LIVING POETICALLY
A friend speaks to me of the ability, perhaps the necessity, of „living poetically.“ I ask her what this means, this „living poetically,“ how it might differ from living decently, living judiciously, living passionately, living morally. It is, of course, a question to myself, whose own life seems more and more‑‑as if by a kind of obstinate and sometimes almost perverse willfulness‑‑ to be moving away from the self‑consciously „poetic,“ the drama of a life willfully distanced from the ordinary.
And yet I ask myself this question out of an inner necessity, a dilemma that reverberates among my own fears, insecurities, doubts. And what I come up with, at least, is that to live poetically is definitely notto live in the purely sombre, the academic, the intelligence‑dominated universe that de‑humanizes the heart and depletes the soul. And yet it requires, it seems to me, something that has to do, deeply, with the moral‑‑ not the easy moralism and piety of right and wrong, but the difficult morality of being capable simultaneously of honoring and questioning one’s own impulses, of loving and containing one’s passions, of finding the extraordinary within the ordinary, of refusing to equate externalized hysteria and inner heroism.
It may even, at times, require the difficult poetry of keeping still when everything in one’s immediate orbit cries out Move!, of holding to an unglamorous and unflamboyant quietude when everything that speaks so romantically of „the poetic“ would have you walking lobsters on leashes through the streets, or lionizing your own demons in some exuberant and costly drama. Yet things shift under the pressure of their own restrictions, and from a still, unflamboyant place the „poetic“ life may yet venture out like a come‑cry on a deserted street, slow and exuberant, demanding no applause, asking no one’s approval.