First Cut: Tenderness Toward Existence
Baseball and Galway Kinnell. Also I explain the whole deal here
Trailer — CUT TO:
CUT TO:! Cut Two! Cut, Too!
A fitting name for this newsletter in its current state: amorphous, possessed of multiple meanings, and maybe a bit misleading. This is not a Substack about screenwriting, although as a believer in tacky excess I like that the use of ‘CUT TO:’ as a scene transition is considered out of vogue, overselling a moment that’s already implied.1 I think the name really stuck because it reminds me of when we would shout “Cut Two!” when the outfielder was supposed to throw the ball to the cut-off man (teammate ideally standing about halfway between you and the infield) to get the ball in to second base (“2”).2 The advice was always to imagine throwing the ball through the cut-off man. This way, your throw could be “cut off”—caught and potentially redirected to a different base, or not thrown at all—by this teammate, but still make it all the way to the target base on its own if no cut was necessary. For most of my time “playing” baseball, this advice was ignored. Balls would soar in high, clumsy rainbows miles above the cut-off man’s head, galumph patiently through the upper atmosphere, and deposit themselves several feet from the base at their leisure.
My favorite art feels like it’s thrown through me, like I can choose to catch it and redirect it into my life however I want, or just let the bright streak of it pass me by as it sears towards its target, and neither could even begin to diminish or exhaust it. But I also appreciate those ungainly rainbows that make me leap and stretch my glove towards their wobbly arc, or just look up and smile as they sail over my head. It takes a very lovable sort of foolishness to ignore the person standing between you and your target and just heave the ball as high and as far as you can. I’m sure I’ll be covering (and, in the process, making) some of both kind of throws on here.
This metaphor is also applies to the creative end of things. You can acknowledge that the audience is there enough to throw through them, but with the force and intention of reaching something beyond both of you. Or you can just fuckin let it rainbow. You’re the one who caught the ball in the first place.
My intention with this Substack is to play more cut-off man than outfielder. Which is to say I want to catch/redirect/ogle up at the seams on other people’s baseballs more than my own. But my intention is also to be constantly changing my intention so you might see some Original Creative Work from me on here at some point. More on that later.
My intention is also not for this to be a baseball Substack, so on to the real reason this is called CUT TO: (other than making a punctuation nightmare for myself): it’s about cuts! Like in the movies. But also in other things!
More specifically, it’s based on my pet theory that the cinematic cut and the poetic line break have the same function. Both suddenly break the static state of the medium—either the single shot, as in photography/videography/gimmicky awards movies3, or the prose paragraph—into a completely new form, building on the meaning established by the previous shot/line while creating a ruptured dialogue between these two inseparable but discrete building blocks of the medium.
There are more similarities between cinema and poetry—emphasis on images and sensory experience, a special ability to convey dream states and surreal logic, Jean Cocteau good at both—but I’m fascinated by the fact that these two forms with such different histories, industries, and creative processes share so fundamental a way of moving through their audience.
And what a way to move! A cut has infinite potential on not just one but three axes: you can cut to anything, from anything, at any time! It triangulates meaning between two already rich and variable elements into an even richer third space of meaning in the way they relate. And they can relate in so many ways, Kuleshoving or metering, revealing or enjambing. Cuts can make us feel entire scenes, entire years, entire lives in a single instant.
The words ‘cut’ and ‘break’ imply—and often contain—a certain violence, but I find peace in the way they fold into a larger work of art. As I get older and the neoliberal world order keeps tightening its disintegrating fist, transitions in my life and in the state of the world feel ever more jarring and violent. Cuts, breaks in the fragile medium of an unjust status quo. Under such conditions, radical or even just thoughtful uses of the artistic cut become ever more exciting. “We are dreaming all wrong,” said Toni Morrison. With their fluid logic and spacetime, dreams—in both senses of the word, nighttime hallucinations and daytime aspirations—move through us in something like a series of cuts. At the very least, our memories of them are sandwiched between a cut from dreamless, desireless sleep and a cut into waking reality/the outcome of our ambition. Maybe if we learn to cultivate our cuts, cultivate our dreams, we will wake up after years of hard work and our world will have cut to a better one.
I find the concept of the cut comforting on a personal level, too. I often feel incoherent, broken between too many projects and interests, uncomfortable with establishing a consistent aesthetic as a person or as a writer. I feel like I’ve changed too radically to move forward as the person I am while containing the people I used to be. I think this is a common experience, one that cuts are uniquely suited to speak to. A character splashes their face in the mirror and cuts to an older actor playing the same character totally differently. A poem lurches back to the speaker’s childhood before vaulting to its final line decades after their death. Being a person is like this, sometimes. Maybe all the time.
So my goal on here is to write every once in a while about about a transition between two elements of something—poetry and film, yes, but also prose, politics, music, tree species, baseball, whatever—that affected me recently. I will attempt to inhabit that negative space, that crossing-between, that third space.
In the spirit of the cut, I totally expect and welcome this project evolving and changing over time. This is just the best way I can come up with at the moment to indulge my conflicting desires for a totally free and unstructured critical exploration of the things I love, and a hyper-focused structure to guide my thoughts. Basically, I couldn’t decide if I wanted this to be a series of essays or a blog, so I’m making it both. Kinda missed the cut-off man on that one, I guess.
Feature — Scratched in Time: On The Book of Nightmares
From “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight” by Galway Kinnell
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight when I come back we will go out together we will walk out together among the ten thousand things, each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
This one had to be first. In a way, it contains all the others, a thesis statement for all the joy and pain of impermanence that cuts represent.
Probably the most famous lines of Galway Kinnell’s career, the final couplet of “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight” is almost as instagrammable as Mary Oliver’s “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves” (from “Wild Geese”), the kind of clear, succinct piece of truth that lingers and reverberates, latching into skulls and bubbling up across timelines and vision boards. I originally found it quoted in Anna Badkhen’s brilliant essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality4, and have since heard it in a Mount Eerie song and seen it scattered across poetry blogs (it’s different when I do it). Part of this broad appeal is the density of its meaning, thanks in large part to Kinnell’s use of enjambment (a line break in the middle of a sentence or phrase), a density that I think gets a bit flattened when it’s brought into other contexts. Where “Wild Geese” is a clear lens, “Little Sleep’s-Head” is a diamond, a moment of crystallization that refracts and brings together seemingly incompatible elements of love, loss, and endurance.
This couplet comes at the end of the seventh section of the seventh poem5 of 1971’s The Book of Nightmares, Kinnell’s ten-part poetic wrestling match with the idea of raising children and living with tenderness in a world that runs on cruelty. These poems are desperate and dramatic and, for my money, perfect. Kinnell often addresses animals, himself, and his children directly, reaching through the personal to arrive at the transcendent. I love him as this sort of middle ground between the socially and spiritually critical rambling of the Beats (who I also love, but am often exhausted by) and the sparse, optimistic ecopoetics of Mary Oliver (who I also love, but am often underwhelmed by). In “Little Sleep’s-Head,” he arrives at the Taoist idea of the “ten thousand things,” a poetic representation of the sublime infinity of the natural world—used because 10,000 is the highest number you can write in Chinese with a single character (萬 wàn, also meaning ‘myriad’). The stage for the final revelation of the poem, the wages of dying is love, is set at the scale of the universe, and Kinnell delivers.
The genius to write “the wages of dying is love” is one thing, but the audacity to break it across two lines is what makes this poem truly monumental to me. That gorgeous poetic phrase, kept intact by its simple brilliance (and by Kinnell’s use of italics) bridges the cut between two lines that stand on their own, an ecstatic truth in the transience between human optimism and brutal reality. By winding up “each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages” on its own line, Kinnell’s final line becomes the short and terrible truth at the heart of The Book of Nightmares: “of dying is love.” With “the wages” at the end of the first line, labor becomes central. On a literal level, the wages can be read within that line to stand for simply knowledge, or across the two lines as knowledge of love, or just as love itself. So by breaking the line here, Kinnell implies that all three are the same thing (so true king). Kinnell is reminding us that love must be worked at, is in fact the only thing worth working at.
There’s a lovely ambiguity to “each scratched in time” as well, which I read initially as a physical image, as the ten thousand things being literally carved into the surface of time6 by the force of love. But “in time” can also be read as a temporal description, as in the all-important realization that love is precious and transient arriving before it’s too late to act. I only realized this because I read the phrase printed in an earlier (1973) edition of The Book of Nightmares as “each scratched too late with such knowledge.” I’ve never come across such a radical revision between printings of a poem, and I sadly haven’t been able to find any interviews where Kinnell has spoken on it. I prefer the second, more optimistic version to the bleakness of the first, mostly because I think it’s more true; it’s not easy to apprehend the dying inherent in the things we love, and even harder to live in that truth, but it is possible. To me, the “too late” version of the line implies that such awareness is only truly possible after the loss of the beloved.
The slight flex in grammar in writing ‘the wages is love’ (instead of ‘the wages are love’) adds to the power of the line break, letting the final line stand better on its own and making the ‘s’ sounds of ‘wages’ and ‘is’ flow across the pause. It also stands out in Kinnell’s style, which is closer to Mary Oliver than his Beat counterparts in terms of writing poetry in mostly normal (line-broken) sentences.
All this to say, if I see a decontextualized bumper sticker that just misquotes “the wages of dying are love,” I’m rear-ending that shit.
There’s another phrase from The Book of Nightmares that has stuck with me across time and space: “Tenderness toward Existence.” Like “scratched in time,” it has a double meaning. Treating existence with tenderness brings us closer to(ward) existence. We exist most when we are tender.
In that vein, I hope to stay tender toward this Substack, posting what and when I’m able, and tender towards my subject matter (albeit in a critical way, I promise they won’t all be this gushy). And I hope that it offers some tenderness towards you.
CUT TO:
I took one intro to screenwriting class years ago just after discovering Charlie Kaufman and that was predictably a complete disaster so if this is out of date or incorrect I apologize!
Madison says it reminds her of this scene from Lady Bird, which is even less flattering.
Rope (1948) innocent ofc
Highly recommend; some of the best writing on the disorientations and displacements of the current human moment I’ve come across. Unsurprising that Kinnell, a former anti-war activist, resonates with Badkhen, a former war correspondent, because both of their work is very concerned with “how the fuck do we live in this evil evil world?”, a question that famously no one is asking right now.
wizard shit