A couple of weeks ago I wrote about first finding literary beauty in Fern Hill, the famous Dylan Thomas poem that contains the lines…
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days,
that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand
In the moon that is always rising,
Well, because I discovered the poem during my own “lamb white days,” I knew little of the long view it represented. What I did know was that I, too, could go into a barn, or - since I didn’t have a barn - anyplace that had the diffused light necessary to make a shadow, raise my hand up, note where its shadow fell, then, sonorously yet casually (And if you think that’s easy, try it sometime!) claim the line as my own.
I might say, for example, when standing with a friend under one of the streetlights that encircle Tacoma’s Wright Park some evening, “We don’t care that the time will take us up to that crow thronged Douglas Fir by the shadow of my hand, or that we’ll be old and gnarly, too, someday."
“What? What are you talking about? There are no crows in that tree!” my friend might respond.
“Well, okay, yeah, maybe not tonight… But they do sit in it sometimes.”
Empty Douglas Fir or not, however, what I hoped I’d get out of it was a sort of 1960s street cred for being poetic, or, better yet, for being “creative!” I just had to be sure not to use that “shadow of my hand” thing with the same friend too many times. And that meant more than once!
What I am getting at here, of course, is that literary imitation, even literary theft, is, or was for me I guess I am admitting, a necessary if somewhat embarrassing step on a ladder at the top of which I hoped to find… if not “originality,” at least a kind of authenticity.
And that’s not easy! For years, even after my Dylan Thomas phase, I paid “homage” to great writers by borrowing from them.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Korea in the fall of 1967, I discovered the wonderful but by no means inimitable, Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō, (松尾 芭蕉, 1644 – 1694) and thought, “Since he’s been dead for nearly three hundred years, surely he won’t mind if I lift a few lines from the pages of one or another of his books.”
I mean, I wouldn’t care if someone did that to me in… say… around the year 2267.
For a decade my favorite Bashō poem was this, from a volume entitled Empty Chestnut (Minashi Guri).
Tired of Cherry,
Tired of this whole world,
I sit facing muddy saké
And black rice.
Who could it possibly be
That mourns the passing autumn,
Careless of the wind
Rustling in his beard?
With frozen water
That tastes painfully bitter
The sewer rat relieves in vain
His parched throat
(Translated in 1965 by Nobuyuki Yuasa)
My God I loved that poem!
In 1967 I was just the right age to embrace the despair of this peripatetic genius. I could feel it like nobody BUT a twenty-two year old American wannabe writer could, off on his own in the world for very the first time.
Oh the sorrow! Even a sewer rat couldn’t catch a break! Me and Bashō, man. Two peas in a pod!
But what was this “cherry” at the end of his first line?
I admit that, for a while - a bit like in the case of Juliet with her “wherefore” instead of “why” - I didn’t figure out that he wasn’t talking about cherries of the maraschino kind, but of Japan’s beautiful and delicate cherry blossoms… those that bloom and then quickly pass into oblivion all over Japan each spring.
“Oh yeah,” I told myself when I did figure it out. “By that he means the brevity of life. So I’ll just change ‘cherry’ to “life,” and make the poem my own… But wait, ‘Muddy saké and black rice’ aren’t in my experience, either, so how about… ‘stale beer and rotten potatoes?’”
Tired of life,
Tired of this whole world,
I sit facing stale beer
And rotten potatoes…
Not bad, eh? Who hasn’t felt that emotion during their twenty-two years of life?
Okay, I admit, again, that I wasn’t exactly happy with the placement of “tired of life” and “tired of this whole world” in such close proximity, not only because of those two “tireds”, but also because they meant pretty much the same thing. Still, it pleased me enough to write it down in my notebook, next to my lists of new Korean vocabulary words for that week. I was, however, very careful regarding who I showed it to, lest one or another of my super-literate Peace Corps friends know Mr. Bashō better than me.
I guess what I hope to convey in this short confessional, is that I was slow to find myself in myself, if that makes any sense to you. I had always been great at joking around, at making just the right ironic observation at the right moment… really, if any of the general requirements of good camaraderie were at issue, I had things under control. And that was not inauthentic, that was me, too.
But when it came time to be what the voice inside me told me I wanted to be: a person willing to engage in the hard work and longterm privacy, in the months and even years of public silence necessary to become a halfway decent writer, I didn’t find my footing until many more years had passed.
I therefore hope to live to be twice as old as Mr. Bashō did, because it took me twice as long to know myself.
I did pay proper homage to him, by the way. In my first novel, Soldiers in Hiding, published in 1986, you can find the first stanza of his poem… the ‘tired of cherry’ one, on page 194.
(Thanks to everyone who downloaded The Grievers’ Group from Amazon. I hope you are enjoying it, and even if you aren’t, I would love to know what you think. Today is the final day to get the ebook for $2.99, its special introductory price, so please go get it! Those of us with fading eyesight LOVE the ability to change the size of the font! Also, a dear friend told me just the other day, that reading my book, even on her phone, calmed a bit of her familial angst.)
Poppies open
and shatter
the same day.
--Shiki, as read by me when I was in my early 20s. (Among many others).
Just started reading your latest today!
Rich-san, I am trying to support a small local book store by purchasing the GG book with real covers and pages. So far, nobody has heard of it. Could you let me know when it bursts onto the literary scene? Sank you.