Commonplace Grace – An Explication of Annie Dillard’s “The Man Who Wishes to Feed On Mahogany”

This is my final paper for Introduction to Poetry and my love letter to Annie Dillard, should I ever travel through time to win her.

Poetry is meant to create new life in words or, perhaps, to recreate in the living a sense of what it truly means to live. In writing a poem, one must stand between the abstract and the imminent and snatch enough from both to find a meaning that is at once both broadly universal and intensely personal.  In “The Man Who Wishes to Feed on Mahogany,” a response to a philosophical quote in a magazine interview, Annie Dillard seeks to liberate human love and desire from abstraction and release her readers to love the weights that pull them during their “walking in the world” (29). As a woman whose writing exudes a love for the “commonplace” (14), a writer who loved “the world, this windy wood” (23), Dillard is a poet who is most intimately concerned with bringing together the abstract and the eminent. In “The Man Who Wishes to Feed on Mahogany,” a free verse poem, she reminds her readers that love and desire cannot and should not be denied by abstraction—they are commonplace, tied to real people and places and things. Denial of love is a denial of the grace found in the real and every day, a detachment from the best of the world.

In her epigraph, Dillard informs her readers that she is writing this poem in response to a paraphrased statement by Chesterton, quoting Borges as saying, “if someone wished to feed exclusively on mahogany, poetry would not be able to express this. Instead if a man happens to love and not be loved in return, or if he mourns the absence or loss of someone, then poetry is able to express these feelings precisely because they are commonplace ” (Epigraph). The implication of the quotation is that there are certain desires detached from common experience which the poet cannot capture in words. In the mind of Chesterton and Borges, abstract and aberrant desires are disconnected from the commonplace exactly because they are uncommon. Throughout “The Man Who Wishes to Feed on Mahogany,” Dillard alludes to this quotation, both in word choice and subject matter, while simultaneously subverting its implied thesis. For Dillard, “wishes weight” and “love holds” (22). Desires are impossible to divorce entirely from the real, try as one might.

If someone wished to feed entirely on mahogany, Dillard’s poem says, he would still be longing for something “real in the world” (7). Even as he desired something entirely abstract, he knows “that in humid Hatian forests are trees,/hard trees, not holes in air, not nothing” (9-10). Though a man cannot feed entirely on mahogany, “some love weights” his “walking in the world” (29), and so his feelings do have a place in “the poem” (13). Contrary to the notion expressed in the epigraph, Dillard hints at a belief that there is something about desiring itself that runs deeper than its object. While Chesterton and Borges divide unusual desires such as mahogany from typical loves, desires and feelings, Dillard does not.

As she opens the first of her six six-line stanzas, Dillard makes her most direct allusions to the epigraphic quote, borrowing the phrases, “the man who wishes to feed on mahogany” (1), “who happens to love and not be loved in return” (2), and “ mourning…the absence or loss of someone” (3). Unlike those whom she quotes, however, she draws a direct connection between these three ideas, arranging them in a sequence at the introduction of her poem, “Not the man who wishes to feed on mahogany/and who happens to love and not be loved in return;/not mourning in autumn the absence or loss of someone” (1-3). Her phrasing emphasizes that in her poem, “the man who wishes to feed on mahogany” is a man mourning a loss. This love lost, this absence, is implied to be a woman. Dillard paints the reader a portrait of this —“in a yellow dress, she leaned/light-shouldered, lanky, over a platter of pears—” (4-5). But as Dillard introduces this mysterious woman, she is ironically canceled, negated by the repeated “not” of the first three lines and by the emphatic “no; no tricks” of line 6. Dillard’s character is “Just the man and his wish alone” (6), the picture of a person who is denying his desires, his love, his earthly affections.

This man believes that love and desires are some sort of trick, a trick which he must deny. By the use of alliteration, “leaned/light-shouldered, lanky, over a platter of pears” (5), Dillard draws the reader into the wish, yanking him abruptly out with the harshly phrased, “no; no tricks” (6), which implies apostrophe from the man, almost as though he interrupts her mid-thought. Like Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, the man voracious for mahogany attempts to stifle natural desires, attempting to refuse acknowledgement that he “happens to love” or that he mourns “the absence or loss of someone” (3). The speaker of the poem tells us what he is not, though his denial of love is a desire as adamant as the feelings he denies.

These attempts to abstract “the absence or loss of someone,” to make unreal the very real wish he alone holds, fail. In the middle of denial the idea that “there should be mahogany, real in the world/instead of no mahogany, rings in his mind/like a gong” (7-9), echoing back at him the truth of the world. By the very act of his denial, he makes his own desires more true; by the very act of desiring, he finds himself in the real world. Mahogany is merely a metaphor for the inescapable love he is denying. Dillard will not allow the man to deny the real with abstractions—“in humid Haitian forests are trees,/hard trees, not holes in air, not nothing” (9-10 Try as he might, the man who denies his hunger has no excuses. She will not even permit the abstractions of border, transitive location, or time, stating ,“no Haiti./no zone for trees nor time for wood to grow” (10-11). This negation emphasizes the speaker’s belief that the emptiness created in the mind does not exist. Bracketed by Dillard’s varied repetition—“real…rings in his mind” (7-8), “reality rounds his mind like rings” (12)—stanza two eliminates from the poem the validity of abstractions. The real is not found in holes in the air, or borders, but in loud gongs and annual rings, in the imminently solid stuff of the commonplace.

As the third stanza arrives, Dillard breaks from the progression of her narrative to state “Love is the factor, love is the type, and the poem” (13). When reading the poem, this line seizes the reader’s attention with its straightforward delivery, its lack of imagery. Its uniqueness demands attention and thought. This allusion in this unenjambed sentence stands as the most direct response to the epigraph that the entire poem presents. While Chesterton views poetry as a response to unrequited love or mourning, a reaction to the real feelings, Dillard insists that “Love is… the poem” (13). Love is not distant; it is present in the act and creation of poetry. It is not just easily defined feelings that are “commonplace.” In poetry, all the seemingly abstract and invisible desires find shape. With masterful use of the third-person point of view she employs throughout the poem, Dillard works a skilled apostrophe to the reader into her poem without completely collapsing its tone with the contrast.

Within the rest of the poem’s third stanza, Dillard voices the questions of her anonymous character asking, “Is love a trick, to make him commonplace (14)?” The man who hungers for mahogany, in another allusion to the epigraph, strives against the idea that his desires are common or universal. Rather than engage with his feelings, he remains “cool” to his desires, another failed attempt at abstraction (15). Dillard places him in “his windy rooms” (15) a metaphor for the world he creates in lonely contemplation, contrasted with the wideness of “the world, this windy wood” (23), an allusion to the Holy Spirit of Genesis 1 whose breath was present at creation. Yet even in isolation, he cannot remain aloof from reality, and his thoughts turn to “all earth’s shapes, her coils, rays, and nets,” and his love for his “sunburnt… fellow creature” (16-18). He still remains tied to love, despite his wariness of “a trick,” he is caught in the “coils” and “nets” of the real world. Dillard presents love as innate to him as one created, not something he can slough off with denial.

More negations follow—“He knows he can’t feed on the wood he loves, and he won’t” (19). As before, Dillard uses negation to set up an ironic twist. Though the man will not move to satiate his desires, they become personified and somnolently move him—“desire walks on lean legs down the halls of his sleep” (20). This use of personification dramatizes the inborn quality of human love and desire; when the man realizes the impossibility of his wish and tosses it aside, it becomes more human than he is. Dillard then brings him to one of the most symbolic places in the narrative, as “desire walks on lean legs down the halls of his sleep,/desire to drink and sup at mahogany’s mass” (20-21). In this Eucharistic image, the poet presents her theme at its most truthful. Through love, the man is brought to the altar to receive grace and this grace is what forges his connection to the world. When his desires draw him to the celebration of sacrifice, “His wishes weight his belly. Love holds him here,/love nails him to the world, this windy wood,/as to a cross. Oh this lanky, sunburnt cross” (22-24). For Dillard, life in this Spirit-breathed world is a divine grace itself. To know love of the creation, to be nailed to “the windy wood” the “lanky, sunburnt” woman who is earth herself is to hearken to the love of the Creator and Savior (22-23). The metaphor of the woman is, though skirted around before (“of all earth’s shapes, her coils, rays and nets” (16)), realized here as the man finds his connection to her grace through the grace of God. Though “lanky, sunburnt,” and imperfect, the earth is still a “windy wood,” breezy with the breath of the Holy Spirit.

From this narrative climax, the poem enters its falling action; in the remaining two stanzas, Dillard employs apostrophe to exhort her audience directly. Urging readers to enter into the feelings of the man’s story, she asks, “Is he sympathetic? Do you care (25)?” Singling out a single reader, she draws parallels between the man’s desire to feed on mahogany and the every day, commonplace activities and relationships through which individuals experience tastes of grace. “And you, sir,” she asks, “perhaps you wish to feed/on your bright-eyed daughter, on your baseball glove,/on your outboard motor’s pattern in the water” (26-28). Reiterating that the stanzas preceding these questions are both universal and personal she repeats the word “weight” to remind the reader that just as the man’s wishes weighed his belly, bringing his appetite to fulfillment, so “Some love weights your walking in the world;/some love molds you heavier than air” (emphasis mine, 29-30). To Dillard’s narrator, the message is not just the story of one man, but a telling of the tale within which all humans find themselves.

In the closing stanza, Dillard urges her readers to look around at the wonders surrounding them, to look and really see it. “Look at the world,” she writes, “where vegetation spreads/and peoples air with weights of green desire” (31-32). Just as the “sunburn” of the woman indicates imperfection, so the “green” desires of people indicate their ties to the fertile earth. All around, she says, you can see the places where people have united their abstract, mysterious desires with the imminence of the grace that permeates the planet. Alluding to the granite monuments brought from Spain by conquistadores and erected throughout the continents of the New World, she draws our attention to the “Crosses” which “grow as trees and grasses everywhere… marking the map” (33,35). They are “Waiting,” Dillard says, “in wood and leaf and flower and spore” (34), waiting to be rediscovered so that they can tell stories of everyday grace. Personified, they speak, saying, “Some man loved here;/and one loved something here; and here; and here” (35-36). Though she earlier rejected maps and borders as abstract, these crosses, symbols of the Eucharistic communion between man and God, unite the concept of earth with its reality. Though the conquistadores’ crosses were few and far between, these stand as monuments to the commonplace.

Throughout “The Man Who Wishes to Feed on Mahogany,” Annie Dillard utilizes allusions, metaphors, and apostrophes to address the premise proposed by Chesterton, turning it on its head. For Dillard, every desire is a beacon pointing to the ultimate desire and every experience on earth, no matter how mundane, is an ikon of grace. She entreats the reader to direct his loves, his desires and his feelings not toward an abstract, but toward the real, green earth and the ultimate Love, a love which brings out the grace found in the real and makes miracles commonplace.

And So It Goes – Reacting to Slaughterhouse-Five

When I read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, I am drawn into a world where time at once rushes onward like a rapid, rushing stream and yet drags in circles like a lazy, dying snail. I am struck by the bitterness, the sardonicism, the rage of a man who went through hell only to find that no one knew or understood his experience. I find myself confronted by the incongruously winking humour of an author who understood that his meaning would be confused by his readers. In Slaughterhouse-Five, I hear the voice of my German, American, human brothers’ blood calling up to me from the ground, asking why we still fight wars, wondering whether the world had any purpose at all, war or no. And so on. So it goes.

Vonnegut opens the story of Billy Pilgrim, the man unhinged from time, with an autobiographical chapter detailing whatever purpose could be gleaned from his “war book.” “All this happened, more or less,” he tells the reader nonchalantly. During his days as a prisoner of war in Dresden as the sky collapsed in flame and in the days there after his liberation, he witnessed many pointless, painfully ironic deaths, “and so on.” In Dresden, Vonnegut remembers, “A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot… and then he’s shot by a firing squad.” The climax of the conflagration is a pointless casualty. I feel the sense of dehumanization palpably in these tone-setting paragraphs, alongside the unmistakable truth that Vonnegut, despite his sardonicism, still intends his message to demand attention and change. The same man who shrugged and penned, “So it goes,” wrote, “I hope we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom…” In the midst of the dark humour and futility, indeed, because of them, Vonnegut is able to convey a gospel for the twentieth century. And so on.

“‘You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?’ ‘No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?’ ‘I say, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”’” Over the post-war years, Vonnegut relates, he has accumulated a sense that his book is both necessary and pointless. Initially he “thought it would be easy… to write about the destruction of Dresden,” but he would strike obstacles ahead, not least of which his own pessimism. Though he would oppose them in his prose, he could not but believe “that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.” In addition to laughing darkly at the author’s gallows humour, I become drawn into the repetitive downward spiral Vonnegut weaves in his prose, a spiral accentuated in the cyclical nature of Billy Pilgrim’s story. This cycle is alluded to in the doggerel, “My name is Yon Yonson,/I work in Wisconsin,/I work in a lumbermill there./The people I meet when I walk down the street,/They say, ‘What’s your name?’/ And I say,/ ‘My name is Yon Yonson,/I work in Wisconsin…’ And so on to infinity.” Attempting to wrench out of the futility of war is just as pointless as the “song” of Yon Yonson, a chasing after the wind. And so it goes.

Vonnegut strives against ignorance and callousness in Slaughterhouse-Five. Writing in a world where the rapidly developing 24 hour news cycle was devoted to mushrooming nuclear threats and cultural memories were clouded by visions of Hiroshima, he brought word of a slaughter that was to him even more futile. Even he, a prisoner in Germany’s Schlachthof Fünf, for which the book is titled, barely “knew how much worse [the fire-bombing of Dresden] had been than Hiroshima.” In the face of the immolation of the city, no human-inflicted suffering, even the Holocaust, can measure up to what he has witnessed. I am challenged by Vonnegut’s comparison of Dresden to Sodom and Gomorrah. In his mind, the blazes were both equally evil, though he caustically points out that, “Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.” With his words burning in my mind, I cannot but wonder whether any death at all can be considered worthwhile or any man righteous. And so it goes.

Slaughterhouse-Five is subtitled The Children’s Crusade, named for a war which history has deemed as brutally meaningless as the fire-bombing of Dresden. In his novel, Vonnegut reports two accounts of the crusaders, either their motives were “those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears,” or they were marked by “piety and heroism… virtue and magnanimity… imperishable honor.” There is no mistaking which way the wind blows for Vonnegut. In response to the anger of his friend’s wife, Mary O’Hare, who “didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars,” and who was convinced that “wars were partly encouraged by books and movies,” he vowed that should he finish his book, “there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.” Though he and his companions had been “foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood,” Vonnegut wrote so that his children would “not under any circumstance take part in massacres” or delight in the news that someone else had. He would work against the forces of The Children’s Crusade. And so on.

In Vonnegut, I find an American prophet of Biblical proportions, a man willing to look back, something which I love him for “because it is so human.” Beneath the black wit and sardonic dismay of Slaughterhouse-Five, I catch sight of an ancient vision, swords beaten into plowshares and lions with lambs, an era when we send no longer our sons and daughters to be butchered and consumed in sacrifice. I hear a bitter laugh that somehow sighs for the hope underlying its scoffing. I vow with him to stand against the glacial slide of war despite the futility of that fight. Suffering moves forward and the glacier slides on, but still I push against its bloody trail. And so it goes.

Janus

I remembered this poem, first written on a New Year’s Eve, when discussing allusions in class on Thursday. I value time even more now than I did when the poem was written and I hope to redeem my hours here and afield.

As always, enjoy the journey!

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On a Salvador Dali day

watching Time slide melting off my

clock,

I count the lost hours.

But my minute hands cannot reclaim

them,

for their import

was weightier than

I

once believed.

With minute hands, I’m at the Gates of Janus

one foot in yesteryear        and                one in tomorrow,

begging for the hours

back, that I might use them for

more.

The Poet Addresses the Question of his Theology

God’s laughter

is a spastic

harmony

no churchyard

could conceive –

screaming

nakedly of

freakish love

and

disturbing our

immovable theses

of should

why &

because

with whimsy

not defined

completely

taught in

theory or

honestly expressed.

Ancestor

On the high road beyond

the small German village,

I catch sight

of his hands and see mine –

Spindly fingers, nails nervously

nibbled and the all-too-familiar

stains

from late nights and dreams

on page.

The fingers slide through

black bootstraps, and the

stains

are indistinct as he

ties the knot.

I catch up to him, unseen

and with him,

I stare away south,

at the baby teeth of the Alps,

nibbling tentatively at the sky.

“Why go,” I ask,

Thinking of the girl whose

father

made those fine boots,

the woman who

carries

my family name.

Glancing back,

He faces me with tired

eyes, all-too-familiar,

and whispers,

“The mountains

have better poems.”

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Ask me about this poem, there’s a fairly interesting story scrap behind it.

Words ( a revision in the style of Connor Park)

Crazy– say it as often as you like

Label me for difference, for lack of sense.

You’ve got your Shakespeare and your Spektor.

You follow Whitman, Cummings, Frost.

And me, just kicking a can

In the alley behind the hallowed hall.

So call me a lunatic,

Shake your head in wonderment –

Read my heroes, walk with giants,

But leave me this notion of mine.

I have words,

Maybe not bestselling

Or chart-topping

But I have them just the same.

I’ve grown fond of them

Unripe though they are, and immature,

I want them to fill a room with silence

Echo over untamed acres

Imprison thoughts with iron bars

Create life, win hearts, cry the tears of thousands.

So call me crazy, but leave my dream to be

I can’t be Shakespeare

or Spektor,

I cannot equal Whitman, Cummings, Frost –

But I have words, just the same.

REVISION

Vocal Stylings (with apologies to Carl Sandburg)

Crazy—I really don’t care how many times you repeat the word.

My particular brand of insanity is lusted for the world over

By lovers of Shakespeare and Spektor

By followers of Thoreau, Siddhartha, Christ.

So call me a crazy lunatic

Shake your head in disapproval

Go on about your business, your science,

But leave me this peculiar notion of mine.

It’s my voice.

It’s not the type of voice to land a big label deal

Or shout prophecies from the curbs,

but it’s mine all the same.

I like it,

Weak as it is, and untraditional

it can bring a room to silence

echo across the acres of an untamed land

capture thoughts behind bars of iron

Create life, woo hearts, cry the tears of three generations.

So call me crazy, but leave my voice alone.

I am no Shakespeare

Spektor

Savior

But I’ve got a song to sing.

Note – WordPress does not seem to be a fan of the original formatting of this poem, so if you’d like to behold the full majesty of this art, just mention it in a comment and I’ll be sure to e-mail you, fellow traveler.

Sol

Here, on the corner of your

Grand Avenue

At the headwaters of your road,

I stand.

Without shoes

Without a coat,

Embracing myself on this

Frigid day.

Here, on the corner of your

Plaza Charismata

Square within your motive grace,

I stand.

With broken arms

With outstretched hands,

Pulling heaven earthward, drinking

Your sun wine.

Here, on the corner of your

Crimson Robe

Draped beneath a curtain of you

I stand.

I am ill

I am undone,

Hiding under blankets shivering,

Ice within, without.

Amid the traffic of the avenue,

Beneath the shadows of the plaza,

Wrapped in bloody cloth,

I am. (cold)

I am. (blind)

I am. (filthy)

You are here.

You are come.

Warmth in death.

Light in dark.

White in red.

And day grows long

And sun returns

And Spring bursts forth.

You are on the move.

Living Deliberately

An essay I recently wrote meditating on the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau. Though Thoreau comes from a perspective perhaps slightly more humanist than mine, I find great truths in his writings and can weave his melody into the grand harmony of my thoughts. I am inspired to live life unto a higher calling and passionately journey toward true delight and peace.

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When I read Walden, I find a kindred soul, a journeying companion for the life I wish to live. My first exposure to the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau was this quote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”. When I first read these words years ago, I was stirred, not by any emotion I recognized, but by the presence of a new and burning question. Was my life deliberate? Was I intentionally seeking to learn or merely drifting passively through existence? I resolved to cease living an unexamined life, and I am still asking questions today, and in Thoreau, I see a friend who ponders many of the same issues.

Thoreau writes of the value of quiet. Illustrating his distaste for the constant input of noise from the world, he says, “Hardly a man takes half an hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes up he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’”. In a culture where I am expected to never fall out of contact with my friends, both actual and virtual, for more than a day at a time, I often find my own mental voice drowned out by a never-ending stream of information. As a person energized by deep thoughts, I sympathize with Thoreau’s need for separation from society, and long for solitude in which to meditate.

In addition to quiet solitude, I also often find myself longing for a life that is less cluttered by urgent tasks. Echoing Thoreau’s cry of “Simplify, simplify,” I seek to save my days from being consumed by pressing but mundane concerns. Rather than merely bustling along like an ant, I ask, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”. In the end, I refuse to define my life by deadlines and hurry and will seek a more natural pace of life that allows me to be human.

Along with Thoreau, I also seek to live with Nature ever before me. Outside of the rectangular concrete crate that is Beta Hall, I am free to ramble “nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which most attracted me”. When I walk in the woods, I am no longer bound by chronos, the inexorably forward moving stream of time; I can enter kairos, the divine current of past, present and future. I am free to dream larger, love deeper, and hope higher than in the paved world. Beyond the curb, I can “reawaken and keep [myself] awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn”. I am inspired to change the world rather than merely dwelling in it.

As I prepare to continue my journey, Thoreau’s words urge me to passionately pursue the life to which I am called, reminding me that “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away”. I, through quietude, in simplicity and among the trees will live a life not of stifling submission, but rather a commitment to follow the only drummer whose rhythm is truly different from that of the world. I will suck all the marrow out and rout all that is not life. I will live deliberately.

Fratricide & Crusade

When brother kills brother,

Things fall apart.

A house divided will not stand.   

Blood is spilled on the potter’s field,

A house divided cannot last,

Upon the mountains of Megiddo.

 

 

 

 

 

Every lament brings our song’s end,

In the foothills of Megiddo.

The center will not hold.

Pull out your stony heart,

The center cannot hold.

You fight in vain.

Awaken from your nightmare.

You fight in vain

When brother kills brother.

The Father’s heart is bleeding, torn;

When brother fells brother,

More orphans are made.