In Time

by C K Williams

  MYTH

  I’ve always been fascinated by myth. My father used to tell me the Greek myths as bedtime stories, and they’re still very much with me. I feel much more attached to the unteleological worldview embodied in the Greek myths than in those of the Hebrew-Christian tradition. The ones the Greeks developed are less grounded in religious ambitions and more in normal human facts. When I was translating Greek tragedies, I found that mythic world was more deeply enmeshed in my consciousness than I’d realized; portions of them kept coming back to me, and when they did they had the texture of personal as well as cultural memories. How splendid that we have all that within us, the emblematic and the tragic, the brutes and heroes.

  At the time I was in college, and in the years after, there was a great deal of interest in myth and religion—Jung, Neumann, Campbell, Zimmer: all the archetypers. And I did my share of reading in them. Most important to me, though, was Yeats; I was fascinated by his way of deepening current historical perceptions by grounding them in older knowledge systems. I’ve often used myths in my poems, usually under the surface, although sometimes I’ve let them come close to the surface. I meant “The Shade” in some ways to be a recasting of a morning in the Iliad, but set in a decaying modern city. I’m also fascinated by the stern, sad, sexy old men of the Bible. I’ve been particularly taken lately by Noah, who is the most innocent and impetuous of men and who creates great pain among those near to him.

  NARRATIVE

  We’re really always living at least two kinds of narrative. First there’s the one that we call our personal life, which are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, past, present, and future, and the other, which consists of our social narratives, the stories that make up our vision of our larger social environment and our situation in it. Our culture is really nothing but a series, or I suppose you could say a system, of narratives to which we give credence or from which we dissent. Furthermore, our relation to narrative is much more elemental than we’re given to think. Whatever there is in the structure of our consciousness that makes it so, we have an absolute hunger for narrative: we’re like monkeys at a switch who’ll zap themselves to starvation to titillate their pleasure centers. I think it was because I sensed all this that I began to move towards narrative in my poems, to deal with chunks of life as experienced by a narrative consciousness; it gave me access to areas of my actual life that had become essentially off limits to poetry.

  Now, although I don’t know whether I’m ready to clarify this to myself yet, I’m beginning to distrust narrative, for various reasons. For one thing, it may well be that those who govern us may very well ground their power, even their oppressive power, in the way they control our public narratives and are able to colonize our individual consciences, and consciousness, more directly than we like to think. Orwell stated all this rather baldly, but in fact the control of our minds may have begun at whatever point those who had already garnered their power managed also to have themselves inserted into the narratives of the cultural group.

  Also, we’re so awash in narratives these days, between the novel, whose age we’re living out, and its enormous retarded child, television. I sometimes wonder whether we’re being blunted, clubbed, and are losing some of our sensitivity to reality, or to imagination, through this endless novelizing. I’ve written about narrative at length in “Admiration of Form,” in Poetry and Consciousness, so I’ll leave it at that.

  NOSTALGIA

  I find nostalgia a terrifically sweet but potentially debilitating emotion, sometimes a dangerous one, for the individual and for society. We all have moments, as individuals and cultures—radiant, nearly mythical moments, little ages of gold, you might say—and we have to be thankful for them, cherish them. But nostalgia can be terribly risky, especially nostalgia for innocence.

  Innocence is a dangerous idea. We’re always trying to find situations and milieus in which we can be innocent, or innocent again. We try to make our personal relationships, especially marriage, in a way that will allow us live in innocence, by which we mean insouciantly and uncomplicatedly yet with great intensity, and we’re often disappointed to find that what we’ve created is a Gordian knot of compromises and painfully lost ideals.

  When this kind of passion for simplicity is cast onto a social vision, it can become vicious, as in Hitler’s myth-tormented notion of a glorious Aryan past that led to such tragic extremes. Hitler’s was a dream of the past, and the Soviet Union promised a future paradise, that in the present generated insane paranoid rapacities, all promised to be redeemed in the name of some future state in which the elect would be able to live more simply and more “innocently.” The mean-spiritedness of conservative Republicanism in the United States is informed by a similar nostalgia for a past that never existed, and for a future that will reenact that past and in which we’ll all be self-reliant and never need social structures more complex than the family.

  Much of this seems to me to come down to the fact that we’re always more complicated than our ideas about ourselves; our analyses, our formulas, our equations are always somehow partial, inept, wounded. There’s something in our whole way of speculating about ourselves that more and more strikes me as trying to shovel water with a fork. Generation after generation postulating notions of justice, of fulfillment, even of basic matters such as relationship and kinship, and so few of them have anything to do with what we actually are, or are even capable of being: all those guiding ideas can seem off the mark, and partial. We remain fugitives to ourselves, both personally and socially—at this level there really isn’t any difference—and the only solutions we keep coming up with have to do with inflicting more rigor on ourselves so that we better fit the broken-down templates and molds we’ve received in our cultural packages, which all leave out the conflicts we experience between the ideas we’re able to have about ourselves and the way we actually are able to convince ourselves to live.

  THE NOVEL

  When I was starting out, I read a great many novels. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were my first loves, then in the twentieth century, Mann, Wasserman, Joyce, but then most passionately the great Americans, especially Faulkner and Melville. Of the contemporaries, I used to love Henry Miller, although he seems to have faded a lot for me—it’s strange how that happens—then Bellow and Gaddis, whose Recognitions was crucially important to me very early on.

  But if I’ve been influenced by the novel, it’s probably been by Dostoyevsky more than anyone else. I’ve always been in awe of his inexhaustible moral energy. No matter how much you disagree with his vision, his thoroughness is always inspiring, as is the way he’s always in touch with the larger questions and, as important, the way his characters exist with so much curiosity and conviction and willingness to risk. He’s also for me the most crucial philosophical novelist: his works enact the paradoxes and quandaries of the epoch we’ve been living through since the French Revolution.

  ON LIVING PART OF THE TIME IN FRANCE

  There’s no question there are benefits to being at a distance from your home place—you can see certain things more clearly if you’re not involved in them every day. In France, for example, people have a strong sense of their social rights; they’re quick to protest, to call strikes against what they perceive as social or political offenses, much more than do Americans. Americans hardly seem aware of the fact that the last years have seen a huge proportion of the national wealth taken away from the lower and middle classes and given over to the rich and that the working class has been made essentially powerless. Something that momentous would be the subject of heated debate in France, but in America it barely seems to catch people’s attention. The right wing has managed to keep many Americans passionately absorbed in cultural issues such as abortion and homosexuality, which they allow to obscure much more significant social and political questions. I don’t think it was until I began to live in France, and understand its social mechanisms, that I really appreciated this, although things certainly have gotten w
orse in the States since I first began coming to France regularly in the early seventies.

  At the same time, I’ve always resisted the idea of defining myself as an expatriate—I don’t like the implications of that, of having given up on one’s home country. I just want to think of myself an American who sometimes happens to live part of the time in France. My audience is American, and so am I, and I’ve been careful not to make the setting for too many poems be abroad. Although I’ve written a good proportion of my poems in France, I’ve almost always changed those poems that were inspired by things that happened to me there to more generic settings. There are a few poems I’ve left set in France because I thought it could be an effective strategy to allow the reader to believe they’re involved in some rather exotic social question, then have them have realize that what’s going on is actually part of their own social universe and their own identity. There’s a poem in Flesh and Blood called “Racists” that does that quite clearly.

  “ONE OF THE MUSES”

  I was trying to deal in that poem with a fugitive emotional and mental state that required a kind of analytic approach I hadn’t ever tried in poetry. The whole poem is really the analysis of one emotion, loss, or more specifically how we recover from loss. I felt that trying to redeem or account for or come to terms with an experience of that sort required a different kind of approach than any I’d used before. The poem is longer than most of my others, and it’s because the experience took more time to come to terms with, and the analysis of it of necessity had to be more capacious. I think the conclusion the poem arrives at, if there is one, is that we need some kind of break, or rupture, to recover from loss. In this poem it’s the experience of almost going insane, of going through a radical disassociation, I think the shrinks call it. It did happen to me; I had the feeling things could never get worse for me, that I was probably going crazy, but somehow that feeling brought with it a release, or the beginning of one at least, and the poem grew out of that.

  PAINTING

  There used to be times when things weren’t going well with my poems or my career, when I had the fantasy that I should have been a painter. I used to draw all the time when I was younger, and in those bleak moments I’d managed to convince myself that when I’d started out I’d had more talent in painting than in writing (which I didn’t—I was never really much more than a doodler) and that if I had become a painter, I’d be rich, the way a few of my painter friends were.

  But there was more to it than that; I’ve always been jealous of the way painting and sculpting are so involved with the body. Poetry is such a purely mental activity that sometimes you can feel—again, especially when things aren’t going well—like one of H. G. Wells’s creatures from the future—a stunted white slug with a brain. Painters work with their hands, their eyes, their whole physical being. It’s always so gratifying to watch an artist at work. I’m very jealous of them.

  PERFORMANCE POETRY

  The few times I’ve actually heard “performance poetry,” I’ve felt it was a different medium from what I think of as poetry, a medium more like songwriting, which has little to do with either the necessities or exaltations of poetry as I conceive them. I should say that my experience is rather limited, but performance or slam poetry always seems to me to have a desperate passion to seduce a larger, more “popular” audience, by decomplexifying it. One of the splendors of poetry is that it offers rhythms and cadences to language that wouldn’t exist in it otherwise.

  I’ve heard some performance poets define any poetry that’s not oriented like theirs as “academic,” and I disagree vehemently with that. The poetry to which I’ve attached my life has more connection to the work of Archilochos and Issa and Rimbaud than to anything to do with an “academy.” I’d also point out that for me all poetry is performance poetry. Poetry is meant to be spoken aloud; even if you’re reading it to yourself, if you’re not saying it aloud in your own voice as you read, you’re not reading it properly. Reciting your poetry to an audience is just saying it a little louder than you say it to yourself. Poetry is the most intimate of the arts; it’s the voice of one person’s mind and musicalized language speaking directly to the listening mind of someone else. Novels and the dramatic arts usually enact an assumption that the writer is speaking to an audience composed of an indefinite number of other people. That’s why we often find in the novel the device of establishing a narrator who’s also a character, so that precious intimacy will be simulated. But the connection won’t ever be as intense as it is in a poem, because the narrating character is of necessity a fiction, while a poem, at least a lyric poem, is by definition generated by a real person, with a real person’s mystery and capacity for pain. Poetry is finally about a fusion between two active, living minds that, at least for serious readers of poetry, doesn’t occur in any other medium.

  POETRY AND POLITICS

  Poets these days sometimes bemoan the fact that poets in other countries seem to have a lot of direct political impact. I don’t think that’s really the case, although it’s true that in places like Latin America and Eastern Europe, where there are obvious social conflicts, poetry seems to be a social resource in a way it doesn’t here. In America, since the Civil War anyway, one of the most effective political tactics has been for those in power to pretend that there’s no social emergency, even when there clearly is. What we’re going through in America these days, with a realignment of class, of economic expectations, of continuing poverty and unemployment, should clearly be considered a sociopolitical emergency, but we have been convinced to regard it simply as a wave in the economic cycle.

  I certainly don’t think, though, that poetry has much to offer in a direct programmatic way. Whether poetry has a particular political agenda isn’t nearly as important as the fact that in its very essence it promulgates a basic human decency, basic values, and a vision of social community. When there is an emergency that people can feel, or are allowed to feel, then they tend to go looking for poetry, for the solace it offers and for the heightened moral consciousness it presupposes. That’s what happened during the Vietnam War, when first the college kids and then many other people realized that poetry could speak for them.

  I think I’m more radically political than I ever was before, in terms of how intensely I feel about social issues. At the same time, I have less sense of what a political program would be that might avoid the various shoals on which all the existing systems tend to run aground. In the sixties and seventies, when there seemed to be the possibility for activism, for a way to really effect change . . . was all that illusion?

  I suffered a great deal back then from the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough politically. The really committed people would say, “Put your body on the line,” but I had no desire to do that. I went to the demonstrations, but I didn’t ever feel truly comfortable with that sort of activism, and I still don’t. I feel less acutely guilty about it now, partly because going to the streets these days would be like running around in circles and also because I’m a little more certain that poetry does finally play a part in change and that there’s a task for the poet that doesn’t involve putting down your pen and grabbing a gun or a bullhorn.

  But my discomfort with the ease and prosperity of my life is still something I feel just because I’m in the middle class. I’ve especially felt that the times I’ve lived in New York. Part of the reason I think I left New York was because of the tensions I felt, the discrepancy between my life and the life that I had to see around me. And that “I had to see” is the part that I often find myself writing about: having to behold so many people who are condemned to poverty and need, and feeling there’s nothing you can do about it, especially at such a reactionary time as the one we’re in now.

  POLITICS AND POETRY

  I do think of myself as a political poet, but that definition is rather complicated. In one sense, every poet is political: we’re of necessity in community with an audience beyond ourselves, and we also share ideas
that can’t exist outside of a cultural-political world. The question, then, really isn’t one of definition but of intention. How much of a political poet am I? And how often? How effective? What are the indications of what this possible effectiveness might consist? And what is the business of a political poet: to clarify, cajole, convince, castigate? Perhaps none of them.

  It’s hard even to characterize other poets. Surely some of the best political poems of the century were written by Yeats—“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” for example—but I don’t think I’d consider Yeats a “political” poet, even though those poems are the very center of his poetry for me. At any rate, the requirements I’d ask of myself for being a political poet would deviate widely from the way I’d define his. Clearly, each person’s historical moment has bearing here. The function of poetry as we conceive it is quite different from the way Yeats did, and the place of poetry in politics, of the individual poet’s place and possible effectiveness, in the political realm has changed as well. It’s even changed over the course of the last decades. What is sometimes referred to as the “rage” in my early poems I think was more a kind of hope. If there was rage, it had to do with the frustration I felt because so much of what seemed self-evident to me about the relation of self to society, of individual psyche to collective, was so adamantly incidental to the world of those with power over us.

  I wasn’t alone in all of this of course. Where the political world has moved since that time in the sixties and early seventies is terribly saddening. Not simply because of the so-called conservative drift in American politics, not simply because of the outrages and crimes of conscience of so much that’s gone on since Reagan, but perhaps more so because the kinds of hope we’ve been entertaining for two centuries seem to have been usurped, particularly from the young. There’s been an enormous sleight of hand perpetrated on the generations who are coming into their political consciousness now. Some of this is due to the chances of history, but much seems to have been quite intentionally, almost diabolically foisted on them. All the so-called necessities of economic activity, the inflations and recession, the deficits, the constant recourse to inculcating insecurity as a way of manipulating people: what a sad consciousness our children have to live with, and how hard it will be for them to generate the hope they need to redeem themselves and their societies spiritually. This is all before we even consider our insane wars.