The Hammock Papers: The Call.

21 December 2009

The Call.

From an interview Harrison did with Joseph Bednarik ...

Bednarik: There are characters throughout your novels who are either poets or failed poets. What is it about a poet that you find intriguing as a character in fiction?

Harrison: I hadn’t realized I’d used them that much. The interesting thing, and what old Joe Campbell talked about—I was privileged to meet him early in the sixties—is: What does it do to a man or a woman when they refuse the call? It creates a kind of explosive negative force in their life. Because they refuse their calling I can create drama with this negative energy in their lives.

Bednarik: Do you think it’s possible later in life to retrieve the call?

Harrison: No, not largely, because poetry just like painting is something that you have to give your entire life to—and that includes all your life. Those people who say it’s never late to start again are largely fooling themselves. They can start again and retrieve some of the essential integrity of the original calling but they all know that time moves quickly and they’ve blown it.

Bednarik: When did you feel that you got your call as a poet?

Harrison: Most definitively at about nineteen, starting at fourteen when I first read Keats. And Whitman and so on. But then really at nineteen it was almost a metaphysical experience: I’m sitting on the roof of our house watching the moon rise over a big marsh—

Bednarik: This is northern Michigan?

Harrison: Yeah, and birds of various species were criss-crossing the moon and I could see them clearly in silhouette. That sort of faux Chinese experience. Anyway, then I heard the call.

Bednarik: In a number of places you talk about taking your vows as an artist.

Harrison: Well, you do take vows just like a priest or a Zen student takes vows. What did Charles Olson say that was incredible? “One must only traffic in one’s own sign.” That excludes every other thing in your life. To me it’s always been important to belong to nothing, other than my marriage which is forty years duration. But you belong to nothing except this.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL