Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright
My reading of "Lying in a Hammock..."
I’ve had time to think this week. I was out of commission for days due to an apparently-not-delta-COVID-illness, and laying there on the couch while a beautiful sunny day blazed away outside, I could feel my anxiety rising: I am wasting this day. Clearly ridiculous, since I could barely move, but I couldn’t shake the guilt of spoiling such a day watching TV. I recited this poem again.
When I first encountered Lying in a Hammock…, it was read aloud in a college class, and I think more than a few of us did that sort of in-between-a-gasp-and-a-laugh at the end. Totally understandable! That final line really comes out of left field. Or does it?
The discussion after immediately became about what this poem means, given that final line. I thought a lot about this while memorizing the poem and deciding on the performative aspect of the recitation. There were four immediately obvious paths: Either the final line is a moment of realization or it’s been contemplated, and it’s either harrowing or blissful. So then, which of these makes the most sense, given the rest of the poem? Again I thought of Buson and his series of images. Wright selects here his usual pastoral pictures: The horse droppings don’t do much for me, I think, but there’s something to the hawk looking for home, and the empty house. But there’s not much else.
I decided that I liked the idea that somehow, these images culminate in a moment of clarity and realization for the narrator. Witnessing this scene, in its beauty, peace, solitude, even the natural ugliness of the horse poop, all this full of distance and loneliness shocks him to realize: Ah, shit. I have wasted my life. It makes the most sense: Confronted with the beauty of the world, he realizes that his own life, regardless of action or intent, could possibly measure up.
The idea though, that perhaps this realization could be somehow positive, or at least not full of doom, intrigued me though. I couldn’t make sense of how that reading would work, until I stumbled on another, altogether different possibility: His realization is neither a positive or negative thing. It simply is.
True, the line does seem to stand apart like a mic-drop: It’s the only assessment or judgement within the poem. But what if we took it instead as objective, as much a matter of fact as the clanging of the cowbells, the inevitable darkening of evening?
What does it mean to waste a life, anyway? If this is a confrontation with the quiet majesty of the world, Is it possible at all to live a life un-wasted? The cows can’t waste their lives, nor the butterfly. Beyond anything we might attribute to them, they just are. A hawk is. The horses just are. They live, they sleep.
For us humans though, we have to live with the terrifying idea that one day, we might find ourselves in such a hammock having this realization, no matter how hard we might try otherwise, kind of like James Tate’s reincarnated dog. Tate spoke of his poems as an attempt to find the “ultimate horseshit;” in Wright’s case, it’s literal. We will never learn in what way the narrator wasted his life or how these pictures brought him to this moment, but we can consider then what it means to waste life, and how to live with regret. I know I have some. And the past will stay with you always; there’s unavoidable horseshit to remind you of it no matter where you go.
I don’t believe in “no regrets,” but rather in learning to live with regret. It’s a part of the human experience that’s difficult to avoid, and there is, after all, nothing one can do about the past. I can see Wright’s narrator both realizing his life has been wasted—in whatever way that is—and also, in this state of bliss and repose, coming to terms with it.
We read I have wasted my life and the tragedy strikes us hard, because we only have the one to waste or to make something of. And we all surely do waste parts of ours: Days, months, years. I certainly have. Sometimes it felt good to waste, some I wish I hadn’t. Some of it was up to me and some was not. But I did, and there’s no changing that, it’s just how my life has gone, and that’s fine. It has to be.
It feels a little strange to write that, and I’ve been wrestling with how to put it so that it treads the line between fuck it nothing matters do whatever man, never think about the past!! and live laugh love :) . Obviously, one of these can be immensely hurtful and the other assumes that there are deeply difficult lives out there that can’t just be embraced with love and ease.
I’ve been lucky enough that I think, if I had to watch my whole life (as I’ve lived it so far) played out endlessly and without change, I’d be okay with that. There are wonderful parts I’d love to see again. There are boring parts, frightening parts, and parts of pure anguish and sadness that yes, I want to see again—because they are mine.
Every few years I think back to who and how I used to be, and am astonished by how little I knew and how far I was then from my true self that I am now or am about to be. Yes, I was foolish. But now I’m ready! Of course, the process then repeats itself a few years later. Frustrating, but even so, it’s also somewhat terrifying to think of what it would mean for this cycle to actually end, to be done growing and to also then be ready to live as the person I spent all that time becoming. All that waste, all that wasted time. I think it’s better and more likely that instead, the process just continues forever: without ever arriving, we are always becoming our true selves. If that’s what I have to look forward to, fine then. Roll the tape.
