No Visual Horizon

By Helen Sadler

I have got to admit, this was a very challenging Invite to Write. I love the challenge – it just took me a while to define just what “create something by hand” meant for me this month. I spent hours going in different directions. Pulling out old paintings and thinking of creating a new series. Cropping photos into interesting perspectives and vowing to write an intense villanelle to match. Two failed attempts canceled that idea. I even tried to make a music video, but for some reason could never access it, even with having set up a YouTube channel. Epic fail all around.

 

Finding the good stuff and saving in sheet protectors

Then I realized I already had the perfect something I have been creating – that is what has been come to be known as the Big Orange Binder With Significant Fragments. Going through twenty-four years worth of journals is a huge job, but so far enlightening.  I cannot possibly read them all, and I don’t even want to. What I do is look glance through for something significant, something that stands out. This essay is evidence of the creative boost I have received in pursuing this time-consuming, yet rewarding, project. So, thank you, Laurie, for helping me find new insight.

Big Orange Binder With Significant Fragments.

No Visual Horizon

Part One: Deep Revision

Recently a poem by Alex Dimitrov called “The Last Luxury, JFK, Jr.” came across my newsfeed from Poetry Magazine. Whenever I think of young John F. Kennedy, I remember that summer day in 1999 when they were searching for his plane. After reading Dimitrov’s poem, I thought, Hhmmm…I should write about my memories connected to JFK and his plane going down. It is something that stands out to me.

I remember that day, not because of the search, but because I was only keeping slight tabs on the entire affair. I was in my second semester of college, taking a summer College Comp II course, which meant a great deal of work in a short period of time. On this particular Saturday, I was working on a research paper about Allen Ginsberg and how his poem "Howl" marked a change in poetry and in culture. I was spending my time with a man who wrote a book length poem that began:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..

I was inspired! Delving into Ginsberg and the Beat poets I now know fed my intense need to know American literary and music culture. This was just Step One in understanding many things about myself, my interests, and my writing life.

Yet, this was the first research paper I had written since my junior year in high school, so I was nervous about getting it right. To say those first couple years in college were nerve-wracking is putting it lightly. I was desperate to know if I was good enough.

I walked into my office around 11 a.m. to get started, and I didn't emerge until almost 8:30 that evening. It was the first time I recall being so deeply involved in writing that I did not even notice the passage of time. I wasn't even hungry – and I’m always hungry!  Every once in a while, maybe when I took a bathroom break, I would ask my husband the status of "little" John. I do not even recall the sequence of events. I do know that the work I did on that research paper gave me an understanding of what it takes to write and to write well. The hours I spent closed up in my room that sunny Saturday took me deeply into the revision process, and what joy I found there! That experience is, sadly, also the reason I put off getting into revision unless I have a lot of time. When I revise, I want to be able to sink in and not care about anything else going on around me. I want that joyous feeling and intensity of experience I had that day in July.

I no longer have a copy of this research paper – somehow I never printed off a final copy because the class was taken online. I think it may be on a floppy disc somewhere, but, well, you know.  What I have is the memory and a deep love of Ginsberg and his writing, the cultural shift that was the fifties, and so much more. It is a paper that has stayed with me because of my experience writing it. July 17, 1999 – the day they searched for John Kennedy, Jr. and his wife; and the day I encountered the psychological experience called flow.

Part Two: Refer to the instruments

In Dimitrov’s poem, he seems to be writing about a relationship breaking up and connecting it to the loss of JFK. It isn’t the easiest poem to understand, and I have been through it several times. There are two lines that stand out to me:

“Spatial disorientation occurs when you don’t refer to your instruments” 

and then near the end:

The old photograph of a young salute.

That one send-off to death, family; the beginning of character.

Maybe you know it’s the last year of the century. So come late and leave early.

(Others flying similar routes reported no visual horizon.)

It’s the last luxury. To go early and never come back.

It was the fragment “no visual horizon” that stuck with me for a few days while I pursued other projects, never quite getting around to writing my JFK, Jr. memory. One of those projects was my Big Orange Binder With Significant Fragments. And that is when the circle found completion – the part I had forgotten.

Part Three: Emancipation Vision

When purging my journals, I found the one with the summer of 1999.  Since I had the essay idea in the back of my head, I paid special care to look at July 17.

That day of the revision, as I think of it, I emerged from the room about 8:30. I recall that my husband and I went to a place called Eddy's Creekside for dinner, since they would be open until 10, and it was already quite late. I remember sitting there, reveling in the day I had had, sitting by the creek running, now in the dark, the trees around us, and I'm sure a delicious meal and beverage.

Significant fragment found!

What I don't recall is what I found in my journal.  When I got home from that meal, I didn't just go to bed.  Instead, I stayed up and wrote my own little "Howl."  I have absolutely no recollection of this poem, called "Emancipation Vision."  It begins…

Fireworks tonight

an awakening at last

with rapid fire

it comes

holding me in

holding me out

blasting open my muse again

fireworks

and Gram

and knowing who I am

The music

The words

The words

The WORD

and I am brought face to face

once again

With the word

I do not fully know what it is about, even as I read it again and again. Obviously I was listening to Gram Parsons, and the JFK thing was still a little bit on my mind. It is just there, in the journal, going over several pages, with no introduction. 

What I do know is that I completed it at 11:01 p.m. 

Gram is here

John is gone

Oh John – John – John

into the vast blue ocean

with metal and the blonde

so long John

we hardly knew ye

holding in

holding out

holding the pattern

you cannot control

never could control

never meant to control

was bent on control

The story issues forth

In insecurity and sadness…

no doubt the sorrow never really

goes away

of what cannot be

She is free…

Holding in

holding out

holding the emancipated vision…

fireworks tonight

the great awakening

no plane crashing in my heart tonite

for I am free

no grievous angel to hold my heart

I’ve got it well in hand.

This has been another reminder that writing breeds more writing—it is the only road to fluidity. The precision required for academic writing needs its opposite – freedom of expression without rules. No surprise that Allen Ginsberg had spent many years trying to write “perfect” poetry, in synch with all he was learning from William Carlos Williams; the night came and he spilled, “Howl,” which was a phenomenon then, and still is now. He wrote it with no previous thought, no limited boundary.

Once this all came together, so did the message. We may not have a "visual horizon" for what is to come, and that is okay. We simply have to let the writing be the writing, its own destination. The only visual we need is what is in front of us on the page. Those marks, be they carefully placed or randomly scribbled, are our last luxury: the chance to emancipate what is inside us in that one written moment.