Greg Delanty, “Attachment”
“Attachment,” a poem by Greg Delanty
How good we are at holding on to what
brings us down, turning it into a life-inflation
device that we refuse to let go of long after
the boat has sunk and we’ve drifted
into shallow water, and all we need do
is put our feet down and wade to shore.
Poems are strange things. Every once in a while – fairly rarely, it seems to me – something stands before us and we are amazed or, as the Brits would say, gob-smacked. The world is otherwise than it was before. We know more, understand more, see more.
These letters, near their very beginning, dealt with a poem by Eugenio Montale [type ‘Montale perhaps one morning’ in Google], in which a man turns around and the whole world which seems so concrete to us just falls away. He turns so suddenly that there is nothing behind him, “nothing at my back.” Wallace Stevens says the same thing of a snow man, who sees “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” [An extraordinary poem: type in ‘Stevens the snowman’ into Google to find it and read it.] I’d been reading Montale for years, and had often struggled to make sense of his ‘hermetic’ poems. But this one: Well, it just leapt at me and devoured me.
I had a similar experience a few weeks ago. My wife and I went to a poetry reading by a long-time friend, Greg Delanty, who was reading from his new book, The Professor of Forgetting. Greg is a very, very fine poet, and many of the poems were moving, many were excellent. But one poem in particular lodged in my brain, and I returned to my memory of it again and again in the following week. I read all the poems in his book – they really are very good – but this one in particular stood out to me. I am pretty sure it is not the best poem in the volume, but it sticks with me. Even if, as is possible, I misread it and see in it things that are not there.
The poem is called “Attachment,” and it is at the start of this letter. Six lines, one sentence, no rhymes except for distant echoes of slant rhymes (what/after/drifted with their hard t’s; inflation/do/shore with their o’s, although only the second and third have that round-mouthed version of the syllable). A lot of assonance on that ‘o’ sound, with to/do/to as internal rhymes, and good/go and the ‘d’ sound in good/down/device/drifted/do/down/wade and the ‘w’ in we/down/we’ve/what/shallow/water/we/down/wade as internal assonances. Tighter than it might first seem, but without end rhymes nonetheless. I’ve noted internal rhymes: down/down, we/we’ve/we.
What happen sin this brief poem? In the metaphor upon which the poem is built, a boat has sunk and we have clung to a bit of the wreckage to save ourselves. That is the first two and a half lines, Then: We hang on to that piece of wood as our life preserver long after we need to, as life and the ocean’s currents have brought us, in a situation unrecognized by ourselves, to shallow water where we may stand. We have drifted, with the passage of time, into safe haven.
That’s what got to me. The clinging, the dogged adherence we have – “we refuse to let go” – to what seemed to save us, hanging on, hanging on, even though time has passed and there is safety under our feet, for we can “wade to shore” in the “shallow water.” A lovely image; it makes me think of the Caribbean, warm water, white sand, an easy to stand on beach beneath us as the waves ripple around.
I suppose this is a ‘Buddhist’ poem, as one can say of the Stevens poem, as one can say even of the Montale poem. What we cling to, the ‘Maya’ of the world, is all illusion. Reality is different from what appears to us. We hold on as tightly as we can to the illusion that what we believe is real, is actually real. We embrace what we have long embraced, and so refuse to accept that perhaps this illusory world is not real, after all. But where Delanty differs from Montale is that the ‘reality’ of the objective world is not in question. What is illusory are the strategies we have used to enable us to survive from day to day, from year to year.
I suppose the Buddhist reading is correct, that we become attached to our illusions. But what strikes me so forcefully in this short poem is how tightly we cling to the wreckage of “what/ brings us down,” using as a “life inflation/ device” what is no longer needed. Delanty suggests we cling to our neuroses and fears and doubts long after the wreck which so disrupted our former life, long after what once seemed to keep us afloa,t is no longer necessary.
There is a deep wisdom at work, here. Enamored of what seemed to save us, “we refuse to let go.” We move through years, through our own lives, holding tight to what may have served us once but now is no longer useful. The water is “shallow” (safe to stand on!) here, yet we persist in hanging on to our wreckage. I think in these six lines the poet is telling us that we take, as our strategy for living, patterns of behavior that saved us once. But having been saved from the disaster of the past, that metaphorical shipwreck, we cling to something that “brings us down” as we continue onward on the metaphorical sea of life.
Charles Olsen once wrote, “What does not change/is the will to change.” Formerly a cutting-edge poet, Olsen is all but forgotten now, but that line, the first lines of his poem “The Kingfishers,” has retained a prominent place in my consciousness for decades. What Delanty is arguing in his poem is that Olsen was wrong, if not about the world at least about our own deepest motivations. The world changes, but we (and our own ‘will to change’) do not change. We cling to our past selves, shaped by the wreckage we confronted in our lives, with a fierce determination. What saw us through catastrophe is what will always see us through. This is, I think, a Freudian poem, for it postulates that defenses we adopt early in life continue to defend us, even if those defenses are no longer needful. We live on, shaped by the adaptations we made ever so long ago. Even when those adaptations are no longer necessary.
Yet, as Delanty reminds us, the world about us changes. “We’ve drifted/into shallow water.” We can stand on our own two feet, and no longer need the things we embraced so tightly to keep us afloat. I wrote above of our “neuroses and fears and doubts.” It is the neuroses, the strange patterns of action and inaction that we have adopted as part of our essential being, and our fears, which prevent us from accepting new realities, that seem so recalcitrant to change.
Long ago, certain patterns of acting and certain fears may have helped us survive when existence threatened to overwhelm us, drown us as we tread water in what Joseph Conrad called “the destructive element immerse.” As life proceeds, we see those patterns – having once saved us, as “life-inflation/devices” – as necessary for our ongoingness. Wrong. The wreckage of the past is long gone, for “the boat has sunk,” but we still “refuse to let go” of what once saved us.
How sad, how wasteful. Even though we are, literally, in safe waters now, we hold on to our patterns of past behavior to escape danger, when “all we need to do/is put our feet down and wade to shore.” We are in some way ruled by what once seemed like a way to safety. It may have saved us then, but it “brings us down” now. Needful protection in the past hardens into neurotic patterns and hurtful attachments in the present.
Perhaps this represents the possible ‘wisdom’ of a saddened maturity, the realization that we have spent too much of our lives clinging to strategies which once saved us but are no longer necessary?
Greg Delanty’s “Attachment” is short but intense. It poses a question each of us must answer: How much of who we think we are is the residue of past tragedies (now long gone), residue which we can jettison because the exigencies of the present are different from what we encountered in the past? We come to love and depend on our neuroses – “holding on to what/ brings us down” – and refuse to let go of them, even if the water is now shallow and we are safe from drowning.
As I wrote, this poem disquiets me. We do not face, freshly and responsively, the current situation we are in. We drag along that which has so long sustained us, the wreckage of the past which was once a “life-inflation/ device” but is now a residue of the past that “brings us down.”
What if a majority of our lives is a useless hanging on? And our refusal to recognize that the present is different from the past keeps us tethered to a past that no longer exists? What if we could shed our neuroses and fears and stand on the safe grounds of the present? What if a large part of who we have been has impeded us, not made us safe?
Large questions, all pointing to the shaping power of the past and its uselessness as we try to live our lives in the present.