If uncertainty—as principle, daily experience—is the mood of our teetering day, what are we to do? From local activism, calling your congressman, to new eucalyptus bath salts, and a long binge of Asimov’s Foundation, the day goes on with and without us. We are doing something, we’re trying, we’re paying attention, sure, but how to resist a quietism that turns us inward, or against each other. Not that the interior is a bad place, but the galvanizing force of social discourse gets lost behind shut doors. We learned that during the pandemic, “for we can cast a form like a dandelion bloom / to heed a material blindness of the senses, yes?” (“Of Poses” the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless). The question’s still out on that one.
My poem “Late Music,” written late in a twenty-year project called the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, arises out of this daily dilemma. Sadly, it was written a few years ago, before a certain miasma settled over the land, but the question obtains with even greater force: how will we spend our days? how will we attend to our rapidly accelerating planet? One habit of response is to read bracing prose, and for me, it’s often “the consolations of philosophy,” to quote an excellent recent example by Alain de Botton. From the Affective Turn to the Queering of Nature, Object Oriented Ontology to Anthropocene Studies, there’s an incredible florescence of philosophical writing going on internationally, as if climate change has triggered all our cells to wake up.
For to write is to read: “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein). And I think poetry does make things happen—clarity, community, collective action, self-actualization, distant companionship, a sign in the square—and however much daily doom scrolling rises up, a brief if necessary condition (see: paying attention) we need to make art, write poems, read. But there’s something more, an almost bodily need. Something along the lines of Robert Duncan’s proprioceptive linkage: “The hand and the eye estimate, and we feel what we see.” To write, for me, is to find a material outlet for an overmuch daily input. And to read something resistant is to refine the input. I think poetry is occasional, and if we pay attention, read attentively, the occasion speaks each day.
“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company” —Sartre
“Late Music” begins on a “long drive home,” no doubt from another swim in the neurodivergent pool. My wife, the poet Aby Kaupang and I, are parents to a beautiful not-so-little-girl who is on the autism spectrum. She doesn’t speak or eat by mouth, she doesn’t sleep too much, but she’s very loving, loves to swim, and we do our best to be upright in the pool. But it’s challenging, and the poem—as I mentioned, written late in the process of a long book—occurs late in the book, captures the somewhat beleaguered tone of an existentially tired parent. Typing here, I realize I’d been writing atmosphere all of my daughter’s life. So “feeling lonesome on a long drive home, you make it so” is the speaker’s acknowledgement of the estranged position we often find ourselves in. But that’s a choice, and the speaker recognizes this, snaps to with the “first frost” of the year. Maybe we’re not disciplined enough to write each day, but we certainly can get out of ourselves, see the sky, touch the earth, breathe in for a moment, our moment.
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us” —Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre has helped me think this thought, practice this practice. One of the key tenets of Existentialism is that “existence precedes essence.” Before any ontological meditation on Dasein (or anything else!) there is this physical body that rises, corporeally, almost heliotropically, like a plant. And that thing, a thing body is connected to other bodies, and these create a prior reality to our ideas about it. I’ve learned a lot from my daughter about such material matters. Thingitude. She is my teacher, and my wife is my teacher, and my friends are my teacher, and my students are my teacher.
Writ large, that’s the kind of daily body we’re all meshed to. There’s nothing on planet earth that’s not connected to other things on planet earth. We’re learning this painfully every day, yet we seem oblivious to the causes of the distress. I suppose the poem tries to track this “foreboding in the winter you have conceived.” It’s a “pain in the belly,” a “boy building an igloo covered in powder,” a kind of collective first-world sickness, a Whiteness that is racial, political and economic, and has roiled our atmosphere without the kind of ethical attendance such responsibility would imply: “White, what have we done to Civilization?” A gun sickness, a war sickness, an empathy sickness, a history sickness: “There is no Snowman you have not rolled from memory.” As a white male poet writing in the late Empire of the 21st c. I have to acknowledge this, have to call this out, and it’s a choice.
“There may be more beautiful times, but this is ours”
I did not choose my natal occurrence, nor did my daughter (I’m an Aries, she’s a Gemini). But we rise to the day, related, each time. And I can choose my affect, my sweater, my speech. And I can do better, we can all do better, and it makes me feel better to do better. Robert Duncan again, “responsibility is the ability to respond,” and ability, ableism, has been made real to me as an entrance to existence. While “humanism is what humans do” right through the ism, “there is no such thing as not choosing.”
The poem harkens back to an earlier poem in the book, “Snow Globe,” (more igloo) which explores similar things from the childhood end of the telescope, meaning my own white privileged origins, and that late 60s world juxtaposed to this twilight moment. In “Existentialism Is a Humanism” Sartre says “every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity.” We can’t get out of our subjectivity, we are always situated in our subjectivity. Spinning and spinning in place, on a planet, choice happens regardless. We might as well make it our conscious own. I like to think we’ve evolved Sartre’s observation; our humanism today acknowledges, and takes in the more-than-human world. Intermittently, to be sure, but that’s a good thing extrapolated to the necessary global inclusion. The book explores that in scale from the pathogen to the atmosphere. And “Late Music,” well, I hope the title is sufficiently resonant to suggest where we’re at.
