from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet
And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.
Randall Jarrell
Some books are so bound up with the circumstances in which you first read them that you can't ever think of them apart from those circumstances. The effect can be perverse. I first read Paradise Lost while living on a roof in Guatemala, and to this day I can't open the poem without catching some quick whiff of strong coffee, avocados, and black beans. I had traveled there from Mexico with only a very small bag, which had room for only one book: The Complete Poems of John Milton. I'm not quite as odd a person as I was once on the verge of becoming. "Long is the way / And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light."
My room was a tiny box made of corrugated tin and cardboard. It was clearly a desperate and hastily conceived entrepreneurial effort by the young, careworn couple below, who slept in one room with their three children, two of whom were infants. Through a large hole in the middle of the floor I could see the kitchen. Through the vaguely rectangular window slashed in one wall I could see a smoking volcano. It was the hole that caused me some anxiety. When I knew I was going to get drunk (a person who carries Milton into a jungle is a person who plans his benders) I'd set various objects around its edges in the hope that a kicked can or bottle top might clatter down into that underworld before I did.
My first problem was the light. There wasn't one. I wasn't accustomed to going to bed as soon as it got dark, and even if I had been the amount of coffee we drank with every meal would have precluded that. I read by candlelight at first, then later—ingeniously, it seemed to me—by a flashlight hanging from a string. I had to strain to make out the words in my compressed Cambridge student's edition, a minor discomfort that mostly pleased me. This was going to do me some good.
Other hardships, though, tested my sentimental asceticism. It was cold. It had been pretty cold in Mexico City, but I figured that a jungle—red-rumped baboons, big squawking birds, that sort of thing—had to be hot. It wasn't a jungle, and it wasn't hot. I read wearing every piece of clothing that I had brought, wrapped up in the sheet and blanket from the bed. Because I had originally meant to make my way through the entire Complete Poems, I set myself a goal of fifteen pages a night. It was like eating lightbulbs. I took comfort from the words of Mammon, not yet wise to the fact that Milton had put them in the mouth of a ruined devil:
Our torments also may, in length of time
Become our elements, these piercing fires
As soft as now severe, our temper changed
Into their temper; which must needs remove
The sensible of pain.
That's from the second book, when the fallen angels, after having gone to war with God, have gathered in Hell to lick their wounds and plot the best course of future action. It remains my favorite part of the poem. It's full of bizarre but very recognizable characters, rhetorically impeccable sophistries, and just flat-out great writing. It's also where we first get a good sense of Satan, whose individuality, defiance, and raw willfulness constitute a single insidious energy that all of the poem's ponderous dogma never convincingly crushes. Satan is the saving flaw, more human than the humans in the poem.
He is also in some essential sense Milton himself. Just as Satan was once one of the highest of angels, Milton, in the years before Paradise Lost, moved at the margins of highest power. He was close to Oliver Cromwell, who had dissolved the monarchy. Everything changed in 1660, when Charles II returned to England. Some of Milton's books were ordered to be "burnt by the hangman." Shortly afterward an order went out for his arrest, which at the time was tantamount to a death warrant. There remains some mystery as to why the arrest was never made (others named on the warrant were killed), though it can probably be attributed to some highly placed, sympathetic figure. For a while, though, Milton must have thought he was done for, by mob violence if not regal edict. Indeed, when Cromwell's disinterred corpse was carted to Tyburn for public gibbeting, the mob salivating alongside passed very near Milton's new lodgings. He must have heard them. He must have still been hearing them shortly afterward, as he backed away from public life and, in a fury of redirected ideals and will, plunged into Paradise Lost.
I wasn't aware of any of this then. I wasn't aware of much of anything then, it now seems to me, outside of the narrow focus of my own hypertrophied will. I was in Guatemala because I thought a writer needed a store of EXPERIENCE, and I was reading Milton because I thought that the only way to write GREAT POEMS, which is all I wanted to do, was to come to terms with the GREAT POEMS of the past. I haven't altogether outgrown those ideas and impulses, though I am less inclined now to go around in my daily life talking in capital letters.
What interests me—haunts me even—is the almost absolute rift I maintained between these two ambitions, experience and poetry, and the extent to which I mostly missed both. For a long time literature existed not in the context of the life I was living but in a sort of stark, almost oppositional relation to circumstance. I seemed to arrange the two—art and life—with just this sort of incommensurability in mind. It was as if I didn't want my art and my life to have anything to do with each other, or wanted art only insofar as it could set life in relief, in both senses of that word. Some jolt was needed to join the two. At that time of my life—"O innocence / Deserving Paradise"—the jolts were mostly gentle.
I first fell through the surface of Paradise Lost early one morning on the dirt roads at the outskirts of Antigua. Fog in the trees, wraithlike dogs in doorways, the tiny tortilla lady barefoot and balancing her day's deliveries on her head, everything creaking awake inside me: I almost ran right into the two Americans. I had met them earlier, a striking couple even in the rather theatrically disheveled state they were in that morning. Each had the kind of varied history that suggests a distinctive individual sensibility, but they also had that abstractedness and enclosed focus that comes with intense love, particularly that kind of love that is sudden, disabling, and, because of circumstance or temperaments, unreplenishable. The tank was almost empty for these two, and they knew it. Or at least that's what I in my wise, twenty-two-year-old detachment knew for them. There was a passionate sadness about them, or a passion that implied sadness, was shadowed by it.
It turned out they had spent the night up on the volcano. Sleepless but wired, they wanted only to keep whatever energy they'd unleashed up there from dying out. We went to breakfast together, where they told me about their night up in the Empyrean. I, to whom it hadn't occurred to climb the volcano much less make love on it, got interested, but I quickly lapsed into almost total silence. They didn't need me.
They talked with a fervor that was at once intimate and desperate, finishing each other's sentences, unable to stop touching, recalling even the details of their lovemaking without embarrassment or even much consciousness really. It was almost as if by articulating their experience together they could in some way—and here it was getting a little weird—experience it again.
The obvious connection is not the enduring one here. Of course I couldn't help but begin seeing these two as a sort of handy Adam and Eve, the volcano Eden, their fuck our fall, this manic postcoital passion our long curse of unquenchable desire. All of this occurred to me, sure, but superficially. Some deeper shift, some bedrock rupture from which the rubble is still settling, occurred in me when the woman, right in the middle of some memorable moment she was reconstructing with her lover, leaned over the table and asked me, "Are you in love?"
I was. Some months earlier I'd fallen for a woman in Virginia, for whom I would presently leave Guatemala, and with whom I would live for an intense, itinerant decade. I had spent a lot of time thinking of her olive, angular face, the charged interior world she inhabited that had so unsettled my own. I thought of the last place we'd made love, some hotel somewhere in Dallas, rain on the windows, rainlight gauzing the walls, the air, us.
"No," I said.
* * *
Blake thought the imagination, because it was infinite and "pure," a higher faculty than memory, which was finite and corruptible. The imagination, he felt, is our residual divinity, through which we feel something of what we once were and may one day be. Memory, on the other hand, is our mere humanity, telling us only what we wretchedly are. Paradise Lost was for Blake one of the greatest of poems because it was addressed "to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason." The crazy cosmological scheme and the vague Eden, God talking like a pipe organ with a law degree, all of the visual difficulty that T.S. Eliot thought was the downfall of the poem—for Blake, these weren't defects but virtues. The poem wasn't aimed at clarifying or imitating life but transcending it. To attain this higher, more spiritual sort of consciousness, Blake felt, requires an art that is as unlike life as possible.
I wasn't any more aware of Blake's distinction than I was of Milton's biography, but sometime after that woman's question I think I began to read Milton, and many other things, differently. Any major work of art requires a massive effort, in preparation if not in actual execution, but there is something singularly willed about Paradise Lost. The poem has a rock-breaking, unromantic rigor about it, which has alienated many twentieth-century readers. The problem is not simply that the poem is often dogmatic and abstract. The real barrier is the poem's style, which is clenched and labored and just generally unreal, its thickets of syntax sometimes so dense and thorny that getting through them can be pretty tough.
Now, though, I began to attend much more closely to moments in Paradise Lost that seemed qualitatively different to me, moments of surprising, brief, incorrigible human feeling. Satan is the most obvious example. Over and over you find him resisting not only his worst inclinations but the very role that Milton has in mind for him. He won't quite ever become the uncomplicated, unsympathetic agent of evil that the myth requires him to be. There are many examples of this, from his insolent and philosophically acute answers to the angel interrogating him outside of Eden ("let him surer bar / His iron gates, if he intends our stay / In that dark durance") to his first, truest reaction to seeing Adam and Eve, "whom my thoughts pursue / With wonder, and could love." He's a type of character that since the Romantics has become very familiar: interior, reflective, motive and will all raveled up with doubt and guilt. This led Romantics such as Blake to see him as an artist-figure, his godlike brilliance and ravening ambition at once his strength and weakness, gift and curse.
And yet, the comparison is not quite right, neither between Satan and the artist, nor between Satan and Milton. For if the character of Satan is compelling because of Milton's imaginative identification with him, Satan's actions—starting a war with God, wrecking the world God made—have an immediacy of consequence and palpable reality that Milton's (and most artists') lack.
There are people of abstract passion, people whose emotional lives are intense but, for one reason or another, interior, their energies accumulating always at the edge of action, either finding no outlet into reality, or ones too small for the force that warps them. This is my sense of Milton. Even his actions in the public sphere often seem to have a misfocused or balked ferocity to them. He was inclined to expend energies out of all proportion to the importance of the issue, or, when the issue was truly important (the right to divorce, the right to kill a king), to apply his ideals and passions so inflexibly to messy circumstance that the results were more inflammatory than efficacious. By the time he gets around to devoting himself to Paradise Lost, it doesn't feel as if he's doing so by default, but that he's finally coming to fully inhabit his proper element, which, really, was the maze of his own mind.
But life goes on. It went on around Milton. Probably the most notorious anecdote about Paradise Lost involves Milton's three daughters, two of whom, because he had gone completely blind, he forced into what amounted to bare servitude. They were apparently taught the phonetics but not the meanings of each of the many languages that Milton had mastered, so they could appease his endless appetite for books by reading to him at his pleasure. During the years that the lines of Paradise Lost came to him "as if they were dictated in his sleep," his young daughters, whom he would eventually disinherit for being "undutiful," took down that dictation by daylight. By all accounts, they were growing very, very angry. "That is no news," one of them is said to have remarked upon hearing, from the maid, of Milton's third marriage, "but, if I could hear of his death, that would be something."
The old crux—how does a bad man make great art—is not really what I'm getting at here. I'm interested in these moments of human feeling I've mentioned, these softened spots in the hard-hearted style. If art exists for the sake of life, and if one recognizes a certain detachment and even numbness in the life of an artist who has produced moving work, then what is the feeling in the work for?
One of the most memorable of these moments of complicated human feeling in Paradise Lost occurs when Eve is first created out of Adam's rib. She wanders to a pool of water and promptly falls for her own image. The feeling persists even after her first sight of Adam, whom she finds "less fair, / Less winning soft, less amiably mild, / Than that smooth watery image." She's almost immediately wrenched into a right frame of mind by Adam's "superior gifts," but the damage, you might say, is done, a whole history of human fallibility and pain implicit in that gesture. In that moment you get a sense of Eve's volatility, which is the volatility of imagination. She is everything the will can't control, an expression of the appetite and passion for a life more intense and eternal than the one that reality offers—which, incidentally, is the passion any imaginative writer is trying to appease. It is troubling to me that the form this passion first takes in Eve is self-love.
Walking home from breakfast that morning in Antigua, oblivious to Blake, the black volcano, Eve, and everything else but the self-enclosed world that I was, I began to have my first dim sense of a rift between what I imagined and what I remembered. I was still some years away from finding my way into work that would intensify and confuse these elements utterly for me, as well as make me realize how disorienting and disruptive it could be to one's life to inhabit that confusion for any length of time. But sometime after that morning I began to take the first steps toward formulating my own version of Blake's distinction, in which I would come to identify the imagination with art and memory with life. I began to see it as a choice, and to wonder if it were one that I, as my immediate and instinctive answer to that woman's question revealed, had already made.
* * *
Every year during Holy Week in Antigua there is a series of elaborate processions and rituals to mark Christ's death and resurrection. The night before Good Friday, the people spend all night working on what are called alfombras—meaning, literally, rugs—in the streets. These are large, elaborate designs made of colored sawdust and flower petals, many of which depict some religious scene or symbolism. There is frequently an effort to individualize the alfombra, some token of a family's or individual person's private life—a photograph or family name, some memento, or even in one instance little cakes that were presumably a source of particular pride—made part of the larger design. The atmosphere is charged and festive, tourists and flashbulbs everywhere, but there is also something portentous in the air, some element of, if not quite gravity, at least readiness.
The father of the family I was staying with woke me at three that morning. With his oldest child, a bright and lively girl of about eight years old, we wandered the streets for three hours. Everything seemed charged and mysterious, and time has not dulled for me the eerie clarity of those hours. I remember not simply the vaguely coffeeish color of those cakes waiting to be arranged on that one alfombra, but their vaguely coffeeish taste, too; for when she realized that she'd been seen, the little girl held out to me the half-eaten piece she'd pilfered, so that we shared in that sweet perdition. I remember the moment when the first cock crowed from the open-aired center of some house that could have been our own (vile animal—"Gordo," he was called, Fatso), and I remember the moment just after, when the father, with an infectious seriousness, leaned close to his daughter and whispered, "Now Peter is denying Christ."
As one by one all the roosters in the town began to cry, the procession began. I have forgotten exactly where I was when I first saw it coming toward me, teenagers and children first, then a phalanx of Roman soldiers pulling a large wooden cart, some blindfolded and impassive local Christ riding high over a crowd of costumed penitents and various historical personages, the air around them clouded with incense and myth. Slowly, seriously, street by street, and alfombra by beautiful alfombra, the procession passed on its way to Golgotha, leaving in its wake swirls of colored sawdust, crushed keepsakes, indecipherable designs, and silence.
The most apparent connections between Milton and my experience are again the least important ones. Much of what is for Blake metaphysically suggestive in Paradise Lost is for me merely physically vague. Having these palpable representations of some of the ritual and characters relevant to the poem helped to ground it for me, just as those two tall, carnal incarnations of Adam and Eve had helped me earlier. It's a silly, reductive way to read literature, I know, but I was really struggling with this poem. The procession gave it a connection with my immediate life, a physical focus, if only a superficial one.
But there's something else. When we got home shortly after dawn, we all went to sleep before the more formal services later in the morning. I came down in a couple of hours to find the father waiting for me at the foot of the ladder. He asked if I would mind watching the children for thirty minutes—and here he paused, smiled slightly, and said, "or maybe an hour." I sat down in the living room with the little girl and the two infants, all of whom were awake but reasonably sedate, whereupon he went back into his bedroom and closed the door.
I had wondered how they made love. I don't mean the mechanics of it, but how they managed to have a sex life with their children sharing the room. It seemed apparent that they did have a healthy sex life, as there was a conspicuous affection between them. Often, over dinner or watching television afterward (next to my ramshackle room was a ramshackle antenna), their eyes darted the same "contagious fire" that consumed and ruined our first parents. Many nights I had vaguely imagined, from the vaguely literary stupor I was in, what ensued, the whole house under me acquiring some medium denser than mere darkness, the two of them moving through it so slowly and deliberately they seemed underwater, some immense tenderness and silence. Nice, in a sleepy-headed sort of way. And yet I had also imagined the little girl waking occasionally, dimly aware of some beast with two backs in the bed, little radioactive Freudian fragments sealing themselves away in her brain to leak out years later.
The underwater part of the scenario may have been right. So quiet were they that there is an element of conjecture in my memory of that morning. Were it not for the sly look the father had given me when he increased the length of his request, and the sly look his little girl seemed to mimic from the far side of the couch, I might have concluded that they were simply taking a much-needed nap. If there were doubts, though, their appearance later dispelled them. A bit disheveled, a bit embarrassed, they came out just in time for church, their faces flushed with the flush that is not sleep.
I don't want to sentimentalize this. The life this family lived was harsh, and if it's not depressing that they had to go to such lengths to obtain thirty minutes of time together, it is depressing—to me, at any rate, from this distance—to think of them renting out a room they desperately needed to some middle-class American in search of EXPERIENCE, to think of myself up there dreamily feeding my imagination upon their hardships.
But there was an element of genuine good in that moment as well, both in their lives and mine. Their elation and relief, the warmth with which they embraced, and were embraced by, their little girl afterward were apparent. We went off to church in high spirits, came home to a meal of strong coffee, black beans, and avocados—though this time there was a bit of meat and some celebratory rum. The effects of that morning were less immediate for me, I'm sure. But whether or not there was any consciousness of it at the time, that morning has become emblematic to me of the kind of feeling in life that I have come to value most, a tenderness that is both released and defined by necessity, some act whose poignancy and simplicity of feeling depend upon the very harshness and severity of the climate, be it circumstantial or psychological, in which it flowers.
And what is true in life is, for me, true in art. The Milton I still respond to is not Blake's Milton, not the Milton of unmoored ascendancy, "breeding wings / Wherewith to scorn the earth," but the poet of those unguarded and altogether earthly moments: Eve leaning over the water in love with herself; Adam in the moment before his fall, in love with Eve ("How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost"); the two of them as we last see them, "hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow," leaving Eden for good. Blake loved the poem for its upward aspiration, its otherworldliness and immense ambition to "justify the ways of God to men." I love the poem in pieces, trust most its backward glances, those moments when the willful style almost relents to the force of some mastering passion.
But they are moments only, and they depend for their effect upon the fact that the style, finally, does not relent, the will behind the poem does not relax. Much as the beauty and fragility of those alfombras are due to the fact that they are being constructed only to be crushed by Christ, so those moments of passion and real feeling in Paradise Lost, those glimpses of, in Wordsworth's phrase, "human life, or something very near / To human life," are attributable to the fact that they are in a sense rolled over by this willed, unlifelike style. Unlike that ceremony, though, in which art is symbolically sacrificed to life, the imagination to memory and history, in Paradise Lost this gesture is never really made. Indeed, I wonder if this gesture ever really can be made by an artist, or at any rate by a certain kind of artist, who finds that life is most life as it is being obliterated by—or, more accurately, into—art.
Life goes on, though, on and on. And what happens to a passion that, though it fuels art, remains in some essential human sense abstract, never altogether attaching itself to any one person, any one time or token of the perishable earth? Does art, at least in some instances, and for some artists, demand this, that they always feel most intensely the life they've failed to feel? Is it worth it? The will, at least in its higher manifestations, is not a capacity that humans have learned to exercise with much precision. Always there are secondary casualties, collateral damages inflicted upon whoever happens to be in the way. To love is to really be in the way. Faulkner once famously said that Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was worth any number of old ladies, by which he meant that any enduring work of art has a higher value than any human costs its making may have exacted. I can't agree. If life is art's price, if imaginative creation is contingent upon, or even just coincident with, the destruction of reality ("They shall have no other benefit of my estate, they have been very undutiful to me") or the exploitation of reality ("if I could hear of his death, that would be something"), then art, even the greatest art, just isn't worth it.
Surely this is a fake kind of accounting. I have come to think that the artist is someone for whom this anxiety over the relative value of art and life, imagination and memory, cannot occur, at least during the moment art is being made—someone who, like Eve in her first infatuation, comes to love the objects of his or her imagination as if they were life. It's too simplistic, finally, to call this self-love, for the world is what one imagines, and real experience is what any artist needs, though there is inevitably an element of satanic pride and egotism in falling in love more deeply with the world one imagines than with the world. It goes without saying that there are big practical and personal problems up ahead for those so consumed or deluded, but the questions come after the fact, are posed and answered by people giving lectures or writing essays, whose Eden is over, and who now, back in the brute fact and formlessness of damaged circumstance, either pound some podium to convince themselves and others that it was worth it, or perhaps just ghost their prose with the notion, but never quite the knowledge, that it was not.
One of the moments of genius in Paradise Lost occurs late in the poem, after Satan has seduced Eve and returned to Hell. For a moment it looks as if the original convocation in Book II will be transformed into genuine triumph, but when Satan ascends the dais and prepares to receive his legions' gratitude and adulation, all he hears is a confused sibilance, all he sees is a massive tangle of snakes. And even as he registers his defeat, he himself is transformed back into the shape in which he sinned, his voice a hiss, his body becoming a single sinuous length, "a monstrous serpent on his belly prone." Not simply one tree of knowledge then, but row after row of them rise around the fallen angels, the fruit as boundless as their sudden hunger, which only increases as each piece turns to ashes in their mouths. This is Hell, we are meant to understand, not so much the consequence of sin as its endless reiteration, to inhabit forever that moment when we were first presented with the choice that defines a life—Are you in love?—and to make that choice again and again and again and...
* * *
I had a dream one night in Guatemala that my room was moving—the walls breathing, a little tremor traveling through the hard boards that were my bed—then woke to find it was: the smallest of earthquakes subsiding even as I felt it. I can only guess that no one else in the house noticed, or that it was too tiny or common to be mentioned, because no one ever did. Though I believe in my bones that it actually happened, I can't quite be sure, for after that moment of half-woken awareness I dropped back into sleep and, until long after I'd left Guatemala, forgot all about it.
It was another jolt, less gentle, a decade later, that brought it back—not the memory of it, which I had recovered before, but the sensation, that trembling instant between waking and sleep, reality and dream. I was living in San Francisco then, with the woman from Virginia I mentioned earlier. It was late at night. There was a sharp, single concussion that shook us awake, then a slow, or what seemed slow, series of waves that went through the floor. In that instant, too brief to be afraid, too strange to speak or reach out for each other, I remembered: it had been real. Then the walls and windows, the floor, and everything but my heart, grew still. It was over.
* * *
When I first began to think about writing something about reading Milton in Guatemala, I mentioned it to a particularly blunt friend of mine. "Oh god," he moaned, "I hope it's not going to be just what you'd expect from a piece with a title like that." I asked him what exactly one would expect from a piece with a title like that. "Lots of phony, forced connections between Milton and Guatemalan history and culture, some meaning in the meeting of the two, rapturous crap about how it changed you."
I don't think that's a problem. It would take a moment for me to find Guatemala on an unmarked map; my knowledge of Milton is fragmentary and superficial; and if I am changed, it is, alas, only in awareness and not in inclination, only as Adam and Eve were changed the morning after their fall, waking to find "their eyes how opened, and their minds / How darkened."
Still, I'm uneasy at the aptness of some of the anecdotes I've related, the way in which, from this distance, my reading and my experience seem to speak to each other, if only to illustrate some essential estrangement. If you one day find that you are living outside of your life, that whatever activity you thought was life is in fact a defense against it, or a crowding out of it, or just somehow misses it, you might work hard to retain some faith in the years that suddenly seem to have happened without you. You might, like Milton, give yourself over to some epic work in which you find a coherence and control that eluded you in life. You might, like me, begin recounting vaguely exotic anecdotes to account for a time when you were so utterly unconscious you may as well have been living in Dubuque—might present them in such a way that your real subject remains largely in the shadows they cast. You might find that the hardest things to let go are those you never really took hold of in the first place.
The night before I left Guatemala, the father of the family I had stayed with rode his bike into town to buy a pizza. He picked bananas for his living, and this gift—for it was that—would have cost him at least a day's wages. It was a gesture of immense kindness and affection, enlarged by the hard necessity out of which it emerged and which it momentarily flouted. We ate the pizza, drank coffee, and talked around my bad Spanish late into my last night there. The little girl crawled sleepily into my lap and asked when I'd return. It was life, I think. So it is both painful and chastening to me now that I, who have in my head all these pieces of Paradise Lost, can't even remember their names.
About the Author
Christian Wiman is the editor of Poetry magazine and the author of two books of poems, both available from Copper Canyon Press: Hard Night (2005) and The Long Home (1998). He is the recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Nicholas Roerich poetry prize, among other honors, and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College, and the Prague School of Economics. Wiman's poems, criticism, and essays appear widely in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Threepenny Review, and Slate. Wiman currently lives in Chicago, a city he describes as having "brawn and sharpness, angle and plane."
Copper Canyon Press
Copyright © 2007 by Christian Wiman
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
