With Confetti in My Hair

Forgot that I told you a while back that I’d write a few words about Andrew Motion’s Keats, a biography of English poet John Keats.

This was by-far the most in-depth look into Keats life but, like all the other bios, heavy on the biographer’s agenda. In this case it was to make Keats a political rebel along the lines of a literary Che Guevara. Some other biographers present Keats as someone ignorant of politics because he was too busy living a pixie life – which, I agree, is bullshit. But there is a difference between pointing at a spot on the wall and running your finger through it. At points, Motion runs his whole arm through. I’d like to say that I’d recommend you to read this, but unless you are planning to be a poet or are unnaturally obsessed with the death of diminutive 26 year-olds – this book is unnecessarily hefty. Whenever Keats meets someone, instead of a name and a tiny blurb we are given a life story – adding page upon page before we realize that, yes, there was a biography at the heart of these tangents. And Keats met a lot of people.

I guess I don’t have another Keats biography to recommend. I prefer W. Jackson Bate’s prose and interpretations, but his book is even longer and runs just as hard into the wall. Maybe I should stop searching. Keats would tell me that some things just can’t be resolved. I used to think that that was just a coping mechanism. Maybe it is. Maybe “coping mechanism” doesn’t need to be a pejorative in my vocabulary. I don’t know. I’m starting to shift, though.

If you’re new to Keats, you can find virtually all of his poems online. This is my favorite poem by Keats, titled “Ode to a Nightingale.” I hope it helps you the way is has me. I’d be curious to your thoughts. I hear you can post comments on these things. I have a fairly bleak interpretation of this poem, but all my interpretations seem to be bleak and/or cynical. I need to be careful of that.

I wonder sometimes about my draw to Keats. Initially, I think I was drawn (as many people are, I assume) to the idea that Keats is the embodiment of a Poet, even Poetry. The pale youth who lives only for poetry and believes whole-heartedly that poetry can heal. The deeper I dig, the more biographers try to tear this idea away, deeming it naive and ignorant. I clung to that cynicism for a while, too. But, sometimes, when I am lonely and in need, I want to believe. I think we need these symbols. I think we need to know that they are symbols, but also be able to lose ourselves in them every once and a while. What else have we to strive for otherwise? What else have we to strive for?

I am losing interest in facts, which tend to dismiss and crush the excitement and connectivity of what we hold in our minds. To believe something happily, only to find that it is not factual. I consider this akin to finding out the secret behind a magic trick: before the revelation of mechanism there is wide-eyed wonder and excitement – after, there is only disappointment in the attainment. There is no spark; only the pain of loss. I’m reminded of Fred in David Lynch’s Lost Highway saying, “I like to remember things my own way…not necessarily the way they happened.” Maybe I am just trying to cope, as he was. I’d like to think I’m more like Keats though, sick of the “irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

I hope, I hope, I hope.

I guess it’s like believing the fiction of nostalgia. But, I guess, more like nostalgia of the present. To live in maudlin. I guess my longings might be another one’s pejorative. You might be still freaked out that I find empathy with Fred. I guess we all have our own vocabularies. I have no interest in which is “correct”.

Back to maudlin: nobody does it better than Tom Waits. I’ll leave you with something that pains me terribly every time I hear it.

I hope you are well, and that we can make it through. Cheers.