Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver
Author:Mary Oliver [Oliver, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Essays, Literary Collections, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781594206702
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2016-10-10T23:00:00+00:00
5.
Poeâs work is exquisitely and opulently constructed; the narratives have a fascination that is a sure-holdâa quality that, for lack of another word, one might simply call entertainment. They are frighteningâbut not in the way that Kafkaâs âThe Metamorphosis,â for example, or Jamesâs âThe Turn of the Screwâ is frightening. In spite of the extreme and macabre symbolism in Kafkaâs story, both âThe Metamorphosisâ and âThe Turn of the Screwâ take place in a world uncomfortably familiar, and the stories unfold, both of them, in a terrifyingly low-key, unextraordinary way. They are, horribly and unmistakably, descriptions of life as we know it, or could easily know it. While Poeâs stories areâstories. Full of the hardware of the nightmareâgraves, corpses, storms, moldering castles, catacombsâand hovering always at the edge of tension and incredulity, they never fail to thrill as stories.
But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human recordâthat is, not words but a reality.
Poeâs work opens on this deeper level when we consider what we know about his life. Such consideration is a tricky business. In our own age such investigation and correspondence is, I think, grossly overdone; hardly a literary melancholy these days is explained in any terms but those of personal grievance. But Poeâs case is exceptional. Life-grief was his earliest and his deepest life experience. Not to wonder how deeply it shaped his outlook and his work is to miss something sharply sorrowful, and deeply valiant.
But let us consider the matter in yet another way. Poeâs inability to incorporate loss and move on was not a response born of his experience alone, but was also an invention, an endlessly repeatable dark adventure created by his exceedingly fertile mind. For Poe, in an artistically kaleidoscopic brilliance, does not write only about his own argument with the universe, but about everyoneâs argument.
For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poeâs narratorsâbeating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace), we come to accept lifeâs brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of usâthe part of us that adores another personâah! that is another matter.
In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view timeâs shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poeâs narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
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