It was its own thrill. I didn’t ignore them, I read them, even if only silently,
with a deep sense of feeling: both the feeling of being replete, a feeling of satisfaction,
and the feeling of loss, the sadness of having finished the book.
I have never, in my life, read a poem that ended with the words The End.
Why is that, I wonder. I think perhaps the brevity of poems compared to novels makes one feel that there
has been no great sustention of energy, no marathon worthy of pulling tape across the finish line. And
then I found a poem of mine that I had carefully written by hand in the sixth grade, and at the bottom
of the page, in India ink, beautifully apart from the rest of the text, were the words The End. And I
realized children very often denote the end because it is indeed a great achievement for them to have
written anything, and they are completely unaware of the number of stories and poems that have already
been written; they know some, of course, but have not yet found out the extent to which they are not the
only persons residing on the planet. And so they sign their poems and stories like kings. Which is a
wonderful thing.
Roland Barthes suggests there are three ways to finish any piece of writing: the ending will
have the last word or the ending will be silent or the ending will execute a pirouette, do something
unexpectedly incongruent.
Gaston Bachelard says the single most succinct and astonishing thing: We begin in admiration and
we end by organizing our disappointment. The moment of admiration is the experience of something
unfiltered, vital and fresh—it could also be horror—and the moment of organization is both the
onset of disappointment and its dignification; the least we can do is dignify our knowingness, the
loss of some vitality through familiarization, by admiring not the thing itself but how we can organize
it, think about it.
I am afraid there is no way around this. It is the one try inevitable thing. And if you believe
that, then you are conceding that in the beginning was the act, not the word.
The painter Cy Twombly quotes John Crowe Ransom, on a scrap of paper: “The image cannot be
disposed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.”
Easy and appropriate thing for a painter to say. Cy Twombly uses text in some of his drawings
and paintings, usually poetry, usually Dante. Many men and women have written long essays and lectures on the ideas
they see expressed in Twombly’s work.