Being around my boyfriend's daughter is hard for me, because I want to tell her she's not the center of the world. She is nine years old, happy, creative, and so social: She feels sure that other people want to listen to her.
Because I'm an egoist, it's hard to let her believe it. When she asks me to look at the painting she's finishing, I say I'm working on something. When she asks me to sit outside on the grass, I say the laundry needs folding. When I do close the door to be alone, I am embarrassed that I need to show her my time is worth more than hers is. Under the performance of teaching lessons about adulthood, I'm still a child.
I'm reading Robert Lowell right now, while my boyfriend and his daughter are at the circus. Lowell is comforting, because while he wrote insightful poetry, and won the Pulitzer Prize at 30, he knew his own alcoholism, mental illness, and immaturity.
In his thirties and forties, when he had a new wife and baby, Lowell battled bipolar illness and checked into several different mental hospitals. His "confessional" poems around that time stage his struggle as a struggle between two parts of his identity: Lowell is both the adult poet he wishes he fully were, and a boy with emotional egotistical needs. He sometimes describes the gap between his selves by looking down on a body that feels or looks like someone else's body. Are these really his own hunched shoulders at the austere writing desk? Is this his face that's acting as if it knows so much?
In "The Dolphin," he watches his slouching shoulders at work: There is "my body/ caught in its hangman's-knot.../I have sat and listened to.../the collaborating muse,/...not avoiding injury to others,/...not avoiding injury to myself." He sees he was often hard-headed--narrow-minded--in his insistence on writing. The last line of the poem admits there was always a difference between who Lowell said he was and what Lowell actually did: "My eyes have seen what my hand did." Even as a "master" of his art, he sometimes twisted into the fetus's or contortionist's knot, needing someone with a sober view to caretake.
In the poem "Man and Wife," he again admits to his blind spots about his emotions and his body. He remembers feeling invincible and handsome when wooing his wife in his 20's: "[I] outdrank the Rahvs in the heat/of Greenwich Village.../too...poker-faced to make a pass,/while the shrill verve/of your invective scorched..../Now twelve years later.../...your old-fashioned tirade--/loving, rapid, merciless--/breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head." Lowell remembers when he was a cocky kid. But he's still cocky in his wife's eyes, so he must still be cocky. Here he knows part of himself through his partner's distance or disappointment.
His body becomes a stranger again in "Walking in Blue," in which he describes what it feels like to be a patient in McLean mental hospital. He looks adult, but he lives with the ill who need to be cared for. "After a hearty New England breakfast,/I weigh two hundred pounds/this morning. Cock of the walk,/I strut.../and see the shaky future grow familiar/in the pinched, indigenous faces/of these thoroughbred mental cases." He feels like a grown man, but he also sees he's living the path of someone who's mentally ill. He does not invent himself.
While I try and sometimes fail to be an adult in the house this summer, Lowell is providing me with some solace. I wish I could give the 9-year-old attention whenever she wants it, but my identity slips and I become a child, too. All of us in this house think we're the most important. Lowell assures us that some yearnings from childhood never leave us. In his poem "History," he writes, "life never finishes./[the] baby crying all night like a new machine./...O there's a terrifying innocence in my face/drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost."
