How obstacles and set-backs can be turned to your advantage
By way of Wallace Stevens' firecat
‘The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.’ Marcus Aurelius
Obstacles and set-backs
I have often wondered about the way in which apparent obstacles or set-backs often end up helping us in our lives, or in our work. It’s almost as if there were a secret law by which things that at first appear as insurmountable problems end up as being central to whatever project we are engaged with. This can happen by helping us to think outside the box, by forcing our hand, by making us explore new approaches.
When we encounter obstacles, it is very easy to accept defeat outright, and to say to ourselves ‘this was not meant to be’, or ‘I’m barking up the wrong tree’. But with such a defeatist attitude we will never get anywhere. We need to have the patience and determination to live with the uncertainty and self-doubt that obstacles necessarily provide (I will be addressing this need to ‘dwell in uncertainty’ in another post, down the line). And there’s no point in waiting for inspiration to come along and do the work for us. Nothing will come of that. As Stephen King reminds us: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
In any case, set-backs and doubts will most likely continue to plague us once we are underway. That is the nature of creative work.
I have never found it easy to settle down to write. I think it was Geoff Dyer who said something along the lines that he would start out on a piece of writing only when he had exhausted every possible excuse not to do so, and I feel much the same. Not only is there an element of masochism in this —why do something if it causes you such stress in the first place?— but even a sort of misguided heroism. However, all of that wears thin when you realise that, frankly, no one else gives a shit whether you write that poem/story/novel, apart from you. So you’d better get on with it and stop whingeing.
And once you are underway, it might be best to bear in mind this advice from Nobel prize-winner Patrick Modiano:
Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.
Feeling that we are on the wrong track, that we need to follow a different path is a recurring problem for writers. Sometimes it is best to ignore the direct route altogether.
Which leads me, in a very roundabout way, to a personal anecdote. On a visit to the USA some years ago, I was stopped by Homeland Security and asked what the purpose was for my visit to that country. I had been invited to a poetry festival and rather foolishly volunteered the information that I was a poet. To my alarm, the fresh-faced agent asked me, straight out:
‘And who is your favourite American poet?’
I gave it a moment’s thought.
‘Wallace Stevens’, I replied, bemused. Although I could have mentioned any number of poets, I thought Stevens —whose day job was as a insurance lawyer— provided a respectable option.
‘Good choice’, said the cop, with a half-smile, as he stamped my passport. I have often wondered since whether the guy knew anything about poetry at all, or was just testing me out. Or whether he knew that I had picked Stevens because he was such a ‘respectable’ poet and was playing along. Who knows . . .
The anecdote is not entirely misplaced, because Stevens had quite a lot to say about obstacles and set-backs, as the following poem indicates:
Earthy Anecdote
Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.
Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.
Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.
The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.
Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.On reading this poem, we might wish to ask:
What are the bucks?
What is the firecat?
What drives the poem? Who is the poem’s hero? Why?
I’d like to suggest, as you have probably guessed by now, that the poem might be an analogy of the creative process.
I do not mean by this to follow a reductive line, to suggest that this is all that the poem is about, since that would limit the reading of the poem to an interpretive one, and would suggest a kind of finality to our understanding of the poem — and that, in turn, would seem to be in conflict with Stevens own’ notion, as expressed in his writings, that no idea of reality is final.
According to Stevens, every new experience, and every new formulation of that experience, changes our understanding, and that would be my point; that no analogy of the creative process would be appropriate for all people or all occasions, that no version of that particular reality is final.
To illustrate this point, we might consider, in relation to this poem, that there is one kind of reader who fastens instinctively on the firecat —the biographical occasion or instance of (heroic) action— as a source of meaning; another kind is drawn to the poem’s deferrals of meaning, represented by the bucks that went clattering. Whatever the preferred reading, the poem seems to be calculated to stop the reader in their tracks.
But what is a firecat? There is no such thing, so it must be an imaginary creature. Perhaps Stevens means a mountain lion. At least, that is the interpretation of some commentators. But if he meant a mountain lion why wouldn’t he say ‘mountain lion’? And just in case you have the idea that this is one big metaphor, Stevens himself wrote, by way of explanation to the editor of the Modern School Journal that first published the poem, “there’s no symbolism in the ‘Earthy Anecdote’" ... "I intended something quite concrete: actual animals”. Except that, as I have just pointed out, there’s no such ‘actual animal’ as a firecat. And even the biggest predatory cats will quietly stalk a herd of deer, not bristle at them like dogs. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine a clattering of bucks —even those generated by AI, like those in the image below— stopping for anything, much less swerving in multiple directions when so directed by a feline traffic cop.
My own understanding of the poem is one that leans heavily on paradox. In this reading, the bucks might represent the steady graft required to produce a piece of work, the long miles and late hours, and the firecat stands for the moment of enigma, the spark, or the epiphany; what was once referred to as poetic inspiration.
In this, shall we say, traditionalist reading, the poem works as an analogy of the creative process in which the firecat is the hero of the piece. However, were it not for the bucks, their clattering and swerving, their constant effort (to re-write and edit, to try out different approaches and different routes into a piece of writing), then the firecat —the moment of illumination— would have no role to play at all, and the firecat would spend the whole time dozing in a tree. But he doesn’t; he leaps about, bristling, and then he goes to sleep. The bucks and the firecat form a symbiotic partnership.
A lot of theory
Incidentally, Stevens himself gave very little away with regard to this poem, other than to say that ‘there was a lot of theory in it.’ Significantly, it begins his first major collection, ‘Harmonium’ and he insisted on it taking pride of place in both the selected and collected editions of his work. As John Miles puts it, in his essay ‘An Encounter with the Firecat’:
‘On the threshold of the Collected Poems this doorkeeper bristles, warning us that if we enter, we must expect to be confronted by poems that resist our intelligence.’
Miles also asks us to consider the poem as an anecdote, citing Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Nietzsche’s concept of anecdotes: “The anecdote is to life what the aphorism is to thought: something to interpret.” (Only in the lexicon of a philosopher such as Deleuze could “life” exist as a thing detached from “thought”). Miles suggests that ‘Earthy Anecdote’ is the most anecdotal of Stevens’ anecdotes . . . “in which its swerving and blocking metaphors seems to place it beyond the reach of definite interpretation.”
However, the visionary critic Helen Vendler goes further. She claims that the firecat’s sole purpose in his waking hours is to make the bucks swerve, and that the game goes on all day, until such time as the firecat chooses to sleep. The suggestion is that if the firecat had not chosen to leap around and get in their way, the bucks would have clattered in a straight line all the way across Oklahoma. And she continues:
At least one way of reading this little parable is to see it as an enactment of the response of the mind’s original inertia when it encounters new hypotheses and then contradictions of these very hypotheses. Once our minds are set on an inertial straight path, they will not become inventive unless blocked: and one can see the bucks as a form of uncreative life forced into creativity by the bright-eyed obstacle of intelligence. In Stevens, the obstacle that forces the swerve is dialectically self- created: ifs and ors and buts, with their bright-eyed queries, force the mind into alternative paths. I believe that this apparently trivial little poem revealed to Stevens, as he wrote it, how much his art depended on obstructions and the consequent swerves provoked by them, and that he therefore gave Earthy Anecdote pride of place both in his first volume and in the final collection of his poems.
For many years, while teaching on the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, I used Stevens’ poem near the start of the course as a way of getting students to engage with ideas about the creative process. I hope it continues to serve others in some useful way now that the Powers that Be of that University, in a supremely callous decision, have decided to axe 50% of all jobs in the Arts and Humanities.
Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.