This story is tucked into an interview with the late American poet Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz has just referred to writing as “an act of transformation, that magical performance.”

INTERVIEWER

“Frost talks about the poet, or himself rather, as a performer, as an athlete is a performer. In what sense do you mean that writing is a performance?”

KUNITZ

A trapeze artist on his high wire is performing and defying death at the same time. He’s doing more than showing off his skill, he’s using his skill to stay alive. Art demands that sense of risk, of danger. But few artists in any period risk their lives. The truth is they’re not on a high enough wire. This makes me think of an incident in my childhood. In the woods behind our house in Worcester was an abandoned quarry—you’ll find mention of it in “The Testing-Tree.” This deep-cut quarry had a sheer granite face. I visited it almost every day, alone in the woods, and in my magic Keds I’d try to climb it, till the height made me dizzy. I was always testing myself. There was nobody to watch me. I was testing myself to see how high I could go. There was very little ledge, almost nothing to hold on to. Occasionally I’d find a plant or a few blades of tough grass in the crevices, but the surface was almost vertical, with only the most precarious toehold. One day I was out there and I climbed—oh, it was a triumph—almost to the top. And then I couldn’t get down. I couldn’t go up or down. I just clung there that whole afternoon and through the long night. Next morning the police and fire department found me. They put up a ladder and brought me down. I must say my mother didn’t appreciate that I was inventing a metaphor for poetry.

Commentary:

I love this story. It’s as simple as it is staggering. I especially like that the ending disturbs the expectation or secret desire of two types of listeners: the first are the ones who, like certain NASCAR fans, go to the oval track in the hopes of seeing a wicked wreck. The second are the ones who only favor adventures that end with a clear jubilant victory like the 90-year old man who whenever he climbs more than thirteen steps in a row sings the Rocky theme song when he gets to the top.

Isn’t the young Stanley’s story, sans falling to his death and sans conquering the granite face and making it all the way to the top, like much of life? Aren’t we like young Stanley constantly negotiating the movement between the comfort of feeling secure and the desire to take risks, defying danger one minute, just trying to stay alive, and the next minute avoiding at all cost any high wire acts. Isn’t Stanley’s predicament like many of our own — living between precarity and promise, caught between falling down and going up, battling the elements both outside and inside us.

Isn’t it even more inspiring in the end that his triumph, his unbelievable triumph, resides not in the fact that he didn’t fall any more than the magic lies in his having made it to the top, but rather in his audacity to climb, to put his magic Keds to good use, to perform not because others are watching but to test himself against something bigger than him, and to taste the dizzy ecstasy and agony that comes by such daring? Wasn’t his triumph reached in his holding on for dear life with his fingertips and his toes, enduring the inconceivably long wait for help, day turning to night turning to day? There is a lot written in Christian spirituality on the virtue of letting go and the peril of not. I have often spoken of a spirituality of relinquishment most vividly exemplified in Christ on the cross abandoning himself to the one by whom he feels abandoned. In Judaism there is the tradition of devekut, of prayer as clinging, as tenaciously cleaving to God the way Jacob clung to the angel he wrestled for a blessing at the cost of his once graceful gait.

The poetry and the transformation require risk, and come by way of the courage to climb, the awareness of when to let go and when to hold tight, which open up like the trapeze catcher’s hands ready to receive the giddy relief of being rescued, and the gravity and grace of climbing not up but down the ladder like Jacob’s angels?