In Other Words [by Jeffrey Levine]

 [Poetry is] a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them. – Howard Nemerov

I want to write this week about the flesh, about loss, and about my father’s passing at 4 am on October 3, 2010, about Freud and about the coming, vast celebratory party for my 70^th birthday, to be thrown next Saturday of this very week by my sweet wife, with my own child in attendance, about my mother, now 95, who has lived a full and heroic life and cannot recognize me but smiles broadly when I read Mary Oliver to her.

About having a catch with my dad when I was a teenager and he in his early forties, about a book he gave me after my reading at a Madison, Wisconsin bookstore on February 29^th 2009—the very day Canterbury Books went out of business (coincidence?). He’d asked me what book I wanted. Was it a biography of Velásquez, or possibly Goya, I can’t remember, which he had the clerk wrap, and that lies atop my desk, still in its wrapping paper, these 10 years later, that paper the sacristan of this mortal relic, a too, too solid metaphor.

From the ubiquitous floating epigraph to the ibids and op cits of scholarly writing, I am tempted, as always, to quote the famous, even though doing so feels self-indulgent, ingratiating, self-glorifying, pompous, pedantic, egoistic, boastful, and ultimately, too far to the side of original thinking and feeling to be worthy of full credit. But there’s also salve, if not salvation, in that quoting, and so I want both to poke fun at the practice of leveraging the words of others, and then to practice it. I would like, for example, to invite Oedipus and Kreon to repeat their ironic exchange in the Prologue to Oedipus Rex, an exchange that prompts any self-respecting psychoanalyst to reach for pad and pencil:

Oedipus. Tell me: Was Laios murdered in his house,

Or in the fields, or in some foreign country?

 Kreon. He said he planned to make a pilgrimage.

He did not come home again.

Oedipus.                                    And was there no one,

No witness, no companion, to tell what happened?

Kreon. They were all killed but one, and he got away

So frightened that he could remember one thing only.

Which one of us lives without the sense of a guilty secret? Although, what the secret is about we do not know. (Cf. Jung on dreams, the dream world, a world of permissible psychosis, which we enter and re-enter, night after night.) Silence and the unsaid: the unsayable, really. That’s what I want to get at as this week goes on.

All in good time. For now, as an unnamed New Yorker staff writer (unnamed by Roger Angell in his memoir, This Old Man, All in Pieces) (Penguin Random House, NY 2016) says about Donald Barthelme: “When he was writing a lot, you had this sense that there was someone else sort of like you, living in your city, and saying things that meant something about your life. It was like having a companion in the world.” As if that vicarious companionship weren’t cold comfort enough, Angell continues: “And an older man, also a writer and contributor, said . . . ‘He always seemed to be writing about my trashiest thoughts and my night fears and my darkest secrets, but he understood them better than I did, and he seemed to find them sweeter and classier than I ever could. For a long time, I felt I was going to be all right as long as he was around and writing. Having him for a friend was the greatest compliment of my life’.”

Companions in this world, then. At 70, I am comforted by my own surrender to the words of the great others, and the words that somewhat lesser others have written about the great. Even if, at the end of the day, little of it is about us. The effort of conveying the uniqueness of our experiences (as I have often said to poets, “What’s so special about your fatal disease—make me experience it”) is an effort of exactness. To pit experience against the frailties of language, the frailties of language against experience. As Jeanette Winterson says somewhere, the poet has the poem, made of words, and the reader has the poem, made of words. But already you can sense the inadequacy of Winterson’s reduction, yes? You can already sense what’s carried within the silences, and what silence might say, and what it might not.