'Nothingness Is Our Need'

One of R.L. Barth’s sisters-in-law found a tote bag containing poems and drafts in a cupboard, most dating back to his time at Stanford in the late nineteen-seventies. He found epigrams (his trademark form as a poet) and some Martial translations. The bag also held “one fugitive Vietnam War epigram” he doesn’t remember having written. Subtitled “in memoriam, R.E., RVN [Republic of Vietnam], 1968,” it’s called “Death on a Bridge”: 

“It wasn’t just the way you died—

An eighteen-year-old suicide—

But your belief that Nothingness

Was something, more or less.”

 

“Since I have no more to say about Vietnam [I’m skeptical],” Bob says, “I guess this epigram will have to remain an unpublished fugitive.” Some of Bob’s Vietnam poems are graphically violent. Not this one, though it seems more chilling than most. It’s the attractiveness of “Nothingness” – note the capitalization – that disturbs. It provided Bob’s friend and mine, the late poet Helen Pinkerton, with one of her recurrent themes. In a 2011 interview with James Matthew Wilson published in Think Journal, citing her 1963 poem “Good Friday” (Taken in Faith, 2002; A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016, 2016), Helen says:

 

“I had been obsessed for years with the notion of ‘nothingness,’ as used by the Existentialists, by [Yvor] Winters, and by countless other writers because it seemed to reflect my own emotional experience—the habitual rejection of what is for what is not. . . . a kind of compulsive pursuit of guilt that causes us to wreck everything we attempt to do.”

 

Here are the second and third stanzas of Helen’s “Good Friday”:

 

“Nothingness is our need:

Insatiable the guilt

For which in thought and deed

We break what we have built.

 

“Nothing draws us down

A vortex of confusion,

Where shape appears to drown,

And being seems delusion.”