To return to my writing—a year, two years, three years after the fact—is an odd experience. Occasionally, I feel a smug satisfaction of writing something so well. It's as if standing in a mirror admiring one's physique: very vain. More often than not, though, I am a bit embarrassed. I find a comma-splice here, a misplaced modifier there, and sometimes plainly horrid writing. Today I was re-reading an essay I wrote a year ago, trying to rewrite the ending in order to submit the essay as a writing sample for a job for which I'm applying. In the final page of the essay (on how I came to love poetry through reading Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts") I found this section:
"Perhaps Stevens is right when he says that death is the mother of all beauty. But if so, it is in a different way than the woman in “Sunday Morning” thinks. Milosz shows us this when he says in an interview that, “every poetry is directed against death–against death of the individual, against the power of death” (64). Death fosters beauty, but only insofar as the beauty is directed against death. But poetry cannot be relegated to books on grief or anthologies of poems for those mourning the loss of a loved one, although some are only read in such contexts. (I am thinking of Auden’s “Stop all the Clocks” or as it is now called, “Funeral Blues.”) In fighting against death, poetry embraces life. The poet and the poem exist not only to give us comfort in the time of need, but also to confront us with hard truths, truths that can sometimes only be uttered in the words of poetry."
What strikes me now is that what I wrote was probably a bit heretical—or at the very least, very Calvinist (perhaps they're synonymous.) Saying that death is the mother of beauty, in that beauty is directed against death, leads to the idea that death is necessary for beauty. This is one step away from saying that God (or the True, if you like) needs death to exist or at least needs it to bring about certain ends. Which is heresy.
Should one go back and rewrite old essays? I don't know....I don't know that much about writing. I tend to want to leave them alone after a few months; they become mile-markers in my past, then. In this case I'm going to rewrite the ending, if only because the recipient of the submission happens to be an ecumenical journal that would notice the conclusions being drawn.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
i'm not so sure i'm convinced of the heresy, no matter how much i want to be. just before stevens makes his claim, he says:
"She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'"
This rings of Freud, in an essay he wrote on the dreariness of Rilke as they walked through a garden bursting in spring. Rilke was despondent and incorrigible because he knew that the immense beauty would nonetheless fade - that death would come and it wouldn't endure. Freud reasoned that this was no cause for despair; that on the contrary, the transience, the death, the scarcity of life gave it its beauty and worth.
Rilke, according to Freud, was experiencing, beforehand, the feeling of loss that accompanies the death of beauty before that beauty had yet passed away. The acute pre-sensation, or premonition of a coming sadness turned into a sadness itself and overwhelmed the moment, blotting out any beauty in the shadow of that beauty's impending demise.
I can't decide if you side with Rilke or Freud. I'm not sure who I do myself. Except that, I think that beauty transcends the vessels it uses to mediate itself. These vessels are merely labels and as such are perishable, changeable. Mountains are not beauty, they are beautiful. So are people or paintings or cars. But these things change. Beauty is migratory. It needs no label except for us to see it. It is Kant's "Ding-an-sich" - the thing in itself. Here lies what I call the "This". What you might call God.
Beauty doesn't, I think, REQUIRE death -- no more than it requires mountains or birds or people. Scarcity is a flavor of beauty, a gesture, a sentence. Beauty itself is the message, the spirit, the meal.
I deleted the ending (from which I quoted) and wrote this instead:
After Auden I discovered others: Yeats, Eliot, Donne, Herbert, Milosz, and Stevens. I
ended up studying English and philosophy; the sciences could not speak to my questions about
humanity, about life. Now through with college, I teach English, trying to convey my love of
literature and poetry to students. Once, in my first month of teaching, I read “Musée des Beaux
Arts” to my sophomore English class. It was a hot autumn afternoon, the last class on a Friday. I read slowly so as to let the weight of the words sink in. As I looked up at the end of the poem, I think I expected to see bright faces illuminated by the beauty and truth contained within Auden’s
lines. Heads rested heavily on desks. A few students looked outside at the trees, then beginning to change to reds and yellows. Only one student looked at me pensively, as if it ask “How do you want us to react?”
I wanted to tell those fifteen-year-olds that “Musée des Beaux Arts” is inextricably linked
in my life with death and grief, that the poem spoke to me when nothing else did. I wanted to tell
them what the great 20th century Polish poet, Csezlaw Milosz said in an interview: that “every
poetry is directed against death–against death of the individual, against the power of death” (64). In fighting against death, poetry embraces life. The poet and the poem exist not only to give us comfort in the time of need but also to confront us with hard truths, truths that are probably best confronted with silence, but if spoken are best done so through poetry. But my students minds were swimming with thoughts of plans for the weekend. I chose silence, and dismissed them to the enjoy the changing leaves.
Heretical or not, there is something about your original ending that really appeals to me. And I don't think it has to be heretical at all. Poetry that is beautiful because it is "directed against the power of death" is not beautiful because death has been denigrated. It is beautiful because resurrection has triumphed. And what is resurrection but a celebration of recreation, of creation, of the first day and the new day?
Hades is not necessary for beauty, but Eden is. And I would agree that Hades cannot make Eden appear more beautiful. But it can make us more grateful, more grateful for the original perfection and the recreation of the new day. If death has no victory, no sting, than it is not its absence we celebrate so much as the presence of life.
The new ending is a good one.
My memory is so fickle. If I'd but thought to Cezanne and Rilke - to art as a creative and not merely representative act, I might have digested it differently the first time.
JMH
Rewriting is writing, yes? I usually give up on old stuff after a long enough time, consider it an archive of who I was. But once in a while, an old poem or essay draws me back in. I think I like the first conclusion best.
dw
Post a Comment