Making Do
On circumstance, necessity, and compromise.
“You cannot call a man an artist until he shows himself capable of reticence and of restraint, until he shows himself in some degree master of the forces which beat upon him.”
When you begin to grow up—the moment you start, that is, to take on consciousness about the world you inhabit and how to make your way through it unscathed and without jeopardizing the store—once a man begins to mature, two words begin to have resonance for him. Three: ‘circumstance,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘compromise.’
In a previous newsletter (“Compromise?”), I may have given the impression that all compromises are bad. I don’t believe that. The word is as positive as it is negative. Life is impossible without some form of compromise. You come into town believing—that is what the world is, and—this is what I am; and this is what I am going to be in the world. But you learn (if you find grace, early) that this is what the world is, and that may be what you are. And as perception changes, so, too, do methods. Every change of method is an act of compromise. And a change of methods is required to survive and to get / break through.
The first thing to be said about circumstance is that: whatever yours is, it is inescapable for you. Just as mine is inescapable for me. I cannot ignore the facts that make up my environment, that define my existence within a specific context. To go for the most obvious: a man, whatever his values are, must eat and drink, have a roof over his head, and clothes on his back. His own body is a fact that he cannot ignore.
But the fashions and trends of the day are also circumstances; the things that demand your attention, the tide that you must somehow give yourself to, the culture, the society in which you live, your country—ignore these things at your own peril. Be a fool.
Not only should you not ignore circumstance, you also should not (from a certain angle) resist it. (There’s of course a way to resist circumstance.) By ‘resist’ here, I mean: don’t kick the rock, you’d break your leg if you did. And the rock stays rock. Said Christ to that man on his way to Damascus, ‘It is hard for you to kick against the pricks.’ You are causing yourself needless suffering. Growing up is learning how not to cause yourself (needless) suffering and how to draw maximum benefits from inescapable ones.
A man cannot completely resist circumstance, but he must also not submit himself to it. Those who kick against the pricks become cynical; the world will break them. But those who submit to the wind need not be broken at all. They are crushed under foot and their lives go out like lamps in the cold wind. They never amount to much. They have, later in life, stories of how much potential they had coming up. ‘But we did what we had to do.’
Circumstance requires us ‘to do what we have to do’—but that phrase can mean a total loss of agency, where you stop being the protagonist in your own story, and you take the bench. You become a spectator watching the waves cast you there and here. No triumph. You are not reaching for a broken raft; you are wading to no shore. You are pure submission.
‘Necessity is laid upon me,’ wrote Paul, the man who kicked against the pricks. ‘I must do what I have to do’ is what that means, but not foolishly, not without discretion. Yes, I am at the mercy of a calling (in its own way, a circumstance) way higher than my will; but still ‘I labour more than they all,’ ‘I do not fight like one who is beating the wind.’ I am under compulsion, I have no options, but even in the thick of circumstance, I master.
Mastery is what life is about. Gaining mastery. We are all artists—whether we make poems or stories or films or do not. (One reason why we are enthralled by the mastery of great art is that it suggests to us a mastery we lack or can have in our own lives.) We are all artists of some kind. The human experience is itself a ‘work of art.’ It’s why we thrill to the stories of men like Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela; to the story of Paul; of Christ. Various degrees of mastery—mastery over and by way of circumstance.
In talking about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Geoffrey Hill said it has a ‘reticent glory.’
‘You cannot call a man an artist,’ Ezra Pound wrote, ‘until he shows himself capable of reticence and of restraint, until he shows himself in some degree master of the forces which beat upon him.’
‘The forces,’ of course, are circumstances—what a man has not invited but which has chosen him for some play of its own. ‘Are we suited to the times we are born into?’ asked Lincoln. ‘Are we suited to the times we are born into?’ I did not choose the age I am born into; the age was chosen for me. There’s much in your life that you have not chosen which you have no choice but to reckon with.
‘Reticence.’ It takes time to learn to not try anything foolish until you have worked out clearly in your mind, with foresight, where that step will lead you. It takes reticence—a reserve able to sustain intense foreseeing and calculations, without looking it on the outside; a disposition like Christ’s when he stooped and scribbled in the sand. A certain reluctance to act, because you are awaiting the exact moment ‘to seize occasion.’
James Russell Lowell said of Lincoln: ‘At first he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he took the breath away from those who think there is no getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, . . . though we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his reserves.’
Reserves: reticence. In talking about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Geoffrey Hill said it has a ‘reticent glory.’ It is a man who can wait, who is comfortable with waiting, while the world goes on around him and it looks almost as though he has missed his time, who allows circumstance to ‘have’ him for as long as it needs to, it’s such a man who wins.
You need a store of enthusiasm, the kind of which Robert Frost spoke in “Education by Metaphor”: ‘enthusiasm passed through an idea.’ Or, as he also described it, ‘enthusiasm tamed by metaphor’ (my italics). It is a coordinated, not a ‘crude,’ enthusiasm. It is subdued gladness that knows what it is about and does not need convincing or affirmation.
And it is through this other kind—this rigorous passion tuned to clear purpose—that ‘restraint’ is possible. Frost’s kind of enthusiasm makes it possible for you to be lonely and not feel alone (as Brymo sang); it is the kind, a more superior, that Christ had—the kind of joy that is a serious business (as C. S. Lewis had it). It has, not a formality, but a certain composure to it. It is the radiant felicity of a concentrated interiority.
‘Stand in awe, and sin not; commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still,’ said the Lord through the Psalmist. To tremble and not sin. Do you know what it must have been like for Lincoln after the first Battle of Bull Run (which Whitman called ‘a terrible shock’ which threw Northern enthusiasm out of its place), or how it was for this saint among men after Gettysburg. He stood in awe, trembled, and did not lose composure. For ‘to sin’ is to lose equilibrium, is to feel your sense of security rattled. But ‘I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me to dwell in safety.’
To hold back, to keep from acting according as circumstance incites you to act, to stay in the midst of the mockery and yet stand aloof, like Christ being slapped and spat on and hearing, ‘Prophesy! Prophesy!’—that is only possible when the inner life is reticent.
‘You cannot call a man an artist until he shows himself capable.’ What am I capable of? What are you? Can you maintain composure at the heart of the fire, and guard the hoard in the deep dark place of your own soul? Can you wait for time to be propitious, and stay alert while you wait? Can you keep anxiety out of your heart and stand sure of what you are made of? Can you rise up to the stakes of your peculiar circumstance, take on necessity, and yet triumph—through necessity and ingenuity—over ‘the forces that beat upon’ you?
(Perhaps. Perhaps not.) 🔷
In other news, looking at circumstance and necessity, I published a piece in Efiko last week on the piracy conversation, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Pirating Books.”
The first poem from chapbook, A Pocket of Genesis (Variant Lit, 2023), and the chapbook were featured in Poetry Daily. I also have a new poem out in Olumo Review.
See my notes on three poems by Christopher Okigbo, O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, and Othuke Umukoro in Afrocritik.
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