In Pursuit of Meaning

That Adekunle line.

You must have seen that picture—that image of Christian Bale in The Machinist, although, like me, you probably have not seen the film. Gaunt-looking, sharpened, shapen by a need (Bale, that is, pushing his body that far, to reach a need), edged.

Bale is not one of my favorite actors, I last saw him in The Pale Blue Eye and I thought his acting lacked truth. His accent betrayed him, so did his eyes. But I am challenged by what he put his body through to take on that role in The Machinist; the same way I am instructed by what Brad Pitt looks like in Fight Club; and, most recently, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver—there is something austere about these characters, something purposeful. (Think of that famous line in Robert Hayden, “What did I know, what did I know / Of love’s austere and lonely offices?”)

I have been working like a maniac. Often, I work like a maniac. Work takes me over like a drug, like a spirit; it wields me. It’s late in the night and I have not eaten all day. I did not eat much of anything yesterday as well. I had bananas in the morning, did a good deal of coffee through the night, finished a book, started another, and worked on a small job. I went out a moment ago to get a can of malt and my legs felt wobbly and I felt light and there’s something that excites me about that—that you can push the body very far in the service of a need that transcends it. Thinking of it now, fasting proves more difficult because you are concentrated on the fact of it. But when I am working, the desperation of it is my fuel. I grind myself against necessity.

As I thought about writing this letter, I thought of Hesiod’s Work and Days, which I should get to next year. I have only read his fragments, started a poem with a metrical fragment from him: “No longer do they walk on dainty feet.” I started reading him because I wanted to know more about Tiresias, the Greek sage, about whom there are various tales. Some say he saw Athena bathing—not deliberately—and, as a consequence, he got blinded. Athena later blessed him with ears that hear omens and eyes in the blood. This version of his tradition, I love, as told in Callimachus’ “Hymn to Athena.” In Hesiod’s fragments, it is said that Zeus was arguing with some other deity about who enjoyed sex more between a woman and a man. As it turned out, Tiresias had been both a man and a woman, so Zeus called him to ask him—his word would be definitive. He said if there are ten pleasures to be had from making love, a man gets one and the woman nine. (The rendition of this phrase in a fragment by Hesiod is somewhat confusing.) For this, Zeus blinded Tiresias.

I wanted to know about Tiresias because of a reference in an essay by William Logan, in Reputations of the Tongue, which seems to be my favorite book by him. He says that Auden is sometimes Tiresias and sometimes the sphynx. I was working on an essay on John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo and I found Logan’s statement relevant to what I was writing, so I had to find out more about Tiresias. (I ended up translating a fragment from the Callimachus poem I mentioned earlier.)

I thought about Hesiod’s Work and Days, because I intuit it might contain a note about what so excites me about work. What will my life mean? Jarrell, in a letter to a woman he had loved who left him because she felt terrified by how much he knew and felt that he would “see through” her (Jarrell was quite arrogant), “The future won’t know what you were like any better than the present.” I agree. But perhaps when I die, perhaps if I put in the work before I leave, perhaps a younger generation will be able to state tacitly the meaning of my life. However, every instant I live and work—I am working out the meaning of my life, as one works out one’s salvation. We find meaning, not in knowing per se, but in doing, in living.

It is why I work, because it is how you realize (as a dream is realized, realize as in “bring forth”) meaning. My life means something, but I plumb the meaning of my life by grinding—that is the only way.

I have worked myself to the point where I am “as one dead.” Once, when I was working at Open Country, the editor called me in the morning to ask me to do the listicle on Wole Soyinka’s book. I stood in the bush, smoking my loud, and working at it for hours—at a go. When you are dozing and yet rousing yourself to work. There’s a delight in that—a joy.

But I have not worked nearly as half as I could work—I am as lazy as lazy gets. Still, I work terribly hard. Let me quote Chekhov, who was quoting someone else, “I work terribly hard—cross my heart, honest to God—very hard.” The Adroit program has begun and I have two students and I am glad to be teaching them. I drink my coffee and I squeeze something, anything, out of these keys. I think that is one thing to live for—the work. And to fail in great strides at the thing. To work and not become in the light, to work and be realized in the dark.

Will I one day hear the meaning of my life pronounced? Will I one day here it? Or do I die before the testimony comes? I believe that I am as one who sees in a smoked mirror what my life means and may come to mean. (Of course, I am here to glorify God: but how will my life express God? How it expresses God, I think, is woven with how I work and how my life means.) I see, but only through a haze. I graduate the university in a few weeks and I have never been unsure what I want to do with my life. Used to have it figured out. Now, I don’t. I can only trust God. That said, I still like to think that one day, at some definite moments even in this world, I will catch a frail but peculiarly lucid understanding—an insight, if you will—that here is what it means, here is what you have been trying to express by working; an echt moment, or a series of them, where Light pierces, sharpens the inner eyes and I am, for an instant, Tiresias, blind to the cosmic significance of my life but hearing the wind in the pines, the quick note of—yes.