Julia Schwartz

March 18, 2004

Against Consolation

            Robert Cording’s collection of poems, Against Consolation, centers around the grief and sorrow of dealing with life, but doing so in a way that speaks directly to the title poem: without the consolation or self-pity that many people need. Through this collection of poems, Cording explores a number of subjects, such as tragedy, imagination, and examination of the minute details that compose a human life. Among everything, he comes to the conclusion that life is never perfect, but it always will continue, and we must continue with it. Continuity is not leaving behind what has hurt or destroyed us, but cherished the memories of these things because some day we will be able to live beyond those sorrows.

            Cording opens the first of two parts of his collection with the poem Mappings, which calls us directly into a world of imagination, a sailor lost at sea. The poem asks us to question expectation, and imagination’s role in it, yet tells us that expectations are always broken. The promise of land ahead “unravel[s] like expectations,” disappointing and cruel. He calls expectations merely a “mirage,” and we are hit with the realization that the actuality of an expectation will never exist. Yet though we know that not all dreams will come true, that there will not always be a green rainforest just beyond the fog, we still need to have dreams: we still “need to inhabit this bleakest of seas.” Those seas are life, and dreams, but dreams are indeed the stuff of life: they are what keep us going, despite that knowledge that most of them will never become truth.

            When the sailor in Mappings is able to retreat to his world of the sea, he “simply creates what is entirely missing, a world he finds impossible to let go of.” For this man, imagination allows for another world that is perhaps better than the one he is in. Through his imagination, he can experience better things, or at least understand that they are out there for him to some day be a part of. This is the reality to him, a sort of consolation prize that indeed is not the fulfillment of the mirage, but is enough to help him to move forward through the rest of his days and continue to believe what lies beyond the present.

            This faith and curiosity that is necessary to keep all beings moving forward is much like the blind faith and intrigue that all children possess, only to lose as they grow older. Cording addresses both of these issues – a child’s inquiry and the fading of the brightness – in his poems. In Distances, he references with yearning “a child’s unimaginable view of the future,” a future that is devoid of imagination, which could be a disappointment, but which is not a future of blandness. Instead, it is merely a focus on the present, which is of true importance.

The unfortunate nature of growing up is that we lose that blind faith in the present, that untainted imagination that is so hard to retain, the insatiable need to know more. Pause cites the fade of this faith: “A teenager now, already it’s hard / for you to feel more than the practiced / ironies and diffidence, too many / hours already spent pretending / you’ve seen it all, and repeatedly.” Once we have begun to realize the truth behind the mirage, disillusionment clouds illusion and life becomes a series of events – what is next; no longer what is now.

The first of multiple examinations of people’s lives and deaths comes with Elegy of Chris McCandless, a boy who left college, donated all his money to OXFAM to fight hunger, and then proceeded to lose himself in the wilderness and intentionally starve to death. Chris’ story is actually well-known; author Jon Krakauer of Into Thin Air fame wrote a book about Chris’ end, entitled Into the Wild. Whether or not Cording knew Chris McCandless is not known, yet the poem still has an intensely personal feel to it; the pain of the speaker is evident in every word, be it mournful, proud, or confused.

A prevailing feeling in the poem is that somehow, Chris was a victim of those who knew him and did not do enough to help him – “it was always too late to save him.” The sadness in this poem is that of pity, and of sorrow – it is not understanding why McCandless would sacrifice his life to an entity seemingly unknown. Yet as Cording hints through the poem, this sacrifice is not unknown, it is simply something we cannot understand: “What could he do once he recognized the false being within him?” asks Cording. It is though McCandless realized that life has become shallow and diffident, it is no longer an ecstasy of curiosity, but an “ecstasy of dispossession.” McCandless is the disillusioned teenager; he is bolder and braver than many of us could ever be. His choice – for it was, indeed, a choice of his to go out in the wilderness and let his life crumble into nothingness – is one of honor. It is a sacrifice to the millions of starving people throughout the world, of which he knew and tried to help through monetary donation and true understanding of their suffering.

This need to truly understand the suffering of those he pitied and tried to help is what ultimately led McCandless to commit slow suicide, masochism through hunger and starvation. The end of his life was unknown; the only details of it are garnered from the way his body was found, frozen inside a canoe. “He spread his arms wide in a world entirely desolate” and received no response. How, in a world so populated and busy, did Chris manage to find not only peace and solitude, but abandonment? This sort of accomplishment required devotion and determination.

Chris McCandless was able to shed the bonds of the world and revert back to himself and truth alone, he bade himself to experience true suffering in order to truly understand a plague. He felt the unraveling of the world and chose himself as the martyr to help save a bit of humanity. Hence, the comparison of Chris McCandless to Jesus.[1] Both gave up their own lives to help people, both understood something about the world that the proletariat knew nothing about, both were willing to suffer in hopes of helping others. McCandless could be compared to Gandhi, as well, who spent weeks in the forests without food trying to connect with a higher being. While Gandhi’s ultimate motive was not death, and McCandless’ was, both realized the importance of solitude and shedding the ties and comforts of society to confront truth.

Another famous prophet of solitude, Thoreau, is mentioned in Nests. Thoreau is honored in the poem for the way “he tried to teach / his eyes to saunter,” the way he was willing to recapture the curiosity of youth and the child’s eyes, to seek pure, unadulterated nature as it was meant to be and has always been. Clearly, Chris McCandless and Thoreau experienced much different outcomes, and McCandless’ interpretation by Cording is one of honor, not that of disgust – not a story of decline and apathy, or one of failure. However, both still were able to, in their own ways, come in close contact and understanding with nature.

Cording continues his examinations of situations in which people die unfairly, such as a father of young children in Last Things from a brain tumor, two friends in Against Consolation, Cambodian women who survived the genocide in Blind, and Holocaust victims in For Primo Levi. Through all of these stories, as well as Elegy…, Cording expresses a deep regret for the lives that have unfairly been destroyed, either by nature or the nature of man. In all situations, Cording is aware both of the sadness in the loss of a life, and the effect of this loss on those people who were close to disaster. In all cases, the tragedies destroy a piece of the witnesses, and try as they might to help, their efforts were in vain. In Against Consolation, the attempts were in vain because of the constraints of time. In Blind and For Primo Levi, they were in vain because the intense hatred and myopia of a few people held the power of life and death insurmountable to a single soul. And, as mentioned, in Last Things, they were in vain because of the ultimate power of nature and God’s determining faith.

These three themes – death, time’s passage and how we fit into it, and God’s role in our lives – are what Cording’s examination of life are built upon. He struggles with death, and how to face it – he is against consolation, as the title and title poem proudly proclaim. And he examines time and God thoroughly – they are two constants in a world of inconsistency.

Many of Cording’s poems express astonishment at the perpetuity of time and how humans seem to be merely a flicker in the stratosphere of life. “Everything… goes on, endlessly beginning,” (Narcissus) and humans are only one beginning in this endless series. Whether we are here or not, “the days repeat and repeat, each day one that has already passed” (Blind). We are then insignificant to the world as a whole, for we individually have no impact on it – it only has an impact upon us.

The world impacts us in our relationships with other people. Loss reminds us of our mortality, and scares us. As Cording asks in In My Study, how do we know that we will live on in memory? That we will not simply be forgotten – “thrown away”? Many of his poems prove, however, that people are remembered. He remembers them in specific poems, or, as in In My Study, he remembers what their lives were like – in Questions, the speaker listens as an old, decrepit woman remembers her youth and her wedding.

We live on in memory. As long as we live well enough – as long as we nourish relationships and create memories and enjoyment – we will never really die. In our own way, this is how we can conquer death; it is how we can learn to live with the way the world is. In this way, we can turn illusion into reality, or vice versa, for we can turn what was once reality into imagination. Through memory, we can resuscitate “the tangible fullness of a moment / bearing down on us in all its final unreality” (Distances).

That same “final unreality” can be two things. Firstly, it is coming full circle and understanding – and accepting – what life is really all about: settling for what we can have, and still believing in what we cannot. Second, however, it can be what comes after life – heaven, reincarnation, nothingness – whatever one believes. Cording has many references to Jesus and his crucifixion scattered among his poems, which all serve to provide an explanation for how the world came to exist, who runs it, and what death ultimately brings, if the mention of Jesus holds true to Catholicism and Jesus’ teachings.

In his poems, Cording first presents the image of Chris McCandless as a Jesus figure. However, this is not the last of the Jesus references. He also refers to the “crucifix” his “summer’s love” wears around her neck in In My Study, and compares the title object in Gift to his expectation as a symbol of Christ and its reality as a bird’s skull. He expects “the true cross”; “the crucifix as it was meant to be,” and opens a grim heap of rotting bones. The use of phrases such as “Christ’s garments” and “the loving face of Christ” serve to enhance this jarring discordance, one that is unhappy. It is “truer to a world grotesque with human misery,” not beautiful and blessed by the word of Christ.

In our world, Christ is only an illusion – an ideal that we strive to achieve and will never really reach, unless we are extraordinary, as Chris was (just add a t, and he’s Christ…). Christ is the beauty we hope to know, but never will see; he is the inspiration to Cording – the best in all of us. Yet, in Gift, Christ is only imagination, and the reality is ugly bones. Yet this contrast – the contrast so important to Cording – is how the world all can tie together: it is “the deformed half of everyone.” This way of thinking accepts that deformity – the ugliness, the pain, the sorrow, and the discord, but it also understands – and seeks beneath – to find the beauty and wonder of the world. It is imagination or truth; reality or disguise; it is two in one. That is the world.

The first poem to bring together many of Cording’s ideas, the first that shows him coming to some kind of terms with his questions, is Passages. In this poem, he examines a flame lighting the dark (light has served, in his poems, to be a sign of enlightenment or transformation – such as in Dust), and finally realizes the perpetuity of life as it is, that extends beyond us and our being. This is “the most intimate knowledge, complete and present from the beginning, of a place [we] cannot see, but must go to, along paths once apparent and invisible.” Here again is the contradiction.

That pathway is life. Life is a series of nothingness that all adds up to something in the end – as Cording sees it, no one being is important in the history of the world, but humanity as a compilation is. He realizes the repetition of lives as he treads among the ancient halls of a cave, the way lives just keep coming up and being forgotten eventually. Our interlocked generations and need to keep on moving along into the future are the “old claims that bound us to stay and leave” the Earth; that is, to both understand and appreciate it, and to be confused and baffled by what we don’t know about it. Through this cave experience, and the realization of so many lives before him – and concomitantly, then, so many lives after him – Cording, as the speaker, is able to realize all the lives that “had come / and gone every year / and would again / for all time, a single moment // I had passed through, / and recognized / by my passing, / my place in it.” We have no control over all the moments of time – only the ones we are in.

In Moths, the next poem in the collection, Cording brings up this same concept, ruminating on the steady cycle of life. The continual movement of the moths until their death strikes him as does the way they “simply became their end.” This view of death is much more peaceful than the torturous deaths Cording fears – like cancer or machine guns – and fits in nicely with his newfound knowledge of the continuation of humanity. His fear of death seems to go dissipate, and all that now matters is the “moment-to-moment urgency of every thing to keep moving.”

Finally, the title poem, Against Consolation, does not leave us wondering why Cording chose it as the title for his collection of poems. In this poem, he speaks to the way we mourn, and the way we should be able to mourn: “No proverb sweetens your suffering,” he says. A typical view of loss is to revel in it for a short while, then forget and move on. Yet as we well know, Cording does not believe in forgetting the lost; instead, they shall be cherished in memory. We should not try to “rid ourselves of the pain”; instead, we are told (in italics, nevertheless) to “stay with your suffering.” The constant renewal of this pain allows for loss, and continuity, but it also grants respect to the dead victims of tragedy.

We should not expect loss to “make more sense in time,” because how could it? Tragedy is terrible and heartbreaking. Instead, Cording decides to go against that consolation that would make it all okay, and “live in that knowledge,” and to appreciate the “void” that is left by loss. We “cannot escape” loss; it is a part of the cycle of life. No matter how hard a tragedy hits a family of friends, because the lilacs will always return and “pierce the air each spring for no cause, beautifully innocent of meaning.” There are new beginnings, that are not pure, but more knowledgeable – “knowledge, the word itself a kind of consolation.” Move on, but do not forget, is the message Cording is sending.

In a collection where the poems are all deeply tied to each other, the final poem in Against Consolation, Pause, Cording finally speaks of the beginning, instead of the ends he has questioned in earnest: a birth. The birth allowed the speaker and his wife to “[forget themselves] and where [they] were,” spanning time and thus being released from one of the more agonizing constraints of human life. The end of the poem, Cording’s last words to us, are words of contentment and understanding; of acceptance: “I can’t explain why one incident // triggers another or why, together, / they become something else entirely. / I’d like to call it the plenitude of / the unintended. The truth is, / I don’t know if chance speaks or if / the mind just cobbles together whatever / it needs – but this world is full of / accidental moments that can stop us / in our tracks and wake in us again / the strangeness we were born to.”

Those accidental moments are what we live for, those peaks that make the valleys worthwhile. It is the ever going sequence of life that forces us along, even as we get mired down in valleys. There are, to every life, some things that will never be understood. That is the strangeness we are born to; it is a strangeness we will die with, and a strangeness the people we leave behind will cope with as well. Cording ends with ties between imagination and reality – the mind’s ability to cobble together what it needs, crafting imagination from bits of reality -- with ties between illusion and fact. He is able to come to term with the simultaneous nature of beauty and grief, and learns to live with loss – without consolation.