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Speaking with my friend at lunchtime the other day, he asked a question that was seemingly simple, but all too mundane for us to have spent the time discussing the subject as we did. He asked, “what does the word “spry” mean?” I said I did not particularly know, but I have heard of it before; so I rolled a ball of humor toward him and suggested that it was the name of a soft drink product, but I believed that I was thinking of Squirt, a sour, lemony seltzer pinched with a hint of lime. So? Well the question was never answered, but I had been riding in my cousin’s car later on that night, on the way to his wedding rehearsal, when inside this tunnel a truck crept up on his Toyota, and with a peculiar, but ever so cautious look, my head crept to the passenger side window to spot this truck. On the side of this truck was the word “SPRY” in big, bold, red letters. I had literally gasped from the sheer power of the coincidence that had been laid in front of me!
Yet, at times I cannot come to deal with these seemingly minute, but all the more awkward perks of the day. They drive me crazy at times, but of course, make funny stories later to write about. So I took the boldfaced word as a premonition of the events of the upcoming day: a day filled with quick, agile movements due to the dancing and merriness that often accompany weddings. I have grown accustomed to welcoming each forthcoming day; I notice the day’s own idiosyncrasies that others hardly notice. The day has its own little perks of which many of us are unaware; although maybe farfetched to say it, the day is more than just the presence of light; it has its very own vitality and charm. But when the night comes! What to do with everything one’s mind collected during the day and what to make of its meaning! When night falls the aspiring writer must become a surgeon, dissecting the hidden and barely noticeable messages that many of us may take as trifling. The time one usually spends sleeping, the writer spends operating, poking at each idea and each subtlety of the day with a scalpel until each idea and subtlety is torn open, and out gushes a promising creation. Unlike the body, the mind is most active at nightfall, and it should be exercised at that time. The writer should not write during the day because he is far too busy burying the day’s subtleties, only to excavate them and bring them back to consciousness at night so that they can be incorporated into a novel or a poem.
Disregarding the presence of those around me this particular morning, I began to tune out to the rhapsody of my own voice- only it was not I who was singing, but rather Elton John. I continued walking, I had said goodbye to the pavement below, flowing through the open crevice of my legs, and spilling out into the already condensed, vast ocean of stone behind me. But this street, this road, whatever it was, made of cobblestone or brick, I don’t remember, was in front of me. Smoke billowed upward like balloon string coming from, what looked like, cigarettes protruding outward from the tops of homes, like they were chimneys. Goodbye yellow brick road, where the dogs of society howl… And it was Elton who had been singing, not I. Maybe you’ll get a replacement, there’s plenty like me to be found. Mongrels, who ain’t got a penny, sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground. And so it came up to me, this mailbox, and while passing me my eye happened to fall lazy, and so it was that it had fallen in love with an incandescent fixture, a peculiar shine that was illuminating with an ever so curious glow, twinkling all the more, that I had sworn it had winked at me! Positioned the way it was in the sun, my eyebrows had been strung upwards as if they were marionettes reacting to an incurably furious hand held by an imprudently vengeful puppeteer. Humbly walking back toward the mailbox I made out this strange figure sitting atop of it. Why it was a penny! So, I picked it up, and slid it into my pocket. So, being a penny richer, pondering the lyrics of Elton’s song, I thought: Oh, now I must no longer be a mongrel! But I was never a mongrel! I was never a dog of mixed or indeterminate breed! But maybe I was not so much an unidentifiable dog, as I was more a young man with a broken identity.
But this song, I thought, I could have sung it one hundred times more and I still would have been poor. Maybe had I sung a song that spoke of one hundred dollar bills, I would have passed one instead. Would it have made a difference if it were a one hundred dollar bill once held in the hands of a pauper, who met fate one windy day, and fate Himself made that bill fleet away out of that poor pauper’s hands before he could spend it? Or, would it have made more a difference if it were still a penny once sat atop the pinky finger of a royal king, who carelessly tossed it away, for it meant nothing to him? Who had owned this penny before I and what circumstances had caused it to make its way into my hands? It has been said that the literary work of contemporary writers has been molded by the art of their predecessors; since modern creativity is based on the work of those who have written before I, I suppose that it would not make a difference who wrote this poem or who wrote that book depending on the quality of his previous work. Let us say that this character, for name sake, Kelvin Archibald Fairweather, is a contemporary freelance poet in the preliminary stages of his career, who has just hired a publisher, and has published a book of poetry; his book has been put out for sale. When the aspiring writer approaches the poetry section at Barnes and Noble, facing the arduous task of which poet’s poems to read at an attempt to emulate them, will he purchase Kelvin Archibald Fairweather’s poetry book The Bearer of Childless Misfortune, or would he rather buy a collection of poetry from an already established, successful poet, say Sylvia Plath? The decision of which poet to buy from is of trifle importance, really; however, what would be the consensus if Kelvin Archibald Fairweather wrote just one masterpiece in his time as an artist, having never published another word of worth for the rest of his literary career, while still being relatively unknown except for his unique, solitary contribution to the poetry community? Juxtapose that question with the following one: If Kelvin Archibald Fairweather’s masterpiece were to be compared with the poorer work of yet a brilliant poet, let’s say Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who Virginia Woolf herself seems to be quite fond of , who would be given the upper-hand in this bout between the two poets? Whose poem is simply better? The following is an excerpt from To A Young Ass, written by Coleridge in 1794:
Poor little foal of an oppressèd race!
I love the languid patience of thy face:
And oft with gentle hand I give thee bread,
And clap thy ragged coat, and pat thy head.
But what thy dulled spirits hath dismayed,
That never thou dost sport along the glade?
Yes, he titled this poem To A Young Ass; jokes aside, I find it remarkably amusing how such a humorous, yet wholly farcical subject as that of an ass can be taken as a serious work of art. It’s as if the unfortunate, young donkey will be encountering the darkest years of his life in the ages to come for being too bashful to play amongst the other asses in the open fields of forest, and one of the most dearly regarded and influential poets of the Romantic era seems to care. Yet here is a small excerpt taken from Kelvin Archibald Fairweather’s work of brilliance:
By these starry dreams in which all the night winds do compass,
Tumbling toward rolling sills of woven cliffs that tremble at winter’s Mass,
I climb, do I climb, upon the hills beneath to kiss the winded breath of dreams;
And though not touched; but these hands that stray to them commend,
To love each more yet leave each less not blessed in fountain streams.
It is as if Kelvin Archibald Fairweather has literally sewn together each verse and phrase with a sharp, fine point needle and thick, vibrant thread. Clearly the subject which he chose to write about is so much more perplexing, yet curiously more abstract than the work of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have written that particular work with a vague tinge of egotism that tends to discolor the rest of the poem. Poor little foal of an oppressed race! Yes it is an ass, a creature, a donkey; I know it is an animal, but it’s as if the thing itself had had to pay for Coleridge’s caustic sympathy! “But, it is Samuel Taylor Coleridge! How could you scold him!” and how could I scold him? I know not much more than the next English student. It may be that certain poetry does not sing as it should! At certain times there is no rhyme, spirit, flow. It’s the highest form of art because it is fused with the affects of all the other art forms. One may write about the immaculate splendor of the great pyramids and a painting is created; the flow and music created in a great poem may resemble the sounds of the Moonlight Sonata; one may have very well written a scene in a poem, as Robert Frost so skillfully did in “Home Burial”. What other art form would be more beautiful than one that incorporates all forms of art? But, should a poet’s lesser work, though this poet renowned for his eloquence and beauty during a time when literary creativity was at its peak, be considered worse than that of a poet who has been known for the creation of just one beautiful verse? Well, will a one cent penny once held by King Charles, the first penny he earned after enforcing the tea tax on the poor citizens of Boston, be worth more than the one hundred dollar bill swept out of the hands of that pauper? With both the penny and the pauper’s money in my hand, I’d have over one hundred dollars, but the penny still is not worth more since it was held in the hands of royalty. It doesn’t matter who the money’s predecessor was before. It does not matter who wrote the poem if its value and artistic expression is worth more. In a similar set of circumstances, I find it ridiculous restaurants tend to frame the first twenty dollar a bill a celebrity spends there, as if it were encrusted with gold lining. If we were to recreate what we consider beautiful, brilliant, incandescent- whatever one wants to call it- we would be able to reconstruct literature entirely. It is deserving of a rebirth, for literature moves in concession with the times, and nowadays such times are accelerating at a rate at which not even man can compete.
Maybe you’ll get a replacement … and it was at the thought of this sentence I had stopped dead in my tracks, colliding with a wall that broke the bricks that fortified the confines of my mind; tumbling down they went, till I reassembled them, and began to make sense of the ideas that had been so erratically strewn in front of me. The young Kelvin Archibald Fairweather is to be the future of literature; he is to be the ideal poet of all former men and women poets who have failed miserably; he is to be the idealization of perfection that poets like Shakespeare, and the others had once been. There’s plenty like me to be found, and what a shame it was! To know that there are so many, thousands in the least, like Fairweather that possessed the same brilliance, the same genius! But whose hands would it be to chaff and sift the grains of that genius, so often excavated from the depths of one’s mind, decide to keep what is worth keeping, then toss the rest away? It is the readers, the writers, the critics that decide who shall rise like dust through those sharp, pointing vents that so often pierce the hopes of aspiring writers like deflating balloons, I thought! It is what the contemporary times allow! It is what the people find beautiful, and it matters not what the writer thinks of his work! But when could one possibly find the time to retrace his steps back to Romanticism and those times alike to vary his style in order to retain the classic beauty of Romantic poetry, yet in the same instance, be ahead of his time?
Never have I thought time travel to be possible except for when the sun melts away, and when moon freezes betwixt the shades of night. I begin to think about Kelvin Archibald Fairweather’s unnamed masterpiece, let us call it An Un-baptized Dream, and notice the importance of dreams in their entirety. Arising only when the night has settled amongst the bushes and brooks, dreams may become creativity’s important counterpart. But time travel, it is at the time of night when all is so dark, peaceful, perfect, yet piercingly still and serene. In complete darkness you could not tell if you were in Bangor, Maine in the year 2007, or if you were in Bangor, Maine in the year 1807. The night comprehends all thoughts yet dismissed as nugatory by the day. Nathaniel Hawthorne was three years old in the year 1807, and having been told, I believe that he too regarded the night as the most ideal time to exercise literary creativity, claiming that was the time that the “ghosts” of his characters emerged from the shadows of the dark. But about this nighttime and time travel and creativity and such, I shall try to write one night in my own backyard, maybe deep within the wood past my home, with nothing but a desk and candle to aid me; with the moon above, whose light is born from the sun reflecting its own rays off of the lunar soil, it will have shined its own light upon my own poetry or prose; those zipping cars whose noxious gasses fumigate the hearty air; all that is concerning the dark day seems to carry on into night, as did my finding of the penny atop of that mailbox, since I had not once thought writing about it during the day in order to relate a seemingly useless penny to the comparisons of two poets, one already engraved in time as a founding father of the Romantic era, who wrote one poorly crafted, unoriginal poem; the other, whose name no one has heard of, yet has assembled a beautiful array of lyric that fills the soul with a sense of repletion that it could not consume another like it ever again! Then ultimately comparing the lyrics of Elton’s song to Fairweather’s genius, and how, with the opinions of the contemporary critics and writers, that genius is attained by managing to fuse the styles of past eras with the style of the contemporary literary era; then ultimately, leading me to the mere thought of how one could attain that level of brilliance, which, as I have established, is writing at night. I have been led to believe that Fairweather himself had created his masterpiece by sacrificing the accompaniment of dreams consisting of marsh-mellow clouds and tapioca grounds, and, instead, residing at his desk with a pen in hand and a piece of paper to stare back at him, with the moon lurking over his shoulder. But, I have noticed that nothing much seems to glow brilliantly lest it is dark out; truthfully enough, I have not written a word of this essay a minute before eight o’ clock post meridiem.
Now I have assumed the importance of the night sky, and with it, I have fixed the identity of the young man, myself, that had previously been broken.
But no, it is not the common existential identity, nor the sexual identity, but it is my own literary identity I have found within this essay. I was no longer a mongrel without a penny, I thought, and that penny, as funny as it was, helped me find what I may have been meant to do. Abraham Lincoln’s face is chiseled onto the top of this penny, I thought, as I stared at it. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation; he freed the slaves. And just as President Lincoln once did for the slaves, this penny now did for me. Poetic, I thought, liberating me, and Kelvin Archibald Fairweather from the stagnancy many writers must succumb to. Now, we must be accepted by the rest of the literary world; we must hope they adopt us as the “replacements”.
With the sluggishness of night, we have been given more time to devote
To our own works of poetry or prose; now, maybe it is that time does not fall into the deep recesses of the past, but rather it becomes ossified like frozen ice. It is with this chilled time we are able to stray back and forth between literary eras, so as much as we are not obligated to overexert ourselves trying to keep up with the times, but rather, find a middle ground and a sense of neutrality within them. Thus, enabling us to excavate every solitary thought of day back up from the mine shaft of our minds to passionately pour out over a piece of paper. Time is what we have little of, yet it has been so honored and cherished by poets hundreds of centuries before. The former Roman poet, Catullus, makes note of the integrity in a poem by the amount of time one spends creating it; translated from Latin, it reads as follows:
The Zyrmia of my Cinna
Finally after the ninth harvest, and after the ninth winter from
which it was started it has been published, when meanwhile Hortensious
(wrote) 500,000 in one year.
Zyrmia will be sent within to the deep waves of Satrachos.
Grey Haired ages, will unroil the Zyrmia for a long time.
But the annals of Velusius will die near Padua itself,
and they will often give loose wrapping for macherol.
Ah, The Zyrmia! Or rather, the title given by Catullus’ dear fellow poet, Cinna, to his work of art. Catullus profoundly admires the time Cinna devoted to writing the Zyrmia, which is quite clearly nine years; yet all the while Catullus is scolding Hortensious, another Roman poet, for the excessive amount of poems he crafts in a single year, as if the art in itself were a race to create the most! But, as if Kelvin Archibald Fairweather had spent nine tedious years on such a work of art, it should better be known as brilliant! But I do ponder what time was spent on such a poem, not even a poem in its entirety, but rather just a solitary excerpt from something that may very well be larger; with this in mind I had almost been certain upon reading it that such poetry had not been written in the year 2007! And, if Kelvin Archibald Fairweather happened to write his poetry in the middle of the night, as I have stated is the most ideal time to construct literary art, his poetry should seem to have derived from the sweltering, and hairy, aged pits of past poetic eras! Rightfully it is so, for it is his own choice to linger as far back, or as far forward in time, as he chooses.
Which brings me to a, quite possibly, insurmountable question: Are we to advance the greatness of poetry by writing ahead of our time or many years before it? Had Kelvin Archibald Fairweather’s poem been so articulately crafted two hundred years ago, would it be regarded with the same opinion that it may have now? It’s as if the reader wants to lend the poem a pair of shoes so it can walk on water, but ha! as if it already could without them! As I have stated before, literature moves with the same swift succession as the contemporary times do. But what time exists, as we have already established, at night? None! Not one minute exists, nor not one instance can be reversed or revisited, for it is all one continuous instant from each end of nightfall! When the night pleasantly ensconces itself in the day’s armchair, the poet can write as if he were living in the year 1807, or maybe the year 2807, and for it all does not much matter where time does not exist. Judith Shakespeare’s incandescence glowed most brilliantly when she consumed all exterior impediments from the day, like that of a barking dog, or a buzzing bee; it all did not much matter to her; for it all does not much matter to the night writer, for he need not worry about bantering disturbances where time stops and where the day’s forgotten idiosyncrasies arise yet again to tug at thought.
Copyright 2007 Charles Andres Alberto
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