Komachi on the stoop: Writing and the threshold life

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 1996 by Hirshfield, Jane

All a monk's needs for clothing, food, and refuge are satisfied (in symbol, if not always in actuality) at the margins of society, within what those who dwell more at the center consider extraneous or useless. Monks are recyclers, compost-makers-out of unwanted waste and communal labor, they create subsistence, beauty, and wealth. This, then, is the work of the threshold: to step into places of seeming barrenness or emptiness or neglect and bring back new wealth. For writers, such a life often entails making a place outside the mainstream in outward ways-jobs, housing. The novelist Anne Lamott has commented, for example, that there are almost no women writers today who haven't worked in "the food service industry," and my own informal surveys (and experience) have thus far proved her right. Inwardly, though, the writer's embodiment of threshold activity has to do with his or her fundamental relationship to language and culture itself. Words that are common currency for everyone become treasure in the hands of the writer-transformed into greater depth, luminosity, and meaning for the entire community because they have been immersed in the freedom of the liminal.

One sign of a healthy society is that its threshold people are granted their role in a way that does not deny them their essential grace. In an essayS considering the debate over welfare in this country, novelist Marilynne Robinson reminds us of the ancient law of Moses: "When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands" [Deuteronomy 24:19]. As Robinson points out, it is important that not only orphans and widows are permitted this gleaning, but also the true outsider, the passing stranger; and important, too, that the ones who are granted the trees' remaining olives after the main harvest, the late-ripening grapes and forgotten wheat, are dignified by their role as well-through them the community is blessed. The same understanding might be brought to the debates over whether there should be public funding of the arts, or whether or not we are willing to share our places of habitation with the coyote, the cougar, the wolf, and the fringe-toed lizard.

Generosity to the stranger acknowledges that community exists beyond one's own social group or species-what it requires of us, of course, is a true altruism, beyond any possibility of direct repayment, even to the point of surrendering what we might rather keep: an extra three sheep on an overgrazed commons; an overly-fixed idea of what is beautiful or of the justice of the current social order. As Lewis Hyde has pointed out in his remarkable book The Gift, it is precisely in this spirit of nonpossession and surrender that art flourishes best. It is also this threshold spirit that makes the liminal writer not only an independent thinker but also an engaged one-when a person identifies with the full range of citizens of a place, sentient and non-sentient, he or she cannot help but speak on their behalf.