Video by Erick Janssen
Notes on a Writing Life / 36
April 14 2022
In these days of terrible news and so much uncertainty in the world, I was enchanted to get this short video, sent to me by a friend in Portugal. It gave me joy and I asked if I could send it on to others: so here are two people doing something beautifully, in harmony – dancing the tango at the edge of the sea.
In this short video, the couple are unaware of any watcher, unaware of being filmed – so in a sense it is a stolen private moment. I would like to say to them, whoever they are, thank you. Thank you for doing this, being there, expressing for me all the ephemeral excellence of being human; thank you for sharing your moment with the world.
This image, the dance, the sinuous interaction of bodies, the complete seriousness of the tango, seemed to me the image that I wanted for now. Art is serious play. Dance is both discipline and grace. What humans are capable of – the gamut of our capacities and emotions – is immense. Does it simply matter to choose, and to choose again? To write the poem, to film the moment, to insist that this, as well as that other, is who we are?
Writers, we have to deal with the entire spectrum, or are selling our readers short. Love and death – they are the stuff of the novel, that D.H. Lawrence called “the one bright book of life.”
For poets, so much can be encapsulated in a line, a turn of phrase, a suggestion of both fragility and strength.
The lines of poems that we remember become spells, to be repeated in darkness. “We must love one another and die.” (Auden). “I went out to a hazel wood because a fire was in my head,” (Yeats). “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver) “Sit, feast upon your life.” (Derek Walcott). “Let there be nothing on earth but laundry/ nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam/and clear dances in the sight of heaven…” (Richard Wilbur).
“Let there be nothing on earth but laundry/ nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam/and clear dances in the sight of heaven…”
These are some of my own talismans, to carry into dark places. April is poetry month, here in the US. It’s also, in Key West, the month of wildly singing mockingbirds and flowering trees that blaze up in the streets and ospreys mating on their high perches. A stunning beauty awaits us every morning.
Affectionately, Ros