In my post two weeks ago, "Ghost of Myself," I compared two poems -- "i am running into a new year" by Lucille Clifton and "in celebration of surviving" by Chuck Miller -- in which the poets look back on their younger selves, comparing youthful goals and expectations to present - day reality. It was theme that I recalled from the poetry of Larry Levis. I was lucky enough to hear him give a reading years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Missouri. I wrote three of his poems down in my notebook (Fall 1976) and have never forgotten them.
1. First, you may remember this one from a previous blog post:
We'll go on as always harvesting walnuts
on our hands and knees,
and die voicelessly
as a sedan full of cigar smoke
sinking under a bridge.
We'll turn slowly, flowers
in the mouths of drowned cattle
In a dawn of burned fields,
the sun disappoints you,
and the blight you begin to remember
is me.
Like an Alp overlooking a corpse
I explain nothing.
2. Next comes the second half of a poem entitled "Rhododendrons." For the entire poem, check out this essay, and this poetry blog which, like mine, strives to make connections.
Speaking of connections, you can see why I was reminded of my old Larry Levis favorites when reading the hopeful late - night epiphany of Chuck Miller's narrator:
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong . . ."
and why I thought of Levis when Lucille Clifton's narrator admits her concern:
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six . . ."
Miller thanks the stars for a another chance; Clifton hopes that her previous selves will forgive; Levis wishes he could offer a helping hand. Though he would have been only 30 when I heard him read this poem, he thinks back to himself at 20 and longs to connect with that ghostly young man, in need of money and sleep:
As I write this,
some blown rhododendrons are nodding
in the first breezes. I want
to resemble them, and remember nothing,
the way a photograph of an excavation
cannot remember the sun.
The wind rises or stops
and it means nothing.
I want to be circular;
a pond or a column of smoke
revolving, slowly, its ashes.
I want to turn back and go up
to myself at age 20,
and press five dollars into his hand
so he can sleep.
While he stands trembling on a street in Fresno,
suddenly one among many in the crowd
that strolls down Fulton Street,
among the stores that are closing,
and is never heard of again.
3. Finally, in "The Double," the ghosts are "the elderly drunks" and "the girl in the Pepsi ad," all "dead now." Sadly, very sadly, the poet who wrote those words is dead now too, for Larry Levis died young, in 1996 at age 49. In a poem filled with ghosts, the poet says, "This poem so like me / it could be my double":
The Double
Out here, I can say anything.
I can say, for example, that a girl
disappearing tonight
will sleep or stare out
fixedly as the train moves her
into its adulthood of dust
and sidings.
I remember watching wasps
on hot evenings
fly heavily over chandeliers
in hotel lobbies.
They’ve torn them down, too.
And the elderly drunks
who seemed not to mind anything,
who seemed to look for change
in their pockets, as they gazed
at the girl in the Pepsi ad,
and the girl who posed for the ad,
must all be dead now.
I can already tell that this
is no poem to show you,
this love poem. It’s so
flat spoken and ignorable,
like the man chain smoking
who discovers he’s
no longer waiting for anyone,
and goes to the movies
alone each Saturday, and grins,
and likes them.
This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.
This poem so like me
it could be my double.
I have stood for a long time
in its shadow, the way I stood
in the shadow of a dead roommate
I had to cut down from the ceiling
on Easter break, when
I was young.
That night I put my car
in neutral, and cut the engine
and lights to glide downhill
and hear the wind rush over
the dead metal.
I had to know what it felt
like, and under the moon,
gaining speed, I wanted to slip
out of my body and be
done with it.
A man can give up smoking
and the movies, and live for years
hearing the wind tick over roofs
but never looking up from
his one page, or the tiny
life he keeps carving over and
over upon it. And when everyone
around him dies, he can move
a grand piano into
his house, and sit down
alone, and finally play,
certain that no one will
overhear him, though he plays
as loud as he can,
so that when the dead come
and take his hands off the keys
they are invisible, the way air
and music are not. [emphasis added]
can be found in The Selected Levis
*************************
"Jackson had spent what was left of the afternoon wandering around . . . a city that seemed both familiar and at the same time utterly strange. He felt as though he was looking for something that he would only recognize when he found it. His lost youth perhaps. Or the lost youth that he himself had been. The dirty old town he remembered had been overlaid by somethng new and shiny. It didn't mean the dirty old town wasn't still there, of course."
from Started Early, Took My Dog
by Kate Atkinson (b 1951)
In another, perhaps surprising, connection, contemporary motivational speaker Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (b 1962) discusses the very topic which runs like a sad lament through the poems of Larry Levis: existential suffering. Thanks to my son Sam for recommending this lecture in which Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of abnormal, social, and personality psychology, explains how in order to function effectively with others and efficiently to meet our own goals, we need to remain on good -- even gentle -- terms with our past, present, and future selves:
"Plan a life you'd like to have, and you do that partly by . . . having a little conversation with yourself, as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like: you won't do what you're told; you won't do what you tell yourself to do; you must have noticed that!Peterson's message echoes that of the poets (as well as Helen Reddy's song "Best Friend"): be kind to those ghosts of yourself who are so like you, they could be your double. One of them may be going to the future.
It's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss. And both of those work, you know, for you. You don't know what you want to do, and then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyway. You should fire yourself and find someone else to be you!
. . . you have to understand that you're not your own servant, so to speak. You're someone that you have to negotiate with. You're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to. And that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much . . . they're always cracking the whip and procrastinating . . . maybe you should do something else with your time [if] you think that your time's worthwhile . . . if you assume that your time isn't worthwhile what happens is you don't just sit around randomly in this sort of responsibility-less bliss, what you do is you suffer existentially . . .[emphasis added]
. . . you can probably have what you want, if you could figure out what the hell it was and then, you know, you diligently pursued it. So . . . you might think 'I can have what I want,' but you better well figure out what it is and you can't just wait for the have - what - you - want fairy to just show up on your doorstep and grant it because obviously that's not going to happen.
Here's how you know if someone is your friend . . . you can actually tell them bad news and they'll listen. That's a good thing, and then this is a weirder thing, you can tell them good news and they'll help you celebrate, and that's a really good way of deciding who you should have around you.
Jordan Peterson
On Goals, Scheduling, Negotiating & Friendship
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