OATMEAL

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if
somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal–porridge,
as he called it–with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him in: due to its glutinous
texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness
to disintegrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with
an imaginary companion,
and he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund
Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
“Ode to a Nightingale.”
He had a heck of a time finishing it–those were his words–“Oi’ad
a ‘eck of a toime,” he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
pocket,
but when he got home he couldn’t figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made
some sense of them, but he isn’t sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through
a hole in the pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a
Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay
itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move
forward with God’s reckless wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas
of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known about any of this but for my reluctance to eat
oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited “To Autumn.”
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn’t offer the story of writing “To Autumn,” I doubt if there is
much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started
on it,
and two of the lines, “For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy
cells” and “Thou watchedst the last oozings hours by hours,” came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him–drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the
 glimmering furrows, muttering–and it occurs to me:
maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a baked potato is damp, slippery and
simultaneously gummy and crumbly,
and therefore I’m going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.
–Galway Kinnell, 1995

I am so in love with words that sometimes I have to share them here simply because I am in love with them, and the fact that someone else “wrote” them doesn’t much matter; what matters is that they be shared, like passing around the most delicious meal possible. Even more than that, really, such a comparison seems almost to cheapen, especially, Galway’s sacred words here. Joan Baez said something to the effect that when she write, it seems that it isn’t her at all, although the words dance down her arms onto the page from somewhere (paraphrasing wildly here, no doubt!). And it’s true, when I write I feel that God (what’s That?!) wants something to be said, and it is a defining attribute of the Divine Being that s/he/it has so much to say and be and show in so many different ways.

So sublime and delightful and descriptive of this funny old world:

He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a
Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay
itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move
forward with God’s reckless wobble.

and….

I can see him–drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the
 glimmering furrows, muttering–and it occurs to me:
maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.

Does this mean God is in the details? I think so. Or in the oatmeal, anyway…

I’m choosing loneliness just now, and I think I’d like to explore it a bit. Stay tuned…