When I was eighteen years old, something happened that had a profound effect on my view of the world. Next door to us in Woodside there lived an Irish family with two daughters, both of them under ten years of age.
One day the elder of these two girls (I believe she was five or six) ran her tricycle into the thin plate glass outer door of her home entrance. The glass fractured into long sword-like shards, and one of them came down to inflict a severe gash on the little girl’s forearm. I’m talking about a major, life-threatening wound, of the sort you read about in the battle scenes of the Iliad.
The girl’s mother went into a fit of pure panic, and my parents and I came running when we heard her hysterical screams. When I saw the sheer volume of blood, I became woozy. My father, a combat veteran from the Second World War, was more dependable than me. He had gone through Tunisia, Sicily, the Anzio beachhead, and the Po Valley. He immediately instructed my mother to get a terrycloth towel, to run it under warm water, and to wring it out. When this was done, my dad carefully wrapped the little girl’s forearm with the towel, picked her up, and put her in my arms, with the slashed arm directly against my chest. He then said “Hold her in that position. No matter what, keep her arm against your chest. If you take the pressure off that arm she’ll die.”
My father was absolutely calm when he said this, and as cool as Castiglione’s courtier. I was terrified, and held the girl as tightly as I dared. I could feel her throbbing pulse, her rhythmic shallow sobs, and the warm blood soaking my shirt. I barely allowed myself to think the following: This little girl may die in my arms. We got into a car, drove to the hospital, and there with great relief I turned the wounded child over to the medical staff. She needed seventeen stitches in that forearm.
As we drove back home, I shuddered with repressed fear. My shirt was drenched in blood. My body was dripping with nervous sweat. My face must have betrayed my state, because my father glanced at me and said “You’re going into after-action shock, Joey. Don’t worry—it’s very common in combat.” And he smiled with a look of utter sprezzatura, of the sort that makes every fear meaningless, and every peril just another occasion for beau geste.
My father got me home, wrapped me in a couple of warm blankets, put me to bed, and told me to sleep it off. The next day I was fine. The plate glass was swept up, the blood hosed away, and the little Irish girl survived.
After that experience I realized that one had to handle all fear that way if life was to be bearable. If you didn’t, you’d just be an emotional wreck who goes into conniptions whenever a crisis arises. Fear is one of the most demeaning and debilitating things on earth. It turns one into a quivering mass of jelly, and paralyzes all power of decision and action.
About twelve years after the incident, I recounted these same details to a woman in the “health professions,” as the current jargon has it. She affected an attitude of outraged shock. Her vocal level ratcheted up a few notches, as often happens with human lemmings when their basic assumptions are threatened. “What?” she screeched, in a voice of pretentious indignation. “You mean you handled it yourselves, without calling 911 and the emergency services? How could you do that? That’s not proper procedure! You’re not professionals!”
Now I was only dating this woman because she was a nurse, and my friends had assured me that she got horizontal faster than a carpenter’s level. So I didn’t argue with her. Men put up with a lot when a woman is putting out.
Nevertheless, I realized that the difference between my father’s attitude and that of this silly nurse was a measure of the deterioration of the Western world’s confidence during the twentieth century. My father had no fears. He just looked at a situation and handled it. But the nurse was in the grip of unexpressed, spectral terrors: the terror of not doing the right thing, of not consulting “experts,” of not running to the proper authorities, of not living up to orthodox expectations, or of not covering your legal ass with all sorts of shyster-prompted excuses. How utterly contemptible her attitude was! She’d have let that little girl die simply out of allegiance to an idée fixe of what was proper and acceptable. Rather than thinking of a human life, she thought about her image as a “health professional.” Her mentality encapsulates why paralysis instead of initiative now dominates the Western psyche.
Make no mistake—this is a systemic and culture-wide problem. Consensus-driven thinking infects nearly everyone, and renders us helpless. One sees it everywhere: in the workplace, the schools, and even in personal relationships. We have been brainwashed to follow “proper procedure,” and procedure is dictated by experts to whom we reflexively defer. We train young people to worship a flashy thing called “expertise,” and then we define expertise in terms of a paper credential or a title. Meanwhile real expertise—the ability to do something in an intelligent and efficient manner—is devalued and ignored. We don’t ask if something has been accomplished; we ask if the proper procedural steps in an approved process have been followed. Procedure and process have become more precious to us than outcomes.
I have seen faculty members in a department meeting go into apoplectic fits because “due process” wasn’t followed in regard to some stupid triviality. I have watched political meetings degenerate into bitter squabbling because some moron was upset that “the proper steps weren’t followed in the approved manner” in coming to a decision. It used to be that obsession with procedure was a bureaucrat’s disease. Now it seems to afflict everyone. We’ve all become pettifogging lawyers and kosher butchers, fetishizing process into a quasi-religious ritual that is an end in itself.
Does this affect poetry? Apple-so-lutely, as Chico Marx used to say. In the demimonde of the workshops, this disease manifests itself in the belief that putting together a poem is somehow more significant than the actual finished product. (This is in fact the received orthodoxy in composition studies, one of the most fatuous and cant-spouting of our newer academic fields.) Workshop nerds are not just proud of their poems, but also of the fact that all their little buddies contributed two cents’ worth of advice to the project. That’s why they are so gushingly effusive with thanks to everyone, like breathless Oscar winners, whenever one of their efforts sees print.
But what kind of poetry comes out of this “proper procedure,” with its deferential bowing and scraping to every workshop denizen? Committee-approved, peer-vetted, and vaccinated, it is the poetry of safety and consensus, of bien pensant solidarity, of Martha Stewart blandness. Without the slightest fire or sizzle, it’s a poetry that, like the nurse I dated, is “professional” in the worst sense of the word.
One of the most pathetically hypocritical aspects of this situation is the way in which people will blather on about how wonderful it is when poets “take risks.” Whenever I hear this, I don’t know whether to laugh or to vomit. Take risks? These little workshop lemmings? These timorous wilting flowers who allow others to go through their drafts with the fine-tooth comb of liberal orthodoxy, removing anything that might upset someone’s equanimity? Gimme a break. These people are more risk-averse than Swiss bankers.
No—when these dorks talk about “taking risks,” what they really mean is screwing up the rhetoric and structure of a poem, messing with the meter, and denying it proper closure. It means writing a lousy poem for the sake of appearing daring to one’s peers. It means trumpeting one’s avant-garde status as an “innovator,” in the hope that associates will think more highly of one’s rebellious persona. But it certainly doesn’t mean taking any actual risks. That would be risky.
The real risks in poetry today are being taken by those who dare to be traditional—who have the nerve to follow our inherited literary forms without turning them into unrecognizable experiments. The risk-takers are those with the courage to keep the meter and the rhyme real, and who write on subjects—political, sexual, cultural, and religious—that the workshop lemmings deem “inappropriate” or “offensive” or “inflammatory.” Risk-takers are those who don’t give a swiving damn what their contemporaries think or feel, but who serve art alone. To put it in a nutshell, they are not afraid.
