upstream

"and whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words i am writing down is kind. writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them."

"my parents were downstream, not far away, then farther away because i was walking the wrong way, upstream instead of downstream. finally i was advertised on the hotline of help, and yet there i was, slopping along happily in the streams' coolness. so maybe it was the right way after all. if this was lost, let us all be lost always."

"could you, oh clever one, do this? do you know anything about where you live, what it offers? have you ever said, "Sir Bear, teach me. i am a customer of death coming, and would give you a pot of honey and my house on the western hills to know what you know."

"something is wrong, i know it, if i don't keep my attention on eternity. may i be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. may i stay forever in the stream. may i look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect."

"teach the children. we don't matter so much, but the children do. (...) give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms."

my friend walt whitman

"estrangement from the mainstream of that time and place was an unavoidable precondition, no doubt, to the life i was choosing from among all the lives possible to me."

"i never met any of my friends, of course, in a usual way they were strangers, and lived only in their writings. but if they were only shadow-companions, still they were constant, and powerful, and amazing. that is, they said amazing things, and for me it changed the world."

"whitman was the brother i did not have. i did have an uncle, whom i loved, but he killed himself one rainy fall day; whitman remained, perhaps more avuncular for the loss of the other. (...) whitman shone on in the twillight of my room, which was growing busy with books, and notebooks, and muddy boots, and my grandfather's old underwood typewriter."

"i spent my time with my friend: my brother, my uncle, my best teacher."

"but first and foremost, i learned from whitman that the poem is a temple or a green field - a place to enter, and in which to feel. (...) i learned that the poem was made not just to exist but to speak - to be company. it was everything that was needed, when everything was needed."

staying alive

"i believe everything has a soul."

"i quickly found for myself two such blessings–the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. these were the gates through which i vanished from a difficult place."

"and this is what i learned: that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness–the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books–can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

"i read by day and into the night. i thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes. i locked the door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness."

"i read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. i wrote that way too."

"he had simply, forgotten that i existed. one could see–i can see even now, in memory–what an alleviation, what a lifting from burden he had felt in those few hours. it lay on him, that freedom, like an aura. then i put on my coat, and we got into the car, and he sat back in the awful prison of himself, the old veils covered his eyes, and he did not say another word."

"i saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that the most joyful of circumstances–a passion for work."

"you must not ever stop being whimsical."

"and you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life"

"but there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. and there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe-that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, i have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life."

"and now my old dog is dead, and another i had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books i gathered there lost, or sold-but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house,a true life built, and all because i was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy-and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the niles and the amazons flowing. and that i did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. it is mine. i made it. and can do what i want to with it. live it. give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes."

of power and time

"creative work needs solitude. it needs concentration, without interruptions. it needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once."

"i am, myself, three selves at least. to begin with, there is the child i was. certainly i am not that child anymore! yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, i can hear that child’s voice—i can feel its hope, or its distress. it has not vanished. powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. it is not gone, not by a long shot. it is with me in the present hour. it will be with me in the grave."

"in creative work—creative work of all kinds—those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward."

"especially at the beginning, there is a need of discipline as well as solitude and concentration. a writing schedule is a good suggestion to make to young writers, for example. also, it is enough to tell them."

"on any morning or afternoon, serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. serious interruptions come from the watchful eye we cast upon ourselves. there is the blow that knocks the arrow from its mark! there is the drag we throw over our own intentions. there is the interruption to be feared!"

"the poem gets written. i have wrestled with the angel and i am stained with light and i have no shame. neither do i have guilt. my responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely."

"the most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."