Resurrections

from The Surgery Diaries



I spent too much money on a short trip to Minnesota this past week. It was the first time I have been away from home any length of time since the surgery. It was partly a test: to see if I was up to traveling, to dealing with changing the ostomy bag when away from home, with lots of physical exertion when on the road, and so forth. I stayed at a best friend's place in Minneapolis, which was a safe place for all this pushing at my limits. I spent one entire day at the Minnesota State Fair, walking and making photos, and taking in the sights and sounds. And a bit of healthy eating; which you can do at the Fair if you pay attention and take your time. I spent another afternoon wandering with friends around the Renaissance Festival outside of the Twin Cities, which was another test of physical prowess. I got home after the long drive, and only then was I really exhausted. So this was a good trip, I enjoyed myself for the most part, I had fun with friends, and I wasn't overly tired. If anything, my energy is returning strongly enough that it's getting harder to tire myself out. And I spent too much money.

But then, it was one of those trips where I knew I would be going to places where I would be tempted to purchase, so I did budget for the spending. And some of that shopping was every-two-years shopping, not on impulse but planned. I needed a new belt for my pants, which I like to get at one particular leather-work vendor at the Ren Fest, for several reasons, mostly because of quality and durability.

I did a little thrift store shopping on the trips up and back, as I knew I would have to stop regularly when driving to give my body a chance to stretch and relax. I haven't driven like this for months, and I knew it would be a good way to unwind. So I stopped at some places I used to frequent, and didn't stop at others.

One of the books I found on one of my stops was The Wild Braid: A poet reflects on a century in the garden, by Stanley Kunitz, with Genine Lentine. This is a poet who has always gardened, who ahs lived a full century and more, who has always written poems in and about the garden, and who I feel has often had wisdom to pass on. Wisdom not only about writing, but about life.

During the preparation and process of this book, which was instigated by Genine Lentine as a series of interviews and excerpts from Kunitz's published and unpublished writings, Kunitz fell mysteriously ill, and as mysteriously recovered. This is what he says about that episode, words which resonate strongly with my own recent experience of surgery and recovery:

The garden instructs us in a principle of life and death and renewal. In its rhythms, it offers the closest analogue to the concept of resurrection that is available to us.

I feel I experienced a kind of resurrection and I'm absolutely grateful for having emerged and yet I have no delusions I've been promised anything but a period of survival, that's all. There is no pledge of survival beyond that.
—Stanley Kunitz

No pledge of survival. I have if anything become even more conscious of my limited time here in this incarnation, of how much I want to get done, of the limited time that is mortality, and that I am aware of my own mortality as never before. No time at all, it feels like some days, to get enough done.

I look for ways to revitalize myself right now. Some have to be new ways, because in some cases the old ways just don't work anymore. I look for a way to come back to life. With the help of some neighbors, I was finally able to thoroughly weed out and mulch the back gardens, where the plants I want there are few at the moment, but very much alive. Earlier in the year, I had thought the morning glories I had planted weren't going to make it; but now, not only have they come back to life, they're exploding with it.

I feel as though I'm a traveler exploring territory that may not be wholly new, but it has reverberations and images that seem to have a collective presence. It's still a feeling, a sensibility that is mysterious in many ways because I don't know exactly where I am at this moment, in terms of the imaginative, the creative process, but I know I am searching for something different from the terrain I was familiar with. And yet, it isn't simply a new landscape. When I finally come to grips with my night visitor, I'll know more clearly what it is I have in mind, which seems to be a new set of images, but connected very much with my whole history.
—Stanley Kunitz

That disorientation, that not-knowing where you are right now. There is a distinct before and after to my life, now. I find myself grieving for the person that I was, who is no more; grieving as well for the parts of my body that were taken away, but also for the vanished sense of integral wholeness. I constantly stumble, fog-brained, around my days and nights not knowing what to think: everything is new, there are no rules, I don't know what's the same and what's changed till I encounter a situation and find out by doing. It's all still very mysterious. Why is recovery so mysterious? I suppose because rebirth is, too, like birth itself.

Certainty is once again dissolved. All the old maps are useless. We seek new terrain to explore.

I've been through this before, in the dark night of the soul, when everything I thought I knew and believed was taken away, leaving a void in me that stayed empty for years. Every time you try to fill that void inside you, it dissolves back into hollowness, because it's a void that can't be filled with belief, only with experience. I've filled that void two or three times since that first voiding, which was the dark night of the senses, the first stage of the dark night. The kenosis of emptying came later, in the desert.

And now I am emptied again. Grieving again. Feeling often lost. As more than one friend has pointed out to me, even at my current diminished capacity I am doing better than most people do at their best. But it's not my own best, and I know it. I can tell I'm functioning well below one hundred percent. I strive in frustration to improve my functioning, and most days cannot. Moments of revelation happen, when suddenly my mind clears, my eyes clear and I see sharper, hear sharper, than I have in a long time. Everything comes into focus. But such moments are not enduring; I am constantly dragged back down the gravity well into rebellious solace.

Everyone seems to think I'm doing very well indeed, but I don't feel that way at all. I still feel very messed up, very uncertain and insecure. I feel sometimes very abandoned, analogous to a person who has been widowed, and is comforted by all her friends for awhile, but all too soon her friends want her to get on with life, stop mourning her loss, and resume. That can make you feel even more alone than you did before, because the support you still need isn't there any more. People think you're fine now, and they can go on. Often enough this isn't really about you. There are two kinds of support, or solace, that people give: the first kind is the support and comfort they give you when you really need it; the second kind is the kind they give themselves, because they're not comfortable with your process. As though grief had a timetable or schedule to be followed.

I find solace for myself in fewer and fewer things. Some days it's hard to find any solace at all. Sometimes you survive purely by distraction and escapism—for once, escapism is not pathological because it's in support of your survival, not an avoidance of engagement with life. I constantly seek new strategies to find and maintain meaning and purpose in my life, which for now remains uncertain and insecure and mysteriously difficult to like. I've heard that some people who go through an near-death experience are troubled by being brought back, they don't want to be here anymore, and sometimes it's just not a very nice place to be. Pain hurts. Some days it takes all my energy to maintain anything remotely near a positive attitude. It can be a real uphill struggle.

Most days, lately, making art does help. Taking a short roadtrip up to Minnesota did help.

But then I had to come home. Right back into the old patterns and enables. Getting pulled right back into the bucket, surrounded by useless black crabs who won't let go. It's depressing just to have to go home when being away is much more life-affirming. It's cabin fever, to be sure, but it's also knowing how easy it is to let discipline and practice slide when lounging about at home. Days you don't feel motivated become an excuse to do nothing. But forward momentum is necessary, if I'm to get anywhere. I need to break out, I need to make this work somehow. Right now, it's not working. I have to find a solution. But all the old maps are useless. I don't know if I have the strength yet to make yet another new map, fill the void one more time. Only time will tell—paradoxically, since time is also the hell we live in, some days.

What's the point? What purpose is there to any of this? I read Stanley Kunitz's book of poems and thoughts and garlands from his garden, and near the end of his book I find this sublime paragraph, and somehow it all seems to make sense, for now, and to give me reason to go on, for now.

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz

The Tissue of Experience

The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience. How can this element be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? That is certainly one of the problems when making a poem is thought to be a rational production. The dominance of reason, as in eighteenth-century poetry, diminished the power of poetry. Reason certainly has its place, but it cannot be dominant. Feeling is far more important in the making of the poem. And the language itself has to be a sensuous instrument; it cannot be a completely rational one. In rhythm and sound, for example, language has the capacity to transcend reason; it’s all like erotic play.
—Stanley Kunitz, poet

How indeed can experience and feeling be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? But that's exactly what we're told to do, these days, in this late-stage postmodern mannerist period in PoetryWorld. Anyone who objects to this trend, with the exception of elder statesman such as Kunitz, gets laughed out of the tangled labyrinths of academic poetry and criticism. Sincerity and meaning are forbidden as unfashionable. The current fashion is precisely what Kunitz above says does not work. And don't forget the required dash of irony.

I enjoy Kunitz' final note about transcending reason and erotic play: that's the real poetry. When poetry stays all in the mind, when it's about nothing but reason, when there's no eros in it, it fails. Poems written only from the head ultimately fail.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
—Jacques Maritain, philosopher

The French philosopher and writer agrees. Bloodless poetry, overly rational poetry, is incomplete. A poem that hasn't been bled on, at least a little, is not a whole experience. How can we expect poets to be able to change the world in any way when we also expect them to be passive, intellectual, and bloodless? There is no equation that adds up.

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant," where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observers and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved (fondu) in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us.
—Gaston Bachelard, philosopher, The Poetics of Reverie

Another French philosopher and writer. The Poetics of Reverie was a book I first read decades ago, when I barely had enough life-experience to understand it. But Bachelard was discussing the connection between dreaming, the Dreamtime, and creativity, which I already knew was there. He was articulating something I already knew to be true. So I pursued reading the book, even though it had little clarity for me till some years later. that silent peace is something I have always known, often wordless, always immersive, the very essence of what Kunitz calls the tissue of experience. That silence upon which all words are founded, which they all arise from and all fall back into, that silence is the very fabric of existence.

An artist says, "I started being an artist when I was five years old." Well, so what? So did everybody. At that age, everyone's an artist. What makes you an artist is that you keep making art when everyone else stops being an artist. You keep going, while they don't.
—Vic Muniz, artist, in an interview

I did stop making art, for awhile, earlier in life. I didn't stop being creative, as I was still writing and making music, but i did stop making visual art. Then I started again. Photography is and always has been the core of that. I started making mature, decent photographs, when I traveled overseas, specifically in Indonesia. Each time I travel, still, I get better as a photographer. Photography and Photoshop was and still is the artistic tool, my palette knife as it were, that got me going, that liberated me technically, that allowed me to make the images I was seeing in my head but didn't have the manual skills to draw or paint.

There's no separation anymore. On the world's most difficult day, I can still make something, eventually. I might fight against it all day long, exhausted and spent by other things, and finally at the end of the day, with the last ounce of strength, then it's done. Tonight the moon was riding above white cumulus clouds; now it's hovering, half-size, above the backyard pines. How do you fight the tendency for art to crystallize and turn solid, and loose its fluid life?

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
—Allen Ginsberg, poet

Ignore the party line. I don't think poetry is only self-expression, and neither did Ginsberg. But he did think it could be used to express parts of the self the tribe would perhaps rather we didn't express. Poetry is transgressive, not tame. Poetry that is tamed, as Kunitz says, is reasonable, rational, powerless. Ginsberg at his best was all about re-empowering poetry: not the poet, but Poetry. The rational poets would criticize Ginsberg and his ilk as being too self-indulgent, too ecstatic, too unpredictable, too vulgar—by which they meant that he was not to be tamed, and he did not toe the party line. There are several party lines these days in Poetryworld, but most of them are inherently tame, and aren't going to break free of anything, or into anything.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual—when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions—it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer, novelist and storyteller

This is Singer agreeing with Kunitz, though it's likely they never heard these sentiments directly from each other. Great minds think alike, come to the same conclusions, and say some similar things. Singer acknowledges the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the left and right sides of the brain (mind, really, but let's use the conceptual cliché for the moment nonetheless), and expresses that tension as a conflict. But like Kunitz, Singer also implies that it's in the union of emotion and intellect, of passion and craft, that real art comes into being. So much contemporary poetry lacks substance precisely to the extent that it stays in the intellect and ignores the passions, that it is not poetry of the soma, of the whole body. Other poetries, unfettered and cloven-hoofed, march across the dreamscape and send shivers up the playground. Those are the poetries I feel aligned to, allied with, attuned to. Images and sounds and movements that rise irrationally from those parts of the self neither intellectual nor rational.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.
—George Mackay Brown, poet

Architecture unfetters us as well. A beautiful building breathes with light and air, it brings us into the space it defines as a living thing. The deliberate geometry of a pure space opens the heart as well as the mind. Years ago, when I was studying modern dance, we went out as a class from the mirrored classroom to the open courtyard of a modern building on campus, and danced there. Passersby stared, most not stopping. There was no music, other than the sounds of hands and feet slapping the concrete of floor and walls, the wind, the distant traffic sounds. But I was filled with sound, just filled with it. As we continued, for several silent connected minutes, a few walkers did stop to watch and become part of the landscape. And then we were done, the late afternoon sun was warm, and we went back, aglow with the pleasure of the dance. It was a moment when we lived the saying "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture;" having done the latter, I feel just fine when doing the former.

So, the tissue of experience made into art, poetry, music, dance, is all of these. It is one seamless fabric, not a series of separate, discrete, rational little envelopes. We are all of a piece, all one fabric, one force.

Oh God, save me from being profound! Save me from those who are carefully literary!
—James Broughton, poet, filmmaker, all around wizard