What has life taught me? I am much less afraid than I ever was in my youth—of everything. That is a fact. At the same time, I feel more afraid than ever. And the two, I can assure you, are not opposed but inextricably linked. I am more or less the same age Emily Dickinson was when she died. Here is what she thought: “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of us would be Lunatics!” The calm lunatic—now that is something to aspire to.

The most frightening time was my very early twenties. For a few years I was practically paralyzed.

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

From that fear emerged a disciplined desire for becoming.  That sounds stoic. It is instead closer to epicurean. Despite the discipline and deep desire I often failed, but was not often afraid.

I HAD a daily bliss
I half indifferent viewed,
Till sudden I perceived it stir,—
It grew as I pursued,

Till when, around a crag,
It wasted from my sight,
Enlarged beyond my utmost scope,
I learned its sweetness right.

Reading Ruefle I worry, a bit, that leaving fear behind I sacrificed a sensibility, a source of wisdom. To some I am naive, superficial, even silly in my willed-optimism.

A WOUNDED deer leaps highest,
I ’ve heard the hunter tell;
’T is but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it caution arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You ’re hurt” exclaim!

I am wounded, even broken and bloody.  I still know the rush of fear.  But I choose, as I can, to step aside to see what comes behind or beside the fear.

Life is but life, and death but death!
Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath!
And if, indeed, I fail,
At least to know the worst is sweet.
Defeat means nothing but defeat,
No drearier can prevail!

Fear is a perception of emerging dread.  But what erupts from these cracks is seldom pure.  Rather good comes with bad, ugly and beautiful share the ride.  I choose, as I can, to welcome one and shun the other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

When Brother André asks us to embrace suffering, is he saying, “If we knew the value of ignorance, we would ask for it?” Should we finally and willingly cease to understand? I have often said I would rather wonder than know. Is that a youthful stance, a Keatsian stance? Is that—could it be—negative capability? Should one mature beyond it? I don’t know. Rilke advises the young to “live the questions now,” because the answers can only be revealed in time, the extension of which they do not possess. Much like Keats himself says, in a letter, that certain lessons can only be learned on the touchstone of the heart, that is, through direct experience.

In his Letters to a Young Poet (number 4) Rilke wrote,

Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Love the questions, live the questions, have patience.  Alles zu leben: to live all, to fully, consciously, actively, positively, gently, and patiently embrace living.  This is much more than - very different from - embracing suffering.  Yes, suffering is one of the questions and some aspect of every life.  But to focus on suffering, on anxiety, on fear is an unnatural restriction of the horizon.

Keats died at an age when no one should have to die. I wonder if the young are less afraid of dying, or more afraid of dying, than the old. I am no longer young. I am old enough to understand and know that it is not death I am afraid of, it’s dying. Dying is the act, most often painful, that leads to death, while death itself is as painless as the feeling you had before you were born—no feeling at all, you didn’t care one way or another (feeling is caring one way or another). But what do I know? Blessed Brother André, currently under investigation for sainthood, said, “If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.” Though others can, I cannot fathom that remark, let alone embrace it. Nor am I a Buddhist, one who believes suffering is based on ignorance, and that ignorance can be eradicated; actually, I do believe that suffering is based on ignorance (if the Third Reich had not been ignorant, millions would not have had to perish), but I don’t believe ignorance can be eradicated. Actually, I do believe ignorance can be eradicated, but in the way of a weed—it will only pop up again someplace else.

In the current election campaign it is possible to perceive a contest between two kinds of fearing.

One campaign seems motivated by fear of fundamental change.  The other campaign is not opposed to change, but is afraid change is moving in the wrong direction.

In some ways each campaign has accurately discerned reality: The change we are experiencing is profound and beyond our control.

But in each case fear overestimates our power to undo or direct this change.  We are riding a flood.  With considerable effort we may be able to move vaguely left or awkwardly right, but the flood will take us where it chooses more than we choose.

The risks are real.  Our emotional responses will range widely and are, in any case, also beyond our control. But as Ruefle set out at the start, with cognition we determine what feelings will emerge from our emotion.

Exhilaration, excitement, expectation are, I perceive, more helpful than fear.

We do not know the etymology of the word fear. That is, the makers of dictionaries are unsure of it. But there is a good chance that it is related to the word fare in its oldest sense, which is to pass through, to go through, as in, How did you fare at the dentist’s? or Fare-thee-well or, He fared in this life like one whose name was writ in water.

Fear O.E. fær "danger, peril," from P.Gmc. *færa (cf. O.S. far "ambush," O.N. far "harm, distress, deception," Ger. Gefahr "danger"), from PIE base *per- "to try, risk, come over, go through" (perhaps connected with Gk. peira "trial, attempt, experience," L. periculum "trial, risk, danger"). Sense of "uneasiness caused by possible danger" developed late 12c. The verb is from O.E. færan "terrify, frighten," originally transitive (sense preserved in archaic I fear me). Sense of "feel fear" is late 14c. Related: Feared; fearing. O.E. words for "fear" as we now use it were ege, fyrhto; as a verb, ondrædan.

Earlier in this response to Ruefle I have referenced יָרֵא or yare, one of the twenty-six words translated as fear in the Hebrew Bible.

The oldest meaning of yare is to pour water or shoot a bow and arrow. Fear is the release of energy.

Released where, how, why?  We get to decide: where to pour the water, target of our arrow, the purpose to which our fear is unleashed.

When still a boy - 10 to 12 - I won archery contests.  What I recall most is the deep calm and quiet that enveloped me in taking aim and releasing the arrow to the wind.

With the bow I was the source of energy. Where I faced, how I stood and when I opened my hand decided where the arrow would go.

In terms of accuracy, most important was how I opened my hand.  A gentle, generous release was best.

Wallace Stevens

So that the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand.

It was the last nostalgia: that he Should understand. That he might suffer or that He might die was the innocence of living, if life Itself was innocent. 

—From Esthétique du Mal, by Wallace Stevens

Anything close to accurate perception confirms I do not understand: not with any fullness, wholeness or finality.

Children in their innocence are natural empiricists, keen observers, but not for understanding. They sense to survive, to be in relationship, to become something more.

Suffering is attachment -- to people, to places, to things, to ideas, to the desire for understanding.

Is this understanding?

"The body dies; the body's beauty lives. / So evenings die, in their green going, / A wave, interminably flowing."

Is this understanding?

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

Is this understanding?

In the words of a painter, the abstract expressionist Pat Adams—

That marveling rush of wonder at sheer multiplicity and differentiation of stuff when surfaces of heightened materiality, of encrusted and layered imprinting are generated to entangle our attention and delay cognition

—until it seems that perpetual fear is a propellant into the innocent, fearless, and vulnerable world of the senses.

I recognize the sense of being propelled into the world of the senses.

But fear is not the fuel.

Curiosity is there, attraction to beauty too, and a compulsion to create.

I'm not sure about innocence, but being vulnerable and fearless is the yin and yang of this world.

I am not disagreeing with Ruefle, just reporting a different experience.  My poetry does not have her beauty, or Keats' or Rilke's or Rimbaud's. My painting does not have Picasso's rush of wonder.  My prose is not as compelling as Montaigne, Emerson, or Trilling. 

Perhaps I lack sufficient fear.

The suffering in these poems remains intact; it is neither resolved nor negated. What happens for the most part is, the poems dissolve, finally, into the cream of the physical world. If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

The artist uses sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing first and foremost.

Even before emotion, well before feeling.

Perceiving reality ought to precede any automatic response, cognition, ordering or meaning-making.

Uncertainty, mystery, doubt propels the person to depend on the power of perception -- much as a drowning man will grasp at anything that floats.

Perhaps the poet is distinguished from the non-poet in the cultivation of this perception long before the storm swells.

One has only to look at the opening lines of a majority of his poems to see him in a state of uncertainty, mystery, doubt—that is, fear:

"When I have fears that I may cease to be”
“Glory and loveliness have Pass’d away”
“My spirit is too weak—mortality”
“O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind”
“In a drear-nighted December”
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale”
“If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d”
“O what can ail thee, knight at arms”
“Why did I laugh tonight?
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains”

Rilke might respond to Keats:

Does Time, as it passes, really destroy?
It may rip the fortress from its rock;
but can this heart, that belongs to God,
be torn from Him by circumstance? 

Are we as fearfully fragile
as fate would have us believe?
Can we ever be severed
from childhood's deep promise? 

Ah, the knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance. 

We in our striving think we should last forever,
but could we be used by the Divine
if we were not ephemeral?

Keats sought to understand much in his life; his poems and letters are full of urgent searching, of the kinds of questions that arise in the minds of passionate youth. He says in another letter:

You tell me never to despair—I wish it was as easy for me to observe the saying—truth is I have a horrid Morbidity of Temperament which has shown itself at intervals—it is I have no doubt the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear—I may even say that it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.

For almost fifty years I have been troubled by depression.

It arises uninvited and unpredictably. It brings a morbidity of temperament that confuses truth, obscures beauty, and undoes goodness.  It is the cause of deep disappointment.

When I was younger I feared the onset of depression.  But I have learned to watch for its coming, abide its presence, and facilitate its passing.

Fear persists as powerless anticipation.  Watchful waiting is different.  Embracing the source of fear is neither fighting nor fleeing.

Fear signals that vulnerability and threat are about to intersect, as when the divorced parents of a beloved child meet at her wedding for the first time in many years, for the first time since he said to her, "I cannot live with you," and she replied, "You are disgusting."

Following this, Keats does a remarkable thing—he sums up something he has not even elaborated on. He says, “This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” What does this mean? For where was there ever any mention of Beauty in the original definition? And do you see how this last bit could be used as a defense by the most archly formal poet or by his worst nemesis? And if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? And finally, we always intimately connect John Keats with negative capability as if he possessed it himself, as if he were speaking of himself, when he was not thinking or speaking of himself at all but of Shakespeare—and who among us amounts to squat compared to Him—of whom we can be as uncertain as we like without reaching after facts, because there are none? Shakespeare’s reputation as a god is enhanced tenfold by the mysterious circumstances of his being. As is always the case, the unknown raises the stakes and the stature and the flag of the formidable before which we bow and do worship in unaccountable dread.

But... beauty is engaged, encountered, experienced rather than understood.

Even in Keats' day consideration was increasingly analytical; today we neglect nearly every other tool.  Analysis has become a hammer that we apply to all our needs.

But to break apart the beautiful is usually to destroy its beauty.  As Ruefle sees with Shakespeare, mystery is a candle's glow revealing the beautiful.

Hera closing with Herakles, Jess (Collins), 1960

The passage is a bit like the US Constitution. By that I mean that it may be interpreted to suit the purposes of a great many people who are at odds with one another. For instance, nothing prevents someone from saying that the essential definition means: once depressed, stay depressed. Of the passage relating to Coleridge there is no doubt: all you have to know is that Coleridge was the great intellectual among the Romantics, the great thinker. But an interesting and further complicating key is provided by the phrase “isolated verisimilitude.” Verisimilitude means “having the appearance of a truth; probable,” so that Keats is saying something like this: “Coleridge would pass over a probability that someone else would accept as the truth because Coleridge is not content with appearance or probability.” If we add to this the idea of isolating, which implies distinction or differentiation, we can’t help but think that Keats has searched the penetralium of mystery at least long enough to isolate a probable truth that is, unto him, sufficient. And this is a far cry from the non-isolating attitude that most of us associate with negative capability.

I do not associate a non-isolating attitude with negative capability, so I may fundamentally misunderstand Ruefle's concern.

Distinction and differentiation can be helpful, especially when accurate. To isolate one thought from another thought, to separate assumption from conclusion, to perceive pieces of the whole can enhance our understanding of the whole

Aristotle argued that what separates a journeyman from an artist is a keen awareness of each element of the poetic process and an ability to explain - and therefore influence - how each element contributes to the final result.

Most of human progress is a struggle against the current day's orthodoxy.  For the last half-century high culture has worshiped at the altar of relativism, uncertainty, and doubt.  This orthodoxy condemns fine distinctions as innately hypocritical or self-interested or stupid.

For any thesis there are many antitheses.

Although the letter in its entirety is too long to quote here, you’ll have to trust me when I say that only the last quarter of it puts his definition of negative capability into context. Here is that context:

Several things dovetailed in my mind, at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The last few months I have engaged a new poetic. I am composing miniature intimations - inferences? - of abstract expressionism.

I find my best opportunities in rusting metal, greasy alleys, and aging walls.  Where the intentional begins to descend into entropy, I find a beauty much more compelling than the original intent.

Where most see decay - and they are not wrong - I choose to see beauty.  As intention is pierced, an inner sanctum is opened and a paradox of perception is exposed.

“Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact reason”: the letter was written by John Keats on a Sunday, late in December of 1817, from Hampstead, and addressed to his brothers George and Tom. The year 1817 is, relatively speaking, quite early in Keats’s career, though only four years before his death; the letter was written before George left for America, before Tom died, before John met Fanny Brawne, before he was sick, and before he had written what are considered his finest poems. One of the things you have to remember about Keats is that his development as a poet was telescoped into an intensely short period of time in which he passed through as many stages as another poet may experience in a life three times as long.

There is no certainty, many mysteries, abundant doubt.

Because this is the persistent character of our context we are compelled to be poetic: to be makers, choosers, creators, and risk-takers.

We may be poor poets.  We may allow ourselves to be distracted from our making.  In our making we may be vulgar, impatient, angry or cautious, predictable, and boring.

But we can choose to be open, exploring, and ready to be transformed.  The English-speaking world would be less-lively if Keats had chosen to compress into his 26 years less living.

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."

John Keats, Death Mask

What an odd thing to say; what a terrible thing to say. Surely someone is saying to himself, “Gee whiz, hasn’t she ever heard of negative capability?” As a matter of fact, I have; those words have become like a sickness unto death for me. As often as I have used them myself, I wish there were a moratorium on them for a decade, so overused are they, so bandied about that they have come to mean just about anything one wants them to, especially a bebop version of Be Here Now, or a diffusive religious awe in which the poet wanders, forever in a stupor. As with most famous sayings, we are given only a fragment of the paragraph from which it comes.

Keats believed in Beauty and mistrusted grand theories or final conclusions... even about Beauty.

“The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing - to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”

Apophatic - ἀπόφασις - theology insists we cannot know God.  The infinite nature of God is beyond our understanding, far beyond our knowing.

But we can, with significant effort, find and describe what God is not.  We have a negative capability, so to speak, when it comes to engaging ultimate reality.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

And I want to say the poet is never afraid because he is unceasingly afraid, and therefore cannot become that which he already is, though of course, Mr. Kierkegaard reminds us, he must; you might say fear is the poet’s procedure, that which he has been trained to concentrate on.

I know a young poet for whom, so far, this seems to be true.

He is very cautious sharing his work, in part from fear.  .

As Ruefle suggests, he is still mastering his procedure.

But I wonder if it is fear on which he must concentrate more, or is it concentration itself that is being developed and fear is only a temporary tool for that purpose.

Fear belongs to man, not to the world. The world feels no fear, at any time, in any place. We are “an unhappy people in a happy world”—Wallace Stevens’s last stance. Feelings of fear—personal, cognitive fear—allow us to feel anguish while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day, allow us to feel as if our life were threatened when the sky is blue and the meadow at peace. Raymond Queneau:

The poet is never “inspired, if by inspiration we mean...a function of the poet’s mood, the temperature, the political situation, subjective accidents, or the subconscious. The poet is never inspired because he is the master of what others assume to be inspiration.... He’s never inspired because he’s always inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposal, obedient to his will, receptive to his guidance.

Fear is but is too often false.

It is false in its origins, its perceptions, and its fruits.

"...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Last evening I was talking with my father who fears whoever is elected will be unable to positively engage the profound problems at hand.

I agree it will be a difficult decade or more.  But I reminded my dad he had been born in the worst year of the Great Depression, his older brother was sent to battle the Nazi threat, most of his adult life had been shadowed by the threat of communism and nuclear warfare.

There is cause for concern, for needed effort, for courage. In confronting our shared challenges fear is unnecessary and unhelpful.

Simone Weil, eternally 34

And he is quite provocative at the end of his essay “The Sand in the Hourglass”:

If in our moments of happiness, mastery, ecstasy, we say Yes to heaven and to earth, and all we need is misfortune, sickness, the decline of physical powers to start screaming No, this means that all our judgments can be refuted tomorrow and that it is easy to mistake our life for the world. It is not obvious, however, why weakness—whether of a particular person or of an entire historical era—should be privileged and why the old nihilist from Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape should be closer to the truth than he himself was when he was twenty years old. 

 Miłosz closes his essay with an astonishing and succinct remark of Simone Weil’s: “‘I am suffering.’ It is better to say this than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’”

We make our reality.  This is true whether God is dead, or not.

Externals have influence.  The landscape can help or hurt.  But I choose my response.

Simone Weil also wrote, "I can, therefore I am."

I am not ready for nihilist wisdom.  Since I am choosing, I choose life and love and beauty.

Even as I decline, I would prefer to sing than scream.

Like Kierkegaard: “As far as I am concerned, I am able to describe most excellently the movements of faith; but I cannot make them myself.” The Danish philosopher’s famous essay Fear and Trembling is a rumination on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God asked Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham’s long-awaited and cherished son, and in the essay Kierkegaard grapples with how an act of murder can become a pleasing, good, and holy act in the eyes of God. It takes faith, a faith Kierkegaard minutely examines and describes, but one that he cannot in the end claim for himself, as devout as he is. He remains what he dubs a knight of resignation, a state that, for all it is worth, is still a state of sin. To be sure, I am “using” Miłosz here for my own purposes. He knows perfectly well he is not a saint. In an interview he has stated—and proved—that he is a man of contradiction. In other words, an ordinary man. But I admire his insistence on an objective reality, his faith in a world and an order that does not exist exclusively in the mind.

Milosz might explain that he had the advantage -- not given to Kierkagaard and Ruefle -- of living under Marxist-Leninist oppression.  He wrote, "It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism."

In my time and place the diminished reach of rationalism seems the greater threat. But I can imagine, based on the limits of my own rationality, the deadening effect of a wholly rational experience: even if only as disciplined effort and aspiration.

How is it then that life under the Communists produced such life-affirming artists, writers, and poets, while a quarter-century of "freedom" and prosperity has produced mostly nihilism?

Much as I am sympathetic to the theory of écriture, I find it—confusing. For why is it meaningless to write with no other function than to assuage fear? Doesn’t that function in itself have a meaning? And why fear the dismantling of language’s semantic function, its being representational of meaning, when that is but one more fear that will drive those in opposition to écriture to write? And certainly this “theory” is no theory at all but a centuries-old practice: “He seemed to be depressed, for he went on writing” reads a twelfth-century Japanese text. Or take Rilke: “I have taken action against fear. I sat up the whole night and wrote; and now I am as thoroughly tired as after a long walk in the fields at Ulsgaard.” Even a bitter poem is a small act of affirmation, and I wonder if we can’t say the same thing about a meaningless poem (if such a thing exists). But Miłosz, who would most certainly disagree, is, to his immortal credit, a knight of faith, and I am but a knight of resignation.

I write for pleasure.  I am not aware of fear playing a part.

This morning I lay in a warm bed in a cool room.  Comfortable I dawdled between sleeping and waking, but was drawn out of a pleasant sleep by the prospect of even more pleasant writing.

I walked beneath the stars, up the hill to where I write.

I read a meditation on Saint Matthew (today is his feast day) and from the book of Job: "'Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."  I drink my coffee.

I thank God, I praise the Lord, I do not fear.  Perhaps I should.  Surely I would if suddenly He descended in  a flaming chariot.  But this morning God seems more forgiving mother than frightening father.

Wislawa Szymborska

There are poets who are resigned to not being able to save the world, who barely have enough time to catch up with themselves and the attendant mystery of their fear and being. I suppose Szymborska was one of them. Here is her compatriot Miłosz describing her: 

In Szymborska we are divided not into the flesh and a surviving oeuvre...but into “the flesh and a broken whisper”; poetry is no more than a broken whisper, quickly dying laughter.... When it is not the perfection of a work that is important but expression itself, “a broken whisper,” everything becomes, as it has been called, écriture.... To talk about anything, just to talk, becomes an operation in itself, a means of assuaging fear.

I did not know Szymborska or her work until she died in February.  But what I have read since suggests she caught up with herself, found herself, made herself, educated herself into a full existence.

Here's a piece of evidence translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak:

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

One of the fears a young writer has is not being able to write as well as he or she wants to, the fear of not being able to sound like X or Y, a favorite author. But out of fear, hopefully, is born a young writer’s voice: “But now,” says Kierkegaard,

to strive to become what one already is: who would take the pains to waste his time on such a task, involving the greatest imaginable degree of resignation?...But for this very reason alone it is a very difficult task...precisely because every human being has a strong natural bent and passion to become something more and different.

It is very easy to read those words, and very hard to enact them. Elsewhere Kierkegaard says, “What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself.”

Nietzsche admonished, "Become who you are." Kierkagaard wrote, "Be that self which one truly is.'

Kierkagaard and Nietzsche were preoccupied by many of the same problems.  They applied the same tool -- the dialectic -- to solving the problems.  Each reached existentialist conclusions.

Nietzsche was sure God is dead and  that belief in God dilutes and distracts from making meaning and creating value.  His alternative is the Will to Power.

God was very alive for Kierkagaard and he wrote, "Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all."

Each found their particular voice. Each resolved their particular fears.  I much prefer Kierkagaard both as biography and in terms of his intellectual descendants.

We fail. And so desire to progress, to become better poets, to eradicate a disease, to become better people, to perfect that which is perpetually imperfect. The biblical “fall” is just such an anti-constraint. The apple was fear. (And remember, fear is knowledge, according to Nietzsche.) The apple set the world in motion by forcing Adam and Eve to migrate out of the Perfect. “Fear is to recognize ourselves,” said the philosopher. 

This is not the only outcome. I wonder if it is the most common outcome.

Many fail and seek to avoid future failure. I am sorry to say this is sometimes my choice.

Fear famously spurs fighting or fleeing. Many of us choose flight.

To fight or flee are emotional responses.  We can also engage fear with feeling.

In applying cognition to emotion we may still fail, but respond with a courage and creativity where we neither fight nor flee.

After the Flood  by Paul Klee

Think of the simplest caricature of a poet, the kind that might be used as a generic figure in a cartoon. Which comes to mind, the forlorn, melancholy, sadly loitering one, suicidal in blue breeches, or the happy eater and drinker, the smeller of roses, the carouser, the gusto-bearing, sun-loving one? In Epicurean atomic theory, “the world functions because from the outset there is a lack of balance.” The French novelist Georges Perec, devoted to mathematical literary forms—he wrote a novel without the letter e in it—speaks of anti-constraints within a system of restraints. He quotes the painter Paul Klee: “Genius is ‘an error in the system.’” (Those of you who have heard lectures on the sonnet may recall that this is often, precisely, the point.) The world functions because of fear, because of the error, the anti-constraint, the anti-perfect, the anti-balance. We stumble. We fall.

The world that we know has been shaped by our fear and failure.

But it would continue to function without either: probably much better.

We respond - especially our artistic impulse responds - to the ongoing tension between fear and non-fear, error and non-error, ugly and non-ugly. The perpetual presence and immediate proximity of these seeming contradictions compel us to respond, to create, and (too) often to choose sides.

Paul Klee also wrote, "Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see."

We respond - artists, bankers, carpenters, designers, electricians, farmers, and most of us respond - to the obvious: the beautiful cliche, the awful decay, dichotomies of desire.  Before we respond, can we see more?

But has it ever been any different? Races everywhere have always been at the mercy of collective desire and collective fear, sometimes their own, sometimes others’. The impulse toward order is born of fear and desire, and the impulse toward chaos is born of the same. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott believed artists were people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

Winnicott wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found."

Much depends on timing.  With very few exceptions, art is not produced on demand.  Art emerges from trial and error, exploration and dead-ends, mucky clay finally formed to match the artist's vision.

Chaos is profound, persistent, and Good. To presume to create order out of chaos is courageously delusional, temporary in effect, and outcomes vary widely.

Collective actions are not exempt from these double powers; consider this succinct and frightening sentence written by John Berger: 

Everywhere these days more and more people knock their heads against the fact that the future of our planet and what it will offer or deny to its inhabitants, is being decided by boards of men who control more money than all the governments in the world, who never stand for election, and whose sole criterion for every decision they take is whether or not it increases or is prone to increase Profit.

It is a frightening sentence. Is it true?

In my own experience profit is not the sole criterion for most decisions. Though, I am sure examples can be found where it is the sole intention.

In my experience decisions are most often confused, delayed, half-made, not made, and badly executed.

In my experience those who take up decisions begin with a sense-of-self they seek to advance.

What is the source of that sense?  What are its parts?  How does it thrive? Why does the sense-of-self change over time and how?

Fear is the greatest motivator of all time. Conflict born of fear is behind our every action, driving us forward like the cogs of a clock. Fear is desire’s dark dress, its doppelgänger. “Love and dread are brothers,” says Julian of Norwich. As desire is wanting and fear is not-wanting, they become inexorably linked; just as desire can be destructive (the desire for power), fear can be constructive (fear of hurting another); fear of poverty becomes desire for wealth.

Love of God is sometimes expressed as fear of those who do not believe in my god.

Love of my country can unfold into fear of those who claim another country.

Love of self may become fear of others.

But if fear is the outcome, can love truly be the cause?

Perhaps it is a lover's doubt regarding the beloved that prompts such fierce defense.

Or you can perhaps remember having read The Wind in the Willows as a child, or to a child, and encountering that magnificent, odd, and out-of-place chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” where Mole and Rat go in search of Otter’s lost son and find, on the very edge of dawn, Nature personified in the august presence of a terrifying and benevolent satyr, half man, half animal: 

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!” Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

In the wildness of reality - and of ourselves - we know an aspect of the divine.

To depart the narrow paths of daily life for far pastures, deep woods, and steep cliffs is to choose vulnerability and discovery over supposed security.

In the domain of Pan - both animal and man - we experience full feeling: emotion and cognition, neither in command but each sharing equally this unfolding moment, the great I AM.

Lopez goes on to chastise those who think hunting peoples such as the Eskimos are living in perfect harmony with nature. Nervous awe and apprehension are born out of proximity and attention. The greater the intimacy between these cultures and nature, the greater the tension. The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it. You can in your own minds recall the long Judeo-Christian tradition of fearing God.

In the Hebrew Bible there are twenty-six different words translated as fear. (As some Eskimo languages provide for many varieties of snow?)

The word most often used for fear of God is יָרֵא or yare', as in Deuteronomy 5:29 where it is written, "Oh that they had such a heart in them, that they would fear Me and keep all My commandments always, that it may be well with them and with their sons forever!"

This is the same fear used in regard to Egyptians, wild animals, and unknown wilderness. Reverence, awe, and such can also be read into the usage.  But it would be wrong to read-out being profoundly afraid.

The psychological abstraction of fear emerges from a more ancient usage of yare' meaning to shoot an arrow.  As the tension of bow-and-string are transferred to the arrow, so fear can release the tensions we experience.

How do I practically use fear?

Barry Lopez, in his study of the Arctic called Arctic Dreams, makes this interesting observation:

Eskimos do not maintain this intimacy with nature without paying a certain price. When I have thought about the ways in which they differ from people in my own culture, I have realized that they are more afraid than we are. On a day-to-day basis, they have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an umiak, not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature. It is a fear tied to their knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of life, of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look at something beautiful. A Central Eskimo shaman named Aua, queried by Knud Rasmussen about Eskimo beliefs, answered, “We do not believe. We fear.”

Given the Eskimo context this is reasonable.

Is my context less dangerous? The risk is less obvious.

Or perhaps the Eskimo is more observant.

"They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature."

Too often this is a reality I seek to deny.

I think it is time to list some concrete fears:

fear of death
of illness
of pain
of suffering
of despair
of not understanding
of disturbance or reversal of powers
of being unloved
of the unknown or strange
of destruction
of humiliation
of degradation
of poverty
of hunger
of aging
of unworthiness
of transgression
of punishment
of making a mistake
of loss of dignity
of failure
of oblivion
of outliving the mind
of eating an anchovy

These are not simian fears. These are human fears.

In this particular moment I am not fearful.  At worst I am vaguely anxious regarding distant possibilities.

But of Ruefle's list there are three (in bold) which I expect an MRI would display as small fireworks.

For each there is precedent and there is a presenting cause.  In each case, I am proactive in preventing and mitigating.

But much - most - is beyond my influence.

I like anchovies.

And George Oppen, who said, “Great artists are those, in the end, who do not have a failure of nerve.” Afraid, yes, but there they are, having locked themselves alone in a room with fear. Or as someone else might put it: “Blank pages—shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.” 

George Oppen's mother committed suicide when he was four. His step-mother was a stereotype.

As a teenager he lost control of a car and a friend was killed in the crash.

He was expelled from high school and college.

He began a publishing house at the dawn of the depression. It failed.

In his thirties Oppen stopped writing poetry, joined the communist party, rejected the communist party, joined the US Army, was seriously wounded fighting Nazis and awarded the Purple Heart.

After the war he was hounded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He moved to Mexico, became a carpenter, and began writing poetry again.

In 1968 Oppen's Of Being Numerous was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Oppen wrote:

A small room, the varnished floor Making an L around the bed,  

What is or is true as Happiness 

Windows opening on the sea, The green painted railings of the balcony 

Against the rock, the bushes and the sea running.

Or Milton’s “equal poise of hope and fear”? Or Blake’s “fearful symmetry”? 

Which is more inexpressible, the beautiful or the terrifying? Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his last, troubled sonnets, cries out, “O which one? is it each one?” Lorca says, 

The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart. 

And Edmond Jabès, in The Book of Questions: “If you bend over your page...and do not suddenly tremble with fear, throw away your pen. Your writing would have little value.”

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 1:7)

A translation of the original Hebrew could also be rendered as: "Being astonished by what exists is the best part of perception."

Writing has particular worth when it helps the writer or reader more fully notice (perhaps discern, but at least notice) the wealth of reality.

“Thank you,” I said, before hanging up, and then I heard my friend Reinhard say, “Faulkner, however, said that for a writer, the basest of all things is to be afraid.” My mind quickly came to the conclusion Faulkner was drunk at the time. But perhaps he was thinking about writer’s block, the inability of a writer to do that which is most natural to him: to encounter fear, to face fear; a fear of being alone with fear... 

Roethke: “Fear was my father, Father Fear./His look drained the stones.” 

Auden: “Fear gave his watch no look.” 

Neruda: “When I was a young poet I was full of fear like a real rat in a corner.” 

 And what are we to make of Wordsworth, “Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”?

When denied or indulged fear will never stop feeding, eating away each opportunity..

But if we can embrace it, name it, and discipline what we fear, it is a source of strength.

The Greek origin of fear, πειράζω or peirazo, suggests a trial, test, or temptation.  It is to see if something unprecedented can be done.

One Greek dictionary offers, "It is to try, make trial of, test: for the purpose of ascertaining his quality, or what he thinks, or how he will behave himself."

In the Gospel of Matthew we read that Jesus was led into the wilderness for peirazo: To confront his fears, to know his fears, to decide what he thinks and what he will do.

And then he quoted Nietzsche: “The degree of fearfulness is one measure of intelligence.” It was better than I had hoped. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. “Fear is to recognize ourselves.” As far back as I could remember, every minute of my life had been an emergency in which I was paralyzed with fear. Feelings of fear, being at least in part cognitive, and therefore thoughts, often constitute knowledge. For instance, the knowledge that one is going to die. This is a fear one can have while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day. And it can lead to an emergency of feeling that often results in a poem.

Henry Nouwen writes, "Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others."

Writing a poem is one of many creative responses by which we care for our own wounds and share the gifts of care with others.  In the poetics of bread making or gardening or chopping wood, fear becomes as yeast, moist soil, or the sun of summer on a freezing cold night. Fear is energy.

The cognitive transformation of fear-as-emotion into fear-as-feeling is to domesticate what is threatening into a friend, a helper, even that which may save my life.

I was a fool on a fool’s errand. Out of the fear of being a fool, I wanted to tell them that the fear they were trained to overcome was an emotion and not a feeling; after all, these were both life-threatening situations and their reactions were pure instinct, albeit professional ones. But I have professional instincts as well, professional instincts I employ while writing a poem. I was hopelessly confused and felt my sense of self-worth losing altitude; in situations like this I pick up the phone and call my friend, the German philosopher. “Reinhard,” I shouted into the phone, “What do you think about fear?” “Yikes!” he shouted back, “I am afraid of dogs.” At last, a friend.

We can each be informed by fear.

What we do with the information depends on the fear, our options, and particular personality.

Suppressing both the source of our fear and our own sense of fear is common.

Avoiding dogs is an option.

Avoidance, suppression, and separation have their costs.

Then the doctor and the pilot, who were in the same room with me, looked at me and said, “So, have you ever had any poetry emergencies?”

Several threats emerge each day. They can spoil verse, prose, and equipoise. Several opportunities emerge each day. They can be as disruptive.

Creation is complicated whether we create with words or hands or otherwise. Whatever else is involved, the mind is our principal creative tool.

The surgeon and the pilot were, as far as I can tell, not being creative They were being procedural, instrumental, managing rather than creating.  For them fear emerges suddenly, unexpectedly and is always something to suppress.

For the creator fear is a constant companion, because failure is more likely than success. The new perception, conception, construction-of-reality - progeny of a promiscuous imagination - is unlikely to survive the day.  We know this in the morning as we begin.  There are evenings we give thanks for what has not survived, for we have seen it was not good.

In each failed creation we experience our own mortality, we anticipate our own demise, we see our own final failure. Knowing this is more likely than not, each morning we awake and take up fear with our coffee, our hammer or broom or brush, our keys or keyboard, our welding torch and flux, whatever the tools of our creative craft: fear is part of the mix.

I asked a pilot about fear. The pilot said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, I was flying a test jet alone at thirty thousand feet and there was a leak in my oxygen mask I didn’t know about. I temporarily lost consciousness, and when I came to I was at fifteen thousand feet heading straight for the ground, nose down, completely out of control—and I was still groggy, still fighting for consciousness. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Those were the only thoughts I had, and I continued to have them until I leveled out at five thousand feet.”

What if overcoming is the wrong goal?

Are there fears to be embraced?

Are there fears that unfold to fulfillment?

Can the emotion of fear be shaped into feelings of appreciation... reverence... love...?

What can consciousness do with fear?

How might fear inform intelligence?

What can intelligence make better because of fear?

And that is where I want to take up our fear again. I asked a doctor about fear. The doctor said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, if I don’t successfully insert an emergency trach—a hole in the throat—someone will die from lack of oxygen. So I mechanically do what I have been trained to do. Someone is there, periodically calling out the oxygen saturation—95, 90, 88, 83, 79—and the lower it gets the more of an emergency it becomes. And the funny thing is, I ask for the count. It is part of the procedure, but I work as if I am not listening—procedural concentration is all.”

What if your procedure is to listen?

Perhaps you listen with even greater focus, more actively.

What is causing the fear? Why am I afraid of this?

What does my fear say about me? About the situation?

How might the situation be changed -- how might I change -- to lessen the fear?

At this juncture it might be instructive of me to look up at you and say, “Try putting less emotion, and more feeling, into your poems.” The fact that neurobiologists have publicly announced the separation of emotion from feeling should be heartening news to poets everywhere, for it implies that to have feelings is on par with highly sophisticated cognitive systems. Feelings are not subpar. On the other hand, lest we forget, let me repeat: to be more emotional and less cognitive is to be less evolved than the species is able to be. It is to be like a four-year-old child. Feelings seem to represent a place where emotions combine with intelligence and experience to create a highly personal thought process that results in an individual’s worldview.

From the Phaedrus, beginning at 246:

We will liken the soul to the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the horses and charioteers of the gods are all good and of good descent, but those of other races are mixed; and first the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.

Continuing at 248:

... that which is best follows after God and is most like him, raises the head of the charioteer up into the outer region and is carried round in the revolution, troubled by the horses and hardly beholding the realities; and another sometimes rises and sometimes sinks, and, because its horses are unruly, it sees some things and fails to see others. The other souls follow after, all yearning for the upper region but unable to reach it, and are carried round beneath, trampling upon and colliding with one another, each striving to pass its neighbor. So there is the greatest confusion and sweat of rivalry, wherein many are lamed, and many wings are broken through the incompetence of the drivers; and after much toil they all go away without gaining a view of reality, and when they have gone away they feed upon opinion. But the reason of the great eagerness to see where the plain of truth is, lies in the fact that the fitting pasturage for the best part of the soul is in the meadow there, and the wing on which the soul is raised up is nourished by this. And this is a law of Destiny, that the soul which follows after God and obtains a view of any of the truths is free from harm until the next period, and if it can always attain this, is always unharmed; but when, through inability to follow, it fails to see, and through some mischance is filled with forgetfulness and evil and grows heavy, and when it has grown heavy, loses its wings and falls to the earth...

Translation by Henry N. Fowler

(Don’t be alarmed, scientists are not studying feelings, they are only studying emotions, divorced from cognition, as they travel in recognizable systems throughout the brain and the body.)

Philosophy, rhetoric, and literature -- until recently at least equal to science in prestige -- were once careful students of feelings.

Given Ruefle's definition, faith is a feeling. So is love. So are each of Haidt's moral foundations:

Care/harm for others
Fairness/cheating, Justice or Proportionality
Liberty/oppression
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/Subversion or Respect
Sanctity/degradation or Purity

 Each of these characteristics can be traced to emotion.  But all are expressed in a particular context by specific persons in reference to their understanding of others: their feelings about a situation, issue, or person.

I am alarmed we do not give feelings the careful and critical attention they once received.

The emotion of fear is what drives all animals away from life-threatening situations, and that is not the kind of fear I have in mind. Feelings, on the other hand, are more complicated and involve cognitive reactions that combine, or can be combined, with emotions, memories, experience, and intelligence. That is the kind of fear I have in mind—the feeling of fear that involves an intelligent, cognitive reaction. Fear that requires self-consciousness.

My horoscope for yesterday agrees: "Fear keeps you alert better than coffee can.  It also plays with your sense of time, helping you experience the power of nanoseconds.  Your performance will get a lift because you channel your fear well."

I don't disagree. I try to be self-conscious working through my fears with cognition.  But fear is a bad beginning.  Anything born mostly of fear is suspect. Combining the emotion of fear with conscious feeling of fear is insufficient, even dangerous.

Fear is a self-justifying feeling.  From the involuntary emotion of fear can too easily arise self-righteous volition.  Under attack nearly any response is right. And under fear's influence, a mere slight can seem a deadly spear.

Neurobiologists have distinguished emotions from feelings, though I am afraid our language has for so long used the two terms as equivalent currency that it is a hopeless task to expect any listener to hear one word and not think of the other. Emotions are hardwired, biological functions of the nervous system such as fear, terror, sexual attraction, and hunger-impelled action (also called “feeding behaviors”). They are each purely physical reactions over which one has no control, and they are common to all animals with a central nervous system.

No control over hard-wired emotions?

In Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998), Jaak Panksepp writes, "Emotive circuits have reciprocal interactions with the brain mechanisms that elaborate higher decision-making processes and consciousness."

Arousal of these emotions is automatic. But expression is a matter of choice.

Fear may very well arouse a fight or flee response, but we choose between these options and the varied possibilities presented by each.

In many churches passages from the book of Job are being assigned as this season's daily reading. Included in today's reading: "When I say, 'My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,' then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I would choose strangling and death rather than this body." But while he says this, Job does not make this choice.

Dread. I like it better than the word fear because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there. But I have not used the word dread in what follows. I have used the word fear. And fear is an older word—it can be found in Old English, while dread enters the language in Middle English.

The poet sees and hears more than the etymologist.

The Old German faera and fer are not related to ear or read.

There is a shared origin with per and peri as in peril and perchance and perceive, suggesting a round-about, vague, ambiguous relationship. There is also a direct connection with a whole host of ancient Greek terms beginning with pero- meaning maimed.

My fears tend toward the amorphous.

My fears curtail my capabilities.

Sometime after I had already written the pages you are about to sit through, I realized I had been using the wrong word throughout. Dread is a more accurate version of what I am thinking about, and I have Julian of Norwich, a fifteenth-century anchorite, to thank for pointing this out. In her Revelations of Divine Love, the account of a vision she had during an illness in her thirty-first year, she says, “I believe dread can take four forms.” In a nutshell, the first of these forms is what I will describe as the unconscious emotion fear—your very first response to the smell of smoke, the sound of thunder, the sight of flames, the slap. The second form of dread is the anticipatory dread of pain, either physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological, and that, folks, covers nine-tenths of the world’s surface. The third form of dread is doubt, or despair. And the fourth form of dread is “born of reverence,” the holy dread with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us the most.

I was reasonably certain my right eye was developing a cataract.  I delayed going to the optometrist.

My children joke that if my arm is nearly sliced from the shoulder I will apply ointment, take an aspirin, drink plenty of fluids and go to bed early.

When I finally sat in his chair I suggested the possibility of a cataract, to which he responded, "You're a bit young." (I was then in my early fifties.)

After a couple of tests, he asked.  "Been in any bar fights recently?"  No, I replied.  "Take steroids?" No again.  I had a non-age related cataract usually resulting from blunt trauma or steroid abuse.

Hearing the diagnosis I had anticipated, I began to slump in the chair.  I could not keep my eyes open. I could not speak   It was as if the calibration between my brain and body suddenly shut down.  I blacked out.  I fainted. For a few seconds, I was gone.

My only explanation is that some aspect of mind -- despite every conscious choice -- was in deep denial at the prospect of death.  The diagnosis frightened this me out of myself.

Although I have never been bitten by a dog, I am scared to death of them, as I am of all living creatures, including myself and my own fragmentation in the long hall of mirrors. James Ward, a British psychologist, broke with religion as a young man in 1872 but found himself a bundle of reflexes over which he had no choice and no control. He said: “I have no dread of God, no fear of the Devil, no fear of man, but my head swims as I write it—I fear myself.” What do I mean by fear? Why I mean that thing that drives you to write—but let us step out of the foyer, and back onto the street, back down the road, and make our approach somewhat more slowly.

I could share a story or two that would step out of the foyer and deeper into my cluttered rooms. I prefer, however, the cacophony of the street.

But surely it is no surprise that fear arises mostly from within. A century after Freud, five centuries since Shakespeare, thirty since Job. This is something we have long known.

"Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals, dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh bristled."(Job 4:13-15)

It is interesting to note that this idea—fear’s being the ghost of pain, or imaginary pain—figures in psychological torture by the CIA; in fact, their experiments with pain found that imaginary pain was more effective than physical pain—poets, take note—and thus psychological torture more effective than physical torture. Here is an excerpt from their Exploitation Training Manual, written in 1983:

"The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

A shifting collage of images constitutes my past.  I arrange and rearrange the images: crafting themes, pondering possible patterns, generating self-referential symbols.

I imagine past happiness and hurts. I imagine future death.  Between and extending from these images, I imagine my life.

Thursday evening I had a conversation.  The conversation spawned images of how I might spend most of my waking hours for most of the rest of my life.  It was only talk.  The prospect is entirely imaginary.

Yet what I do with this bit of imagination will have some influence on future images.

"I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic -- with this linguistic reference for which I did not find everything that would have suited me -- and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real in the very form of the knot." Jacques Lacan, Seminarie XXII

But something seemed to be missing from my neat little formula; surely the dog’s face was important, too? This dog was eager and friendly, if a bit clumsy, but what if the next dog took a good-sized chunk out of the child’s face? I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the recurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides. And then he quoted Auden: “And ghosts must do again/What gives them pain.”

My mother was a fabulous entertainer, nothing gave her greater pleasure.  The summer I turned four she put me on stage to share the fun. Dressed as a hobo I sang, "Down at the station, early in the morning, see the little pufferbellies all in a row... See the station master, turn the little handle, puff, puff, toot, toot. Off we go!"

I continued to share the stage with my mother and others until I left for college.

Fast forward twenty, forty, now a half-century later:  Before an audience I seem calm and competent.  I speak or ask questions, even occasionally sing.  Inside my brain and guts are in flames.

In my late thirties I arrange to attend a reception in New York.  There are a few colleagues from Japan.  I'm introduced to David Rockefeller. We chat about the Rothko exhibit.  I sip red wine with a fellow alumnus of the Reagan White House.  Finally my target enters.  I ease toward him.  We discover a shared interest in the art of Muso Soseki. After speaking softly for twenty minutes, my assignment is completed.

Returning to my hotel room, I thrash in torment, never sleeping, as each word is recalled and found insufficient.

In my late fifties I host a reception in Washington.  Friends and colleagues crowd the room. One calls it a "wonderful event."  He is impressed by the "earnest enthusiasm" of those present.  But more than a dozen others send last-minute regrets.

I am embarrassed and regretful.  Again and again, there is a vague insufficiency.  Again and again there is pain.  Again and again my performance fails to meet expectations, mostly my own.

The shodo above is by Muso Soseki, the Japanese kanji says. "No Spiritual Meaning."

I don’t know if other poets have this fear, but if they do not, I reason it will only increase the anguish of the outcome if it one day passes into being. To pass into being—now there’s a fear no one ever had. No one ever feared being born, even when all those responsible for the event were fraught with fear for the unborn. And if I may segue to a child at the age of four, I recall watching her beingapproached by a dog that was, well, much larger than the girl herself. The girl’s face was astonishing to watch. It was completely elastic and changed from an expression of wonder and glee: Please come to me doggie and we shall play oh what happiness to be approached by you—to—in less than ten seconds—an expression of sheer terror: Fear! fear! doggie will eat me up and mommie is far away. As the dog slowly crossed the room, in what could not have been more than two minutes, the girl’s face changed expressions so many times I gave up counting. As she oscillated between feeling secure and insecure, it struck me that her face would probably continue to change, albeit at a slower rate, every time she was approached by a dog for the next couple of years, one day coming to rest on that expression that was likely to signify forever after how this human being felt about dogs.

I was walking the wastelands left by strip mining. A decade before I was born the flat, fertile prairie had been torn asunder.  Steep hills now surrounded deep ponds and muddy bogs.

The destruction of the land had softened over time. Slag heaps were hidden beneath tall grasses.  Rain, snow, freezing and thawing had broken the soft rock of the ancient seabed leaving narrow valleys scattered with milky mica, iron pirate glittering in the sun, and fossils of fabulous creatures.

Barely three miles from home, a twelve-year-old became Kit Carson or Stanley searching for Livingston or, in one Thanksgiving blizzard, Robert Peary making for the North Pole.

My dog Cleo and I were above "Dead Cows" (sensibly named for dozens of cattle skeletons stuck in the mud) when movement caught my eye.  He (even at this distance, almost certainly he) was carefully choosing a path across the flooded bottom-land.  Willows quivered as he grasped one then another to steady his step.

I had thrown myself flat against the ground on first glimpse, holding Cleo tight against my left side. But then from, maybe, thirty feet above and sixty yards distance I decided this was a friend coming to find me.

"Mark! Mark!", I stood and waved.  But the voice that replied with one indecipherable sound was deeper than any twelve-year-old.  This was not Mark.

I turned and ran as fast as I could, pine bows slapping my face as I raced through the woods, stumbling over rocks, sliding down flinty hillsides. The deeper, the darker, the better.

On the ridge over Dead Cows I was at the edge of my known universe. It was my purpose that day to explore toward sunrise.

I now know the original meaning of explore is "to cry out" or "to flow out".  I rushed into the unknown in a blur of green and moist earth spongy beneath my sprint.  When finally I paused to take a deep breath I was, except for Cleo's asking brown eyes, surrounded by the unknown.

I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean—what I think I mean—by “imbecility” is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel. It was a Master who advised that we speak little, better still say nothing, unless we are quite sure that what we wish to say is true, kind, and helpful. But how can a poet, whose role is to speak, adhere to this advice? How can anyone whose role is to facilitate language speak little or say nothing?

I have given my life mostly to banality. On rare occasions I have ascended to mediocrity. I can't claim to have consecrated my life to anything.

I am paid to move people toward vaguely understood goals. I talk and write more of possibilities than actualities. Most respond by wandering wherever they choose.

Questions are good. Questions are often all that's left after a hard rain of reality.  Gadamer argues:

"... the path of all knowledge leads through the question.  To ask a question means to bring into the open.  The openness of what is in the question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled. It must still be undetermined, awaiting a decisive answer.  The significance of questioning consists in the questionability of what is questioned.  It has to be brought into this state of indeterminacy, so that there is an equilibrium between pro and contra.  The sense of every question is realized in passing through this state of indeterminacy, in which it becomes an open question. Every true question requires this openness." (Truth and Method, page 363)