The Impermanence We Are

It seems
Our own impermanence is concealed from us
The trees stand firm, the houses we live in
Are still there, we alone
flow past it all, an exchange of air


Everything conspires to silence us
Partly with shame
Partly with unspeakable hope
                                                     -Rilke, The Second Duino Elegy


When I was writing the last chapter of my dissertation a handful of months ago the last two lines of this poem spoke volumes to me.  It intimated a communion among things that should not be together - yet somehow are.  The women in my study had histories of sever abuse and neglect as children, and then later in life alcohol addiction and abusive adult relationships.  As I attempted to make some sense of their narratives I realized the futility in attempting to parse, separate and to consign into discrete piles their experiences of shame and hope.  Now how these two lived together is a discussion for a whole other time (!) - but it mirrors a reality in my own life.   I grew up within a dominate narrative that divided the world into well ordered piles: faith -fear, gay-straight, sin-righteousness,republican-democrat, moral-immoral. These categories made sense and promised to make sense out of the world -  until I actually lived into the complexities of life.  The categories did not hold.  


It is within the confluence of shame and hope; fear, frailty and faith; fracturedness and longing; dying and breathing that we all find our way. In my faith tradition we all construct our histories between "my god my god why have you forsaken me?" and "Lo, I am with you always".  To attempt to live otherwise seems to be a distortion. Conspired to silence, hoping to sing, hungry to be heard. 


I think that Kierkegaard was getting at this when he said: 


What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful."


It is integral to our own humanity and the communities we are a part of to be open to the formation of our lips but also to create deep space and compassion for our own hollowing and the hollowing of others who lips cannot hold the form.  

Stunning debut of the repairing of a life

It was the title of the book that caught my eye. The poetic work of Leigh Davis, treasury analyst turned poet who wrote this collection during the 15 months between diagnosis and death.  The Auckland native was largely self published and his work is as much poetry as it is visual feast. "Anarchy" and General Motors" are wonderful examples of the layering of word and image: http://www.jackbooks.com/Leigh/online/onlineworks.htm  

In 2008 Leigh was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer.  He confided in a close friend his worry that during surgery his voice would be taken from him and he would not be able to find coherence, creativity and life in what was to come . The effects of surgery were so sever that he temporarily lost the power of language altogether.  During this time a friend brought him a notebook and pen and encouraged him to write, "Just write, anything, everything, just write".  

The very struggle to regain and find "his voice" became a central theme of his poems for Stunning Debut.  The first 20 pages of this book are filled with hack marks, indecipherable scratches, letters coupled in combinations that form a private language that is incomprehensible.  The reader is given page after page of this notebook, the working from a seemingly endless dark night of the soul.  And then in this awkward and irregular sea Stunning Debut goes through a transformation.  Words appear and are circled as if discovering a treasure, lost objects of invaluable worth.  These discoveries begin to be coupled with other words that take on meaning, content, coherence, beauty.  Some where in this unfolding Leigh writes on the front of his notebook in a hand yet settled "simple, broken, beautiful".

Leigh's work is not something you drink but something you have to swim in - it simmers along gently but there is a wildness to it as well.  Here is how it opens:

I don’t know what I am doing here: I do not that-

I like to read things in the world in time and distance out of disparate connection

Poetry is writing with space in it, but I need more now than before.

‘Space’ is a property of interpretive liberty; the right amount of disjunction,

of content you can ponder and are drawn toward,

of unfinished and unfinishable reflections of variations in texture

everyday, common, exalted, abstract of enigma and its obvious vehicles;

writing that is just – tolerant, its machinery often showing.

Offers bright beautiful surfaces but withholds is meaning, philosophy

and the intransitive manipulation of thought.

I want contemporary forms, that is, to do something new.

I don’t want novelty but archaic ingenuity.

I know what classical is and want to associate myself with it.

I don’t want wit, or argument, pompous thought, but warmth,

speed, trances, voices, celebration, mystery, consolation.

I want expansive, everlasting, continuous vehicles

that are elusive and that command a lifetime of love,

and aren’t mere episodes or observations.

I want writing continuous, surprising, and not production well made things.

I realize at 50 that what I want, what I am ALWAYS tuned for, my revelry,

the gain of my mind, my regulations, my heartbeat,

breathing, motions and balance, how I compose and the source

of the nonstop commitment that I have to do it,

my sense of beauty and meaning, my source of emotion and my peace,

causes the name of anarchy, the balance and the eternity of complex, sly,

disruptive, self-regulated insurgent weather patterns of composition and rules.

Anarchy is the smile in the Mona Lisa, and the fountain of youth.

Another name for it is poetry.

Once the superset of art. It has the tensile strength of great stability,

it prompts but assimilates, contains chaos; it is the source of prophesy,

Of rejuvenation, and the absolute constancy of history.

I want to reflect what I live with, to extract representation’s

subtle body in even the most intimate moments.  It is something

you dive in the middle of with no sense of time having passed

As a writer I am a dog chasing that bus.

It is immensely forceful but with the rich unpredictability of chaos.

Never correct but always accurate.

We are so used to text being straightforward but I am so used

to seeing this as profoundly bent, a much grater gap

between what is obvious and what is mysterious. A place you can love

and in which you are welcome, and where you have never been before. 

My flow is going with time.

Two months after Stunning Debut was published Leigh Davis died, and a month later his work was awarded the Kathleen Grattan Award, New Zealand's biggest poetry prize.