On Impoverishment
Reflection on Louise Glück's powerful essay and the relationship between acceptance and resistance
In her essay On Impoverishment, poet Louise Glück, who passed away earlier this year, writes of seasons of terrible silence or creative muteness.
She calls them seasons of “impoverishment,” by which she means times of complete lack. Lack of security in who you are and where you’re heading or deep, meaningful connection to the world. She could just have easily referred to them as seasons of depression or crises of faith.
She was writing about moments of creative and spiritual exhaustion and the desire to return to a place where your words or other artistic expressions have meaning again. But I believe she was also writing about being a person of hope in general, one who is capable of meaning-making.
Glück writes that these seasons often come when you’ve turned a corner in your life and are no longer the person you used to be, but unsure of who you could possibly become. There’s a disconnection from your past, but also a blockage preventing you from envisioning your future. These moments arise “after long enterprise, after closure or triumph, after fatigue, after pride in achievement ebbs.”
For me, impoverishment often accompanies my worst times of financial insecurity. When I lose my ability to take care of myself, I struggle with self-worth and, as a result, am creatively impotent.
But there’s also a connection to my faith in humanity. When I see so many decisions being made by politicians that disregard the inherent worth of entire groups of people (Palestinians, trans folks, people of color) and I look around at the large swath of regular citizens that blindly support these decisions, I struggle with faith in the power of my voice, the point of my labor.
Regardless of what spurs on these times of muteness and/or despair, the result is the same: suffering.
To Glück, this suffering is inescapable. But what’s important “is the meaning of suffering, or the yield.” In other words, what comes after the silence.
Here’s one very appropriate example of Glück’s yield.
The Wild Iris
by Louise Gluck
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Her connection between the creative process and spirituality is evident in this poem. Her ability to “speak again” comes after a metaphorical return from death, after she walks through a doorway from “the other world” or “oblivion.” And the result, “the yield,” is a new fountain of creativity or hope.
In the essay, Glück writes that she taught herself hope by tracking periods of silence and what came after. She discovered that silence wasn’t just followed up by periods of speech, but that the speech was always different “in ways [she] couldn’t through act of will accomplish.” These periods acted as cocoons that nurtured her next artistic transformation.
But how does this transformation take place? How can we nurture it in times of silence, impoverishment, depression, or despair? (Choose your word.)
By simultaneous acceptance and resistance:
Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace the faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t follow that, since despair can sponsor deep change, capitulation should be immediate and absolute. The condition demands resistance at the outset; to treat impoverishment as a prerequisite to wealth, to turn it into a kind of fraternity hazing, is to deny the experience. It must be feared and resisted; it must exhaust all available resources, since its essence is defeat.
The alternative? A life made entirely of will and ultimately dominated by fear.
I find this essay particularly poignant and timely as so many of us in the U.S. feel debilitated by our country’s support of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Meanwhile, federal aid to Ukraine is being held ransom by the right in exchange for more border control funding. Not to mention the rest of the grotesque injustices being enabled by our Congress.
Meanwhile, most progressives (including myself) are too silent about the ongoing ethnic cleansing occurring in Sudan. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile …
How can we not despair?
For activism-inclined creators, a constant internal struggle is to continue believing that our words, music, or other art can actually make a difference. It’s a calling that doesn’t feed the hungry or stop the bleeding.
It’s so similar to my question about whether spiritual motivations matter, and I think it’s why making art so often feels like an act of faith or hope to me. To keep creating, we need to believe that a better world is possible and that our works of lament and hope can help us get there.
So here’s the funny thing about hope: if we don’t accept the reality of what is, we can’t really hope for something better. As Glück writes, “the deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade.” I see this “skirting of despair” as willful naiveté, which isn’t hopeful at all.
Therefore, to be better activists, creators, spiritual leaders, and bearers of hope, we have to lean into our despair and learn from it. And we do this by practicing acceptance.
I’ll leave you with Lama Rod Owens’s poignant thoughts on the relationship between acceptance and activism from his book Love and Rage (emphasis mine):
If we do not accept something before trying to change it, the process becomes like trying to walk without your feet being on the ground. There has to be contact with what is, because we need to see and know something before we do something about it. This teaching is particularly hard for addressing the difficult stuff in our lives. This teaching can be a hard thing to hear when we are being asked to accept forms of violence or harm happening to us or others. I tell activists often that if we want to change systems of violence and inequity, we must accept the reality of these systems. Again, accepting doesn’t mean celebrating or condoning; it only means that we allow the reality to be present so we can see it and really figure out how to change it. We cannot walk unless our feet are on the ground.
My wish for all of us is that we’re able to accept and resist together.
For more:
· Opulence Abundance writes about cultivating a grief practice.
· A 2011 poem spiritchild wrote and performed about Palestine.
· Lenny Duncan writes about the sorcery of genocide and the power of sacred story
· Spell to Be Said against Hatred on the Marginalian
Featured image: Despair by Magnus Enckell.
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