Age Quod Agis

Jean-Paul Sartre was a lit­tle toad of a man, but he said one mem­o­rable thing: L’enfer c’est les autres. Other peo­ple are a hell­ish dis­trac­tion, a vam­piric and par­a­sit­i­cal drain on our energy and cre­ativ­ity. My men­tor Alfred Dorn wrote a mag­nif­i­cent poem on the sub­ject titled “The Island,” which ends this way:

Hell, Sartre wrote, is Oth­ers, all who ask
to lodge in us, mak­ing our life their food.
Rather than yield the island that needs no mask,
we brave the demons that hound soli­tude.

Every­where one turns in the mod­ern world, there are solic­i­ta­tions and appeals. Com­mer­cial adver­tis­ing alone has metas­ta­sized into a world-encircling mon­ster that no one can avoid. Pros­e­ly­tiz­ers and huck­sters of every type infest the planet. Unless you con­sciously block out this avalanche of noise, you will accom­plish nothing.

Even that is not enough. You also have to con­quer a per­va­sive and crip­pling fear that has spread just as widely and destruc­tively as adver­tis­ing. And that is the fear of not fit­ting in, of not being part of the mass.

Apart from sim­ple incom­pe­tence, the biggest obsta­cle to human accom­plish­ment is fear and fear’s most typ­i­cal con­se­quence, a par­a­lyz­ing hes­i­ta­tion. Today, such fear is com­monly rooted in a patho­log­i­cal com­pul­sion to sat­isfy the expec­ta­tions and prej­u­dices of other peo­ple. When you are con­stantly wor­ried about what oth­ers think, you can­not focus on a task.

Men study­ing to be Jesuits are con­stantly admon­ished with this Latin saw: Age quod agis. It means “Do what you are doing.” In other words, when you are engaged in an activ­ity do it with absolute con­cen­tra­tion, and refuse to be dis­tracted by any­thing else. The Jesuits didn’t become the most pow­er­ful order in the Catholic Church by let­ting their minds wander.

There’s a won­der­ful story about the Ital­ian artist Ben­venuto Cellini and his cre­ation of the famous statue of Perseus in bronze. Cast­ing large bronze stat­u­ary was dicey in the Renaissance—the ancient Graeco-Roman tech­niques had been lost, and artists had to guess con­cern­ing ques­tions of proper heat, metal vis­cos­ity, pour­ing pro­ce­dure, and all the rest. When Cellini was cast­ing his Perseus, a num­ber of things went wrong. Since pour­ing a large cru­cible of molten metal is dif­fi­cult and dan­ger­ous, his arti­sans and helpers started to lose their nerve. They filled the air with their pan­icky recrim­i­na­tions and sug­ges­tions. But Cellini bel­lowed “JUST SHUT UP AND KEEP POUR­ING!” Despite all the dis­trac­tions, Cellini remained focused on task, and he cast the statue suc­cess­fully. He refused to be afraid, and he refused to pay atten­tion to those who were.

That’s how you have to be in life about every­thing. You must be focused on task. You must have absolute tun­nel vision that blocks out every­thing and every­one not imme­di­ately con­nected with what you are doing. If you lis­ten to the bleats of the sheep around you, with their whin­ing sug­ges­tions and gut­less warn­ings and intru­sive kib­itz­ing, you will accom­plish noth­ing. You have to not care about them.

I recently invited a friend to lunch. I was look­ing for­ward to a leisurely meal, with drinks, wine, a series of courses, and a long dis­cus­sion of mat­ters of mutual inter­est. My friend called me the night before, and told me that he would have to limit our lunch time to one hour, since there was a chance that some other per­sons might require his assis­tance that after­noon. I imme­di­ately can­celled the lunch date, telling him that I would not let our dis­cus­sion be cut short by the hypo­thet­i­cal needs of some damned third party. My friend was offended, and said “How can I help it if my cell phone rings?” I retorted “Very easily—just shut the bloody thing off when you have lunch with me!”

This assump­tion that one is at the beck and call of other peo­ple, that one “has a respon­si­bil­ity” to see to the needs of oth­ers at the drop of a hat, is being incul­cated into the pop­u­la­tion by a relent­lessly other-directed edu­ca­tional sys­tem run by sen­ti­men­tal lib­er­als. We are being sub­tly social­ized into think­ing that our per­sonal goals and aims come sec­ond, while the needs of a widen­ing cir­cle of strangers come first. This is unnat­ural non­sense: our pri­mary respon­si­bil­ity is to our­selves, our imme­di­ate fam­i­lies, our very close rel­a­tives and friends, and NOBODY ELSE. I’m not an Objec­tivist, but Ayn Rand had a point about the ele­phan­ti­a­sis of altru­ism in mod­ern thought. And this assump­tion that we have to be altru­is­tic makes it impos­si­ble for us to focus on task.

How does this affect poetry? Well, con­sider: you will never be able to do the things that you must do in poetry if you are con­stantly wor­ry­ing about other per­sons. Poets have a prob­lem, and that prob­lem is other liv­ing per­sons who prac­tice the art of poetry. They are what St. Paul would have called a “stum­bling block” or a “thorn in the flesh.” For the most part, they inter­fere in what you are doing, and they dis­tract you from your task.

It’s dif­fer­ent with dead poets. All they can do—thank God—is leave the results of their labor for you on paper. You don’t have to deal with their per­sonal obtuse­ness, their petty idio­syn­crasies, their air­head pol­i­tics, or any of the other crosses that afflict you when you are inter­act­ing with poets who are still alive. A dead poet’s iden­tity is his poetry, and noth­ing else.

The Greek his­to­rian Herodotus recounts a story about Solon the Athen­ian and his visit to King Croe­sus of Lydia. Despite the vast wealth of Croe­sus, Solon refused to pro­nounce him a happy man. When asked why, Solon explained that since Croe­sus still had many more years to live, there was no way he could make a judg­ment as to the king’s felic­ity. Any­thing might hap­pen between now and the man’s death. And in fact ter­ri­ble things did befall King Croe­sus after Solon’s visit, ren­der­ing him miserable.

The Greeks felt you could not judge whether a man was happy until he was dead. At that point his life was a com­plete Gestalt, and you could look at it as a whole and deter­mine its basic qual­ity. The same thing is anal­o­gously true for poets. When all that is left is their text on paper, things become much clearer, and you can accept or reject someone’s work or influ­ence with­out the slight­est embar­rass­ment, qualm, or messy entanglement.

When­ever young poets ask me for advice, I tell them “Talk with the dead. The liv­ing are not impor­tant, since they haven’t fin­ished their tasks yet. More­over, the liv­ing will be judged by a much later gen­er­a­tion than this one, so there isn’t any call for you to med­dle with them. Just mind your own busi­ness and do your own work. Don’t be spooked by any­one or anything.”

Or, along with the Jesuits, I could have sim­ply said Age quod agis.