Other People's Poetry

I'm not a great reader of poetry but I tend to keep a volume handy and read a verse or two during off moments.  Currently, Mary Oliver's *Dream Work is within arm's reach. I like her stuff quite a bit.

But poetry, like music, is often best when it catches you by surprise. One poem has haunted me since I read it in a book called *The Immortalization Commission by John Gray, probably my favorite living philosopher. The book is about two projects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to either prove human immortality -- via a soul or spirit that persists after the the death of the body -- or create immortality -- i.e., defeat aging and death with science. The former was associated with spiritualists, the latter with communists. Neither project succeeded.

Gray inserts verses from time to time to flavor the text including these by *Wallace Stevens:

                                        I am not,

Myself, only half a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man

Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn

Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

The beauty of the lines struck me and chilled me. I see why Gray put them them there. They represent what the immortality seekers feared most, not just the ceasing to exist but the fleeting, wispy nature of consciousness itself. People tend to value consciousness so highly (I among them) that it's a jolt when you run into something that suggests maybe it's not the most important of all things.

Some of the figures in Gray's book become despondent when the proof of immortality eludes them. An existence that is just temporary, material and Darwinian seems bereft of purpose or meaning. But Gray offers this verse from a Hungarian poet serving time in a labor camp which suggests meaning can be found elsewhere:

Drunk on the emptied wine-cup of the earth

I grasped at people, objects and at thoughts

as drunkards cling to lamp-posts for support,

And so my world became a lovely place,

became a gallery bedecked by stars

and draped with three-dimensional tapestries,

a warehouse stacked with bales of wonder where

my wrist-watch was a table laid for twelve

and seconds passed in heavy honeyed drops.

  -- Gyorgy Faludy, "Soliloquy on Life and Death," Recsk Prison, 1952

I won't try to add words to that passage. I did mention Mary Oliver so I'll leave off with a snippet from her poem, "One or Two Things:"

For years and years I struggled

just to love my life. An then

the butterfly

rose, weightless, in the wind.

"Don't love your life

too much," it said.

and vanished

into the world.