Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

The British psychologist Adam Phillips calls boredom “that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire,” and defined as such, boredom isn’t fixed by distraction, by bars or restaurants, but by the arrival of a feeling of anticipation. I know for myself boredom involves a spatialization of time; the forwardness goes out of life, and I wait, and in waiting time becomes a place — not a particularly good one, but a place nonetheless, with the minutes and hours, the days and months piling up indifferently. For phenomenologists, this kind of repetition isn’t a property of time but of space, and then it’s more aptly called “redundancy,” when things exceed what’s necessary. In boredom you take on some of the character of an object, becoming lifeless and inanimate, lacking flow, and the more the time sense is rendered into space, the more isolated you become — isolated by becoming extraneous. The spooky intimation behind boredom, the whispered secret of it, is death, a final draining of time, when at last all the living belong exclusively to space. In boredom, we become victims of a sameness within a hierarchy whose original principle of design was a now-forgotten, vestigial loss of proportion — which is an aesthetic problem, the problem of arranging parts harmoniously within a whole.

What is worse, time, always strongly spatial, has increased its spatiality; it has stretched infinitely back out behind us, infinitely forward into the future toward which our faces are turned. Today I cannot deny that in the background of all my thinking there is the image of the “chain of development”—of gaseous nebulae condensing into liquids and solid bodies, a molecule of life-begetting acid, species, civilizations succeeding each other in turn, segment added to segment, on a scale which reduces me to a particle.

— Czesław Miłosz

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it, submerge, hit bottom . In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. [Italics mine.]

— Joseph Brodsky

To fall and hit bottom life has to give up its hold on the horizontal, its restriction to the same level in a now-tedious hierarchy. For this, there’s no choice but to descend, if only because hatred, that forgotten structure inside boredom, has already failed in its attempt to rise above history and circumstance. Upward progress is a social or economic idea, but from literature and, to an extent, religion, we know going down holds a lot of life’s interesting possibilities. If up isn’t an option, then down is the obvious alternative; it’s even desirable. Down is the direction poetry travels on the page, anyway, and poets have tended to follow their pens. For contrast, the etymology of the word prose means to go forward, generally straight forward, and there’s nothing internal to a sentence that limits its length or sideways nature. Paragraphing arranges ideas logically, but for that one could imagine a codex like an accordion, the folds expanding laterally. Even punctuation isn’t really about organizing or shaping the inherently horizontal character of prose. Periods, commas, and colons regulate the breath, and well-written prose always includes, in its long or short rhythms, a kind of pulmonary function; reaching into these vital rhythms, good prose can, like breathing exercises in yoga, inhabit the visceral life of a reader. Conceivably prose could be written on ribbons hundreds of yards long, winding the reader and testing his lungs in another way, but we bind and store it in books, mainly, so that doesn’t happen. The quotidian tendency of prose is either to satisfy an immediate disposable need or to point beyond itself, toward a distant, receding horizon of information. It’s the écriture of choice for assembling bicycles and analyzing wars, and the difficulty for a writer, the danger, is that his words, failing to capture a cadent, living pulse, will lose meaning in the vastness of other words. If a piece of prose aspires to art, it must close itself off, setting in motion sympathetic vibrations and gaining, as with any enclosure, resonance.

Poetry’s orientation is not primarily horizontal but vertical. It goes across, left to right, but mostly it goes down, top to bottom, and that descent is dictated from within. Though our language for prosody has largely shifted to a discussion of stresses, we still listen for feet and measure in meter the distance a line travels. The syllables in a haiku might be the exception to this idea of poetry’s descent, but you’d lose the stillness in space if all seventeen were strung like clothesline across the page. While a haiku hangs, suspended in air, hexameter hits its beats and heads down, line by line, and it’s easy to imagine an idea of descent and depth coming to a stymied poet by simply staring disconsolately at the page. The etymology of verse means “to turn” or “return,” and if the trick in prose is to overcome its diffuse and vague and ubiquitous presence, the trap for poetry is hermeticism, its tendency toward the occult, the ease with which it turns in on itself and, going down, abandons or forfeits its participation in the upper world. Still, poetry has no choice about its generally chthonic direction. Even a democratic poet like Whitman, resisting hierarchy’s vertical axis with his broad, barbaric yawp, eventually descends. Down is where poetry is, and whatever poetry has to say, whatever it can deliver, is down there too.

In a trope typical of him, at least in this poem, Hugo monkeys with the expected syntactical arrangement, wrenching new emphasis from fairly accessible language; playing with inflection is a way he has of torquing a phrase, and he does it twice in the second stanza. Let me look at the second instance first. The mill “in collapse / for fifty years that won’t fall finally down ” gives us the adverb in its most active form. Finally doesn’t idle in an ancillary place, taking up slack because the right verb wasn’t available. In fact, for a word without a verbal form (except the somewhat bureaucratic finalize ), finally , as Hugo writes it, is as close as you’re going to get to a sense of the desire inside the downward trajectory of falling. Somehow the down here, the collapse, is being propped up, penultimately supported by an old, useless structure, and finally is the hope or possibility of falling, the fulfillment of fifty years of need. Positioned just above a stanza composed entirely of questions, the line suggests that the mill, slumped in desuetude, must give way before a bottom can be revealed. The end of Pburg (as locals call the town) or history or gray isn’t really the end — there’s something below. But to get to it the landscape’s first got to be leveled, the kilns and the mill razed, the horizontal world abandoned.

“All memory resolves itself in gaze”—this is the second instance of oddly inflected syntax, and it’s an interesting choice. Omitting the expected article creates a slight hitch in the reading, compelling attention, and compresses the word gaze , making it do the work of both noun and verb, mixing stasis and action, fusing space and time — the word is like a pivot, and the entire stanza turns on the phrase, bringing us to a fatal form of memory, an arrested, fixed memory that is now the only thing preventing total collapse, while at the same time offering gaze —gazing — as an action that might release the hold memory has on the horizontal. It’s at this point in the poem that Hugo begins the move toward the salvational hopes of language, of poetry itself. He’s down low, but not low enough yet to find his poem.

It seems to me a poet of Hugo’s skill and knowledge can’t possibly write this line without hearing the allusion to Orpheus. This is the heart of the poem, this is where it is. It happens quickly, reading like a toss-off, without a glance back, but I believe it’s there. Gaze shows up in a similar passage in The Merchant of Venice , also about Orpheus, also about the poet’s power to alter the quality of perception: “Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze / By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet / Did feign that Orpheus. ” Orpheus, whose lyre is now among the stars, is the figure of the poet and the poet’s work. Nothing can withstand the charms of his music. Beasts are softened and lose their ferocity, stolid oaks move closer just to hear, rocks relax their hardness. Here it’s probably worth mentioning — actually, it’s vital to understanding — that Hugo’s poem sits on top of the pastoral tradition, and certainly could be looked at as a failed bucolic. The poem seems to turn by shorthanding this rich, deep tradition. In Virgil’s Georgics the story of Orpheus shows up strangely, in a treatise on bees, but has the passing character of a fertility myth. That the “green” in Hugo’s poem is only “panoramic” at this point indicates how far from the regenerative power of all these vegetable myths Philipsburg is: there’s no real sustenance in a panorama — or, as they say in Montana, you can’t eat the scenery.