Transforming Flesh into Poetry
How Struggle, Effort, & Grace Create Beauty
This essay appeared in Wayfare Issue 7: TRUST, which features many women’s voices among its beautiful essays. Issue 7 will make a perfect Mother’s Day gift! Give a gift subscription now for 20% off and we’ll send your loved one Issue 7 and every subsequent print issue for a 12-month period. Email info@faithmatters.org if you have any questions about your gift subscription.
“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.” —Montaigne, “Of Experience”
Flesh is a fickle medium with which to compose a masterpiece.
Unlike oils or frescos, clay or stone, flesh makes its own demands and follows its own rhythms of production and destruction. Flesh—not just bone, organ, and fascia, but that intangible humanness that Jeremiah warns against when he curses those who make flesh their arm—resists the transformative act of spiritual poiesis. And yet, it has been done: on the cross, in the slums of Calcutta, on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, in Birmingham Jail. Perhaps Walt Whitman had such masterpieces in mind when he wrote the preface to Leaves of Grass. If you live filled with love, devote yourself to others, abide with the humble, and re-examine the way things are against the instincts of your soul, then, he writes, “your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” I long for such a self. But the work of parenting has newly attuned me to the raw state of the life-poem I am writing.
My second son—Clark—was born abruptly. The face of the nurse performing the routine dilation check registered alarm as she felt her fingers brush against my fully dilated cervix and the wet membrane of a bulging sack. Just try to hold on, she told me while paging a doctor in the emergency room. Every part of my conscious self dissolved into the acute sensations of my body, and I surrendered to the will of muscle and sinew. And then, a surreal softness of skin against my skin, slick with blood and vernix.
Clark was a colicky baby. He woke repeatedly in the night for months on end. The infant sleep strategies that had worked so well with our first child felt fruitless with our second. He fought sleep. Nursing only provided temporary reprieve. If I locked his flailing limbs against my chest and bounced him vigorously for long enough, he would sometimes become drowsy enough to put back in bed. But so often he would wake again, and the whole process would start over. He outlasted all of my attempts to let him “cry it out.” I set timers to force myself to wait longer and longer, crying frustrated tears of my own. I tried to sleep through his crying, but his wails jolted me out of sleep, sending dread down my spine. I didn’t want to feel resentment each time I forced myself out of bed, but my body was so desperate for sleep. I didn’t mean for my daytime self to become irritable, snapping at my two-year-old’s simple requests and speaking passive-aggressively to my husband, but my flesh felt like it was failing me. This was not the self I had intended to make, I thought as I packed crying children into car seats and drove in frustrated, aimless loops, knuckles white on the steering wheel.
How then does one go about creating a masterpiece, whatever the medium might be? In one of his many letters to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh ponders the effort required to breach what he called “an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.” No amount of frustrated pounding is likely to help, he concludes. “In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently.” What does that steady filing look like? In another early-career letter he includes a sketch of a small child in a cradle next to a pipe stove, along with these words: “I hope that by keeping hard at it I shall draw the little cradle another hundred times, besides what I did today.” One hundred repetitions. With reference to another piece, he writes: “Larger compositions must mature gradually, and for a drawing with, let’s say, 3 seamstresses, one might have to draw 90 seamstresses. Voilà l’affaire.” There you have it. Repetition. Perseverance. Patience.
I’m reminded of a few rhyming couplets by an unknown author that hung in the bathroom of my grandmother’s house when I was young. The platitudes printed in neat cursive inside a simple wooden frame matched the aesthetic of the home: the baskets of tough wheat rolls, the home-sewn aprons hanging from the pantry door, the antique foot-pedal sewing machine in the drawing room, homage to the generations of hardy ancestors who trekked to the Rocky Mountain West and farmed their way to relative prosperity.
Stick to your task ’til it sticks to you; Bend at it, sweat at it, smile at it, too; For out of the bend and the sweat and the smile Will come life’s victories after a while.
I suppose this succinctly (if perhaps too tritely) summarizes a philosophy I inherited throughout a childhood of filling tin cans with rocks sifted from the garden, scrubbing our old blue van with sudsy water, and canning quart after quart of applesauce. Applying a little more elbow grease always seemed to work for projects like learning a song on the piano or learning the breaststroke. But are effort and repetition always enough?
I somehow made it through the 250 or so nights until Clark finally learned to sleep through the night, always with one hand winding a lock of hair around and around his fingers. He delighted us with playful wrestling and enthusiasm for the outdoors. However, the same indomitable will that refused to give in to sleep as an infant manifested as a toddler in wholesale commitment to hyper-specific expectations, which, if unmet, led to extreme meltdowns, the intensity of which were beyond anything we experienced with our first child, or later with our third. Something as simple as draining the bath water or not letting him push the red “end call” button on the phone could result in prolonged hysteria. Sometimes the water bottle was the wrong color, or I was walking too far ahead of him, or we couldn’t find his blanket. The toast had butter on it. The toast didn’t have butter on it. Every day brought a fresh round of possible missteps with their ensuing chaos. I knew that in his frame of reference, those things really mattered, and I wanted to honor that. But despite my best efforts, I felt myself getting weaker instead of stronger each time I tried to approach an interaction with patience and love. Instead of growing in my capacity to respond gracefully, I was becoming more and more frazzled.
Sometimes you get stuck in a phase of the creative process that you repeat again and again without the micro-improvements that lead to positive change. It seems that in addition to effort and repetition, technique is also necessary. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, the “essential quality” of poetic components such as form, plot, and rhythm can be analyzed and learned. Mastering techniques means masterful art. As I struggled to learn how to interact with Clark, I listened to parenting book after parenting book. I practiced listening and naming how he was feeling instead of immediately correcting him. I practiced giving alternatives instead of just saying no. Things very slowly got better.
