
Wake and rise Live aware Hunks of matter Dance in air Raise your arms Plant your toes Release your body Mix your soul Get outdoors Touch some dirt Smell the sky And live the hurt by Richard W. Bray
laughing girls and romping boys a thousand lovely aching joys spots of time the spirit captures mundane moments dizzy raptures drink all this the blessèd mood little things felt and viewed By Richard W. Bray
When you can’t make it home
When you’re stuck in a rut
When the roads are frozen over
When everything is shut
When hope is mirage
When there’s torment in your gut
When the bridge gates fall
When you’re walking in the trees
When the world opens up
When your heart gets a squeeze
When you’re finally together
When you’re overwhelmed with ease
by Richard W. Bray
And I wonder sometimes, what is it in me that hates me?
—Richard Wilbur, Complaint
He was the perfect man
Every woman wants to meet
Loving and honest
And friendly and sweet
I love him so much
I hurt him so bad
I beat up his sister
And slept with his dad
I love him so much
I hurt him so bad
I took all his money
And burned down his pad
I love him so much
I hurt him so bad
Left him demolished
And totally mad
I love him so much
I hurt him so bad
Something inside me
Just has to be sad
by Richard W. Bray
And I wonder sometimes, what is it in me that hates me?
—Richard Wilbur, Complaint
What was I thinking?
Am I insane?
I wonder what happens
Inside my brain
Boss took me out
To announce my promotion
I puked on his shoes
And got a demotion
Whenever life hands me
The perfect shot
It ties up my tongue
In a perfect knot
She asked for my number
I was ready to score
Why did I tell her
She looks like a whore?
Whenever I’m offered
A True Romance
I flub all my lines
And ruin my chance
My mind is an iceberg
I just see the tip
I cannot control
What comes across my lips
by Richard W. Bray
So far the human episode has been a brief chapter in the story of life on Earth—about two hundred thousand years. That’s not very long compared to the dung beetles who feed on rhinoceros droppings, which are the hearty descendants of bugs that were frolicking in dinosaur poop at least forty million years ago. And sharks have been around for over 400 Million years.
Although it’s fun to fantasize about a time long ago when giant monsters roamed the earth, it’s much more painful to imagine a point in the future when Mother Nature says: “Time’s up, humans. You had your chance, but you blew it.” Indeed, as the poet Richard Wilbur notes, it’s almost impossible to imagine a future on this planet without us:
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The novel Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut describes a future where evolution has altered humanity beyond recognition. A million years hence, we have mutated into a furry, seal-like creature with flippers and a much smaller brain encased in a “streamlined skull.” Our future progeny is no longer equipped to build skyscrapers or compose Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And these new creatures exhibit an immense moral superiority over modern-day humans because they lack the intellectual and physical tools to harm one another on a grand scale. Besides, “how could you ever hold somebody in bondage with nothing but your flippers and your mouth?”
According to the Ghost of Leon Trout, the narrator of Galapagos who witnesses the million-year transformation of our species, this reduction of endowment is all for the better because humans
back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn’t imagine and execute.
Trout’s Ghost concludes that the human brain “is much too big to be practical.” A practical brain would never “divert” people from “the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion.” The main business of life, of course, is survival and procreation. Yet by some freak of evolution, human beings are capable of so much more.
Trout’s Ghost laments how our “overelaborate nervous circuitry” is responsible “for the evils we [are] seeing or hearing about simply everywhere.” Furthermore, such self-inflicted horrors as war, famine, slavery, and genocide are “as purely a product of oversized brains as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”
Trout’s ghost confides that, “A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race.” He also describes “the most diabolical aspect” of the oversized human brain:
They would tell their owners, in effect, “Here is a crazy thing we could actually do.”….And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it—have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”
Here’s another disadvantage to having too much brain power for our own good:
Big brains back then were not only capable of being cruel for the sake of cruelty. They could also feel all sorts of pain to which lower animals were entirely insensitive.
Today the “mass of mankind” is “quietly desperate” because “the infernal computers inside their skulls [are] incapable of idleness.” The constant din of thought inside our brains that people must bear is akin to having “Ghetto blasters inside our heads.” And there is
no shutting them down! Whether we had anything for them to do or not, they ran “All the time! And were they ever loud! Oh, God, were they ever loud.”
Like Brick in Tennessee in Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” humanity craves to hear a “click in the head” which renders life “peaceful.” In Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut suggests an evolutionary solution to the plight which ails us. And perhaps it is the most plausible solution. As Emily Dickinson notes
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth That nibbles at the soul
by Richard W. Bray
As soon as Max sees me grab the leash, he goes into spasms of delight, jumping in the air and making little pirouettes. Joy. It’s not just for humans.
(I try not to say the word “walk” in front of Max unless I’m ready to take him for one. So in order not to tease him, I’ll say, “Maybe I’ll take Max for a ‘W-Word’ later this afternoon.”)
Like so many poets, Max is giddy for the natural world, and he cannot contain his enthusiasm for outside smells, sights, and sounds. And like Max, William Wordsworth began to cultivate his love of nature exploring “those few nooks to which my happy feet/ Were limited.”
Unlike so many human beings, however, Max is not overburdened by the demands of his quotidian existence. And I’m pretty sure he’s never given much thought to the meaning of life. It is therefore unlikely that Max could share with Mr. Wordsworth
That blessed mood
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten’d:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the things of life
But ecstasy also hurts. Wordsworth referred to such ecstatic moments as “spots of time.” Spots of time are often induced by nature, and as Sheldon W. Liebman explains, nature is “a domain in which the fundamental conditions of life are mixed, even paradoxical.” Ecstasy hurts because even in its thrall we realize that soon we will return to a world where
That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
Once we get beyond joy “And all its dizzy raptures” we are once again confined to “The still, sad music of humanity”
In the poem “Hamlen Brook,” Richard Wilbur calls this phenomenon “joy’s trick.” (Collected Poems 115).
Confronted with the immense beauty of the natural world, Wilbur laments his inability to “drink all this”
Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
For his part, Robert Frost argues that “Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It Lacks In Length” (Collected Poems 445).
There are many moments in Frost’s poetry when
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude. (445)
And the trick for human beings is to appreciate this happy now on its own terms. Frost explains in “Two Look at Two” (283).
‘This must be all.’ It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor
Had made them certain earth returned their love.
by Richard W. Bray
I’d like to read one of W. H. Auden’s best-known poems and one of the best-known poems, I suppose, modern poems of the last ten years. Probably someone will find that it was written in the last nine years, but it doesn’t matter…”As I walked Out One Evening.”
—Dylan Thomas (from the Caedmon Collection)
No poet consistently knocks me on my tailbone the way W.H. Auden does. Listening to Auden read Death’s Echo from the Voice of the Poet recordings makes me want to lie down in the fetal position and turn out all the lights.
As I Walked Out One Evening, depressing as it is, leaves me with some hope, however. At my lowest points, I try to remind myself that my life remains a blessing although I cannot bless.
Each stanza of “As I Walked out One Evening” is by itself a masterpiece, containing more literary merit than you will find on this entire blog.
The theme of the poem is certainly nothing new: Everything human beings do and feel is ephemeral. But a poet’s task is not to discover new themes. As Richard Wilbur notes, the “urge of poetry” is to bring its subject matter “into the felt world.”
The poem has many notable lines, but I’d like to focus on one that seems mundane at first reading, line seven:
“Under an arch of the railway”
There are, of course, many less lovely ways to express this particular image: Beneath the railroad line, below the arch which a train passes over, underneath the elevated train tracks, etc. But Auden’s construction magically sings itself off the page and into my brain where it will remain until such time as I am forced to surrender my smidge of nitrogen to the World Fund
Richard W. Bray