What You Love Is Your Fate

The excerpt and response below is from poets.org's Life Lines: Vital Words in which, We each carry lines of poetry with us. Words that others have written float back to us and stay with us, indelibly. We clutch these "Life Lines" like totems, repeat them as mantras, and summon them for comfort and laughter.

The line of poetry I carry with me always is,the world offers itself to your imagination, from Mary Oliver's Wild Geese.

I've been thinking about Frank Bidart's last line, What you love is your fate, trying to come up with a list of the things I truly love, and also looking at the direct correlation to my life, and thereby my fate.

My list of what I love, so far, in no particular order:
solitude
silence
oceans
rivers
trees
flowers
words
books
my daughter
family
myth
art
history
Great Salt Lake
Egypt
birds
dogs
red
wanderlust


then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE
— from "Guilty of Dust" by Frank Bidart

I have been both comforted and frightened by those lines, on countless occasions. To me they are a lasting example of how poetic power does not always depend on image and metaphor; poetic power can come in abstract language if there is enough emotional energy propelling it.

"What you love is your fate"—the central force shaping your life, according to this deeply romantic view, is your love. The idea is attractive, romantically, yet in "Guilty of Dust" there is a fierce sense that we may find ourselves loving in ways not only unwise but desperately troubling. Your love—your deepest and most impassioned desire-ardor-admiration—turns out to be a force controlling you even as you feel you are choosing to be defined by it. A frightening idea, yet preferable to the idea that you are controlled by animal needs, by chemistry, by economics, by tribal politics, or by some imaginary deity.

"What you love is your fate"—the essence of your life will turn out to be a pattern designed by your power to love. But Bidart's lines say that you may rebel against this—with agonizing consequences.

Bidart is interested in people whose deepest desires are transgressive. In my own life, this has not seemed to be the case; but like most of us, I'm very familiar with desires, or kinds of love, that defeat and prevent other conceivable pleasures and satisfactions.

These lines from "Guilty of Dust" have come to me, for instance, when I see myself heading home toward wife and child—or, turning toward a book of poetry—when a beautiful young woman is leaving the room, leaving the building, getting into her car, going away. Or, when I see myself lifting and moving boxes of books from one apartment to another, one house to another, decade after decade. Or, when I imagine all the memorial services, years hence, at which I'll praise the writing of a friend who has died—or I'll be the deceased writer . . .

I once heard Bidart say "You've got to love what you love" (I think he was quoting Robert Lowell who was quoting Van Gogh); and this helped me: the realization that you can at least choose to love with vigor and imagination what you find yourself loving; there is thus some choice involved!


Mark Halliday
Athens, Ohio