I wasn’t sure what this would turn out to be, but in the end it seemed to fit with the Poem, Prose, & Praise theme, which is something that I thought was going to be a bigger Covid project three years ago, but it turned out to be just a fun couple writing activities.
IT HAS COME TO THIS
I have been thinking about this poem by Wisława Szymborska every day since I read it on one of the flights coming back from Ukraine in December:
No Title Required
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
It’s horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone.
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
In a sense, it’s obvious why the poem would be meaningful. Coming from a hospital in eastern Ukraine, how does the daily, constant sound of rockets and artillery, destruction vibrating nearly every air molecule, compare to time off in Savannah, Georgia. One train and three flights, and I’m back on the other side of the world. How do you go, in less than two days, from a war-torn oblast, with Smerch rockets rattling the doors to the basement you’re sleeping in, to a peaceful walk through Forsyth Park with your dog? Last week, I sat on brick steps that today lie blown to pieces and looked out through empty autumn branches onto a cityscape that might as well have been colored in black and white. This week, I’ll be taking the brick sidewalk down a bright and sunny Bull Street to the Marsh Island Channel, surrounded the entire time by evergreen oak and Spanish moss that seem to have no end, in space or in time. The contrast between the two could not be more stark. And yet, in the middle of that transition, I find myself on a plane reading a poem that seems to say that the movement of an oval pebble with the tide could somehow be commensurable to my movement across the globe.
Still, I can’t help loving this poem. It helps that I don’t think the poem is saying that one thing is never any more or less significant than another. Obviously, for us—each of us or all of us together—there will be moments in life that are more significant, more condensed with meaning than other moments. But the poem is at least saying that we can’t know, with absolute certainty, what is and is not ultimately important—even for ourselves. And the reason we can’t know, says the poem, is because “the tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.”
The other day, I was flipping through an old commonplace notebook from 2018, and I came across a line from this passage in Julian Barnes’s Staring at the Sun:
Jean visited the Grand Canyon in November. The north rim was closed, and the snow-ploughs had been out chivvying the road up from Williams to the south rim. She booked into the lodge at the Canyon’s edge; it was early evening. She did not hurry with her unpacking, and even went to the hotel gift shop before looking at the Canyon itself. Not putting off pleasure, but the reverse; for Jean expected disappointment. At the last minute, she had even considered rescripting her Seven Wonders and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge instead.
A foot of snow lay on the ground and the sun, now almost level with the horizon, had thrown a firm-wristed sweep of orange across the mountains opposite. The sun’s kingdom began exactly at the snowline: above, the orange mountain crests had orange snow beneath indolent orange clouds; drop below the line and everything changed into dry browns and buffs and umbers, while far, far down, some murky greens enclosed a trickle of silver—like a lurex thread in a dull tweed suit. Jean gripped the frosty guard-rail and was glad to be alone, glad that what she saw didn’t have to be translated into words, to be reported, discussed, annotated. The extravagant fish-eye view was bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful and more frightening than she had thought possible; but even this alignment of excited adjectives failed her. . . . Someone else had promised, “It’s like looking at Creation”—but that too was only words. Jean was fed up with words. If the Canyon shrank the watchers at its rim to midges, it shrank their noises—the prattle, the whoops, the camera clicks—into mere insect hum. This wasn’t a place where you made self-deprecating jokes, fiddled with your exposure meter, or threw snowballs. This was a place beyond words, beyond human noise, beyond interpretation.
The phrase “beyond interpretation” has a lot of depth. It’s not beyond experience or observation, not beyond meaningfulness or praise, but it is beyond interpretation. I think the point, at least for me, is not that it is beyond interpretation but that it should be beyond interpretation. It belongs there. It should be the way things are for us. There’s no reason, it seems to me, that “the extravagant, fish-eye view” of our own lives should be any less confounding, whether we are standing at the Grand Canyon or standing anywhere else.
When I thought about trying to write something, anything (though I admit, it isn’t much) about coming back from Ukraine, the first thing that I could think of was this: “Sometimes, I don’t know what I’m doing. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.” In fact, for several weeks, those two sentences are almost all that came to mind.
I walked into that sandbagged hospital in November and one of the first people I saw was my friend Bill. He looked at me, shook his finger in my direction, smiled and said, “You said you weren’t coming back.” And he was right. When I left Ukraine at the end of March last year, I did say I wasn’t going back, and I did think that I wasn’t going back. But like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I am becoming more and more okay with this.
Also in that little commonplace book is a quote from Gilbert Meilaender’s The Way That Leads There, and it is one of my favorite quotes, one of my favorite thoughts in the world:
We cannot really know ourselves, Augustine concludes. Only God manages that—only God can catch the human heart, see it whole, and hold it still. Hence, only God can discern the ultimate significance of any moment in a person’s life.
We don’t know all that brought us here or all that will bring us there—or even where “there” is. We don’t know exactly what it will take to make the world right, or totally wrong, nor how big or small or numerous the steps might be that send us in one direction or the other. To step back for a moment and to view myself as one tiny speck within that intricate and dense tapestry—whether that speck-that-is-me is on this side of the world or the other, in a hospital or a coffee shop—is to see that any moment in life might be “bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful or more frightening than we know.” And hopefully then we might admit that humility is the most necessary human quality, that life has seasons as well as days and moments, and that I cannot know which ones will ultimately be the most fruitful or the most meaningful.
Sometimes, all I can say is, “It has come to this: I am sitting in a coffee shop.” And sometimes, that’s enough, that’s all I need to know right now.