The Process of Creation
The Process of Creation:
Thom Gunn’s “The Blank”
But I don’t want to write a poem about Gunn’s poem. It seems tacky, too obvious. Although an important part of the process of creation is imitation, in this case I don’t feel that I want to echo Gunn’s words with words of my own. I would not want to unless Gunn had provoked an honest poetic response from me. In other words, not as a paper assignment.
The idea that has struck me while I sit here at the computer, is to echo Gunn’s work in the most concrete way I can: by making this assignment a process of creation and a process of revision. I’m going to try to show the process of this particular paper, from the original draft to whatever it becomes. And maybe on the last page I’ll feel happy with it. I don’t know yet.
This draft is mostly just getting the ideas down on paper—it is not intended to structure them into a logical sequence, just to present the concepts I found in the examination of the poem “A Blank.” I always read the last poems in books with extra care, because they often attempt to sum up the whole book, in a way. So the following paragraphs are not connected, are often prefaced by questions, and the whole is shorter than the paper will actually be. That’s how I started the rough draft, with notes to myself. It seemed the best way; I didn’t know if the rough draft was going to be read or not, and it was a good way of covering my ass if the professor decided to count pages, or whatever. I know that was unlikely; Hank isn’t really that kind of professor in this class (maybe he is in other classes—I don’t know). In any case, I do know that what I plan to do now is to fill in those gaps between the questions and the answers I arrived at earlier, and to try to explain the things in Gunn’s poem as I think of them now.
In fact, it makes me wonder, to reread that rough draft paragraph over. Do I always read the last poems in books especially carefully? Or is that just posturing on my part? So many of the books of poetry I own are collections (that is, with poems in an order that does not reflect the order they were placed in individual books) that I doubt my honesty in having said that. But then, maybe I did think so at the time. (I’m not even sure that self-questioning of this kind is helpful—the statement stands, because I’m not going to change anything in the earlier draft. And my wondering stands too, because that is part of the process I want to put myself through.)
In fact, this feels really weird. Is it making sense? I hope so.
An introduction
Gunn’s poem “A Blank” is an exercise in redefining the concept of blankness itself from a symbol of death and sterility to a sign of opportunity. It describes the poet’s revision of the idea of love in his society and his society itself, because he worries about the nature of love as it is defined all too often. And the poem is in itself Gunn’s own contribution to the new ethos he is attempting to define for himself, the ethos his friend has demonstrated the practical side of: that of creating when a void is left behind, that of going deeper than surface affection to a guiding love.
My, how pretentious. But it leads me to why it is that I’m trying to write this essay this way. I suppose that a redefinition is what I’m after here as well.
I said that Gunn is revising the word “love” and redefining “society.” While I’m willing to stand by “love,” I question whether or not Gunn is really after redefining the nature of or the perception of “society.” Not in this poem, I think. He presents society to us as so much of a given. He talks of “Victorian porches,” of “a friend/ stopped on a corner-kerb…” He makes an allusion to Classical literature. These all fit under my broad definition of “society.” In fact, it makes me wonder whether any definition of society can be narrow. Certainly Gunn does not see it as narrow. He includes himself and his ex-lover in it, and I don’t doubt that there are people in this world who would label them enemies of society—or at least enemies of this society.
Love, however, is being redefined. Or so I said. But is it really? Or is that just an illusion of mine? I’ll have to wait until I come to whatever arguments I raised. (I haven’t reread this early draft before starting this. I thought it would hurt what I’m trying to do by putting me too much in the critical essay frame of mind).
So, creating when void is left behind is what I assert to be the central idea of the poem. Let’s see what I said next. I asked myself a series of questions, the responses to which formed the body paragraph of the essay. I was going to cut the questions, but I’m going to leave them in.
Gunn’s inadequacy—the grief it causes him to see the self-permission? I suppose the “self-permission I’m referring to is the one given in the poem: the friend’s permitting himself to adopt. Grief at what? His own inability? His own incapacity to redefine love as this?
Until this poem is written, perhaps Gunn feels an inadequacy at dealing with the various deaths that have taken place during the “year of griefs” that is chronicled with the book The Man with Night Sweats. I wonder if this is really what I mean. Of course Gunn feels that he has dealt with these deaths inadequately. At least, I would feel so. So let me retract that—maybe Gunn feels inadequate about dealing with the deaths of thousands, potentially millions of people, from AIDS and HIV-related illnesses. I think that it is likely that this is so. But this particular inadequacy that I must have seen before: might it not be the realization that Gunn himself could not adopt a child blindly? I went on to say, He even perceives one last grief, even though it is one that is a renewing one: that of a whole lifestyle and personal world demolished. And that makes me think that I had read the poem as almost anti-homosexual, in an odd, recursive way. The adoption of a single child does not the death of homosexuality make. Nor does it even indicate the death of this one man’s gay lifestyle. It may mean an awakening to less personal pleasure and hedonism and to a more conservative kind of lifestyle—and I, like most people, associate the gay lifestyle with hedonism. I wonder why this is so, and to what extent it is true? In any case, I know that people tend to get more conservative once they are in charge of raising children. They have a responsibility on their shoulders that makes them have to eliminate many of the pleasures of their former lives. Marriage does the same thing. Freedoms are curtailed, when you come down to it, and maybe what I was perceiving was my own imposition of this knowledge on Gunn’s poem. Rereading it now, I don’t see any textual evidence for Gunn’s supposed inadequacy. This one last grief that he refers to might not even be in the poem.
But I do get the sense it is. I feel a lot more unsure that it is what I said it was: the adoption of this child by his friend. But I don’t have an answer to offer in its stead. So I’ll let the original question stand: What grief? and try to come back to it. I wonder if I came back to it in the original draft.
The sight of his friend who is apparently denying his orientation and abetting the destruction of that lifestyle is perhaps this last grief that Gunn suffers. Ah, now here is where I made the flat statement (and I hedged it!!). It makes me wonder. Given the extraordinary number of gays who want to adopt childen and are turned down in highly publicized cases, is it fair to say that it runs counter to the lifestyle to want children? Why should a a homosexual raising a child imply destruction of the lifestyle?
I suppose I really did mean the lifestyle. But I have no evidence that Gunn lived the wild lifestyle that is the public image of homosexuality. If we take statistics as our guide, countless gays have raised kids—within the bounds of a heterosexual marriage. Clearly sexual orientation is no bar to the desire for parenthood. This doesn’t answer the question of what grief this is, but it makes me deny my prior argument as fallacious. There is no reason to assume that the grief that Gunn refers to in the second line, “one last grief,” has anything to do with the death of his lifestyle.Wait, not his lifestyle—the hedonistic gay lifestyle that may be only a media fabrication. That lifestyle’s death, it seems to me, is being brought about by AIDS, not by any form of parenting.
But it is a grief which forces a re-evaluation of itself, for the friend’s action is clearly not one that is destructive, but rather creative. Now this statement I agree with, to the extent that creativity and the creative (and also the continuative, to coin a term) impulse seems to be a key to this poem. Of course, the statement says nothing. Let me quote from the first stanza of the poem:
The year of griefs being through, they had to merge
In one last grief, with one last property:
To view itself like loosened cloud lose edge,
And pull apart, and leave a voided sky.
That says, as clear as day as far as I’m concerned, that a revision and expurgation of grief is going on. So my bold statement in the rough draft was no great shakes. What did I follow it with? An explanation, I hope.
The friend is “visibly tugged on by his decision,” we are told; but Gunn also is tugged upon, and the syntax of the sentence makes it applicable to either of the two men. Let me quote the actual part of the poem referred to. “Now visibly tugged on by his decision,/ Wayward and eager.” It reads like only half of a sentence. Yes, it can apply to either to the poet or to the friend. The child is the physical manifestation of the decision the friend has made. And is pulling on his hand, of course. So there’s one sense of it.
But this decision also tugs on Gunn, who sees that this choice does not deny the lifestyle that they have led, but rather is an extension of it. The previous features of love, “—Eros playing, features undisclosed—” have become concrete and specific and not as casual as the meetings he has had in the past with Gunn.
Okay, so I’m adducing as evidence of Gunn’s lifestyle the fact that he says he knows this man only in terms of bedroom smiles. It raises the question of whether this is a valid criterion. On any given night there are enough one-night-stands going on in this world that it seems ludicrous to allege that a wild and crazy lifestyle is being led just because a relationship is referred to as “certain passages.” I also seem to be condemning that lifestyle between the lines—and I don’t really have any right to do that. Just because I have never understood—in fact, precisely because I have never understood—the mentality that lead to one night stands, I cannot condemn it. Sort of like in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, where you can’t kill anything unless you grok it first. But I still see the point I was trying to make: clearly the questions I’m asking myself here are the ideas Gunn was dealing with.
The next sentence was a free floating one that wasn’t attached to any particular argument in the poem. I had planned to extend the idea behind it into a paragraph, but I think that would probably have meant padding it. But the sentiment is “the same melody” and in that belief Gunn transcends his own void and writes the poem. It sounds very poetic, but considering that I hadn’t defined any of the terms in it yet, it seems that I was jumping the gun. Maybe I’ll come back to the idea.
So why does Gunn grieve in the first stanza? Oh—here I am coming back to the first question. There have been griefs which we have learned about through the past book—deaths of friends and lovers, tests of endurance with long painful demises. The placement of this poem is not careless—it shares the job of a couplet in a sonnet in that it must cap the book as a whole. So why should it begin with grief? Well, it serves as a grief that can look back over all the griefs that came before. In that it is an all encompassing grave but vague grief. A sort of meditation on the universe that can do such things.
This still makes sense to me. The poem follows “Death’s Door” in the book, and “Death’s Door” is a remarkably somber poem, one that portrays death as a form of amnesia. It is a wonderful touch and a very traditional touch to end the book on a note of redemption. It seems to me that amnesia is an excellent metaphor to describe the AIDS epidemic, for the victims of this plague are often forgotten, marginalized, and ignored. So I can certainly still see the poem as a final couplet on an enormous sonnet.
But it also is an acknowledgement of a slate wiped clean, for that is the metaphorical situation of the man as the poet stands revealed to us. A man who has lost so many of his friendships and so much of the insularity and safety of his world that to go on is to start over, to have to redefine the lifestyle and the world as he knows it. I’m back to the lifestyle. Why do I keep coming back to it? Does it bother me so much? I grant that the poet has to redefine the world he lives in. We have all had to redefine our worlds when great events in our lives overtake us. For me, these events have included the deaths of people I have known, moving, going to college, and getting married. Certainly the deaths of all these people that Thom Gunn has known must have redefined his world.I will accept the grief as being the loss of an innocence of sorts. The whole book can be read as a book of a new maturity in many ways. Sex becomes spasm, and many “will be’s” become “would have beens,” as in “To a Dead Graduate Student.”
A lesser grief may be his seeing the way in which the friend starts over—his own way, perhaps one not to be embraced by Gunn: in fact, one definitely not to be embraced by Gunn, for as the poem shows us, Gunn’s way of starting over is this book itself and the way it fills a blank page so admirably, so all-encompassingly lovingly.
So all these could be the sorrow of Gunn. Of course, the primary must be the many deaths and the destruction of his world, characterized as a loosened cloud: not clouds in the general, but a very specific cloud that in examining itself disappears. The most important thing is that Gunn sees a void left behind, a blank. It is blankness itself that undergoes a complete revision in the poem.
Revision. That is one of the things that I now realize fascinates me about Gunn’s poetry. Today I was talking with my creative writing professor, and I was telling her how one of the typical things I try to do in my own work is to add a few lines at the end that revise the sense of the poem as a whole, rather than recapitulating. And the idea that Gunn is working with this same idea intrigues me. I don’t think I pursued it that much in the rough draft. I talked about it a lot in my journal, as I recall, particularly the redefinition of “lesbian” in Grahn’s work.
And redefining blankness is mentioned too. Well, that isn’t really that much of a leap, I suppose. Although in some waysI wonder about it, because Gunn uses the word “void,” and while I associate “blank” with potential, I can’t say the same thing for “void.”
This is turning out longer than I thought…
The question of fertility; the ultimate fertility of blank pages
For Gunn, the ultimate solution is not to raise a child. There is no indication that he is necessarily suited to it. Is there any indication that he is unsuited to it? I don’t think so… .but it is true that he does not make this choice, even given an example to follow. I think the draft said before that the poems themselves stand as his metaphorical adoption. He cannot perhaps make the leap from his sort of love until this “year of griefs” to the love that is needed. “Until this year of griefs”? I cannot judge, but it seems to me that it’s doubtful that Gunn really was incapable of what we often call “higher love” until he experienced the deaths of so many friends.
After all, he has loved in bedrooms without knowing the other well: that thing set before us in this poem as a gentle evil, a malaise that harms only in its incompleteness, not in any false sense of immorality.
Now that’s interesting. Is that Gunn’s perception of it, or mine? I certainly regard it as a gentle evil. Shallow love is better than no love. As long as the people involved recognize each other as people and not as just objects, I see little wrong with one-night-stands. Just because I myself feel that I would need a greater emotional commitment doesn’t mean I condemn the idea. I do feel that there are strong pragmatic reasons not to engage in sex with lots of different people whom you don’t know well, but I still think that to explain that as an ethical problem is to falsify the facts.
I’m not sure that Gunn regards it this way. “Eros playing, features undisclosed” is not overtly condemned in the poem. I’m beginning to think that the assumption that it is condemned in the subtext of the poem was the general assumption and error inthe rough draft.
First stanza speaks of a grief to cap all the other griefs of a year: but it is a special grief, one that renews itself and re-examines itself. Didn’t I say this before? The special gift of this grief is that it will “view itself like loosened cloud lose edge,/ And pull apart, and leave a voided sky.” A limitless view, an open horizon. Perhaps it seems sterile, but as the poem reveals, nothing is as fertile as a blank. Especially to an artist, what is more fertile than a blank page?
Thus Gunn’s own response to the blank that he sees his world made into is to populate it—in his case with poems.
I have been working on a poem called “Elegies” that speaks to this concern. Actually, I wonder how much it does speak to this. In it I state that the greatest works are those of human hands, and I mean that in the broadest sense. I include children, songs, a building, even just a sense of wellbeing left behind by the dead. Vita Brevis, Ars Longa, yes, but even the Vita Brevis can be a short but sweet thing. My, what does this mean? I wrote that poem to rid myself of lingering guilt over the deaths of far too many people, in the way that Gunn writes a book about a man with night sweats—himself, sweats brought about by the knowledge that his fortress body is insecure, just as he saw the fortress bodies of his friends defeated by themselves… witness the last nine lines of “Lament”:
You never thought your body was attractive,
Though others did, and yet you trusted it
And must have loved its fickleness a bit
Since it was yours and gave you what it could,
Till near the end it let you down for good,
Its blood hospitable to those guests who
Took over by betraying in into
The greatest of its inconsistencies
This difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.
Now I seem to be saying that the impulse behind elegizing is a sense of insecurity. I guess that the deaths of others cannot help but remind us forcibly of our own mortality. But this poem clearly is life-affirming. Life is a “difficult, tedious, painful enterprise,” perhaps, but since life is what there is to do around here, we go on doing it.
The redefinition of love—from undefined Eros to guiding and keeping warm.
He is redefining expectations, Gunn tells us, redefining love and certainly redefining family, redefining traditional upbringing. The new is to be based on the same melody, but in a different key, “another pitch.”
And it is a love that does not flinch from the former activities of the man: it does not turn from the smiles in bedrooms of little acquaintance—Gunn makes a point of bringing up the little he knows this man, the little he knows except the brief smiles exchanged in both their bedrooms, presumably a sexual congress but one with sheer nonspecific love. But it isn’t that, not really. Gunn describes the previous assumptions as “Eros” and I see the love that the poem leads us to as “Agape.” Eros isn’t a nonspecific love, not really. It can be very specific. And likewise, Agape can be very specific and very nonspecific. We must assume the love they shared to be equal to that given to the child. Perhaps Gunn did not feel it, and now he feels that as a great guilt, as a sorrow: he describes these incidents as one last great grief, after all, and perhaps it is his recognition if his shortcomings as a love-r. This seems to be to be baseless, but it does lead to interesting speculation. This is getting long, so I won’t explore it further, since I’ve already touched on it. But the friend did, for he makes no distinctions. He “turned from nothing he had done,/ Or was, or had been.”
The link between Eros and Agape falters here. I don’t think that Gunn, or indeed anyone, can say that Agape is better than Eros. Most people accept it as superior, but I really think that we must accept (particularly after looking into psychoanalysis) that Eros plays just as important a part in daily life. And of course going from one to the other doesn’t imply abandonment of either. They are simply two aspects of the same thing.
I think that the problem that this poem addresses is that fact, and I think that the reason such a simple thing has to be addressed is cultural, and it has to do with our perception of homosexuality. With that stereotype of the casual sex affair.
What sort of assumptions do we make culturally about single gay men raising a child? Even adopting a child? We assume the lifestyle to be the inappropriate one, certainly; but we also deny single men the right to raise their kids, and we say that the mother is the most important factor in childhood state. Well, here is a man who is going quite against the current of those ideas, and what’s more we are told of his love for the child in such a way that it makes us question his attitude: after all, his smile is the same as a bedroom smile. And it is a smile that was present at a relatively shallow relationship as well—despite the sex and despite the smiles, Gunn “did not know him well.”
Interesting. Until I went back and checked the poem just now, I was not sure that the bedroom smile and the smile given to the child were the same. They are in fact, the exact same smile: one calls the other to mind. I wonder if it is a deliberate link that Gunn makes here. It could stand for the fact that all these forms of love are the same melody.
But what a life affirming thing to do. Gunn reaches out beyond the homosexual realm to deliver this message, because it is the only way that it can be delivered in this its most fundamental way: that life produces more life as well as joy.
The way I phrased this makes me think of why I was basically attacking homosexuality earlier. Life producing life seems to contradict homosexuality in such a fundamental way that I wonder if life producing life is really as life-affirming as we think. I know that sounds paradoxical, but let me put it this way. If a deep abiding physical and spiritual love between two men or two women isn’t life-affirming, then perhaps I need to rethink my understanding of the term. We tend to measure the value of things in terms of production. Why must a love produce something to be “life-affirming”? A couple that lives together for years and never has kids can still stand as a symbol of life-affirming love, can’t it? Philemon and Baucis come to mind, if only because Gunn wrote about them too.
An admiration by the poet of the deep commitment to a certain ethical point of view expressed in the adoption of this child before knowing anything about the kid: as a blank, as Gunn describes him. Yet Gunn also describes it as a self-permission—a self-indulgence in a manner of speaking. Primarily, though, it is a fundamental act of non-discriminating love, love that can become more fully expressed but not altered. It is a love that can grow to encompass an unknown, and that is defined by the need to care for the child in mundane senses, but more importantly, to “guide…[and] keep warm.”
A non-discriminating love must be one that can love without even knowing the subject of that love. Isn’t this very noble and very impossible? It reminds me of the old paradox about God. How does one reconcile an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God?
But it is a very poetic sort of ideal. I won’t question it as such, because I do see it as a sort of measuring stick by which to define our individual ability to care for others. It’s a nonprejudicial thing, and that’s probably why it appeals to me.
This guiding must consist of permissiveness of the same kind the man has allowed himself: to seek out broader or perhaps just new forms of love. The child may be more comfortable in a heterosexual relationship, and the poem seems to suggest to the reader that this man would be comfortable with this. He will be able to understand because through the book we have seen love defined in terms of temperature—and warmth has irresistible associations with affection, deep abiding affection and love. Am I back to talking about Agape? This child, we are told, will be “kept warm.” And the final proof that this is true is the fact that this love was entered into blindly. Perhaps not. I seem to have abandoned the idea of Gunn’s individual grief and replaced it with this general glowing sort of loving everyone. The poem undergoes this shift as well, so I won’t question the fact that my rough draft did it too.
I see that I’m one page past the limit set for the paper length. I think there’s a only a little further to go.
What does the “countering pull” mean? Good question. If asked now, I don’t think I could answer it.
So this countering pull, what it is against? Perhaps the sense of anonymity which is the great enemy of love. Against the blankness that makes the bedroom smiles anonymous, against the infertile void that the sky is after the clouds have departed. I thought the poem redefined void as fertile. It seems I contradicted myself. But the idea that filling in the blank is the goal is consistent. The countering pull seems to refer to the fact that only with another’s balancing pressure on you can you make progress. As in physics, where for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In fact, this poem brings physics to mind for me now… the void as the rough draft just defined it sounds like entropy, and the poem now reads to me like a denial of the Laws of Thermodynamics: creating something out of nothing. This friend of Gunn’s is pulling with his “devoted arm” an organism out of oblivion, making something from nothing, because he saw the nothing as a space to be filled. In the same way, Gunn’s pen is going to pull this poem out of the grief that was left in the space Gunn’s dead friends had occupied.
Funny, how that worked. My revision and the original draft seem to have led to the same fundamental idea. I don’t know whether this is because I have failed to revise myself and my ideas enough, or because I must have hit upon something that is actually there.
There’s a conclusion in the rough draft… after I repeat it, I’ll try to think about whether or not I accomplished what I was trying to do in this exercise in the process of creation.
A conclusion…
The whole book The Man With Night Sweats is a life affirmation, for all that it is a book overwhelmingly about deaths. That is because in Gunn’s worldview, deaths are an occasion for more life, an opportunity for those who have helped the little deaths of lack of knowledge, lack of empathy, lack of deep love along to not redeem (for they have not been guilty of more than a small omission) themselves but to extend themselves. To grab what will serve to permit smiles that are more than slight.
The syntax is garbled, but I can’t deny what I said earlier. I think I redefined several key words used in the original conclusion through my new remarks: lifestyle, and life-affirming, and so on. Maybe that’s all that I can hope for with this paper.
It’s odd, in a way, to be doing this, because I feel like I’ve been engaged in deconstructing myself, and I have viewed deconstruction as a sterile sort of thing for a while now. But then, Gunn also argues that there is a certain path to clearer thought (I don’t want to use the term revelation in this context) in the elimination of what has gone before. Self-examination to the point where the truth as you had known it disappears, and then reappears, in many ways the same, but in many ways different.
That is the understanding of the poem I reach now, one that isn’t so much about the way we love as it is about the way we think. And in that regard, I feel this exercise has been a success for me, because I have redefined “The Blank” to myself. I can’t think about it the way that I did a week ago, when I wrote the first draft of this paper. But I don’t know if this experience is a success for anyone else who might read this.
But then, I also see the poem as a process of creation, and I see this paper as a process, not a result. So it may not matter whether you who read this have undergone the same redefinition. The artifact remains, and for me it will have the same resonance as the experience. So as far as that goes, I don’t feel my time (and perhaps my grade!) has been wasted.
