Franz Wright's "Solution"

Thoughts on the unseen world.

Solution

What is the meaning of kindness?
Speak and listen to others, from now on,
as if they had recently died.
At the core the seen and unseen worlds are one.


from Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009)

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Funnily enough, for much of this week, I thought I would write about James Wright’s poem, “Trying to Pray,” which reads, in full:

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women's hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes and think of water.

James Wright is Franz Wright’s father, and I have had a book of his selected poems on the shelf where I sit, often, before and during and after feeding my son. I have been drawn to the elder Wright’s poems because, though I thought these months would lend themselves to the reading of book after book after book, I have found my attention fragmented and serrated, these mornings before dark when the broad rectangle of a single page’s words feels like some forever-locked door, and yet, as is the case with many of my favorite poets, there has been something about Wright’s work that pulls my eyes back toward that page with some thin, fine, silken thread—this invisible handiwork that opens that unopened door and says yes, you can come inside.

“Still,” he writes, “there are good things in this world,” and I am holding a child and looking again at the page and sitting with it, not trying to rush my way out of it, or toward the end of it. I am there, with the poem, having begun it but never quite finished with it, thinking. And that’s good. That’s really good.

Just a couple of pages later, Wright has an uncharacteristically buoyant poem, “Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem,” which reads:

As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying
This is what I wanted.

These mornings before dark, these beleaguered sessions of feeding, these long moments of half-awake-ness, fearing the closing of one’s eyes, knowing sleep is an impossible blink away—they lend themselves, at least for me, to these poems of Wright’s, where realization jumps out of the darkness in the same way that a child’s eyes open, suddenly, in the immediate declaration that comes with waking. And so I sit with them, and I read them, and I, having waked, wait for someone else’s waking, and then welcome the company.

Anyways, I came across today’s poem by Franz Wright because, after sitting all week with his father’s words, I was interested in the possibility that the younger Wright’s poetry might have something to do with prayer.

I love Franz Wright’s poetry. His book, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, was one of the first books my mother ever gifted me. It’s a book I’ve had for two decades, moving it with me from apartment to apartment, appreciating it more as I’ve grown older. In the titular poem of that book, he writes of the “infinite tenderness” of the sky, a phrase that, I think, characterizes his poetry, which is full of wonder and longing and searching. There is an openness to his curiosity that feels like a time before the anxiety that comes as a result of judgement. In that way, his poems feel like prayers: these things said in private, full of the deepest questions.

In his poem, “On Earth,” which I’ve written about before, he asks:

How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—
The world
is filled with people
who have never died

I think that poem and today’s poem are linked together inextricably. Reading today’s poem for the first time, I was struck—profoundly so—by its advice, advice I have never heard before, not to treat people as if they might die, but to treat them as if they already have. It is a surprising, touching, radical commandment, on both its surface and in its depths. On its surface, such advice means, simply, to talk to people with the kind of grace and honor and dignity with which we speak about the dead. But deeper than that, such advice asks us to talk to people as if they will die, which asks us to talk to people while holding the fact of their frailty front and center, which also asks us to talk to people while reminding ourselves of our own capacity to imagine, which also asks us to talk to people with imagination enough to realize that they, too, will become invisible, which, finally, asks us to talk to people while remembering that there is an unseen world operating at the same time as the world we see, a world of ghosts and souls and memories and metaphors and wants and desires, a world that holds each mountain we carry, each of us, yes, on our backs.

And that’s the final part of this advice that stuns me. To speak and, especially, to listen to someone as if they had recently died means to listen to someone as if they have access to an unseen world. As if they know what it is like to be ferried across the river. As if there is some unknown that you are wrestling with that they may be able to help you hold. It’s a brilliant way, I think, to consider the unseen depth in each of us, that massive and invisible ocean we keep dammed up, this place we have no language for and yet is what all language is reaching for. We share that unknown and unseen thing. We should talk to each other as if we share such depth, rather than as if such depth is parceled out to only a select few. Why? Because, I think, to choose the latter option is to choose a world of loneliness. It is loneliness I feel when I feel that no one knows my heart. It is an unseen thing, my heart. And so is yours. It beats in the dark. It will never know the light. And so we must bring the light to it.

I think of this especially now, not just because I am holding a little person who is growing so fast that I would like the seconds to take minutes and the minutes to take hours, but also because of the way we live in a time that offers us ever-increasing access to seemingly infinite and certainly infinitesimally smaller and smaller metrics by which to know ourselves. There is a button on my watch, for example, to test my heart rate variability. I know, each day, the various deepnesses (or lacks thereof) of my sleep. And there is a sock that my baby could wear that would let me know its blood oxygen percentage. It is billed as something that would offer me peace of mind, but, knowing myself, and remembering the way I stared at that number while he breathed in the NICU, I know it would only give me a restless, obsessive anxiety, my entire body quivering at the slightest percentage shift. A single digit sending me to the moon.

The mean trick of such devices is that they end up sending us further and further into ourselves, giving us hope that we may fully know ourselves without the help of others. They sell us on the possibility that what is unseen is only just one product away from becoming seen, transparent, fully known. This, I believe, is a false hope. And a dangerous one. The further we get from mystery, the further we get from each other, and the further we get from ourselves. To keep mystery alive is to remind us that there is the possibility, each day, that we may encounter something that may surprise us, that we may need help with, or that we may love. Love arises more out of mystery than certainty. I cannot possibly know all of you, love says, and yet I love you.

The final poem of Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, “The Only Animal,” ends with these lines:

You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret one thing to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

Considering the fact that Walking to Martha’s Vineyard is a book that details Franz Wright’s ongoing recovery from a life of addiction and depression, and the grace and wonder he found in the midst of such recovery, this poem just absolutely aches. I adore that phrase—the / tall blue starry / strangeness of being / here at all. But what I love the most are these final lines. I love the you at the heart of them, how the you must exist so that the poem’s speaker does not condemn himself for that dark and painful ocean they keep dammed up inside of them.

And isn’t that, too, what today’s poem is about? The you? How there must be a you who speaks to us, who listens to us, to remind us that we do not have to condemn ourselves for the depths of ourselves? That we can be heard? And seen? And loved?

That you is present everywhere in Wright’s work. It is present in his poem “Fathers,” which also echoes today’s poem, and also breaks and mends one’s heart. It begins:

Oh build a special city
for everyone who wishes

to die, where
they might help one another out

and never feel ashamed
maybe make a friend,
etc.
You

who created the stars and the sea-specimens
come down, come down

in spirit, fashion
a new heart

in me

I love how that You stands alone on its own line, and in the same stanza as the word friend. When coupled with the advice of today’s poem, it’s almost as if you is the answer to that question Wright asked years before:

How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—

You are, aren’t you? Yes, you. I am speaking to you, and I am listening.

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