Litost

 In the spring of my twenty-seventh year, about five years ago, everything in my life was going just right. I was leaving my former part-time employment; I was a few months into my first-ever full-time job, with benefits. Modest enough accomplishments, in the scope of human ambitions, but to my mid-to-late-twenties mind, they signaled that my adult life was turning out to be more normal than I had always expected, and that things might in fact be okay after all. 

To mark this moment of transition, my co-workers at my former part-time employment invited me out for an evening of bowling. Now, I had always loathed bowling, darts, table tennis, and all other party games that required even a small amount of athletic ability and hand-eye coordination. Why did I loathe them? Because I was bad at them. But in my newfound twenty-seven-year-old-everything-is-going-my-way confidence, I thought I'd give it a try. 

After all, I thought, maybe all of those feelings were just a hangover from my insecure adolescent past. How did I know I was bad at those sorts of games, anyways? When was the last time I had even given them a try? It was probably in high school or college. Times long before I was my new, mature, fully-employed and successful adult self. If I could achieve more in my grown-up life than I had always thought possible, might I not turn out to be good at bowling too? 

I did not turn out to be good at bowling. As I miserably threw one gutter-ball after another, coming dead last behind all my former co-workers, I had a gripping realization. My confident adult self was based on an illusion. I felt that I was now good at everything and able to achieve everything not because I was actually more competent than I had ever been before; rather, it was because I had constructed a life around myself that only ever required me to do things I was good at. 

As soon as I was once against forced—however briefly—to engage in activities that I was not in fact good at, this adult self crumbled. It was gone in minutes, to be replaced by the same trembly awkward insecure adolescent self it had supplanted. And as this insight came to me, it began to shape itself into words: free verse, to be precise. When I came back home later that night, I wrote it out as a poem, "Bowling." It still strikes me as one of the better things I've written. 

I was reminded of this episode recently in reading Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, specifically in his extended discussion of the emotion of "litost." This supposedly untranslatable Czech word is defined, according to Kundera, as "a state of torment created by the sudden realization of one's own misery." But it carries as well connotations of impotent rage and a desire for revenge; so perhaps the closest word to it in the English language would be "humiliation."

Litost was evidently what I felt on the fabled night of bowling, and which I chose to sublimate into verse. And what's intriguing is that Kundera states that this is the most time-honored and effective method of processing one's feelings of litost. When someone "has no means of escaping from litost," writes Kundera, "then poetry's charm flies to his assistance." (Aaron Asher translation.)

 Which makes a lot of sense. So much of the best poetry, it has always seemed to me, is rooted in some mixture of anguish, fury, and humiliation—litost, in short. After all, what is the life's work of Philip Larkin all about, if it is not the minute chronicle of one person's daily litost? 

And also in this insight, perhaps, is the key to understanding why my writing life has become so much more dominated by prose with the passage of time. 

You see, the recent silence of my poetic muse had been something of a mystery to me. For a number of years in my twenties, I would periodically feel an unbidden bubbling up of verse in my mind. Apparently normal sentences would suddenly start breaking themselves into lines, and there was nothing for it but to write them out that way. This blog records the many products of this period of poetic fertility. I can't say these pieces were all good; only that they were abundant. 

Then, a couple years back, the poetry stopped coming. The inward sybil had gone silent. I hadn't stopped caring about or reading poetry created by others. I had merely stopped feeling the urge to write it myself. I look at a product of my pen like "Bowling," now, and I can't really imagine how I created it at all. I'm not saying that it's such a work of genius as to be inexplicable. Just that it came out so effortlessly at the time, and yet now no conscious effort could call something similar forth again. 

It's sad, I suppose, to lose an inner muse; but I'm relieved to know that I am not alone in having this experience. In her memoir Instead of a Letter, Diana Athill describes how, in her university years and in her twenties, she wrote poems frequently, only to have the ability to do so later fade. "They were not good and I did not suppose them to be good," she writes, "but they were real in the sense that they were pushed out of me by their own growth rather than pulled out by volition."

Such was my experience of writing "Bowling," and such is my feeling in regarding it now. I'm not saying it's outstanding; but it is a marvel to me, in the way that every child must seem to their parents, simply because it came out of me yet now has an independent life. And, just as Athill describes, it is a fact that—if poetry really is something that comes without volition—then it can choose at any time to stop coming. Her poetry ceased after her twenties, and so did mine. 

Why is this the case? Kundera again provides a clue. Litost, he tells us, often recedes with age. And if litost is the root of all poetry, then it makes sense that poetry would depart with it. But why does litost recede? Kundera explains: "Anyone with wide experience of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost," he writes, because, "[f]or him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth." 

If the loss of my poetic ability is a tragedy, therefore, it is one that comes as simply the price I must pay—as a sort of cosmic balancing of payments—for an emotional gain: the diminution of litost, the growth of life experience. If I wish to continue to be happy, therefore, and to avoid humiliation, perhaps I must accept as an inevitable consequence that I must trade away my poetry for this adult emotional equilibrium. 

But then, of course, there's always the hope that, as age brings new humiliations in its train, with it litost and the poetic muse will return as well. After all, most of the best of the world's poetry has been written by the very aged or the very young—Yeats and Shelley, say, occupying two ends of the spectrum—and it may well be because the quantity of litost in one's life follows a sort of inverted parabolic shape as the years progress. As I once wrote in a poem published on this blog alongside "Bowling":

In reading the collected life's work

of any much esteemed poet

One finds some that meets a certain standard

And a lot that's far below it

But more – it seems, when it's arrayed in order,

  that the best always appears at the borders

  I.e., at the beginning and end of the story

  When a young man’s rage becomes an old man’s fury [...]

As Yeats, who was among those poets who is notably more interesting as an angry old man, once queried: "Why should not old men be mad?" After all, they are full of litost, are they not? Long may our cups runneth over with this mysterious element, so that—by the refined emotional alchemy of sublimation—it may be transmuted into utterance; and so the world will continue to have poetry, so long as litost is permitted to reign.