Franz Wright, "P.S."

Hi all --

Before I say anything else, I have to say this: they're arresting judges and throwing children with cancer (not that it matters, but U.S. citizen children) out of the country.

Things aren't good, to say the least.

I'm donating to a number of causes so as to help the helpers. Food banks, resources for foster care, books for prisoners, immigrant defense, meals for the homeless, and a few others. If we help the helpers, then it's that much easier for everyone else. Unfortunately, this can be the least we do, and in times like these we need to figure out how to do more. Some aren't figuring out how to do anything. I just watched Trump respond to a question about what Russia has conceded with regard to Ukraine. Trump answered with no concept of what "concession" meant. He baldly asserted that Russia will stop the war if given all the land they took; that was their "concession." I'm using this as an example less to pick on POTUS and more to point out that a number of people don't care at all what words mean. They're just going to say anything and if we don't do more, their carelessness fills the space we abandon.

I do think it's important to get into the habit of doing more each day. "More" means consistently acknowledging and encouraging those who care. When a no-kill shelter in West Odessa pleaded for funds, a number of us were able to help them in time. Unfortunately, I haven't seen that energy turn into things both the shelter and the broader community need. Groups who serve need pledges more than one-time donations. They also need affiliate groups to form who will back them and other causes which complement theirs.

So a colleague asked if some of us would help defend Marfa Public Radio. It's an absolutely critical source of information in an area filled with what's called "pink slime." The death of local news organizations means that billionaires can enact political agendas with publications masquerading as news. (Here's an example from Dallas.) In contrast, Marfa Public Radio has been essential for my work. Their reporting on Lake Boehmer, a 60 acre toxic lake formed by one (!) leaky oil well, and the reluctance of those in charge to do anything about it, tells some brutal truths about Texas.

I'm donating $5 a month now. It isn't much but my goal is to get a bunch of us to chip in and publicize how much MPR has contributed to our understanding of where we live. Obviously this can't substitute for defending judges or preventing children with cancer from being forcibly evicted from the country. But the hope here is that all of us follow through on the community we want to create. We've got to start forming the groups that act like they know what is at stake. Otherwise, plenty will be telling us what they think "concession" means, much in the same way they say "you always have a choice" when you clearly don't.

Franz Wright, "P.S."

I am taking a creative writing class right now. My work is serviceable. I can be the boring wannabe poet before someone who actually knows what they're doing gets the mic. No one will think less of me; maybe a line or two will stick with someone.

And then there's a poem like Franz Wright's "P.S.", which makes any number of us want to burn everything we ever wrote. He's got high drama from the outset, but he doesn't need any gimmickry. He just needs you to focus on an image not unlike the sharp, detailed print posters at the doctor's office. There's a picture of the desert, the seagull against it, the blue sky, and you see like you've never seen before. "I close my eyes and see / a seagull in the desert, / high, against unbearably blue sky."

Wright takes a scene in danger of collapsing into cliche and makes it distinctly his own. He pushes you to contemplate how harrowing the everyday is. Sure, we can imagine a remote scene with birds; we often have. Have we really thought about what it is like to cross miles of ocean or sand? To have heat singe you as you try to try to change climates? The seagull has to fly high–that's how you make journeys of distance–and that in turn makes the sky "unbearably blue."

P.S.
Franz Wright

I close my eyes and see
a seagull in the desert,
high, against unbearably blue sky.

There is hope in the past.

I am writing to you
all the time, I am writing

with both hands,
day and night.

Wright establishes empathy with an animal's ordeal. To feel for a moment how much the Earth, as we know it, strives to be. Little miracles everywhere that defy expectations so much that they have become our expectations. Then he brings out a thought that I am going to have to wrestle with day and night for the rest of my life:

There is hope in the past.

I think a lot of us would disagree. We can list the phonies, the do-nothings, the bullies, the abusers. We know how many situations were simply unworkable from the start. It's funny, though. For the creative writing class, a student wrote about a broken relationship. That got me thinking about how the brighter moments from old dates still are bright. I don't think about them, I don't want to think about them because they entail other memories. But they can stand independently even if the larger commitment was an impossibility. Can that be used to interpret Wright's "There is hope in the past?" That our memories have a certain weight independent of, well, us?

I don't know. I am looking at Wright's last two stanzas, which plead less like a love poem and sound more like what we owe the dead. "I am writing to you / all the time, I am writing // with both hands, day and night." What we owe the dead, ironically enough, goes beyond our memory. A major reason why I read Heidegger is that he addresses this indirectly. When we use the past to create the future–this is what the "present" really is, a future-making machine–we change the past. Those of us who struggle with those we've lost continually find things we didn't know, when we're not dealing with selective memories and half-memories. We don't rail against the authenticity of it all, because it is fundamentally authentic. You can't call a process like this "reconstruction" or dismiss it as completely made up. It is, in the end, nothing less than living itself. What is our place in the world? How does it relate to the places of those who have passed?

"There is hope in the past." I believe the proof of this statement is the struggle, the journey. The seagull fighting every inch of desert sky. I can think of a few who have never escaped their past long enough to see any hope in it. There never was movement for some. But Wright's words resonate like a bell struck for those of us wondering whether we can conceive a serious future. That work is done all the time, even if we are not in the specific desert to see it.