September 1, 2022

Happy Birthday to me. The day given by the gods is brilliant, but I’ve found ways to darken thought. The central theme of five decades of my life is work as hard at writing as can possibly done, improve, probe deeper into the mysteries, so far as it is given me to probe, perfect and refine until achievement and abilities find the same resting place. This I have done. I stand before whatever power there is and say “This I have done.” But alongside that came the supposition that a certain amount of visible success-renown, perhaps recognition, eventual ease of publication-- would attend upon those efforts. This did not happen, and my response was to redouble effort, as an athlete does, to break through, to surge ahead finally by the power of determination. The difference between an athlete’s efforts and mine is that in a race who has crossed the line first cannot be mistaken, or, if it can, both are counted winners. I read or watch onstage the productions of my contemporaries and there are few cases in which mine is not better, but having crossed that line furlongs ahead seems to make no difference. It is somehow not preferred. The moment has been invisible, everyone turned away looking at something else. I am the best poet in America, and ten people know my name. Beating against that wall has been futile so long my thoughts turned another way, a way they do not go naturally. What if I am simply “meant” to be the one who never gets the life he believes he has earned? What if my own efforts are completely irrelevant in this regard? A foreordination, this, that, and then no more? Otherwise is not going to happen, as tulips will not bloom from the chestnut tree. You were meant to have these things, and you have them; these things were not meant for you, and you will never have them. Longing beyond your destiny is not the fault of the gods. It should be a kind of relief if it had nothing to do with me. It is not, though, for it requires a change of world view into something dim and rigid. My conception of God was one who changed with you, who saw what you had earned and rendered the prize, who saw what you needed and stood at the door with it in his hand, who moved the goal when you exceeded it, who lured you on from the front, fleet, inspired, dynamic. My experience of him at all times has been the one who says “no” regardless of the rightness of “yes,” who lets you get to the corners of the box but does not allow you out however you gnaw and protest. Even I went to the end to let the raccoon family out of my attic. In a way, I am to blame. I did not register what stood before my perceptions. I operated on faith. I turned my eyes the other way to spare him. I have not spoken the truth, because it lessened him into One not fit for the songs of praise. So, I asked myself, what do I do about it? If the whole perception is right, thinking you can do something about it is the root of sorrow. What if I refuse to accept it? My recent perceptions about physical pain– crying out that you can’t stand it does not mean you will not have to stand it– enlightens me here. A little mouse voice says from the corner, “What else would you have been doing? Imagine futile striving to be the gift of God, for had you not been striving, your life would have been empty indeed.” I cannot declare this to be untrue. Poetry filled my life, and while I was creating it I was always happy. So if I look back and resent a long, long deception, it’s difficult to know what to do other than resent, go dull to it, move on. It is a kind of relief, as the angels of entropy surely intend it to be. 

This goes some way to explaining my career as a painter, too. I wasn’t bad. So much that is idiosyncratic is prized that I thought my idiosyncracies might find a champion. But the word was, “No, that’s not for you.” Was I happy painting? Yes I was. Should that have been enough? It wasn’t. I paid the consequence. I cannot say these perceptions fill me with sadness. They don’t. On a day when I had more fight in me, perhaps they would. May that day never again come.