Perspectives on the third of the Big Five happiness factors: Humor, music, and poetry.
OK, here’s a joke. A poem and a cello walk into a bar. Cello: “I’m paying for the drinks.” Poem: “What’s the catch?” Cello: “Really, no strings attached.”
Now that we have established I cannot be depended upon for a decent joke, let me shift to the actual topics of this essay, music and poetry. I have been contemplating the third of the Big Five happiness factors, here-and-now meditative practices and creative endeavors. Considering topics like meditation, you might think of traveling to see the Dalai Lama. This isn't necessary. Beautiful and creative things surround you already. Two prime examples are music and poetry.
I would like to share some good music with you. You can click on the words below to hear the songs. I also would like to talk about poetry, and one poem in particular that has been a center post for me. If you are deciding whether to keep reading or not, don't worry, I promise not to tell any more jokes.
Great Music
My favorite alone time is early Saturday morning. Awake before the others in my family, I go to my basement wood shop, build stuff, and listen to music. With no eyes upon me, I feel free to dance to the same sounds that animated my college years, REM, Talking Heads, early Springsteen.
Something unnamable within myself stirs to hear the haunting mysticism of the Bulgarian Women's Choir. I am filled with gratitude for the solidarity of Stand By Me. Though it causes my heart to ache, I stop everything and just listen when my playlist comes to Jill Barber. Upon first hearing her voice, I was struck how she was singing the same tender words Michelle and I had already been whispering to one another in our most painful post-Jack moments. “I’ve got you.” She asks us to show mercy to ourselves.
The boys in their younger years often indulged me by coming downstairs to listen to opera. Opera, stereo at full volume, filled those mornings with vocal fervor. “Listen to this boys, it is amazing!” I would exclaim, putting on Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma.
Poetry
One of the many things I love about my dad is that he writes poetry. He wrote about sounds and visions of the prairie when we were on a train trip across Canada. Here, at top far right,
he has just finished reading a poem he wrote to celebrate launching the guideboat–receiving applause from our friends who brought their own boats and poems for the occasion. A remembrance of the events and places that define our identity as a family, he wrote this when his wonderful sister, Joan, passed away:
On Deerhorn Road
One day you may ask where we come from.
My answer is beside the McKenzie River.
Along the river valley roads where Great Grandad's buggy creaked its way on a doctor's rounds.
At the homestead house where Mother was born,
By the riverbank where Grandmother felled the cougar,
Near the hill that Granddad logged.
In the River where today we laid our Sister's ashes and watched as the sunlight flashed along the riffles.
Our roots are in Oregon.
In the Valley.
Beside the river.
John Russell Gustafson
August 1999
Yes, it is true, my children exist because my great grandmother was a good shot. She killed a cougar that was stalking my then-three-year-old grandmother, Hazel.
One of the things Robert Pinsky accomplished when he was Poet Laureate of the United States was to ask people to identify their favorite poem and explain why they chose it. The “why” was often breathtaking. These heartfelt observations and the related poems were assembled by Pinsky and Dietz in Poems to Read and Americans’ Favorite Poems.
When normal words don’t suffice, I sometimes pull Poems to Read off the shelf in my psychiatry department office. Knowing it is out of the ordinary, I ask my dear patients if I can read them a poem. They have always said “yes,” and later, “it helped.” For example, I read Langson Hughes Life is Fine to a literary-minded young man who contemplated suicide after a romantic breakup. Reading the poem, we laughed through our tears, glad he was alive.
The poem that matters most to me is also in Pinsky’s book, Prayer by Jorie Graham. Like life itself, the first half of the Prayer is lyrically beautiful. The second half is a punch to the gut.
The poem challenges me at a lot of levels, foremost I think because people come to see me when their worlds are falling apart and I do my best to help them find a path forward. In one form or another, we almost always succeed. I have not lost a patient to suicide, for example. Serving as a psychologist, that should have happened by now, statistically speaking, and probably will.
Given my track record, how is it possible that one of the three children I have tried the hardest to help has died, my own son?
I tried to teach him to stay safe. It is hard, but important, for me to come to terms with the fact that I had so little power.
Years before Jack died I built a cello. I had been thinking so much about the poem, feeling there is something important for me in it, that I wrote it on the entire back of the instrument. I sealed the words in coats of varnish. I cried as I wrote the words, not even being sure why. Now I know.