Sister Failure

Some time ago I saw an article about Philip Schultz's recent book of poetry, Failure, and I knew I had to get it. Somehow the title was too evocative to miss.

I am kind of new to poetry. Some people live with poetry all their adult lives. Me, I found it strange -- modern poetry especially. Plus I had a girlfriend in college who found poetry very profound, and who was always urging me to read this or that piece ... words scattered haphazardly across the page, breaks in the damnedest places, verbs or punctuation missing. So I'd read it, and she would look at me expectantly, as if I were about to experience some shattering revelation that we could then discuss for the next three hours, and all I could say was "Huh?" It was never the right thing to say. So I shied away from the whole thing; and with only a very few exceptions -- most notably William Blake, whom I discovered in graduate school and whom I whole-heartedly love, yes, including all his bizarre prophetic visions -- I say, with only a very few exceptions I stayed away for decades.

I can't place what brought me around to be interested. Maybe it was my affair with D, who sends me books of poetry but doesn't act like she is giving me an exam. Maybe it was when I started trying to write poems for her -- far more structured than modern, as you have been able to see. Whatever brought it on, it has been comparatively recent. But I am enjoying it.

Anyway, I read this article about Schultz's book, and the title instantly spoke to me. I don't know why, exactly. When I told D about it, she got cross with me at first, telling me that I had no business "considering myself a failure" just because this or that hadn't worked out in my life the way I had planned.

Whoa, whoa, ... wait a minute. I never said it had anything to do with how things had turned out in my life. Nor did I say that I found anything sad or pitiful in the thought of failure. I know the word is often used as a form of condemnation or reproach, a disgrace, a cause for remorse. But I don't think it has to be any of those things; and more and more these days I feel that it isn't. Failure just means that you set out to do X, and in the end you didn't. OK fine, you didn't do it. There might be a hundred reasons why not, some of them interesting and others very prosaic. But the end result is what it is, and now you have a new configuration of circumstances facing you in the world. Next?

It seems clear to me that Schultz doesn't mean "failure" to be a reproach, either. The title poem (near the end of the book) describes his father's funeral. Somebody tells him, "Your father was always a nobody," and Schultz corrects him saying, "No, he wasn't a nobody, he was a failure." And then he goes on to describe his father, whom he plainly loved, and who was clearly a fine fellow with interesting and off-beat ideas for businesses that never worked.

The thing is that none of us ever hits 100% of what we set out to do, and that's OK. Sometimes we don't hit any of what we set out to do, either because it was out of our power to begin with, or because we went at it wrong, or because the world changed underneath us and made everything different. But it is still OK. Achieving the things you set out to do isn't really the point. At the end of the day -- at the end of our lives -- we won't be graded by how many items we have checked off of our To-Do lists, any more than we will be graded by how much money we have. Bumper stickers notwithstanding, the winner is not the one who dies with the most toys. The things that really matter are things along the way -- what kind of person I am, and you are; how we treat each other, and those close to us, and even those far away; what kind of balance we can keep our souls, and how much we love God. These kinds of things, and others beside them. They are what matter. But notice: if those are the things that matter, then one consequence has to be that Success as conventionally understood does not matter, or not so much. That is to say, Success understood as checking items off our To-Do lists, planning and setting and achieving goals -- all that manic, driven, targeted way of life -- is really not that important. It is at best what the Stoics called "an indifferent thing," neither good nor bad except in how we make use of it. (Just as a point of reference, they included money and food and health in the same category.) In fact, I might even venture to speculate that Success could turn out to be a distraction from (or a hazard to) our real job of leading the best life. And in that case, if Success is a hazard that can deflect us from leading the best life, then it is at least thinkable that Failure may not be so bad after all. I can imagine an updated St. Francis picturing Sister Failure as one of our guides along the way, in the same way that the real St. Francis spoke of Sister Poverty. Certainly in this place and time, here in today's America, any praise of Sister Failure would be about as deeply counter-cultural as it gets.

It is an odd thought. I think it came to me because for some time I have been thinking that the current chapter in my life is drawing to a close. Son 1 is out of the house, in boarding school. If Son 2 goes to a boarding school for high school, he'll be out of the house in another two years. And then Wife and I can sit down and dissolve the marriage without the boys caught in the crossfire. On this line of thought, I could find myself three years from today with no marriage and no house -- still bound to the boys, but otherwise freer and more mobile than I have been in ... well, longer than I can remember. And what will I do then? Honestly I don't know. But the autumnal sense of an approaching end has been growing in me for some time, and I see no sign of its going away. I get the same autumnal sense from Schultz's poems about failure. And I think this is why I felt the title call to me before I had ever laid my hands on the book.

It is an interesting place to be in, right now. I don't know where I will go next.
__________

Failure, by Philip Schultz

To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can't remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn't belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures —
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis —
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.