I often love a poem without understanding what it means. The sound, or the images, stick in my head, and sometimes, years after I’ve read it, it comes back to me with a jolt of enlightenment. So that’s what it meant. How true. How important.
One of these poems is Robert Frost’s The Oven Bird. The lines that stuck with me are these:
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
I read it as a teenager. A diminished thing? What is that? A thing is what it is, isn’t it? And if it isn’t, if it’s less, than why make anything of it? Life is about expansion, not diminishment.
In late 2015, at the age of 53, I started to notice I was aging. I’d seen I had wrinkles before, but that wasn’t such a thing. I was never amongst the blessed few with faces molded by the gods, so I knew early that looks are not to be depended upon. Your capital, if you’re to have any, must lie in other areas – becoming caring, or a good listener, interesting, or well-informed, inspiring, funny, talented or rich. I’d invested what I could in several of those (I’m not rich).
But this was something else. I was fit, I felt healthy, but I couldn’t churn through the work like I used to – my old stamina and speed were waning. And my mind wasn’t throwing up connections like before. New information - ideas, names, stories, jokes - often seemed to sink away into my unconscious, never to rise again. So this, I thought, is growing old. This is diminishment. Huh. It’s a bit depressing.
Three months later, I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
It feels like I’m overdramatizing to write that. But that was the fact. I was diagnosed with a fatal disease, and a particularly bad mutation of it, and told that without treatment it would kill me in four months. My best hope of survival, they said, was a stem cell transplant. Which treatment itself might kill me, or, worse, to me, leave me permanently disabled or scarred. It could damage my organs, my eyes, heart, lungs, liver. The side effects of the transplant could attack my skin. As my stay in hospital extended to week upon week, I saw these effects impacting on people I’d come to know. What to make of it? At what point does diminishment become death? At what point does one want it to?
I can’t answer those questions yet. Next month, October 2018, it will be two years since my transplant. Two years is a key date – risk of relapse falls precipitously after this. I survived my transplant almost unscathed. I’m not taking any medication; my organs are all fine. Four months of excellent NHS counseling for PTSD got me through the emotional after effects.
Nevertheless, I am diminished. My stamina is even worse than before. My once sparky brain operates only at a low hum. But I’ve lost other things, things I’m much more ambiguous about. The belief that I had plenty of time to play with, for example, and its nagging bedfellow, the consciousness that I wasn’t using that time, or my full potential, very well. The vague ambition that comes from that belief. The delusion that I was special and unique. That’s gone too. Like the bird that inspired Robert Frost, like the poet, like the billions of human beings who have lived and died and are living and dying right now, I’m just a being alive til I am not. Part of a cycle of living and dying on this young and ancient planet, that itself will one day be diminished and pass away.
From my new, diminished viewpoint, things look very different. Life itself seems so precious and miraculous and fragile that ambition, fame, accomplishment, riches all seem irrelevant. Friendship, sharing with my fellow travelers, acceptance that there will be a time of being strong and a time of being weak – there are some beautiful things to see from down here.
I’m back at my chosen vocations, writing and making films, and agitating for an end to the kind of societies that are killing our environment. I still get stressed about things, lose my temper, behave like a child. But I think I forgive myself better. Like the Oven Bird, my “song” is no longer about being “a singer”. It’s about being alive. And I’m writing this now because, more and more often, I recognise in others that stage of wondering, for one reason or another, what to make of a diminished thing. Is the West declining? Where did enlightenment go? What will happen to the earth? And what is happening to me?
The Oven Bird is a poem about approaching ends. About a bird whose song forecasts autumn. It’s so beautiful. And I think I understand it better now.
The Oven Bird
By Robert Frost
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Post by Michelle Golder