“There are two ways to live your life: one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.”

I recently met someone who is striving to further the idea of the technological singularity. He used an interesting metaphor to describe his work. He asserted that, given three wishes from a genie, the best possible first wish would be to wish for more wishes. Striving to eliminate disease, aging, and death, he said, was a bit like “wishing for more wishes” from life.

It was a clever way to describe the hope some hold for technology’s seemingly unchecked advance against death. But something about the metaphor did not seem right to me. In the end, I came to the conclusion that the best first wish would not actually be to wish for more wishes, but to wish instead to know the summum bonum–the highest possible good–for the use of the remaining wishes.

The next wish might, indeed, be for more wishes, or for the strength to carry through on that final summum bonum wish–or for something else entirely. Because I have not actually been granted this first wish to know that highest good, I can not know what would come next. But I do know that unchecked individual omnipotence, in the form of endless wishes, would alter not only the consciousness, but quite possibly the physiology of the wisher. In the face of limitless opportunity, the brain chemistry could change–causing one to become paralyzed by choice, go mad with power, or drop dead from a heart attack.

I accept that the sum total of my consciousness is a subset of all that is. Though the variations my mind can construct seem endless, I liken it to the same kind of infinity as the number of numbers that exist between zero and one. Although this line segment can be divided into smaller and smaller pieces, it is still just a segment that exists between two points. Another person’s consciousness might be represented by the number of numbers between one and two. But the set of all possible numbers, real, imaginary, and perhaps yet-undiscovered, is a far greater and more encompassing type of infinity.

Under the presupposition of an omniscient genie, the summum bonum becomes a calculus of that most encompassing form of infinity. Although the mechanics of this calculation are necessarily beyond any human comprehension, the results are knowable. This recognition–of my own seemingly-limitless-but-finite capacity for knowing, and the possibility of a higher good that is knowable but not comprehensible, is also a revelation about what does not seem quite right to me about the deus ex machina of singularity thinking.

I often think of the benevolent but (to her, at times) incomprehensible relationship we have with our cat as a metaphor for faith in a higher good. Why we bring her indoors at certain times, pick up her food bowl when she is sick, or transport her to the veterinarian’s office, is not knowable to her, in itself, as a benevolent act. In considering the differential between cat consciousness and human consciousness, and extrapolating this out to the differential between human consciousness and all that is, the existence of a highest good that somehow encompasses disease, aging, and death seems not only possible, but worth striving toward on trust.

Perhaps this is why, despite my great respect for science and technology, my love of the incomprehensible–manifest, for example, in my striving to find words that transcend words through poetry–is one genie that won’t be put back into its bottle, or downloaded into a microchip, anytime soon.

“Hope is the thing with feathers”

Try courage instead

This Thanksgiving, I was keenly aware of my gratitude for an absent member of our family. Had he lived, our son would have been four years old. I am truly thankful for his brief presence in our lives, which activated my paternal instincts, and gave me a deeper respect for my own forefathers. The three days I spent with him in the hospital, and the subsequent years I have spent coming to terms with his short life, taught me something important about how to live my own life. My wife put it succinctly one morning: “You don’t need hope if you have courage.”

We admire saints and martyrs (including the secular ones) not because they hoped for success in their own lives, but because they faced the circumstances of their lives with a sense of higher purpose, and great courage. And while they often had visions of a better future, they were prepared to act courageously whether or not they would ever see these visions realized in their lifetime. Likewise, our American ancestors, whom we honor by feasting at Thanksgiving, may have hoped for a better future for their children. But it was their daily application of courage that I admire most.

I was talking with a friend recently about how perilous it may have been for our current president to have run his election campaign on a message of hope. My countrymen now seem determined to ignore whatever progress he has made so far, and I believe this illustrates one of the dangers of hope. The problem is that hope is an expectation of something we desire in the future. If it is a personal desire, and it is not met, we feel disappointed, even disillusioned. And that seems to be the case with so many Americans right now–that their own individual hopes have not been met, and so they feel disillusioned with a president who could not live up to their expectations, no matter what else he has done.

Buddhist philosophy tells us that desire leads to attachment, and that attachment is the cause of human suffering. Hope is a form of desire. And so, instead of riding the constant swings of hope and disappointment, I choose instead to focus on the inherent value of courage. I can still be optimistic, even inspired. I can exercise my preferences in the present tense to influence the future. But I choose now to abide in the strength that comes from knowing that whatever my life brings to me, I will face it with courage. Because according to the most courageous woman I know, with courage, you don’t actually need hope. And so, I will take one more step along my journey with courage, by clicking “publish” on this post.

“Then what are we fighting for?”

There has been a furor over recent cuts in humanities education at the university level in America. Most of the counter-arguments for keeping the humanities alive play out the “transferable skills” angle. My wife, a piano teacher, knows these arguments all too well–that learning to play an instrument accelerates childhood brain development, and that music actually teaches certain kinds of mathematical reasoning (such as fractions).  Likewise, with literature, English departments often underscore the importance of “soft skills” like communication.

But in the end, this line of thinking only lends strength to the argument to, for example, replace courses in Shakespeare with more practical courses in business and technical writing. It is also not difficult to imagine games designed by psychologists to more effectively deliver specific, developmental results than learning to playing Bach partitas ever will. Clearly, the argument that the humanities can deliver practical, bottom-line results is problematic. Why, then, are they so critical in difficult times?

When I transferred out of the computer engineering department at a top university during the height of the dot-com era to study poetry instead, many thought I was crazy. Several years later, after the death of our infant son, poetry became the only language that made sense. It kept me sane when nothing seemed sane anymore. I credit my being here to write this now in large part to all the Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton I read back then–which opened the door to Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, and Li-Young Lee. I found a means to embrace some of the greatest paradoxes of living, and transcend human suffering, through their words.

It is the centuries-old tradition of humanities education that passes down the words of Socrates to us, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Humanities examine what it means to be alive, and human. And now more than ever, after market crashes, environmental disasters, and seemingly endless and intractable wars, we must ask ourselves: do we really have an excess of humanity? Is our ability to embrace the complexity of living with dignity and compassion at such a surplus nowadays that it should be the first thing to go?

Any text can teach you to read, and any topic can teach you to write. Only literature can teach you why to read, and why to write. Science can measure how well you hear and see. But visual and performing arts teach us why these senses matter. Do not support the humanities because they will give you the means to an easier life. Support them because they will quite simply make life worth living, no matter how difficult it gets.

Do not sign your child up for piano lessons because you want to give them an edge over other kids. Do it because they may wake up one day somewhere in suburbia, surrounded by all the symbols of material prosperity, with a deep and gnawing hollowness that negates every grade or promotion they ever won. And if, in that moment, a bar of Bach or a line from Shakespeare returns to them, they might just have a reason to go on being human, and alive.

“No motion has she now, no force; / She neither hears nor sees; / Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the birth and death of a poet-friend’s son. Today we finished packing baby items originally bought for our own son, James, to pass along to our nephew-to-be in Australia. No life is simple. But while most Americans are firing up their grills or caravanning to the beach to enjoy the easy pleasures of a three-day weekend, I find myself sifting through a tangle of thoughts and feelings that seem, well, complex.

The clinical term for a sometimes-debilitating sadness that persists long after the moment of loss is “complicated grief.” The Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide online says that “the disorder is more likely to occur after a death that is traumatic–premature, sudden, violent, or unexpected,” and the Mayo Clinic website cites “risk factors” such as “being unprepared for the death,” and “in the case of a child’s death, the number of remaining children.”

Loss is never simple. However, if I were to try to define a corollary to this condition, called “simple grief,” an illustrative example would be the death of a grandparent who had been sick for some time, and who had lived a long and happy life. Such a loss fits the framework of most cultural beliefs about the natural and acceptable cycles of life and death. The death of a child, or suicide of a loved one, however, do not.

And so, the complication, for me, became existential. Without the agreed-upon societal mythos about life and death to guide me toward resolution, I have had to come to terms with, and make meaning from, this experience anew. A lifetime of spiritual studies taught me that any situation, no matter how intense, could be used to learn and grow. Losing our son, and not being able to have another child, tested this belief intensely.

One of the great blessings James brought was my return to poetry. It is through poetry that I have been able to relate to the the complexity of this grief–and the complexity of life itself–on its own terms, without, as Keats put it, “irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Another blessing that has come from this experience is compassion. Val recently pointed me toward “Glow in the Woods,” a blog dedicated to supporting bereaved parents. But it is not only parents, but anyone suddenly plunged beneath the surface of life’s apparent simplicity, who has my heart.

Persistent and ubiquitous marketing messages teach us that life is simple–with simple problems and simple solutions (for a price). In fact, most of the messages we receive on a daily basis seem designed to try to keep us relating to life superficially–to mask out disease, suffering, and trauma, and keep us focused on cycles of short-term gratification. And so, there are few external reference points for navigating the deeper waters when something unexpected and traumatic occurs. Yet this too has been a blessing for me. I turned inward, to my own experiences, and the wealth of spiritual teachings I had studied up to this point, to guide me toward a refreshed understanding of what it means to live.

This deep disillusionment and reawakening was one of the greatest blessings of a complicated grieving. And so, while I agree that it is important to find ways to return to a healthy, productive life, and to reconnect with joy and hope after a trauma, I also see how grief triggered in me a more profound examination of the complexities of life. In this examination, it seems to me that the ways in which we, as a society, train ourselves and each other to blot out unpleasantness and to project an image of success based on consumption is, in fact, the real, and rampant, psychological “disorder.”

I keep listening to a musical setting by The Divine Comedy of Wordsworth’s “Lucy.” In the version I have, the accompaniment stops before the final word of the song, and there is something compelling about the vulnerability of Neil Hannon’s progressively-less-musically-supported voice pronouncing the final words: “with rocks, and stones, and trees.”

In hearing it over and over, I have come to see “Lucy” as a poem of complicated grief, stemming from sudden loss. In the final lines, however, the speaker-griever experiences a moment of transcendence: ” A slumber did my spirit seal; / I had no human fears: / She seem’d a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years.” Following this, he experiences the simultaneously comforting and heartbreaking awareness that Lucy has become one with everything, no longer a particular individual he can love, but instead a part of the natural process, “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

It is only through similar moments of elevation that I have begun to understand seemingly tragic events and circumstances–my own, or those of another–as part of the grandeur of the universe. Poetry allows me to relate to the complexity of human experience more on its own terms. Yet it, too, is insufficient–even as words are insufficient to capture moments of transcendence. It seems to me that the ultimate transcendence–the ultimate state of being in which all the contradictory, conflicting, beautiful, and traumatic aspects of human existence might be reconciled, and lovingly held, is what many religions call “God.” And so, a simple definition of God might be: the one who can abide all things, with love and understanding.

Wordsworth’s grieving speaker catches a glimpse of this consciousness in the final lines of “Lucy.” It is through facing down grief, in all its complications and implications that run contrary to the shallow surface of an unexamined life, that he reaches a state capable of containing, at once, so much pain and beauty, love and loss.

“The self that writes may need to be a delicate and protected creature, but the self that submits to magazines ought to be as tough as a rhino’s butt.”

Organization is one thing. Discipline is another. The discipline of getting up early before work to write poems has saved my life. However, if I want anyone other than my lovely wife to encounter these poems, I have to submit them to journals and contests. It is far more enticing to just write another poem. Or goof off on Facebook. Or stick needles in my eyes. In short, I’m still working on the sufficient thickness of rhino hide, strategically located and cultivated, to make this a dispassionate process.

I recently seem to have overcome one major obstacle. A writer pal observed awhile back that the more she writes, the less she submits, and this has been true for me–leading to backlog. So, I resolved to spend the several hours each Tuesday that Val is off with her own writers’ group to plough through worthy poems, matching them to potential suitors and sending them off on dates. Yeah, right. Human nature, anyone? The bigger the project, the more I stalled, leading to more backlog and a mounting sense of dismay.

The solution was to employ the same approach that led me through my MFA while working full-time–manageable bites. Even as I nibbled away at poem-writing (and still do) in less-than-forty-minute increments on a regular basis, I decided to set a ridiculously simple goal of sending poems to one journal or contest per week. And so, each Tuesday for the past two weeks, I have only sent a single batch of poems to a single journal. The consistency feels good, and, strangely enough, this seemingly trivial goal ends up being just about manageable in practice.

And so, I slip gradually into my Mr. Hyde (or is that “hide”?) role–steadily working away at the business of poem-sending. It seems trivial, but the truth is that I do, in fact, still live with a double mind. Mostly, what people see is my Jekyll-like nature in my working life. But still, nearly four years later, the grief of being a childless parent hits me suddenly, unexpectedly, in the middle of a seemingly ordinary life.

It can happen while reading a poem, too–mine, or someone else’s, on the topic of grief, or totally unrelated. And so, the process of sending out poems is one that seems easy, manageable, and even fun when I am feeling robust. But when the grief hits, the simplest tasks seem insurmountable. And so, by setting the smallest useful goal possible, I hope to keep putting my work out there, no matter what–finding strength in vulnerability, appropriate outlets for a sometimes double mind, and hope in knowing I will continue to show up to the conversation of poetry.

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

Recently, we began the process of giving away baby items bought or given to us for our son, James. Since he never came home from the hospital, they remain unused. Several months ago, we moved them out of the shed, into a closet at my parents’ house. But the time has come for another step. We are beginning to pass these items on to friends and family who are becoming parents. We have been unable to have another child, and are not in a position to adopt. And so, in the same gesture of giving that celebrates the new parenthood of people we care about, we also acknowledge it is unlikely that we will raise a child of our own. Neither of us ever thought it would be this way.

Since our young neighbors moved in across the street with their infant and toddler, I have been unable bring myself to exchange more than a passing smile or wave on this otherwise friendly block in our quaint small town. More than two lanes of quiet asphalt stretch between us. As much as I realize, rationally, that I sometimes idealize the hard work of child-rearing, it is tempting still to wish for a different life. And yet, over the past three years, I have had the opportunity to face down some of the deepest questions about my life, and how I must make meaning in it anew.

Perhaps a branch of my family tree will end with my name on it. But I have not lost the chance to influence my world for the better. Sharing my love of poetry is one way. As I slowly wake from the long dream of grieving, I am sure I will find others. For now, we are taking small steps toward the next crossroads–one bag of diapers, one box of clothes, one bassinet at a time.

“What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”

It is now a matter of public record that my company recently laid off 40% of staff. But numbers do not do justice to the sense of loss. Today I rifled through comments written in our software source code management system by ex-members of my programming team. Sprinkled among the technical remarks were little witticisms and the occasional wry geek joke, artifacts of camaraderie among the ash.

I have been cauterizing the wounds of loss with poems–more reading than writing lately, and catch-as-catch-can. I could not have willed my way toward a better book in this challenging time than Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire. Doty captures the fierce and sometimes terrible beauty of life with musical phrasing, stanzaic integrity, and the courage to look and look, deeper and deeper, into the human world. It is from loss that these poems are written, but their trajectory is towards awe–the hope that springs from amazement, the amazement that springs from deep observation, the deep observation that settles in the ashes of loss.

Doty’s carefully-measured stanzas seem to propel his poems like an engine–which is, after all, a series of well-timed explosions. Each little engine links together to drive us into the depths of the poem–be it the shell of a turtle, the smoky glitz of a cross-dressing bar, or the heart of a man care-taking his dying love. Doty is not afraid to hold with the poem until it opens up, frequently busting the page barrier in little epics that never feel watery, or strain to make a point. It is an inner fire he seeks in each poem, heating up line by line and phrase by phrase–his technique a poetic kiln. Thank you, Mark Doty, for firing your ovens, and plying your craft–producing stunning reminders of the beauty that can rise from flame.

“Publication–is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man–”

I must admit I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with sending out poems to awards and periodicals. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more of a hate-hate relationship. The difficulty lies on two fronts: practical and psychological. So, this weekend, determined to let a few more poems from my manuscript finally have a chance at seeing the light of day, I enlisted my wife’s help. She, after all, sees nothing unusual about sending poems she likes to journals with a similar sensibility, and waiting patiently for the reply. After all, they are not her poems.

For me, it’s been a morass of spreadsheets and angst. Though otherwise detail-oriented, I found rounding up the information necessary to send off poems akin to a multivariable calculus exam. You see, the mind-games and doubt have somehow transformed a mildly laborious process into something Kafkaesque. So, making the process simple and methodical has been a key for me to stick with it. Poems, after all, don’t publish themselves.

My process involves maintaining spreadsheets: of poems I have already sent out, when, to whom; and of journals that might like my work. I have recently taken to rating them by the degree to which I think the sensibilities of the periodical might match my own, and by my perception of their reputability. So, then I sort the list (sensibility first, reputability second), and ratchet down one by one, checking submission periods, guidelines, and the number and format of poems to send.

For choosing the poems, I pick from a folder on my computer of poems I both think are done, and are worth publishing. I have a a single, huge document full of continuous writing, and a separate folder with individual files of single poems from that document with which I would like to tinker before declaring them done. Once done, if they’re good, they make it either to a place I call “fossils” (i.e. stuff I might mine later, but not worth publishing) or the to-publish folder I mentioned above. Once the to-publish folder starts looking really full, a combined sense of guilt and duty prompts me to submit a few poems.

This is my method. I have tried to make it as simple as possible so that, like the tasks assigned to astronauts waddling through the vacuum of space, the procedures are so methodical and well-rehearsed that I can execute them even when gazing into the yawning black void. I’d love to know what other people do, what works–both practically and psychologically–to keep putting work out there for consideration. Do you view it as a necessary evil? A pleasant delight? Do you have some other system that really works?

Like it or not, in the end, sending out poems is a part of the process. Making that process bonehead-simple, and doing it even (sometimes especially) when I would rather, instead, be writing a new poem or, better yet, wasting time on Facebook, is an exercise in detachment, perseverance, and yes, you guessed it, continuing to hope.

And yet, I am heartened by the absolute flurry of poetry events passing through in recent weeks. A small but formidable group of women poets are hosting a reading in a beautiful backyard just around the corner from me. The names of two fellow students from long ago found their way to me in announcements of their separate readings. Others seem to be driving up and down the California coast reading poems associated with their recent prize, or book, or just because there seems to be a hungry market for poetry right now.

In some cases, the marketplace of poetry does intersect with the financial marketplace. Those poets who have managed to in some way cobble together a lifestyle of writing and teaching poetry are likely influenced by the recent economic downturn. Yet there exists a separate marketplace for poetry wherein supply can be measured in willing voices, and demand in eager ears. This marketplace seems to work almost inversely to the financial marketplace, in that difficult times bring us back to the necessity of art.

Writing poems is, in many senses of the word, “free.” And during times when it can be difficult to be generous materially, opportunities to be generous with one’s time and creativity seem to represent an outlet for hope. Attending readings, buying and borrowing books of poems, is generally inexpensive. Yet the payoff is significant. From a small investment of time, an enrichment of perception. Therefore, as the stock markets, and other markets, continue to rattle and roll, I say let us all invest our human currency–in reading, writing, and listening to great poems.

The chest, with all that it symbolized as an act of preparing for parenthood, we decided to set aside until we could find it a new home. That meant going through each drawer, re-packing the small hats and shirts and vests and the impossibly small socks. What got me was the smell. I realize that brand new baby clothes don’t actually smell like babies–it is, in fact, the other way around–but the two have become closely associated for me, and somehow my nose has secret wiring straight to my heart. I again recalled Keith’s post last year about the cap his son wore to keep warm, and how he and his wife tried in vain to hang on to what he left behind in that cap–his smell.

Moving the baby stuff offsite was also a way of accepting that we may not be able to have another child. Facing this has meant riding out a second wave of grief, with many of the same effects as when we first lost our son. In the past two-and-a-half years, many new people have come in to our lives–new friends, neighbors, and colleagues at work–who know nothing about our James. And so, I find myself, at times, living in two worlds at once. Occasionally, the disparity between what others can see, and what I carry inside, is brought into startling contrast by, for example, a giddy new mother, unaware of our past, eagerly accosting us about our plans for “starting a family.” I respond with a sheepish grin, and change the subject. They probably think this means I don’t like kids.

Life was never what we thought it was supposed to be about. A shed piled up with junk is about more than clutter. The name “shed” somehow seems fitting–as though I have cast off a heavy coat or, like a snake, shed a skin. Or reached, perhaps, a watershed in recovering from grief, choosing once again to direct myself, despite so much uncertainty and disappointment, toward renewal–and with it, a strange kind of hope.

Our nation likewise had the psychic fabric of its imperviousness rent by the attack on the Twin Towers by airplanes. It was an immeasurable tragedy. Yet other countries suffer such losses in greater numbers and more frequently; other families lose more children than those who see adulthood. How can we live, awake to such fragility, without, in the process, being crushed?

Poetry is a kind of faith. The audacity of poem-making, in a world saturated with throw-away words, a preference for television and music, and suspicious indifference to all but the ironic–is itself a profession of belief. To commit one’s life to this art in such times is as irrational as any religion. Truly, we write against the odds.

Tonight I have been reading the poems of Ilya Kaminsky–a Russian poet from Odessa, deaf since early childhood, who, a year after arriving in America with little English, lost his father suddenly. He writes about Mandelstam, Akhmatova and others who survived the un-survivable, writing poems for which they could be killed or worse. Here is a fierceness of faith in humanity. What we pass on to each other in such thin books of poems is some likelihood of greater self-understanding–and a precious likelihood of hope.