The contrast of blue and green is enough to make a darkened soul hate its ignominy. The Descent of Aeneas into Hell (French, circa 1530, painted enamel on silver copper)

Now let’s see: what has passed in the past 24 hours that requires a written message? Not much.

I drank, listened to Springsteen, slept, and drank some more … Oh, I took a 5-mile run around the local park. BFD

Perhaps Wordsworth can help us figure out, for this one moment in time, just why someone pretending to be a poet writes.

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.

(William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802) – my emphasis

That is where I disagree with Bill. “Immediate external excitement” is the be all and end all of life. I cannot recollect anything of emotional force in tranquility. I can only recreate the scene and, perhaps (if I’m poetically lucky) the atmosphere.

How very few theorists have dwelt on atmosphere! I mean real atmosphere: the kind that causes a suburban lane to suddenly transform into a track behind a mediaeval English manor house, where the Gawain-poet likely wrote.

When I read poetical texts of any kind, I look less for content than for atmosphere. I don’t particularly care for Piers Plowman, but the opening lines:

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,

I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,

In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,

Wente wide in this world wondres to here.

Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles

Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.

I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste

Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;

And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,

I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.

(William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, prologue)

These lines invoke a childhood past that never quite existed, but came close enough to the tenor of those ancient lines to produce a marked affinity. And that, to me, is sufficient to make a poem worth reading. I am no fan of allegory, which is why I cannot quite make it through the rest of Piers (nor the Faery Queene for that matter!). But I think, somehow, we all make an allegory of our respective lives. My descent into alcoholism can be described thus:

Because this beast, at which thou criest out, Suffers not any one to pass her way, But so doth harass him, that she destroys him; And has a nature so malign and ruthless, That never doth she glut her greedy will, And after food is hungrier than before. Many the animals with whom she weds, And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain.

(Dante, Inferno, Canto I. – Longfellow translation)

If I tried hard enough (actually, it would be pretty fucking easy) I could allegorize my life as a struggle against this insatiable monster (the bottle of vodka in front of me as I write this), one to which I am rapidly succumbing, but yet still only on one knee! It is too easy to allegorize, which is why so much of mediaeval poetry is bullshit to a post-modern atheist. Yet I still love it for its atmosphere!

So here is my anti-allegorical tale:

One early morning, when I was about 10 years-old, I rode my bike to the edge of a brook near our street, parked my bike, descended the bank, and watched the water flow against the emerald green of the bank. I fell asleep, and when I awoke, a garter snake was warming itself on a rock nearby. I watched him sleep, and was amazed at his primitive beauty. Like a typical young boy, I tried to catch him, but he quickly slithered into one of the many rocky outcroppings along the bank. Now I could easily turn that into an allegory, but it was just an experience, a point in my life when my childish innocence had yet to be sullied, and my connection to nature yet to be mediated by all-powerful science.

Yes, that old-fashioned manner of speaking still applies.

And when I returned home, the excitement of that day became a tapestry of that day’s denotive texture and tinctured it with a silent sort of significance. (I’m being consciously alliterative and silly now, but still whistling-in-the-dark serious) …

When I recall those days, the obvious reference is to Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode.

But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.

(lines 17-18)

For something in me that day spoke of a point of no return. Carrying my household gods on my back, I returned to that brook later … only to find: The snake still there, the same emerald bank, the same gently bustling water. But my eyes had veils over them, metaphorically speaking. Only when I was in the moment did it matter. All now is a memory. And memories are like assholes.

I may not agree that we are capable of relinquishing the “immediate excitement” of a moment while still remaining poets, but I do agree that something of beauty has left this world … but only because our (meaning MY) drunken eyes can no longer see it. When I embrace a woman today, I only feel a potential corpse. The days of feeling a warm example of the life-principle are long over. (If any reader of mine has read Dragonlance and I refer to Raistlin, she or he will know exactly what I mean!)

The manifestations and perambulations (my own choice of words) of the universe: it still goes on. As do I.

For worse.

I am, like Wordsworth said, affected by absent things as though they were present. It is a disease of the mind. The greatest poet of the 20th century (in my none-too-humble opinion) Sylvia Plath, said:

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Past and present, present and past, the point of immediacy which exists not. Too much fucking philosophy. Sylvia said it best. We don’t need Heraclitus or T.S. Eliot to tell us that the river flows and we are but tragic salmon. (Horrible analogy, but purposely so, like Lautréamont’s famous sewing machine). But I do need to make a point of this admittedly drunken ramble through a park filled with goose shit and crying brats, as I gulp from a bottle of Poland Spring water that is actually vodka. So here it is.

If ever I see the snake on the rock again, I shall recall my days of Gnosticism. If ever I meet a woman like Sylvia I won’t be a Ted Hughes but an Edward Moore.

And if ever I meet again the woman I truly (as if truth exists!) love, I shall tell her this (and so this day-long production ends):

Charon did not cry when the last soul reached the shore … He rejoiced, but with the melancholia of one who is alone, and has no purpose.

Sometimes it is good to have no purpose. At other times, despair becomes the wraith that smothers us in the night.

The poet creates a purpose, and it is his own.

That is why some of us continue to live.

All the learning in the world cannot compensate for the loss of the compassion that leads one to talk to a madman in Central Park at two o’clock in the morning. One may have to be drunk to do so … but by God (who doesn’t exist!) I’m better off for having been that person. Now that I recede into the dim caverns of my Avernian vodka, I hold on desperately, and as life recedes, my love for it increases.

Does that make me a poet?