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Stream of Consciousness: Random Mix

Posted on October 31, 2008
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I came across an entry from Sylvia Plath’s journal in a blog yesterday: 

“Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. People read it: react to it as to a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not. It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. You do it for itself first. If it brings in money, how nice. You do not do it first for money. Money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter. Not that you don’t want it. It is only too lovely when a profession pays for your bread and butter. With writing, it is maybe, maybe-not. How to live with such insecurity? With what is worst, the occasional lack or loss of faith in the writing itself? How to live with these things?

The worst thing, worse than all of them, would be to live with not writing.”

I don’t know much about Sylvia Plath and the reasons for her seeming popularity (there is even a movie about her. How many movies do you know about writers ?). But what she writes here is beautiful. I think about my waking up early in the morning to write a little before the day consumes the rest of me. Do I do this because it’s some new fangled thing or is it something that is sustainable ? The way my running has  deteriorated has given me little comfort in habits and love. From running a half marathon every weekend to not having run one in the past eight months seems unbelievable. Yes, Maya has affected this somewhat, but I don’t think it is appropriate to hold this reason alone supreme. The flagging had begun sooner. After Kitty’s death. I noticed an amazing lack of enthusiasm for doing anything but just wallow in his memories and write. As C.S. Lewis wrote: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief“.

The grief over Kitty’s death has changed. It was a strong undertow before, dragging me away from the shore, despite myself. Now it is like an ocean current. Unseen, powerful, ocean currents affect the lives of those on land, without their knowing that it is affecting them.

Reading William Stafford restores my faith in writing anew every time. He talks about it like it were as essential as breathing. And it is. In “The Answers are Inside the Mountains”, he writes: “The action of writing is the successive discovery of cumulative epiphanies in the self’s encounter with the world”.

So I sit here at my desk, the world silent except for clickety-clack of the keyboard and the rain pattering on the roof above (I’m not trying to be poetic, it is raining). Waiting. Watching. To discover another epiphany of myself.

I don’t really know what I’ll write about most times. Some times, a subject has been nagging me for so long, it eventually takes shape before me. Like that piece on infantile amnesia. It had been on my mind for almost three months. Several attempts to get it out failed hopelessly. Then, it finally clicked. Talking about the song Secondary Waltz from his latest album, Mark Knopfler said he waited for forty years to find the melody for this song. He said: “”I don’t go nuts if a tune doesn’t come – I wait for it to happen, even if it takes 40 years.” William Stafford wrote: “I’m very indulgent at the time of writing. I’ll accept anything, any old trash; it can never be low enough to keep me from writing it.”

Reading brilliant artists talk like that nudges away the tightness that I feel some mornings, when no two words seem to want to talk to each  other, talk together.

Anne Lamott, the author of one of best books out there on writing, Bird by Bird, writes about her writing process:

Even after I’d been doing this for years, panic would set in. I’d try to write a lead, but instead I’d write a couple of dreadful sentences, xx them out, try again, xx everything out, and then feel despair and worry settle down on my chest like an x-ray apron. It’s over, I’d think calmly. I’m not going to be able to get the magic to work this time. I’m ruined. I’m through. I’m toast. Maybe, I’d think, I can get my old job back as a clerk-typist. But probably not. I’d get up and study my teeth in the mirror for a while. Then I’d stop, remember to breathe, make a few phone calls, hit the kitchen and chow down. Eventually, I’d go back and sit down at my desk, and sigh for the next ten minutes. Finally I would pick up my one-inch picture frame, stare into it as if for the answer, and every time the answer would come: all I had to do was write a really shitty first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.

Writing like this reminds me that I need to trust the process, that I need to just sit down and let me fingers move.

I used to complain a lot a couple of years back, that I didn’t get around to meditating every day, as much as I liked to. A wise friend who had it up till here hearing me whine, said, “Have you practiced the one minute meditation ?”.

“What”, I said, startled out of my whining reverie, “No. What is it ?”

“It’s what it sounds like. You just meditate for a minute”.

“What good would that be ?”, I asked, unhappy that he wasn’t content to just let me moan.

“Well, if you haven’t tried it, you wouldn’t know”, he said.

“OK”, I said, sounding like a doubting Thomas, “I’ll try it the next time”.

What I meant to say was “OK, could I now go back to my whining ?”

When I was in a more zen like mode, I realized what he meant. If I could get started, maybe I could do the whole 15 or 20 minute meditation that I wanted to. If I thought that it was important enough, I could at least devote a minute to it. That’s when I realized it was far easier to conclude that I didn’t really care that much about meditating everyday. I just thought that it sounded good, felt good to want it.

I had a little postcard on my desk with the picture of a woman running. “You become a great runner by running”, it said. Just get going and it’ll all hang together.

Letting the fingers run, as the stream of consciousness fly out in words that somehow seem to connect, Stafford’s poem comes back to me:

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life condemned. So these moments
count for a lot – peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool. Cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

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William Stafford

Posted on September 9, 2008
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I have a new hero, William Stafford, a poet closely identified with the Pacific Northwest. I was researching some quotes and poems for an article when I ran into a few by him. The first one that hit me was called “Just Thinking”:

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot—peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

I loved the language, the simplicity and the directness of it, the unusualness of phrasing, the writing of the being in the now. “Been on probation most of my life”. Those words achingly echoed how I’ve always felt about my life. Trying to be better than I am, knowing how immature I am about so many things, knowing the growing up that I have to do. Reading the paragraph of letting the bucket of memory into the well brought waves of memories rushing back, memories from childhood, from adolescence, from my time in the US. Not specific images, but just a flood of impressions that seemed to capture the wonder and bewilderment of being here. I was hooked to this man. I had to find out more, read more. And the more I read, the more I became hooked.

Since I was a child, I’ve been partial to wordpeckers, people who play with language in unusual ways to convey something profound. My first encounter with this pleasure was in listening to Hindi film music. The poetry of some of the lines would enchant me, the words ringing in my ears, instantly memorized. With many lyrics, I’d be able to guess how the song would go, what words would come. But with some, it was like being sucked into a vortex, inexorable, taking my breath away. For example, the song “Kabhi Kabhie” has beauty, yet is so simple, no complicated Urdu words and has such a poignant ending.

The poetry that I encountered in school mostly left me cold, maybe partly because I was too immature to appreciate them, maybe partly because the teachers who taught them, couldn’t fully understand, appreciate or communicate them. The first poem that touched me was “Ode to a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The first line “Hail to thee, blithe spirit”, stuck with me as did the lines: “Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”. I felt instantly that the man was onto something.

As I grew older, I ran into others that moved me such as Lord Byron and Robert Frost. Having studied outside my home state of Karnataka for most of my schooling years, and moving like a vagabond between states, learning different languages every three years or so, left me with little appreciation for the regional languages including my mother tongue, Kannada. English and Hindi were the two constants and so my appreciation for the beauty of language was manifest mostly with them.

William Stafford was born in the first years of the last century, when the world was entering the first of the wars that ravaged the world. Coming of age during the second world war, he protested the draft as a conscientious objector and performed alternate civilian services. He became a teacher, married, had four children and hardly had any publication till he turned forty-six. And then the poems came pouring out. He wrote every single day for fifty years, has apparently composed over 22,000 poems of which about 3,000 have been published. He died in 1993, in Oregon, where he spent the latter part of his life. The day of his death, August 28, was a couple of days after Kitty’s death day, the 26th. For a while he also taught at San Jose State, a college nearby here. How the mind seeks a narrative where there maybe none, a pattern that is only discernible to the maker of it. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, said Joan Didion.

Stafford’s most famous work, the one for which he won the National Book Award is called “Traveling Through The Dark”. It tells of his coming upon a dead deer on his way home, on a narrow, mountain road. As he tries to roll it out of the road, to make it safe for other drivers, he makes a discovery.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

Coming across the passage in the middle of the poem, left me gasping. For some reason, I’ve carried the lines from the Hindi song “Zindagi Ka Safar”: “Aise jeevan bhi hain, jo jiye hi nahin, jinko jeene se pehle hi maut aa gayi”. I originally thought of them as meaning the road not taken, of lives not having lived because of the choices we make, of fear and suspicion. I now see that even literally interpreted in a context like this, the words possess an enormous power. Just being born is a miracle, a blessing.

Stafford said that he is a butterfly, not a butterfly collector, that he wants the experience of a butterfly. He addressed the here and now in his poems, drawing inspiration from the things that surrounded him, finding in them for us, awe and beauty of the kind most of us find by staring at a naked sky, full of stars. For example, in a poem titled “Ground Zero”:

While we slept —
rain found us last night, easing in
from the coast, a few leaves at first,
then ponds. The quietest person in the state
heard the mild invasion. Before it was over
every field knew that benediction

I felt god touch me, the hair on my back stand up, when I read that last line. How life affirming rain is and how beautifully he says it. That word benediction seems so apt, no other word could have taken its place. He can take the same scene, say rain, and turn it in many different ways, each beautiful, each wondrous. Here’s an excerpt from the poem “Waiting For God”:

This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air’s memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.

Stafford was also admired as a teacher. He has written two books on the writer’s craft, Writing The Australian Crawl and Crossing Unmarked Snow. He travelled far and wide, encouraging poets and writers in countries as far away as India and Nepal, in countries as diverse as Iran and Singapore. His teaching style was called “no praise, no blame”. He said: “.. in the process of writing and in the process of teaching writing, assessment is in a decidedly secondary position”. He said that his function as a teacher was to enable a student achieve what (s)he wanted, not critique. If a student, for example, said that he was not happy with the ending, Stafford was willing to help the student with that, but not critique the ending himself.

He was the Poet Laureate of the US, when it was still called “Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress”.

He said that he woke up every morning at 4 am, ran three miles three times a week, and then sat writing till his wife woke up at 7 am. In his poem, “The Way I Write”, he writes:

My head lolls to one side as thoughts
pour onto the page, important
additions but immediately obsolete, like waves.
The ocean and I have many pebbles
to find and wash off and roll into shape.

His love of language is clear in his many sayings. Writing that he grew up during the days of Vietnam war and Watergate he says that he is seeking not just freedom of speech, but freedom in speech, of writing that does not tolerate duplicity, of language that feels “uncomfortable if it distorts the proportions of discourse”. I’ve always held that music can go where words cannot, but reading Stafford makes me wonder that just as reading Byron or Nazim Hikmet or Frost or Emily Dickinson makes me wonder that. Stafford seems to address that directly when he writes: “Language can do what it can’t say”.

As a poet, using the briefest of expressions to convey a mountain of meaning seems critical. In his poem on Emily Dickinson, he distills the essence so well in so short a piece:

On that page where the whole world moved
and other people ran
frantic in their lives to stay the same,
she was the stillest one –

Eye in the night to lag or surge,
ready to catch the shine
of the newest star or the old sky in the brain
where the right word again begins time.

His belief in the power of language is clear in that last line: “where the right word again begins time”.

He was a pacifist, which is another great quality in a person. His latest book culled from his collection is called “Every war has two losers”. His son, famous in his own right, Kim Stafford, writes that his father wrote on behalf of the unknown good in our enemies. He wrote in 1955 that “Armies are a result of obsolete ways–just as gibbets are, and as thumbscrews are, and leper windows.”

In his book of poems called Passwords, he ends with:

World, please note -
a life went by, just
a life, no claims,

A stutter in the millions
of stars that pass,
a voice that lulled -

A glance
and a world
and a hand.

I remembered the song “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon” in which similar sentiments were echoed. I remembered Kitty when I read the lines “a life went by, just a life, no claims”. I constantly measure myself against that and the urge for leaving a mark behind, of doing something of some consequence. During the course of my forty years, I’ve chipped away at that desire and managed to convert it to one of living well and dying well. And one central element in that journey has been to come across and savor works such as those by William Stafford.


References:
1. More Than Has Ever Been Found: 17 poems by William Stafford
2. Selected Poems of William Stafford
3. Sleep of Grass: A Tribute In Poetry to William Stafford

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