HEADLIGHTS

“You have the blood of a poet. You have that and always will. You show, in the middle of savage things (that I like), the gentleness of your heart, that is so full of pain and light.”

Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?

For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.

Subjectivity is made of such detail, of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us, known through our associations and histories, our scaffoldings of concerns and interests, the tones and shadings of our moods. We’re invited to form a sort of readerly alliance with Bishop’s speaker, brought close to what she’s feeling and seeing at a moment of intense clarity. Poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself. “How it feels to be oneself” has a great deal to do with the experience of time. It’s oddly difficult to describe what subjective time feels like. The clock on the wall simply ticks, persisting in its steady progression, while those in the body and psyche call for a great variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions. The time of interiority pools, constricts, tumbles, and speeds. We live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory. And memory edits its records of the past like a brilliant auteur—cutting, juxtaposing, creating a pace determined by the direction and emotion of a story. What is memory but a story about how we have lived? In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse it takes dozens of pages to render the inner lives of a group of people sitting around a dinner table during a single meal; later in the book, decades pass in a few pages. This kind of shifting feels accurate because it replicates something of our internal sense of time, where the irrelevant portions blur while significant moments swell. But there is another sort of temporality, too, which is timelessness. In this lyric time we cease to be aware of forward movement; lyric is concerned neither with the impingement of the past nor with anticipation of events to come. It represents instead a slipping out of story and into something still more fluid, less linear: the interior landscape of reverie. This sense of time originates in childhood, before the conception of causality and the solidifying of our temporal sense into an orderly sort of progression. Such a state of mind is “lyric” not because it is musical (though the representation of these states of mind usually is) but because we are seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded. The parts of a narrative are contiguous, each connecting to the previous instant and the next, but the lyric moment is isolate. Though it most often seems to begin in concentration, in wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object, such a state leads toward an unpointed awareness, a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action. Bishop herself described this sort of attention in a famous letter to Anne Stevenson: “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” Self-forgetful concentration is precisely what happens in the artistic process—an absorption in the moment, a pouring of the self into the now. We are, as Dickinson says, “without the date, like Consciousness or Immortality.” That is what artistic work and child’s play have in common; both, at their fullest, are experiences of being lost in the present, entirely occupied.

Poetry's another word

Once, my mother in the shape of God pointed to the moon in a screen door.

I do not think I really have anything to say about poetry other than remarking that it is a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer’s eve—if you persist in following the thrush it will only recede deeper and deeper into the woods; you will never actually see the thrush (the hermit thrush is especially shy), but I suppose listening is a kind of knowledge, or as close as one can come. “Fret not after knowledge, I have none,” is what the thrush says. Perhaps we can use our knowledge to preserve a bit of space where his lack of knowledge can survive.

Praise the moment when our grief becomes a window, when we can see what we could not see before.

People — People — Phone — Phone — Endless. And l am so tired — And I would like to sleep under trees — Red ones — Blue ones — Swirling passionate ones —

For me, imagination is synonymous with discovery. To imagine, to discover, to carry our bit of light to the living penumbra where all the infinite possibilities, forms, and numbers exist. I do not believe in creation but in discovery, and I don't believe in the seated artist but in the one who is walking the road. The imagination is a spiritual apparatus, a luminous explorer of the world it discovers. The imagination fixes and gives clear life to fragments of the invisible reality where man is stirring.

All truth must conform to music.

In my case, ever since I could remember, I had been inexplicably anxious, given even to a kind of experience of non­being (as though that were possible). There must have been rea­sons for why, from an early age, I was beset with fear and with the sensation that the world, or even I myself, was not entirely solid. It may have been that my father had left us, unsettling my first sense of things; or that my mother then had no one and despaired of her ability to support us; or that perhaps there had once been a certain unspeakable finger that had known me before, as Shakespeare’s Adonis says, I had known myself. Who’s to say? But, surely, even the basic arrangements of existence, the universal rules under which we all live (the inevitability of death, to begin), are so strange that no further reason is needed for anyone to feel perplexed and unsolid—never mind (for now) all the other disas­ters that can wrack a human on her journey from one shore to the other. For me, the solution to this perplexity—or, since no solution is really possible, the orientation toward psychic survival or even toward joy—came in the most unlikely way possible: It was, incredibly, through reading that I was able to find a place for my consciousness. (Incredibly because we have been trained to think that intellectual life and well­being are two separable things.) This place for my consciousness was a kind of Arcadia that was necessarily both a freedom from the pressures of a largely unsparing reality and a reflection on those pressures, a way of inhabiting at the same time both myself (whatever that is) and also another person (whatever that is), a way of drawing in history (whatever that is), a way of thinking in a mode of sufficient com­plexity and suppleness that my mind felt real and also could whir along with a certain lightness, in an as-­if mode that is the single ground rule of fiction.