TO BEN: AT THE WINTER SOLSTICE

TO BEN: AT THE WINTER SOLSTICE 1989

The shortest day is gone. Tonight the longest night. Things circle in my brain: Only the pen won’t write. We walked through winter streets in London yesterday and saw ourselves retreat to bookshop, gallery, hoping to find, I guess, a thread to lead us home, out of the labyrinth of chance, where art alone, or verse, or what you will, orders the universe: Only the pen won’t write. I should, I know, if Freud was right, resent you, Ben, resent at least your youth, the fact that I must wain as you must wax, resent the phases of the moon’s ever growing crescent lighting this longest night, resent that, in your prime, telling of how you write, should inevitably remind me of a time such things came easily. But no, Ben.

The bright, new, twenty-first century is yours: My hope for you: To wrest, somehow, from the chaos of existence, something .......

But how can I begin to say just what I mean now that the pen won’t write. There must be something else ‘beyond all this fiddle.’ Thus wrote Marianne Moore, who never ceased to scribble.

The pen won’t write, and yet counting the syllables in the fruitless dark, the consonants and vowels still comfort; as we make these hieroglyphic signs across the empty page, our evil star declines in impotence and rage. And so we still go on. The oyster does not form Pearls for future ages Knows only grit and pain Which nothing else assuages. Is this what Stendhal meant by ‘To the happy few’: Beethoven, dying, deaf: the anguish of Lekeu; and poor mad sad van Gogh, able to paint, not live; and Milton, old and blind, Keats young, so much to give. It seems God is not kind to artists, in a way, yet through them lets us find the past, alive, today:

We do not, when we look at Michelangelo, say that the work was done five hundred years ago, but rather, as we look, see with those seeing eyes, meet across centuries; as, rival in his time to Leonardo, he now treads the sky with him That bright blue Florence sky. Enough. I versify merely to make a verse. There is no rivalry. Contemporaneous the generations dance. Yet Leonardo asked: “Was anything ever done?” There are, I am afraid, no easy answers, Ben. A fifteen year old boy is shot in Bucharest, and I think of you, Ben, of how your life is blessed by peace, prosperity, of how fate chooses one to prosper, one to die, and that one thought alone darkens this darkest day.