Kay Ryan, "New Rooms"

Living is exhausting nowadays. One aspect of what's wrong: these hidden, vast chasms separating our experiences. You don't realize someone has no idea what your life is like until you start falling into one. As you stumble, you're surrounded by the notion that you have never understood anything relevant about them.

A small example: on paper, two people have the same title in the same building. They serve the same group. But if one only does the minimum so they can leave early and the other invests in everyone they meet, the difference is so extreme that they're not doing the same job at all.

My students asked me why our state legislators, until very recently, have been so reluctant to provide the incarcerated air conditioning. Temperatures in Mississippi prisons once reached 145 degrees; nothing suggests Texas prisons cannot become ovens. It is important to consider that someone with genuine support and opportunities–this doesn't mean life is easy for them!–can find the brutality of everyday life for others unbelievable. Someone tells you they were sleeping in their car while working a minimum wage job. It's strange to hear; you wonder why anyone would put up with that. The system ultimately works for you and it is hard to conceive how badly it fails others. You want to think that this has to be the exception, not the rule. The desire for that thought colors everything, including your approach to the grim statistics you occasionally hear, or the sight of those breaking down right in front of you.

I don't just think social class blinds us; there's a more fundamental consideration. Kay Ryan strikes at it directly in "New Rooms:" "The mind must / set itself up / wherever it goes..." Philosophy grapples with this problem in various ways. Whether we speak of the transcendental idealism of Kant or Nietzsche's perspectivism, the mind must impose order, and that practically is reality. But we recognize an even more pressing problem immediately. How do each of us deal with a world continually in flux without any time to think? How do we adapt to the new job or the demanding mother-in-law? It's always messy. We pretty much take the memories closest to us and filter everything through them:

New Rooms (from Poetry)
Kay Ryan

The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms—just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes 
aren’t where 
the windows
went.

"The mind must / set itself up / wherever it goes / and it would be / most convenient / to impose its / old rooms." When I read this, I thought about moving. How simply relocating to an apartment across town is a chore with consequence. When I did so, I lost essential things ("Where did I put my passport?") and in the best case, found them months later ("Didn't know I had a pocket there"). Ryan's words remind me that on the most basic level, I was imposing "old rooms" where the new ones were. I wasn't thinking about how I shifted everything; I was expecting things to be in the place they were. But I wasn't in that place! I personally changed where I was!

So there's this element in "New Rooms" of not recognizing one's own agency. I see myself as part of a place as opposed to someone who is somewhere and needs to figure out where they are. But I can say that more successful moves are also subject to the same problem. I'd take seriously that I had to learn how others lived in a new place. I'd adapt. And I'd still underestimate what I was confronting. You think you know a place because you've been there a couple of months. You've honed in on how people see themselves, how they distinguish themselves from elsewhere. But you haven't examined the causes, and when you do, you'll only see their surface for the longest time. To speak concretely: I'm always learning what oil in Odessa, Texas actually means. An economy of extraction has far-reaching, complex effects which demand a lifetime of study.

That last thought gets close to what "New Rooms" really pushes us to ask. There's the simpler problem of tacking up old rooms on a new place "like an interior / tent." You're treating the job you just got like the old one. After a time, the failures of this strategy are readily apparent. The more difficult problem is that "the new holes / aren't where / the windows / went," and you won't realize you reside in darkness. You believe you can see outside when all you see is a wall. Regarding American politics nowadays, we speak of an "epistemological crisis," a fancy way of saying crank ideas about medical science or election results not only dominate but decrease trust in the very possibility of knowledge.

I think "New Rooms" is taking us to somewhere subtler, though not unrelated. We need to know what is beyond us, and our combination of nostalgia, tradition, quotes from the calendar with a celebrity's advice, bad habits which worked in hell jobs, assumptions about the people around us, good friends, family drama, etc. all lend themselves to blindness. We need to find the light; we need to find an actual opening. You get the sense that a mere question won't work to activate the mind in this way.

What needs to happen involves identifying a mismatch. I need to know how I don't fit in, what I will almost certainly miss no matter how hard I try. It's not comforting. Maybe the new rooms will remain uncomfortably alien. Truth is inconvenient that way: it doesn't let you assume you're being seen or valued. It's darkly funny saying that in this era where people assume the television or the doomscroll on their phone speaks directly to them. Where they believe they've made friends with the talking heads on a show about the news, the heads only telling them what they want to hear.