Businessman or Poet
Earlier this year, seemingly unbidden, I typed a set of keywords into the search bar at the top of my web browser and pressed “enter” on my keyboard. A page appeared and my eyes flitted from one line to the next, scanning the list of search results about writing and the body. I moved the pointer down the screen until it hovered over the phrase, “Profoundly, Deeply, Centrally Sensual.” I clicked, consenting to being whisked away, and arrived at an unfamiliar website where I eavesdropped on an interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler.
In his interview on Lit Hub, Butler explains that literature is the only art form in which the medium itself isn’t sensual. “Most words distance us from the events of the body,” he says. “To create a story out of words, you do have to summarize some things… But those things then come through the moment-to-moment, sensual experience of the narrative voice.”
To Butler, whether depicting a scene in vivid detail or summarizing information to move a story along, the great challenge of literature is to use words (which are mostly abstract) to evoke a kinesthetic experience in the reader.
My fingers stroked the laptop’s trackpad to move the pointer back to the top of the browser. This time I clicked the plus sign and, like conjuring a door with no fixed street address, another tab opened. I typed in the URL of the local library and passed through the doorway. Within minutes I’d put on hold copies of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, the collection of short stories for which Butler won the Pulitzer Prize, and his book on craft entitled From Where You Dream.
But weeks went by before I read them. One afternoon, while lying on the sofa, my eyes floated above the coffee table, then landed on the binding of the book of short stories. After losing the staring contest, I sat up and took the book into my hands. One hand held it open while my free fingers instinctively flipped through its pages, pressing down each time a new story appeared as if to take its pulse. After a few cycles of flipping and pausing and pressing, I read this start to a story: “I am just a businessman, not a poet.”
Sometimes a sentence is a stop sign. Like a responsible driver I checked for oncoming traffic, reading and rereading this opening sentence. Then I drove through the intersection and accelerated into the story.
I cruised along until halfway through the final paragraph. The narrator is unsure of how to console his wife, who’s slumped next to him at the base of a tree in their front yard, shocked by her grandfather’s condition. That’s when our narrator, the businessman, does the most poetic thing, which while reading I registered in my flesh and in my bones and even in the viscera of my body. I had to pull over.
Butler shaped an artifact in the form of a fictional story whose chosen elements rub together to create a vibration that resonated in not only my heart, but in my whole being. What is it about that particular story?
We swallow a lot of half-truths as teenagers. I used to believe that I am just a businessman, not a poet. In my late 20s, a dozen years after eating the lie, I vomited it out, no longer able to stomach the discomfort of feeling divided. Though I found small ways to honor the poet in me, the businessman continued to dominate, until I came to resent that part of myself.
Another dozen years on and I’m tired of my struggle against being a businessman, for now I know the truth: ultimately, I am neither poet nor businessman, and that truth sets me free. And in that freedom, I get to be both, because being both is beautiful in a way that is utterly unique to me.