In eleventh-century France, Bruno Hartenfast, the esteemed canon of Reims, took to the mountains. He and six other companions had tired of the moral disorder they had seen in their decades teaching at the Cathedral of Rheims, and in lowered heads and uphill steps, they withdrew. In the Grand Chartreuse, they sought Christ by kneeling in austerity, as the Desert Fathers had nearly 800 years before.
“Bruno then gave up all his assets, the honours associated with his office, the false attractions and the perishable riches of this world. Burning with divine love, he left the fleeting shadows of the world to seek eternal goods and receive the monastic habit,” as described in a letter to Ralph le Verd. In this act of simultaneous departure and arrival, Bruno and his companions founded the Carthusian order.
Their order approached God by solitude and contemplation, conducted at all times other than Sundays and feast days within a strict regime of labor and prayer without conversations. Monastic silence—across Christian orders—resounds from the Rule of St. Benedict, which states that “monks should diligently cultivate silence at all times.” The purpose of silence was to express their rejection of all but Christ, to tempt as little as possible the snare of reputation. By their shared daily solitude, the Carthusians prayed and worked unto the Lord. Bruno’s charterhouse in Grand Chartreuse and those like it were diligent, quiet hives. Some of the monks wove cloths, others copied and illustrated manuscripts, and all of them remained in their cells (“hermitages,” in their tradition). Meals passed through a slot in their closed doors. Praise to the Lord rose to the heavens from their robed and bent bodies, their still hearts.
The Carthusians call this living “the spirituality of the desert.”
The poet Robert Hass writes for who mourn the worst loss one can admit, in “Meditation at Lagunitas.” I once heard the poem’s opening lines and thought they were only a cute irony, wafting out from Ecclesiastes:
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea.
But leaving “Meditations” at the teasing of the “new thinking” overlooks the melancholy at the heart of both new and old thinking, the “loss” he names in that first line. It is an ambiguous grief which weeps not for the specific but for the general: “each particular / erases the luminous clarity of a general idea.” But, the reader might mutter, what is the general idea? What is the particular in contrast?
That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light.
The illustration of this bird springs from the Lagunitas vista with bright clarity, but the illustrated concept remains blurred. What is the lineage between the “clown-faced woodpecker” and “a first world of undivided light?” But Hass is a patient—if oblique—teacher. He layers another image atop his bird, “the other notion” that makes him grieve:
because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies.
What is meant by the word is dead at the word’s arrival. And Hass must mourn what has died, especially when his words stifle it.
I worry more and more about stifling my poetry and fiction with my nonfiction writing. In my time allotted to write, the essays and book reviews can and do swamp the other texts I most enjoy—the seedling novel and poems breaking the ground of a fetid greenhouse, which I write slowly and deliciously.
It is a Hassian irony that maintaining A Stylist Submits as a “writer and poet” loses me so much other writing and poetry. In proving that three-word designation with my reams of literary criticism, I fall from the “luminous clarity” of the novel and poetry which delight me. Make no mistake, y’all—at heart I am an aesthetic hedonist, desiring above all the writing that most pleases me.
Literary criticism does please me, of course, as does your support of the poetry readings, essays, and book reviews that I began in October. I’m more than grateful that one of the lines from this work, one of the strays whose resonance I can never anticipate, can surprise one of y’all with a well-gripped handshake. But my current timecard of nonfiction-on-demand will render me only a media company. And I am a writer, not a media company. The need for silence, for slow immediacy, is my most natural need.
Once Hass names its sources, he cannot escape his grief in his conversation nor memories. See how his original loss compounds:
We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I.
Signifier, beat your breast for the sign you had meant to signify. The more the poet writes about his concerns, the more they dissolve. The more immaterial the concerns become, the more anxiously the poet writes about them.
The joint signifier-signified relation that Hass mentions adapts the dyadic model of the sign schemed by the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. By this model, the signifier (“signifiant”) is the form of the sign; the signified (“signifi”) is the concept it represents. Together, the signifier and the signified relate to create the sign as a whole.
Pine, as the literal line of four letters, is the signifier. Pine, as the species of tree reaching into heaven but also as the longing for that which we love distantly, is the signified. Pine, understood as the tree and the longing courtesy of the four-letter line, is the sign.
Saussure described this model in his 1974 and 1983 editions of Course in General Linguistics, which are textbooks and thus of limited use to me and “Meditation at Lagunitas.” (Though I’ll admit that semiotics sounds like a drawn cello bow, and that Lacan, Derrida, and the rest are an alluring pack of loups at the door.) But his theory insists that the sign is “wholly immaterial,” because in Saussure’s view words have no value in themselves.
As someone here for the Word and the words, I can’t accept the immateriality of language. A coin’s metal may not determine its monetary value, but the coin still has a mass and weight measurable even when it doesn’t sit in my palm. Hass himself cannot accept this immateriality either, even as he drapes its melancholy over himself. He writes the past to find the inherent essence of its people, its sensations:
There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places were we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
Oddly romantic in its detail of “her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,” the reminiscence attempts to redeem the poem’s language by giving material essence to the lover its words signify. The poet writes to make “a woman / I made love to” real once more.
As real as the “childhood river / with its island willows,” as the “orange-silver fish / called pumpkinseed.” As real as he knows he had been to her, once. He can’t mourn the death of meaning rendered in poetry, for that is the death his lover, his childhood, and himself. Hass must continue:
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Written details form the woman rather than only signifying her. “[W]hat / she dreamed” remains unexplained, so that her dreams—secret to us, personal to her and Hass—live more fully beyond the page. Hass, in a quick and telling hinge, defines “the body” as sometimes “as numinous / as words” or as “good flesh continuing.” The body is materially alive and holy, just as words can be.
Approaching the final two lines of “Meditations,” Hass has restored the poem by resurrecting all it signifies. He can now return to the meanings he thought he had lost:
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
“Meditations in Lagunita” inspires reexamination, how could it not?
I badly need to restore what is signified by poet, by writer. All the on-demand, train-table nonfiction I’ve imposed in this newsletter for the last six months now feels like I’m chattering too much and too often, foremost from the anxious sense that I should. I did not begin A Stylist Submits to feel overexposed.
Today, I’ll no longer keep this pace. In simultaneous departure and arrival, I will take up a more diligent quiet. It is my requirement for meaning. Hedonist that I am, I’ll write only more of the texts that delight me: the fiction, the poems, the nonfiction whose forms flicker like the mirrored flame of their subjects. I don’t wish them to dissolve, that’s all.
I’ve written similar nonfiction before and will again:
I will not stop writing to y’all, though I will not be sending you work on the dot each month.
If I can hope querulously aloud, future essays and poems here will be like sudden lightning storms across blank skies. For the foreseeable future I will keep those future articles public for y’all. As I said, I’m not a media company.
As A Stylist Submits changes, paid subscriptions remain open and vital. I’ll always welcome support from y’all, because you encourage me and I need your help. But instead of exchanging money for articles and readings, I ask only for anything you can give.
Now is the season when I ask you to support the literature in germination, not just the criticism already in bloom.
Now are the years of silent, Carthusian immediacy. The signs of the writer and poet are, inherent in themselves, the novel and the poems to be written. My hermitage is open to y’all always, but by God I will spend more time there and less time chattering.
Thanks for being here, y’all. For the first time at A Stylist Submits, I don’t yet know yet when I’ll be in touch. And I ask you to trust, as I’m trying to, that that’s a luminous change.
In the meantime, I’m testing the Notes feature on Substack as short-form writing about what I delight in reading—Appalachian black bears, songbird fallouts, artistic ecstasy, the dead, and their poetry, so far. I’ll guard my exposure there also, but it’s a great place to ask me just about anything.
Writing is a slow process. I too feel the desire and pull to produce poetry every week, but I also know that I can’t rush the poetry. It’s more important to produce good quality over lots of quantity. Thank you for this thoughtfully written piece! It’s a good word and encouraging to me.