The greatest danger is standing motionless on the bank as the river of your life passes by. It's not easy, learning how to stop waiting and start living; it is not easy not to waste your life; it is not easy to know how to spend your time and your mind and your love is worth the impossible fact that, when you are facing the greatest difficulty, you are there.
And yet to the sad question that rises beneath it all – Why you? – the only answer is your life, you lived.
Emily Ogden sharpens the blade of that question in the first sentence of an essay in her stunning collection. On Ignorance: How to Love and Other Essays (public library):
Is your boat quiet? I am asking for authors of my books. Your bonds you have made, your chosen lovers, has the spirit fallen? Have you ever wondered if you were meant to wait for the next breath, or if you should row your life?
With the eye of fear that the poet Mary Ruefle once composed with the usual sadness of blinking – “the deep discomfort around that one day it will be revealed that I have devoted my life to youth” – Ogden looks at the seriousness of this basic fear, including in all aspects of what we surrender to him and who. You write:
In my attitude towards these lovers of my life, I find the same mixture of conviction and shame. I am dedicated. I am ashamed of my devotion. I see the scornful face of the one who sees my image as a lump of clay.
Let's say that a life that can be divided, or not, is an inappropriate thing. What then? What answers are there, beyond trying to answer with an indefensible certainty?… Putting the matter in the form of a question is more agreeable. The question mark business won't end with me. It stands like a cow on the road, it doesn't understand, it doesn't move.
For my part, I stand with Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska: “I prefer the folly of writing poetry to the folly of not writing poetry,” she wrote in her brilliant poem “Opportunities.” I prefer the folly of devotion to the folly of indifference.
At the heart of devotion is the recognition that the other's reality – whether you understand it or not, that is, you can derive personal meaning from it – is important. Iris Murdoch captured this in what remains the best definition of love I've ever come across: “the hard realization that something outside of you is real.”
Ogden considers Emily Dickinson's poetry – those great love letters to the truth – as a piece of art that “escapes the need for final meaning,” opening something that “will not come to a point.” In Dickinson's poem “A Bird, came down the Walk,” he notes, this bird is not a Romantics bird that sings and symbolizes, not a bird of divination, but a creature busy with the “prosaic things” of its own life that meets its own criteria: it lives, weighing its wants against its needs. Ogden writes:
John Keats's nightingale warbles continuously through the centuries. Walt Whitman's thrush mourns Abraham Lincoln. Dickinson's robin gets closer and makes a living. This poem is about looking at a series of external problems that are managed and submitted. If poets are like birds, then looking at this poem, it is not that they sing; it's because they care about their own. The poem goes down through the journey. I don't know that I saw. It doesn't ask if I think it's important. My doubt will not destroy you.
Each existence – yours, mine – is a living poem and every experience in it, if we let it, is a bird. Its own business. Our business is not to interpret or interpret but to recognize, to integrate, to surrender to what is – to be pure, without fear or judgment or impulse to control, with the truth and the infinity placed within it: all those truths that are different from ours, beyond them, never fully grasped by means of thinking, accessible only, and barely, by love.
This requires what Iris Murdoch memorably called “self-awareness” – the same difficult practice that provides the best relief I know of from the grip of the most painful self-centeredness.
Ogden writes:
The other day I watched a song sparrow perched on top of my arched bean trellis, the feathers on his throat straight, his body the trumpet of his habitat. The whole small body became a loud noise. I was happy for him; I was completely interested in his love of singing. In the same way, I take comfort in walking with my hunting dog. A different world from mine, but equally organized with deep love. Because of his sense of smell, the grassy areas that seem isolated to me are very important to him. Moved by the passing of another dog, he will cover the carpet in the affected area with his nostrils, inhaling so forcefully and so quickly that his nose twitches. Looking back at you with an uncontrollable face is a struggle and a desire to follow; not, however, striving for or aspiring to a succession like yours. You can follow along with different statistics; you still get to count, but not for you. It is because the animal is pursuing a real project, not an empty dream, that watching it is a relief.
We don't know what it's like to be a creature other than ourselves – a bird, a dog, a person we love. The greatest achievement is to let the dream of understanding go with love anyway.
