Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

More important to Hugo’s poem than the wide horizontal panorama is the idea of descent and depth implied in the Orpheus myth. Both are orders of vision, but they offer different things. Ovid gives Virgil’s Orpheus a fuller treatment, the one people are familiar with, in which Eurydice, after her wedding to the poet, flees a seducer (Aristaeus, another poet and, not surprisingly, a beekeeper, who will subsequently suffer an apiary disaster) and is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus descends into the underworld to reclaim his bride. Along the way a fairy feeds him roasted ants, a flea’s thigh, butterflies’ brains, mites, a rainbow tart, all to be washed down with dewdrops and beer made of barleycorn — indicating, fabulously, the earthy depth of the poet’s descent. In the underworld, as in the upper air, Orpheus sings his grief, and ghosts shed tears, Sisyphus sits on his rock to listen, Ixion’s wheel stops its ceaseless revolving, Tantalus forgets his thirst, and the Furies, just this once, cry. But on his way back to the world, in an exact, cautionary lesson about one of the perils of artistic creation, Orpheus turns around, hoping to reassure himself, and loses his wife, who reaches out for a last embrace as she’s drawn back toward death. Orpheus gives it another shot, but the underworld, whether in Chicago or Hades, is famously unforgiving, and second chances aren’t available. In mourning, Orpheus seems to sicken with ennui, yet plays his lyre, wooing the inanimate world, wresting emotion from the trees and rocks, but eventually, for-going women and loving boys, he’s torn apart during a Bacchanalia by jealous Thracian maidens, and his severed head floats down the Hebrus, while his lyre, his poetry, is flung to the heavens.

If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature — and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution — is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

— Joseph Brodsky

What’s the deal with a poet who fills an entire stanza, fully a fourth of his poem, with questions? Part of it’s just Hugo’s standard battering style — where a single question might do, he pounds out a whole stanza — but again that style serves the subject. The heavy questions hammer away and demolish the mill that won’t collapse. That Hugo’s prosodic fist is big and blunt only makes it more suitable for the job. Each question — about the persistence of love, the pain of defeat, the scorn preventing desire — undercuts not only the binding failures of Philipsburg but also the poem’s earlier assertions, turning us toward a kind of metacreation. The best way to come at this understanding is through the poem’s back door. Desire in this stanza has an anachronistic, distinctly World War II flavor, with its blondes, booze, and jazz, and you sense Hugo’s own swaggering, wounded self, his own haunting self-doubt, his own town, Seattle, needing to die inside. Suddenly it’s no longer 1907 but 1947, and Hugo is back from the war, reaching down into a pain and hope that’s personal. That’s fine; it’s his poem, after all. This slight historical warp is partly about Hugo’s generous self-effacement, anyway; but it’s also an oblique admission about the stake he has in the poem. In seeking hope for Philipsburg he begins to find hope for himself or, more accurately, for his poem. Here’s the motivation, the stirring of desire, the first turn toward feeling necessary again. In much the same way that the myth of Orpheus elaborates a secondary tale about the act of creation, Hugo too gives us a poem about the making of poetry. The poem offers, somewhat covertly, an allegory of the poet’s soul, caught in the terrifying process of creation. Why would anyone write a poem in this wrecked world? And really, how could they? Massive doubt, failed love, shitty thoughts, empty spirit, a dead history compelling a transfixed vision, these are devastations that might overwhelm and silence anyone; and silence, for a poet, is a prison. It’s where the descent hits bottom, it’s where the poet either faces or does not face all the risks of failed comprehension. It makes sense that Hugo would discover his reason for writing in a stanza so completely expressive of doubt. The critical difference between a poet and a regular citizen is that the poet seeks this realm; it’s where he works, where his office is.

So, why questions? Everything in this stanza could be written using the indicative, flatly observed, or the ragging, hortatory imperative of a coach, urging us on. One answer might be that questions imply an auditor, the presence of another, and a stanza full of them suggests, by reaching out, some break in the isolation. Perhaps the questions are meant to prod an answer, but I kind of don’t think so. Answers are as transient and foolish as we are, and poets generally aren’t in the solution business. In fact, if you’re a poet and you’re going to pose questions, they’d better approach the unanswerable. Why? Is it that only questions without answers are worth asking? Is it that the muse needs courting and doesn’t usually go with know-it-alls and wise guys? Is it that questions salt and preserve life, keeping the mystery fresh? Is it that any descent that hopes to claim our attention and hence a place in the record books is asterisked by answers, as if the poet, cheating, hadn’t really touched bottom? In poetry, is the irritable reaching after answers (or certainties, as Keats put it) paradoxically just a type of doubt, a doubt about poetry itself? If rock bottom, if total bust for a poet is silence, then the questions must be unanswerable, without remedy, to provoke the central event, which is language. Answers are the end of speech, not the beginning, and if language is the main draw in poetry, silence is the occasion for it, the ground of renewal. Questions precede speech; they’re language tensely coiled, expectant.

In the second stanza, the word hatred repeats, and now in the third stanza, it’s ring we hear twice. It’s an excellent, nearly echoic repetition, it rings, but it’s also a curious choice; every connotation I can think of is almost purely positive. Clarity and resonance, calling, summons, proclamations, talk, producing sound, vibration, sonority — all meanings that counter the unanswerable questions, the testing of silence in the stanza. In my reading the aural quality of the word creates tension, making music of a different tenor than the literal subject. My ear hears something my eye doesn’t quite see. The sound of ring rides on the surface of the stanza, separating from it somewhat. Whereas hatred draws us down into the core of the poem, ring begins to lift us out of it. Down deep in this stanza of questions, we hear a ringing, and it becomes possible to understand that Hugo’s questions, their Orphic summons, aren’t calling for an answer; they’re calling for poetry.

How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?

— critic Theodor Adorno

And how can one eat lunch?

— poet Mark Strand

“Say no to yourself”—if only Orpheus had, if only he’d refused the unsure, doubting, rearward glance, he’d have spent that first night back in the upper air abed with his bride. Instead, his hesitation breaks the lyric charm and condemns Eurydice to death. The temptation, in art as well as life, is to fall back on old forms, to attempt an impossible repetition, giving yourself over to the sort of redundancy that has always been the defining feature of the underworld, where time is either a torment or means nothing because the iterations are endless and unvarying. Hell is crowded not because sinners are commonplace but because incompletion is the norm. Orpheus, descending, charms the underworld, he moves it toward an uncharacteristic stillness and rest, but in ascending, it’s as if his hesitation, his glance back, were suddenly an affliction no different from the thirst of Tantalus or the labor of Sisyphus. Because he looks back, losing his bride, his work remains unfinished, forever, and the sorrow he can’t overcome results in a sort of hypnotic hindsight. “Saying no” is necessary; it too is part of the process of creation. After saying yes to the descent, saying no is how the poet emerges. Perhaps another way of articulating this is to say that a new yes must be found, the courage of the descent sustained until it’s completed. In a poem the future, or the next couple dozen words anyway (which to a poet is the same thing), is the poem. The need is finally aesthetic. Hugo’s final stanza is a return to speech, referenced phrasally throughout: “say no, he says, you tell, you’re talking.” But the return is premised on not looking back, on avoiding the gaze that tempts and paralyzes memory. Unlike Orpheus, the poet here says no and, in true Western fashion, gets the girl, who happens to be slender, with red hair that lights the wall.