The World As It Is

“The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.” I have always loved this line from the West Indian poet Derek Walcott. It speaks to the essential challenge that we face. We are called to hold at the same moment the bombed out villages in Gaza in one hand and the blooming pink and raspberry-colored cherry blossom in the other. It’s a lot to ask, but we continue to perform this balancing act year after year, century after century. History is one corrupt, bloody, oppressive event after another but it hasn’t kept us from marveling at giraffes and geraniums, our children, the last quartets of Beethoven. As bad as it gets, and it’s really bad as of this writing, most of us want to stay alive in this world however painful that may be. We don’t want to get up and leave during the intermission. 

I remember coming-of-age during the Vietnam War, the defining event for those in my cohort, the horrific photojournalism of maimed children in southeast Asia and the rapturous druggy partying at home. I remember the two years I spent in the deserter community in Stockholm with my first husband and the stories I have inherited from Frank about his time in the service during the War. The teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh have brought me some measure of solace, some way to take it all in. Thay, who witnessed the violence and degradation perpetrated against his country in the early years of the conflict in Asia, then lived in exile for almost four decades, understands our predicament from the inside. I’ve been reading Fragrant Palm Leaves, a collection of his journals from 1962-66 and have been touched by their plaintive tone and transparency. I can dive right through the words into the deep pool of his sorrow. The journals follow Thay’s time at Princeton and Columbia in the early ‘60s and in Vietnam in the middle of the decade as his homeland is shredded. His writing is mournful and gentle like a soft rain falling. It’s filled with the small pleasures he encountered as a lonely ex-pat in the gray, frigid Manhattan I know so well and the grief he experienced returning to his beloved  country now bleeding from its heart. In New York, he lived with a friend on west 109th street, two blocks from where my grandmother Teresa Rosenberg rented a railroad flat with her two unmarried daughters. My grandmother was gone by the time Thay lived there in 1963, but my aunts were still there, eating their strudel in their overstuffed chairs, their swollen feet resting on ottomans upholstered in needlepoint. I imagine them brushing up against him at the corner grocery, Thay thin and thoughtful buying his rice, my aunts large and loud lingering in the doughnut aisle. They may have been puzzled by him, this spare elegant Asian man in his monk’s robes. But I think he would have enjoyed them the way he enjoyed the vendor in the market outside of Van Hanh University about whom he wrote in 1964, “Every morning when I look down and see her preparing noodle soup, I am filled with an inexplicable feeling of peace.” 

Thay seems to have looked at the world with eyes of love. I am sometimes capable of that when I remember. I can look out the glass doors of my little winter house in California and see the sun glittering in the puddles on the deck from last night’s downpour, drops of rain flickering in the trees.  This is me on the receiving end, my eyes wide open, my arms embracing the fanfare of this life, all its gorgeous tapestry interwoven with the anguish, the amputations, the hate-mongering. I am not counting my blessings in the manner of Bing Crosby. This is not about me and what a good deal I have, even though you would have no argument there. This is about me trying to remember the world in granular detail, making note of how beautiful and fragile it is much like the people I love who inhabit it. My memory for the particulars is not what it used to be, but I believe I can inhale the spirit of it if I look at the world with a wide angle lens that takes in events at the margins of time and space. I see my aunts all done up in hats with feathers walking right by the zen master and I see Frank, in the market in Saigon in 1964 taking a few hours off from his job as a Signal Supply Specialist in the 69th Signal Detachment of the 145th Aviation Battallion to enjoy a lunch of noodle soup in one of the stalls. 

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In March, seventysomething looks forward to sharing the work of Lyn Chamberlin, a successful higher education executive who lost her job on the eve of the pandemic and re-invented herself as an entrepreneur.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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