In which Narcissism Collides with Selflessness

My blogging career is off to a bit of a slow start. You see, after my great declaration of narcissism, I found myself suddenly needing to be very selfless: my wife gave birth to a daughter. She has nothing to offer. She has two states, sleep and discontent. And she sort of has the flat, wrinkled face and squinted eyes of an old Asian man.

And, of course, she has ripped my heart to pieces, and rebuilds it every time she peeks out at me with her grumpy blue eyes.

In commemoration, I’m going to share a poem—not one about this moment, but about the moment that my wife gave birth to our first child, Hudson. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with poetry; not unlike my relationship with blogging. I’m a bit of a skeptic (this is a nice way to say cynic) when it comes to life, which creates a weird tension because I'm also a bit of an optimist. Figure that one out, and I’ll owe you some sort of counseling fee. The thing about loving and hating something is that they’re not all that separate really; these are measures of intensity, not necessarily pure motive. Although I think I have a fairly liberal definition of the word love. Most of our feelings actually land somewhere on the continuum of the concept of Love, and where they get so conflicted is that each feeling is bent through this series of lenses: how we love ourselves, how we love those we intimately know, how we love those we don’t know, and how all of these sum together in how we love God (with an extra dose of how we love our parents, our authorities, and, well, the list goes on). So in that love and hate are one in the same, because if Love is the pinnacle of emotion, then we can only hate that which does some damage to one that we love—and often that "one" is our self. Or, we can hate ourselves in proportion to how we (perceive we) hurt those we love, even if that generic “those” is all of them encompassed in our understanding of God.

All that to say, I have this love/hate relationship with a lot of things in my life, because when I feel strongly about something that tends to be the result. I plan on exploring that tension in this space over the next however-long. Poetry, art, the Church and its churches, colleges, social media, faith, apologetics, responsibility, structure, the oxford comma, and so forth. But that’s not what I promised in this post, I promised a poem, and I also promise a future post that explores a bit my relationship with poetry, which is both the most beautiful art there is and the largest cauldron of bullshit you can dip your spoon into. 

The Weight of Blood 

It’s a hard thing to hold blood.

I’ve given blood and preached blood and

     eaten blood and spilt blood and

     shared blood and feared blood and shed

     blood.

Then I watched my wife

fair-haired and straining

muscles corded a

Viking shieldmaiden yelling

curses at Odin

because today is not a day for death but for life.

And she split herself in two to make way for a son.

He flailed out, purple and gray and red,

a gollum golllum cry for air for warmth for regret

and I wasn’t going to cut the cord until

and I never knew how to hold a baby until

and I can see the blood on the floor

and count the cost in stitches

because I am a father now.

And he cried until laid on his mother

and sweat and exhaustion

and tears and pain and blood

lift as my wife increases

as she weighs the cost of love and becomes it.

Learning anew: the playfulness of Updike.

I recently (well, a couple of weeks ago) Updike’s book of poetry Verse. It is two books of poetry combined into one, most of which was written and published before he began his string of commercially successful novels.

One of the facets of Updike’s writing that I’ve always admired is his unflinching adherence to ugliness, and his belief that within ugliness, we can find beauty. These themes run through his Rabbit series, color his short stories, and add to his most common main character: an egotistical, sexually-driven man. Death, divorce, drug use, and despair; these are not pretty items but they are true items.

Yet in his poetry, Updike portrays a vastly different personality. These poems are, in a word, fun. Spanning from an alphabet of poems—one poem per letter, each for one item starting with said letter—to a touching poem written to his daughter, who, like him, was born in March. And yet the biting wit, the sly cleverness of Updike remains. It shows concisely and cleverly in the following poem:

Xyster

“An instrument for scraping bones”
Defines the knife.
The word is rarely used—but why?
What else is life?

Beyond playful—or cynical—witticisms, though, Updike shows a patience for the act of crafting poetry. In the poem, “Yardstick” he writes five lines, each split into three sections—and each section containing exactly twelve characters. Equate the characters to inches, of course, and the poem is five yardsticks stacked on one another.

Updike pulls from headlines, from funny turns of phrase he hears, and from antiquated sayings that appear comically poetic to a contemporary ear. It reads more like Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstine than Updike, but even at his most lighthearted, Updike shows the same mastery of the English language that enabled him to pen some of the best American novels I have ever read.