On Delighting in Permanence

The creation of art that lasts

Photo by t k on Unsplash

Once when I was a student I was taken, with a few others, to visit an elderly man in a small office on the top floor of the library. He was introduced as Albert Lord. He spoke to us for a few minutes, then played some recordings that he had helped another scholar, Milman Perry, make of singers of living oral epic in then-Yugoslavia during the 1930s.

Perry died young, but Lord became a professor, and their work (see Lord’s book The Singer of Tales) transformed our understanding of oral epic traditions. Because of it, we see Homer differently. We have a sense of the Iliad and the Odyssey as being created over time by the people who told them, within conventions of what could be improvised, and how.

The Homeric texts eventually became fixed, and the fixed versions are what continue to exist, and are accessible to anyone who happens to be reading this essay today.

On that morning at the university, I had no idea who Albert Lord was. I hadn’t come across the book before that, and he was too tired by our visit for us to stay long or get a complete story. But the experience of being ushered upstairs without explanation by one of one’s own professors; the sense of being offered something important even if one didn’t understand it; and the revelatory reading of the book afterwards, stayed with me. I loved everything about it, and not least how Lord himself, already frail, was still surrounded by his books in his office, leading the life of a scholar.

Does it matter, such a small, individual memory?

Not long ago I uploaded a bunch of such memories into the world: I wrote down my grandparents’ and parents’ most-repeated stories. They were the anecdotes, some trivial, some deeply important, that get repeated over and over in a family, with variations, like a Homeric verse, until they have worn deep and permanent grooves into the vinyl of one’s mind.

To that I added some of my own early memories — a part of the writing was adapted into last week’s essay on Bolinas — and a few other things as well.

I was astonished at how much I wanted those stories to live: to have a permanence, an independent existence beyond the flesh and blood of my own brain housed in my own body.

Photo by Paolo Gregotti on Unsplash

There is a poem by Philip Larkin titled “Continuing to Live.” Its final three stanzas go like this:

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
      To exist.

And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
      But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
      And that one dying.

https://allpoetry.com/Continuing-To-Live

I suspect that the point of the poem is precisely to evoke a counter-argument, to have us passionately say that an understanding of the self — and by extension a memory, a thought, an experience, a piece of art, a story — that reflects the mind of one person who lived once does matter, precisely because of that, because of the glory of the specific, the unique human being.

It is because of Larkin, I think, that I can understand how much I wanted to write the stories down. It stems precisely from some belief about the value of the personal, the specific.

About how the individual matters.

Here is another memory, adapted from the family book:

When I was two or three, I discovered that I could speak silently inside my own head. It was different from thinking in words. It was intentionally expressing precise words, in my mind.

I was outside when this discovery happened, on a sunny day, on a patch of grass that lay between our old blue-trimmed house and the sidewalk in front of it.

I left the grass and went onto the sidewalk and started to pace, while I tested the discovery to make sure that it was true. I recited Mary Had a Little Lamb over and over again while I went back and forth, the length of the house one direction, then a turn and the length of the house in the other. My brothers were riding their Hot Wheels in circles on the driveway; I watched them as I walked in their direction, and thought about them, but could continue to recite my poem even so. It was astounding.

When we were called inside I told everyone about this skill I had discovered.

The announcement fell flat. So I classified the experience as important only to me, and filed it away in my memory, where it engraved such deep and steady lines that I am telling it to you, now, a half-century later, almost exactly as I experienced it.

A young painter once told me something about his body art, which was intense and extensive and echoed the sensibilities of his canvases. I had said something about tattoos being permanent; he pointed out, clear-eyed, that they were not. That by definition the art that he had created to be inked onto his own body was his impermanent art. He had designed and had the tattoos done, he told me, at a time of severe illness a few years before, when it had not been clear that he was going to survive.

I think that it’s easy to think of our memories, or our grandparents’ stories, as parts of oneself, as permanent as a tattoo or a scar on a knee, until it occurs to one to think as the painter did, and to make a distinction. We might then decide, against Larkin, as surely he meant us to, that it is a glorious thing to externalise ourselves, to create art, to share what is specific and personal and allow it to continue to live even if it belonged just to one person once, as recently as oneself, or a grandmother, or as long ago as Homer.

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I’d like to express deep gratitude to

Ann Kennedy Smith

,

Mark Bramhall

and

Nick Hornby

for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.

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