Writing from the Frontier

The one who is looking disappears

Perell opens with prolonged attention: look at something long enough and it grows larger and sharper. Whyte widens it. It is not only the eyes. There is listening (for years his Zen koan was simply "who is listening" 0:19), and there is the body, a sense far larger than what we usually call feelings.

Bring all of it to bear on the world and something gives way: "a place where the person who's paying attention, who was seeing and who was hearing disappears." 1:15 He reads a poem of his own about that loss, "Revelation Must Be Terrible", which begins "with no time left to say goodbye." 1:37

"If you are paying attention to the world, you suddenly realize the world is paying attention to you." 3:13

He learned it as a naturalist guide in the Galápagos 3:37, where the animals have no fear of people. You can stand a few feet from a hawk that will not fly, "and the hawk is looking at you" 3:56. At first, he says, he hardly saw anything: knowing the bird's Latin name "was actually a way of covering over the essence of what you were looking at." 4:05

Later the fur seals and iguanas he had come to know as individuals turned up dead on the beach, and "everything was looking back at you … more fiercely than you were looking at it." 4:59

You write from the meeting place

"The identity is where what you think is you meets what you think is other than you and that's actually the place that you write from." 5:27

The self is not where writing starts. It is one side of an edge. Sometimes the frontier is far out, a horizon. Sometimes it is "an inner horizon inside yourself below which the revelation the truth the beauty of what you want to say is hibernating." 5:46

Asked whether the work is stillness or endless rewriting, he puts rewriting in its place, "an outer afterthought" 6:56. The writing is the ability to take a physical experience and translate it "into language which has the same movement." 7:05

That is why some poets compose on foot. Wordsworth trained a little dog to run ahead and warn him of the locals, who already thought him eccentric for muttering to himself 7:50. Whyte mutters too, now into his iPhone.

The frontier is often felt as a darkness: you know that what you want to write "lies deep inside you but you can't articulate it as yet." 8:43

The dark has eyes

He noticed in one intense writing period that he wrote differently when the window was dark, and wrote "Sweet Darkness" about it. He reads it 9:59:

Of "you are not beyond love" he says: "I didn't even know what it meant when I wrote it." 10:19 Rilke, looking at a fire in a dark landscape, asks the question this poem answers: what would it be like "if you actually contextualized your life from the darkness from what lies beyond from what lies over the horizon." 12:55

The horizon is the hinge of the whole conversation. "By definition, a horizon has a world beyond that you cannot see, and that's actually what's nourishing about it." 14:05 It is "constantly invitational", and so is good writing. But we have an inner horizon too, and there we feel the opposite.

What works at that edge is what Coleridge and Keats called the primary imagination 16:00. Not thinking up new things (that is the secondary imagination, "the fancy"), but a faculty "able to align thousands of elements of the unknown … in one coherent line of poetry." "It's a faculty of belonging, really." 16:46

On a walking safari his guide stopped everyone dead, and a male lion lifted its head twenty yards away 17:03. How did he know? "I don't know. I just knew there was something there." 17:36 A few molecules of scent, the way the grass lay, half-seen tracks, "integrated at this central imagination that said lion." 18:00 Not the unconscious, Whyte insists: "a deeper conscious." 18:29

Below the inner horizon is "the next territory of understanding you're about to go into that part of you has actually already walked into." 19:09 We have all had the revelation we turn out to have known for years. We just refused to face it.

Weeping, anger, and time

Perell admits a lifelong fear of grief and heartbreak. Whyte's answer starts plainly: "almost every quality if a human being can feel it is meant to be felt." 21:35 We "use words against ourselves", naming feelings in ways that keep them at a distance 21:49.

"Weeping may be the closest experience human beings have to an actual experience of enlightenment." 22:19

In weeping, the perimeters you built against grief give way. "You haven't built a body that can hold that revelation but now you're just about to do it" 23:15, so "you're actually becoming larger through the weeping." 23:30 Camus's imperative, "live to the point of tears" 24:06, is not sentimentality but "an invitation to feeling everything as much as you can feel it." 24:20

In The Prelude, the young Wordsworth, lost in St Bartholomew's Fair, sees a blind beggar with a paper on his chest explaining who he was 25:01: "My mind did at this vision turn round as with the might of waters." 27:02 We all walk around, Whyte says, "with a piece of paper metaphorically on our chest saying, this is who I am." 27:31

Perell quotes Whyte's line that anger is the purest form of care, and calls his work redefining terms. Whyte corrects him: "My work is to create beauty." 31:22 The line about anger surprised him when he wrote it. Good writing is "the act of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew." 31:55 What he overheard was this: "anger is the deepest form of care. It's just you have no vehicle for that care." 32:35 The care overflows the small vehicle you have for it, and "real writing has to do with undoing." 32:56

Writing an essay on time in an Italian castle, its old walls looking back at him 36:48, he noticed that almost every phrase we have makes time an enemy. The breakthrough line turned it around: "time is not slipping through our fingers. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time." 37:47

"That willingness to pay attention until the name you've given to something breaks down and the essence speaks back." 38:01

Try it, he says, with someone you have not forgiven. Spend 45 minutes with their essence, and "it would only be a matter of time before you came to a place of forgiveness." 38:39

A store within you

Perell has started memorizing poems and asks how Whyte does it. "Well, literally one line at a time." 40:31 His mother sat at the foot of his bed with a fund of "stories and poems in English and Irish" 40:33, so a store within you seemed normal.

As a child he felt that "becoming an adult was a form of amnesia" 42:18. Reading Ted Hughes and Tom Gunn, he found "it's possible actually to keep the vision I have now alive into adulthood." 43:00

Blake "saw innocence as your ability to be found by the world in repeatedly larger and larger ways." 43:56

A memorized poem works in the body. Facing a hard boundary this year, he had Mary Oliver's "The Journey" 44:38: "One day you finally knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice." 44:52 "If you have that in your memory, that is an incredibly powerful ally." 45:56

In rooms of executives who have never met poetry, he feels a "bow wave" 48:02: a shock to a personality used to "language that distances, language that guards, language that obfuscates." 48:35

The axis of invitation

A beautiful question is "the axis of invitation in every written piece" 49:08. It invites the writer and, if the writing works, the reader too. Nothing is more disappointing than a book that "doesn't live up to the questions that it started you off on." 49:57

Why do we keep going back to places like Coleman's Bed, the cave and holy well in the west of Ireland where St Coleman lived 52:06? Because each of us has a threshold moment: a call made, a door gone out of. Without it your life would be "immeasurably impoverished today" 54:46, so you can go back and thank the one who did it. "You were the ancestor of this happiness that you have now." 55:13

"How could I become the ancestor of my future happiness today?" 55:24

A sense of humor belongs here too, as a spiritual practice: "there's always another context that makes your context absurd." 58:49 Cliché is the opposite of a beautiful question, "this too solid naming of the world" 59:39. Tell a heartbroken sixteen-year-old there are plenty more fish in the sea and it does no good at all. Real conversation, he says, nourishes the inside as much as the outer senses 1:00:30.

When Perell quotes John O'Donohue on overhearing yourself in conversation, Whyte laughs: "he was quoting me there actually." 1:01:28 After O'Donohue died, Whyte began sentences with something John would say and finished them in his own voice 1:02:38. "The older you get the more conversations you have with people who have actually left the lighted hours of your life." 1:03:43

There is no protected path

It is disappointing to serious young poets, he says, to find out "that it is actually just all about love" 1:06:22. And the word itself can cover over what love is inviting you into.

"There is no path a human being can take without … having their heart broken." 1:07:31

So "you might as well have it broken over something you really care about." 1:07:44 Love is "all about granting life to things and people other than ourselves." 1:08:15 A parent's first promise, nothing will happen to you on my watch, is right for the cradle. Kept at fourteen, it would strangle the child's possibilities 1:08:44. Love keeps giving its own promises away for larger ones.

"The ultimate form of friendship is witness." 1:10:03

One kind of love often has to mature into another, romance into friendship, or into the love of a brother or sister. The change breaks the heart, which is why "it's much easier to turn the person you're separating from into the enemy rather than go through the heartbreak of finding the new form of love." 1:10:57

Make the path by walking

How does anyone make a living as a poet? By asking for help, visible and invisible 1:11:54. Visible help is transactional. "Invisible help is the help that you do not as yet know you need" 1:12:36, and without fierce attention you walk right past it.

For a year he did one thing every day toward becoming a full-time poet 1:13:55. Then came his first talk as a poet, to 600 people at Asilomar 1:14:43. For days beforehand he could barely get out of bed, and within minutes of walking on stage the symptoms fell away. Wordsworth had the words for it: "I made no vows, but vows were then made for me." 1:16:40 "There's no way you can follow your passion without having your heart broken." 1:17:13

Here he completes the horizons (see the figure in chapter 3) and adds a koan: "not knowing is most intimate." 1:18:23 Then Machado: "Pathmaker, there is no path. You make the path by walking." 1:19:59

"The best foot is the loving foot, one loving step at a time. But you don't know what form the love is going to take." 1:20:31

He ends with his poem "The True Love" 1:31:27 and the story behind it. Peter steps out of the boat towards the figure calling him across the water, and "he starts to drown only when he turns his face away, when he looks back at the boat." 1:33:22

Asked at the very end whether beauty is what he keeps his eyes on, he describes it as the inner and the outer meeting, "and disappearing in the meeting itself." 1:35:25 It is where the conversation began: the one paying attention disappears, and the world speaks back.