seeing is believing: spots of time revisited
Note to the reader:
William Wordsworth coined the term “spots of time” in his great work The Prelude.
Here’s Wordsworth:
There are in our existence spots of time
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired.
Spots of time refer to an experience in the fullness of time. Time not as sand pouring through the hourglass but time as deep revelation of the world you inhabit, so much so that you lose track of the disappearing sand. A formative event is remembered with the feelings that shaped the experience. The experience is reactivated, relived in the mind. One reflects upon the past event, yet seen anew in the present–this is the work of the imagination.
Wordsworth’s use of spots of time gives him a way to “unpack” his memories by isolating a moment of consciousness seen and felt from the perspective of his present self. The past isn’t dead and gone, it is an interactive influence upon our lives and changes as we change. Wordsworth’s contribution as a poet is not inventing but identifying this process and also the language he uses to re-examine personal consciousness which he makes the subject matter of his poetry.
This article is titled “Spots of Time Revisited.” The format is Wordsworth’s, the life under examination is mine. The spots of time presented here, in prose not verse, start at age seven and end in recent history. Mine is just another human story with themes and experiences that will, I hope, resonate with you and call to your attention what it means to live in your own skin, to be human and to recall some of the important moments that have shaped your life.
Journey with me into three spots of time that have shaped my life and poetry.
Spots of time, I
Pittsburgh, PA, Chatham Village, 1957: A whole category of my poems is about spots of time in childhood. This is one that may yet become a poem and is a memory I cherish. I was seven, sledding for the first time without an adult, down a narrow trail at night, into the snow-covered woods surrounding our community.To be out of the watchful eye of parents on this new, perfect-for-sledding trail with only a friend on his sled felt like the bold, dangerous risk-taking of my television hero Davy Crockett. The woods at night possessed mystery and the snow that changed their appearance added to the exhilaration of being in uncharted territory. My Flexible Flyer came to a slow, full-stop where the snow, not yet reached by hikers, was too deep to pass through. I was alone, immersed in silence. Even the illumination of street lamps above failed to reach the depth of the woods I had descended to. Yet, the landscape was lit by a forest of trees whose branches were a filigree of white against a night sky held in the arms of a crescent moon.
My home was nearby but I had entered another dimension in which part of me, unknown before, was awakened and became self-aware. A strange combination of welcome and quiet presence greeted me and though I stood up and grabbed the rope to pull the sled to the top of the trail, I already felt a long ing to return. Or, rather a surge to stay and see more of this place so familiar, yet now so strange, transformed from thick foliage in spring and summer into lonely acres of naked trees in winter. Through them we could hear traffic and see the outside world–our neighborhood overlooking downtown Pittsburgh. The city, a source of great prosperity but also poverty and disease, defined by steel-making, was bordered by two rivers coming together to form a third–the great Ohio–each river braided by bridges as far as you could see and busy with barges carrying coal mounded as high as the house I lived in to the mills upstream, where long rows of smoke stacks billowed black clouds day and night.
What held me at the bottom of that hill was a spectacle I’d never seen before–the snow-covered trees and trails so different from the park where we usually rode our sleds. The long descent from the entrance of the woods to a waterfall where my sled stopped delivered me to an old place that was clearly the same old place but by the work of mere weather was no longer bare black branches and brown leaves but a shimmering silver reflection of the moon and stars. In my seven-year old mind this sleight of hand performed by Mother Nature suggested other wonders to discover–my mind skipped to the bigger waterfall nearby, to the picnic grounds and trails connecting them, what they must look like, what it would feel like to see them now. I thought of the small cottage on a lake where we vacationed each summer and the trails and stream behind it and the pasture above–decked in white. That nature could transform what was familiar, so suddenly, made the world bigger and strange. It was too much to grasp at once. The promise of it filled me with the thrill of risk tinged with fear like seeing the curve of the horizon from the top of a big Ferris wheel.
In the minute it took to reach the stream that trickled through the ice, I crossed over some meridian into a place that was within me and yet everywhere I turned to look about me. The silence brought everything close. Like the newborn who has not yet differentiated from the mother, my first-time encounter with our woods in winter transformed them into Mother Nature, with whom I felt intimately part of. The snowy woods erased my expectations of what to find there. Everything was completely new, I’d never been to these woods before, yet I knew they were the same woods I walked with friends and family. Emerson refers to becoming a transparent eyeball as he crossed the public green in Cambridge one wintry night. Startled by the glistening moonlit trees bent with snow, I was that naked eyeball, all-perceiving, seeing the world as if for the first time. Because of that night, I understand why the sage of Concord said, after crossing the green,“I felt that nothing could befall me in this life that nature could not repair.” The grandeur and power of nature, independent of human design or control–at least on this night–intimated goodness in its beauty and something like kinship in its undisguised self-revelation.
The surge to stay was to feel, as much as see, more of this world, or perhaps to feel through seeing more of myself. It seemed what was waiting to be discovered was already part of who I was, and who I was, was linked to the living presence of nature herself. Perhaps this is what Spenser meant when he said, “Nature is the greatest Goddess and equal mother of all.”
Spots of time, II
Ambrosia Restaurant, Elmwood Ave., Buffalo, NY, 1999:
Spots of time can manifest themselves in any experience to virtually any end. This memory was the catalyst for my desire to become a poet. Bob Bertholf, lovable and cantankerous curator of blessed memory, of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo and I, shortly after my arrival to Buffalo, met regularly for breakfast at Ambrosia, the best Greek diner on Elmwood Avenue. We were planning a program in the arts co-sponsored by the church I served and the Poetry Collection. Eventually, our meetings morphed into a private seminar in Romantic poetry. Then, one day, Bob handed me a copy of William Carlos William’s epic poem Paterson. Reading it provided a literary spot of time (or succession of spots of time), a world, a made-up place I entered every morning for the ten days I read through that iconic work.
Williams’ poem mimics the chaotic churning of the Passaic Falls in Paterson where the Passaic River continues through the city, wending north then south and emptying into Newark Bay. The poem is a vast slurry of history, autobiography, and current events, including Williams’ medical practice . The poet dismembers and rearranges the English language, its syntax and literary forms. The rubble that is left is a radioactive detritus, not unlike the fetid debris that gathers in the eddies of the river before being drawn back into the main current of insight and possibility; the whole enterprise free-flowing, obligated to no authority or dogma. It was as if Williams detonated and leveled all previous forms for what a poem was, cancelled all previous notions of what poetry had to be.
Not sure what to expect when Bob handed me the book, I found a mind-altering experience, a weird dream in technicolor with people and events cherry-picked from daily life mixed and matched in random order but upon re-reading ingeniously linked to illustrate some problem or solution on the poet’s mind. The effect was of a vista revealed by sunlight-dispersed clouds. The work pulsed with life. There was urgency in the experimentation, a quest for something important but not yet fully known or identified. “Beauty is the quest,” Williams announces as he defies literary tradition in his single pursuit of taking the life-giving pulse of the present moment.
What finally removed the blinders from my plebeian view of poetry and transported me into the pulsing bloodstream of Williams’ imagination was his response to a letter from Ezra Pound urging him to turn to classical literature for inspiration. His reply, indeed the entire enterprise of Paterson, was a body blow to Pound and his like-minded colleague Eliot–the reigning authorities and champions of a new generation of American poets. Williams translates Pound’s letter into the exact opposite of the syntax and sophistication Pound was urging him to adopt through a methodical reading of the classics. Williams’ reformatting of Pound’s plea spoofs then later ingeniously negates the notion that America lacked the cultural depth to produce poetry worthy of world literature. Williams turns Pound’s literary style into a rough-hewn, countryfied American dialect with phonetic spellings of words, unorthodox punctuation and spacing that violates any manual of style. In response to Pound’s urging Williams plays with and reformats the letter:
[...]That don’t necess/y mean making
reading matter @ all.
Enny how there must be
one hundred books (not
that one) that you need
to read fer yr/mind’s sake.
Re read all the Gk tragedies in
Loeb.–plus Frobenius, plus Gesell.
plus Brooks Adams
ef you ain’t read him all.–
Then Golding’s Ovid is in
Everyman’s lib.
& nif you want a readin
list ask papa–but don’t
go rushin to read a book
just cause it is mentioned
eng passing–is fraugs.
That Pound isn’t even mentioned here is not only a slight, but leaves his advice to stand on its own and exposes the presumption, if not arrogance, this general practitioner in a blue-collar town finds so contrary to his poetic philosophy.Williams’ confidence rejecting the worn-out forms of the past and his determination to forge a new, authentic voice in American poetry was the battle-cry that summoned me.
Then comes on the facing page titled “Substratum” a text that baffled me the first time I read it. In the spare language of a scientific report, is a long, vertical line-by-line listing–as if he is drilling to the bottom of the page–the verbatim of an 1879 geological survey of an artesian well at the Passaic Rolling Mill in Paterson. A 30-line inventory of geologic material found at increasing depths from 65 feet to 2100 feet at which point the survey was abandoned noting that the rock formations and soil content of England and Europe are also “found here” in New Jersey:
SUBSTRATUM
Artesian well at the Passaic Rolling Mill, Paterson.
The following is in the tabular account of the specimens found in this well, with the depths at which they were taken, in feet. The boring began in September, 1879, and was continued until November, 1880.
Depth Description of Materials
65 feet.................Red sandstone, fine
110 feet...............Red sandstone, coarse
182 feet...............Red sandstone, and a little shale
400 feet...............Red sandstone, shaly
404 feet...............Shale
430 feet...............Red sandstone, fine grained
540 feet...............Sandy shale, soft
565 feet...............Soft shale
585 feet...............Soft shale
600 feet...............Hard sandstone
605 feet...............Soft shale
609 feet...............Soft shale
1,170 feet............Selenite, 2x1x1 1/16 in.
1,180 feet............Fine quicksand, reddish
1,180 feet............Pyrites
1,370 feet............Sandy rock, under quicksand
1,400 feet............Dark red sandstone
1,400 feet............Light red sandstone
1,415 feet............Dark red sandstone
1,415 feet............Light red sandstone
1,415 feet............Fragments of red sandstone
1,540 feet............ Red sandstone, and a pebble of kaolin
1,700 feet............Light red sandstone
1,830 feet.............Light red sandstone
1,830 feet.............Light red sandstone
1,830 feet.............Light red stone
2,000 feet.............Red shale
2,020 feet.............Light red sandstone
2,050 feet.............
2,100 feet.............Shaly sandstone
At this depth the attempt to bore through the red sandstone was abandoned, the water being altogether unfit for ordinary use....The fact that the rock salt of England and of some of the other salt mines of Europe, is found in rocks of the same age as this, raises the questions whether it may not also be found here.
to the teeth, to the very eyes
uh, uh
FULL STOP
–and leave the world
to darkness
and to
me
When the water has receded most things have lost their form. They lean in the direction the current went. Mud covers them
–fertile (?) mud.
[...]How to begin to find a shape–to begin to begin again,
turning the inside out : to find one phase that will
lie married beside another for delight . ?
–seems beyond attainment .
On he sifts, through the putrid remains left in the mud by the receding poetic past, through the decaying debris in his quest “to find a shape–to begin again,” informing Pound and Eliot theirs is a dried-up literary tradition. Williams’ quest emphasizes the visual, the importance of seeing, not just hearing, poetry. If Williams was the literary underdog as a full-time physician and part-time poet which his frenemies Pound and Eliot thought him to be, he was having none of it. Dr. Williams became for me, full-time pastor and part-time wannabe poet, an inspiring role model. His immediacy, candor, freedom, and wit made poetry alive, relevant, and important.
His claiming his poetic ground inspired me to make some claim of my own poetic territory. Williams’ response to the expatriate Pound is his literary Monroe Doctrine proclaimed in a forgotten soil survey that he would not tolerate artistic colonization, nor march under the banner of a foreign king. American history and culture were as rich, deep, and fertile for the imagination as those of the old world. In fact, he was saying something more. Beauty is found not so much in the art of antiquity or Renaissance as it is in the everyday mundanity of life; in something so common we often fail to think or be cognizant of it; like earth itself, which holds and gives life.
This is “the poem searching for a poet and his own language” as Williams said poems should do. Paterson is the artist’s studio, a live recording session. There are cuts and takes that lead the artist to experiment in new ways.The material he works with is his own life. Where else to look but in the terrestrial layers, the substratum of one’s own habitat? Williams dug into local lore, periods of history, newspapers, letters, even took samples from his medical practice and marriage. The poem is the poet’ s vernacular; an odyssey of self-discovery; a wider, deeper awareness of himself and his world in real time. Authentic, alive.
The effect on me of this single work was seismic. Tectonic plates of emotion and intellect shifted in my psychic core. My life experience–good, bad, and ugly–held new fields to explore, were vistas behind the clouds of time and indifference. I discovered the god within me as Emerson urges us to do. Like Adam given the privilege of naming the new creation before him after God breathed life into him, I was eager to name my new world. I began writing what I decided would be my Paterson. The experience amounted to another spot (or series of spots) of time. It felt like that moment in the Book of Genesis when the Spirit hovered over the watery chaos before God said, “Let there be light,” like Williams contemplating the churning of the Passaic Falls before he brought Paterson into being.
Spots of time, III
The Pastor’s Library, Westminster Presbyterian Church, 2000: Writing my Paterson, I was a conservationist remembering and making inventory of my mental and emotional environs, from people and places that shaped who I was to the philosophers and novelists who illuminated my imagination. I wanted to listen to the beating heart of the universe in my world and find some honest, artistic expression in the right words to leave for whomever might come along. I wanted to put my mark on the wall of human consciousness to say, “Kilroy was here,” but, like graffiti, to say something bold for anyone who felt alone, to say we are not alone. I wanted to make even a ramshackle dwelling to respond to the hospitality I received in Williams’ mansion of poem.
My quest for beauty was not in a waterfall and river but in an American landmark, H. H. Richardson’s 1872 design for, of all things, the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. While the intention to create a humane and open space conducive to light is laudable, what preoccupied me was Richardson’s misuse, if not abuse, of Platonic ideals for his design. Rather than refuting Pound and Eliot, I was refuting Richardson’s remedy of Classicism for his time–the later 19th century amidst national rupture, racial turmoil, fiscal crisis and later paranoia aroused by the waves of eastern European immigrants. Richardson’s Platonic placebo gave the illusion of improvement to a society whose economic and political decision-makers ignored the causes and shunned the relief of profound social ills. Yet, his Buffalo asylum gave birth to the neo-Romanesque movement in American architecture which became the design-of-choice for public buildings–city halls, jails, schools, and hospitals–during a time when the only resources available to employ architects were public funds. Richardson’s shrewd marketing of public buildings put a happy face to quell growing social unease on human suffering perpetuated by greed and bigotry.
Richardson’s use of the circle, triangle, and square to design his structures evoked eternal verities and universal order. The great architect’s prescription for America’s ills was the stability of ancient Greece. Yet, during Jim Crow, the Gilded Age of robber barons, and the squalor of tenements housing the poor who migrated to urban centers and to the nation itself with hopes for better lives, Richardson’s aesthetic was a superficial gloss, if not mercenary. The poem I wrote titled “Up Elmwood Ave.” ends with a mute street woman, among several lost souls regularly seen in present day Elmwood Village. She dressed in white from head to toe including her face wrapped in cloth as she wandered Elmwood Avenue near the asylum. My quest for beauty led not to Platonic philosophy but to the dark side of American society and the societal pains of a post-industrial nation. Williams’ urging in his epic poem to face the reality of the here and now led me to face my new city as bleak and unjust or as bright and true as it was.
Writing my Paterson felt like using the pen Williams used with ink from a Passaic River of inspiration. The words, symbols, and metaphors I used inWilliams’ style–a flood of vivid moments tapped from my own memory and imagination–conformed to my own spontaneous sense of creative order. The gift of Paterson was freedom to create a poem without worry of adhering to any rules for poetry. My fight wasn’t with effete poets of the past; it was using the power of poetry to puncture the self-absorption of the Gilded class and impotent political will of elected leaders. This newly discovered voice tapped into a fascination with the mystery of words that had been waiting for me to give myself permission to give expression to. Often, I didn’t know what I was creating but simply recorded, moment by moment, the revelations of spots of time spanning my life, linking details as disparate as Tennessee snake handlers and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. It wasn’t a sermon, maybe not even a poem anyone would recognize. But it was writing unlike anything I’d known.
Eight weeks of euphoric experimentation resulted in a document I sent to Bob with whom I shared recent, faltering attempts at verse, most of it lugubrious and sentimental, before he shrewdly introduced me to Williams. His stunned voice mail still calls out to me, ‘You were knocked off your horse by blinding light on the way to Damascus. Welcome to the world of poetry!’ His allusion to St. Paul’s conversion were exactly the right words not only for my life-alter ing encounter with William Carlos Williams but for a calling that was distantly familiar from adolescence, long forgotten in the wake of a busy career, and compelled me to beg in writing poems of my own.
Williams’ great poem then a succession of other varied poets and a few, devoted, critical readers revealed to me the deepest reasons we set pen to paper in the first place. If self-reliance is, as Emerson said, to “speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense...to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across your mind from within,” then I had entered a literary self-reliance not unlike a second birth. Paterson twenty years ago emboldened me to see and explore the world of poetry not as an antiquated art form or academic exercise but as something essential to life.
Epilogue
Spots of time signify as much as anything the old adage that the journey is the destination.
We are here but for an interval. What ultimately matters are the present moment and the people and possibilities in it. Spots of time come when we least expect them like the nighttime sled ride of a child, or a book someone hands you or the sudden freedom to write a poem about something you care deeply for. They reveal the abundance and hidden treasure of our ordinary days and routine lives; they save us from worry about the diminishing sand in the hourglass and counter the threat of the abyss and darkness.