Years ago my brother asked for a painting of Don Quixote. Above is one I made based on the painting by Pablo Picasso. My brother wanted the painting because he saw in this knight titling at windmills a touch of his own devotion to lost causes. I’m thinking now about what I wrote my brother in my letter about Don Quixote after I first began reading this novel.
“Don Quixote is insane, but I think Cervantes did that only to make him very human. Here is a person at his most human level, even unable to reason, unable to understand the most basic happenings around him. In the midst of that, he helps people. The underlying message seems to be that ultimately all our sophistication and panache isn’t what makes a difference in the world. It is the greater spirit within us. It works through our disabilities and weaknesses.
He hears a boy, a slave, for example, being beaten in the forest and goes to help him. Most people would have seen a slave being beaten and stayed out of it. But believing himself a knight, Don Quixote goes to help the boy. In all his fumblings and misunderstandings he becomes a hero. Human ability isn’t as necessary as we think it is. We strive to be perfect, and here is a man who is far from it and still helps others. I think that’s what Cervantes is getting at. Our intentions outweigh our gifts or abilities.”
I realize now what I wrote my brother is only partly true. The boy, for example, is not saved. After Don Quixote leaves him, he receives an even greater beating than the first because Don Quixote tried to help him. When the boy finds Don Quixote later, he tells him this.
But in another story Don Quixote is the means through which madness works to bring about the happiness of two young couples.
This is a story of two sets of lovers, Don Ferdinand and Dorothea and Cardenio and Lucinda. Cardenio is in love with Lucinda and she with him, and they plan to marry. When Cardenio goes to tell his father that he wants to marry Lucinda, he finds that he has been ordered to a nobleman’s house in the region. He leaves immediately and plans to marry Lucinda when he returns.
There he befriends the nobleman’s son, Don Ferdinand, and tells him of his love for Lucinda. Don Ferdinand is also in love with a girl named Dorothea. He convinces her to sleep with him, and after she does he no longer wants anything to do with her. He then falls in love with Lucinda and tricks her into marrying him.
This ends his friendship with Cardenio, who rides into the mountains overcome with grief and loses his mind. It is in these mountains that Cardenio meets Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. Dorothea also takes refuge in the mountains.
One night in an inn, Don Quixote has a terrible dream that he is slaying a giant. His traveling companions rush into the room to find him standing in bed, his sword drawn. He is slaying wine skins hanging at the end of his bed but thinks he has cut off the giant’s head and spilled its blood on the floor.
He has killed this giant for Dorothea who convinced him to leave the mountains by telling him she is a damsel in distress. He must return with her to her country to slay a giant. On the night Don Quixote has this dream, Don Ferdinand arrives unexpectedly at the inn. He is with his wife Lucinda. When Dorothea sees Don Ferdinand, she throws herself at his feet and begs him to return to her. In the eyes of God, she is truly married to him. He relents and lets go of Lucinda who runs into Cardenio’s arms. The giant is slain.
Don Quixote is insane. He jousts with windmills. He wears a barber’s round bowl on his head and thinks it is Mambrino’s helmet. He fights sheep and traveling monks, goat herders and muleteers because he believes them to be demons or warring soldiers. But on this night he fights like a mystic who conjures demons away in his sleep.
Throughout the text, Cervantes includes sonnets and when Don Quixote speaks we hear the voice of a poet.
Know’st thou, O love, the pangs which I sustain,
Or, cruel, dost thou view those pangs unmoved?
Or has some hidden cause its influence proved,
By all this sad variety of pain?
If Love’s a god, then surely he must know,
And knowing, pity wretchedness like mine.
From other hands proceeds the fatal blow.
Is then the deed, unpitying Chloe, thine?
Ah no, a body formed so perfectly
A soul so merciless can ne’er enclose.
Nor can it be from Heaven my ruin flows.
But it’s most certain that I soon shall die,
For when the cause of the complaint’s unsure
“Twould be a miracle to find a cure.
Men of arms like Don Quixote, our warriors in the world, our righters of wrongs are quite different than men of letters. Our keepers of peace see and endure the most horrific conditions in war and see humanity at its worst. And yet our man of La Mancha, this knight with the sorrowful face, in his romantic devotion to chivalry, is more a poet than a warrior.
That is what inspired me to read this novel. Poets are told that the battles that take place in their minds with language and metaphor, with voices and visions are as desperate and as useless as those of Don Quixote. We too are titling at windmills.
Every poet I know, even the most famous, struggle to make ends meet. They are married to an art form that takes them from teaching job to teaching job, keeps their checkbooks slim and rarely enables them to own a home. They do this to pass along the art form to others and to write books that book publishers don’t want to publish because they can’t justify the print costs. And yet poets dedicate themselves to these few books and the education that goes into writing these books.
That said, Barnes & Nobles and Borders reported recently that while sales of books have flattened over the last few years, the sale of poetry books has increased by 400 percent. Why? Why do people bother to read poetry? How does it help them to live their lives?
W.S. Merwin relates a story in an interview in The American Poetry Review about a construction worker he knows who reads poetry to find happiness. The man had high blood pressure and left for work everyday angry and in a bad mood. But when he started reading poetry, it took over his life and he became so changed by it he began teaching it to others.
That is perhaps an unusual story, to hear poetry having such a direct effect on a man’s life. But I hear the same story by teachers who teach poetry in prisons. And though poetry is no longer the gentle words of Shakespeare, we also hear poetry echoing through the highways on people’s radios each day. It is how poetry has emerged in this century. It is how poetry now reaches into people’s hearts.
I believe that poetry in any form can physically change people. It reaches into places in our lives where feelings are kept in cages and we feel dumb to express what is in those in cages. It gives words to those feelings and unhinges terror or love or human suffering in ways that only art can. As Merwin puts it in that interview, “Poetry enlists the participation of the senses, beginning with the sense of hearing, of vibration, and its pace derives from and attends the body’s motions. I believe that poetry … begins as language does with the urge to give voice to the unsayable in our lives and in life itself.”
So my brother became a pastor and I became a poet. These are the lenses through which we look to clarify and focus our lives. And in both our professions we depend on faith and our dialogues with silence to make a living. We speak in parables like Don Quixiote who tried to dream himself a new existence. But for whatever reason, connecting with dreams is what he needed to do most. The act of becoming something even if it was something he made up in his own imagination was a way to discover how to become.
On my more pessimistic days, I almost feel irresponsible in my duty to poetry and believe I too am tilting at windmills. But it is all I know to do. It is not just a source of a kind of writing or reading for me but of believing in the impossible.
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