10-30-22 ENTANGLEMENT
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled—since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take—the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show--
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
If the writing of poetry for the poet is to gain clarity or to probe mystery, then the reading of poetry is to do the same things based on the reader's life context and the lenses through which he views life. Of course, I am thinking of my own approach to poetry. I have been away from poetry for quite a long time, longer than I can ever remember not having poetry in my daily life. In this era of my life, I have abandoned poetry even when it continues to come to me. This era of my life has included some unsettling and dismembering of assumptions and a desire for simplicity. It is an era that includes reality testing and dementia. There have been confusion and basic emotions surfacing which have surprised me and forced me to confront the me and the not me.
This poem by Lewis (1904-1972), taken at its face, is about many things, all involving attachment and detachment. It is about a father's feelings watching his son spin out of a cohort to make his way towards something that seems familiar but isn't on a familiar path. It is the father imagining how it must be for the son to be caught in the eddies of youth, like a circular course of water at the edges of a stream. And isn't this a good picture of what it is like to be young and restless? Yet, the father has a feeling of attachment to make the path for the son, to prevent “scorching ordeals” from harming his boy. But the father also knows that such inclinations are not possible, as those same ordeals will continue to shape his son's character regardless of his determination to change everything.
So this poem is also about change and what we are able to influence in the lives of others. This brings to mind a connection to the satellite reference. The connection comes from quantum physics in what is referred to as “entanglement,” the idea that atomic bodies will continue to have interactions with their siblings or parents even after separating from them at some distance, a distance that otherwise would seem too great for such a relationship. I want to think this is true for humans who leave the parental orbit or the orbit of relationship with someone else and wobble off seemingly independent but actually still dependent on attachments to the other. This speaks to the interdependence that Buddhists have taught for centuries but which we now translate from the behavior of physical particles.
So, there are the observations of the father of the son in this poem and in each stanza the father opens up his emotional responses to what he observes. Certainly, the idea of being “wrenched” and “drifting” give the sense that the father is interpreting the boy's actions in an emotional way, a way of disconnection and perhaps confusion. In the second stanza he nails his emotion with the tenderness that “pathos” generates and to see his loved one wander into a “wilderness” that is the substance of youth. In the third stanza, the father sees his boy as unsteady, “eddying,” and subject to the forces of nature that buffet all of us as we get older, the “scorching ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.” And the emotional gnawing of the fourth stanza is impartially resolved (as it always will be in letting go of what one loves) for the father in seeing what might be a grander plan at work, invoking God's love for those of us who are lost but moving ahead.
As I thought more deeply about this poem and having a need to understand why it was so powerful for me, I realized that I was viewing it through the lens of my life right now which is all about dementia. Dementia is a very real world situation that is incredibly complex and confusing and challenges reality as well as what context is operative on any given day. I have read and reread this poem over the course of a few days and it was only when I could hear its connections with my life that I have been able to clarify my own feelings about where I am right now. I give credit to this poem for bringing me back into the gardens, the lights, and the darks of poetry as a way to interpret what is happening in my own life.
So, I read this poem as how I or anyone else might view the dementia of a loved one. The one afflicted with dementia is a lost soul, buffeted about by forces that are oftentimes uninterpretable by the caregivers. They are being wrenched out of a familiar orbit and drifting away, all attachments eventually given up. And, yes, the person is wandering into a wilderness, unprepared for this journey, and stumbling along without direction. I remember someone referring to this wilderness as a different “country” with its own borders and internal functions. But the idea is that the person with dementia is wandering farther and farther from those to whom she has been attached in so many ways, yet maintaining some “entangled” connections. This is what can be observed outside the borders of that new country.
The emotional responses of the caregivers mirror those of the father for the wandering son. The poet says he has had “worse partings” but none quite like watching his son move away from him. The decline of dementia is very often slow, as it is now with one in my life. The untethering is gradual with dips and plateaus. There is the potential for wrenchings and eddyings but, for the most part, the loosening is often subtle. I as a caregiver have wrestled with emotions that have bypassed logic and measure. They well up unbidden and sometimes stay on the surface of things like paste. These are painful times and hard to dislodge in any way. The cry is to find some way to soothe the pain and for everything to be reversed, fixed, cured, and returned to a state of well-being. None of that happens except to note, along with Lewis, that what one knows as God can light the path of one walking away and to show that this is love expressed in letting someone go.
I am no mystic and no religious adept. But I believe, as Lewis does, that God is operative in our world and that his spirit is actualized in how we as humans care for one another. We are the translators of his infinite compassion and love and we prove his love for us by loving more deeply one another. By letting go of attachments; be they casual acquaintances or family members, how we identify ourselves through our work, our ambitions, our desires, our relationships to money or things, or how we reflect the fads and prejudices of the society that surrounds us, we get practice in untethering. It seems to me that this practice also prepares us for the ultimate letting go and that is to monitor our own aging and mortality and eventual death. We who will die but are attached to someone declining faster than us must manifest the love that bonded the attachment in the first place. This is the love that God has cemented in our lives and that will remain, part in the wandering soul and part in the caregiver. Our “selfhood” includes not only how we have become someone in our lives but also who we are in God's protective embrace. Each of us is someone precious, even as we lose parts of the self that have identified us in the past. In essence, we continue to shape selfhood as long as we draw breath—and maybe beyond.
Lewis has offered multiple portals of interpretation in this poem, clarifying the particular and opening it out onto a higher plane. I think the reader will always interpret poetry through personal lenses and that makes poetry the entry point for understanding more deeply what troubles us and what brings us joy in our own lives and the lives of others in our orbit.
