Praise and Lament, Part 1: Types of Lamentation

This series of blogs deals with praise and lament, two modes of writing that make up a large portion of literature. I’m going to focus on poetry in these blogs, but in a sense, many works of prose, both fiction and nonfiction, are also praises or laments. For example, all of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past could be considered a lament. Proust’s thousand-page novel laments the impossibility of holding onto the past—and holding onto love.

Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book on the effects of pesticides on the environment, Silent Spring, could also be seen as a lament. What is Carson lamenting in her milestone book? I would say she’s lamenting the absence of a world in which humankind lives in harmony with the natural world. 

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is a lament for the moral destruction of an entire country, or an entire generation, or for the hope of a better world that the Russian Revolution represented at a certain point in history.

On the praise side, Jack Kerouac’s novels On the Road and Dharma Bums could be seen as hymns to the lifestyle and values and tastes of the Beat Generation. Terry Ryan’s memoir, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, a book about how her mother overcame countless obstacles to provide sustenance and excitement for her family, is also a hymn of praise.

I think it’s easier to talk about praise and lament through poetry, though, in part because a poem presents a microcosm that’s easier to study than an entire work. And partly because I know more about poetry.

I’d like to begin by talking about lament. What sorts of things would a person want to lament in a piece of writing? Well, to name a few: death, loss of faith, losing a lover, losing a loved one or friend or acquaintance, tragedy, war, injustice. What is the common denominator among all these subjects? I’d say it’s loss: the sense that something that should be present in one person’s life, or in many people’s lives, or is no longer present, or has never been present.

There are many forms of writing or speech or song that traditionally are laments. Among them are elegies, eulogies, sermons, sonnets, ghazals, or the blues.

In the next installment, I’ll discuss a common form of lament, the song of the spurned lover.

Praise and Lament, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Curvature of Time

Several years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s brilliant book, A Brief History of Time, and marveled at his ability to make the Theory of Relativity exciting to troglodytes like me who never braved a science course after high school. Hawking discusses how Relativity shows that time is actually subjective, based on the observer’s relation to gravity. But he then asserts that time is an arrow, always moving in one direction: “Our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is therefore determined within our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time.”

I think writers operate with an entirely different notion of time. Our idea of time is based more on emotion. In Einstein’s vision of space, the shortest distance between Point A and Point B is not a straight line as it appears on a ruler, but a line tugged and stretched by the gravity of nearby bodies. So the time between Moment A and Moment B is, for the writer, not a simple stopwatch calculation. For the writer, the proximity of an event in time has more to do with its emotional and symbolic power for the person affected by it. The day of my mother’s death, for instance, though it occurred over forty years ago, is far closer to me and easier to recall than the work meetings I attended last week. My first day of kindergarten fifty-five years ago is more vivid to me than my commute this past Thursday.

For the writer, the nearness of the past has more to do with its emotional and symbolic mass than with its place in the linear parade of time. But this applies not only to the past, but to the future. Just as past events constantly erupt in our present consciousness, events from the future that have a traumatic or symbolic power seem to ripple into the present. This happens most often in our dreams, where we are most sensitive to the curvature of time, but it also sprouts up in our waking life. How many times has each of us dreamed some detail only to see it occur a few hours later the next day? Of course we all shrug off all such events as coincidence. But let’s not forget that for centuries scientists dismissed the slight miscalculations that Newtonian physics produced, before the Theory of Relativity revealed that this margin of error pushed open the door to understanding the nature of space.

For the writer, the curvature of time has always been of the utmost importance. Tragedy as a literary genre is obsessed with foretelling the hero’s future fall. Think of the Weird Sisters’ prediction that Macbeth will meet his doom when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and at the hand of a man “not of woman born.” The mechanics of how this prophecy plays out are a huge part of what makes Macbeth’s fate interesting, not the fact that he died after a certain string of events. In Ford Maddox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier, the story is told out of sequence altogether, the jumbled way one person would actually recount it to another, in a burst dam of emotions. Wordsworth’s daffodils and Proust’s madeleine are those writers’ proofs of the formula that the nearness of the past is proportional to its emotional or symbolic mass.

So I have to quibble with the physicists’ idea that time is an arrow. As a writer, I see time as being just as oxbowed as space, with emotion and symbolic gravity as the equivalent of the physical force of gravity in stretching the elastic of temporal material.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer