4-22-24 

THE BEGINNING OF FAITH

 PHILIP LARKIN—AUBADE

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

--The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And so; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

THE INNER LIFE AS A WINDOW

The title of Larkin's poem is a bit misleading. Aubade in dictionary terms is: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn usually as a compliment to someone. The tone of this poem is more like a dirge. Larkin awakens to “soundless dark” and there isn't any other musical reference in this poem. This is the third Larkin poem in a short sequence I am parsing and all three are windows into his inner life and his relationship with formal religion as well as how he is drawn to reckon with his mortality. Religion has a way of doing this for the appropriately sensitive individual. And, in some ways, religion begs questions about this tumultuous life we live every day and what happens when all of that life ends. What do we imagine? What about this life prepares us for what happens after it?

I am coupling this poem with a short book by Mark Doty, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. It is a memoir, a look at a still life painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem in the 1650s. His reflections, as with Larkin's, are seen through a window into his inner life. In both cases, however, there is a visit to memories and an effort to find some meaning in the granularity of daily toil. Larkin struggles with the idea of death, especially when “we are caught without people or drink.” His poem does begin in the early hours of the day, what seems to be the only connection with what an aubade is said to be. I do not find in it anyone whom he might be complimenting. In fact, the whole poem is a darkened landscape of mortal fears. There are references to: “unresting death,” “arid interrogation,” “dread of dying,” “being dead,” for instance.

Larkin imagines a place of “emptiness for ever,” “extinction,” and of being lost in this place “always.” He disparages the efforts of religion to assuage these feelings of horror and dread by pretending that people don't actually die. At different places in the poem he bumps up against what he feels is the finality of his physical life with nowhere else to go. It is the end of a sense-filled life where there is “nothing to love or link with/ the anesthetic from which none come round.”

And how does he respond to this dreadful situation? He relegates the “blur” of it to the margins of his consciousness. It is a realisation for him that no amount of courage or bravery or whining will save him from the final end. In the first stanza he awakens to the darkness of the day and later as it begins to get light “I see what's always there.” In the last stanza he returns to the room in which he is awakening to see the objects he expects to see and feels he has to make the decision to accept this mundane life with all its familiar objects and the work that “has to be done,” the very granular existence that we experience from day to day. He makes this choice to sound like a begrudging one, perhaps the most convenient default so as not to slip into the nothingness he imagines the next life to be. He doesn't entertain the idea that perhaps one can be transformed from one life venue into another of a very different nature. He does not seek any comfort from his bleak existence. Is he suggesting to us that in rejecting the darkness of death we are choosing life? Or is he preparing us, the readers, for just such a possibility by letting us see into his inner life? We, too, have choices to make about what our inner lives will tolerate when it comes to the unimaginable, the infinite possibilities that poets of all stripes have explored when they have considered mortality and death.

It is all too easy enough for me to read through this poem once and then discard it, thinking that its dark message that sits on the top of the poem leaves me with little to work with as far as enlightenment is concerned. But why should I expect a poet or anyone else to provide me with enlightenment? I try to reconcile with what I know and believe about this life and anything after it with what Larkin puts before me. After all, the title is about a musical form and there are references in the poem to light and the reality of every day life. Every day life is where all of us must begin, no matter how the monk, mystic, CEO, or UPS driver manages the day after arising. It is where new beginnings can also find us—or where we find them. To this point, I think Larkin's poem is his beginning and he leaves it unfinished to allow us to imagine what follows. In some way it introduces us to the exploration of Mark Doty and what he discovers looking and reflecting on a still life. I would like to think that Larkin's discordance is a prelude to experiencing some of the illuminations that capture Doty. Larkin's (the poet) life is a very still life, a dark one, but one with the potential for transcendence, as I feel everyone's life can be, always beginning with wardrobes, telephones, and “the uncaring/intricate rented world.”

It is at this point that I bring in the short memoir of Mark Doty, also a poet. His work explores ideas about time and its passing; the fragility of life, mortality, and death; the sensual life at its fullest; the functions of memory; and the meaning of objects we collect and carry. I found this book in some ways to be a completion of Larkin's poem (and the preceding two: “Church Going” and “Faith Healing”), an extension of an exploration and also a celebration of what living this life can mean when reflecting on the finality of it. It is a different view on an inner life that seems more vivid and hopeful, if only to find meaning in what we encounter by our senses. Larkin's “unfocused blur” turns into Doty's still life with delicious objects and color and light.

Here are some short passages from Doty's book that help illustrate what his inner life is witnessing. I include many short references because Doty's poetic identity brings to light and attention what is life-giving in daily life and in art.

“That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it—which will fail—will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay toward what is.

“That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.”

“And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving.”

This seems like a poetic way to describe how we reveal our inner lives and our personal substance, opening a window to the morning allowing more light to enter.

“To think through things, that is the still life painter's work—and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”

“Therein lies a large portion of the painting's poetry; these things form not a single whole but a concert, a community of separate presences; we are intended to compare their degrees of roundness, solidity, transparency, and opacity. They are each a separate city, a separate child in a field of silent children. They speak back and forth—do they?--across the distance between them.”

“The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.”

“At first still life seems so entirely of this world—a clarification and celebration of what is—that it can have little to do with mortality. But in truth, the secret subject of these paintings is what they resist.

… Everything in the field of our vision is passing. ...Here intimacy seems to confront its opposite, which is the immensity of time.”

“[And then there is]...the adult recognition that the things of the world go on without us, that the meaning with which we invest them may not persist, may be visible to no one else, that even that which seems to us most profoundly saturated in passion and feeling may be swept away.”

“The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets.”

“I am learning to accept the flux and revision time and experience in variably make, but I am also learning to love what I wish to keep the same, something that nothing in my life has taught me until now; learning, that is, not to let go but to hold on. I hold on to the mended, exactly right old platter, fixed in its place, cherished, singular, at rest.”

“What is it that such a clear-eyed vision of the particular wishes to convey? A way to live, perhaps; a point of view, a stance toward things.”

“A still life is more like a poem than it is like a portrait.”

“Maybe [Garcia] Lorca has it right—we want thing to wash us clean, we crave the plainness of the unmediated, the directness of apples. If we could live with their solidity, with the apple's clear distinction between inner and outer, how the firm shine and protective color of the peel wraps seamlessly around that fragrant, nourishing core, so that it remains unbruised by air, ready to feed...Fit to carry the dark central star of the seeds into the world. In this sense, still life is refuge, consolation, place of quiet. The world becomes bearable, apprehensible because so many elements have been subtracted from it.”

“But these paintings fill me with the pleasure of being bound to the material, implicated, part of a community of attention-giving. That is what we do with sight, give it out, give it and give it away, in order to be filled.”

“They [the paintings] cannot be generalized about without diminishing them, but I can report on their lesson, which is to remind us of the strangeness and singularity of things, and therefore of ourselves. Singularity, they wish us to know, resides in the physical, the particular, the seen; this knowledge can be looked at, can be held. Here you are, the painters say, a body in the city of bodies, in concert, in the astonishing republic of things, the world of light, which is the same gray world sliding past the boat, lapping and chilly, alive with detail as the boat pushes forward, slipping away.”

“Sometimes I think these paintings seem full of secrets, full of unvoiced presences. And surely one of their secrets—somewhere close to their essence—lies in a sense of space that is unique to them. These things exist up close, against a background of burnished darkness. No wide vistas open behind them, no far-flung landscapes, no airy vastness of heaven. This is the space of the body, the space of our arms' reach. There is nothing before us here we could not touch, were these things not made of paint. The essential quality of them is their nearness. “

“What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing—the object infused with the subject. The eye moving over the world like a lover. And so the boundary between self and world is elided, a bit, softened.”

“It [still life] is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we're everywhere. It is an art that points to meaning through wordlessness, that points to timelessness through things permanently caught in time. That points to immensity through intimacy. An art of modest claims that seems perennial, inexhaustible.”

“Someone and no one. That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of saying, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.”

“Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing....It's the same with painting.

Part of what that poetry is, I think, is the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us; you can look at the paintings and you can feel it. This is evidence that a long act of seeing might translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful.

Of what use, exactly? As advocates of intimacy, as embodiments of paradox, as witnesses to earth, here, this moment, now. Evidence thus, that tenderness and style are still the best gestures we can make in the face of death.”

This is a long way around the subject of Larkin's poem but the path is a way of illuminating what alternate meanings might be. There is no way for me to know if Larkin might have shared Doty's impressions of still lifes and poetry if he had extended his reflections about life and death—and maybe even faith. Certainly, his mood is dark and sad in its losses and the doleful acceptance of a life of daily toil without respite. He does not seem to share Doty's view of shared objects and what intimacy they might proffer. He doesn't see the dazzle of light in the same way. He does not perceive his own poetry as “the best gesture we can make in the face of death”--or does he? Is Larkin making the distinction, by subtle contrast, between the mundane practicalities of life and what beauty can be found in them if looked for, as Doty does in his wonderful little book?

At various points in my life I have become fretful of the details of the routines and habits of daily toil, thinking them needlessly tedious. I have thought: if only I could escape them, then I could experience the freedom I can only taste fleetingly when I am awake enough to sense their presence. But I see these points now as Larkin moments. I see now that they were an opening to Doty moments where being attentive to life and life-giving sustenance attested to the necessity of beginning with “what we know/ have always known, know that we can't escape/ yet can't quite accept” (Larkin). I have learned to begin with what I know of daily toil and its tedium in order to make a leap of faith to a place where “in a field of light/ we are intensifications of that light” (Doty).

Here we have two poets viewing still lifes in very different ways. Sitting side by side, each is a contrast to the other and each enriches the perceptions of the other. One is of melancholy and disappointment and the other is of illumination and transcendence. Human life holds all of this. When we look at our own lives what do we see?

Beginning with the Larkin and then visiting Doty's essay brings light into the darkness, as “slowly light strengthens” (Larkin). It seems to me that what Doty says about still life painting and poetry applies as well to faith, or maybe a prayerful life. It all begins with a recognition of what is present for us in just this moment and extends out into a wider world of impressions, perceptions, interior condensations, reflections, and countless opportunities to experience our world's objects and their intimate connections to memory and dreams. And this is the beginning of peering through or under the veil that shields our eyes from more light and new life, full of beauty as well as sorrows and joys. Philip Larkin has done us a favor, as has Mark Doty.