Denise Levertov's "Action"

Thoughts on giving oneself over.

Action

I can lay down that history
I can lay down my glasses
I can lay down the imaginary lists
of what to forget and what must be
done. I can shake the sun
out of my eyes and lay everything down
on the hot sand, and cross
the whispering threshold and walk
right into the clear sea, and float there,
my long hair floating, and fishes
vanishing all around me. Deep water.
Little by little one comes to know
the limits and depths of power.

from Selected Poems (New Directions, 2002)

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I want to pull the last two lines from this poem and beam them up into the sky. I want to pull the last two lines from this poem and hand them out on the street in little folded flyers, to scatter them from up above, to write them against a cloud, to paint them on the street. They have the air of criticism and love. They remind me of Jenny Holzer’s truism — abuse of power comes as no surprise — while also reminding me of something Wendell Berry wrote:

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

To read Denise Levertov is to feel, simultaneously, her love and criticism and awareness. I feel all such things in today’s poem, from the title to those final lines. I feel it in so much of her work.

One of Levertov’s poems, “Primary Wonder,” begins with a single, solitary sentence:

Days pass when I forget the mystery.

And it’s that mystery, right, that is at the heart of today’s poem? It’s that mystery that beckons Levertov away from the imaginary lists / of what to forget / and what must be done. It’s that mystery that serves as its own reminder of limits and love, of what is worth surrendering a body into.

Here’s another of Levertov’s poems in full, titled “On Being”:

I know this happiness
is provisional:

     the looming presences—
     great suffering, great fear—

     withdraw only
     into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
          this mystery:

There’s that mystery again. And it’s funny. As I read through Levertov’s work, I’m reminded of the way in which poets like Levertov (and I’m thinking too of Mary Oliver) can often get grouped into a category of not just sentimentalism, but also generalization. I’m thinking of how someone might compare Levertov’s work to some kitschy mindfulness thing, or some cliched new-aged Instagram account. But I find her work to be too steeped in the reality of the world, in the politics of being human, to be reduced to such generalization. Even in today’s poem, think of how intensely imagistic Levertov’s writing is. The sun in the eyes. The hot sand. The whispering threshold between the world of consumption and productivity and the world of giving-over. There’s a deeper understanding at the heart of Levertov’s work. A way of seeing.

When I think of today’s poem, I think of another poem — “Coping,” by Audre Lorde — which reads:

It has rained for five days
running
the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water
where small islands
are only beginning
to cope
a young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun
forget
and drown easily

And I think, too, of yet another — “Mimesis,” by Fady Joudah — which reads:

My daughter
                        wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?

In both poems, Lorde and Joudah remind us that the world as we come to understand it — especially as adults — is still a world of mystery and care, even when we forget, and especially if we don’t even consider such a possibility. In both poems, children serve as the primary vehicles of care and wonder. They remind us — as Lorde’s poem suggests — to be kind. To remember that even people (not just seeds) can forget, can drown easily. I take that word forget to mean more than just the literal. I take it to mean forget how to live or forget how to find joy or forget how to ask for help. I take it to mean so much. And, in Joudah’s poem, a child reminds us to allow a metaphor to extend into the political. To not just speak in a vacuum. To remember that we can always build a connection between the here of where we are speaking and the simultaneous here that exists forever in the present moment. Somewhere else. But still here, nonetheless.

All of this contributes to a way of thinking about those final lines by Levertov:

Little by little one comes to know
the limits and depths of power.

Levertov’s poem ends with a statement about de-centering oneself — recognizing that an individual can only do so much, and then accepting that recognition. That same act is present in both Lorde and Joudah’s poems above. It is present in the way children remind the speakers of the poem to reconsider the world. And it is present in the way both acts of the children — the kind spooning-out of water and the rhetorical question at the end of Joudah’s poem — are acts of curious, attentive care. They are acts that acknowledge a wider world, acts that de-center the self. In today’s poem, Levertov quite literally does the work of de-centering herself. Her speaker sheds herself in those opening lines. Sheds her history. Her glasses. Her lists. She lays everything down. She gives herself over to the world.

I just finished the late Erik Olin Wright’s How To Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century. In it, he defines our society as:

A consumerist society, where people are led to believe that personal happiness and well-being depend largely on one’s level of personal consumption.

He writes, too, of the “competitive individualism” at the heart of our society’s ethos — “the desirability of competitive striving for success even when this is at the expense of others.” He writes:

A robust capitalist culture accomplishes this by narrowing the social contexts in which most people see the values of community and solidarity as relevant and expanding the contexts in which competitive individualism operates.

That emphasis on consumption, competition, and production seems to be part of what Levertov’s speaker is shedding as she moves through this poem. I think especially of the moment when Levertov writes:

I can lay down the imaginary lists
of what to forget and what must be
done.

When I read this, I think immediately of our societal emphasis on productivity that is directly related to Erik Olin Wright’s insights above. Awhile ago, boarding a plane, which is its own oddly stratified and ritualistic process, I walked past someone reading a book titled “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.” Looking up this book now, I’ve discovered, to my dismay, that it is widely lauded — billed as a “bible” of sorts for businesses and people concerned with productivity. Years ago, when I left adjunct teaching in search of something more sustainable, I spent a year teaching at a high performance charter school, the only place that would hire me at the time, a year that I have yet to fully process or recover from. That school had a large room called the “#GSD Room,” which stood for “Get Stuff (or Shit) Done.” A couple of times a week, I had to stand in it and ensure that the fifty to hundred students there were working in complete silence, because silence was, apparently, the hallmark of good work, and because work, apparently, had to be done at all times. To be as frank as possible: I hated this part of my job with every ounce of my being.

And so, when I read the title of today’s poem — “Action” — and let that title echo within me as I read about the litany of letting go that occurs within the poem’s lines, I feel a great sense of gratitude. I am reminded that action can look, quite simply, like being. That action can look like laying down. That it can look like stillness. That it can look like the care and attention that stem from reminding oneself that the things we think we have to do — the lists we make and tasks we inherit along the way — do not have to be done at all. That, maybe, there is a relationship between the negative byproducts of power and our societal proclivity toward doing. That, maybe, we should not always be climbing and scaling and jumping from one rung of our imaginary ladder to the next.

Both Denise Levertov and Erik Olin Wright remind me of what must be a fact: the more we honor an individual ethos of productivity and the more we center ourselves over others, the less we view solidarity — with other humans and with nature itself — as worthwhile. This is a shame. A massive one. This is how we inherit a world in which a bestselling book with thousands of rave reviews exists to tell people how to get things done better, how to become more productive CEOs and managers, when, really, what we ought to be thinking about is the image at the end of today’s poem: a body given over to the world, taken to understanding that a constant inclination toward power will always be checked and limited by the world we live within, and that one should allow oneself to understand the generosity inherent in this awareness of fragility, and the kindness that ensues as a result.

I’m thinking of a line from Walter Benjamin that I encountered in Gavin Mueller’s “Breaking Things at Work” — a study of luddism:

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency break.

And so, that too: a kind of action. Saying stop: a kind of action. Thinking of mystery: a kind of action. An awareness of fragility: a kind of action. Letting go: action. Laying down: action. Feeling the water hold you up: action. Being reminded: action. Paying attention: action.

The older I get, the more I find myself alone in holding onto this notion of fragility and limitation and deceleration. In that single hellish year of teaching long ago, I often engaged in small acts of subversion as a part of my job ensuring that the hundred students in that huge room stayed silent. I carried a deck of cards in my back pocket, and would go from table to table performing quiet magic tricks taught to me by my friend George. I wanted to see my students smile, to remind them that there is a world within this world that does not care about how much you produce or how quietly you do it. Part of the brutality of that year was the fact that the large majority of our students were marginalized in some way — economically, racially, culturally. They and their families had been systematically disenfranchised, and the model the school decided upon to get them toward opportunity was a model based in high stakes and high pressure — a pressure cooker of productivity and rigidity. No one seemed to be happy, even when “desired outcomes” were reached. It was sad on all counts. It mimicked and replicated some of the worst systems of our world — the same systems that caused such rampant marginalization in the first place.

When I brought up my frustrations to fellow teachers, I would sometimes get chided. I was made to feel immature. Someone once told me that I didn’t care about the futures of those students because I was interrupting the stern silence of their work. But the thing was: I did. I cared about a future that didn’t have the hard, mean mantra of productivity at its core. A future that still retained some semblance of beauty and allowance.

I hold onto joy and wonder for this reason. We think we can forget about such things and then remind ourselves again. To bring joy out of our back pockets when we need it. But you can’t do this sustainably. Joy actually isn’t just a magic trick; it’s part of paying attention, part of a certain commitment we can make to lived experience. You have to hold onto joy, and wonder, and attention, and permission, and generosity, and you have to let so much else go. Just like the children remind us in the poems above, we need to remember that hope — for a more imaginary future, one that fully acknowledges the limits of power and cherishes communal solidarity as a result — comes in part from this sense of wonder. It comes from keeping the seeds from drowning. It comes from asking questions that mean the whole world. What care is there in productivity? Perhaps none. But there is care instead in letting go, and, as you lay down, in recognizing that you are held.

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A small note:

• I am reading at an event in NYC on Thursday, November 3rd to celebrate Tree Abraham’s new book, Cyclettes. Details are here. You should come!

• Tree is a wonderful book designer, as well, and you should read this absolutely cool essay (filled with sketches and early cover drafts) that she wrote about designing the cover for her own book.