Dear Local Poet,
How can we survive constant assaults on meaning? How do we read the news and not give in to despair?
Signed,
Run Down by the News Cycle
Dear Weary:
In your question, I recognize a kindred spirit who loves knowledge and meaning, who’s torn between wanting to stay aware and feeling, at the same time beaten down by the steady assault on fact. This is no ordinary 24-hour news cycle we’re in, in which news that is replaced in the next celebrity divorce announcement or wardrobe malfunction is therefore inconsequential. We know history, so we know what’s happening has the potential to ruin us.
We’re becoming so protective of logic and truth that we’re practically warriors who won’t let ourselves look away. That sounds so dramatic! And I am not a dramatist. But if no one’s paying attention, if no one corrects each statement, fact-checks each comment, and, when necessary (and always politely, I hope), responds to the alchemy of presenting lies as “alternative facts,” we may be sentenced to dwell in this castle of surrealism forever. Your question is how do we keep going?
Last night, as I was falling asleep, I thought of your question again. The curtain was like a bright cobweb that pulsed in the breeze, and suddenly there was the familiar soft press of deer hooves outside the window. At this time of the year, they forage at the needles of the pine, whatever is green, or left from the winter; they’ll happily chew a locust bean as if it were licorice. It sounds soft and peaceable, though in saying this, I know I’m diminishing what is really going on; they’re trying to survive what’s coming. I think that is a consequence of existence. But we should take the gifts distraction offers us. I listened to the sounds as they moved. It was a quiet marked and modified by their pressing, their chewing, a chuff or snort here and there. Then, as they moved on, the silence had properties that soothed. Even though nature is at least half-terror, the moment had given me patience, and ordinary fact: truth, its ordinariness, and realism. At the same time that we have to pay attention, we also have to take these moments that we might think of as distractions, and pay attention to them too. We have to take them, practically, like vitamins, really, or like water for our thirst, for nourishment.
I love Pat Schneider's “The Patience of Ordinary Things” because it finds a free-heartedness in in the everyday things that surround us, like teacups and soap. I hope her poem will help you too.
The Patience of Ordinary Things
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
"The Patience of Ordinary Things" appears in Another River: New and Selected Poems, published by Amherst Writers & Artists Press. It is reprinted here by permission of the author.