Elisa Gabbert's "Random Assignment"

Thoughts on the approaches of our minds.

Random Assignment

It seems to want to rain but can’t.
It fades to pink, an argument.
Relinquish the dream.

You can’t ever get what you want,
You can’t please any of the people
Any of the time.

Time just lies there,
Not fast or slow,
Any more than a line.

I wonder if the very small ants are afraid
Of the big ants, if they ever cross paths.
I wonder if happiness is ethical.

I’d like to do it all again
In silence now, in darkness,
A wasp in a fig.

from Normal Distance (forthcoming from Soft Skull Press)

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I remember seeing this poem published in The Nation over a year ago, and then receiving an early copy of Elisa Gabbert’s forthcoming collection (preorder it here!) and seeing it in there! What fortune. I love this poem.

I love, too, all of Gabbert’s poetry. The mind that such poetry illustrates is witty and honest, wildly funny, and disarmingly tangential, in a way that seems to make these imaginative leaps until I realize oh, a mind can work that way — a mind can be as jarring as it is beautiful, as sad as it is joyful.

In “Historians of the Future,” Gabbert writes:

All my imagined futures have turned into memories.

Today, there’s more past than yesterday. But is there any less future?

In “Moon News,” Gabbert writes:

I resent all this news about the moon. I only love the moon when it takes me by surprise.

Such moments, to me, are at once childlike and brilliantly inquisitive. They question at the same time as they awe. This is a wonderful combination, I think, for any poem.

Such a moment is illustrated by the following stanza in today’s poem:

I wonder if the very small ants are afraid
Of the big ants, if they ever cross paths.
I wonder if happiness is ethical.

At the heart of such a stanza is not just noticing, but also wonder. The word wonder is, in fact, present in this stanza twice, but the wonder is also present in the act of attention that allows for such wonder to blossom out of it. It’s the kind of attention that bottlenecks itself into something so small and microscopic that the world — the big wide complexity of it — inflates out the other end. By turning her gaze toward something as small as an ant, Gabbert makes the very feeling of fear acquire a different sort of perspective. What is a big ant to a smaller ant? This re-lensing of perspective then allows for the final line — I wonder if happiness is ethical — to sit and simmer in our minds as readers. If attention can focus on the small, it can also apply that focus to the large. What is a big ant to a small ant? Oh, I don’t know. What are the politics of our joy? Oh, gosh. I don’t know, either. But I feel moved to wonder. I feel that I must have to.

This reminds me of a poem by my friend Hannah Rego, where they write:

Who were you talking to,

little darling,

smallest glass of water for an ant?

Here, the shift in perspective takes us with it. To be kind — to be gentle — is to be smaller. To be as small as one can. To be the smallest glass of water for an ant. A beautiful thing, I think. A wonder.

One thing I love about today’s poem is the way the final line of each stanza seems to resolve itself into a deeper collective understanding of the world. I notice that immediately:

It seems to want to rain but can’t.
It fades to pink, an argument.
Relinquish the dream.

I love the energy of that second line, the way the sky fading “to pink” is qualified as “an argument.” An argument between whom? An argument about what? The question seems purposely unclear, but the idea itself — that the sky might fade to pink, signifying, perhaps, a kind of surrender — is vivid. It enters one possibility into the poem almost immediately: that the world might not care for us or operate by principles that we are calibrated to understand. When that line — Relinquish the dream — appears, I feel myself letting go, piece by piece, my willingness to judge or even know. Maybe such a line only calls back to rain — relinquish the dream of rain — but maybe such a line actually echoes outward. Maybe it asks us to relinquish the dream of pure knowledge, of certainty.

The following two stanzas continue that push against certainty with a kind of anti-certainty:

You can’t ever get what you want,
You can’t please any of the people
Any of the time.

Time just lies there,
Not fast or slow,
Any more than a line.

You can’t please any of the people / Any of the time might seem like an absolute statement, but the statement actually opens itself up to possibility. If you cannot guarantee acceptance or pleasure, you can only guarantee literally everything else, which is another way of saying that you can guarantee — in every interaction — the complexity of human personality, situational chance, variables of every metaphorical shape and size that one could possibly imagine…and then some. I find the repetition of can’t, therefore, to be almost liberating. It liberates experience towards multiple possibilities, not just one.

These moments in Gabbert’s poem remind me of a point made by John Berger in his essay about the sculptor Alberto Giacometti:

The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him — it became a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute. It was the act of looking which kept him aware of being constantly suspended between being and the truth.

What a beautiful way to describe, I think, poetry itself, or even the very nature of attentiveness. I feel such a suspension in Gabbert’s poetry — this willingness to linger between what one notices and what might be certain, to Zeno’s-paradox one’s way, line by line, toward the ending of a poem. Sometimes a poem feels like that, doesn’t it? Like someone folding a paper in half endlessly. Line someone walking forever halfway toward someone or something or some feeling. It’s there in that first line — It seems to want to rain but can’t. Yes, a poem is like this, too, isn’t it? It’s run up against its own limitations. The limitations of form, yes, but also the limitations of pure feeling. A poem that wants to embody grief itself can only approach grief. A poem that wants to embody joy can only approach joy. The trick, then, is perhaps in the approach. To convey the approach toward feeling in such a way that the reader can feel such trying, and, in feeling such trying, feel grief itself. Or joy. Or love. Or whatever.

And so one more thing about Gabbert’s poetry that I love is the way in which it seems to embody so many of these approaches at once. What do I mean by that? Well, I guess I mean that one quality of humanness is that our approach toward this big thing called life — by that I mean our approach toward memory or feeling or just trying-to-live — is more radial than linear. There’s another essay by Berger — “Uses of Photography” — where he writes:

There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it.

And so, when I think about some way to visualize, in geometric terms, what it means to have a mind in today’s moment, I think of whatever is happening inside our brains as something soaring or spiraling or wandering out of a center in so many different ways at once. These simultaneous approaches can be hard. Sometimes being alive can feel like trying to land a thousand planes at once, in wildly different conditions, on wildly different lengths of runway. And I say that with absolutely zero experience landing any sort of aircraft. This is why a poem can move from rain to acceptance to time to happiness to silence and still be a poem that gets at some element of the human experience. And this is why life can be — to be at once plain and cliche — fucking hard. We can experience confusion or what we think of as failure on one approach of our lives at the same time as we are approaching something else. It’s also why, I think, we can laugh during moments of great sadness, or why we can find ourselves wondering about clouds during a funeral.

There’s a line in another of Gabbert’s poems where she writes:

I think I pray a lot now; prayer just isn’t what I thought it was.

This is what I mean, I think. Maybe it is better to say that life expands rather than moves. Because, if we say that life expands, we allow for contradiction still. We allow for whatever is experienced in such expansion to become part of our new possibility. We allow for things we once did and still do to be different than we thought they were. We allow, we allow, we allow. And allowance, I think, is a beautiful thing. It is more interesting — to me, at least — than whatever its opposite is.

And this is why I am drawn to Gabbert’s final stanza:

I’d like to do it all again
In silence now, in darkness,
A wasp in a fig.

I find this to be such an apt and honest summation of one element of human experience — that desire to surrender one’s life, to chalk it all up to error, and to try again, but this time without the complexity of human awareness. To be. Just to be. And let life happen that way.

I feel this more than ever now. And I feel it not because the news itself veers toward the catastrophic, but rather because of the way that the approaches of my attention feel detoured and stunted and distracted in ways I do not want them to be, and in ways — sometimes — that feel out of my control. I do not want my news paywalled or my headlines rewritten in ways that stimulate some emotional reaction or my videos truncated. I do not want, either, my physical experience of being in the world to be so alienating, or so dictated toward what is assumed to be my own experience. I do not want targeted ads. I do not want to give off as many signals as I do that I do not care about others. I do not want to be met with such collective inattention — so many eyes locked to so many small screens. I do not want to feel as weird as I do for saying this.

And so I want, sometimes, darkness. And silence. Toward the end of this school year, on days where I teach my highest load of classes at my high school, I have gotten in the habit of sitting in a dark room by myself when I can. On those days, I spend my mornings teaching three classes in a row — each almost an hour long — without a break. When I am done, even on the days that bring me the most joy, it feels as if my eyes are being swallowed into my cheek bones through the dual-throats of my eye sockets. And so I find a room — if I can — that has no one in it, and I turn off all the lights, and I just sit there. I don’t know how much time passes, or how much I need, but time passes, and I either get what I need or I don’t. But I need the darkness, and the silence. I need to feel as close as I can to being absent from the world so that I can go back into the world again.

I don’t know why this year of teaching has felt more difficult than past years. COVID, certainly, has played a role. But I think one answer also has to do with attention. So much of teaching literature has to do with the championing of the very act of attention. But in this world that coaches not just kids, but also adults, to give their attention in smaller and smaller units of time through little portals that curate the objects of their attention, it’s hard to prove that there is value in what can come from extended acts of attention — the kind of acts of attention that allow one to wonder aloud about an ant and use such a wondering to move toward a consideration of the ethics of our happiness and joy. What drains me these days is not complexity, but the lack of it. Sifting through the richness of the world and the mind to find wonder — this is an enriching thing. But translating what is billed as a simple, clearly defined world into one that is complex — that is more difficult work. It is so tiring. I have to do that work for myself — just for myself — every day.

I long for an experience of the world that operates like this poem does. An experience that holds the so-much-ness of our collective existence in its lines and wonders aloud about all of it. I learned, through this poem, about the fig wasp. I learned that the fig wasp is part of a mutualistic cycle that began millions upon millions of years ago. I learned that a female wasp literally forces her way into the fruit of a fig tree and deposits her eggs and dies. I learned that the male wasps hatch without wings, that they cannot fly, that they mate within the fruit and then, just before dying, dig a tunnel out of the fruit. I learned that the just-born female wasps have wings, and use these tunnels to leave the fruit and fly away. I don’t think of this as a metaphor for anything. I am just in awe that it happens, and has happened, and is happening — right now, I know, as I write this.

There must be joy in this kind of knowledge. There has to be. Most newly acquired knowledge forces me to say something like I can’t believe or I can’t make sense of this. It changes some of those approaches of mind, mid-flight. It lands some planes, sends others into the air. It makes me realize that one great joy of being alive is coming to a deeper and fuller realization of the great all-ness of this world, the way this contradicts prior assumptions and prompts new obsessions. Why can’t that be enough? Why can’t an opinion about such a thing — about anything — be something simply approaching wonder?

I do think, too, that it is beautiful to know that there is a wasp that lives inside a fig. When I am tired and sitting within the dark room of my mind — beleaguered by the world and the way it feels, sometimes, to be at a loss for how to live — I will think of such a thing as light. And I will leave that dark room and walk right into it.