SPECIAL FEATURE: Jane Hirshfield: On the Nature of Language and Art - LANGUAGE WAKES UP IN THE MORNING: A MEANDER TOWARD WRITING

Language wakes up in the morning. It has not yet washed its face, brushed its teeth, combed its hair. It does not remember whether or not, in the night, any dreams came. The light is the plain light of day, indirect – the window faces north – but strong enough to see by nonetheless.
Language goes to the tall mirror on one wall and stands before it, wearing no makeup, no slippers, no clothes. In the same circumstances, we might see first our two eyes looking back at their own inquiry, or else, perhaps, glance down to the two legs on which vision stands. What language sees is also two-fold, what it sees is this – the two foundation powers: image and statement. The first the wordless outer world and all its intricate treasure moving inward, into the self’s interior realm, and the second something humanly made and moving outward: the answering mind and its multiform workings, travelling back into the world. All that is sayable begins with these two modes of attention, and their prolific offspring. Begins, that is, with the received givens of bodily existence and the created, creative responses we offer the world in return.

Image: the word comes from the Latin imago, a picture or likeness. An image is not the primary world, though it comes to us from that source. It is the name we call the world by once it has made the journey into the mind. From there, it may remain in the interior storehouse of imagination, or it may travel back into the outer by taking the form of paint or stone or word. Some images enter the mind by touch, others are heard or seen; some are simple, others complex. Here is a simple image: a small fish hovers in a creek, its body exactly the color and variegation of the algae-draped rocks below it. For an instant, the onlooker rests in only that. But it is not the mind’s nature to stop with what it first sees. The mind goes on to notice that in its streaked camouflage mottling, the fish – it is a young trout – appears to be itself a rock, but a rock drifting somehow, and a little transparent. It appears to be what a rock would be if a rock could dream itself alive. Then perhaps comes the memory of having seen this before. Generations of trout have made a home in the same deep place in the streambed, scooped to steepness by ten thousand years of winter rains; the watcher recalls having seen more than a few. Then the mind continues further: “Almost big enough to eat,” the mind muses. “A few good mouthfuls, if I were truly hungry.”
Our human attention has many ways of engaging the primary world in any moment – perception, identification, comparison, imaginative drift, memory, the attraction/aversion of fear and desire, the old evaluative habit of predator in the presence of prey. And somewhere in their midst, image-mind becomes the the mind of statement – the rock of pure being breaks free from its creek-bed mooring in the world and swims off: lithe, muscled, and hungry for what the world tastes of, for what it can make use of, play with, mate. Little splinter of life force looking for something to do, because that is its nature.
As a horse crops grass or a pear tree makes pears, we make statements. They come in different forms – some are propositions, some are suppositions, some are narratives; some are similes, recipes, questions. All are ways we cross more fully into being, plunge the containment of the inner life into engagement with the scouring, altering outer. Looked at from its own verbal history, a statement is how we declare our place in the world. The Indo-European root leads back to “stand” – to holding onself upright on the earth. Standing is the human posture in the body, and statement the human posture in the mind. Its cognates are many, and illuminative. At the heart of most is the pause of “stasis,” which in Greek is connected to the idea of something sufficiently stopped to be physically or mentally weighed. To “stare,” for instance, requires a stillness of both subject and object: we must be able to look both deeply and long. The root holds also an aspect of display, which leads to the word “stage.” The arranging of standing things to be examined becomes, in late Latin, the concept of “system.” “Stanza,” at first a dwelling, later becomes the separate and adjacent rooms in which the verses of a poem may linger. The route from “stationary,” unmoving, to “stationery,” the pages where language is set down, goes straight through a bookseller’s stall in the Roman market. And finally, the verb “to state” refers originally to fixing a thought or object into its detailed particularity, in order to express its definitive condition, its “state” (the noun) of being. All these etymologies point toward an intimate connection between considered language and some contemplative pause in the rush of altering experience.
But the mind does not remain rooted in any one statement, it moves continually from one to the next. One of the ways we do this is by musing – no accident, that word used to describe the ways in which the more fluid kinds of transformation occur. The term implies a kind of idleness, and something not quite adult. A playful quality inhabits the musing mind. It lifts a thing, turns it over, licks it; explores in a way that leaves behind both simple preconception and the directionality of strict purpose. Here too the etymology reveals. “Muse” derives from the Latin mussare, which means first “to carry in silence,” then “to brood over in silence and uncertainty,” and finally “to murmur or mutter, to speak in an undertone.” Musing, it seems, is subtle. Undogmatic and tactful before the object of its attention, it does not impose, but bears witness. It quietly considers, and then, when it finally speaks, does so with the voice we use in a library or a church or museum – when we feel we are in the presence, that is, of mystery, of something more important than ourselves. The mind that muses is in its essence modest, permeable to what lies beyond comprehension – and also amenable to being amused. Arrogance reserves itself for the more self-involved.
Behind the word stand also those nine figures of Helicon – Erato, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Polyhymnia, Clio, Calliope, Melpomene, Thalia, Urania. Hesiod calls them the daughters of Earth and Air; others say they were begotten during the nine nights Zeus spent with Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory. Between them the moods and curiosities of human existence are hummed: the stories of historical narrative and epic wanderings; the poems of eros and feeling and landscape; the irreducible buoyancies of music, dance, and laughter; the cautions of tragedy’s examples; the answers we make to the sacred, the questions we ask of the awe-shining stars.
The nine sisters are depicted always as virginal, young. Perhaps their youthfulness carries the silence, the doubt, of mussare’s first meanings. The very young animal, when it is learning, begins by watching, by listening, by testing, by taking in. Then it experiments with its body, its tongue, its desires. It is neither self-conscious nor contained. And what is virgin does not yet know. The muses, in their slender and untested forms, remain strangely unwetted by the enormous floodwaters of creation that pass through their beings. An epic, a tragedy, a concerto is finished, and the next begins as it must: from the silence preceding beginning, from the condition where nothing as yet exists – not the first word, not the first note, not key or tempo or gesture or subject. Only a template is there, a proclivity. This is why the muses cannot age: only in the realm of human realization does knowledge transform the body.
A poem by the Swedish poet and novelist Lars Gustafsson, captures the condition of the world as the muses must know it. It is a world purely image, in which the mind-created realm of statement does not yet exist:

THE STILLNESS OF THE WORLD BEFORE BACH

There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters’ axes,
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child’s ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach.

(translated by Philip Martin)

The landscape of Gustafsson’s poem is a painted child’s landscape – a country of fairytale innocence rather than adult knowledge. Daughters of memory, the muses remember form, remember pattern, remember an arc of awakening and the sleep that follows, but content – even the eventual music of Bach – passes tracelessly through them. Their gaze is always turned toward the not-yet-imagined.
Let us return to the morning bedroom, to the moment when language awakens to rise, looks outward, looks inward, asks its one question: “What might I say?” What does it mean when the answer arrives through the gate of a muse, arrives, that is, as what we think of as art?
Thought is thought, color is color, sound is sound. Each becomes recognizable also as art when a certain awareness, shapeliness, and movement enters in – a kind of balance, we might say, between the motionlessness of established knowledge and the fluidity of the creative mind at play. The linguistic root for art means, most simply, a skill: it signals a task undertaken in a particularly effective way. Near to it in the Latin dictionary are words concerning themselves with small, ingenious, and moveable fittings: words used to denote the physical joints, or the idea of compression, or the condition of things packed tightly together while still maintaining their distinctness. Etymologically, the articulate person is one who speaks by dividing things into their precise parts, but also with awareness of the precise moment in which an argument must turn. The artificial is that which has been cleverly maneuvered, altered by the ingenious human hand. The artist begins by fitting one thing into another – a cup to its hand, a lid to its box, a color to its image, a story to its cultural and individual occasion. Once placed into the world, the cup is lifted for use, the lid swivels on its small brass hinges, the story shifts a little with each telling.
That movement and alteration are at art’s essence can be seen in the meaning the root takes on when given a negative prefix: the opposite of art is inertness. And all good art is moving, both in its enactment and in its effect. It is the nature of living beings to move – some quickly as that stream-immersed trout when an insect dimples the water above it, others as slowly and inexorably as a bishop pine growing the narrowest of annual rings around its green heartwood. Art, which is life refined to its sheerest order, is similarly active at its core. And when a work of art is unable to move us, because of some failure in its conception or execution or because we are too far from its originating circumstances to understand what request it makes of the soul, that work becomes inert, becomes dead.
A piece that keeps its heat and breath and meaning is as swift and stunning and alive as a blow. I think of Keats’s late, margin-scrawled fragment, how startlingly it reaches for the reader. Not finished, not shapely, deeply uncharacteristic, by the power of its core gesture it has preserved a place among his most-known poems:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is –
I hold it towards you.

The shock comes in the way time is so abruptly twice inverted, in the way the heat of life and the ice of death so brutally coincide. The request and implied threat of these words is in one way of reading them potentially repellent – one friend, a devoted student of Keats, told me this poem gives him the creeps – but the reader’s response depends upon where the poem is placed in time in the reader’s mind. Are these words spoken by a living man to his beloved, or from the grave? The grammar and facts of its composition tell us we must see it as the former, yet the poem’s concluding statement cannot help but be heard in the second way – these words come to us from behind the shroud. Because of this, we forgive their proposition of desperate exchange: their speaker knows it is impossible. Still we should not read these lines for anything less brutal than they are, or lightly pass over the fact that, however heartbreaking, they also break all pretense of politeness. “I want to live,” Keats’s words say, “and I will take your life-blood if I must in order to do it.” They offer an unveiled depiction of how the artist occupies the psyche of others. Aspiring as it does to the condition of life, art is rapacious to survive the effects of time.
Art’s gathered powers bait not only time, but deep thought itself. Patterned and musical, self-aware, compressive, stylized, a work of art is not simply a signalling outward, a communication of the already-established – it is a transformation of the kinds of thinking that happen under its roof. Whatever is held in the embrace of art is made more fully itself than it was. It grows resonant, as certain plants in the warmth of the late afternoon grow more fragrant, or as an ant surrounded by amber becomes more than simply insect. What is trapped by artfulness grows dense: to enter a work of art is to enter a thicket. Caught itself, it then catches us.
Yet the artful is also, as we have seen, increasingly quickened as well as stilled. The captured ant is preserved in the gesture of its single moment, one leg raised in the attitude of flight. In the suddenness and completeness of its enclosure is the tension between the living subject and its mysterious preservation. The viewer recognizes the same tension in certain Chinese scrolls and Renaissance sculptures, even in the 40,000-year-old bison of Lascaux, seeming to shift on their cave walls in the light of a raised-up torch.
That small fish in the creek – drop a leaf into that water, and it will simply be taken, sliding swiftly between rocks and away. But the living fish both darts at will through the current and resists it. Just so, a work of art resists time while shaping itself to a form that can navigate and respond to time’s continual pressure. The alternations and returns of formal rhyme and meter are the most obvious outward means by which a poem combines movement and stillness to outwit time, but free verse’s more subtle architectures accomplish the same end. We can see time netted in the structure of poems across centuries of aesthetic shifting. Consider the opening three lines of Robert Herrick’s 17th-century love poem, “On Julia’s Clothes,”

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Now hear those of Louise Gluck’s recent “Unwritten Law”:

Interesting how we fall in love:
in my case absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often –
so it was in my youth.

The difference in diction, approach, sensibility is vast. Yet each poem is set in a non-standard form, and each engraves itself upon the mind of the reader by means of a sure and exuberant shapeliness.
Time’s resistance, transformation, and remembrance form a large part of the deep pleasure a good poem contains. And there is, always, pleasure, sometimes delicate and subterranean, sometimes a large-ribbed exulting. You can hear it in both the poets just quoted: how much pleasure each takes in the mouthing of words. In poetry’s rages and griefs, as in its most limerick laughter, art sinks its roots in the aquifer of pleasure. Kay Ryan has spoken of it as a kind of hilarity that lives within even the most serious of poems – it is her term I use here, remembering the “giggling aquifer” she describes as running through all good poems. The rustling fabric of Herrick’s consonants and vowels, the muscular wit not only of Gluck’s mind but of her music, can be recognized as fine hair roots, the means by which a pure language-joy is taken in. This steady undercurrent of joy is the elixir by which good art revives us, watering the dry regions of more straightforward thought, more straightforward seeing and hearing.
The existence of pleasure is as strong in the art which addresses darkness as in that which unfolds by light, and as present in the simple as in the complex. Why does plainness sometimes gleam, other times bore? Even in the world of the visual this is so – some colors saturate with richness and invite the eye in, while others close their faces before us, and we in turn look elsewhere for delight and instruction, for the engagement that calls us into the world of being. A work of art defines itself into being, when we awaken into it and by it, when we are moved, altered, stirred. It feels as if we have done nothing, only given it a little time, a little space; some hairline-narrow crack opens in the self, and there it is. The result is as uncontrollable and irresistible as eros, as the new green weeds in the crack of a sidewalk. Here is Kafka, describing its arrival:

You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, remain still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

What have we gathered thus far into our fold? The outer world with all its mottled shapes and scents, its antlered and stamened densities, its secretions of nectar and sweat. The complex or simple statements that are our reply to that world. The moods and modes of the gatekeeping muses, their playfulness and also their silences, pauses, and doubts. The necessity for shapeliness and its muscular, resilient collaboration with time. Movement. The plain, shivering joy of aesthetic encounter.
Next, perhaps, is experience, is knowledge. The muses may be virginal, but a realized work requires both its particular skills and its materials, its pieces to be fitted together, before it can press its way back into the realm of the not-yet-known. Those skills and pieces are assembled of everything we have lived and learned from. The sum of a life, in its entirety, is the knowledge we bring to the moment of creative making – our experiences, our book-learning, our ethics. The poet needs to know the parts of the internal combustion engine, the histories of Buenos Aires and the Ukraine, the fleeting trace-maps of particle physics, the poetries of north India and Iran. The poet needs to know the almost alchemical processes by which whiskey and honey come into being, the secret look that passes between mother and almost-grown son, the narrow alleyways of rhetoric, the differing fatigues of failure and success. There is no way of telling in advance what part of our knowledge will be needed at any given moment, hence Henry James’s apt formulation – the writer must be one on whom nothing is lost.
Seen from the point of view of art itself, individual existence is not the source of the poem, the painting, the drama, but its servant. I think of the beginning of a poem by Czeslaw Milosz, “My Faithful Mother Tongue” –

Faithful mother tongue,
I have been serving you.
Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors
so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch
as preserved in my memory.

But nothing is simple, especially for Milosz, and the poem goes on:

This lasted many years.
You were my native land; I lacked any other.
I believed that you would also be a messenger
between me and some good people
even if they were few, twenty, ten
or not born as yet.

Now, I confess my doubt.
There are moments when it seems to me I have squandered my life.
For you are a tongue of the debased,
of the unreasonable, hating themselves
even more than they hate other nations,
a tongue of informers,
a tongue of the confused,
ill with their own innocence.

But without you, who am I?
Only a scholar in a distant country,
a success, without fears and humiliations.
Yes, who am I without you?
Just a philosopher, like everyone else.

I understand, this is meant as my education:
the glory of individuality is taken away,
fortune spreads a red carpet
before the the sinner in a morality play
while on the linen backdrop a magic lantern throws
images of human and divine torture.

Faithful mother tongue,
perhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you.
So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors
bright and pure if possible,
for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.

The poem is about Polish and about the condition of exile, but it can be read also as addressing the place of poetry in Milosz’s life. Poetry, too, for Milosz is a mother tongue and an education, and it too for him (as is clear from other writings) has been debased during his lifetime, put to frivolous, self-involved purposes, or wrong ones. The subtext emerges from behind its curtain for an instant: surely it is without poetry, at least as much as without Polish, that Milosz would be “just a philosopher, like everyone else” – merely another of this century’s displaced persons caught up in the examination of his own fate. Yet for this poet who continued through decades of exile to write his poems in Polish, perhaps the two have intertwined so thoroughly as to become one. In the end, whether language is the poet’s salvation or the poet saves language, the needed activity is the same – bowls of pure color, each an image of the incontrovertible Real, are carried by Milosz to be laid upon language’s altar.
Every good work of art speaks of something never quite known before. Sometimes the knowledge is investigated directly, as in Milosz’s lyric. Other times it is so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. There are poems, paintings, thoughts that rest in seeming silence a long time, like a turtle at rest on a rock, unmoving but with its neck fully extended. It is hard to tell if its eyes are open or closed, until you move to just the right angle and all at once the sunlight glints in them. Then perhaps you can see: the turtle is watching you as well, from the alertness of its own particular life and being. Such knowledge is infinite and inexhaustible, as the world of actual being is infinite and inexhaustible – the writer need only look outward to see what looks back. One example of such a poem is D. H. Lawrence’s “The White Horse.” It is a “pansy,” as Lawrence called his brief poetic versions of the French “pensée” – “a single thought, not an argument . . . true while they are true and irrelevant when the mood and circumstance changes”:

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.

Next to nothing happens in this poem, which is nonetheless oddly, strongly affecting. A moment of connection between two beings is described, first from the outside, then, perhaps, from the inside. A simple image is followed by a single statement. What the poem knows seems as ungraspable as the knowledge that comes to us in a dream. And yet it meets Lawrence’s requirement for a poetic “thought” – when we enter its words, a small window is felt to open, and a light wind recognizably true blows through the reader. We step, with boy and horse, into a different world. It is that opening into an objective-seeming truth which gives poems of this kind, however slight they may appear at a casual glance, the weight of known life – as the rock-warmed turtle has actual weight, actual consequence, purely by the fact of its existence.
In art, knowledge carries with it an inevitable flavor – the sensibility of the artist is in the work as the fingerprints of the artisan are in the clay. It can be said that this is true of all knowledge, that every description bears within it the mark of its human and social context. But in a work of art, the peculiarly personal sensibility is part of what we look for. With a detective’s sheer pleasure at seeing what is for what is, we distinguish one anonymous Old Master from the rest by the idiosyncratic pose of the hands or the odd largeness and extra height of the women’s foreheads.
Sensibility in a poem or painting reflects individuality back into the world of larger archetypes, impersonal forms, outward circumstance and current. What the artist has been shaped by, moved by, soaked through with at some level deeper than consciousness, deeper than will, enters the poem as the press of a seal enters the wax or the edge of a metal printer’s press enters the paper. It is the touch of the actual meeting the actual, of particularity’s bite. The last decades of the 20th century were a time when the aesthetics of pure sensibility rose to ascendence. Sensibility has, perhaps too largely, become the dominant means by which metaphysics, psyche, politics, emotional content are signalled. Yet a recognizable style of vision and being is as easy to see in the self-portraits of Rembrandt or the sonnets of Donne or the haiku of Issa as in the work of John Ashbery or Lucian Freud. Within classical forms, there is more than enough ground for a worldview to blossom; within modern aesthetic freedoms, “vision” and temperament become themselves a source for what Coleridge referred to as organic form.
Nor is sensibility a matter of simple emotional response – the capacious equanimity of Shakespeare before his characters is as fully a sensibility as any other. Keats’s description of the Bard’s genius as a negative capability rather than a positive one reminds us perhaps of Virgil’s warning to Dante when travelling in hell: if he is to see rightly, pity is forbidden. The eye that wishes to see human nature complete must be unclouded by tears, unclouded even by allegiance. Pity, as Blake stated, divides the soul. For an artist, everything interests, everything instructs, everything is put to use.
If we are, however, to taste the full range of what is given art to carry, we will revel also in the works of partisan, partial genius: in Larkin’s acerbic eye, Plath’s rage, James Wright’s or Neruda’s harangues as well as their more broad-hearted lyrics – all the flavors and scents of the human, emanating from within as well as observed from without. The single, fundamental request of sensibility is that we respond to what we perceive. As strong feeling initiates events, it initiates art. It was the Greek gods’ pleasure to stir up troubling passions; the working out of what then unfolded amused them. It also allowed them to partake of the range and weathers of human feeling, more interesting than their own eternal and essentially unchanging repetitions of folly and feast. In the human realm, what we make of our feelings matters: has weight, has breath, creates an irreversible fate – a story. And so Antigone’s dilemma still moves us, and Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice, however inevitable, remains both a heartbreaking surrender to human weakness and a clue: the greatest musician is the one who sings on, after the second loss. Even when his music is powerless, even when it includes failure and shame as well as grief, he sings. Feeling what cannot possibly be felt, he sings.
And that brings us near to the last of what we will look at here.
Language has been up now for some time. It has showered, made a large pot of coffee or tea and drunk down the first blue mug. During the pauses between sips, it has stepped into some clothes. It is almost ready to go to the desk, to begin whatever work the moment may bring. There is one thing more though, before it is ready – a thing without which language might never go to that awkward, armless, upright chair with its three wheeled feet; might instead lie on the couch and entertain itself with a good mystery, or perhaps step out into the garden and weed, since the day has blossomed into something warm and fine. The last thing language needs before it begins the day’s work is the burr of discomfort.
Dukka, the Sanskrit word that appears in the first noble truth of Buddhist teaching, is often translated as “suffering,” but its actual meaning is closer to dissatisfaction. “Life is dissatisfaction” – from this statement, the rest of the path toward awakening appears. For that reason, distress is a noble truth, not a problem to be turned away from or forgotten. Without the dissatisfaction, there would be no path, no necessity for a path. And without dissatisfaction, why would a person spend the good days of his or her life setting one word and not another upon a white page?
Surely the solitary creative writer is never merely a disinterested, comfortable, purely detached observer. The path of writing is too difficult for that. The writer is driven, goaded to the page, helpless to do anything but write. We write because something hounds us and will not let us rest until we have stopped to face it – to take it so thoroughly into ourselves that it devours us. Rilke raised that sense of extremity in a letter sent to his wife, which describes a work of art as always the product of “having-been-in-danger.” For him, as for many others, the unbearable goad was transience, the fact that life will end. As he wrote in a different letter, this time to his Polish translator, “ . . . it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishing earth in ourselves so deeply, with such passion and endurance, that its reality rises again in us ‘invisibly.’ We are the bees of the invisible. We distractedly plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it into the great golden hive of the Invisible.” (tr. Jim Powell)
Rilke’s is a Platonic worldview, in which the (uppercase) Invisible is the thing that lasts, while the actualities of earth exist for the sake of transformative plundering. Inspiring and beautifully wrought as his description is, it seems to me also extreme. But what maker of art, in the modern undunderstanding of that task, does not share Rilke’s idealization to at least some degree? Even those who work in the media of transience preserve some record, hope to be remembered sufficiently to be asked to work again. Only Tibetan monks and Hopi elders create their art of sand. For most, the sand is that which lodges inside the oyster, causing it to set down in answer its layered inpourings of pearl.
Transience is only one of the possible goads. The sand-grain might be the despair or spiritual ardor of Hopkins, or the desire shaking Sappho’s being as wind shakes an oak. It might be Rukeyser’s or Whitman’s compassion or rage on behalf of the oppressed; it might be finding oneself, as did Celan or Hikmet or Ahkmatova, far inside that oppression. It might be metaphysical disarray or theological puzzlement or scientific awe. It might be what Bertrand Russell described as “a temperamental unhappiness so great that but for the joy the artist derives from his work he would be driven to suicide.” Rarely, it can be an excess of joy itself, some upwelling pleasure demanding expressive release. In whatever realm the discomfort arises, a tear occurs in the fabric of the universe and the creative impulse rushes to repair it. The artist cannot help this any more than could a spider; it is his or her survival that is at stake.
And oddly, that very repairing is, as Russell points out, the writer’s summum bonum and dearest wish. It is as Yeats wrote, in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” – “nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” To participate in the creative renewal of the world is as close as we may come to touching the cloth of existence’s original daybreak – in that moment, the artist is neither human nor god, neither perishable nor lasting, neither good nor bad. In that moment, when language has fully awakened and taken its seat in the full light of morning and begun the tentative exploration or sure-tongued outpour, the artist is not even himself, not even herself. The artist and language and the page are given over to one thing alone – or rather, into no separable thing at all: they have surrendered the condition of noun to become purely verb. They are working.
And this working, the creative act of a whole and undivided heart, is the one true appetite of the writer’s tongue and mind and heart, with us as long as the trout swims in the streambed while above it, slightly shadowing the surface, floats the faintest, curious glimmer of the watching human face.

Jane Hirshfield, a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review, is the author of five collections of poetry: Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award), The Lives of the Heart, The October Palace, Of Gravity & Angels, and Alaya, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Nine Gates. She also edited and co-translated two poetry anthologies: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan and Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Her work has appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poems, and Alaska Quarterly Review.