Fame

Every year, as Christmas rolls around and then a new year knocks on the door, my thoughts turn to mortality and fame. We are all destined to have a brief life and then we just disappear forever. Very likely nobody will ever remember or know about us unless we were individuals of exceptional deeds and talents. Some rich individuals bought fame by donating money the establishment of colleges or hospitals. There was a special group of self-expressing artists who managed to achieve immortality through the exquisite beauty of their crafts. Among these were certain "confessional" poets whose tortured lives,, ended in self-extermination. I had in mind American poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman. I had an impression that these suffering poets turned to poetry for therapy, not for fame. Fame was only incidental in their lives. The Vietnamese poet Bui Giang could be labelled as a "confessional" poet. And his life could be seen as a long flirtation with self-destruction, but we must give him credit for not pulling the trigger. Somehow he must have found reasons to hang on to life. My life is also a long flirtation with self-destruction and I've been trying to fall back on words as therapy. In the process, I'm discovering the power of music. Let's hear what Anne Sexton said about "music":


Music Swims Back to Me
BY ANNE SEXTON

Wait Mister. Which way is home?   
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.   
There are no sign posts in this room,   
four ladies, over eighty,
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me   
and I can feel the tune they played   
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.

Imagine it. A radio playing
and everyone here was crazy.
I liked it and danced in a circle.   
Music pours over the sense   
and in a funny way
music sees more than I.
I mean it remembers better;
remembers the first night here.
It was the strangled cold of November;   
even the stars were strapped in the sky   
and that moon too bright
forking through the bars to stick me   
with a singing in the head.
I have forgotten all the rest.

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.   
and there are no signs to tell the way,   
just the radio beating to itself   
and the song that remembers   
more than I. Oh, la la la,   
this music swims back to me.   
The night I came I danced a circle   
and was not afraid.
Mister?


Name Le, a young Viet expatriate fiction writer assuredly gained fame with his debut collection of short stories in 2008, and possibly immortality with the story "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" which has been widely anthologized. How many of us can honestly say to ourselves that we have lived our lives with love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice?
Roberto Wissai/NKBa'
January 11, 2012