Attention without feeling is only a report.
-Mary Oliver
I wanted more and I didn’t know how to get it.
-Joy Harjo
I found another new-to-me podcast: On Being. It too, is about how to live a purposeful life. Among the episodes I’ve listened to have been interviews with the poets Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, and Nikki Giovanni. These interviews have sent my mind wandering, scattered my attention, and put the light of my various and modest ambitions through a type of prism – focused, yet fractured. Once again, I felt a level of shame or disappointment for not being more serious about the practice of writing, for not having better discipline or habit. As I listened, I was taken with their phrasing. Oliver talked about being a child who skipped school and spent time in the woods reading. I loved when she said, “Whitman in the knapsack.” As I listened, I was lost and impressed in their depth of thinking. Harjo said, “we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world.” Her statement made me consider the possibility that we know everything (the entire cosmos) before we are born, and promptly forget it all with our first gasp of air. We then spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to that knowledge, to that bigger type of knowing, that bigger cosmic self. It’s a wonderful and tragic concept. This is the story of the Garden of Eden, this is Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel.”
Several times, I’ve been brought to the watery edge of reflection and consideration – thinking that maybe artists need to be solitary creatures, or struggling creatures… and I’m not sure I want to be that alone or that struggling in order to be good. Perhaps I have too many obligations that I take seriously to be any good at writing. Perhaps my life is too soft to be any good at writing. This is when I’m closest to joining a writer’s commune or becoming a bum by the beach – living more simply, trying to shut the busy world out. Most of the writers I know have jobs – regular jobs…. but it seems that in order to be good (getting interviewed on a podcast good, being a poet laureate good), the writing has to be the job. Oliver says, “I used to say I gave my — when I had jobs, which wasn’t that often. But I’d say: I give my very best, second-class labor to the…” job. “Because I’d get up at 5, and by 9, I’d already had my say.” I suspect most artists, aspiring or otherwise, struggle with having to pay the bills and wanting to spend their time doing anything but paying the bills. Is starving a necessary part of the equation?
The other morning I woke up at 5:05. Got out of bed at 5:10. Made some breakfast and some coffee. I scanned the headlines and then tried to write. Nothing happened. I decided to close my eyes and focus on my breathing. I could hear the coffee maker click as though it were counting time. I started to write the experience down. A man sits at the table. He wants something, but can’t picture it or grasp it. The sky is yellowing with daybreak and he tries to clear his mind. I was trying to send my writing in the direction of a Dobyns poem – a man, alone at the kitchen table stuck between ambition and turpitude. Half packed and ready to leave on a big, semi-permanent adventure or about to get ready to go work as another Willy Loman. Who’s to say, who can decide? I stopped writing that scene. Oliver said in her interview she encourages writers to never use a computer. I went and grabbed some notebooks. In one were some letters I wrote but never sent. In the other, in someone else’s handwriting, notes on how to write effective copy and fundraising appeals. I put both notebooks away and pulled out a different one. I started to write about the clementines shrinking and hardening in a bowl on the table. I compared them to a bullied teen who, alone in his room, dreams of hurting other people as he shrinks and hardens to the world. How might his life be different if someone told him that the rich color of orange of the clementine rind reminds them of the way the afternoon sun shines in his eyes. And though the clementines are going bad and drying up inside… I know when I peel them they’ll still smell bright and sweet.
While writing these things out, I was reminded of Oliver saying that “attention without feeling is a report.” I wanted to do better. I wanted to get more feeling into the writing, but it was 6:30 and the dog needed to be fed and I had an 8:30 appointment in my office. Even if I’m about to give my best self to the craft, I have to stop short. It was that old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial… time to make the donuts. There was no running away with ideas and words. You see, when I feel inspired or deep or thoughtful like this, I want to take the entire day off and I begin to resent the interruption of daily life and responsibility.
And, as so often happens, listening to these smart, articulate women dedicated to their craft, I was reminded of my ex who wanted to be a writer. Did she have Oliver’s disposition? Views? Temperament? Harjo’s spirit? Is this what she meant when she needed time alone?
She and I used to get into silly arguments about texting and responding to texts. More often than not, it was my expectation of a semi-prompt response and her insistence that she can’t always respond promptly or sometimes doesn’t want to that served as our kindling. I could understand the can’t part, but took “not wanting to” reply personally. At that point in my life, I hadn’t gotten in the habit of writing or hadn’t spent much time getting lost in my thoughts… I was coming from a place of always being connected and being deeply attentive to this other person and would wonder how she could leave her phone at home when she walked the dog or why I wasn’t present in her thoughts the way she was in mine. “Love” can be a selfish master. I have a different view of those things now – an appreciation, and understanding, of how she might have resented the interruptions or expectations.
Relationships can be hard like that. They require commitment, patience, and understanding – and especially patience when there is a disconnect in the understanding. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to give this person what she needed, it’s more that I’m not sure I knew how…. I think if I had a better understanding of the “why” behind it, I could have done a better job, but who knows? I know that I get kinda pissed when my deep thinking or quiet moments or writing time is interrupted by the dog whining to go out, a text message, an email, an obligation, or the simple fact that I need to get ready and go to work. When I’m lost in thought or writing, it can feel like this is the most important thing I could possibly be doing. That had not been part of my life’s experience before.
Sometimes, I think the hardest part of being in a relationship is learning when to leave each other alone and how to meet in the middle – when to give unconditionally (without needing an explanation) and when to explain in order to promote understanding. Which, stated slightly differently, is about knowing when to support the other person, when to let them support themself, and how to negotiate the space between those two things. Here, I’m thinking of how a child will sometimes want help and sometimes push you away in order to do it own their own. Give and take, push and pull. We accept this in children as part of their learning and their fickleness, but as adults, we want, and expect, deeper understanding from each other. We fumble around, clumsily trying to help each other or show our devotion and are stunned when it’s refused or not needed or not received as intended. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
“I saw what love might have done / had we loved in time.” Oliver says of this line, which is in reference to her father, “Well, he never got any love out of me, or deserved it. But mostly — what mostly just makes you angry is the loss of the years of your life, because it does leave damage. But there you are. You do what you can do.” One night this past December, before I ever listened to this podcast, I was thinking of the phrase lost years. I was wondering if I’ve lost these past two or three years of my life in this attempt to understand solitude – which has also been an attempt to understand this other person as an approach to my own growth. I want to do better, show more grace when and if I encounter similar circumstances. I’m attracted to artist types – they are acutely aware of time, they see the world differently, and they often walk the knife’s edge between solitude and external stimulus (the real world). In that thinking, I was reminded of the ex’s final blog post titled “Lost Years.” No doubt influenced by the second beer, I started to write a response. She must have disabled comments, because the reply never posted. In her post, she had written, “I’m still full of hope. That life has meaning, that there are other legacies besides a child. But it’s taken me so many years just to remember this side of myself, it makes me wonder what else I’ve forgotten about myself and who I wanted to be before I fell in love.” My response was to suggest that the years are never lost – that being in love with someone or several people is never a waste of time. As was so often the case in our communication – I suspect I was misreading things.
Listening to Oliver and Harjo and other writers, I’m once again reminded of how little I understood or knew / understand and know. I don’t think (or know) that she was referring to being in love as lost years, but perhaps was writing about how we tend to lose a bit of our self in the process. I’ve quoted Adrienne Rich several times, “An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” And Nikki Giovanni, another poet interviewed in the podcast series, says, “…for something to live, something else usually dies.” This is what makes growth painful and challenging. New love replaces old love, compromise means giving up all or some of your own position. Love is demanding, and sometimes we don’t want to meet its demands.
What I think I remember of my ex’s story is that many years ago, she took time off from work (perhaps a year) to focus on being a writer. She attended some writer’s conferences, hosted a poetry reading, spent time in the world trying to see – it is what writers do. Billy Collins says he spends a lot of time looking out windows. I only know this about her because I read her blog, and because she once talked about wanting to write a book of poems, and because I could see she sometimes wanted to break free of life’s constraints – be bigger than her past or the moment or how anyone might define her. I have no idea if she was writing much before we met and I have no idea if she was writing while we were together. If I had to guess, she struggled/struggles with many of the same concepts that I grapple with – purpose, public vs. private, memory, value, acceptance, etc.
What I know (and in a few years from now, I’ll probably admit this knowing was also wrong or ill-informed), is that sometimes, there’s a lot of guilt associated with writing. You find yourself revisiting happy or painful points which can feel like an infidelity to the present moment. We can take years, even decades, to process the events and people in our lives – and that processing comes at different times and in different forms with different levels of intensity. Nearly every time I write about this particular ex, I feel guilt – as though she, or you the reader, might say “good lord, man, get over it.” I feel judged and slightly defensive, because where once it might have been a type of pining or mourning, it has become more about understanding other people, her, myself, the next one and how we all move through the world. “I saw what love might have done / had we loved in time.” Which seems like a good “lesson” for everyone to carry.
After listening to the Oliver interview, and thinking about the type of life Oliver might have led, the type of solitude she might have required, and projecting this ex onto Oliver or Oliver onto this ex, I wrote, “Could I have loved Mary Oliver? Could she have loved me back? In every poet’s story I see glimmers of you shining through – the wild, the wandering, the sometimes hurt and often kind…” Having pursued my own writing for a bit, sometimes seriously, sometimes half-assed and distracted by real life, I can at least imagine some of the conflicts my ex might have faced, the competitions for her attention (her grief, her job, her new life, her writing life, her internal monologue that says this balancing act is not sustainable). Again I project, because that has been much of my experience in my “lost years.”
This brings me back to purpose and a purposeful life. Vonnegut says our purpose is to fart around. The Buddhists suggest there is no purpose. Yet here we are. From Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” When I think about why I write (especially these personal thoughts), I’m beginning to believe it’s in the spirit of sharing, unburdening, connecting, and maybe helping. To do this well, and I’m not sure I do it particularly well, can be type of gift – to myself or anyone who finds it or needs it, or “hungers for it.” A Facebook friend recently posted a letter to his deceased father. It’s been 10 years. He thinks of him every day – always sees something that reminds him of his father in some way. It’s heartfelt and personal – and I’m glad he shared. So many people carry similar sentiments – a type of universal experience that ironically makes us feel unique and maybe alone. We are protective of these feelings, they help define our place. I’ll end by sharing Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” – a poem that people have said has saved their life.
You do not have to be good.
-Mary Oliver “Wild Geese”
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.