A Vocation

Since early adolescence I have wanted to live the life of a poet. What this meant to me was a life outside the law; it would include disobedience and uprootedness. I would be at liberty to observe, drift, read, travel, take notes, converse with friends, and struggle with form.

Struggling with form meant creating problems of self-expression that only I could solve. This required boundless time, no obligations, lots of conversation and love, little money, little stability but always freedom to play with sound and meaning. I was surrounded by poetry at home so this should have been easy, but another atmosphere undermined its powers.

Like the rest of my generation, I was catapulted into a double bind. On the one hand each of us was valued, treated to an education in humanist values, and nourished for a long life; on the other hand we were told to hide under our desks during nuclear bomb alerts, and to wait there in the knowledge that we were as disposable as pieces of tissue paper that could blow away like ashes.

While we learned languages, poetry, science, and athletics, the prevailing social attitude was nihilist. Not officially so, not with reference to Nietzsche, but in the stirring cavities of decision making and imagination. Mass murder, global destruction, and genocide were idle topics. We grew up at the tail end of the Victorian period and at the beginning of the postmodern. In the year 1968 the contradictory forces behind the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement came to a head and my generation embodied the conflict and attempted to find synthesis and progress.

Now the millennium has come and gone and I am in a hermitage facing a field of snow and bristling grain where there is a line of gray trees at the end. The sky has the wintry golden blush that makes it seem to swell like water. I hear cars and trucks in the distance. Over the years I have written during days just like these, when there was snow, or cold, and some sense of safety and enclosure. More often I have written on the road in the middle of children, crowds at train stations, airports, motels, bus depots, in offices and schoolyards.

I have put this collection on the table in order to discover what I was doing during those times, because it was not just a matter of writing poems. That activity was inseparable from the dialectical questions of my generation, from the paradoxes of a life spent in a cynical social terrain.

Why was I chained to these language problems that I myself had created? Why all this scratching and erasing? It was more like drawing an invisible figure than painting what was in front of me. I wanted something to recognize: a disembodied presence.

A friend wrote down some words for me shortly before he died: “Poetry is backwards logic. You can’t write poetry unless you have knowledge of, or taste for, this ‘backwards’ way of finding truth.”

Another person said sound is eternal, it has no beginning. And a Hindu teacher said to me, “The Upanishads were never written for the first time.”
I am always wondering at the way there are varieties of points of view, just as there are different names for the same things and concepts.

This collection of notes and memories is an effort to resolve the question: what was this strange preoccupation that seemed to have no motive, cause, or final goal and preceded all that writing that I did. Did it begin in the environment of childhood, or was it formed out of alien properties later? If I had known what I was doing all along, would I have done it? What people, places, books, and things guided me? What could I call what was calling me?

A vocation that has no name.

From The Winter Sun. © 2009 by Fanny Howe. All rights reserved.