The Quacks of Quack-O: Notes on Ambition

The quack quacks.

I. I have gotten the travel essay out of the way, I can now return to my musings on art and life and faith and the terror at the heart of it all.

I believe strongly that I was born into a terrible age. But then I saw Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance was stellar, as always, and I think I may never get it out of my head that Spielberg’s Lincoln was what Lincoln really looked like) and one of those great illumining moments occurred (there is a packet of such moments in the film).

Lincoln asks, in that soft spoken manner, “You think we choose to be born?” Head bowed, his stovepipe hat on the ground next to him. The light is low, Lincoln is braided with his own shadow and the shadow of things: the chair he sits in, the cap sitting like a bowl, the table, although the room in which he sits with the two men who handle the telegram (he is trying to send a message to the soldiers of the Union) seems empty. Orbs of light hang in the room, the one behind him is very dim. It is a great picture. The young men mumble something and Abraham Lincoln asks, “Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?”

One of the men (Adam Driver) says, “I don’t suppose so.” And with a little more urgency in his voice—now the camera has moved closer, the shadow has faded a little—Lincoln asks again, “Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?” He says it with speed, too; not rushed.

That moment in the movie gave me an understanding that I did not lack but had never really considered, being attentive to—that I did not choose to be born, I did not choose to be born into this age, however terrible it appears to be, and that if there is a God (as I believe there is) and He sent me here at this particular point in history, I must be fitted to the times I’ve been born into. It’s not a radical idea, but it’s a good one to keep in mind.

II. I wrote an email to a poet I admire yesterday. In that email, I wrote, “I want to be a poet, a great poet.” I have said this so many times that even I am bored of saying it. And I don’t doubt that I want what I want (do you feel your ambition in your body, in the sense of an ecstasy of some kind?) but I doubt that it is worth it. I doubt the work it takes, the kind of rigor of living (not just of art) that making great poems demands is worth the profit.

Great poets don’t have a strong fan base. They are rarely ever popular. I don’t think they end up becoming very rich. Perhaps if you are Heaney, you travel the world giving speeches and you are invited to give guest lectures. I think that would bore me, even though I concede that I would enjoy some of it. Or winning awards? Great poets don’t usually win the awards in this age. Ishion Hutchinson is not a great poet but I think he is on his way to being one, still: School of Instructions lost the T.S. Eliot Prize to some book by a critical theorist (what I have read from the book, in a review you can read here, is poor, and the book has joined a few books to win the Eliot and the Foreword prizes). You see the point? You don’t have to try very hard to make it big in this age, so why to try so hard?

III. Yet Hutchinson is a real stuff and everyone knows it. That’s the point. Perhaps some people can manage to live comfortably with the knowledge that they have not given their best to what they do—I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can be comfortable with mediocrity. I would rather just leave the thing alone, just forget about doing it at all.

It is probably well-known to others, but I despise being the same as everybody else, doing the same exact things, going down the very same road, thinking the same away. And it has cost me a lot over the course of my small life: In junior secondary school, my relationship with a particular woman (who had given me a place to stay) was broken because she encouraged us to cheat and I reported her to the Vice Principal. She could not forgive me. (Years after I left Lagos for Abeokuta, she reached out.) My father sent me out of his house because I wouldn’t go to his church. In senior secondary school, my principal, who loved me so much he declared I would be senior prefect when I was still in SS1, got infuriated with me in my second year when I moved to the hostel and led (with a guy named CM) my mates to stay back in the hostel because we had no water to bathe with for days. He banned me from going for debates, threatened to put my name in the school’s Black Book.

I lost all of that when I joined the literary space. I had coveted it so much I shed feathers like “Stalin’s chicken” to feel among. But the old beast returns, you see. There is no use going down the same lane as everyone else, no use to it really. “It’s a bitch existence.”

IV.

         “Therefore my soul lay out of sight

                        Untun’d, unstrung:

My feeble spirit unable to look right,

             Like a nipt blossom, hung

                          Discontented.”

V. I have been reading George Herbert. I need a space for faith to breathe, to rephrase Wiman. The poem I excerpted that form is titled “Deniall.” It’s good how I hear myself in him, how he seemed to have had my problems, the same problems I have as a Christian: lust, pride, self, ambition, arrogance. I love “Sinner,” especially the line: “In so much dregs the quintessence is small” and the last three lines. Also, the famous couplet that ends “Affliction (I)”: “Ah my deare God! though I am clean forgot, / Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.” Sounds like Augustine’s “Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.”

The problem that I have as a Christian is that I can lean into the liberal side of faith at expense of its more disciplined aspect; and sometimes I lean into the other at the expense of the liberal side. I should pray the same prayer as Flannery O’Connor, “Lord. I want to be a mystic. Make me a mystic now.” Was there a “now”? But becoming a mystic in this age, and in every age, is tied to the amount of suffering you are blessed with.

One of the poems that have kept me company these past few months—I find myself quoting it often, on X and in buses—is Anna Kamienska’s “A Prayer That Will Be Answered” which begins: “Lord let me suffer much / and then die.” It’s a prayer I have prayed twice, laughing because I am crazy, directly to God: “Lord let me suffer much and then die.”

VI. “In so much dregs the quintessence is small.” Of course, the line is about the heart. What he calls, in the same poem, “shreds of holiness.” My heart contains shreds, mere shreds of holiness, and plenty of nonsense. I began to think how unbelievable it is that God makes Himself available to me all the time and yet I am not always interested. I believe the Reformation thinkers, I believe Calvin, and it is hard for many to believe it—but we cannot really choose God. I have the power to choose Him now, but I really, of my will, cannot choose God. We don’t care for God. We care for things, I care for poetry more than I do God these days, and it is a crazy confession to make, because I care for God, but not enough. Because faith sometimes seems docile, because God—how stupid but how I believe it—can wait. This is why I have been reading Herbert, he understood it, and loved God more.

But the line—“In so much dregs the quintessence is small.”—is about poetry, too. Much of what I draft is dregs, the quintessence is little. My education as a poet seems to be that I am realizing that I am just setting out. I used to get over a hundred rejection in a year, I currently have only ten submissions on Submittable. And I think about poetry every day. But the things that once mattered to me, the magazines, they all seem dead to me now. I am going through a poetry conversion, a translation from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light in the poetry world. I am learning everything again, and trusting nothing.

VII. Let me not bore you. But here are a few links to some good essays I have read in the past few weeks. Jason Guriel (how I love his essays) writes on the ills of literary community, on going negative in a review, on the Age of Browsing (unlike ours, the Age of Scrolling); John Matthew Wilson on the not entirely accurate view that poetry is dead, and on Eliot; Christian Wiman’s “If’s Eternally”; the late Roger Scruton on whether sex is necessary; a small interview with Hutchinson; Phil Klay on Guernica’s cowardice, his review of Hutchinson’s School of Instructions; and William Logan on Hecht (a sober review).

Forgive the title of this essay. I chose it for the sound. Thank you. 🔷