In response to a friend’s question: “What kind of Mark would you like to make on this world?”
I was selected to participate in a poetry workshop some years ago, with British war correspondent & poet James Fenton. He held strong opinions, no doubt informed by atrocity and explosion, and his work ranged from doggerel to deep, from limerick to libretto. His writing was always clouded by a shadowy lining, even when he was being flippant. I was riding my old BMW motorcycle to an event down the Mississippi river road, and he — not being much for tame avenues — thumbed a ride. Indochina, he said, rode bikes a tenth the size of mine, with three times the cargo; I had spent time on Java, so I shared his appreciation of smooth pavement, limited traffic, and 900cc of German engineering.
Rolling down out of the bluffs toward the rivertowns, I asked him over my shoulder — or maybe he offered behind my ear — his motivation for writing. He answered, shouting over the artificial wind and the drone of the engine: “Well, immortality, of course.”
~
Maybe that was a rhetorical argument. I wasn’t convinced at the time; and now, some years later, I am certain that immortality as motivation for anything has limited value.
No physical mark we make on the world is indelible, so if anything, it is a question of “how much immortality”. Shakespeare is going strong, though lately Facebook, rabid right-wing and frothy left-wing sound-bites, and the Duh of language has pretty much restricted his fan-base to the diminishing over-sixty crowd. So, even Shakespeare…
Extrapolate slightly (considering the span of ages) and the pyramids, like mountains, erode and will be sand again, and my lasting contribution will be measured in how I touched others, now, while I am alive, not how much I nudged the Earth up or down in its orbit, how I sped or slowed its revolutions, nor the height of a tower I build upon some (erodible) hill.
How I touch others, and how that touch ripples out (imperceptibly and irresistibly, as opposed to indelibly) to influence their next touches, in all dimensions, including time, including the dimensions we can’t see… that will be my legacy.
I suppose that guarantees my ego-name will not “go down in history”, nor will I claim a multitude of A-male inspired lovers; and the two wonderful kids I have been graced to accompany through my life, and into some portion of theirs, will likely be my only children.
Dylan Thomas’ famous line about “Not going gently into that good night” is poetic, but his life was not, and raging is not: it is just rage. I have faith that a word I offer, or an embrace, or an affirmation of another’s value (none of it my ‘invention’, but my pleasure to have been its conduit) will be received, and will be passed on. Somewhere along that line of giving and receiving, I will be taken care of as well.
So, what Mark will I make on this world? Words written in the sand, below the line of the tide.
Excerpt, “L’Ecriture Magique VII“, by Michel @ DeviantArt.com
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