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Matthew Rohrer's "There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier"

Thoughts on loneliness, of all things.

Devin Kelly

Apr 20

There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier

There is absolutely nothing lonelier than the little Mars rover never shutting down, digging up rocks, so far away from Bond street in a light rain. I wonder if he makes little beeps? If so he is lonelier still. He fires a laser into the dust. He coughs. A shiny thing in the sand turns out to be his. from Surrounded By Friends (Wave Books, 2015)

Sometimes I get in a little poetry rut and maybe, too, in a bit of a life-rut in general, and, in those moments, such as now, I turn to what I know, these little footholds I have placed, over time, in the wall of the well I find myself living in. This poem today, by Matthew Rohrer, is one of those footholds. I think of it often. I remember when it first appeared, shooting-star-like, on the inter-webs of nearly a decade ago, and how frequently it was shared, this kind of ooh and aah thing, this beautiful reminder of the holy shit that can still be brought forth from our lips, this gentle whisper that goes what the fuck, I can’t believe someone wrote that. It’s a thing that sometimes happens with a poem. You encounter language used in a way that makes your lived life feel exultant, that makes your loneliness feel shared, that makes everything sorrowful hover closer to the possibility of joy — a gift, you might say, if you are into that sort of thing.

One thing — of many — that’s wonderful about life is that the poem remains, even after the initial reactions subside. And that you can return to it. This poem remains. And it holds true. When I first read it, I was struck by the personification, the metaphor, the “little Mars rover” who “makes little beeps.” I found it cute. Endearing. Adorable. And tragic, too. Yeah. I still do.

And I found it real, despite metaphor, or maybe because of what metaphor makes real, because of what it connects across distance. The wondering. The trudging. The desire to connect to something out there when you’re feeling lost in here. I found it real, too, because of something Leslie Jamison points out in her essay about the loneliest whale in the world, 52 Blue, who sings a song for someone who never comes:

52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as salve for loneliness. Metaphor always connects two disparate points; it suggests that no pathos exists in isolation, no plight exists apart from the plights of others.

In Rohrer’s poem today, he connects disparate points — a Mars rover on a different planet and a person walking on “Bond street / in a light rain” — to remind us, as Jamison suggests, that no feeling “exists in isolation.” Metaphor is the work of constellation-making. It is age old, I imagine — this part of us that looks out at what is not us and reaches across the gap. And maybe there is a kind of possession there, yes, and a kind of ownership, too. Not our best qualities, no. But there is also — alongside that — a humility, I think. A wonderment. I wonder if a tree can feel. I wonder if a whale is lonely. I can feel. I am lonely. I wonder if I am not alone. I hope not. Sometimes I feel so alone.

When I first read this poem, many years ago, I found myself so struck by its comparison, by the way the poem drew my attention to something — the Mars rover — that I hadn’t thought of before. I found it endearing, to think of the little beeps. And I found it sad. I thought, yes, how terribly lonely it must be for that machine up there.

Reading the poem again, I can’t help but think of loneliness as a defining trait of our lives. I no longer think of the Mars rover as some distant figure making little beeps somewhere out in space time; no, I think of us — you and me, sitting here today. I think of us, and the beeps we make and the lasers we fire into dust and the things we gather that we call our own. I think of our loneliness; I think of how real it is. And I think of how, when that comparison is flattened, and when there is no distance between ourselves and Mars, then we, too, are the subject of this poem. We, too, are the people who are absolutely lonely.

Perhaps the most tragic part of this poem today is this moment:

There’s something here about futility, yes? Something about how this little machine, making his little beeps, becomes even lonelier when there is no one to hear him or recognize him. And yet he toils on. He never shuts down. And us, here? What are we doing?

I am reminded, in such a moment, of something Hanif Abdurraqib said when he visited my school a year ago. A student of mine asked, in a Q+A, the most important advice he would give children their age, and Abdurraqib said something about figuring out how to deal with and cope with one’s sense of loneliness. There was a marked hush that fell over the room. I think people were expecting — as I was — something about selfhood, or identity, or belief, something about confidence in the face of the world’s repeated tries to bring one down. But no. Abdurraqib brought up loneliness, and I haven’t forgotten it.

In one of his poems, Wendell Berry said the following:

And so, I am thinking of loneliness today. I am thinking of it for a number of reasons. I am thinking of it mostly because I feel it, which is a circumstantial thing. I am feeling it now because some things in my life aren’t quite working. My body, for one — how it has found itself injured right before I was supposed to run the Boston Marathon, with a calf that seizes up on me with a steak-knife’s sharpness only when I run, as if to say and you thought you were okay, didn’t you?

I will get over that; injury has happened before and will certainly happen again — uncertainty and fragility being two of the most true things of our lives. But it’s a small loneliness now, a missing out, that feels connected to something greater. I turned 34 this past week, and sometimes birthdays are a beautiful thing and sometimes they are a pain and sometimes they are both. Sometimes they fill me with longing; sometimes they fill me with joy. Sometimes I can think about all I have become and sometimes I can only think about all I am not — this mix of shame and wanting, this almost-ness that life sometimes feels like, this why can’t I or why didn’t I or what’s wrong what’s wrong what’s wrong. This year I felt a wish, I think. A desire to be a little different than I am. And then everything fell into the pit that such desire makes of me.

There is a loneliness that arises when we do not meet our own expectations, when the self we want to be doesn’t quite mesh with the self we are. Sometimes we reconcile that distance quickly. Sometimes we allow it to grow. Sometimes we narrow it. But whatever we do, no matter what, there is at first, I think, a loneliness. It is the loneliness of realizing, with a kind of certainty you can’t quite shake, that you are not exactly who you think you are. Distance is one of the great isolators of our time. We pretend at intimacy so often in this world; we are, at every second, merely a click and a millisecond away from the presumption of knowing ourselves or someone else. But really we are, at all times, so far away. And sometimes, we are so far away from ourselves. That distance is a loneliness. And it is a hard one to bear.

In the final lines of his poem, “The White Fires of Venus,” Denis Johnson describes this distance:

It’s cold, in other words, to be inside the body that we wish was not our body, but is. And it’s lonely, too. Earlier in that poem, Johnson writes:

The remedy, in other words, is part of the work of poetry. It’s the work of transcending and reimagining. Of calling loneliness solitude. Of considering the fact of hurt with grace. Of coming to terms, but with new names for terms. And new understandings.

This is hard, though. When you are feeling alone in New York City, and when you are walking along Bond Street in the rain, this street of cobblestones snuck into a neighborhood, with restaurants that come out to the curb and glitter in the damp light of street lamps, and with people endlessly talking in voices that rise into the air the way that birds do, in unison, as if everyone is in on the same joke except for you, and when you hear their silverware make a kind of tickling, shining music that is the name of a song you keep forgetting, and when a child is jumping into the small puddle formed between two stones laid by people who have since disappeared, and when the city is both beautiful and nameless, when it is a painting you are walking through but can’t quite feel a part of, as if the painter ran out of paint at just the moment he was going to paint that thin, little dash of you, a shadow between lampposts — when all of this is happening, it is hard, I think, to reimagine the world or the words within the world, to consider something new, or to call your loneliness solitude. It is easier, I think, to disassociate, to dig yourself a deeper well, to make more distance out of yourself rather than to reach across that distance and find someone or something — anything, really, a tree, a person, a small machine on Mars — to hold your hand.

I don’t think that work ever becomes easier. That is why, I think, the world has crafted and sold us technology that imitates intimacy without creating it. That is why, I think, it is dangerous to allow so much else to do our thinking and our creating for us — because it is thinking itself that will save us from the distance we make out of our loneliness. It is the work — never easier, really — of reaching, of connecting, of looking back out at the world, even and especially when we are tired of ourselves, and wondering what might understand us, what might feel in the way we do. When I read this poem today, for some strange and magical reason, I want to hold this little machine. I want to cry. Absurd, maybe. But those are real feelings. And I remember that I, too, want to be held.¹ And I, too, might need someone — anyone — to cry with me.

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Protectors

** after a girls' night in with MR talking about how she REALLY needs to have a baby even though it would disrupt her entire way of life. and she hasn't found the person yet.

Amie Barrodale

“Don’s wife was like, Poor Emily. The miscarriage, and now this. She must feel like, First I killed my baby, then I killed my dog. Does everything I touch just die?”

“I never thought I killed my baby,” Emily said. They were quiet for a while. Then she said, “Well, sometimes I thought it was because I drank tea in the mornings. Or took hot baths. I thought maybe it was because I took a Valium that one night, before I knew I was pregnant, when my mom came for dinner.”

“But Dr. Marsh said one wouldn’t do anything.”

“I’m just saying how it felt.”

“I know. Sometimes I thought it was my fault. Because I wasn’t sure I wanted a baby.”

“Really?”

“I wanted our baby, but I wasn’t sure I wanted a baby, until we lost it.”

From issue no. 218 (Fall 2016)

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On Pruning

Allison Funk

Cut it way back. Do not be afraid to pinch the first, the only blossom. The berry cannot thrive in freedom. Have no mercy,

gardener. Train the tree to a leader crowned by the uppermost bud. Make ten o’clock your angle for the outstretched limbs of the apple. Prune when the knife is sharp, taking care that the scar be neat. To share the surgeon’s belief in healing, you must trust what has been taken from you is a blessing. Trust

by April, the cherry and pear will fill in, stitching the dreamiest lace, punto in aria, think of it as a veil if you must.

And the rose, this is a special case. When winter’s close, cut back the tallest stems, then with soil topped with straw or leaves, bury the plant, make the mound as high as you can, as if the grave were your own impermanent home, as if you believed anything could bloom again.

From issue no. 152 (Fall 1999)And to read more poems from TheParis Review, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our seventy-two-year archive.

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"I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolvable ache," giving in to knowing more than him. "It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second that you have is somehow for it."

You could also apparently lose your calling and wind up wandring around with a guy who worked at Hertz.

― Miranda July, All Fours

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I canceled all of my friend dates with a text explaining that I'd had an artistic revelation and was going to use my time at the Carlyle as a solo wriitng retreat but I'd reach out next time I was in town.

There was only one friend, a woman named Mary, who I was too close with to do this, so to her I just said I was having a bit of a crisis but I couldn't go into it now.

"As in... midlife?"

I laughed, no. Although maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.

― Miranda July, from All Fours

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“Sometimes someone sees a loneliness in me, but what it is is a need to be alone” ― Ada Limón

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Rebecca Solnit - Slow Change can be radical change

I’ve found in my twenty-something years of messing about with Buddhism is that what it has to teach is pretty simple; you could read up on the essentials in a day, probably in an hour, possibly in a quarter of an hour. But the point is to somehow so deeply embed those values, perspectives, and insights in yourself that they become reflexive, your operating equipment, how you assess and react to the world around you. That’s the work of a lifetime—or of many, if you’re inclined to believe in reincarnation.

Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it.

We are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now.

We need stories in which getting where you’re going—individually or as a society—mostly happens step by step with maybe some backsliding, muddle, and stalling, not via one great leap. Maybe this is the task at which novels and biographies excel.

In the scope of a substantial novel is room for someone to grow up, to change, to learn, for Pip to come to understand how his love for Estella was all tied up in other people’s suffering and his own upward-mobility ambitions and class shame, for Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy to see that their own first impressions were mistakes born of hubris and fall in love with each other, for the nun at the beginning of Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse to undergo extraordinary transformations, heal others, find and lose love, and grow old, for the formation of characters, the building and tearing down of relationships, the arrival of those revelations that can only arrive slowly.

Anyone who’s gotten over a heartbreak or a bereavement knows that there aren’t five stages of grief you pass through like they were five whistlestop towns on the train route. You are more this way one day and more that way the other, looping and regressing, and maybe building reconciliation or acceptance like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.

And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.

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Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of storytelling

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“Addiction is not condemned- it’s understood. Not a failing, but an affliction”

Ocean Vuong

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“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I mean all artists),” James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.” And the truth about us, as I know it, is that how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are. The transmutation of suffering into love — the transmutation of the wear and tear and helplessness of living, of the rage it can induce, into compassion and care — is what we call art. Anyone who performs that alchemy within and then gives another the means to it — whether with a poem or a painting or an act of kindness — is what I would call an artist.

― maria popova

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XXXV

is that you Boss is that you hooting in the hollow are you a night bird Boss is that your face behind the moon is that your hand cupped to the cricket’s ear do you tell the cricket how to sing to you say that’s it now softer softer now you little bug do you pour moonlight on the river do you say river let this silver ride on you you’re up to something Boss you’re like a treetop there against the sky a wave you’re like a neighbor Boss is your favorite game a game of peep-eye Boss are you as sweet as you can be you cutie-pie I can’t keep track of you Boss you’re just too many things at once you’re like a lullaby that never ends a breath that makes the moment last again again again

from Bucolics (Ecco, 2008)

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Tired Of

Patricia Hampl

Not the wrist of the sunset which sinks every night below the electrical wires— that is pink, I’m not tired of pink. But cover up the stars, the stars are the absence of clouds. Let the clouds come, clouds are vague. Say you didn’t betray me, or am I being too clear again? I’m a primary color in your presence. On the window sill a blue bottle is filling with pink light. I won’t hate you, I won’t love you. There is the possibility of floating, a pink cloud is scudding by. French-blue is right here, it is serenity even though the color is bright and as you said, much too obvious.

From issue no. 74 (Fall–Winter 1978)

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This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World

The Twilight of the American Passion Job

Anne Helen Petersen

Feb 23

I keep thinking of a conversation I had last month with Caroline O’Donoghue, the brilliant author of The Rachel Incident. We were talking about the route she took to writing the book, and the prevalence of Irish authors in pop culture. She stopped the wandering conversation in the way you do when you want someone to be very clear about how things actually work.

It’s not that Irish people have more historical trauma to mine, she said, or that Americans love Irish shit. It’s that her civilization believes art matters — and funds it accordingly, as part of public infrastructure. They believe art makes life navigable. Its actual value is beyond measure, and like a lot of invaluable things, its survival hinges on public support.

Americans, by contrast, will say that art absolutely matters — but balk at the prospect of funding it in ways other than owning it. Art is truly only valuable, in other words, when it can be a profit center.

But remember: the vast majority of art is not profitable. Neither are most of the things that make life survivable. Teaching, caring for elders, and helping people escape domestic violence, just to start. National parks require far too much staffing and maintenance to ever, realistically, be a profit center. See also: daycares and preschools and wilderness. Conservation work and disaster relief. Libraries. Science, particularly in the essential early stages. Public universities. Definitely not profitable.

And yet, they all exist — because our society at one point decided that just because something couldn’t yield a profit didn’t mean we didn’t want or need that service. We agreed to pool our money, in the form of taxes, and fund those services, hiring millions of public servants to do the everyday work of creating and maintaining a thriving society. The tacit agreement: just because you didn’t personally use a service, just because it wasn’t visible to you, didn’t mean it wasn’t necessary.“Have you ever moved 60,000 + lbs of timber in the woods with just four people, some mechanical advantage, and human power? This is what the “low productivity sector” looks like.”

But over the years, the demand for these services outgrew the American public’s willingness to fund them — and politicians came to that that a very effective means of garnering people’s votes was promising to decrease spending on projects citizens did not personally prioritize. Or, at least, some things: funding for the military, which is absolutely not profitable, remained robust. But funding for the arts, education, and care work — easily slashed. Why fund schools if you don’t have kids in them? Why fund art you, personally, wouldn’t choose? Or a park you don’t visit? Or research to cure a disease you don’t have? Why make it possible for other people to have good care if you, personally, at that moment, don’t need it?

Instead, each person should be able to take the money they’ve saved on taxes and pay for the stuff that matters to them: their own art, their own private schools, their own concierge doctors, their own backyards. That’s liberty. I find this type of thinking counter to pretty much everything I believe, but I also grew up in a place where a lot of people held fiercely to it, so its contours are very familiar. In short: you should only pay for what matters to you, what directly affects you, and what meshes seamlessly with your personal belief system. Everything else is waste.

But here’s the problem: no one actually wanted any of that societal infrastructure to disappear. They just didn’t want to personally pay for it. So as a society, we’ve developed a patchwork of public-private solutions to make stuff sorta public: rich people get tax breaks to create foundations that fund stuff that matters to them; middle-class people put in countless hours to cover classroom costs; non-profits provide or supplement essential services but are only able to exist because people are willing to work for very little; widely accessible student loans replace public dollars to cover tuition. People pay fewer taxes, but often pay dearly in other ways.

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Today, Americans citizens shoulder more and more of the costs — and risk — of navigating everyday life. Maybe they’re paying less in taxes, but they’re ultimately paying far more to cover private medical care, private childcare, decreasingly subsidized higher education, private art, private sports leagues, and private outdoor spaces. It might be feasible to shoulder these costs if you have two adults working for pay, or if one adult makes so much money that another adult can opt out and manage all of the responsibilities of home. But throw in one disaster, one bad decision, one layoff, one divorce, or one medical catastrophe, and the fragile structure crumbles.

We felt this fragility acutely during the pandemic and in its ongoing aftermath. What happens when we no longer have childcare? When someone can no longer work because of Long Covid? When someone dies suddenly? Or when everything gets more expensive, but wages aren’t rising at the same time, or the government is deliberately trying to keep unemployment high to address that inflation? How do we name the cause of our instability, our fear, and our discontent?

For many, the answer was clear: DEI programs, #MeToo, the existence of trans people, immigrants and refugees, and the government that failed to fully fix the problem — but never the corporations or politicians that profited from it.I am the "fat on the bone." / I am being tripped as the consequence of the popular vote / I am the United States flag raiser & folder / I am my son’s ‘Junior Ranger’ idol / I am a college kid’s dream job

When a political party is elected as convincingly as the MAGA Republicans were this past term, they often declare that they have received a mandate from the American public. And that mandate, which they made abundantly clear on the campaign trail, was to eliminate what their voters blamed for the general feeling of life being harder than it once was. Again: DEI initiatives, trans people, immigrants and refugees, any reforms around #MeToo, and the government itself. It didn’t matter if companies, even those associated with the politicians themselves, enriched themselves. For these voters, the companies were never the problem.

This is how you get Elon Musk fundamentally restructuring both the government and the checks and balances of our democracy with no pushback from Congress. Because the short-term goal is cutting costs (which will then theoretically translate into lower taxes) individuals can feel like they are indeed paying less for projects and services from which they receive no explicit and immediate benefit.

But the long-term reality is bleak. The cuts aren’t just to park rangers who staff a national moment in a corner of Nebraska or the people doing fire mitigation in Western Washington. The cuts affect the systems that make so many parts of public life work. Payroll. Bathrooms. Science before it becomes the sort of science that drug companies pay for. Data sets that make medical records function and VA prescriptions renew on time. You can call it the meat of public works, or bureaucracy, or infrastructure. It was already hobbled from years of cost-cutting measures. Now it’s just straight-up busted.

The goal, of course, is to enshittify public works to the point that they become unusable — and then sell them to the highest bidder, who can transform them into a profit center. The cascade will go something like this: wow, sure seems like this national forest is being mismanaged, probably shouldn’t be under the purview of the federal government; it would be irresponsible of us, and against the public interest, to turn down all this money from a gas company / a developer / a wealthy landowner who wants to buy it! (And if you want to see this thinking vividly manifest, I invite you to read the FB comments on this piece about forest service firings in rural Idaho)

Not having the toilets cleaned is the point. Not getting the VA prescriptions automatically filled is the point. Making public services worse is the point. Making people (further) dislike and devalue public infrastructure — the point. How else do you get millions of citizens on board with a handful of robber barons profiting off what rightfully belongs to the public?

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These cuts don’t just signal the end of public works as public good. They also signal the twilight of the passion job, better known as the jobs performed by millions of Americans, often at great personal expense and sacrifice, simply because they loved the work that they did. When you read the stories of the forest service employees who lost their jobs, that’s what you hear over and over again: I moved myself and my family across the country. I agreed to be a contingent employee for years. I didn’t make much; I spent weeks and months in the backcountry; I did physically taxing work; I dealt with understaffing and cranky visitors and unspeakable poop splatters. And I did it because I love this work.“I made significantly more money plumbing in the private sector, but I never took this job for the money; I took it because I believe so strongly in the national parks”

But work won’t love you back — and passion can only sustain you for so long. One of the reasons so many of those government workers stuck with their precarious and difficult jobs was the promise of stability, and access to a government pension when they were eventually hired on full-time. That’s what a full-time public service job could offer: you might never be rich, but you’d also never be poor. You’d always have health care. You’d always be able to retire. That dream is gone for the thousands whose jobs were cut last week, and it is seriously threatened for the hundreds of thousands who remain.

These cuts also affect all of those left to pick up the slack, whose job descriptions just expanded exponentially, and who are now operating with layoff brain. They’re frantically trying to patch holes. They’re dealing with even crankier tourists. If they weren’t already, they’ll soon face a turning point: when burnout turns into demoralization, and you feel you no longer have the resources to do your job in a way that feels ethical or right.

Here’s how one national parks employee laid it out to me:

I don't think people understand how underfunded public lands agencies already were. There's always been a "do more with less" culture, and people already have a habit of doing multiple jobs; doing work above their pay grade without being compensated; working extra hours for free; etc. — "paid in sunsets" is the famous phrase — because we care about the land, about visitors, and about our colleagues. The show must go on; visitors must be rescued; your coworkers have to get paid; etc. A big concern I have is that visitors will not see the effects of this, especially as volunteers and nonprofit friends groups step in to try and pick up the slack. Things will probably continue semi-normally, even as staff behind the scenes are stretched thinner and feel the burnout, institutional knowledge is lost, and the next generation of employees has to find work elsewhere. It's a short term band-aid, continuing on the road of privatizing / volunteer-izing public lands, and losing careers in public service and good jobs in rural areas where there aren't many to be had.

Demoralization is the goal. Overburden those who remain so they, too, quit, thereby “unburdening” the system of the dead weight of the remaining bureaucrats. Trump and Musk’s goal isn’t efficiency. It’s slowly burning the entire apparatus to the ground.

I remember the first time I realized that this was the end game. Legislators in my home state of Idaho were cutting the education budget to the bone. Soon thereafter, they started devouring the marrow — while simultaneously creating funding structures for homeschoolers and private (Christian) academies. The far right’s goal is the end of public education, full stop. It’s not that they hate teachers — teachers are welcome to teach at their private religious schools! They just won’t have pensions. Or unions. Or job protections. Or anything else that made the difficult but essential work of becoming a public teacher stable.

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Consider the passion jobs that remain. Librarians are overburdened by student debt and chronically underpaid, but that’s been true for some time. They’re also struggling to serve as librarians and de facto social workers in one of the few remaining public spaces in most communities. If even more social services are eliminated, what’s the breaking point? If the job already feels unsustainable, when does it feel impossible?

If you worked in higher ed, when do the massive funds to science funding begin to erode the already crumbling financial foundation of your institution? How long will you be able to make the case for your department, or your work, as a profit center? How many more classes will you have to teach a semester, what sorts of costs will you have to shoulder, and what pay freezes will you (continue to) endure? At what point does it become untenable?“Most Park Rangers make sacrifices for years as seasonals, with low pay, and moving every 6 months, before getting a permanent position. Today, Valentine’s Day, the day I was terminated, was the first Valentine’s Day my partner and I have spent together in 4 years due to the sacrifices we both had to make for our careers.”

If you work for a non-profit, particularly one that relied on any sort of public funding source, or whose mission was intricately tied to USAID or other public works, how does your organization survive? Whose jobs are mission critical? How do you ask your already tapped-out donors for more money? What other services will your community ask you to take on now that public services have atrophied? How will the job and its demands of you expand — but not your pay or benefits?

Journalists, artists, musicians, and authors already know the answer to these questions: you try to hang on, cobbling together freelance gigs, for as long as you can, and then you leave the business. You realize you can’t support a family, or that you’ll never be able to retire, or that you just can’t keep hustling the way you have — your health, both mental and physical, cannot take it. Maybe you still pack a bit of the work you loved into the corners of your week, but it is not your life’s work.

It’s difficult for me to write clearly about the end of these sorts of jobs, as I’ve denigrated them so thoroughly in my writing for so long. But here’s where I say loudly and clearly: these jobs never had to be “passion” jobs. They become passion jobs through the belief that your passion, alone, should sustain you — tand hat doing something that inspires you and enlivens you and serves the public good somehow requires sacrificing a living wage and stability. I don’t hate this type of work; I hate how we’ve normalized a blood sacrifice to pursue this type of work.

●

So why has teaching and so many other federal jobs remained tenable when journalism and the vast majority of the arts have not? Public funding and unions. Get rid of the public funding, defang the unions, and these jobs become the new journalism and career non-profit work: available only to a select few who can shoulder the costs, which means they’re usually privileged, usually partnered, and equipped with private personal safety nets.“Passion for conservation shouldn’t come at the cost of job security”

When that sort of change occurs across an industry, you don’t just change who can do the work, but the character of the work itself. And when a civilization is limited to work that produces profit, we don’t just lose the artistry and texture of everyday life. We distance ourselves from the values of care and generosity — and the simple but profound belief that what happens to one of us affects all of us. We become further atomized, cruel, and careless with others, incapable of planning any further than our own lifetimes. We fall out of love with the world.

When I talk about feeling all of this in our bodies — this is what we are mourning. Our personal losses and fears, absolutely. But also this grievous, heartbreaking regression, and the feeling that our once-trusted if tattered systems of protection are not only failing to protect us, but facilitating the collapse.

I know we’re all tired. But I’m not ready to give up — or fall in line as a weary liberal who just wants to live their life. Because the truth is stunning, even as those in power try to make it opaque: our lives will never be the same. The stitching of our society is being ripped out. We will survive, but we will not thrive.

The future where we’re headed is not enough for me, or you, or anyone we know, or even anyone we don’t. It will serve the few and the powerful; the rest of us, and the natural world that surrounds it, will be little more than fuel, subjugated by our own fear and enduring precarity.

Living in this country, we have been trained to want — and to work tirelessly to fulfill those desires. If we want more than that future, we have to fucking fight for it. 

[thedancemostofall]

allen ginsberg on hallucinogens

[thedancemostofall]

Prose in a Small Space

Rita Dove

It’s supposed to be prose if it runs on and on, isn’t it? All those words, too many to fall into rank and file, stumbling bareassed drunk onto the field reporting for duty, yessir, spilling out as shamelessly as the glut from a megabillion dollar chemical facility, just the amount of glittering effluvium it takes to transport a little girl across a room, beige carpet thick under her oxfords, curtains blowzy with spring — is that the scent of daffodils drifting in? Daffodils don’t smell but prose doesn’t care. Prose likes to hear itself talk; prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canapés, lust rampant in the antipasta — e.g., a silver fork fingered sadly as the heroine crumples a linen napkin in her lap to keep from crying out at the sight of Lord Campion’s regal brow inclined tenderly toward the wealthy young widow . . . prose applauds such syntactical dalliances. Then is it poetry if it’s confined? Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention — Over here! It’s me! — while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs? We have white space too; is this music? As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?

“Prose in a Small Space,” from PLAYLIST FOR THE APOCALYPSE: POEMS by Rita Dove.