sodden, sodden week

by bam

i come this week with sodden heart, afraid for the world we are (no longer becoming but present in the now), fearful of what’s to come. 

once again, a week of news bulletins, and the voices of mass-shooter psychologists filling the airwaves, unfurling the narrative in their cable-news staccato. i didn’t write of the children of annunciation church two weeks past, because i had no words vast enough to reach the depths of it. and i didn’t want to add empty noise.

but a woman i’ve come to love for the purity of her heart, and her inextinguishable humor (mother of five, breast cancer survivor, sister of a brother who died too young, neighbor of annunciation, and one as likely to freely shed tears as to find the hilarity in the everyday) found out that at the moment the first bullets shattered the stained glass of annunciation church, the children in the pews were just beginning to recite psalm 139. 

one of the most ancient prayers, it begins: 

Lord, you have probed me, you know me:

    you know when I sit and stand;
    you understand my thoughts from afar.

You sift through my travels and my rest;
    with all my ways you are familiar.

Even before a word is on my tongue,
    Lord, you know it all.

Behind and before you encircle me
    and rest your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
    far too lofty for me to reach.

and it includes a line i consider one of the most beautiful of all sacred text: 

II
You formed my inmost being;
    you knit me in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, because I am wonderfully made;
    wonderful are your works!
    My very self you know.

My bones are not hidden from you,
When I was being made in secret,
    fashioned in the depths of the earth.[e]

Your eyes saw me unformed;
    in your book all are written down;
    my days were shaped, before one came to be.

III
How precious to me are your designs, O God;
    how vast the sum of them!

Were I to count them, they would outnumber the sands;
    when I complete them, still you are with me.

When you would destroy the wicked, O God,
    the bloodthirsty depart from me!

Your foes who conspire a plot against you
    are exalted in vain.

i can barely get past the line about being knit in my mother’s womb. and it turns out neither could my friend laura. 

she recites it here, a reading worth hearing, as you absorb the words….

then came this wednesday, and with it an assassination and yet another school shooting. and then, thursday, the twenty-fourth anniversary of 9/11. another tragedy, another thread that over the years has brought its tragedy into full view as a woman i have come to love lost her father in that tower that day. and because i know of the layers and layers of tragedy it brought, it is so much more to me now than a terrible day in our national story. as with any violent death, the shrapnel is of the never-ending sort, carnage upon carnage, year after year. flesh shredded, souls shattered, psyches never ever re-settled. 

and so, this poem, with its title so apt: “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” mutilated we are, all right. 

this poem, it seems, made its way to light in the immediate wake of 9/11 quite by accident, when the poetry editor at the new yorker, who happened to be reviewing an advance copy of the poet’s newest book (at the time) was asked by david remnick, the new yorker’s editor, to find a poem fitting for a special edition of the magazine to be printed and published within days of the tragedy. it was printed on the last page of that issue, as we all scanned the mutilations that hadn’t yet fully revealed themselves. isn’t that always the case with tragedy? the revelations, not unlike a land mine, explode and explode, unseen until the moment of detonation, whenever that comes. 

adam zagajewski, a polish poet who died in 2021, had written the poem with no particular occasion in mind. over the last two dozen years, it’s become his most famous poem, and a poem often pulled from the files to mark this sad, sad day. his choice of the word mutilation is most apt, a word not too too often pulled into text. twinning it with the verb “to praise,” is wholly disturbing. what is there to praise? maybe the work is in the “try.” maybe that’s the instructive, meant to be just beyond our reach. try to praise….

there is work to be done here. there is always work. and maybe if we can remember june’s long days, and the wild strawberries, and the gentle caring of one stranger for another, we can remember why we must weep at the sound of gunshot, and why we must not surrender. this world, mutilated in so many ways, is still a world rife with wonders. 

might we add but a single drop of sweetness to the bitter, bitter taste in our mouths….

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

By Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
(Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.)

a closing thought from jeremiah johnson, co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, who writes on his substack Infinite Scroll, where he ponders the politics of posting and the dynamics of the social internet: 

As much as you can, resist the hysteria. Refuse to participate in it, refuse to make the polarization worse. The purpose of liberalism is to allow us to disagree with someone without discriminating against them, without harassing them, without killing them. It’s a precious thing, perhaps the most precious thing our civilization has achieved. Every time you break bread in peace with an outsider, every time a Catholic and Protestant shake hands, it’s a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.

what might you find to praise in this mutilated time and this week of mutilation?