BANNER: AT WAR WITH TIME
Today is not Memorial Day, as was true in our prior post. Now we turn to another type of “memorial,” and a decidedly different variety of war that we deal with every day and night, but that we seldom pause to define or express, much less figure out: At War with Time. This ia a war that is almost impossible to win, and one we aren’t sure we want to. All our time management books and devices say we want to be the victors in this battle, but are we really, and what would that mean?
The second part of today’s topic, “At War with Time,” ferrets out the various machinations that humanity’s fetish-like involvement with time leaves us.
Human beings have fetishes with time. After all, we are the ones who invented it. Time is a human concept for which we have our clocks, wrist watches, computers, and a few chipped sun dials in a few weedy gardens. We like knowing what time it is, but do we stop and ask ourselves why we need to know what time it is? Humans harbor the illusion that hours to nanoseconds actually make up living experiences. Imagine, no timepieces to organize our lives. Think of life whirling around the seasons of light and dark. There was a time when that’s how it was. A time when the home fires burned and made shadows.
That said, it seems obvious that humanity craves ways to slice our activities into imaginary pieces. Sometimes, when time is troubling you, you may feel like the screaming person in Edvard Munch’s painting. Yes, since the time of the hunter/gatherers, and before, humanity needed ways to know when the buffalo herd might whisk by, or when the berries were ripest. The War with Time appears to be eternal, and it is likely to proceed at its petty pace until we’ve driven ourselves quite mad, and with our bad luck and lack of planning, to extinction.
What does a war with time mean for us? Why are we at war with time, and who is the “enemy?”
Here are some of the components of this War. See if you recognize them:
- At war with memory
- At war with the three times – past, present, and future
- At war with beginnings (re: doubt, anxiety) and with endings (re: loss, gain, relief and sorrow)
- At war with each other
- At war with ourselves
- At war with war
- At war with deadlines
- At war with both happiness and sorrow (i.e., How long will it last? Will it ever do away?)
- At war with clocks ticking, cuckoos popping out, and digital time pieces silently displaying the instants
The most significant war that occupies our time in the most significant way of all is our WAR with DEATH. This is brought home to us when we witness dying and deat. The end of us suddenly becomes real indeed. Good grief! My time is finite. I don’t have a thousand years to accomplish what I want to. Of course, those statements have a decidedly Western ring, but that’s another story. That said, most people appear to ignore their own endings until it’s, well, too late! (See the excerpts from C. Phillips poem below. Also, see the following poem for a specific take on dying, death, and memorial, aka memory). Some religions extent time into versions of the afterlife where time is eternal; however, to get to a heavenly place, we must do battle with the flesh, its cravings, and its unhealthy proclivities.
Now, things aren’t quite so 100% grim. Is this not so? We can counter these “wars” with joy, the peaceful times, and moments of downright awe. Yes. It’s true. But that’s not the subject of this post. We’ll leave the daffodils and bluebirds for another day.
Never enough time. Too much time. Harried. Bored. The never-ending nature of the illusion of time.
Beginnings and endings – over and over and over – routines punctuated by the terror of deadlines. The world keeps ending. The world repeatedly begins.
Today’s poems bring various viewpoints on the time wars. The first one by yours truly views time as a war zone wherein we forge on, never knowing if this time is the last time – whether what is happening brings pleasure or pain of both, as in a melancholy refrain.
Next, Carl Phillips takes on the final timekeeper and wonders (and answers) about what death means, other than movement through space at an end . . . and then . . . and then?
Dudley Randall looks deeply into a little known fact and adds his take on that time and ponders on the meaning then and now.
F. Choi, in Time-Sensitive explores the three times and ends saying, “my past catching up with yours.” As if . . .
POEMS
And So It Is – Not Done . . .
by CatherineStenzel
Part I
no matter how many times
consummated
despite the rolling average decades
huddled together
never long enough
for ripeness
regardless houses bought and sold
children raised
despite anniversaries counted, memorials called
parents buried
stains and taints on the crooked heart
forever triggered
love won back with fervent flaming candles
bound to sputter
and so it is . . . not quite
and never, ever enough
only a change of sweet-dark sweat nor sleeping next to
nor stars wished upon
neither miles’ passage nor counterclaims nor lies
nor oaths on crosses
no match for hallelujahs sung in time
despite accords reached and broken
no accusations proffered nor praises volunteered
make marble floors less hard for kneeling
or make them any more appealing
unreliable stale yeses drop graceless
from untrue-salt mouths
irretrievable no’s overflow lips’ dams
over the edge of unfaithful tongues
never enough and too much
never done and done too soon
insufficient word-soldiers deployed too late
failed to arrive at the capitol’s gate
thus, it is completed
the matter not once done
nor sealed
nor consummated
Part II
while she waits up
porch light glowing on again
as always
waiting
for the finale never arriving
driven hard by frost-mouthed mother
close behind father flown away
uncharted
no plan for flight
neither even blowing kisses to their fell-dropped sons and daughters
huddled waiting
on their dull-lighted porches
for the sleeping watchman
with no letters nor hellos
Is it not so?
This longer than never
a certainty with no resolve
sleeping partners will awake and not be there
near the truth
for those who sit
sit and wait
the porch light burning
hanging waiting
for the messenger passing by
for word of what is and what is not
living and enduring for what is coming
the one great thing
not done
by Carl Phillips
Do not imagine you can abdicate
Auden
Prologue
If the sea could dream, and if the sea
were dreaming now, the dream
would be the usual one: Of the Flesh.
The letter written in the dream would go
something like: Forgive me—love, Blue.
I. The Viewing (A Chorus)
O what, then, did he look like?
He had a good body.
And how came you to know this?
His body was naked.
Say the sound of his body.
His body was quiet.
Say again—quiet?
He was sleeping.
You are sure of this? Sleeping?
Inside it, yes. Inside it.
III. The Tasting (A Chorus)
O what, then, did he taste like?
He tasted of sorrow.
And how came you to know this?
My tongue still remembers.
Say the taste that is sorrow.
Game, fallen unfairly.
And yet, you still tasted?
Still, I tasted.
Did you say to him something?
I could not speak, for hunger.
by Dudley Randall
It is a little-known fact that 200,000 Negroes fought
for freedom in the Union Army during the Civil War.)
In this green month when resurrected flowers,
Like laughing children ignorant of death,
Brighten the couch of those who wake no more,
Love and remembrance blossom in our hearts
For you who bore the extreme sharp pang for us,
And bought our freedom with your lives.
And now,
Honoring your memory, with love we bring
These fiery roses, white-hot cotton flowers
And violets bluer than cool northern skies
You dreamed of stooped in burning prison fields
When liberty was only a faint north star,
Not a bright flower planted by your hands
Reaching up hardy nourished with your blood.
Fit gravefellows you are for Douglass, Brown,
Turner and Truth and Tubman . . . whose rapt eyes
Fashioned a new world in this wilderness.
American earth is richer for your bones:
Our hearts beat prouder for the blood we inherit.
by Franny Choi
“When did the ‘present’ begin?”
Lauren Berlant
When the tyrant’s voice comes on the car radio, I close my eyes in an effort to slow the rate at which hopelessness enters me. With this act, I hurl myself faster toward extinction.
Every morning, I stretch, put food in my throat, and fail to forgive myself.
At night, I sit down to watch last year’s extinctions paint the wall, while next time’s fire buffers in a perpetual next time.
Somewhere between these, I occupy the present tense, with all the confidence of a settler.
Sometime before was when the things we survived happened. What am I surviving today: the war or its unending ending?
I remember none of it and so live without language for its opposite.
The country (was/is) divided, the US military (occupied/has occupied) the country, I (return/am returning) there.
What is the opposite of the present tense?
(I’m speaking, I say, until it’s no longer true.)
I love next time. I love it with all the declarative confidence of a child who’s never fished the softened bodies of her parents from a river as soldiers chew cud.
History hangs inside me, like a dependent clause.
History ends when its mirrors rush from the future like brake lights, polishing me into language.
After the catastrophe. By polishing me; through buffering grammar. In red memories dotting the highway smudged out by a storm. By the tyrant, unevenly distributed. With current.
The screech of tires is just the sound of my past catching up with yours.
BACKGROUND
Dudley Randall was born on January 14, 1914, in Washington, DC, In 1920 his family moved to Detroit, Michigan, where his father, Arthur Randall, worked for Ford Motor Company. Randall began writing seriously at age thirteen, and in 1927 his first published poem appeared in the Detroit Free Press.
Randall graduated from Detroit’s Eastern High School in 1930. He began working full-time at the Ford Motor Company foundry in 1932. After he was laid off in 1937, he served as a postal carrier and clerk for Detroit’s U.S. Post Office for several years. In 1943 he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in the South Pacific during World War II.
After returning from the Pacific front in 1946, Randall received a BA in English from Wayne State University in 1949 and an MA in library science from the University of Michigan in 1951. He went on to serve as a librarian at several universities, including the University of Detroit, where he was also the poet in residence.
In the 1960s, Randall became involved in the Black Arts Movement. He published “Ballad of Birmingham,” a poem in response to the tragic church bombing in Alabama, in 1963. In 1965 he established Broadside Press, which published many prominent African American poets. In 1978, Black Enterprise magazine called him “the father of the black poetry movement of the 1960s.”
During his lifetime, Randall published several poetry collections, including A Litany of Friends: New and Selected Poems (Lotus Press, 1981) and More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades (Third World Press, 1971). He also edited the anthologies The Black Poets (Bantam Books, 1985) and For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (Broadside Press, 1967). In 1981, Randall was appointed the poet laureate of Detroit. He died on August 5, 2000.
Carl Phillips is the author of Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (FSG/Carcanet, 2022), among many other titles. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
“. . . Living amid the always-unfolding aftermath of war and colonial violence, it does weird things to time. All of which is to say, I was lonely when I wrote this.” Franny Choi. Choi is author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), among other titles. A 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, she is a faculty member in the literature department at Bennington College.
EXPLORATIONS
- What is your experience of time? Do you resonate with the proposition that time is only a human concept?
- Throughout the poem, it is suggested that time is an enemy. Comment.
- What am I surviving today: the war or its unending ending? Thoughts?
ReplyDelete1. Time officially started with the Big Bang.
Eternity is in our hearts so we can never see its beginning or its end.
2. The enemy, dear Brutus, is not in time, but in ourselves.
3. I'm trying to survive the roadblocks I have put in my way.
I think I need to not do that (put roadblocks), or at least to slow down and look around.
Or take a different road. Abdication is not an option.
The older I get, the closer I come to re-experiencing the timelessness I enjoyed in childhood. I think that's the eternity CJ references. I like going in and out of that.
ReplyDeleteWhen I get out of my head I war less and enjoy more of the above
Your poem is so sad - full of uncertainty with no resolve.