“A life of patient suffering… is a better poem in itself than any of us can write,” the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich wrote to Emily Dickinson shortly before her untimely death. “It is only through the gates of suffering, be it mental or physical, that we can pass to that emotional compassion and suffering of all mankind which should be the goal of every soul to reach.”
Suffering is the name we give to the way we live and to the imperfection of life, and to ourselves – which is often the source of our greatest suffering. How we bear this imperfection, what we do with it, is our greatest living poem.
This awareness resonates throughout the essay collection Deep face (public library) with Jon Mooallem – one of the best magazine reporters of our time, and one of the true storytellers. He writes in the introduction:
Twenty years ago, I was working at a small literary magazine in New York City, sifting through dozens of poetry submissions for whatever the editors might wish to publish. Please know that judging all these people's poems was confusing for me. I was twenty-two years old, poorly educated, and my only previous full-time job was as a kosher butcher. I could only love what I love. And, I was incredibly sad. My father had died a year earlier, and the grief and frustration I had been holding down was beginning to rise. I felt alone. I felt lost. And I was determined to find out why everything was so difficult, what I was doing wrong. Some evenings, I'd walk the fifty-eight blocks home from the office, looking up, shaking my brain like a Rubik's Cube, struggling to make it show a bright color.
Then, among the thousands of poems he had been given the uneasy task of selling, one stopped him short: “Snow in the Fields” by Eric Trethewey, no longer alive; one line of which adorns the landscape lyric:
Why aren't we better than ourselves?
This can be a living question of Jon's life, as a writer and as a person; The question that every article whispers or roars, none more tragically than the one in the title: “Why These Are There Instead of Others?” – his account, falling into the abyss of his twenties, of a trip to remote Alaska that he took with two college friends in the spring of life.
Some time after Rockwell Kent set sail to find the origin of creation, these three young men arrived in a place so far away that they dulled the consciousness of their town to the point that they seemed like aliens:
As the rescue boat disappeared, its engine roared and finally took off, there was an unimaginable silence on the beach, and the vastness and strangeness of our surroundings suddenly became apparent… It sounded like those scenes of astronauts, when they finally express freedom from the earth's atmosphere, they glide into space. Except we weren't in space. We were on earth – finally, truly on earth.
But this fleeting idyll was soon interrupted by the cruel impartiality of nature – a boom, then a crash, faster than the speed of thought, a huge tree on top of one of the three friends. (Unfortunately, also named Jon.)
They were able to get help on the radio. After firing a barrage of fire, they began to fear that they could not be found in the unknown wilderness far from the land and their camp. All they knew was that they had to keep him awake until help arrived, nailed to a tree in a cold stream, hypothermic on top of all the internal bleeding that was no doubt filling his system.
With some sense of the animal, kneeling on top of the other Jon, it depends on the change of his mind:
What can one say? I had two literature professors in college who made us memorize poetry. You never know when certain lines of verse will come, they say. One liked to boast that, when traveling through Ireland, he discovered that if he spat some Yeats in a pub, he could drink for free. That's how I ended up saying a love poem to Jon.
That poem “The Shampoo” by Elizabeth Bishop. He moved on to Auden's “The More Loving One.” Then some Robert Frost, some Kay Ryan. He narrates:
Jon and I spent about an hour and a half together alone in the woods. I ran through everything in my folder—Kay Ryan, AR Ammons, Michael Donaghy—leafing through each poem with speculative words, while Jon said nothing, just pointed with his eyes or made a sound whenever I entered. I felt like a radio DJ playing records in the middle of the night, not sure if anyone was listening. And here's one about Richard Wilbur's owls, I was going to tell Jon, and off we went.
He was not sure – how can one be sure? – that he was doing the best, that he could not do better, be better. But it was the best he had.
One Jon survived, and lived to remember the poems in the forest as a moment of calm between terrifying uncertainty and intense pain. Reflecting on the experience, now both twice their age, Jon writes:
Even my recitation of those poems, which I always felt was a moment of helplessness, was, in Jon's telling, the perfect symbol of that series of problem-solving. “He exuded composure,” he told me recently.
This was poetry as time dilation and poetry as prayer – a way to keep the throbbing mind focused on the questions that keep us awake every day and accelerate the creative restlessness that we call art, that we call meaning. Another way to answer that age-old question: with this gentle proof that, sometimes – and especially when life is kneeling down in the forest of disaster – we there is better, better than we thought we could be while we were walking along the illusory safety of our everyday lives.
Moved by the unlikely way a stranger's poem had helped Jon save a friend's life and make his own, I asked him to read it to us from a lifetime after he encountered it at a conference for his entry-level job posting, on the side of Bach:
Fill up on Gwendolyn Brooks' life line of poetry and Mary Oliver on how books saved her life, then revisit the very related story of how Oliver Sacks saved his life by reciting poetry.
