“Well, the
future is imaginary, the present is happening and that only leaves the past to
be true; and it leaves the past as, in a sense, all of a piece. Once a thing is
done, it belongs to the past. When you write a poem, you write it in the context of the
great poets of the past, not of whatever happens to be reviewed at the moment.”
The cynic
will say: “Your time is over, old man. All you have is the past. Your future
will never arrive.” To which Sisson might reply, as he does in one of his late
poems, “In the Silence”: “In every spoken word, / Always, the past is heard.”
For the young, the omnipresence of the past is tyrannous and must be denied.
The idea that we are born with generations of precedents behind us is
intolerable. Our uniqueness burns like white phosphorus. Sisson looks at not
just poetry but the world and his life sub specie aeternitatis, as did
Spinoza. Michael Oakeshott writes in Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint
Academic, 2014), in a section dated 1928-29:
“Striving to
get away from our past – an impossible task, yet ‘life’ is nothing but this.
The past – like a tattoo mark – which is ineradicable & brands us as a
sailor whatever walk of life we may follow. Our effort to escape is like a fine
spray of water, directed at a mark which, no sooner does it start on its way,
than the wind dissipates it, & all is lost.”
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