, who will die, one person who must suffer the knowledge that all will be lost and she will lose herself. And yet it is this retention of Margaret’s identity by name that creates the greatest poignancy: not, Hopkins could have said, all will be lost, but Margaret will be lost. In keeping it singular in this way each single living thing is a jewel in Indra’s net. Each self contains the universe. Each self must experience its extinction. Each self is tender toward itself. Hopkins is Margaret. We are Margaret; the unassuageable grief is not that we will all die but that Margaret will die with the knowledge that there are only Margarets … some of whom are so young they don’t yet know.
Radiantly Indefensible
1.
The central thing I want to think about is the mystery of—I want to call it profundity, which seems all wrong for Stev
ie Smith. But impact seems inadequate.
No, it is inadequate; impact just means that one is struck; profundity means that when one is struck, one sees deep stars. So profundity.
Stevie Smith’s poetry had a profound impact on me, how about that.
I was looking for Stevie Smith, so hard. I turned over libraries and bookstores for years, trying to find her. I didn’t know her name or anything about her; I didn’t know what country she came from or what kind of poetry she would write or that it would have little drawings.
All I could find was not-her. I would find a piece of something here and another one there, but they couldn’t be put together. I mean, in the living; there was always plenty to adore among the immortals. But anybody alive. I was young, and I thought there must be someone; now I wouldn’t assume that. We are occupying such a thin wedge of time, what are the chances?
It seems so unfair, how the heart is. Why couldn’t I feel the same about Auden? Surely Auden is profound and so wise and weary and puckish too, obviously a vastly more elastic soul and mind and talent. Or Larkin. Larkin was alive then, when Stevie Smith was, in the seventies. Maybe I didn’t know about Larkin then. But even if I had known, it would have been like Auden, or like Frost. I would tug at my forelock (for even then I had a forelock).
It must be said, it appears, that reverence has its limits as a useful feeling. I never felt my hand going up to my forelock when I read Stevie Smith, even the first time, standing up in City Lights. It was so wonderful to have the thing in my hands at last, a white paperback with a scribbled drawing of the head of a girl on the cover, as it turned out. I had expected that however it would look, the book I was looking for, it would be unprepossessing on the outside, but even at that. It looked fey. Not that I paid it any attention then, or really ever, when I think about it. Fey is something we get less and less amused by the older we get; if it isn’t a pose it’s a kind of stunting, one no better than the other.