[There are a lot of new people here, thanks to my friend Jon in great part, I think. If you want to know what this place is about, this will give you a sense of it. In brief, I am writing an essay each week for the twelve months between March 1, 2023 and March 1, 2024. They all go out on Sunday mornings Irish time. Each month, one essay is titled “[while walking]” and is drawn from my near-daily walks in the place I live, and another is titled “[while washing the dishes]” and is a chance for me to write about—or invite someone else to write about—something that’s entered the frame of my thinking while doing housework. Across all the essays here, I take Fanny Howe’s idea of “bewilderment” as a guiding principle both aesthetic and ethical, and consider Virginia Woolf’s “little arts” of “talk, dress, cookery” alongside other arts. I aim to think about what it might mean when Frank Bidart asserts that “being is making” and when Toni Cade Bambara writes that the role of the artist “is to make revolution irresistible”. Thanks for being here.]
A note about a few upcoming events in November and December.
On November 9at 7 p.m. Irish time in the Classics Museum at UCD, Jeanne Tiehen will direct a staging of my work An Archaeology, for which I’m making costumes. In-person only; tickets are free but very limited. Email sasha.smith@ucd.ie to book.
On November 19at 2 p.m. US Eastern I will give the first of two lectures as the Annulet Inaugural Linkages Lecturer. I will give a talk entitled “When you get someplace new, learn to read the landscape like an alphabet”. This talk will be broadcast online, for free. To register, please click here.
On November 21, along with two other writers to be confirmed, I will read and talk with the others as part of the Trinity College Literature & Resistance Series, in the Trinity Long Room Hub. Event and booking information will be here (in person only).
On December 10at 2 p.m. US Eastern I will give the second of my Linkages Lectures. I will give a talk entitled “On the line”. This talk will be broadcast online, for free. To register, please click here.
There is a lot of beauty in this city, like everywhere. You look long enough and you can’t stop seeing it. People want to make their spaces feel right to them, and that yields beauty—not the Home & Garden variety, not the Instagram variety, which are a skin of “beauty” but not beauty. By beauty I mean, among other things, the old man I often greet while walking home: he sits on his chair inside his southwest-facing doorway anytime there is sun in the afternoon. He has built little shelves all up and down the inside of the frame to hold plant pots and has tiled them with orange and yellow and brown tiles. He did it himself, he must have. They are ugly but they are beautiful because they are particular—they show the making and the maker in them.
There is a lot of “good taste” here, too; a lot of self-conscious correctness, a lot of primness, a lot of what feels to me like Prufrock saying to himself, “Time to turn back and descend the stair, / With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — / (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)”. A lot of what looks like “beauty” and “good taste” here, as elsewhere, is the adoption of the mores of wealth as a sign for beauty. These mores produce desire in me—they signify space, light, not having to move yet again, no landlord, some kinds of ease—but they often, ultimately, feel hollow. I often feel more alive in a room someone has decorated with “too many” patterns and colors than in a “tasteful” gray or white and pale wood room. I love this essay by Anne Enright in a similar vein. In the end, the facts of the world are generally more of a blur than a binary. The surprise of individual seeing and world-creating pokes through and ruptures the skin of “good taste” to make a moment of beauty.
In any case, let me be clear that when I say “beauty”, I’m not talking about “good taste”. I don’t care about “good taste”. “Good taste” is a set of rules that serve wealth and power by grinding in the values of of wealth and power to the point where they seem normal, unquestionably desirable, almost signs of health (aesthetic as well as bodily/mental), and nearly invisible. “Good taste” is a continual lesson in not-looking-at-the-world. “Good taste” is fitting oneself into a given container and god help you if you overflow. No, thank you. Not “good taste”; I’m talking about the beauty of invention and of lived-inness. The beauty of specificity of attention. The beauty of being-person with other people. That’s what we grieve when anyone dies, I think—the way they made a world, which no one else could have done in just that way. And then also the beauty of the world they were, taste be damned, which no one else will ever be, despite the preservation of matter and energy in other forms.
There is a lot of vileness in this city of beauty, too. Vileness and the pressure of “good taste” go hand in hand.
I peel far-right stickers off postboxes, garbage cans, lightpoles, and signs as I walk. They have visual rhythm: appearing every so often along particular stretches of road, in particular areas in my neighborhood. I have never seen anyone put them up, but they are there every week, sometimes more than once a week. And I rip them down every week, sometimes more than once a week. I imagine no one sees me doing that, either, at least most of the time; most of the time, people don’t look around them as they walk or drive. I know that it is not ‘becoming’ of me, a middle-aged woman, to stand and touch ‘dirty’ things in public spaces. Though I generally feel unseen while I peel the stickers off, when I am seen, I see people’s disgust. It is true that the sides of public trash cans are dirty and I, in my leather shoes and work clothes, am ‘clean’. The meniscus of manners and class and taste ought to keep me well-behaved. But I reach out and peel the sticker off and throw it away.
There are stickers that tell lies about vaccination; there are anti-trans stickers; there are antisemitic memes, both gross and grossly obvious; there are profoundly disgusting Islamophobic stickers that someone keeps putting up by the mosque; there are fascist recruitment stickers with QR codes; there are conspiracy theory stickers; there have been, recently, really vile stickers that use the likeness of George Floyd to stir up white supremacist fear and propagate the white supremacist ‘replacement’ myth. In the past few months I’ve seen large wheatpaste posters as above, that appear to be from the city council but are not, and that dehumanize and demonize drug users and homeless people. I’m reciting the stickers’ content categories not to reproduce their rhetoric but to lay out the the field of their concerns—the people they unpeople, and how—as well as the facts of their persistence, their prevalence. This is the underside of good taste, when good taste means looking away, refusing to name things as they are, the use of euphemism, comfort. When good taste means being able to opt out of confrontations with what dehumanizes us, or to feel that another person’s dehumanization might be ‘deserved’ or somehow have nothing to do with one.
Often, walking, peeling off these stickers and throwing them away, I feel weighed down by the ugliness of this place, its dense and complex histories of violence woven through with the world-crossing violences of antiblackness, xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, much of which is exported by the place I’m from. I don’t know what else I can do in the face of this feeling of weight. There is no heroic action. There are only the everyday actions of looking, thinking, asking, refusing, insisting, examining. So I go on walking and peeling the stickers off, walking and peeling and throwing the stickers away. In this I am alongside others who also do this small, daily work. Writing NO and FALSE in big letters on the stickers we can’t tear off. Putting up our own stickers, too. The sticker calls the eye and says, here. One nice thing about my leather shoes and work clothes—the invisibility they lend me—is that I can put up stickers mostly without being seen. Any risk of being seen is diminished by the sensation of changing the world, materially, microscopically, toward what feels vital and alive rather than deathly. And the risk is also diminished by my smallness, my femininity, my whiteness, my work clothes—the signs of my belonging to an order of “good taste”, the signs of my “unthreateningness” and docility.
Sometimes the stickers have already been defaced or partially removed when I find them, which makes me feel like we are working together, me and whoever else is watching for them and tearing them down. We sticker-removers are termites of the fascists’ world, unmaking some transmitters of violence one tiny chomp at a time, over and over and over. It takes no special tools to be such a termite. Fingernails do most of the work. An ID card peels difficult ones off. And a soft-leaded pencil (its dark marks will not wash away in the rain) permits one to deface any part one can’t remove.
Living beauty is possible for all of us. We can do it—make minuscule changes to the world we move through that insist that care, justice, liberation, that compounding of acts that add up to beauty, are more important than good behavior. I think beauty is a disturbance in the field of comfort—the comfort often given the names of taste, or propriety, or manners—that confronts me with the irreplaceability of everything (everyone) living. I feel a demand to work and fight, mourn and build for and with others when I am faced with that.
Beauty forces a reckoning, over and over, on a minute scale, with my own complacency. It makes me see in specific, makes me see pattern and meaning, especially pattern and meaning that’s not my own. I think beauty confronts us with the eachness of each of us, our difference, our irreducible human preciousness, patterned together. Not conformity; finding out. Widening. The way a new parent looks at their baby and realizes, you are absolutely complete and I couldn’t even have imagined your you a month ago. You. Us. Here. Together. For one another. Clear-eyed. That’s what I mean by beauty.
September is just over. I am back to my commute walk now, a roughly 45-minute walk that takes me long the Grand Canal. To my right is a busy two-way street that is clogged with traffic at peak hours. To my left is the canal, and across it a walking path, two cycle lanes, and a narrow street for one-way car traffic. Not a bucolic place at all. The world of the living is present there, though. I was maybe five yards from this heron. There are always swans. Lots of crows, jackdaws, magpies. Seagulls. Starlings. If I moved more slowly or sat longer I know I’d see smaller birds. The variety of plant life is huge. If I knew better what to look for and how to look I’m sure I would see more insects. I have seen fish in the canal, which surprised and delighted me—I had assumed it was too dirty for fish. And there are all the humans around the canal, too: the ones who drive by, the ones who cycle by, the ones who walk, and the ones who sit by it to smoke or drink or hang out with friends because there is no private space in their houses or just sit on the benches for some quiet in the green shade. And there are the ones of us who live in tents along the canal banks.
You don’t have to go away, is what I’m saying, to see ‘nature’. It’s right here, and we are in it—we are it. The faraway nature preserve one might voyage to to spend a day in nature feels to me like a way of pretending we aren’t implicated in it, permeated by it, always with it, in fact like a way of pretending we can even say it instead of saying, more properly, we, us. Embedded in the world of the living, we live along with it, as it. When we die we become it thoroughly. When we breathe, it becomes us. But prior to any conception, it is us, we are it. It ises us, the us of all the living.
When I told some people I’d just met that I’ve walked about 1200 miles this year, nearly all of that in my neighborhood, two questions came up. Did I go out for ‘better’ walks, i.e. did I travel away to See Things, and was I doing anything with the walks. I don’t go away to see things because I am seeing things all the time. I haven’t walked the streets where I live enough to be tired of them and I don’t think I could. When I go a week without checking on the trees, flowers, brambles, gates, paths I feel a pang of regret for all the change I’ve missed. Time is fleeting. What better thing than to be a deep-space telescope of one’s most local surroundings, sending oneself image after image of the same view over time?
The question of doing something with is such a gound-in question in art life.
Such a ground-in question in the lives we live inside of capitalism.
I take these walks because I want to be related to the place I have arrived. I owe it real looking; otherwise my relation to it would be assumption on my part. I am still assuming things despite my walks—because I just can’t see, sense, understand the all of it all. I don’t want to assume, or I want to assume as little as possible. I want to be light on this place. I want to see how things are, be puzzled by them, figure some of them out over time. I want to learn to draw connections in this place. I also want to know where things are, practically: both the best place to get bread in my neighborhood and the places where blackberries are thick hanging over walls in August. My walks, though this isn’t the reason I take them, keep me aware of my nonbelonging by teaching me what it might be to belong here. I value that.
The pleasure of walking and looking is also sufficient reason for walking and looking.
We are here, the world of the living says, including us in the we. That’s what pleasure means, I think.
Walking can be a reply to the speech of the living world, because the scale of walking is on the scale of living things. By walking I mean moving at the pace of a walk. It doesn’t entail the use of one part of one’s body in a particular way. It is about tempo, not anatomy. It’s also about finitude. You can’t walk limitlessly. There has to be an end to it—because your body is tired, or because you need to eat a meal, or to go to the bathroom. Walking reminds us we are alive by insisting on the things living beings need: rest, food, water, an end.
My walks do something with me—they put me among and in. They change my eyes and my language, my sense of smell, my leg muscles. Alive and not alone. What will you do with this is not the question of the world of the living. The questions are, at least but not only, where are you? and who else is with you?
written in Iowa in an especially warm September (2021)
A little note at the start: there is a lot of discussion of death in this essay. There are mentions of torture, and I talk about war. There’s a lot about covid-19. There are also a lot of images of skulls (drawn images, no photographs). Finally, for those of you who’d like advance notice about entomological images, there is a photo of a cicada. It’s a long and looping essay, still a draft. Thanks in advance for your slow attention, but also take care of yourself and give it a miss if you need to.
In Iowa, my place of residence for 2021-2022, the skulls are everywhere: on a child’s dress, white on gray. A sticker on a student’s laptop. On the back of truck after truck, the stylized skull that is the symbol of a comic book antihero, adopted by US soldiers during the second US war in Iraq, and then by neo-nazis and right-wing extremists and white supremacists and police supporters. They are printed on a student’s scarf, looped around her neck in a gesture that stops me in my tracks: a noose of skulls. The sign of death. The sign of the end of the world, poison, go-no-further, the limit of human person touching the limit of corpse, object brushing up against subject.
This isn’t a new motif. I remember when I noticed the skulls appearing, ten years ago or more, because when I first saw them I was shocked that anyone would wear a symbol of death. But there they were, on scarves and shirts and hats and skirts in H&M and Top Shop. They appeared about a decade into an endless war that only recently ‘ended’, and now I think of this motif as a way of processing all that was submerged during that time and has happened since: all the violent, horrific, dehumanizing death at a remove of thousands of miles, much of it carried out by unmanned drones. All the thousands of coffins coming back to the US with dead twenty-somethings in them, borne across tarmac without so much as a photo on the front page of the US paper of record. All the hundreds and thousands of children and women and men killed in places hidden from us by the same paper. So I started thinking about the skulls: about why they were still showing up, what underlying currents might cause images like these to bubble up in our daily lives like gas in a swamp.
The fashion industry moves so quickly, changes so quickly. Nevertheless, the skulls are still there. How is it that this image continues to appear? I find skull-print clothing in the children’s section at Target and think, isn’t this an old design? The child in the skull dress rides a hoverboard down the central Iowan sidewalk toward me, and I step into the grass so she can pass. The hoverboard takes up most of the width of the sidewalk. The grass has a little sign sticking out of it, a white sign with a green circle on it: Keep Pets And Children Off. Poison. Grass Has Been Treated. When I step back onto the sidewalk and into the shade, the air is cool even though the day is warm and the sun is high. September.
Arriving in Iowa in August 2021, the heat hit my whole body. In the evenings, cicada song was so loud that with the windows open the insects’ noise surpassed the volume of music and television. In August and through September I walked early every morning, when the humidity was high but the temperatures were relatively mild, and every morning I found cicadas smashed on road and sidewalk, both fifth instars and adult cicadas.
Adult cicadas’ wings are iridescent and stiff. Their bodies are colored like enamel, copies of Lalique cicada brooches that turn out to be actual cicadas. Instars are gray-brown, glossy, almost waxy. There were so many dead cicadas that I developed an ability to spot their carcasses in advance and lift my eyes enough not to see them closely, while also avoiding stepping on them. Cicadas are large enough that they seem to be individuals. It was hard to see them flattened or squashed or just upside-down and motionless in the street.
Early September is a beautiful time of year in the Upper Midwest, an island of crisp weather before a final week or two of high heat and humidity in the second half of September. Before our 2021 arrival in Iowa I had spent almost two decades away from Midwest autumns: the huge open blue skies emptied of humidity, the ragweed releasing its billions of grains of pollen. The monarchs, the milkweed pods. When I last lived in the Upper Midwest I was a university student, only a year or two out of my family’s house. Then, September mornings felt like total freedom. Those mornings, I could go anywhere on my bicycle, and the air would be crisp and bright and everything would be living all around me. My feelings of September freedom took place in the first few years of our endless war, which began just after the towers were hit by airplanes used as missiles.
It was a bright Midwestern September morning when 2,977 people died in a city halfway across that continent. That morning would be the beginning of thousands of retributive deaths in other places over two decades. But I didn’t know all that, on that Tuesday morning: I only knew bicycle, blue sky, September, Mississippi River shining wide beneath the Tenth Avenue Bridge, the cool dark in the university ballet studio before my eyes adjusted to the dimness. I remember that morning’s sky very clearly. I walked out of class with everyone else after the head of the dance department dismissed us, mid-barre. No one told us what was happening; it was only later that I began to hear. The sky was huge, open, empty. No planes flew through it. I lay on my boyfriend’s double bed all afternoon with him. We had seen the towers fall and the bodies fly from them as if they were paper, or doves, or some substance other than the unbelievable, factual substance of human bodies falling, leaping, from skyscrapers, through a September sky that was ash, ash, ash, ash.
In September 2021, I am an employee on a one-year contract at a small liberal arts college in the Upper Midwest. I ride to campus, lock my bike behind the library and walk to my office under blue sky. On my way, I cross paths with a male student, tall, white, soft curly hair, wearing a green T-shirt with an image of a snake coiled around an automatic rifle. (The Gadsden reference is clear.) Underneath the image it reads “COME AND TAKE IT”. I don’t want it, I think, reflexively. I just don’t want you to kill me with it. I realize as I think those words that to say them out loud might, in some contexts in my country, seem so laughably submissive as to be a provocation to violence—this country where we yearly revisit our most spectacular victimhood in order to justify a perpetual, universal vigilanteism that is hardly given a second thought.
The student with the snake-and-gun T-shirt isn’t in my class, but the feeling of the shirt is. When I collect my students’ writing exercises in the first week, about half of them contain a reference to a mass shooting—an imaginary one. The prompt was to write a poem, based on Allen Ginsburg’s “A Supermarket in California”, where something unusual or magical happens in a grocery store. The unusual event in many of their poems turns out to be gun violence, public death, terror: a mass shooting. It’s a small sample size, just twenty students at a tiny college in rural Iowa, but nevertheless I’m taken aback at the amount of space mass shooting takes up in their imaginations. Then again, they have practiced for such an emergency many times every year since they were small. The fact of public mass killings is so deeply embedded in their understanding of the world that they see them everywhere, even when they close their eyes and write. They live in a place where people who prefer for children and teachers not to die are made out to be a threat to “liberty”. But in the classroom I see that the threatof being killed reduces the liberty of my students’ imaginations. In a culture that worships death, the ritual and ceremony, the liturgy and its secret language, are performative speech acts. The words we use, the ways we speak, makes what we imagine real.
I often think about the student with the ‘Come and take it shirt’, or a version of him, when I’m working at a university in the US. Every time I’m in a classroom with young men in the US I feel keenly aware that, demographically, they could kill me and others in the room: for perceived slight, for bruised ego, for anxiety and grief badly handled, for unmet entitlement, for whatever reason or for no reason. This sense dilutes as the semester goes by; in the end, I believe in our shared human life, the one we make in classrooms together. I believe my students can transcend and make sense of their hurt, worry, and anger as much as anyone else can. I believe they have the right, as we all do, to struggle toward a liberating being-with-others. And I also know that some of them will not make it. I know they, as I do, live in a culture that is suffused with violence in service to whiteness and maleness, wealth and nationalism and a perverse practice of Christianity. I know that white and male rage and entitlement simmer beneath the surface of everyday life, emerging Vesuvial from time to time in spectacular displays of violence that are talked about as isolated incidents.
A mushroom also appears to be an isolated incident, but is an instantiation of a massive mycelial network submerged in earth, just out of sight. This is what I’m thinking about. How our cultural and physical bodies show that we know what is happening, even if that knowledge is pressed down, made unspeakable.
It is beautiful early September in Iowa, and the days are passing as if all our days are just ordinary days. But the calendar. of public life knows these days are not ordinary: they are the preparation for a public renewal of our national commitment to death. Since returning to the US in 2017 I have had to learn a new date in the calendar here. Watching “September 11th” creep up is like observing the approach of a religious holiday I don’t celebrate while living in an especially orthodox area. For some people—who lived through those events; family members of those who died or who were first responders or who lived nearby and witnessed those horrors; people who suffer under the US’s draconian surveillance policies and from vigilante violence against anyone apparently Muslim—maybe this yearly revisiting is meaningful, painful, deeply personal. Perhaps it is necessary for some people. In the case of those who had no body to wash, wake, and bury, maybe the yearly reappearance of this event in the public consciousness affirms that the unendingness of grief is unending: each year, at least for a day, everyone else is thinking about it again, too.
But in my case, each year, articles about “September 11th” in the week leading up to the anniversary take me by surprise. The papers print a yearly, national observation of the nearly religious, unstated principle “we will avenge your deaths”. But we the taxpayers of the US have ‘avenged’ those deaths hundreds (if not thousands) of times over, using missiles and drones and “the mother of all bombs” and literal decades of human life stolen by our torture and confinement systems. Every year we commemorate a relatively minor (in global terms) attack, and every day we are required to repress the facts of the minor and major attacks carried out in our names.
What I’m trying to say is that even as I bike to the college where I will teach under a clear and open blue sky, I realize that out of a sky like this has come, and will come, death for many people I can’t see; death I pay for with the taxes on the salary I bike to work to earn; death that is tallied up in an accounting that puts 2,977 lives on one side of a balance, and infinity on the other.
Biking home from the university one afternoon my eye is drawn to something in the road. As I get closer, I see, horribly, that it is a squirrel. At first, I think the squirrel is alive: it is lying on its stomach and its body is whole. But then I am just near it and I see that it has probably fallen from the huge tree that shades that part of the street, misjudged a leap and died on impact. It is gory. I do not want to have seen this but as soon as I have seen it I can’t unsee it, and I can’t unfeel the urgent desire to lift this animal out of the road and into a grave. I feel the same with the cicadas, and these I do often lift out of the way. But the squirrel I can’t—it’s too horrible, I’m too disgusted, and there’s the practicality of fleas and mites and how to move such a thing and where to, and on top of all this I’m in the road, on my bike. So I don’t do anything, and over the coming days as I bike by it it is flatter and flatter, drier and drier, until now, two weeks after the death of this animal, it is just a piece of leather and a stain.
It had been a whole being.
They had been a whole being. That’s what I find myself thinking every time I encounter one of the reports of people dying in intensive care of Covid-19. At this point, most of the reports are about people who are not vaccinated, and the undertones are wonder at ignorant carelessness or schadenfreude at what seems like karma but is just the fact of viral transmission in populations where some people have less resistance than others. The photos that accompany these reports are hard to look at: they show people subject to intense medical intervention. Some are intubated. All have IVs and other monitoring and medicating equipment attached to their bodies. Some have no clothes on, or almost no clothes. Alongside the reports of deathbed regrets or defiance there are also reports from the workers who have been taking care of people—who have been caring for people as they die, sometimes in great fear and often alone—over and over for the past three years, and who are exhausted, fearful, and traumatized themselves. All these dying people. All the nearly seven million deaths. All these nurses, doctors, janitors, cooks, assistants, and other workers in hospitals and clinics who have been going to work, day after day, not knowing what lay ahead but nevertheless going to work. Each one, a whole being.
Each year, when August ticks into September in the US, the number 2,977 floats through our newspapers, social media, radio. The number is something more than a number: it now stands for uncountable loss. The immensity of the figure is emotional and numeric. Emotional: all that loss, all at one time. Numeric: 2,977 flickers at the edge of countability and our ordinary capacity to conceive. We use numbers like that in daily life—price of a computer, maybe; a secondhand car?—but it’s unlikely that we know 2,977 people. In its immensity 2,977 is a reminder of the hugeness of perception, zooming out toward galaxies, and the minuteness of perception, zooming in toward atoms. Telescoping out, 2,977 is an untellable number of universes. Infinite details, possibilities, relations were lost when those people died. Limitless grief. Each one, a whole being. Telescoping in, 2,977 is a dot in a field of time composed of the death of every being who has ever lived. 2,977 is both a number of individuals and an integral number, unbreakable into component parts, at once a tally of each person dead on that blue-skied September day and a total from which perhaps few people beyond those directly affected can extract a single name trailing its complete, beloved ghost (a whole being). 2,977 is a number from which there is no return and yet a number to which the US as a country returns, religiously, each September. The idea is: the number is so huge. The shock of the huge number is enough to remind us of the shock of that day. Let there never be another such day, the number says, when so many universes are extinguished all at once. 2,977 is too many to lose.
The day I first drafted this essay was September 10, 2021. In the United States, that week, 3,231 people died of Covid-19.
The average Covid-19 death rate between March 2020 and September 2021 in the United States was just over a thousand deaths per day. Every three days, on average, the number of deaths equalled those of that one September morning. But there has been no monthly, weekly, yearly national commemoration. There has been no massive mobilization of resources to face and rid ourselves of the cause of all this death. Instead, in much of the country, not long after the dying began, governors and legislators doubled down on the side of death, prohibiting common-sense public health measures, spreading lies, and letting a contagious virus run its course among poor, weak, sick, elderly, Black, Native, immigrant, and young people.
I read local newspapers as a way of understanding where I live and what is happening there. I love to know that there are church members debating about new windows, and that the local humane society is sponsoring a walk-a-thon, and how the recovery from a storm is progressing. The papers give me context and language for what I see as I walk through the place I live. In the comments sections of the newspapers I read during the first years of the pandemic (in two different towns in two very different places) I frequently encountered an argument that most of the people who had died of Covid-19 were elderly. The argument went, older people and people with underlying health issues are more susceptible to death in any case. And then it came to its flawed conclusion: being vulnerable in any case, these deaths are therefore no great loss, no great worry. We should get on with our lives as usual. Week after week in September 2021 I read comments with arguments like that one—more or less the same as that one—in the local papers. And the conclusion was almost always the same: that some people’s lives are simply the cost of other people’s comfort.
But each death is a death of a beloved universe. And each person suffering, being ill, being isolated, fearing—that is a whole person, however old, or disabled, or already sick. It seemed, reading these comments, that many people I lived among had decided that some kinds of life are no life at all; that there are whole categories of expendable people, generally unseen, whose deaths are permitted or even welcome in service to “life as usual”. We need to get on with our lives. Okay. But who gets to get on, and with what kind of life?
Imagine reaching a point in your very real, very whole existence when you knew that people around you considered you disposable simply because you…were elderly? Or couldn’t or didn’t have employment? Imagine living in a body whose “pre-existing conditions” (including the human condition of being born into a mortal body) meant your place in the great social calculus is the remainder, swept away as an unfortunate but unpreventable casualty of each new wave of economic life and human death. Solidarity relies on a public sphere in which each of us knows that even people we can’t see, even people whose lives look nothing like ours—lives that might have less mobility, less authority, less power—have an absolute right to those lives.
In the same newspapers, over the same period, many column inches were taken up with personal and official testimonies, remembrances, and oral histories of a national catastrophe two decades in the past. When is remembering an encumbrance of getting on with life? And when is remembering required for life to feel like it is going on normally? What is the “normal” life that we “get on” with when we return to a tragedy put to nationalist use? The character of “normal” life for the US since September 11, 2001, is the mass, ongoing death of people whose lives are figured as abnormal, or barbaric, or dangerous, or who are simply out of sight. Normal life in my country is the death of others in service to “normal life”.
All along, as the days unspooled after the towers fell and in the two decades since, we in the US have been asked to remember some deaths: 2,977 of them. But this public demand is not the private remembrance of commemoration and grief or grief and humility or grief and solidarity; it is a publicly demanded, publicly performed and ritualized remembering that has been put to use for private profit and pillage, for murder and terror and impunity. We were asked to remember, but we were also asked to forget.
We were asked to forget that there were no weapons of mass destruction. To forget that bombs fall on real people, with houses, families, ideas, imaginations, pasts, futures, none of which likely included being killed by American weapons. We were asked to forget mass death, hundreds of thousands of people dying over the course of decades. We were asked to forget, as years went by, that we were paying for these deaths, and that in paying for a war we were also paying for critical infrastructure failures, both practical and interpersonal, that meant the deaths of even more people. And we were asked to forget that all of this was based on a lie, and that the lie meant a few people close to the president got very, very rich.
So our mourning moment was subsumed into support for or ignorance of years and years, decades, of war, all of which were happening so far away from most of us that, in the urgency of keeping body and soul together on a federal minimum wage of $7.95 per hour, we could forget, or we had to forget, or we simply didn’t know.
We have had so much practice in forgetting, as a country, and so much practice in looking away.
In his discussion of dreams, Freud writes that the dreamer suppresses the negative, latent content of a dream, and this content takes new, distorted, diluted, or unrecognizable forms. In dreams we may, like a child offered an apple she does not want, “[assert] that the apple has a bitter taste, without even having tasted it” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 119). Through the process of displacement, fear, loathing, and other negative affects relocate to unrelated elements of the dream, while the actual target or cause of these affects may only glancingly or passingly appear. When negative affect is repressed, it is the work of what Freud terms the ‘Foreconscious’, which “reenforces […] antagonism against the repressed ideas” (ibid, 480). What is, however, does not disappear just because it is repressed. It emerges as symptoms. Freud is writing about sexual desire and about violence, how these manifest in the psychological activity of individual subjects. I’m thinking of Freud’s theory not as a diagnosis, but as a metaphor.
We in the United States are told we live in the greatest place on earth. We are told we are free, we are rich, we are powerful. The impunity our government grants our military to act with in places beyond our borders is doubled at home by our police.
The US military-industrial complex (both domestic and foreign) is inordinately wealthy. US parks are beautiful, US highways are wide. In the US, our grocery stores give us strawberries in January and ice in July. But like the dreamer whose sleeping mind displaces fear, rage, longing, desire, our minds repress what makes our comfort—the appearance of freedom and plenty—possible. And repression makes our minds comfortable: if we were to confront the mass death that underwrites “getting on with life” or “back to normal”, how would we ever sleep?
When the dreamer’s subconscious represses even the knowledge that there has been transfer of negative affect onto a banal target, that is not the end of the road for the affect. The fear, rage, longing of the dream’s latent content does not die, dissipate, nullify, or depart. It finds crevices. It squeezes through, returns to us in daylight. The great fear? Fear of death. The end of the world, enacted on us as we enact it on others. It comes through the cracks, looking for oxygen.
Since 2020, we have all lived in the presence of continual mass death. In the US, after a few months of relatively mild restrictions designed to curtail both the number and the normalization of mass death, people in important and visible positions decided that we could live with mass death on a daily basis. What do we do with that fact, as organisms? As a social organism? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. What is the effect of this decision to normalize mass death in social terms? In bodily terms? In the terms of the images we make and live among?
The fact is that for the last twenty years in the US we have lived in the presence of continual mass death, albeit far from our houses and ordinary lives. For the last twenty-two years in this country we have also lived in the presence of continual mass death in high schools, elementary schools, nightclubs, grocery stores, movie theaters, colleges, sorority houses. For the last fifty years in this country we have lived in the presence of continual mass death sprayed from airplanes onto landscape, plant, water, animal and human alike. For the last eighty years we have been living in the knowledge of the mass death of the nonhuman beings whose lives are integrally connected to our own. We go on as normal: we go to school, go to the movies, go to the grocery store (where we buy fruit and vegetables and meat and grains). We pay our health insurance premiums. We love our children and our parents. We make our art. We bicycle to campus, watching for roadkill. And underneath all this normal life?
Each of us, one whole being.
Each one of us, in an us much wider than county, state, regional, national boundaries: a whole being.
The lives of everyone on earth touch the lives of everyone on earth: we know that intimately these days, as the breath in the lungs of one child enters the lungs of another, and the virus replicates. What happens to us when we forget this, our shared life? What happens when the knowledge of our shared life is pressed down by a thick forgetting of death, of the deaths of others elsewhere underwriting our “normal lives”?
The morning arrives, and the sky is bright and high and blue again, as it has been almost every day since we arrived in Iowa. September washes over the rolling hills of south-central Iowa, and over the pools in New York that are surrounded by the names of the dead. It washes over the hospitals where the ICUs fill up and doctors send out desperate messages looking for a bed in the city, the state, the region. What is to be done? Our jobs are calling us back; the economy is “fully open”. The few financial supports have ended, student loans are coming due, and we still have to eat.
We have to get on with our lives, and so we must somehow displace our fear and rage and longing and grief, our knowledge of the irreplaceable nature of each human on earth and our fear of living in a death-driven society. We find ways to tamp down our despair. We look away from the cicada and the squirrel as we head to work or the grocery store; we switch off the radio when the numbers for the day’s fatalities are reported. Eventually we can feel that things are normal again. But like anything repressed, the fact of mass death and the culture that relies on it will find places to emerge. It makes its way toward the light of day.
August. Almost autumn. Hardly feels like “August” here in Dublin, but whatever I feel like “August” should be, this has been the August it is: more or less cool and more or less damp, after a July that was the rainiest July on record. Most days have been whitely overcast. There has been fine rain, heavier than mist but not heavy enough to drench. There are ripe figs on trees behind stone and brick walls, and blackberries reaching from behind white-painted metal fencing. Most days have had a period of fair weather in them.
I have been reading poetry every day, a kind of training. I’m trying to learn about poetry. I have been learning about poetry for more than thirty years, twenty years in formal ways, and I feel more and more bewildered by it. How does it do it? How can some people be so sure about it? What would it be like, to be one of those people who is sure about poetry? I feel like I am always just asking about poetry: what, what, what, what, what; how, how, how? I spent a week in July with other poets and every morning the teaching poet gave the group a single poem to read closely. We spent about forty minutes on it, usually, and I could have spent three hours—or the whole day—doing just that close reading. I love this thing called poetry, even though I don’t understand it, I love to do it with other people, and I have no idea how I would go about understanding something so big. So August has been poems and blackberries for me, the latter catching my clothes on their thorns as I reach in to pick ripe fruit. The former always already caught on my clothes.
While walking through this cool and damp summer I have had the syncopated knowledge that in so many places this summer has been terrifyingly hot. I’ve felt sick with the knowledge of heat and drought and fire, floods and crop losses, fear and suffering and death—human and nonhuman beings, and the land and the ways of living on and being in those places. When I am afraid I often feel immobilized by that fear and by the immensity of things like the catastrophes of capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, plastic, petrochemicals, ‘forever’ chemicals—the ruin of whole worlds, ways of being, possibilities for relation, already in action. The sense of my smallness and the problems’ largeness quickly spirals in two directions. What could I possibly do? What do I have to offer? My life feels very tiny, short, and ineffectual then. And yet life is what we have, each of us and all of us. Not only our individual lives, but our shared one, too. When I remember this I feel immense gratitude for labor unionsandworkers (and students!) who arestriking or have usedstrike threats to get fairer contracts and safer workingconditions—and to remind us what we can ask for and must ask for, and to remind us that we cannot do it alone, and we are not alone.
A model for the present and the future, strikes teach me that we can make sacrifices together that, when we do make them together, feel like joy. Strikes remind me we are together. Our daily lives have to change. That’s a fact. And we can only make that change together—the details may differ from place to place, but the fact remains that we can only do it with other people. We need, we cannot live without, a change that insists that those who cheapen and discard all of life and all the land, water, air desist: militarized nations, massive corporations, massive tech. Our lives are not cheap—none of them, not the lives of the ones who face buoys made of saw blades in border rivers; not the lives of the ones who embark on unbearable journeys in insufficient crafts; not the lives of the ones snipping threads in clothing factories that run day and night, or of the ones carrying ore from a mine, or of the ones packing boxes under the eye of a computer timer in a warehouse. Not the lives of the ones who fly or of the ones who photosynthesize.
We can change our lives together, for one another. The urgency is huge. We are faced with the facts—the exclusionary, unjust, entrapping facts—of landlords’ hoarding and of billionaires’ death-driving. But we don’t have to accept these facts. There is no outside to the circle if we insist there is not. We can set down our tools, close our laptops, park our cars, and walk into the street together, hand in hand, arm in arm, shoulder by shoulder, singing. We can strike from our everyday lives. (I am still in awe and wonder at the self-immolation of Wynn Bruce. How do I live as committedly as that?) What happens if we do strike from our everyday lives, our habits of knowing and doing and being? What happens if we step, for a moment, together, into a new possibility? (Ruby Dee: “[The songs of the civil rights movement] became almost as common as love songs. And also—direction songs.”) Direction songs. We aren’t the first people doing this. If we sing together? Sing instead of shopping? Sing instead of working?
A strike is holy. That’s why it’s hard—holy things feel impossible on the one hand, and maybe almost silly on the other. But looking one other person in the eye and joining them—we will find it is not silly at all, or difficult, at all. There we are. Together.
I think that sense of holiness is a name for what happens when people do something together that departs from the “just how the world is” of the world in order to insist on beauty, dignity, care for the world and its beings, the value-as-such and -in-such of land/water/air/all life. Invention and daring in service to shared life. I haven’t figured this all out but that feeling of holiness is part of why I want to pay attention to poetry—its how more than its why or even its what—and to blackberries and all the other ‘minor’ (not minor!) indices of time and place. The closer I look the more I know: we are here together. Meaning happens amid the smallest movements and by the most minuscule differences. Everything is precious. I’ve said that before, I’ll surely say it again, because it is the simple thesis of the world as I’ve encountered it. There is no living thing that is not bound up in our shared existence. If we mean, we mean together.
What have I learned, reading poetry and walking, looking at and picking blackberries in neglected lots this August? Thinking takes place over time—I knew it, but I have to learn it again and again. A poem is sometimes the accretion of meaning across a duration rather than the crystallization of an image within a form that can be held in the hand. The most basic, incontrovertible fact of life is that we are bound up together in it, and that one thing that poetry, music, art can do—not necessarily, and not always, but it’s possible—is remind us of that fact, and of our responsibility to one another. (Need something to carry you there? Here’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe with a lesson. And here’s Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee with another version of the same.)
Beauty is the lesson we can never finish learning. Whole, open, for everyone. Like poetry, we can spend our lives on it. It’s not simple—it’s deeply complex. It’s not reserved; it’s for everyone, always. It’s not esoteric, it’s here, right here, at our fingertips, again and again, every day. It’s the fact of our intense, intricate co-relation, unfolding.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems, one I think is probably on a lot of people’s list of favorites. It’s a poem I was given by a teacher when I was about 22 and it is still mysterious to me. In every season it’s given me something new. I still don’t fully understand how it does what it does, or all that it does. But it does remind me that the world is a shared one—the world of blackberries and beloveds—and that one thing poetry can do is try to speak and spell exactly that complexity, one letter at a time, one poem at a time, until, along with the everything-elseness of the world, we have made and continue to make the world in which we can all live.
Claes Oldenburg died about a year ago (July 22, 2022). He was 93. I have been reading a lot about the midcentury US art world over the past few years and his name is one that comes up over and over. But for me the name Claes Oldenburg is not a name for columns and quiet marble hallways or the whisper-passed, enclosed knowledge of art school, or even the rustly pages of the newspaper of record or the books by art critics I love to read. Claes Oldenburg is a name that means summer heat and drawings on secondhand paper and humor I sense but can’t really understand until I grow into it, and, most of all, it is a name that reminds me of the kind of person my father was. Like Oldenburg, my father died in 2022. Like Oldenburg, my father was the product of the white, American mid-20th century (though Oldenburg was a Swedish immigrant, and my father was born in the US to a settler family). Like Oldenburg, my father lived in New York and spent time in the art scene there in the 1960s, though he was never an artist by profession, being instead an artist of his everyday life.
My father’s approach to art was to like it. That was an active verb for him: he liked a lot of things, from Alexander Calder, his perennial favorite, to Yoko Ono. (He once took me to an exhibit of Ono’s work that changed my life.) His favorite painting was Rembrandt’s Lucretia, which is held in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (now MIA), and which his mother took him to see often as a child. I can remember dozens of times in that museum, just standing with my dad in front of the painting, looking at it, and after a while he would say, It’s beautiful. And that would be it. When we were children we were also often taken by my parents to the museums in our city, which were free, warm, and open to children without pandering or condescension. And it was with my father, and probably my brothers and my mother, that I remember first encountering the work of Claes Oldenburg, in the form of his hanging sculpture Shoestring Potatoes Spilling From a Bag. How could I help but like that work, when the person who introduced me to it approached it (and the Sol LeWitt mural near it, and the Louise Nevelson construction around the corner) as something it was possible to find visual and intellectual and felt pleasure in, however it was it came? Liking art as a way to be with art is one of the major lessons I took from my dad.
On the day I met Claes Oldenburg’s work I was a child, holding my dad’s hand as we walked through the collections of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag, hung in a stairwell. I have a bodily memory of it—it’s one of the earliest memories I have of a work of visual art, and most of those memories take place at the Walker. The memory I have is of its size, but not size as in monumentality; size as in disproportion. It’s a sculpture of a small thing that’s represented hundreds of times larger than it is. The sculpture’s not-quite-rightness made me feel good, and that’s a feeling I’ve been interested in ever since. It’s not a “good” of smoothness that thought can slide off of; it is a “good” that made me ask but why? and follow that question with more thinking. The shoestring potatoes are huge (wrong! fries are small) and they are floppy-soft (wrong!! sculptures are smooth and hard!). The bag is not quite symmetrical, and the whole thing hangs not like paper (which it represents) but like cloth (which it is). Thinking through my first reaction (pleasure, humor) has helped me understand this sculpture and Oldenburg’s work—what it’s saying about art, about everyday life, and about the intersections between the two.
Most people in the city I come from have seen the huge sculpture Spoon Bridge and Cherry that sits in the garden outside the modern art museum. Oldenburg is known for massive works like this, many of which he made with his wife Coosje Van Bruggen, who died in 2009. This sculpture, like most of Oldenburg’s work, is playful and interested in the objects of everyday life. What happens to them when the scale changes? What happens when we see a typewriter eraser or a clothespin as a monumental object? Whose lives and work are memorialized when these are the things that we have to look up to see, instead of a man on a horse, pointing toward the territory? I am drawn to Oldenburg’s work—the soft sculptures especially, but also the prints and drawings that lead up to and accompany them—because he makes images and sculptures that show ordinary things and that are rendered in ordinary materials. Not marble, but cloth. Not oil paint, colored pencil. Children’s media, not able to be dismissed as children’s media. Or “feminine” material—cloth—and processes—sewing—that are to be taken as seriously as carving marble or casting bronze.
Claes Oldenburg’s work formed a background to my childhood, though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you his name. That makes sense, not least because he was preoccupied with the things and thoughts of everyday life, the kinds of background objects we forget are even there—clothespins and bathtubs. That his sculptures became part of my world’s wallpaper seems like one right trajectory for them. But also, I was a child, and the art museum was not so different from other ordinary places: the grocery store, the kindergarten classroom. All were part of the life my parents made for me and my brothers, and so the images and objects of these places became part of what I knew the world to be, early on. It was long after my early encounters with Oldenburg’s work that I connected the soft sculpture of the french fries falling from their bag to a specific person with a name and a place in art history. In a narrow classroom, among printmakers and painters, photographers and installation artists, our professor handed out the reading for the week. The handout was Oldenburg’s 1961 manifesto “I am for an Art”.
In the manifesto, Oldenburg writes that he is “for an art” that “does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” “I am for an art,” he goes on, “that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. […] I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself”. Oh! Yes. Rereading that manifesto now, after years of reading it alone and with others, gives me language for what Oldenburg’s work meant to me, and, I think, what it meant to my dad. It gives me language that insists on looking at and turning toward what might be passed over or assumed to be uninteresting; a language of obstinacy and of invention. A language that I saw in my dad’s encouragement to look, and look again, at the places we lived. Back when I first encountered Oldenburg’s manifesto, in the classroom of a beloved and revered teacher, “I am for an Art” awoke in me an understanding of what it could mean to have ordinary life at the center of one’s gaze, to steadily affirm that the objects, perceptions, and actions of one’s own life were part of a lifelong engagement with art.
Of course, Oldenburg’s work does sit in museums, now; his and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental everyday objects are not everyday objects once they are made of coated steel at immense scale. But I don’t take the manifesto that literally, or that singlemindedly. (It’s a fault-fact of my language that we can’t say all of what we mean simultaneously, and so our experience of contradiction might look like correction or sequence rather than multitudes or copresence. That’s one part of what Fanny Howe is writing about in her essay “Bewilderment”, by the way.) I take it to mean: look. What art is (what poetry is!) isn’t settled. By extension, neither is beauty! It’s not to be found in the places called “art museums” alone. Look for it everywhere: look at the charming form of that typewriter eraser. Look at how the toothpaste tube sags when it gets empty. Look at the beautiful lines of that slice of cake. And all of a sudden it’s clear that it is the seeing that makes the art: your seeing, you, ordinary person, seeing your ordinary life, which (it is revealed to have been all along) is the site of big, living questions about aesthetics, about geometry, about ethics, about optics, about haptics…. Claes Oldenburg’s work taught me, as a very young person, that art was for ordinary life—that art is in fact made of ordinary life; that there is no separation between the things of our lives and the things of art. And his work teaches me that art can be playful, light—and that playfulness and lightness are serious ways of understanding or getting to know the world. From his work in part I draw the knowledge that sculpting means sewing as much as it means working with a hammer and chisel, and that, too, reminds me that art is and can be made of whatever is to hand in our ordinary lives.
I love art and I love people who make it with seriousness and playfulness (and serious playfulness) and Claes Oldenburg seems to have been one such person. When I look at Oldenburg’s sculptures now, I see my father’s seeing in them. I see I learned from him a lesson in delight, in taking things as they are, in looking again, in being playful, and in the pleasure that can come in there being a difference between what you expected and what showed up, whether in the art museum, in the classroom, or on the bus home from work.
At the start of July I saw a pyramidal orchid for the first time in real life. At the place I work the groundskeepers have left swathes uncut between mown areas for walking and in those places I’ve seen so many wildflowers over the past three months. When you get down by the ground what might have looked homogenous when rushing or even just walking by fractures into incredible diversity of kind, color, size, form. And it doesn’t take a ton of space for this, either. I often think about the breadth of a street, and how many gardens, how many fruit trees could be made in that space. Imagine walking out your door to a vegetable and fruit garden of your own (imagine a redistribution of massive wealth such that having the time to care for and work in such a garden were not a ‘luxury’ but a part of everyday life). In my imagined city there are bike and pedestrian paths down the center, fruit and nut trees shading the paths, gardens between there and the houses. Bus and tram lines too but I’m not an urban planner, here; I’m just a dreamer, kneeling in front of a pyramidal orchid. But look what huge things can happen in such a little space.
Did your nose lead you through the streets until you found the source of July’s perfume? It is the linden (lime) trees in flower. Only for a short time—a week or two; shorter if it was unseasonably hot. For everyone, freely available, without cost: their scent is a shower of softness.
In gardens we may not own but rent or borrow, in friends’ gardens, in the places where plants escape the borders of the private yard and spill onto street or public path; on the grounds of banks and private equity firms; in the crack between pavement and wall: we can find and gather the riches of summer. (If you are in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and you want someone to find and gather these riches for you, Night Owl Farm has a beautiful flower CSA. It’s not cheap but what a gift—flowers every week for the price of a lunch out that week. Elsewhere, look for farms that do this. Great way to support smaller farms and to give presents that don’t need to be manufactured.)
What do the beings of the world say but that borders are fictions and that everything is precious? That life is always going on, all around us, and is infinitely interesting and complex; that the work of making meaning and of coming to understanding is endless and for everyone—could not be achieved by one person alone, or in one lifetime. These border-crossers know that ‘nation’ is a lie enforced by militarization and in service not to life but to wealth. They know that the networks of mutual dependence and reliance are everywhere and nothing living or unliving is outside of them.
The beings who live alongside us (including the human beings) also tell us that grace inheres in each thing, as it is, in the ways that it is, a grace that is not theological but intrinsic, theology being only one way to interpret what is always already there. Hopkins’ theology brings him to this conclusion—“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:/ Selves—goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came”. The beauty of geometry and the unlimited curiosity it can teach us! “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare”—would I go that far? Maybe not, but I know the poet uses hyperbole to effect an argument, and I take her point. (Also, I learned this week that snails are left- or right-‘handed’.)
This city is a city of fruit trees: public plantings of plum, cherry, pear and hazelnut all drop their bounty to smash on the sidewalk and be crushed under the tires of cars. As I have walked over the past eleven months I have noted the places where fruit and nut trees are and mapped them, and in July I returned to plum trees—already covered in ripe fruit—to gather what fell. (I only take windfalls from trees that are private, or I ask at the door if there is fruit on the ground whether I could pick from the tree. And I shake public trees to adduce them to drop fruit for me.) From windfall plums and mirabelles I made four small jars of jam. I have to push back against the scarcity feeling when I gather this public fruit—telling friends on purpose where the trees are. It has to be for everyone and if I’m against its enclosure I have to be against my own desire to enclose it. There is more than any one person can use. And imagine if all the plum and apple and cherry trees in the back gardens of derelict buildings could be harvested? Imagine a jam kitchen for anyone to use. Imagine a café that served meals or treats on a pay-as-you-can basis, made with food grown in back gardens and on city streets. The world of plenty and of solidarity is already here, we just have to act as though it is. This world in which we could live by the dictum of sufficiency-and-no-more rather than by more-and-more-and-more is possible and we are part of it.
It seems impossible to me to walk without thinking about riches: in Dublin this is so because of what the financialization of housing has done, and also because there are banks and finance corporations and tech corporations and the trappings of extreme wealth, and because property is so prominently present as well as the dehumanization and abandonment of the poor. But it’s also so because the world itself is riches. Not marble nor the gilded monuments—what “lives in lovers’ eyes”, what is lasting and meaningful to me is the way that looking and walking makes me alert to ever more complex detail, the way observation teaches me to see that detail and its relations and to metaphorize and generalize from this, to understand structures and concepts in new ways, which again direct me to the world of things, material and phenomenal.
August is almost here; September is coming. I’m planning to write, loosely, in the region of learning to write and teaching writing. If you’re reading this and there was a moment you can remember where a teacher changed your mind/your life/your practice about/of poetry or writing, or a reading you remember that broke your mind open in important ways, would you be willing to tell me in the comments?
From about the middle of March, 2020, until about the start of the new year, 2022, I could hardly read—or, couldn’t read the way I was used to. Why? It’s too undifferentiated to say “the pandemic”, when what I mean is “mass death as well as particular deaths” and “the awareness of stratified classes of more and less expendable workers” and “migraines from wearing an N-95 for twelve hours of commuting and teaching” and “the police station in my childhood neighborhood on fire!” and “the unsettling joy of seeing crowds in my home city, marching, but only via internet” and “moving yet again for uncertain employment” and “emails with landlords arranging to view apartments we couldn’t afford, by video chat”, as well as meaning “parental illness” and “underemployment and short-term contracts” and “expensive, freezing, poorly maintained rental housing” and “coping with loneliness” and “mortality” and “grief as mass death was normalized”. Even that list is too undifferentiated. What I am trying to say is that over those twenty or so months I learned how bodily stress is: how there really are thresholds beyond which it is impossible to read, concentrate, write more than a sentence or a fragment of a sentence. I felt like I was losing an important part of my mind. I felt like I would never read anything again, much less write anything. I sometimes felt that didn’t matter. I felt I was inside a thick layer of wool, from which no sound would emerge.
Reading came back slowly in early 2022. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started being able to read with more coherence and comprehension at the point when I accepted a job with some stability in the mid-term and we began to make plans to leave a place and jobs that were really soul-killing for both of us. Being able to read didn’t come back all at once: I had to teach myself to sit with a book. I couldn’t read with music on. I sometimes set a timer and forced myself to read for twenty minutes at a time. Training. It was a huge relief to be able to pay attention, sustain immersion in someone else’s thought. The lesson in what stress can do to that ability helps me think about my students as well. It is impossible to think well, much less read something complex, under existential strain.
At the moment I live in a city, in a country, with a robust public library system. Books travel across the country to me. I can request almost anything and have it show up within walking distance in a few weeks. And the university library supplies me most of what I can’t find at the public library. Going to the library feels like childhood: the pleasure of choosing things, finding things I’ve been wanting! to read, finding things that surprise me. The deadline: three weeks to read them, and then back they go. The smell of the public library and the university library. I love it. It is in part the library that has given me reading again, because the due date requires me to commit. Twenty minutes in the morning, or a chapter at breakfast and one at lunch, or an hour in the evening, or a section at bedtime.
The library lets me pick things up I might not have—long schooled in the careful accounting of contingent and short-term contracts, I rarely buy books. But the library permits me to be catholic in my acquisitions. It lets me put things down when I find them insufficiently thoughtful, or not to my current liking, or dull. It’s also helped me remember that I have preferences and tastes, and to begin again to describe those to myself, which in turn lets me think about what I’m writing and where it belongs. Once, a male writer told me that my writing was “too philosophical” to be poetry or literary nonfiction. I have thought about that for years now. What does that mean? What was he trying to say about writing, about poetry, about essays, about philosophy? What is “too” in that case? As I read and set aside books from the library I realized that the books I most thrill to, think about after reading, want to write in the company of are those “too” books, the ones that refuse to stay inside polite lines or that critique or refuse the ‘politeness’ of those lines.
Solnit: a pleasure to read. Richness and variety of research, sturdy and steady insistence on complexity over flatness or immediacy. Labatut: I love the mobile imagination, the treatment of the ‘real’ as a way to make fiction (physics, chemistry, math…and also destruction, gardens, desire, competition, human shortsightedness, war, history…). McKittrick: giving me so much language for ways of writing and studying; so smart and dense and formally curious. Sharpe: this will enter my shelf of ideal books. Many-stranded, deeply subtle, attentive, complex, tender (!), insistent, moving, joyful and brilliant; made me want to reread In The Wake: On Blackness and Being. Lucas: handles metaphor so well, over the extended form of the chapbook; a really gentle but unflinching gaze at family history and violence. Zambreno: goddamn ambitious and capacious and smart and moving, this book made writing wider. Actually all these books do. They returned to me not only some of the pleasure of reading and the work of attention, but also the sense of writing in company. Including yours. Thanks for reading.
June is fruit, humidity, the return of rain although not sufficient rain in some places and far too much in others. I’ve been watching the gardens with fruit trees and bushes all spring and now that it’s full summer I’m watching them with covetousness. I did sneak one raspberry from a cane that overhung the sidewalk. There are apples, quince, pears, raspberries, blackberries, plums, and figs on my usual loop. There is a greengage tree at the university that was absolutely covered in white blossom early this spring.
June has also held the lingering awareness of the Canadian fires: smoke arrives here off and on as haze. Only once so far has it been a low haze, and even then nothing like what I experienced in summer 2021 when we moved from Maine to Iowa and drove through smoke so thick the sun was a small, red disk in the west. But enough to trigger sinus infections and breathing problems and simply to keep the maritimes and Québec in my mind. When the rain comes here I think of it also arriving on those burning and smoke-filled cities and forests. The horror of the fires are what they contain. Hard to think of the trees, plants, animals, birds—and also of the buildings, oil, plastics, insulation, heavy metals, people’s houses and objects, all burning.
All this beauty. It is not ordinary: it is so precious. I talk to a woman in a town outside of Dublin where I’ve gone to look at a house and she says, but of course you will get a car. I laugh, because this is what you do when people confront you with your own ‘silliness’. Well, no, I say. I’ve never had a license. But you’ll surely have to get a car, she says again. And I demur and we go on to talk about something else, and I am not quite brave enough to say, I won’t get a car because I’ve been thinking about this for almost thirty years. I won’t get one because that would tether me to oil fields and military occupations and a couple of tons of machinery and insurance agencies. I won’t get one because I’ve been walking for more than forty years now and have yet to exhaust the possibilities of foot, bicycle, bus, tram, and train. There are fires all over North America. Online a scientist posts a graph of the Greenland ice melt from this season: I’ve never seen anything like this, he writes. The temperature of the ocean around this island is shockingly warm right now, and every time I see one of those diagrams with the years represented as a red or blue line I feel sick to my stomach. There is very little I can do. It isn’t a one-person problem. It isn’t solveable by my decision to do one thing or another. But I can go by foot and bicycle and public transit. I get something out of that—it changes me (what I can imagine, how I use time, what I see…), expands me, feeds me and makes me happy. I try to constrain my desires and my consumption just that much but it doesn’t feel like a loss. One way—one way I’ve found for my life—of yielding to the bog orchid and the corncrake, the ladyslipper and the loon. Your ways may be different to mine.
But I don’t say any of this to the woman.
Going by foot has benefits, just not speed. But I’m not sure that speed is a benefit in any case apart from when one needs to get to a hospital or similar. The midpoint of the year has gone by now but the academic (teaching) year here is just beginning to slow down. I can’t help but think how much better and more humane it would be if we kept to a much slower pace all through our teaching year. I pick flowering weeds as I walk from the bus stop to my office on campus and put them on the photocopier, week after week. I’ve been able to see the empty lots and byways transform over the past months, day by day, on this short walk.
This week there were more flowers in bloom than easily fit on the platen and the image is packed with them. The colors now are yellow, white, red. Yellow has been a constant through the spring and summer; poppies showed up around the start of June. Blues and purples, the delicate speedwells, have receded. The yellow of late June is a change from the butter-yellow of cowslips and the almost fluorescent buttercups; it is slightly warmer, almost ambered. Now along the canal is meadowsweet, and in waste ground I see chamomile, yarrow, tall oxeye daisies and the ever-present marguerites, white clover. Calendula still overruns garden walls and the creeping purple bellflowers do, too. Do you enjoy color charts? You may enjoy this.
Summer is also the season of house sales. Every week a new sign pops up in the neighborhood. I’ve gone to see a few houses, in part out of curiosity, in part out of longing. There is nothing nearby that we could afford; the average two-bedroom house sells for more than €400,000. I watch bids online and see houses go for €70,000 or €100,000 over asking. How long will it continue like this? The houses are “tastefully redecorated” or “a perfect starter home”. One I visit sells for almost €430,000 and has no heat or floors. One near us sells for €690,000 and has been gutted down to the studs, needs wiring, plumbing, and heat. Another, a house with a beautiful old rose garden in the front, sells for more than the first and will need total renovation. Twenty families have lined up to see the house at that viewing, which was the third of four the agent had scheduled.
Here is richness. The fruit in the neighborhood—cherries in high-pruned street trees, these plums in the paved courtyard of an apartment building. I imagine a city that is a shared garden: boulevards planted with fruit trees. A department of arborists and gardeners. Civil service in companion planting, mulch, and weeding. I would sign up to work in that service. Walking in the shade of these trees, I think, I will never take a garden for granted. Green space, the ability to plant things and care for them, the ability to plant trees, especially—it feels so fundamentally necessary. We make gardens for ourselves but also for the everyone of the passers-by, and also for the future. Who planted this plum tree in the garden of what was once a Methodist chapel? They surely did not imagine me, but here I am watching their labor bear fruit.
Late June is the time of the hydrangea. Most beautiful, generous, luxurious flowers. Down the street from us a house is being converted from a single-family to apartments, and the owner has (I think?) removed a massive hydrangea plant covered in a gradient from bright blue through purple and all the pinks. I saw it every day this spring, watched it carefully to catch the flowers emerging. I fantasize about knocking on the door to ask the builders whether the plants are gone or I hallucinated them. The garden I hallucinate is never gated from me.
I thought about the painter who painted his father’s vegetable garden
In 1815, the English painter John Constable made a pair of paintings in oil on canvas that were for his own collection. By “his own collection”, I mean they must have been for his own house, hung on his walls. When I first encountered these paintings—and I’ll get to the paintings themselves in a moment—it struck me that the painter had made them for his own house. This seemed of a primary importance, or, it filled in the contours of an idea that had been moving in my mind for a while. I’m keeping the paintings back from you for now because I want to think first about the fact that Constable made these paintings for himself. Art can be for this: for making our own places beautiful, for remembering, and for trying to understand the world. When I look at Constable’s paintings, made for himself, I see art that is outward-directed, i.e. attentive to the world, and also inward-aiming, i.e. not made to be sold but for something else (the ‘something else’ of our own lives).
This is often the originating impulse in making texts, images, objects for me: to make something that will render my own place more pleasing, interesting, comfortable, complex, or beautiful, and that will help me understand my surroundings, my life, a difficult idea, or another piece of art. (This has been especially true in times when I haven’t had much money. The internet confronts me continuously with things to want. But art lets me choose: what do you want enough to make it? And then what? I include here what Virginia Woolf called the “little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery”—I have to think that making clothing must fall under ‘dress’ as an analogue to ‘cookery’.) Form, pattern, composition, movement, color, duration, sequence are ways of working out and understanding beauty, power, pain, loss, wonder, belonging—and also of understanding form, pattern, composition, movement, color, duration, sequence themselves.
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So here are the paintings.
Constable painted these two views of his father Golding Constable’s gardens—flowers and food—in 1815. The paintings show the gardens in their surroundings in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt. From the reproductions I downloaded, I can’t make out exactly what is growing there, but that doesn’t seem to be the aim of these paintings in any case. They are not botanical pictures or agricultural advertisements; they do not catalogue a precise range of fruit and flowers. They are doing something else. In the painting of the vegetable garden, someone in white shirt stands hoeing or raking, their back to us, in the lower right. Around the gardens are the fields, copses, villages; in the distance, in the kitchen garden painting, I think I can make out the cross-arms of a windmill. (Constable’s father was a miller.) The painting of the flower garden shows with care a brick wall, a timber fence, the lawn’s precise edging (someone has trimmed it away with a spade). Above the gardens, in both paintings, Constable has put in the English summer skies, full of the large clouds that appear in other of his paintings. The gardens are in shade. Is this afternoon? Is the day racing away from the painter as he paints?
A year or so before he painted these pictures of his father’s gardens, Constable painted another image of the Essex landscape. This painting, The Stour Valley and Dedham Village (1814, collection of the Boston MFA) was commissioned by Thomas Fitzhugh on behalf of his bride Philadelphia Godfrey “so that his wife could be reminded in London of a familiar scene from her childhood” (Reynolds, 60). The painting can keep you company. It can acknowledge what is lost when we leave those places that have formed us. It can remind us of the ones who go on living there, and remind us of the dead who sleep in narrow beds among their own late beloved ones.
Constable grew up in a house his father built, surrounded by these gardens. He must have spent time working in them as a boy and young man. His letters, sketchbooks, and paintings of the village he grew up in testify to his affection for this place. But beginning at the turn of the 19th century (when he would have been about 24), he left East Bergholt and lived in London part of the year as he tried to become a recognized painter. He returned to East Bergholt in part to work—to learn to see by sketching and painting. In 1815, the year he painted these pictures, he was in East Bergholt in May and again from July through December, when his father was seriously ill (Reynolds, 180). His mother had collapsed while working in the garden in spring 1815, and his father would die in May of 1816. It must have been, by dates given to the paintings, during the months just after his mother’s death that Constable painted these two pictures.
After his father’s death, Constable would marry Maria Bicknell and from then on live with her and their children in London, in Hampstead, in Brighton. Reynolds writes that for “many years [Constable’s] visits to East Bergholt were confined to hasty journeys on business matters” (15). As far as I can tell he never returned to live in the Suffolk-Essex border country along the Stour, for which his pictures show so much attention. Growing up, the places we live we often take for granted, a steady and even uninteresting background to the longings and wonderings, flashes of event that draw our daily attention. This is just home. These are just the tomatoes planted by the garage. This is just my mother, my father. At some point we make the decision to leave, whether to points near or far, and on that day leaving may seem like an inconsequential choice. And yet decades pass sometimes before we can return to these places, and sometimes we never can. The painter’s habit of looking is transformative—not of the place but of looking itself. It changes what the seeing means: from ordinary to precious, from background to foreground, from support for meaning to meaningful in itself.
I imagine Constable in his father’s gardens (his mother’s gardens, too, I think they must have been), painting them. I imagine him making these paintings in order to be there in the gardens, in order to bear and proceed under the weight of bewildering grief, or the banality and dullness of waiting for a death. The curiosity that is enlivened in a person by the act of looking and trying to make a representation is its own reward, and it also can move the mind away from difficult preoccupations that thinking will not change. Making the work in order to learn how to look is part of making any work, but maybe especially when one is looking at something so familiar that has been rendered especially precious by the reminder of loss. When I think of Constable making these paintings, I am placed in the gardens by the panorama the two canvases form. But I am also faced with the kinds of questions that we spend our lives working out: what is death? What is a family? Who are these people called parents? Why must we leave, and how can we bear it? Will this place remain? Why does time keep moving and how is it that it can feel both linear and circular at once? Constable made these at a moment when the death and illness of his parents would have made the transience of all things appear in sharp relief. I read in them the awareness of that transience. The paintings become a way to hold onto a place he loved, even while he lived elsewhere. He kept them with him all his life (Kennedy, np).
The ordinary places of our ordinary lives: the vegetable gardens, flower gardens, neighborhoods, houses, streets, schools. The bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens of our ordinary childhoods; their decorations and their furniture. These precious signifiers of what cannot be held. When Constable paints the two pictures of his father’s gardens and keeps the paintings to hang on his own walls are they a kind of memorial picture? Maybe so. I think they are also simply pictures of what was beautiful to him, privately beautiful because of what they betokened as well as beautiful in the shared way that artworks are (color, composition, etc.). This is, finally, what most draws me to these paintings: that they were made for the painter’s own life, from the materials of his living and looking. They remind me that art is and can be for this: for understanding and reckoning with the world, for recording it, and for hanging on our own walls.
Works cited
Constable, John. Golding Constable’s Flower Garden, 1815. Oil on canvas, 33.1×50.7 cm. In the collection of the Ipswich Borough Council Museums and Galleries. Image in the public domain, retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.
Constable, John. Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden, 1815. Oil on canvas, 33×50.8 cm. In the collection of the Ipswich Borough Council Museums and Galleries. Image in the public domain, retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.
Constable, John. The Stour Valley and Dedham Village, 1814. Oil on canvas, 55.3×78.1 cm. In the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
seid umschlungen, Millionen / diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!*
Refuse not to see it. See it, see it, see it, see it. In the vacant lots, in neighbors’ yards, in the cracks in pavement, in overgrown front gardens, in gutters on abandoned buildings, around the neglected city trees’ bases, at bus stops, in public planters, along the highways: see it, see it, see it.
Beauty is here. Joy is here. Neither may last but: here they are. They’ll be again. Right there. In the most ordinary places. Real. For everyone. For every, every, every, every one of us.
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