The Secret of Life

[y66]

The Secret of Life

 

by Ellen Goldsmith

 

I grabbed the streetcar from Fisherman's Wharf

to the Ferry Building to save my feet for later.

My dollar bill, wrinkled and worn, resisted disappearing

into the slot. I stuffed the transfer

in my pocket without looking.

 

As the streetcar rounded the Embarcadero,

I called my mother-in-law with mother's day wishes,

imagined the conversation

I'd have with mine, were she alive.

On exiting, I asked the conductor

how long the transfer would last.

I gave you extra time, he said.

Just show it. Hardly anyone looks.

It's good until it's taken away.

 

"The Secret of Life" by Ellen Goldsmith from Such Distances. © Broad Cove Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

[kenberg]

I often feel I have been stamped with extra time, getting more than I have paid for.

 

But then my skeptical side takes over. Can you really get from Fisherman's Wharf to the Ferry Building on a streetcar? And for a buck? It's an easy and enjoyable walk from the Ferry Building to FW, but we took the cable car back downtown. Five bucks each, if I recall correctly.

 

Ms. Goldsmith might be living in the past. The first time I was in SF you jumped on a cable car in the middle of the block as it went moving past (definitely not allowed anymore) and gave them two bits if you felt like it.

[y66]

Seems to me that healthy skepticism is also important. Maybe that's what Yeats meant when he said "cast a cold eye on life, on death" and what that conductor meant when he said "Hardly anyone looks".

[y66]

They have put a golden stopper into the mouth of the bottle. Pull it Lord! Let out reality.

Upanishads (translated by Yeats and Purohit Swami in 1936)

 

I pray

That I, all foliage gone,

May shoot into my joy.

Yeats, The Herne's Egg, which he started writing in 1935 at age 70.

 

According to one of his biographers, Richard Ellmann, Yeats spent his last years struggling to come to closer grips with reality. Apparently, his struggle was somewhat aided by the Steinach operation, which he had performed in May 1934 after a friend half jokingly suggested it as a source of rejuvenation. Yeats once described the part of his life that followed as a kind of second puberty. And in the work that followed, reality is the key-word, according to Ellmann

 

... it is the state which the poet wishes to attain and, in another sense, that which he must interpret. He must speak, as D.H. Lawrence (whose works Yeats was now reading with pleasure) would put it, from the solar plexus, and say finally what he had always meant to say, and perhaps even more than that, about every aspect of life. Conventional morality and all conventional attitudes were thrust aside.

On January 21, 1939, he wrote his last poem, The Black Tower. The following day, he said in a letter to a friend:

 

In two or three weeks -- I am now idle that I may rest after writing much verse -- I will begin to write my most fundamental thoughts & the arrangement of thought which I am convinced will complete my studies, I am happy and I think full of energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere drags out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.

Shortly after writing this, he passed into a coma and on January 28th he was dead.

[Lobowolf]

They have put a golden stopper into the mouth of the bottle. Pull it Lord! Let out reality.

Upanishads (translated by Yeats and Purohit Swami in 1936)

 

I pray

That I, all foliage gone,

May shoot into my joy.

Yeats, The Herne's Egg, which he started writing in 1935 at age 70.

 

According to one of his biographers, Richard Ellmann, Yeats spent his last years struggling to come to closer grips with reality. Apparently, his struggle was somewhat aided by the Steinach operation, which he had performed in May 1934 after a friend half jokingly suggested it as a source of rejuvenation. Yeats once described the part of his life that followed as a kind of second puberty. And in the work that followed, reality is the key-word, according to Ellmann

 

... it is the state which the poet wishes to attain and, in another sense, that which he must interpret. He must speak, as D.H. Lawrence (whose works Yeats was now reading with pleasure) would put it, from the solar plexus, and say finally what he had always meant to say, and perhaps even more than that, about every aspect of life. Conventional morality and all conventional attitudes were thrust aside.

On January 21, 1939, he wrote his last poem, The Black Tower. The following day, he said in a letter to a friend:

 

In two or three weeks -- I am now idle that I may rest after writing much verse -- I will begin to write my most fundamental thoughts & the arrangement of thought which I am convinced will complete my studies, I am happy and I think full of energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere drags out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.

Shortly after writing this, he passed into a coma and on January 28th he was dead.

Bizarre post timing...I was just reading me some Yeats yesterday.