Jane Hirshfield

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Those Who Cannot Act

“Those who act will suffer, suffer into truth” __ Aeschylus


What Aeschylus omitted:
those who cannot act will suffer too.

The sister banished into exile.
The unnamed dog
soon killed.

Even the bystanders vanish,
one by one,
peripheral, in pain unnoticed while







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Exerpt from a Conversation with Jane Hirshfield
April 20th, 2006


HIRSHFIELD: That, and a great extent depends also on the circumstances of life you were born to, and on what the world gives you in the course of that life. We were talking before the recorder was turned on about something closely related to this, what for me has been a life-haunting question about how much choice people actually have in what happens to them in their lives.

FOX: Yes.

HIRSHFIELD: Somewhere in each of my books, I've noticed, there's a line or two that considers that question. It haunts me. Anybody reading this, and you and I, sitting in this room--we have some choice. We're lucky, and we have some choice about our fates. There are many people who have next to none. For them, it takes some great force of world and soul to break through the pressures of non-choice they were born into. It can be done, but it's rare, and it's hard.

FOX: Why do you think many or most people have such limited choice, or relatively limited choice?

HIRSHFIELD: Because life is simply too hard. If you're a child born in the Sudan right now, you don't have a lot of choice, besides suffering and starvation. One recent poem about this, the last to go into After, too late for any magazine, is "Those Who Cannot Act." That poem came out of thinking about the tsunami two Christmases ago, which led me to think also about the Iraq war. In the one, no one at all had a choice; in the other, the carnage and vanishment are caused by human decision. Yet many of the people who die in war are as without choice as those villagers and beachgoing tourists who vanished inside the waters. There's a much-repeated sentence from Aeschylus's Oresteia, "Those who act must suffer, suffer into truth." But that is the protagonist's perogative. The tragic hero will die but so will the chorus. Many people, most, suffer without the catharsis of meaning. The poem is for them. It ends mid-sentence, broken off, as lives do, every day, in Iraq, in the Sudan, in New Orleans, in Indonesia, in Kashmir.

FOX: Yes, yes.

HIRSHFIELD: And I think that those of us who do have some choice have a deep responsibility to those who don’t.

FOX: Say more about that.

HIRSHFIELD: We have the responsibility of doing whatever we can to alter those circumstances, whether by writing about it directly or indirectly, or donating, or volunteering, or political activism--again there's a full spectrum of possibility, and all parts of that are necessary. But also, I think, there's a responsibility to make, of these lucky lives we've been given, what we can.

FOX: Yes.

HIRSHFIELD: Not to throw them away, because so much opportunity is given to leave the world better. And to know joy. Simply to know joy. You mentioned the Dalai Lama earlier, and one of his central teachings is that happiness matters. Perhaps you have to be the Dalai Lama, a person who has known exile and the dismantling of country, a person who has spent a lifetime in a practice that originated in the recognition of suffering to say that and not be taken as a simpleton. And, of course, one corollary of a joyous heart is that it allows some chance of behaving better, of acting out of richness and generosity rather than selfishness, grasping, and fear.

FOX: And yet there are many people who are not born in the Sudan, who feel themselves victims, and they have no choice, because things happen to them...

HIRSHFIELD: Something I wrote in one of my essays may speak to that question. It's in my mind because it was quoted recently, first in something called the Little Zen Calendar, and then by the director of an Episcopalian church, whom I was told used it in her Easter Sunday sermon. The sentence was "Habit, fear, and laziness conspire to keep us in the realm of the deeply familiar." There are forces of inertia in the soul, and there are forces of awakening in the soul, and for each of us, that's one of the very few places of choice--which way we turn--towards inertia and the comfortable habitual or towards the unknown, frightening permeability of awakened heart. To make one choice in that realm rather than another, even in the smallest way, will change a life. There's an eight-line, early poem I love by the Greek poet Cavafy. The title is an Italian quote, from Dante, "Che Fece...Il Gran Rifiuto." And the poem begins, "For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes, or the great No." That is a life-changing poem, I think.

FOX: Yes.

HIRSHFIELD: I can give you the rest of it if you'd like.

FOX: Yes, please, absolutely.

HIRSHFIELD: [laughs] This is Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's first translation. They revised it, but I like the first one better:

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he'd still say no. Yet that no--the right no--
drags him down all his life.

FOX: Yes.

HIRSHFIELD: I love the poem both for its reminder of the possibility of declaring a great Yes and a great No, and also for the koan held by the phrase "the right no." What does that mean, "the right no drags him down all his life"? Sometimes I think it means one thing and sometimes I think it means the other. For me it's a question you can weigh a life against.