The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft

Selfish Pleasures in a Life of Art: A Speech to the Graduating Class

£etPKH P/^AfUfLEf /N/ A LiF£ OF A^T A Speech to the Graduating Class What is the speed of life? I remember two sensations from myyouth. One, that I would last forever, a euphoria of eternity with the earth. Second, that I would suddenly end, that my whole long life would collapse into a moment and be done, that I would suddenly wake, ancient and finished. In school, they taught me the speed of light, how a river of sunlight hurtles toward our green earth. They taught me the speed of sound, how an echo, the wail of a departing train sings at a certain speed. But what about the speed of knowing, the speed of life? I have had to learn these on my own. A friend once told me, "Kim, on your deathbed you will be unlikely to cry out, 'I should have spent more time at the office!' But you will also be unlikely to shout, 'I should have been Mother Teresa! I should have been Martin Luther King!' The crisis you will be likely to feel, if you don't live right, will be this: 'I should have been Kim Stafford—the one person I had a chance to be!'" I am trying to do the work, the unusual, eccentric, and crucialwork of Kim Stafford. There is a story in my family that mygrandmother's physician, during her pregnancy,prescribed an hour of beautya day. There is no re- port of dietaryrestrictions, exercises.No, she was simply to take her music, or her sunset, or the unworked colors of the quilt spread by the lamp before her. While others did chores, she sat on the porch and watched the slow inevitability of the twilight, heard the crickets chanting the beginning of the world night by night. She was to take the roll of pasture by evening's mist, the looming shape of barn and of elm, the warm September moon hung low over the corn rows.She was to take these things to nourish her child, my mother, within her. I feast on this story. It teaches me the fundamental practicality of close witness of the world, which is the beginning of art. What is it like to live yourlife story,to feed on the beautymeant for you alone, to insist on the conditions that makeit possible to live the precise, full life you are here to accomplish? There is a story my brother told me. He stood on a bluff upriver with a group of county planners, looking down at an island in the Columbia, discussing the fate of this morsel of countyland. One suggested opening the island for a housing development. Another suggested a marina, another a rock quarry. It was evening. The river glittered in a silver perimeter around the island below them. "It's beautiful,"my brother said. "You can't eat beauty, Bret," said one of the company. "You can't eat beauty." I will always believe my brother died byhis own hand at the age of forty becausehe did not eat enough of sunset and wheeling flock of birds and fern that spirals from itself into the most intense green we can stand. He did not feast sufficiently on the mountain at first light, the time when nothing makes sense but the world as it is, directly there before you. He did not act the art of anger, lullaby,blessing, the articulate curse against cruelty that can begin a healing. He was silent about these things, and silence finally took him into itself, drank him up, and he lay still, and was gone. Selfish Pleasures in a Life of Art 113 My mother was born, and mybrother died, at this boundary.Cross it, I sayto you. Don't wait for the right time. Don't hesitate. Cross into your beauty now. Carry your seeing, your feasting, your selfish pleasures in the art you choose to the placeyou need to be, and enact what you have to do there. If you are awake,you have no choice. Life begins with your witness there. You have been in school, and now you enter the world. You have been rehearsing Romeo andJuliet, and as you go forth you willbe called to perform Waitingfor Godot. Whitman tells us that every successwill call for the need for a greater effort. You have had school time, and now you will have to invent...