A. R. Ammons, "Uppermost"

Work has taken precedence. When it concerns the job I am paid for, I have focus and clarity.

Unfortunately, that has not been the case with my recent writing. Outside of work, I'm struggling to make the points which need to be made. For the time being, I've pulled back an entry I published on Denise Levertov's "Keeping Track." I want to think more carefully about how the self hides (or doesn't hide) in our creative acts.

I don't need to trip over my own words. I must stop myself from believing I make sense when I spin a sentence which fails to stand.

I guess I must learn from the grain in A.R. Ammons' "Uppermost." The grain "weighs next / to nothing" and "has no burden." It is "ready to float," eager to use a "blank sky / to guide its dreaming." A grain with the freest, simplest mind:

Uppermost
A.R. Ammons

The top
grain on the peak
weighs next
to nothing and,
sustained
by a mountain,
has no burden,
but nearly
ready to float,
exposed
to summit wind,
it endures
the rigors of having
no further
figure to complete
and a
blank sky
to guide its dreaming

You're there. You're where you shouldn't be, uppermost. It feels slightly forbidden, definitely rare. The wind might carry you away–there's always a gust that might be too strong–and you know two things: 1) you're not welcome 2) this is a moment all people should strive for.

What is this place? Ammons gives us a grain which overlooks everything. It is anchored to the mountain and has the sky as a canvas. The question I have is whether I should try to be that grain. Is this earthly height too much? Am I seeking a wisdom too far beyond me? There's Li Bai's "Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain" to consider:

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

In Li Bai's lyric, wisdom atop a mountain is acceptance of death at a specific point in life: all else is done. "The birds have vanished down the sky... the last cloud drains away." It makes sense, in the face of those events, that the mountain is permanent. It stands as the logic that everything else in your life has moved on.

Ammon's "Uppermost" avoids the idea that wisdom, to some degree, has to be an end, a border to our lives. There are truths and ideas far beyond us, ones that it would take our whole lives to glimpse. We get a sense of how little we know when we empathize with animals in pain. We can't enter their consciousness, we know our pity can only do so much, yet we're immersed in a strange union of wonder and grief.

But "Uppermost" does not meditate on these sorts of possibilities. "[N]early / ready to float" and "exposed / to summit wind" are about the endurance and freedom of what otherwise is a most delicate object. We're not talking about amber waves of grain, but just one grain, standing tall at the very top of a peak. It has "no further / figure to complete" and indulges an entire sky for its "dreaming."

I would like for my dreams to have the entire sky. What an amazing image, what a reminder that my mind can shrink itself to a pinpoint. Freedom feels like a bold, wide projection, not the need to win every battle or to speak words in volume. However, I do have a "further / figure to complete." I don't know that I can steal the sky as my own. I'm not anchored to the top of a mountain. Even Nietzsche's musings about those who seek rare views and places with little air end with a descent. For a moment, we glimpse what is uppermost–Ammons understands our going out into the natural world as an exceptional, special moment–and we know there are things we must live toward. The sacred is earthly, and the earth itself the mystery.