It's hard to stop kvetching, Playing in Any Quarter -- the tasks are many for each. Indeed, as I think about it, my grandchildren and children have many more things to keep them busy .... Who to love ... How to behave ... Who to become ... Who to love ... How to behave ... and ... Who to become... all in some chronological repeating order. I don't know how many times it repeats; I think at least twice. I remember the dizziness of this process in myself, though I'm still working on/with Marsha, my first wife, the lady who has arisen with me and whom I've arisen with some 16,500 times, not including naps!
I have, like other Players who have been Blessed/Cursed with making it to the Fourth Quarter, gone through many incarnations ... a Poet Laureate called them "The Layers" in a poem he dated for his 95th birthday. Stanley Kunitz, too, recalled: "I have walked through many lives/some of them my own/and I am not who I was/though some principle of being/abides from which I struggle/not to stray." He wonders: "How shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?"
For Kunitz, he had a "nimbus clouded voice" directing him to '"Live among the layers/not on the litter."' I think some Popular Psychologists call this "getting on with life." Kunitz can no longer be asked what he meant and his contemporary Archibald Macleish, once Librarian of the US Congress, already warned us "That a poem does not mean/A poem is," but I don't think Macleish, himself, was recommending against finding our own meanings in others' words.
For me, the call to "Live among the Layers" is a recall to remember all the incarnations ... of those we loved and of who we became and, perchance, to smile about how we behaved. Happy/Sad are the recollections.
Happy/Sad are the choices we make Playing in each Quarter.
There's that other voice that may speak to my kids and grandkids ... "Kvetch! ... Don't Kvetch ... but remember to Dance!"
No comments:
Post a Comment