The Nobel Laureate Who Rescued Me

In the winter of 2001, I was in my mid-20s, halfway through a six-year doctoral program in religion that left me uninspired. Friends seemed to be moving forward—in life, in work, in romance. Feeling stuck, I told myself I was taking a leave from graduate school. What this meant was no more lying to myself that I was making progress toward my dissertation (I kept lying to everyone else). Liberated from this pretense, I took a job as a newspaper reporter. I also began auditing an undergraduate poetry class.

I’m not sure what inspired me to sit in on this course with Yale undergraduates. Perhaps it was the sheer absurdity of reading and writing poetry with college students as a way into adulthood? In the introductory course on writing verse, we met once a week, read good poems out loud, and wrote bad ones under their inspiration. Our teacher was the celebrated poet J. D. “Sandy” McClatchy. He had a wonderfully resonant baritone, a perfect three-day stubble, and an infectious love of the art form. He told stories about his friendship with James “Jimmy” Merrill, and he would sway his hand in time with the meter of the poems he incanted. When students read their work out loud he gave candid, often brutal criticism.

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One week Sandy opened his laptop and played a recording of W. H. Auden reading the 1952 poem “The Shield of Achilles,” his dystopian take on the scene Hephaestus forges on the shield in The Odyssey. The line about the cruel urchin who’d “never heard / Of any world where promises are kept, / Or one could weep because another wept” stuck me like a blade and brought tears to my eyes. I decided to memorize it.

I would memorize a few lines a day. It was difficult at first, then easier. After I had internalized “The Shield of Achilles,” I moved on to Robert Frost’s “Directive.” Other poems followed. Some I quickly forgot; some became obsessions. For months after memorizing Wallace Stevens’s “Landscape With Boat,” I read it aloud to myself before bed, while listening, always, to Dave Matthews Band’s “Crush.”

I was building a poetry library in bursts, making up for lost time. That is how I came to Anne Carson, the Canadian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. In one of New Haven’s secondhand bookstores, I bought her 2000 collection, Men in the Off Hours, and within it I found her poem “First Chaldaic Oracle.” I’m sure I chose it because it was the one of the shortest in the book.

[Read: Anne Carson’s seductive strangeness]

I knew from the start that I would never understand “First Chaldaic Oracle,” not the way I felt myself to have an understanding of Auden, Frost, or even Stevens, who was weird but on my wavelength. By temperament a square, every once in a while I turn and face the strange, as one weirdo sang, and Anne Carson was my kind of weirdo. I learned “First Chaldaic Oracle” in a matter of days. Here are the first four of the poem’s 10 stanzas:

There is something you should know.
And the right way to know it
is by a cherrying of your mind.

Because if you press your mind towards it
and try to know
that thing

as you know a thing,
you will not know it.
It comes out of red

with kills on both sides,
it is scrap, it is nightly,
it kings your mind.

The Chaldean Oracles were lost spiritual texts that survive in fragments in the Neoplatonists’ writings of the third through sixth centuries. So there is a plain reading of the poem at the outset: The “something you should know” may be these unknowable fragments, this “scrap.” But it’s also immediately clear that the poem exists outside of history’s linear accumulation of philosophical knowledge. For what does it mean that “the right way to know it”—whatever “it” is—is not through study, not through religion or archaeology, but “by a cherrying of your mind”?

This was the question I got obsessed with: What the hell is a cherrying of the mind? I stopped reading Stevens at night; I let Auden take a back seat. The urgent question was one of cherrying. What was it? Who could do it? Could I cherry my mind? Was that what I needed?

The poem has more mysterious irruptions like that. You’ll be going along, reading words that, if we’re honest, are not so far from late-night dorm-room claptrap about the futility of knowing (“try to know,” “you will not know it”), and suddenly the voice turns vatic and omnipotent, powerful enough to invent new verbs: That scrap of knowledge is “nightly, / it kings your mind.” To king—we don’t know what it means, but whatever it is, it’s grand. Then again, squint and we’re on a cosmic chessboard, with nights, homophone to knights. Or is it a checkerboard, where one can be “kinged”?

In Carson’s poem, this hard work of knowing, of learning elusive truths, becomes explicitly playful while remaining deadly serious. By the end of the poem, the narrator has given us hope that we can get “it,” the oracular knowledge, the “scrap.” But how? You have to “keep chiselled / keep Praguing the eye // of your soul.” To cherrying, Carson adds “Praguing.” What on earth is “Praguing”?? To unlock the mysteries, one must first solve fresh mysteries.

As I understand the poem now, Carson means to teach us new ways to act, new ways to be. New ways to verb the world. Which was exactly what I was looking for that winter. I had tried being a scholar, and I was no good at that. I had tried being a boyfriend, and had been mostly a failure. Friends were in law school or medical school; I was developing no such useful skills. But there was always cherrying and Praguing. I just had to find out what they meant.

I could not have articulated this theory of Carson’s “First Chaldaic Oracle” back then, couldn’t have explained why the ultimate futility in the poem’s soul—that I’d never learn to cherry, just as we’d never learn exactly what the Chaldaic oracle said—was so soothing. Somehow this homework assignment from antiquity, as I memorized it, helped unburden me of my ambitions. It freed me. Carson wasn’t there to tell me what to do, but she would at least tell me what not to do. In the middle of the poem, she writes, “The way to know it // is not by staring hard.”

And so I didn’t stare hard. I didn’t look for answers. Into the spring, I kept memorizing poems, and I wrote some bad ones of my own. By not “staring hard,” I was able to see what I had to do. I quit my job at the newspaper. I finished my dissertation, after my therapist told me, “This town is filled with people who wish they had.” (My dad also said I’d be glad I did. He was right.) I got a job, got married. I figured out what kind of writer I was supposed to be: a reporter, after all. I just wasn’t ready to embrace that vocation back then. To get there, I needed a little more cherrying and Praguing, whatever that was.

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