Dangerous Epiphanies

I came to a startling revelation tonight, as I sat downing a pint and trying to contemplate poetry (mine and others'). Call it a discovery of negatives, whether negative capability or negative space. (Choose your analogy as you will.) I was thinking on Pope's assertion that "To follow Poetry as one ought, one must forget father and mother, and cleave to it alone." I've never entirely agreed with that sort of assertion, even if there is an ounce of truth to it; after all, it tends to be that the so many of the best poets were reprehensible human beings in one form or another, and I can't help but wonder if they sacrificed their relations with others in the name of poetic pursuit. Not entirely consciously of course; few of us make decisions entirely consciously; really, none of us do, because we only think we do; but that's another matter entirely. My thoughts turned, as they so often do, to two very odd figures: Eliot and Ted Hughes, Eliot the modern master of clinicizing his feelings into marvellous poetry, such that the real Eliot remains forever a cipher to the intelligent, and a caricature to the ignorant, and Hughes, the apparent solipsist, but also the man so disparaged for his treatment of Sylvia Plath that many refuse to acknowledge his genius, despite the fact he waited until his own death throes to finally write Birthday Letters, the truly moving coda to his own body of work that finally revealed the man, warts and all, behind the scenes-- and the pain he and Sylvia inflicted on one another.

And I thought of where I fall in between.

The poet is always part solipsist, always fussing over his own experiences and how they relate to his view of things. On one side, you might have people like John Dryden and Alexander Pope, masters of form before emotion, regulators, one might say, of their own emotional content; on the other side, you might have Walt Whitman, self-eroticism and all, and so many of the feminist writers (especially in Canada, but also elsewhere: c.f., Adrienne Rich) for whom poetry is a dirge-like love-song to femininity, itself a kind of spiritual onanism (rather like providing oneself a congratulatory orgasm, and pretending it a political statement). But it got me thinking, in cruder terms, that a true poet doesn't dread to live his life out loud; he may choose to omit, he may choose to refrain, but he doesn't bottle things inside for some purpose extant to his poetic calling; anything, after all, can be addressed, but be sufficiently coded as not to be immediately 'explicit.'

But it occurred to me tonight that, although I've always thought I've lived my life 'out loud,' or as 'out loud' as one can expect in rational society, I actually haven't. There are things the poet, indeed the human, inside of me should have written about but did not. Instead, I buried them away, and refused to look at them with the emotional precision only true poetry can (though, of course, whether or not anything I wrote would be poetry is another matter).

I realized tonight how many of the truly 'informative' thingsin my life I never wrote about, how many things I never even tried to write about; indeed, how many things, I buried like secret corpses in the backyard of my mind that only I could face, and then only truly so in silence. And that troubled me, it troubled me greatly.

It troubled me that I never even tried to put down to paper the most truly romantic moment in my life-- a moment I think of often, more often than I care to admit, and which always finishes with a kind of tragic aftertaste. It troubled me not just what happened, but that I'd in a way been dishonest by not articulating as best I could the poetry that was in that moment, and what it meant to me, and how I really haven't been the same since. It troubled me that she'll never know exactly what happened in my eyes. It troubled me that she'll never know that she saved me from myself.

It troubled me too that I never wrote about the anguish of holding someone I loved dearly in my arms, as she lay there barely breathing, drool coming out of her mouth, as I vowed I would do anything God demanded of me so long as she was okay. It troubled me that I never wrote about the irony that came after that, or the irony that I'd made a similar promise about the same woman years before.

Yes, before any of you say the obvious, these were all troubling; epiphanies are seldom comforting.

It troubled me that I never, ever, ever wrote about -- or really tried to write about-- something I still won't really talk about. And, really, I should have written about that, coded as necessary, if only for myself. Rationalized regret stings only slightly less.

It troubled me that I never did write the elegy for Brent, that I never found the words that might have been at least cathartic for those I worried most about at that time.

And it troubled me that I can't seem to write for those I care about without resorting to casual, even preachy, prose. I never truly wrote again after.... And though I suspect it would not have made a difference, I wish I had, not for the sake of writing per se, but for the sake of saying what I felt. And, yes, it troubled me too how long this has indeed been going on.

I've been holding back, for any number of reasons, depending on the circumstances. And although this sounds artificial, as if it relates only to poetics, it goes far beyond that. It becomes about regret, about the things said instead of those that should have been said, it becomes about the slow process of erosion, about shutting oneself to silence.

I don't know what I'll ultimately think about this in the morning, or the day after, or the week after, or the year after. It is quite possible such things were simply tactical, private, or otherwise 'beyond' (I leave the word deliberately unpointed). I don't finally know anymore.

I guess it all comes down to this: I wish I were the man I used to be. Sad thing is, that I'm even writing this tells me 'he' is still there, the truer poet, if only in spirit. But he nags like a vicious conscience, but never comes out to play anymore. And I don't know if it's shame or regret that has made him so chimeric.

Ah, bah, humbug, hopefully all this will be gone in a bit, like a bad rash. Times change. We move on.

But seven, that haunts me. Almost seven.