Poetry as Survival

1. Poised on a Mountain Peak, Floating on the Ocean

CHAPTER ONE Poised on aMountain Peak, Floating on the Ocean I stepped from Plank to Plank A slow and cautious way The Stars about my Head I felt About my Feet the Sea. I knew not but the next Would be myfinal inch This gave me that precarious Gait Some call Experience. EMILY DICKINSON, J. 875 If we knew what the next moment held, or the next week, wouldn't we feel differently about the future? If we knew what would happen tomorrow? But we don't. And where are the events of last week? Can we find them anywhere ? Or that glorious summer day two years ago when we swam in the river? Where has it gone? Has it ceased to exist? "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"—"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"—the sixteenth-century French poet and outlaw Francois Villon asked in his lament that lists the names of celebrated beauties who, even as he wrote, were fading along with their fame. I look forward into the unknown. I look backward and the moment I just inhabited has vanished as quickly as if I drove on a highway—I can barely glimpse it in the rear-view mirror, and then it has disappeared entirely. 13 14 THE SELF, JEOPARDY, AND SONG Maybe I should look inside myself for something stable. What do I see and hear if I pause for sixty seconds to try to register what is passing through my consciousness? I see brief images—fragments of thoughts announce themselves, then sensations my body sends about its position and comfort, or about sounds and smells, and then a phrase from a song passes through and I think of someone, see his or her face and then the memory image of a house where we both were, and a sad feeling, and then one of longing, and now something else, and avoice istalking inside me also, chattering along as if it were a radio commentator. And all of this taking place in sixty seconds, and happening faster and more confusingly than I could ever communicate in something as simple and straightforward as written language. What I'm trying to sketch here is a sense of what it feels like to be a self in the world. It's an odd thing to be a self, and stressingthat oddness, for a moment, can lead us toward notions of the nature and purpose of lyric poetry. Ifmy sketch of a selfin its existential context sounds a bit melodramatic, bear with it briefly until, as Keats says, you can prove it (or disprove it) on your own pulse. Imagine the self as a small circle in the middle of a blank page. This circle of self is bisected by a dotted vertical line that stands for the present moment, the moment we are inhabiting right now. This present moment is all that we ever really have—it is where we exist and the only place we exist. This circle of self will move forward (toward the right margin) into a succession of present moments . Behind the circle of self (toward the left margin), are all the past moments it has lived—they are gone, they have become what I'd call the Vanished Past. All the joys and terrors, the boring days and the Kodak moments—all up in smoke and the smoke itself drifted away into the blue of oblivion that is the Vanished Past. Even as you read this line, the moment in which you read the last one is irrevocably gone and with it all that you thought and felt. And what about the future, that space to the right of the circle Poised on a Mountain Peak 15 of self? What about the next moment that is approaching you now? You can't know what that moment holds anymore than you can know what words I will write in my next sentence. What words I will write in my next sentence. (Could you have predicted my odd and spontaneous decision to repeat those words? No more than you could predict next week's weather or the day on which you will meet a new love or your own death). The truth is, to a very great extent, we all of us live our lives with our faces pressed up against the unknown and unknowable next moment. True, the sun will (probably) rise tomorrow...