Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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photograph by dawn wainwright
“The task of literature is to describe our ways of understanding and misunderstanding our universe.” —Fred Chappell
A Last Glimpse of the Traveler With each step, divergent pathways open to the girl Who strides emphatically, attempting to outpace The empery of moonlight. One way wends To the snow-dapple mountain, one way to the river Where the moon stretches longwise on the water. Where, girl, do you fare as night extends? I go to every place my journey conceives. Why do you travel so, knowing not where? I go to leave behind the things that I must leave; I go to seek what yet has been unsought. There is a grove ahead wherein the shadows Clutch and hold the wanderer with fearful doubt; Ravines on either side yawn so vast and black Moon cannot fetch their depths with her long spear. So I have heard and do in part believe; Yet if I stood just here and walked no farther, All my destinies would wither, shrivel and decay, And I would have no part in them, not even As witness. I would give over to what is already over. We shall not go your road. We wish you well. I think you do not. I think you are eager to forget The very sight of me in my silk dress, with my bright hair Unbound upon my shoulder and all my happiness Shining in my face. Are you not cowardly? Are your hearts not withered and shrunken?
I admit that this is a dispiriting picture of the situation and it is not really fair to any of the parties involved. In the untitled sequel to the poem, the villagers at a later date strike out on the trail of the lonely trekker and follow her trace to a splendid place, though they are unable to name the kind of splendor they have been led to gaze upon. That poem remains unwritten. It has offered more difficulties than I had counted upon. But I do not despair. Those thinkers who stride so far ahead of the rest of us must be lonely individuals. Almost no one is interested in what they may have to offer and of those who are interested, only a very few are qualified to judge the nature of the offering. This means that the seekers must sometimes take themselves seriously. We accept as a given that they take their art and their missions very seriously indeed. Otherwise, they have no motive for their deeds. But it is a very different thing to take oneself seriously. There is a lot of the missionary – and sometimes of the messiah – in writers like Shelley, Whitman, Blake, and the others, and if they do not have a sufficient sense of self-worth, they are likely to be overwhelmed by doubts and detractors. “Arms and the man I sing,” says Virgil, and the first-person pronoun is emphasized, marking this poet as different from Homer who eschewed first person. Virgil is engaged in a task no one else has conceived or can accomplish. This sense of burden must make things doubly difficult. I know for a fact that if l allowed myself, when I sat down to work, to think, “Well, here is Fred the capital–P poet getting ready to indite one or two of his immortal phrases,” I would be dead on the spot from a mortal attack of the capital–G giggles.
We have said what we have strength to say. above left Fred Chappell delivering this address, with the Roberts
Award for Literary Inspiration plaque in the foreground (Watch the award presentation and this address on the event’s website.)