Thirst and the Writer's Sense of Consequence
by David Bottoms

A few weeks ago while thumbing through a new anthology, I ran across a little poem I hadn’t seen in years. It’s a well-known poem by Walt Whitman called “A Noiseless Patient Spider”:

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

I had always admired the beautiful way this poem catches the human need to connect, to empathize and to find empathy, to love and be loved, and the way it suggests the writer’s role as an explorer of the unknown, who seeks “the spheres to connect them,” who seeks the mysteries to tie them all together. But what surprised me and intrigued me on this re-reading was its urgency of longing and the sweep of its immeasurable range. Once again I started to ponder the whole question of artistic sensibility, more specifically, the sensibility that gives impulse to poetry and literary fiction. What I’m talking about is the characteristic of personality that makes a writer seek serious expression through language, the impulse that makes the soul launch forth “filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” Robert Penn Warren suggested that this impulse was, in his case, the quality of spiritual yearning. “I am a creature of this world,” he told Peter Stitt in a 1977 interview, “but I am also a yearner, I suppose.” Though he had “no theology,” he said, the world seemed to him infused with hidden spiritual significance, and he yearned for verification of this (Stitt 243).

I’m attracted to this notion of the “yearner,” what Charles Wright calls “a thirst,” because it echoes strongly in many of my earliest memories of reading. Two come immediately to mind. In the first I’m in the seventh or eighth grade, sitting in our living room in Canton, Georgia, prowling through a story by Edgar Allan Poe. I believe this was my first encounter with the ill-omened spirit of the Lady Ligeia and her efforts to find bodily re-entry into this world, but that part of the memory has faded. What’s left is only the feel of our sofa, a halo of yellow light struggling through a lampshade, and most importantly, a still powerful sense of pursuit, of quest, of anticipation of discovery pulsing through me.

Another memory in which this feeling is especially intense is of an evening a year or so later. I’m sitting in our living room, on that same couch, in the yellow light of that same lamp, reading in the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, which I’ve checked out of the county library. I’m baffled, but caught, helpless. A few puzzling images have dug in like hooks—a fly with long legs moving over silent water, the sleepy soldiers of some Emperor, a creature with the body of a lion and the head of a man. Of course, I understood little or nothing of Yeats’s meanings. However, I sensed deeply the anticipation, the desire to discover, that prompted me to dig into those mysterious poems and plow, as best as I could, through their strange sounds and imagery.

That anticipation, which I still experience occasionally when reading, is certainly why I fell in love with stories and poems and ultimately, no doubt, with the notion of trying to write them. It was a sense of anticipation, which I had come to associate exclusively with books. Nothing else carried the same emotional ache, the same promise of adventure and revelation—not sports, not school, and at that age, not even girls. I remember the way it flowed through me as I flipped the pages, looking for an interesting title, a promising poem. Though I would not have been able to name it then, I understand it now as a feeling of consequence. Something about Yeats’s poems seemed significant in purpose. Something about those poems felt as though they might point me in the direction of consequence in the world and, perhaps, in another world. Those poems seemed to be on the trail of something, an answer to a question I carried inside myself, a sense of significance deeper than my individual life, a meaning for which, in Warren’s sense, I seemed to be yearning.

* * *

I try to teach writing, and I try to write, so occasionally I think about the creative process and the mission and offices of the writer. Most folks these days who are interested in teaching the craft of poems, stories, and novels are in the business of demystifying the writing process and the role of the writer in the world. Evidence of this abounds in the enormous stack of practical writing guides that have been published over the past few years—books that tell us everything we’d ever want to know about the particulars of syntax, character development, symbolism, or figurative language—but tell us little or nothing about the creative process itself. Never, in fact, have I seen the authors of any these guides even attempt to talk about the nature of the creative urge and how that might define the relationship between the writer and the world. This is perilous territory, true, where one must step cautiously along the borders of psychology and mysticism, and conversation here has become difficult because it requires broad statements that are ultimately insupportable—a misdemeanor, at least, in a scientific and secular culture such as ours.

A case in point. A few months ago I was talking to a group of young poets, and our conversation bounced from the creative process to world-view to God. I asked them then to think for a moment and silently to categorize themselves as believers, agnostics, or non-believers. A general embarrassment broke out, and after a few seconds I said, “Okay, if you find yourself among the first two groups, you may have a chance of becoming a serious poet. If you count yourself among the latter, your chances may be greatly diminished.” A look of profound discomfort fell across many faces in the room. Some people were clearly angry. One fellow had taken out a small but ominous-looking pocketknife, and the young woman beside him appeared to be twisting her hair ribbon into a noose.

The totally insupportable thing that I said to those young poets and want to repeat now is that the greatest writers, the writers who touch their readers at the deepest emotional and psychological levels, are most frequently those poets and storytellers who are yearners after meaning. I’m inclined to say that this brand of yearning is, indeed, the characteristic that gives impulse to all good poetry, and perhaps all profound art and science. It's the simple but insistent longing to discover significance in the world, the need to understand not only how the world works, but why. We usually associate this sort of desire with science and philosophy, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less prevalent in art. The creative urge itself indicates a hunger for order and purpose in a world that only grudgingly gives up any evidence of such. In this sense the highest function of the creative act is the quest for the key to creation’s puzzle. Should it surprise us then that the writers who affect readers most deeply are those poets and storytellers who have not abandoned hope for the possibility of the human soul? What the atheist gives up, but what the believer and the agnostic may share, is that sense of hope, that yearning to discover some ultimate purpose in one’s life and in the world. Flannery O’Connor suggests a similar notion in her essay “Novelist and Believer”:

The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness […], and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, a total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. (167)

True enough. Where there is no belief in the soul, or no belief in the possibility of the soul, there is, truly, very little at stake. Significance never stretches far beyond our present moment in history—what we did yesterday, what we expect to do tomorrow or the next, all a series of events moving inevitably toward one conclusion. And for the writer who abandons hope for the soul, even the writer who is grateful for life in the present moment, the voice can turn too easily to lamentation and cynicism.

Though testing O’Connor’s notion against the canon of world literature is something slightly beyond the scope of my expertise, I feel fairly safe in asserting that the eternal is always more significant than the temporal. Still, many of us will probably be tempted to run this notion through a few of our favorite books. After I came across that passage in O’Connor’s essay, I immediately thought of a handful of my own favorite novels. Two are by Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, and following closely come Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby-Dick. Every few years I read these books again, and I think now that what continues to draw me to these novels, and what seems to link them to other great novels, is the profound religious sensibility that pervades them. In each story this sensibility is a dramatically crucial, indeed defining, attribute. For instance, imagine The Brothers Karamazov absent Alyosha’s concern for Dmitri’s soul or Ivan’s agonizing “The Grand Inquisitor,” or imagine The Scarlet Letter without the religious consequences of Dimmesdale and Hester’s adultery. In Moby-Dick this sensibility expresses itself more symbolically, but it’s still a powerful and dominant presence in the quest for the white whale. Without these spiritual dimensions we’d have only a few pretty good adventure stories. This is the very characteristic in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction that links her more closely to these great novelists than to fellow writers of the modern Southern gothic, with whom she is often grouped. For instance, if we remove the Catholic foundation from O’Connor’s work, what we have left is the grotesque fiction of Erskine Caldwell or Harry Crews.

* * *

I’m not trying to say that every good writer is a religious person. I am suggesting, though, that the greatest writers seem to be those folks who exhibit a religious sensibility, at least in the sense of probing the profound questions of the human predicament. Of his own experience, Warren said in that same interview with Stitt, “I would call this temperament rather than theology […] that is, I feel an immanence of meaning in things, but I have no meaning to put there that is interesting or beautiful. I think I put it as close as I could in a poem called ‘Masts at Dawn’—‘We must try / To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God’” (243).

I’ve always loved that line because it points beautifully to the writer’s proper approach toward the world, which is always through a sense of awe. “We must try,” Warren says, which is sufficient witness to that condition of yearning, that state of longing. We desire meaning in our lives, we yearn for significance; therefore, we must try to find it in the objects and actions of the world. This is, for Warren, the charge of the writer—to be an explorer, a searcher, a seeker of the ultimate. His starting point, and ours, is the physical world, but his goal is the revelation of meaning behind the operations of the world. As he says in a wonderful poem about his parents, “I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision”:

All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. (34)

We, of course, did not dream “the original dream,” and, being inside the dream, we are incapable of comprehending its total meaning. Still, glimpses of that meaning suggest themselves to us at various moments in our lives, and the possibility of puzzling those glimpses into a complete picture eats at us constantly.

* * *

I remember James Dickey sitting at my dining room table one morning back in the mid-eighties. We’d gotten up late and had skipped breakfast, so we’d raided the fridge for what was left of a honeybaked ham. I don’t remember what we'd been talking about, but Dickey was picking at the ham with his fingers and doing a fine job of finishing it off, when he glared at me across the table. He took one of his long thoughtful breaths and bared his teeth. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I think I can almost see right through it, right through it all, right to the bone.”

He wasn’t talking about ham, of course, but about those rare and teasing moments of clarity when we think that we might just see into absolute core of things. He’d experienced moments of clarity so intense, he said, that he felt if he could just tie them all together, just draw a line between them in the way one might connect the dots of a puzzle, he would have an outline of the true story. (His version, I suppose, of Whitman’s soul as spider “seeking the spheres to connect them.”) James Joyce, of course, called these moments of clarity “epiphanies,” a religious word he secularized to refer to a deep insight. Wordsworth called them “spots of time.” Out of these moments, good writers, when lucky, make good poems and stories, and so each poem or story is, in its own way, a dot in Dickey’s puzzle. The poet or the fiction writer who wants to touch readers on the deepest level is constantly seeking out those dots and trying to connect them, acting against desperate odds on the impulse of yearning to know. In this way, literature becomes a record of the ways the world moves us toward a sense of significance. The world is constantly trying to tell the poet something, Warren liked to suggest. But the world is coy. It will not explain itself outright. Its strategies are the strategies of the poem. Its language is imagery, its method innuendo. It teases us, lures us, prods us toward discovery, and if we are to learn what it has to reveal, we must accept the challenge of the quest. These well-known lines from the concluding section of “Audubon: A Vision” describe Warren's first waking up to the mysteries of the world:

Long ago in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward. (100)

A boy stands on a dirt road, at night, alone. The geese pass overhead, unseen in the darkness. Yet he hears them. They are a real, if invisible, part of the world, a small but real component of the world’s mystery. He hears, in short, a moving element in the processes of nature, and something primal stirs inside him. The world has stirred a longing, has issued a call, unmistakable in its presence, but hazy in its particulars. Even years later he can say only, “I did not know what was happening in my heart.”

* * *

Not always, though, does the yearning for meaning focus its search on the exterior world. One powerful irony of art is that while it moves outward into the world, it may be moving simultaneously inward, into the realm of the unconscious psyche, that murky reservoir of image, fear, and desire, which mirrors in darker ways the subtle and often hidden truths of the natural world.

One of my first glimpses into the frightening possibilities of the inner life, the frightening power of the imagination and the dream, came in my childhood, and twenty or so years later spun itself into a poem called “Appearances.” When I was eight or nine years old, I heard on a radio news report that a UFO had been sighted in a field in south Georgia. There had been several UFO reports that summer, and I was both curious and alarmed by them. This report, however, seemed particularly disturbing because the “craft,” the “thing,” or whatever it was, appeared to have something liquid inside it. I’d never put much stock in little green men, which seemed entirely too anthropomorphic, not really alien enough to be real, but a living liquid seemed entirely alien, bizarre, frightening, and credible. Therein, lay my great horror. In the poem the sheriff’s deputies search the field and discover that the object of terror and intrigue is actually a broken piece of a neon sign. However, this discovery, the poem says, “is nothing to ease my sleep”:

I dream of the whole universe, of an infinite
and indiscriminate creation
where the black frontier behind the eyes floats back as far
as the light behind the stars. (100)

The yearner knows that the “black frontier behind the eyes,” the inner life of the psyche, is a land of treasures and hidden powers, but also a land of perils. It is, in short, a land of magic, both good and bad, and going there often requires some courage. It is in the deepest sense the underworld, and there are secrets in that world we’d rather not encounter. “The dread and the resistance,” Jung tells us, “which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of Hades” (439). But the writer who is also a seeker must learn to move by faith across that dangerous terrain, to trust in his or her own hidden strengths, to nourish them, to apply them in artful ways in our search for meaning. This amounts to nothing less than giving ourselves up to the uninhibited contents of the unconscious as they manifest themselves in myth, fairy-tale, trance, and dream.

I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing
to step out of their bodies into the night,
to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,

palming the blank spaces, touching everything.
Always they return home safely, like blind men
who know it is morning by feeling shadows.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.
We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-
walkers who rise out of their calm beds

and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.

* * *

So, how do these observations about yearning for meaning, assuming they’re true, affect our lives as writers? Specifics are elusive here, because many effects will, no doubt, be personal. Perhaps, though, in some way our awareness of our roles as yearners may help us refine our stance toward the world, our way of perceiving, our way of catching the messages, the clues, the hints the world sends. A searcher certainly watches and listens with a heightened intensity; a yearner certainly moves through the world with a greater sense of urgency. Gradually then, all things of this world intensify as they become vehicles for the possibility of consequence. Also, this awareness may teach us not to close down possibilities, not to close ourselves off from the difficult or the improbable. It couldn’t hurt to take Warren’s charge as our own. “We must try,” he writes, “To so well love the world that we may believe, in the end, in God,” which is to say that we must avidly pursue our role as yearner and seeker, that we must hold out hope for the soul, hold out hope for the possibility of meaning and purpose in a world that grudgingly suggests such. “I have a thirst for the divine,” says poet Charles Wright, “a long drink of forbidden water. / I have a hankering for the dust-light, for all things illegible” (“Lost Language”). Flannery O’Connor would certainly agree. Only that thirst, that impulse, that hope, can give birth to a story or poem of the deepest significance.

Works Cited

Bottoms, David. Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1995.

Hirsch, Edward. For the Sleepwalkers: Poems. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology and Alchemy. Ed. William McGuire. Trans. R.F. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C.G.Jung. Vol. 12. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1969.

Stitt, Peter. “An Interview with Robert Penn Warren.” Talking with Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 233-46.

Warren, Robert Penn. Robert Penn Warren: Selected Poems 1923-1975. New York: Random, 1976.

Wright, Charles. A Short History of the Shadow: Poems. New York: Farrar, 2002.