Jim Harrison's "Becoming"

Thoughts on making music of all of this.

Becoming

Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

from Saving Daylight (Copper Canyon, 2006)

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I love Jim Harrison. I love his face, the small furrows of it when he squints, and the way it becomes large and wonderful the moment those eyes widen. I love the sound of his voice. It’s this lilted, gravely thing. It knows deepness. It is like a shovel coming up from the dirt, speaking through the earth as it rises.

I think I’m thinking about this Jim Harrison poem because I’m about to spend tomorrow (Saturday, as I write this) with two friends — one of whom is in the midst of hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail. We’re going to meet up somewhere on the New Jersey and New York border, and we’ll spend all of Saturday walking our way through woods and grass and muck and roots and mud. And that pending experience has me turning to Harrison’s work — work that I feel is so unashamedly and unabashedly obsessed with the natural world, which doesn’t just mean nature, no. It means mystery, and uncertainty, and music, and death, and life.

I mean, who but Jim Harrison can open a poem in this way the way this poem begins?

Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.

There’s something about a Jim Harrison poem that allows for this level of absolutism, which is not a kind of absolutism at all, really. Instead, it is a sense of absolute uncertainty in the form of three lines. What I love, though, is that such uncertainty comes through — in a very Jim Harrison way — in declarative statements. These lines are not based in images, or specific moments of description. There is no narrative. In other words, they are not typical ways of beginning a poem. And by “typical,” I simply mean that, from experience, a lot of workshops about how to begin a poem might tell you to begin in the specific, or the narrative. To begin, even, in the jarringly absurd. These are ways that I also think to begin a poem. It’s hard, in other words, to make a reader care about the universal without rendering a specific world. I don’t know if that’s true. I think I’ve found it to be sometimes true. And I think I’ve found that that’s what poets are often told.

And yet, Harrison begins his poem in such a universal, declarative way. And what I love about such a beginning is the way that it announces itself. It says: HELLO, I AM GOING TO BE A POEM ABOUT BIG THINGS. It says: I AM STILL TRYING TO FIGURE SOME SHIT OUT. I love that. Thank you, Jim, for beginning your poems like this. It’s like opening a book to find a pair of hands grabbing you by the shoulder, shaking you, a voice saying: DO YOU SEE THAT WE ARE ALIVE? WHAT DO YOU THINK? HERE’S WHAT I THINK.

And what I love, too, is the way that, the moment the poem mentions “downward cellular jubilance,” it also — as it travels downward — becomes more and more concerned with the cellular, the granular, and the specific. First, there is:

the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers

And then this magical phrase:

invisible
thimble of antimatter

And then, even more specifically:

the wattles under my chin

And finally:

the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957

Such moments illustrate Harrison’s reach and charm as a poet. I am often someone who, in my own poetry, tries to move from the specific to the universal — to offer my hand to someone else in poem-form and guide them through a moment of specifically-rendered life as a way to get at something big and wide and vast and unknowable. Who knows if it works. But Harrison just begins there, right there in the big question, the big universe. He knows, perhaps intuitively, that we are concerned with big questions — that there must be a shared experience. And even if we aren’t, he gestures in such a beautifully big way that we can’t help but be concerned with such vast ideas. And then, like a showman selling a trip into some infinity-themed amusement park, he beckons us inside. He holds us up so close that we can see the wattles under his chin.

Turn again to those opening three lines:

Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.

Notice how pointed they are, and even how grim they might seem. How they combine absolute truth with absolute uncertainty. And how, in doing so, they refuse the certainty of knowledge in favor of the certainty of mortality. Nowhere is it the same. None of us is the same. We finally die. But notice, too, one word from the next line:

jubilance

Notice another:

shared

It’s not grimness that Harrison is reaching for in this poem’s opening; it’s joy. It’s a wild, fever dream kind of joy. A joy in fragility and mortality and death becoming life. A joy in whirling with the earth. A joy in knowing enough to know how much you don’t know. A joy in aging and forgetting and growing feeble. A joy in remembering, perhaps, what it was like to have a little bit more luster, a little bit more lust, a little bit more than enough. A joy, yes, despite so much — or because of it.

I feel that in one Harrison poem, “Return,” which ends with this wry bit of humor:

The birds that ignored your absence
are singing at dawn assuring you
that all is inconceivable.

I think part of what makes Harrison such an approachable and generous poet is the way in which he nearly always de-centers his speaker from the universe. Both today’s poem and the poem I just mentioned are poems where Harrison’s speaker understands that he is not at the center of the universe — not even close. In today’s poem, Harrison even writes that we “whirl with the earth,” not that the earth moves around us, or that we control the earth, or anything of that matter. In “Return,” Harrison allows his speaker to be ignored. He allows birds to sing in the poem for no reason that has to do with human understanding. In fact, instead of centering human knowledge, he centers a kind of deep unknowing. Such an act of de-centering allows for an almost whimsical approach to all that conspires to make me anxious on a daily basis: death, fragility, limitation, power, and more. Maybe such things make you anxious, too?

What then? Some might say to turn away. To concern yourself with other things. But perhaps more beautifully than anything, Harrison doesn’t seem to be saying don’t care about any of this. No. Look at that last line:

Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

Even though the line just before this talks about our collective disappearance, Harrison turns away from cynicism and into music. Into love, even. Into the puzzling beauty of being alive.

This turn into fragility and music and love and awe…it reminds me of a poem from Sharon Olds’s Odes — a real gorgeous and tender book. She begins her poem “Ode to Wattles” — Jim and Sharon in conversation! — with the line:

I want to write about my wattles—oooo

The oooo is real. It’s there on the page. And just like Harrison’s phrase downward cellular jubilance, Olds writes:

I want to hold a mirror under my

chin so I can see the new

events in solid geometry

occurring

In solid geometry / occurring. That’s such a wonderful phrase to hold in the mouth. It moves the tongue, the throat — it reminds you of your life. It makes you move and work a little bit. And just like Harrison’s phrase downward cellular jubilance, it also reminds you of the way so much of this life carries on in its own pattern — geometric or not — with or without you. But certainly without your permission. What to do with that reminder? Harrison would lean into it, would, I’m sure, burrow toward some joy. And so does Olds:

I love to be a little

disgusting, to go as far as I can

into the thrilling unloveliness

of an elderwoman’s aging.

The moment I read those lines — I love to be a little / disgusting — I loved them dearly. I loved the line break, the playful dangling of the word little out there on its own, and all such a word conjures. Anything but disgusting. And then the word: disgusting. And to extend it as far as I can. It’s such a joyful moment of poetry.

Thinking of today’s poem and of the Sharon Olds lines above, I can’t help but think of how often I turn away from something like my own fragility out of the fear that acknowledging it and living with such acknowledgment might make me even more anxious or scared than I am now. But that’s not true, is it? I can love what is disgusting and what is broken and what is on the verge of shattering. I can love my own smallness in the wide and vast and certainly bigger-than-me all-ness that is this world.

Earlier this week, on my spring break from teaching, I found myself up in Maine with my girlfriend. I wanted to visit the Nubble Lighthouse, this adorable and far-too-perfect embodiment of New England scenery. We drove up along the coast in the wake of a storm, and the waves crashed up against the off-season beaches. We turned off the main road and curved along a slight climb to the end of a little peninsula. I thought no one would be there. It was windy, and it was cold. But the parking lot was full. And people sat in their cars, feet on the dash, watching the waves crash against the rocky coast and send watery plumes high up into the air. And some people gathered, fearful but smiling, along the high rocks — salt water in their faces, hair whipping in the wind.

We got out of the car, and the sound was immediately magnificent. It felt like we were standing on a bass drum the size of a small town, and each wave was the kick that sent the mallet straight into our hearts. You could feel it in your bones. And the two of us laughed, and screamed a bit, and laughed again. I felt small then, is what I am trying to get at. I felt so impossibly small amidst the largeness of the water, and the sound, and the water’s power, and the sound of the water’s power. But still, even in that smallness, I couldn’t help but make music of it. I didn’t want to leave. I felt myself caught up in the wild and vast and syncopated chorus of this earth. And I knew that part of that feeling was an understanding that all of it — not the lighthouse, but the water, and the rocks the water met — would go on without me and had been on before me and that a great joy — maybe the greatest joy — was that I simply could stand there in my brief moment of being, and be among all of that vastness. Which is another way of saying that I felt happy — yes, happy — in that moment to be alive.

In Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, he writes:

Maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe I should just gather my clamshells and be quiet.

Yes, maybe. I love that moment in today’s poem when Harrison writes:

we're getting ahead of ourselves

We are, aren’t we? So often. And there’s a real joy in finding those moments when we are not trying to get ahead of ourselves, to predict the future or control the future (both of which are essentially the same thing). It reminds me of the opening to a poem I just recently read, Tomas Tranströmer’s “The Blue Wind-Flowers,” translated by Robin Fulton, which begins simply:

To be spellbound—nothing’s easier.

I think much of our modern world conspires to make us forget such a fact. Or it conspires to make our feelings of awe or wonder or spellbound-ness into something commodifiable — like an elixir to live forever. But being spellbound — just like being curious, just like being disgusting, just like being a different person than yesterday — doesn’t mean you have to live forever. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the future. It can simply be the way you are, in one single moment, and how it’s beautiful and joyful and uncertain and part of life. I’d like to be spellbound as often as I can for as long or short as I live. I’d like to be spellbound when I am young and disgusting and spellbound when I am old and disgusting and spellbound as often as possible in between. But I don’t need to be spellbound forever. No. That’s alright. That’s okay.

I’ll leave you with Jim Harrison’s words from another poem, “Water”:

Before I was born I was water.
I thought of this sitting on a blue
chair surrounded by pink, red, white
hollyhocks in the yard in front
of my green studio. There are conclusions
to be drawn but I can’t do it anymore.
Born man, child man, singing man,
dancing man, loving man, old man,
dying man. This is a round river
and we are her fish who become water.