This is my journal entry for today, my 40th birthday:
(Explanations reserved for darker corners of my notes to self.)
Today I followed through on something planned in childhood. I read Donald Justice’s poem “Men at Forty” to see how it resonates today compared to when I first found it over 25 years ago.
MEN AT FORTY Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to. At rest on a stair landing, They feel it moving Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, Though the swell is gentle. And deep in mirrors They rediscover The face of the boy as he practices tying His father's tie there in secret And the face of the father, Still warm with the mystery of lather. They are more fathers than sons themselves now. Something is filling them, something That is like the twilight sound Of the crickets, immense, Filling the woods at the foot of the slope Behind their mortgaged houses.
I do not find this poem grand and lofty like when I read it so many times at 13 or 14 years of age, but I still like it. The language falls a little flat for me, and the “mortgaged houses” come through like an unwelcome return from reverie to reality.
Funny, I felt the same about those words at 14 as I do today, though I may have lacked the words to articulate that criticism.
I forgot the lines about rediscovering the face of the boy in the mirror. I do that. I see the boy not just in my mirror but in the faces of men I know who would seem to have moved far along from childhood. Few things change about a person as the years gather, and the man at 40 differs little from the boy at 12.
The line “They are more fathers than sons themselves now” seemed ominous to me as a young person, suggesting that fatherhood transformed a person in ways beyond their control. Indeed, that sense of dread seems to have sustained and even fulfilled itself. I think I would make a good father, but I have managed to avoid any situation in which fatherhood was even a remote likelihood.
The opening lines have, in numerous circumstances, proven to be words to live by. I don’t think of it as verse, but as advice: “Close softly doors to rooms you will no longer use” is a metaphor that reaches into all manner of circumstances, whether I am leaving a place or a place is leaving me.
“Something is filling them” are the words from this poem that have sustained their strength over time. This line has surfaced in my mind thousands of times since childhood. Something is filling me, and maybe this “something” will finally cull the echoes of youth that linger in my mind like wind chimes.
I feel that that “something” complements the “Western Wind” of the great 16th century anonymous poem (which I prefer in ye Olde Englysh):
WESTRON WYND Westron wynd, when wilt thou blow The smalle rain down can rain Christ yf my love were in my arms And I yn my bed again
In the anonymous poem the western wind symbolizes death itself, or its inevitability. To me the “something” of Donald Justice’s poem represents the distractions (euphemistically re-named “achievements”) that occur before death, or the fulfillment of a life’s earthly promise.
My love for the Westron Wynd poem comes partly from how I found it: Randomly. In 1992 or 1993 I discovered the “finger” command. If you typed “finger sorabji@panix.com” and hit enter you could read my .plan file. For years my .plan file contained a long poem by Ed Dorn, at other times it contained pithy quotes and dada-esque nonsense.
I will not get off on the tangent of what a .plan is or what “finger” does except to say that I believe the .plan represents the Internet’s first blogging platform.
Having spotted their e-mail address on Usenet I “fingered” someone in a far-off country (I think it was Korea). My screen went dark except for those four lines of poetry and the “anonymous” signature. It was dramatic how the screen completely cleared, save for the poem, and it was astonishing how this poem (itself reaching me across so many centuries) had traveled completely around the world from Seoul to my screen in New York.
After all these years of virtually living online I find that I still do not take for granted the miracle of electronic communication.
