We spend our lives trying to see our own light, to catch its surprising refractions on the face of the world, to play in its waterfalling golden blue radiance until we are ready to lie down in the bright black of time as the stars go on spinning, their fractured hieroglyphics encoding the memory and mystery of being alive.
Sarah Williams — one of the five wonderful women in my intergenerational poetry group — offers a shimmering set of instructions for how to do that in her splendid poem “How to See the Milky Way,” read here by Rose Hanzlik — the youngest member of our constellation — to the sound of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” against a painting of the Milky Way by Étienne Trouvelot.
HOW TO SEE THE MILKY WAY by Sarah Williams
Travel far
from crowds. Leave
lit places that yellow the sky.
Bodies of water help.
Pick a cloudless night,
a new moon.
Find a place to rest your head,
perhaps on someone’s chest,
their heart keeping time.
Or float in still water
flecked with stars
rippling around you.
However you arrive
parallel to earth and sky,
settle your eyes in their soft sockets and wait.
Look up.
Disregard the march of satellites,
their plotted lines.
Linger here.
Drink speckled light
from billions of neighboring stars.
Some nights your life is like this.
Couple with “The Whole of It” by Hannah Fries — another of the five women in our poetry group — then revisit Ellen Bass’s lifeline of a poem “Any Common Desolation,” which has been an ongoing inspiration to all of us.
A self is a personal mythos — a story through which we sieve the complexity and condradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success — that affirmation of the self by the world — is the way it can ossifty the story of person, ensnare them into believing their own myth. In this regard, learning to live with your success can be as challenging as learning to live with your failure — both are continual acts of courage and resistance to the petrification of personhood into a selfing story, a refusal to measure your soul by the world’s estimation.
Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) labored at his singular paintings and prints in solitude, in penury, in obscurity for decades. When the New York art world declared him an overnight success, largely thanks to his transcendent account of nine months on a remote Alaskan island, he left the city and moved to a quiet farmstead uptate, then left the continent, returning to the austere solitudes of the Arctic to paint, write, and reflect on the meaning of it all. In a lovely passage from N by E (public library) — his altogether exquisite 1930 memoir of the year he spent in the far north, rife with wisdom on how to be more alive — he models that courage, recounting a thrift store encounter that stands as a scale model of the disorientation of success.
Fifteen years earlier, living in Newfoundland during WWI, Kent had adorned his doorway with a statue of a maiden he had found “weatherbeaten and neglected in the rubbish heap of a ship store,” which he had washed, sanded, painted, and bejeweled to restore her haunting beauty. When the time came for him to return to New York, he yearned to take her home, but could not afford the fees:
I offered what I could for her. But I was poor and it was little. So I left her there.
A decade passed. The gallery world awoke to the shimmering originality of his paintings and Kent became one of New York’s most celebrated artists. One day, he wandered into a thift store and there was his maiden, “hardly changed” — a ghost of the life that had changed so profoundly, yet in that moment Kent realized how hard he must fight to keep it from changing him, from turning him into a statue of himself. He recounts:
Out from among rare cabinets and chairs and clocks and porcelains, the frayed and mellowed chattels of decayed gentility, she stared — that sailor’s sweetheart — vacantly, as if the room, the city and the world were part of the wide sea and firmament that she was born to. And as I turned and ran to her, and sweet memories and almost love crowded and clamored in my brain and breast, as I reached out to touch her as I used to — suddenly I dared not. And I knew what changes time and affluence had wrought. And I reproached myself.
“Where did you find her?” I asked the salesman in a whisper.
“In Boston,” he whispered back.
So then — not even asking what her city price might be — I tiptoed out.
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion, predictable and perfectly self-consistent — the impossibility of that is the price of our complex consciousness — but a promise to own every part of yourself, even those that challenge your preferred self-image and falsify the story you tell yourself about who you are.
There is a peace that comes from this, solid as bedrock and soft as owl down, which renders life truer and therefore more alive. Such authenticity of aliveness, such fidelity to the tessellated wholeness of your personhood, may be the crux of what we call “the good life.”
That is what the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) explores in a chapter of his 1961 classic On Becoming a Person (public library), anchored in his insistence that “the basic nature of the human being, when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy” — a bold defiance of the religious model of original sin and a cornerstone of the entire field of humanistic psychology that Rogers pioneered, lush with insight into the essence of personal growth and creativity.
Drawing on a lifetime of working with patients — the work of guiding people along the trajectory from suffering to flourishing — he writes:
The good life… is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality.
He identifies three pillars of this process:
In the first place, the process seems to involve an increasing openness to experience… the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness [is] the organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of himself, or of himself in relationship to the world. These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess.
The necessary illusions Oliver Sacks wrote of are a form of that defensiveness — they help us bear the disillusionments difficult to bear: that we are invulnerable, immortal, congruent with our self-image — and yet they render us captives of the dream of ourselves, unfree to live the reality of our own complexity. Rogers writes:
If a person could be fully open to his experience, however, every stimulus — whether originating within the organism or in the environment — would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of “subception” whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or a visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be “living” it, would have it completely available to awareness.
The reward of this willingness to be fully aware is profound self-trust:
The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. He is free to live his feelings subjectively, as they exist in him, and also free to be aware of these feelings. He is more able fully to live the experiences of his organism rather than shutting them out of awareness.
Out of this “movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience” arises the second element of the good life: “an increasing tendency to live fully in each moment” and discover the nature of experience in the process of living the experience rather than in your predictive models, which are only ever based on the past. When you are fully open to your experience, Rogers observes, each moment is entirely new — a “complex configuration of inner and outer stimuli” that has never before existed and will never again exist in that exact form, which means that who you will be in the next moment will also be entirely new and cannot be predicted by you or anyone else — that lovely freedom of breaking the template of yourself and the prison of your story. Rogers writes:
One way of expressing the fluidity which is present in such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience, rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit preconceived self-structure. It means that one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it.
Such living in the moment means an absence of rigidity, of tight organization, of the imposition of structure on experience. It means instead a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality.
[…]
Most of us, on the other hand, bring a preformed structure and evaluation to our experience and never relinquish it, but cram and twist the experience to fit our preconceptions, annoyed at the fluid qualities which make it so unruly in fitting our carefully constructed pigeonholes.
By discovering experience in the process of living it, we arrive at the third element of the good life — a growing ability to trust ourselves to discover the right course of action in any situation. Most of us, Rogers observes, consciously or unconsciously rely on external guiding principles in navigating life — a code of conduct laid down by our culture, our parents, our peers, our own past choices. He writes:
The person who is fully open to his experience would have access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior; the social demands, his own complex and possibly conflicting needs, his memories of similar situations, his perception of the uniqueness of this situation, etc., etc. The data would be very complex indeed. But he could permit his total organism, his consciousness participating, to consider each stimulus, need, and demand, its relative intensity and importance, and out of this complex weighing and balancing, discover that course of action which would come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation.
What makes this process most vulnerable to error is our continual tendency to lens the present through the past:
The defects which in most of us make this process untrustworthy are the inclusion of information which does not belong to this present situation, or the exclusion of information which does. It is when memories and previous learnings are fed into the computations as if they were this reality, and not memories and learnings, that erroneous behavioral answers arise.
Rogers paints a portrait of the person who has braided these three strands of the good life:
The person who is psychologically free… is more able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without. He makes use of all of the information his nervous system can thus supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his total organism may be, and often is, wiser than his awareness. He is more able to permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. He is able to put more trust in his organism in this functioning, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the consequences of each of his actions and correct them if they prove to be less than satisfying.
He is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself.
It is worth remembering that anything worth doing, anything bound to earn its keep in the house of tomorrow, takes a long time, takes riding the troughs of doubt with unassailable devotion, takes balancing a clarity of vision with the courage of uncertainty. This is true of art and true of love and true of every creative endeavor in the great work of composing a life.
Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865–January 28, 1936) was the age I am now when he became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.” The wild, wondrous worlds he created enchanted generations of children and influenced generations of writers. They are why Jane Goodall became Jane Goodall.
In the final year of his sixties, not knowing he would not live another — how cruel and how merciful that only hindsight knows each last — Kipling began setting down all he knew about writing, lensed through the story of his unusual life. He worked on the manuscript tirelessly until just before his seventieth birthday. Days later, he suffered a hemorrhage from which he never recovered. His wife edited the unfinished manuscript and published it as Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (public domain).
Rudyard Kipling at thirty
Considering the Socratic notion of a personal daemon that Aristotle popularized — an “unknown superfactor” of divine origin that steers you toward right action by mercilessly flagging wrong choices — Kipling looks back on the first visitation of his daemon as a young, unsure writer who “sat bewildered” among possible paths to take until the daemon whispered, “Take this and no other.” (Dostoyevsky must have heeded a similar voice when he so boldly wrote to the general of his military unit, pleading to be released from duty in order to become a writer: “I am convinced that only on that path could I truly be useful.”)
Kipling stumbled down the path, looking back on his early writing as “weak, bad, and out of key.” But over and over his daemon goaded him to give things the time they take, often leading him back after a long lapse to ideas he had given up on. “Again and again it went dead under my hand,” Kipling recalls of one such abandoned story, “and for the life of me I could not see why.” But returning with a new perspective, which life always gives us by the mere accumulation of living, he would reanimate these dead ideas into some of his most beloved stories — a reminder that waiting is not a passive state but a creative act that allows time to anneal the essence of things and find the right shape of a devotion, be it to a person or to a project.
He recounts:
My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw. I know that he did not, because when those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.
But beneath this mystical conception of the writing process pulsates Kipling’s uncompromising pragmatism about the mechanics of the craft, one of the hardest aspects of which is knowing when something is finished — feeling the tap turn off. He shares his exacting strategy for arriving at that point and trusting it:
In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and “when thou hast done, repent not.”
Kipling’s relationship with his daemon contains a wonderful antidote to what may be the greatest danger of success for any artist — becoming a template of yourself — entirely countercultural in our era of sequels and uninspired variations on a marketable theme:
One of the clauses in our contract was that I should never follow up “a success,” for by this sin fell Napoleon and a few others.
Kipling distills the central tenet of allowing your daemon to serve you:
When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.
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