The night before I turned 22, two days ago, I felt so intensely the sense that James Wright was getting at when he wrote, “I have wasted my life.” I am wasting my life, I thought. At 22, how many books have I read? How many essays have I written? Scholarly papers? I have been lazy, slack, pontificating like a fool. I have been a big fool. I realize now that what I need to get through my life is a casual indifference, the kind of indifference that characterized the life of Simone Weil.
It was a wonderful birthday. I thanked God. I ate ice cream. Spent a few hours with friends. But I have spent a large part of the past forty-eight hours writing. I finished the piece about ten minutes ago, about 1:50 AM. I began writing yesterday. It is a review. I started reading the stories two days ago. The stories that were shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2010. This is one of my birthday gifts to myself. To review the shortlisted stories and to go on doing it until I am through reviewing every Caine-shortlisted story online. I hoped that the review would be about 2500 words long. It stopped at about 3700 words. Also, I bought myself some good books. This was a good birthday. I had a lot of time to myself.
I got off social media the night before my birthday, to avoid the noise. I have been thinking of Christian Wiman’s 1997 essay, “Notes on Ambition and Survival”. In this essay, Wiman concerns himself with what makes a great poet, what makes great art, and how ambition, in the long run, dissolves into a kind of comfortable mastery. At some point you will stop looking for high tide, you will be okay with just doing some good poems and that will be it. Few poets ever go on being as incredible as they were in youth in their falling years. He mentioned Elizabeth Bishop and Yeats as two of such poets. Inventiveness wanes when the life question that pushes one to write is a done deal. People make great art usually because they feel offended; or in a bid to be as good as the greats they have read.
I am thinking now of Eminem’s lines on the Bruno-featured “Lighters”. There is a series of lines where he tries to give supposed reasons why he drove hard to become the greatest rapper of all time. There is always some hurt to it. Now I do not want hurt to drive me, but of course I have felt myself wronged. Wiman suggests that there is also art that is great because the finger of God has touched the artist. But the finger of God could also empty the artist. My life is anchored to God. But I have not yet learned how to balance ambition and devotion. The law of the world is gravity, it takes grace to negate that falling (Weil). Weil believed that all great art comes from a contact with the divine. I know this to be very true. When I say balance, I mean, I want to work so hard and still not believe whatever I receive is due to the work I do. I do not want grace to make me go easy on work, and make me feel like I am jack when I am not even a screw yet. Now, in God’s book I am not becoming, I already am as great a poet as I can be under God. It is finished. That is the deal. Yet I could get carried away by the promise.
It takes grace, too, to be balanced. I pray for that grace that not only dissolves weight into wings, but that also wings the weight, flying stones. I know that 22 will be much better. God has been faithful.
“Heaney's lines from "North" have to do with survival, with reconciling the singularity of ambition with endlessly recurring days and diffuse experience. Because what seems evident is that if poets find themselves writing because they "feel themselves wrong," and find that only through the achievement of form can they hold off (but never quite take hold of) what threatens them, then eventually they are going to run out of will and resources. "Unlike writing, life never finishes," Lowell wrote as a grand old public poet of unsink- able reputation and shipwrecked standards. Only it does fin- ish, of course, in a final silence which all one's poems, all those high-finished boxes clicking like coffins shut, both impeded and implied. The difficulties of form, which if clung to beyond a certain point turn what was defense and refuge into an inescapable cage, must become the difficulties of life itself, one's craft adapted to and altered within what Keats called "the van of circumstance," one's passion for poetry transformed - but not attenuated, never relaxed - into a pas- sion for life. Because at some point the diving bell metaphor is not just inadequate to one's experience but positively dangerous. At some point, the pressure builds, the right words won't come, and all the unsung life begins to leak into the tightest lines. Then the poet feels what Hart Crane must have felt long before he finally leapt into an actual ocean, after his four years of fighting with The Bridge and feeling the air of inspiration running out on him- the water taking him in.”
— Christian Wiman, from “Notes on Ambition and Survival.”
Every month, a review of five Caine stories will be published under “The Cane”. Thank you.