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Calmly we walk — 43 Comments

  1. As much as as I like it, I don’t see how you can keep writing. For better or worse, I’ve lately been drinking too much alcohol, and you don’t do that, so maybe that’s the answer. In your loss of love, best of luck. Good-bye.

  2. Cornflour:

    Writing is generally therapeutic for me – up to a point, anyway. And of course this post is something I wrote 5 years ago.

    You’re right; I don’t drink. Is writing my version of drinking? 🙂

  3. I don’t recall Gerard ever being that emotionally charged in his comment section.

    I do recall him using the quote

    “Time is the fire in which we burn.”

    That has… impact.

  4. Is writing my version of drinking? — neo

    Anais Nin in her first Diary spoke of her journal writing:
    ________________________________

    This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream … I must relive my life in the dream.

    –Anais Nin, “The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume One 1931-1934”
    ________________________________

    Though I wouldn’t consider Nin’s quote as an answer to neo’s question.

  5. There is an excellent discussion back in the first Delmore Schwartz topic. neo mentioned:
    ________________________________

    Creativity and manic depression (bipolar) are somewhat linked. –neo
    ________________________________

    Which, by my reading, is true. Poets seem to be about the most vulnerable among creatives for mental illness, female poets even more so.

    Writing can be therapeutic, but not so much for poets it seems. I’m on an academic mailing list about creativity. Just the other day, I ran into this:
    _________________________________

    This paper examines the literature on creative writing and mental illness and relates it to the “writing cure” research that shows that expressive writing improves health. There is an abundance of evidence that professional poets have poorer health outcomes relative to both other writers and to the population at large. Why doesn’t the writing cure help them? The formation of a narrative, an element often missing in poetry, may provide the answer. Other possible explanations are that poets may be more depressed to begin with and may be even worse off if they did not write. For female poets, they may be subject to stereotypic expectations about writing themes, which may put them at further risk. Those seeking improvements in health through writing are advised to adopt a narrative style.

    –“Why Doesn’t the Writing Cure Help Poets?”
    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/1089-2680.10.3.268

    _________________________________

    I ran with a group of poets in my 20s and 30s. We were screwed up well beyond statistical norms. We were rife with alcoholism, depression, addiction plus one schizophrenic and one suicide.

    I never figured out whether unstable people were attracted to poetry or whether it was a self-fulfilling prophecy about crazy, suffering artists or some confluence of factors.

  6. I’d guess that people of one or another kind of mental illness see things we see but see them differently and in a way our language is not structured to describe.
    Thus, a search for a different description, possibly metaphor nobody’s ever thought of before.
    If not beyond the ken of the rest of us–there’s a continuum and it becomes unintelligible out there, somewhere–then we, too, may see it differently if only fractionally as the poet sees it.

    Orwell, or somebody, said Kipling was a “good bad poet”. I asked an English prof what that meant and he said, “Have another drink and cry.” Kipling is as deep as I can go. Deeper, so to speak, and it’s just words to me without the impact(s) that others feel. I might, kind of, try to sympathize with the guy…but he’s there and I’m here.

    The times I have “burned” were because of things which happen to almost all of us, one way or another, although not always simultaneously. Never had any new way of looking at it or describing it. Business to take care of and….

  7. Schwartz’s closing two lines in this poem are marvelous:
    “Time is the school in which we learn,
    Time is the fire in which we burn.”

    Pretty much eloquently sums up man and his transience.

    Thanks, Neo, for revealing Schwartz to those of us who do not usually read poetry.

  8. I got into poetry in a big way in the early 1990s for about a 5-6 year period of time, and Schwartz was one of my favorites from the mid 20th century.

  9. @ huxley > “Why doesn’t the writing cure help them? The formation of a narrative, an element often missing in poetry, may provide the answer.”

    Serendipity strikes again —
    https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/02/81-year-old-neuroscience-shares-brain-rules-that-keep-his-memory-sharp-as-a-whip.html

    1. Choose fiction when you can.
    You can learn a lot from non-fiction works, but they are often organized in ways that allow you to skip around based on personal interests and previous familiarity with the subject.

    Fiction, on the other hand, requires you to exercise your memory, as you proceed from beginning to end and retain a variety of details, characters and plots.

    Incidentally, I’ve noticed over my years as a neuropsychiatrist that people with early dementia, as one of the first signs of the encroaching illness, often stop reading novels.

    Some of his other suggestions look like they might be helpful, but I particularly like having a prescription to read things I’m going to read anyway.

    Note to those who commented back in 2018 – very interesting discussion of poets and poetry, and Schwartz in particular. I don’t think I ever encountered his work in school or at random.

  10. Fiction, on the other hand, requires you to exercise your memory, as you proceed from beginning to end and retain a variety of details, characters and plots..

    AesopFan:

    I can imagine how reading fiction exercises the brain in a comprehensive manner militating against mental decline. Thanks.

    Furthermore, one must usually extract a larger meaning from fiction — which I consider huge. IMO finding meaning is one of our highest, most empowering human abilities.

    It’s a big difference I notice in people. Many seem to live within a swirling fog of feelings and thoughts with little meaning. Disconnected. They drift into dreary or worse circumstances and become trapped.

    I can go on about The Problem With Poetry. But one serious sub-problem IMO is that modern poetry is often written as a swirling fog of feelings and thoughts. No one presumes there is meaning anymore, leaving the reader and the writer trapped in a disconnected world.

    There is a famous Rilke poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Rilke is telling the reader of a marvelous sculpture, which, though headless, conveys dazzling energetic grace. Then Rilke abruptly informs the reader that the aesthetic encounter is a two-way street:
    __________________________________

    …for here there is no place
    that does not see you. You must change your life.

    –Rainier Marie Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
    https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo

    __________________________________

    Wow.

  11. Does Rilke have any plan for someone who doesn’t care that he “must change”? What happens when the poet runs into people?

  12. Well, there’s this piece of short verse that has always gotten me, from Punch magazine around the turn of the previous century:

    =========================================
    Who is In Charge of the Clattering Train?
    The axles creak and the couplings strain,
    and the pace is hot and the points are near,
    for Sleep has deadened the drivers’ ear,
    and the signals flash through the night in vain…
    for Death is In Charge of the Clattering Train.

    =========================================

    I have quoted that one probably a hundred times, no exaggeration, and yet it still sends chills down my spine. The imagery is so…graphic, and oh, so casually leads right up, quietly, to the 1-2 punch at the end.

  13. }}} Which, by my reading, is true. Poets seem to be about the most vulnerable among creatives for mental illness, female poets even more so.

    Indeed, I’m not huge on poetry, there’s only about 2 pieces (the one above, and Ozymandias, by Shelley) which I can quote from memory — both fairly short…

    But the one poet(ess) I have found some interest in was Emily Dickenson, and she was a shut-in and more than likely suffered from severe depression.

    She did almost all of her work in private, and never published much of it during her life. She just stored it in a trunk, with instructions to burn it all to her executor.

    Thankfully, her executor saw fit to reject those instructions, and published them for posterity… and this is probably the only reason anyone knows her name any more.

    .

    Ozymandias
    By Percy Bysshe Shelley
    ————————————————————————-
    I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
    And on the pedestal, these words appear:
    My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
    Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

    ————————————————————————-

    That one, too, shows little sign of where it is headed, and then delivers a 1-2 punch starting with the 11th line, and then absolutely flips the arrogant King’s proud exclamation on its head.

    IIRC, this one was written in a personal contest with a friend, to start with a given title. The friend’s name and poem are largely forgotten. This one is, IMNSHO, one of the greatest ones ever made.

  14. Speaking of “vice”, this has got to be SHEER poetry!
    “South Carolina Dem James Clyburn funneled six figures from campaign funds to family last cycle, filings show;
    “Clyburn’s son-in-law and grandson benefit from the powerful Democrat’s campaign”—
    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/south-carolina-dem-james-clyburn-funneled-six-figures-campaign-funds-family-last-cycle-filings-show

    And why not? After all the Honorable Rep. Clyburn is THE King of Kingmakers, is he not.
    And these may be viewed—should be viewed—as the reparations he and his oppressed family surely deserve.
    (In fact, it’s a pittance considering how much they’ve suffered since, since, since…)

    “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”…indeed…

  15. Not so calmly we board…(AKA The Spirit of ’76):
    “…[M]other and daughter are seen trading blows with Spirit Airlines agents in video of wild airport brawl after they were hit with extra fees at the gate for their oversized carry-on baggage”—
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11707233/Spirit-Airlines-agents-seen-trading-blows-passengers-Philly-airport.html

    Clearly, people should read more poetry…and listen to more Baroque and Classical music. (And of course the BeeGees, goes without saying…)

  16. Does Rilke have any plan for someone who doesn’t care that he “must change”? What happens when the poet runs into people?

    Richard Aubrey:

    That’s what re-education camps are for! But seriously…

    As I read the poem, it starts as the poet’s journey. Rilke is moved by the statue, basks in its magnificence, like that of a wild cat, then realizes the vitality he finds there is watching him, measuring him, challenging him to be equally alive. And he falls short.

    Hence, “You must change your life.”

    Which is not a demand or destination. It’s more of a question of what one will do now to meet that challenge. For Rilke that starts with Rilke.

    If you, the reader, are similarly moved by Rilke’s poem and the statue he describes, it becomes your challenge too.
    _______________________________

    Archaic Torso of Apollo

    We cannot know his legendary head
    with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
    is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
    like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

    gleams in all its power. Otherwise
    the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
    a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
    to that dark center where procreation flared.

    Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
    beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
    and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

    would not, from all the borders of itself,
    burst like a star: for here there is no place
    that does not see you. You must change your life.

    –Rainier Marie Rilke

  17. Now that’s a really good point…keeping in mind the soundtrack to “A Clockwork Orange”…

  18. There are rulers who thought themselves mighty ramses and other figures who were barely noted at the time who have had a greater presence

  19. But the one poet(ess) I have found some interest in was Emily Dickenson, and she was a shut-in and more than likely suffered from severe depression.

    She did almost all of her work in private, and never published much of it during her life. She just stored it in a trunk, with instructions to burn it all to her executor.

    OBloodyHell:

    That’s the legend. I believed it too.

    It’s true she was eccentric and reclusive. However, once I read a big new biography, I discovered her story is not so simple.

    Dickinson stayed at home but she maintained a large circle of friends she corresponded with. She sent her poems out with her letters. Her friends copied her poems and sent them to their friends.

    Imagine what it was like to read her poems when she was just a friend or a friend of a friend!

    She didn’t attempt to publish her poems because in her world at that time it was considered unseemly for a woman to publish.

    So Dickinson was not some shy depressed woman who created all these beautiful poems and kept them locked in a drawer, unseen by the world.

    There is, of course, speculation that she was depressive, manic-depressive or lesbian. She was a complex and sensitive person, no doubt with her ups and downs, but whatever was going on with her in those respects, they weren’t crippling.

  20. The lines:

    May memory restore again and again
    The smallest color of the smallest day

    Are reminiscent of the Jewish mourning phrase:

    ‘May their memory be for a blessing’

    Particularly when you consider the fact that he is referring to his dead father in the poem and, of course, of the fact that he is Jewish. I wont say it fits in exactly but poetic license would allow it.

  21. Huxley.
    To be anal about it, my shoulders are messed up and more pushups aren’t likely. Got a couple of free weights I wave around from time to time.
    Fortunately, I have enough left over from more prosperous days to take care of what, so far, has shown up on my plate.
    Less literally, I know of some folks whose efforts seem laudable and I maybe should try to emulate whatever of their stuff I can.
    For example, my wife and I were kidding about pre-writing our obits. I said mine would be…”Tree across your driveway? You’re out of luck, Aubrey’s gone.”
    There are things where I should be proactive but…..
    Don’t have to be particularly self-aware to think of things you might do better. Which is to say such a poem is not a flash of insight.

  22. Regarding the ill health of poets – have we ruled out malnutrition?

    It does make some sense that a prose author is more focused on reality. They must create a believable – if heightened and edited – simulacrum of reality in their work.

    Contrast that with poets and lyricists whose work often is impressionistic, compressed to the point of symbolism, and free to be dreamily irrational.

    I have a lot of trouble with modern poetry. Much of it is lazy and self-indulgent like the worst of the modern visual arts. I agree with Robert Frost’s comment that much of the stream-of-consciousness stuff is like playing tennis with the net down.

  23. Neo: thanks for giving us a glimpse of Delmore Schwartz’s glimpse of the fire in which we burn. What a gift he had: not only to perceive things as he did, but to find the words, and order them into that seemingly-simple scene, that gets deeper and deeper. It’s just about perfect IMHO, although “perfect” wrongly implies that it is an aesthetic object to be considered as distinct from ourselves; when in fact the poem ends in a direct seizure of our inmost selves, a cry and a warning to every living one of us.

    Thanks also for the Rilke, my favorite of his (many fine) poems, which has a similar crescendo of perception and feeling.

    And don’t get me started on Dickinson!

  24. Don’t have to be particularly self-aware to think of things you might do better. Which is to say such a poem is not a flash of insight.

    Richard Aubrey:

    YMMV — your mileage may vary. I don’t believe Rilke has realized he must do more pushups.

    Rilke is, I believe, pointing at the possibility of waking up and becoming vibrantly, fully alive like a jungle cat or the headless statue of Apollo Rilke admires in the poem.

    Here’s a video reciting Rilke’s poem in German, then English, to various views of the Apollo statue in the poem.

    –“Archäischer Torso Apollos/Archaic Torso Of Apollo”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II4psVJk59g

    Some say German is an ugly language. That’s not how I hear it.

  25. Huxley
    Rilke was saying we must change and he was using an exaggeratedly musculuar torso as his metaphor. So I stuck with his metaphor.

    “fully alive” Reminds me of a curiously apt FB post somebody put up. A guy is in what looks like a screened in porch. Entering the porch and facing him is a bear.
    Caption is “90% of a guy’s day dreams are for situations like this”

    I’m not 90%, but I’m over 50% in case circumstances call for it. Meantime, being vibrantly, fully alive like a jungle cat gets in the way of planning for the just-in-case. CPR training for the ushers at church. Can I draw my pocket knife and open one-handed. How’s my Army first aid–needed that once after finding a motorcycle accident.
    Mentoring an at-risk third grader; what’s next? Figure getting him to think of himself as a competent, responsible young man. Example, Xander Vento. Why does a four year old have to rescue a three year old? If everybody’s watching, nobody’s watching and that leaves it up to you.
    What’s next? Reading about the Magic Tree House and sabretooth tigers. Discuss flint tools? Organize a hunt–might do that, using second person singular, putting him in charge of a dozen hairy, bad-ass spearmen.
    Got to do some echo reading since his reading level is below grade.
    Heard him humming La Marseillaise. Where…? It’s a secret. Call up the classic scene from Casablanca? No translation.

    What does a kid look like when a stranger is trying to get her to go for ice cream?

    When something weird is going down at a truck stop, what’s the number for Truckers Against Trafficking?

    Talked to the cop who did the CRASE class for us. What are some tells?

    Meals on Wheels…at what point do I call for a welfare check versus busting the door?

    If Rilke wants to crouch, quivering in anticipation, next to a water hole, let him. I’ll go on being an average guy.

    Mark Twain had some funny stuff to say about German Larry Storch, late of F Troop, said German could start a fight in an empty room.

    I learned a very little bit of German; phonetic but not the meaning. In eighth grade, ca 1958, I tried it on the German teacher. He put his hands up. He seemed to think it was funny, since it probably wasn’t the first time and he may as well be a good sport about it.

  26. I did a poetry translation of Miklos Radnoti from his works that were found sewn into his coat pockets and retrieved from his body in 1944. The translations that were done previously of his work were politically motivated and were appalling. I did it, and I’m not a huge fan of poetry.
    I’ve been critical of your work, and I stand by my statements.
    But Neo, I am sorry for your loss.
    You seem to have loved this man very very much.
    I genuinely hope you have a spiritual basis to meet him, and your friends, in the afterlife; or to at least possibly anticipate where they may go.
    Or, you can go on YouTube and play, as loud as you can, Offspring, Gone Away.
    That I highly recommend. And read the comments, they are heartbreaking.
    It won’t make you feel better right away but it will tell you, you are not alone.

  27. Thanks for the discussion about the Rilke poem. I just went through the original, and it is indeed striking. I wonder where Rilke saw this piece of statuary. Given his span of years, I suppose it could have been at the Pergamon Museum or somewhere like that.

    The poem being in a sonnet form makes it the more appealing for me. It reminds me of the feeling I have had for a couple of the pieces in the Albany Institute’s sculpture collection, though I don’t think I feel it nearly as intensely as Rilke did. This is understandable in a way, since those works don’t leave enough to the imagination compared to the Apollo remnant, and what they do have is too soft and silken to carry that kind of visceral, almost animal impact.

    It’s too bad that the English translation found by huxley suffers from a certain weakness toward the end: it captured the original’s rhyme scheme about as well as one could reasonably expect in the first half, but the latter six lines totally fell apart in that respect. Maybe it just wasn’t achievable in any event, given how translation as an art is such a fraught thing; but it’s funny that, seeing that translation next to the original and considering how much greater it could have been had the English text been able to reach the same level of rhyme emulation in the final six lines that it did in the first eight, I feel a kind of inverse of Rilke’s impression about the sculpture – a piece of art on the way to something wonderful, and then it just crumbles.

    Here are some examples of what I mean about the Palmer school sculptures:
    Launt Thompson, Unconsciousness
    Erastus Palmer, Morning

  28. Hey, I just had another thought about this.

    There is a fantastic pairing to be enjoyed between “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” and “Ozymandias”. Rilke’s poem talks about a torso with no head or legs… Shelley’s talks about legs and head with no torso. Put them together and you have a nearly complete body! And when you consider that the impressions left by the respective remains in the two poets’ minds are near-mirror images of each other – desolation on the one hand, vitality on the other – how could the juxtaposition be any more perfect?

  29. Cause vs Effect. I’ll take the other tack: people who are creatives tend to be nuts to begin with. Well adjusted people don’t become poets, actors or artists in general. The people who go into this field are generally not quite sane to begin with. At least as a rule – exceptions notwithstanding.

  30. @ I Callahan –
    “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
    “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
    “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
    “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

    (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6)

  31. Huxley: There is, of course, speculation that she was depressive, manic-depressive or lesbian. She was a complex and sensitive person, no doubt with her ups and downs, but whatever was going on with her in those respects, they weren’t crippling.

    I knew she sent a lot of them around, but she had a lot of them that were in that trunk that were not, and she did, as I understand, instruct that they be burnt after she was dead.

    As to it being “unseemly” for a woman to publish, there are a number of females who found the solution, notably the Austens and “George Sand”, was not to acknowledge their gender. And regardless of this option, I see no reason not to publish after you’re gone.

    I also gather she was not one for going out much, even though she did have a lot of written interaction.

  32. I knew she sent a lot of them around, but she had a lot of them that were in that trunk that were not, and she did, as I understand, instruct that they be burnt after she was dead.

    OBloodyHell:

    My understanding is Dickinson’s instructions were to burn her papers, not the contents of a trunk.

    Her sister, Lavinia, didn’t seem to experience any moral quandary about the difference. Lavinia published a first volume of Dickinson’s poetry within four years of the Emily’s death.

    I’ve got about a twelve feet of handwritten and typed journals in the basement. I’d just as soon they were destroyed upon my death.

    But. Not. My. Poems.

    Not that I have any illusions that my poetry ought to outlast me.

  33. If one lives quivering with life as a jungle cat, are there likely to be apologies due behind one?

  34. Re: Rilke translation

    Philip Sells:

    I love hearing stories from the translation trenches! My experience of Neruda translations and my beginner’s Spanish had taught me a few lessons.

    Now my beginner’s French to hear Francoise Hardy’s internal rhymes in Ye-ye songs which don’t/can’t make it to the English translations.

    So fun to see what happened Petula Clark’s “Downtown” in French. Downtown disappears and became “Dans le temps” which is translated as “In the old days.” That song evokes nostalgia instead of the vital urban Now of the 1964 English version.

    Brutal.

    https://ar.pinterest.com/pin/dans-le-temps-petula-clark-downtown-french-version-lyrics-english-french-paroles-translation-youtube–532128512223200677/

  35. Re: Hindemith / Rilke

    sdferr:

    Those were remarkable!

    Somehow I got the impression Hindemith was a Schoenberg kinda guy and never bothered. It seems I need to recalibrate.

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