The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  I had never thought of Mark as a mystic. At no time during our years of friendship did we have that word in our vocabulary. But, of course, it does describe him.

  John’s letter, too, reminded me of the years, after Mark finished graduate school in Texas, when he was working on This Living Hand. I saw now that these were his years of deliberate practice. He wrote and rewrote the scenes. He worked on the dialogue with a coach. He put it through many trial runs in front of live audiences, and then went through weeks or months of driven rewriting. The play went through countless iterations—and I really think that Mark was revising and improving it until he died.

  In an attempt to befriend the spirit of John Keats, Mark frequently traveled to England and Rome, to walk in the places where Keats had walked. I realized that these were all part of Mark’s efforts to know the object of his work—what Keats himself would call “knowing the essence.” There must have been fulfillment for Mark in this process. It’s clear to me now that Mark absorbed himself in the life and mind of this great poet—until Mark himself disappeared.

  I remembered that I had actually witnessed this absorption—this disappearance—when watching his play. John had seen the same thing, and wrote about it in his letter. “I got to see Mark on stage performing This Living Hand twice during his college/school tours through Michigan and Ohio,” he wrote. “On both occasions I witnessed the character transformation—from my brother Mark to the person of John Keats. I still wonder at Mark’s ability to achieve this early in the show and sustain the show by being Keats—not performing as an actor. That ability, that presence, made the show what it was and no other actor could accomplish the same outcome with Mark’s play.”

  It made me happy to hear John say this. Mark had indeed been fully engaged in the work of the poet, the playwright. He had mastered the skills required to produce this magical transformation. And I knew that this mastery itself must have brought him a sense of fulfillment. It was his dharma. He was pursuing it with everything he had.

  Twenty years after his death, I understood for the first time the sacrifice that Mark had made for his art. I grasped the meaning of those years of waiting tables and living in a tiny Manhattan apartment. It all made sense, though Mark himself wrestled with his doubts about this sacrifice from time to time. He talked about inevitable comparisons between the trajectory of his life and that of his many Amherst peers who went on to more mainstream lives—and the rewards of money and respectability.

  Mark had thought of himself as a vehicle for his work. He found his calling, and dived in utterly. I think, too, that at some point he had really let go of the outcome. He understood that he was not the Doer. Can there be a more exciting life?

  13

  At the age of twenty-one, Keats had a premonition of his own death. He came to believe that he had only three more years—“one thousand days,” as he said at the time—to realize his gifts.

  His premonition was not far off. By the time he was twenty-three, Keats had clearly contracted tuberculosis. All the symptoms were there, and from the Fall of 1818, he continually complained of them: pressure in the chest, coughing, an ever-present sore throat, colds that would not go away, fatigue, and night sweats.

  But the shift in consciousness that had taken place through his fierce pursuit of poetry allowed him to face illness and even impending death. He was committed now, “to bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,” he wrote.

  Keats began to frame death in an altogether new way. He saw death as “the supreme experience—Life’s high meed.” While heretofore he had tried to keep out the “disagreeables,” he now saw that they had to be fully admitted in. And now, in “admitting in” even death—the great disagreeable—he was expanded and freed.

  This reframing of death is his final embrace of “the world as the vale of Soul-making.” “Do you not see,” he wrote to George, “how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence, and make it a soul? This school is a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”

  14

  The final year of Keats’s life is often written about as a miracle of creativity. But it is really no miracle. It is only the natural fruition of the process of transformation in which Keats had already been engaged for many years. In the spring of 1818, Keats walked daily on the heath with the now-famous young beauty Fanny Brawne—with whom he was passionately in love. During these months—months almost lifted from time—Keats’s most astonishing poetry poured forth. These were the months during which he wrote the so-called “Four Odes of May”—On Indolence, On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale, and On Melancholy—which would forever seal his reputation. In these odes Keats reached his own ripeness as a poet. “For these few weeks,” says Ward, “he stood at a point of perfect balance, confident in his ability to meet the future, able to contemplate his past with calm, and rejoicing in the beauty of the season, the joy of an answered love, the delight of a mastered craft—the themes of the odes as well as his incentives to writing them.”

  During these months of creative exuberance, Keats became an uncharacteristically solitary creature, save for his walks with Fanny. Already sick, and chronically weak and fatigued, he found great relief in quiet, solitary days—days spent writing and studying Italian. He was in love with his work, and fully absorbed in it: “I look upon fine phrases like a lover,” he wrote. “Poetry is all I care for, all I live for.”

  What emerged, finally, in these months lifted from time, was his most astonishing poem: “To Autumn.” This is sometimes called the most perfect poem in the English language. Keats called it simply, “Verse that comes not out of the fever of ambition.”

  To Autumn

  Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

  Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

  To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

  To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

  And still more, later flowers for the bees,

  Until they think warm days will never cease,

  For Summer has o’er-brimmed’d their clammy cells.

  Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

  Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

  Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

  Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

  Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

  And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

  Steady thy laden head across a brook;

  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

  Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

  Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

  While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:

  Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river shallows, borne aloft

  Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

  And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing: and now with treble soft

  The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

  And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

  The poem was a quiet triumph. In this poem, Keats’s personality is finally completely out of the way—utterly lost and absorbed in his images. He has here achieved the effortlessness that Robert Frost describes when he declares that “a poem should ride on its own melting.”
“To Autumn” was a poem that wrote itself. Creativity creating itself! Keats is now at one with the world.

  As it turned out, “To Autumn” was a gesture of farewell. Within months, Keats would be assured of his impending death.

  15

  After a bone-chilling coach ride from London (on an outer seat, because the impoverished poet could not afford to sit inside), Keats arrived home seriously ill, flushed and trembling. He climbed the stairs to his room, and as he got into bed a fit of coughing seized him. His friend Charles Brown, who was following him up the stairs with a glass of wine, heard him gasp. Blood was oozing from his lips.

  Brown found Keats sitting up in bed, examining the bright red spot on the white sheet. Then, according to Brown’s account, Keats looked very steadily up into his friend’s face, and said, “I know the colour of that blood. It’s arterial blood. There’s no mistaking that colour.” As calmly as he could, he added, “That blood is my death-warrant. I must die.”

  16

  In the Fall of 1993, Mark and I went back to Amherst College for Homecoming. I knew that Mark had been sick for some time. But I had never yet really seen him obviously ailing. Now he was clearly ill. He was pale. His face looked strained. He had lost weight.

  Still, his mood was exuberant, and he was buoyed by being back at “the fairest college.” So I was stunned when, just as we walked onto the campus, he sprinted to a sewer drain in the parking lot and threw up several times—violently. He didn’t want to talk about it. We just moved on—walking across the campus, kicking through piles of oak leaves, toward the soccer fields, where we would meet some old friends.

  Later that afternoon, Mark and I sat again on Memorial Hill—as the skies turned red with the sunset and the throngs of alums moved toward their dorms to prepare for dinner. I looked closely at Mark. I could see the suffering written on his face. But his exuberance was there as well. There was the regal tilt of the head. The impish grin. Mark was in a mood to reflect on his life. He was glad he had written his plays. They were the chief satisfaction of his life. His many sacrifices for his art had been good and right. “Austen called her books her children,” he said. “I know exactly how she felt.”

  Mark talked about the struggle involved in writing. “I know I’m not a brilliant playwright,” he said. “I’m not a natural, really. It didn’t come easy. But it was my work to do.”

  He said, “You know, Keats sometimes wondered about where his poetry came from—marveled at it really. I’ve felt the same way about my own work so many times.” And then he quoted a line from Keats I had not heard: “many a verse from so strange an influence / That we must ever wonder how, and whence It came.”

  We looked together—and for the last time—out over the expansive view of the Holyoke Range in the distance. Mark talked jokingly about his withering body. He had never really had more than a modest amount of physical vanity. He talked about how Keats had observed the terrifyingly rapid decline of his own body. And Mark reminded me that Keats had become obsessed with the look of his hands as he failed.

  It provoked a question. I had never understood why Mark had quoted the whole of Keats’s poem “This Living Hand” at the end of his play—or why, in fact, he used that line—out of all the fantastic lines he had to choose from—as his title.

  “It was ironic,” Mark said. He thought for a moment, looking out at the mountains in the distance. Mark spoke deliberately as he finished his thought. “Keats always had the sense that his greatest poems came from somewhere beyond him. That he was just the channel for them. And his life’s work was to prepare himself to channel these poems. At the end, of course, he was full of despair that he had not fulfilled his destiny. His hand was withering. And yet ‘this living hand’ had written some of the finest poetry in the English language. This living hand, though dying, was now immortal. Through his art, he had conquered time.”

  NINE

  Marion Woodman: When Difficulties Arise, See Them as Dharma

  In the several years leading up to his eightieth birthday, my father—unbelievably, impossibly—developed Alzheimer’s disease. Its onset was rapid, and within a few years he was completely disabled. Well, not just disabled. Gone. Poof. My handsome and charming father—a college president, admired for his wit, impeccably groomed and dressed, affable, commanding—now sitting blankly in a wheelchair looking into vague space, surrounded by other wheelchaired beings in the same disastrous straits.

  Here was an energetic man in his late seventies, still vital, who had decidedly found his dharma early in life and had been living it mightily—until he began the long good-bye of Alzheimer’s. It was an unending nightmare for those of us who loved him. I was working on another book at that time—also on dharma—and I wondered as Dad’s Alzheimer’s rapidly progressed: What was his dharma now?

  Dad had been born to a poor family in an Ohio River industrial town. He was a short, skinny kid who’d fought his way to high school every day along a route infested with river-town bullies. He won a scholarship to college—then to graduate school. Education lifted him into a life of meaning. And so he fell in love with the power of learning. He became, as he proudly said, “an educator.” This was his dharma. He began his career as a professor of history. Then a dean. Then a college president. He loved his students. Loved his faculty. The guy was lit up. He had plans.

  And then: Alzheimer’s. Dad’s story, of course, is not the least bit unusual. One day we’re cooking along nicely with our dharma, with the work of our lifetime. And then, wham! Life knocks it all to Hell. Illness. Natural disasters. Divorce. A friend of mine was well-launched in his career as a concert pianist when an automobile accident destroyed his hand. He was driving himself into New York City for a concert. He reached over to get a bottle of water on the passenger seat, and when he looked up—bam! His career was over. Walt Whitman had completed Leaves of Grass and was on the way to literary gianthood when the Civil War blew the country apart. Nobody cared much about poetry for a long while. Keats had barely launched himself on his brilliant career when he contracted tuberculosis and died.

  Difficulties arise. Some small. Some large enough to blow our boats out of the water. That’s life. But back to our question: What was Dad’s dharma now? He could no longer teach, or even read a book. What would his work be henceforth? What would Krishna say about Dad’s dilemma?

  Of course, you already know the answer. You’ve read the title of this chapter. When difficulties arise, see them as dharma. Your dharma is the work that is called forth from you at this moment. And like everything in this impermanent world, the work of the moment can change on a dime. Alzheimer’s was Dad’s new dharma.

  2

  Most of us do not much like change. We get our mitts around the dharma of the moment, and don’t want to let go. Our friend Katherine hung on to her deanship for years, her hands tightly wrapped around the rope as it was painfully pulled through them. Whitman hung on to Leaves of Grass for almost a decade—living in the fading glow of his success. Hanging on is our first strategy.

  I’ll tell you later on in this chapter how Dad managed his hanging-on challenge. It was pretty magnificent. (In fact, he didn’t hang on much at all.) But for now, let’s start with Mom. She was a little more prone to hanging on than was Dad.

  Here is the story. As you can well imagine, my father’s meltdown hugely affected his partner of fifty years. Mom: the beautiful Barbara Crothers Cope. In fact, it pretty much put the torch to her dharma as well as to his. And what was her dharma? She was a wife and a mother. She was also a poet and a writer. But more than anything, her dharma was to love Dad and to support his career and his life. She loved being the wife of a college president. She loved being the wife of Robert S. Cope, period. She was in love with him from the time they met in college. They had kids—five of us—and we were great (naturally) but in a funny way we were optional (which is a difficult story for another time). Dad was not in any way optional. He
was essential. So, Mom was particularly savoring this time in their lives. We kids had gone on to lives of our own. She and Dad traveled together. She joined him in his consulting work abroad, and they had many adventures. We saw the pictures. Mom and Dad in Europe. Mom and Dad in the Philippines. Mom sang as she washed the dishes in the evening.

  And then: Alzheimer’s. Mom’s immediate instinct for dealing with the meltdown of her life was one we will all recognize: She declared war on it. “We’re going to fight this thing. We’ll get the best doctors.”

  Here was her plan: We will go on as usual. We will keep things as normal as possible. We will never say the word Alzheimer’s. “Your father is who he always was,” she said to me, “only slightly diminished. We’ve got him on the best medications.” Mom held on as best she could, holding tight to old patterns. She sat—resolute—in the passenger seat of the car with him as he drove forgetfully, straight through stop signs and red lights.

  I do not blame Mom one whit for the strategy she employed to deal with the meltdown of her life. I understand her instinct to treat it this way. Indeed, it was heroic. As things deteriorated, Mom was monumentally self-sacrificing in her caretaking for Dad—as are so many of the wives who sit by their bed-bound husbands, feeding them meals in small spoonfuls. Like these other wives, she put the ridiculous party hat on his head at his eighty-second birthday party, when he did not know who or where he was. The family smiled, aghast.

  In Mom’s strategy the illness was seen as an alien intruder—the enemy. This was completely understandable. (In the face of their mutual catastrophe, I felt, really, that Mom was entitled to any strategy that she could hold on to.)

  I said nothing. But in the back of my head I knew that there was another possible approach to this disaster. A radical one, yes. An approach that involved walking a razor’s edge, yes. But one that might transmute some of their suffering into possibility. Here’s the other approach: Instead of declaring war on Alzheimer’s, embrace it. Take the whole bloody mess as your dharma. Take it as your new calling. Name it. Claim it. Live the experience of Alzheimer’s consciously, fully. Talk about it. Investigate it. Look high and low for the meaning in it. Experience it. Open to the possibility—yes, even to the slim possibility—that this ordeal could be some kind of crazy initiation into wisdom.