The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (32 page)

I asked Dorothy if she had a copy of the manuscript of
This Living Hand
.

“Yes! I’m pretty sure I’ve got it packed away somewhere. I’ll find it for you.”

A week later, there it was on my doorstep with the mail. It was the original manuscript of
This Living Hand
, typed out on a manual typewriter in the early 1970s, with copious cross-outs and notes written in Mark’s elegant hand. It all came rushing back.

Dorothy gave me the phone number of her eldest surviving son, John, and I called him as well. We talked at length about Mark. What was Mark’s relationship to Keats? What about this old notion that Mark was a reincarnation of Keats? John had clearly thought about these issues.

“
We often spoke about his feelings regarding this possibility [of reincarnation],” John wrote to me after our chat. “I do remember a distinct time when he wrestled with this notion, a restless period that ended with his acceptance of what he called ‘the spirit of Keats.’ This point is supported by two clear examples from Mark’s life. First, he told me of his experiences in feeling—and once seeing—Keats’s spirit at his house in England and also at his grave in Rome. Neither experience frightened Mark, but rather gave him a sense of calm and joy to be alive and carrying out his dreams of finishing the play and working to improve each scene—much like Keats’s own dedication to his poetry. In either case,
what happened to Mark was much more than an inspiring moment; I think these occurrences had a lasting effect, and became part of the mysticism of Mark’s life forward. He was never afraid of these experiences; they gave him comfort, like meeting up with a long-lost friend who returned for a brief visit.”

I had never thought of Mark as a mystic. At no time during our years of friendship did we have that word in our vocabulary. But, of course, it does describe him.

John’s letter, too, reminded me of the years, after Mark finished graduate school in Texas, when he was working on
This Living Hand
. I saw now that these were his years of deliberate practice. He wrote and rewrote the scenes. He worked on the dialogue with a coach. He put it through many trial runs in front of live audiences, and then went through weeks or months of driven rewriting. The play went through countless iterations—and I really think that Mark was revising and improving it until he died.

In an attempt to befriend the spirit of John Keats, Mark frequently traveled to England and Rome, to walk in the places where Keats had walked. I realized that these were all part of Mark’s efforts to
know
the object of his work—what Keats himself would call “knowing the essence.” There must have been fulfillment for Mark in this process. It’s clear to me now that Mark absorbed himself in the life and mind of this great poet—until Mark himself disappeared.

I remembered that I had actually witnessed this absorption—this disappearance—when watching his play. John had seen the same thing, and wrote about it in his letter. “
I got to see Mark on stage performing
This Living Hand
twice during his college/school tours through Michigan and Ohio,” he wrote. “On both occasions I witnessed the character transformation—from my brother Mark to the person of John Keats. I still wonder at Mark’s ability to achieve this early in the show and sustain the show by being Keats—not performing as an actor. That ability, that presence, made the show what it was and no other actor could accomplish the same outcome with Mark’s play.”

It made me happy to hear John say this. Mark had indeed been fully engaged in the work of the poet, the playwright. He had mastered the skills required to produce this magical transformation. And I knew that
this mastery itself must have brought him a sense of fulfillment. It was his dharma. He was pursuing it with everything he had.

Twenty years after his death, I understood for the first time the sacrifice that Mark had made for his art. I grasped the meaning of those years of waiting tables and living in a tiny Manhattan apartment. It all made sense, though Mark himself wrestled with his doubts about this sacrifice from time to time. He talked about inevitable comparisons between the trajectory of his life and that of his many Amherst peers who went on to more mainstream lives—and the rewards of money and respectability.

Mark had thought of himself as a vehicle for his work. He found his calling, and dived in utterly. I think, too, that at some point he had really let go of the outcome. He understood that he was not the Doer. Can there be a more exciting life?

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At the age of twenty-one, Keats had a premonition of his own death. He came to believe that he had only three more years—“one thousand days,” as he said at the time—to realize his gifts.

His premonition was not far off. By the time he was twenty-three, Keats had clearly contracted tuberculosis. All the symptoms were there, and from the Fall of 1818, he continually complained of them: pressure in the chest, coughing, an ever-present sore throat, colds that would not go away, fatigue, and night sweats.

But the shift in consciousness that had taken place through his fierce pursuit of poetry allowed him to face illness and even impending death. He was committed now, “
to bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,” he wrote.

Keats began to frame death in an altogether new way. He saw death as “
the supreme experience—Life’s high meed.” While heretofore he had tried to keep out the “disagreeables,” he now saw that they had to be fully admitted in. And now, in “admitting in” even death—the great disagreeable—he was expanded and freed.

This reframing of death is his final embrace of “the world as the vale of Soul-making.” “
Do you not see,” he wrote to George, “how necessary
a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence, and make it a soul? This school is a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”

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The final year of Keats’s life is often written about as a miracle of creativity. But it is really no miracle. It is only the natural fruition of the process of transformation in which Keats had already been engaged for many years. In the spring of 1818, Keats walked daily on the heath with the now-famous young beauty Fanny Brawne—with whom he was passionately in love. During these months—months almost lifted from time—Keats’s most astonishing poetry poured forth. These were the months during which he wrote the so-called “Four Odes of May”—
On Indolence, On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale
, and
On Melancholy
—which would forever seal his reputation. In these odes Keats reached his own ripeness as a poet. “
For these few weeks,” says Ward, “he stood at a point of perfect balance, confident in his ability to meet the future, able to contemplate his past with calm, and rejoicing in the beauty of the season, the joy of an answered love, the delight of a mastered craft—the themes of the odes as well as his incentives to writing them.”

During these months of creative exuberance, Keats became an uncharacteristically solitary creature, save for his walks with Fanny. Already sick, and chronically weak and fatigued, he found great relief in quiet, solitary days—days spent writing and studying Italian. He was in love with his work, and fully absorbed in it: “
I look upon fine phrases like a lover,” he wrote. “Poetry is all I care for, all I live for.”

What emerged, finally, in these months lifted from time, was his most astonishing poem: “To Autumn.” This is sometimes called the most perfect poem in the English language. Keats called it simply, “
Verse that comes not out of the fever of ambition.”

To Autumn

The poem was a quiet triumph. In this poem, Keats’s personality is finally completely out of the way—utterly lost and absorbed in his images.
He has here achieved the effortlessness that Robert Frost describes when he declares that “
a poem should ride on its own melting.” “To Autumn” was a poem that wrote itself. Creativity creating itself! Keats is now at one with the world.

As it turned out, “To Autumn” was a gesture of farewell. Within months, Keats would be assured of his impending death.

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