Ellie Black's "Be Spiritual No More Mechanical"

Thoughts on making fun.

BE SPIRITUAL NO MORE MECHANICAL

                   after a roadside church sign seen in New Orleans 


Be spiritual no more mechanical.

Be spiritual—no more mechanical.

Be spiritual—no, more mechanical.

Be spiritual. No, more: mechanical.

Be spiritual? No.  More mechanical.

Be more mechanical, no spiritual.

Be mechanical, spirit; you’ll know more.

No, mechanical spirit. You’ll be more.

I can call me: be spiritual no more.

I can be no more spiritual. Call me.

Spirit me no more; I can be called.

I spirit you all & call no more.

No spear can be ritual; call me more I.

Bemourn o spirit mechanical.

Ritual, I call: Be no more.


first published in Afternoon Visitor (Issue 8) (link here)

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I feel grateful for having stumbled across this poem. I feel grateful because the act of stumbling across it — which entailed an hour or two of browsing through various online magazines of poetry, before reading almost the entirety of this magazine, Afternoon Visitor, which I now love, bookmarking many poems to return to later, such as this one, by Timothy Michalik — reminded me of, well, all the poetry that exists in the world today. And it reminded me of all the poetry being written right now, in this very moment of me writing this word, and hitting the space bar, and writing the next word that follows. Yes. Right now, and now, and now.

And yeah — poetry, poetry, poetry. Sometimes the word itself can feel a little stale, or even like a cliche. And yeah — poetry does this, poetry does that, poetry saves, poetry changes the world. Sometimes the way we talk about poetry, too, can feel a little stale, or even like a cliche, or maybe even so trite that it reduces the imaginative capability or intention of poetry itself. Yes, yeah, yes. But, still: poetry. It means something to me that someone is writing a poem right now. And it means something to me that someone, driving or walking through New Orleans, might see a roadside church sign and then wonder, in writing, towards a poem inspired by such a thing.

And maybe, too, I’m drawn to this poem because I just finished Voyage, the first volume of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia. It’s a play that contains so much romantic, idealistic, beautiful conversation about art and society. And it contains the frustration inherent when such wonder and mystery runs headlong into the difficult thing we sometimes shake our heads about and call, with a shrug, reality.

(Remember? You were young, and wishful, and then someone older told you, with a shrug, life’s not fair? Remember? You were older, and reaching back into that wishful wistfulness you thought you’d left behind, and wondering if some institution or system or structure might change its ways, and someone your same age told you, with a shrug, that’s not possible? Remember? Awful, such memory. It happens every day.)

Toward the end of Stoppard’s Voyage, Alexander Herzen says, with a bit of cynical snark that I still feel deeply:

We’re not the plaything of an imaginative cosmic force, but of a Romanov with no imagination whatsoever, a mediocrity. He’s the sort of person you see behind a post office counter who points to the clock at one minute past five and won’t sell you a stamp.

It’s a point that’s echoed multiple times in David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules. Such as here:

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

Or here:

What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.

Or here:

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

And so, I’m thinking of that very idea — of the person who refuses to sell you a stamp one minute past closing time, and of the system that demands such refusal — because I hear it echoing throughout today’s poem in that word: “mechanical.” And, more so, I hear Ellie Black playing and toying with that very idea and, as such, through the very act of this poem itself, refusing the stale mundanity of the mechanical and insisting, instead, on the right to subvert and play and turn and wonder.

In these first four lines of today’s poem, you see all the turning that can happen with just the same words:

Be spiritual no more mechanical.

Be spiritual—no more mechanical.

Be spiritual—no, more mechanical.

Be spiritual. No, more: mechanical.

Here, poetry turns the straightforward into the slightly askew. Here, poetry says if you thought I meant one thing, let me go ahead and mean another. Here, poetry says maybe if I don’t have to know, then you don’t have to, either. Here, poetry says look how much I can insist on, even in contradiction. Here, poetry says what a vast playpen this thing we call the world can be.

In more literal terms, if such terms exist, this poem begins with the idea that the spiritual is in some ways greater than the mechanical — that we should try to be more spiritual rather than mechanical. But then, just a few lines later, the poem insists that the mechanical is more than the spiritual. It contradicts itself, yes, but in doing so, it enacts the messy and joyful play that a poem can enact. It is having fun with the uncertainty of the world. It enacts, in other words, the imaginative, the wonderful, and, even (dare I say?), the some-might-say spiritual. It becomes, in some ways, what it is about.

And, by the time the poem ends, it has in some ways devolved, like a machine breaking down. I can hear it. It is crying and aching. And it says, the poem does:

Bemourn o spirit mechanical.

As in: I am weeping for the way my spirit has become mechanical. As in: there is a part of myself I am mourning for how it has changed.

In this way, the poem weeps over the mechanisms and machines we can sometimes become. And, in this way, the poem is also not such a mechanism. No; it is a testament to what turning something — even what feels like the same thing — can teach us. Yes; this is a poem that teaches me about what a poem can offer us. When I feel stale and sullen about the world, I can read a poem like today’s and be reminded that poetry can turn the world, quite literally, even through the figurative, into something new again. Poetry can remind me of how language is one way of making sense of the world, which is also a kind of making fun, and it can remind me that playing with language is a way to make a different sense of the world than the one that might feel upsetting, boring, difficult, dull, or unimaginative. Poetry can wake me up into a new way of seeing. Certainly today’s poem does.

Yes; poetry can, as M. F. K. Fisher writes in How to Cook a Wolf, a book my wife gave me and a book I just finished, dog-earing these decades-old recipes and writing little exclamation marks next to the passages in between, “make you feel, for a time at least, newborn into a better world than this one often seems.”

That passage comes at the end of a chapter on bread-baking, which is equal parts science and equal parts magic, which is to say, all parts poetry. And it’s funny, on a walk with my friend and fellow poet George (of “Remember how we used to wonder rather than know” fame), we were talking about baking bread, and the science of it. He was, I believe, talking about making some kind of pumpernickel, and then we got on to the stuff of kilograms and scales, and how, after a certain point, you really can just feel it. It might not be perfect, no. But you can feel it. And it’s true; you can. You can, after baking enough bread, know enough to feel when something is right, or wrong, which is to say: you can know enough to know when to salvage something, and how to salvage it, which is another way of saying you can know enough to know how to make a poem out of a mess.

Anyways. That aforementioned chapter of How to Cook a Wolf contains, with Fisher’s characteristic wit and style and verve, a beautiful passage on bread-baking:

And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

I think of these moments when I think of today’s poem, how the spiritual — whatever that may mean, though ostensibly it means something that fills rather than empties — can sometimes feel distant, hard to reach, like how, in Tom Stoppard’s Voyage, one of his characters bemoans his current state of being, and says:

Where can I turn?

The outer world worms itself into my heart like a serpent!

I know the feeling. I think I know it well. Maybe you do, too. But poetry, I think, at least sometimes, can unworm the worm of the world. Poetry can answer that question: where can I turn?

I think you can turn, in such moments of feeling the worm of the world worming itself into your heart, to a poem. Or to making bread. Or to something that feels equal parts magic and equal parts attention. I think a lot about that phrase I mentioned a few times above: making fun. And I think of how often we associate such a phrase with mockery. We say: don’t make fun of people, and we say this with good intent. But, I wonder, isn’t this poem today a kind of making fun? Doesn’t it take this object found in the world and make a kind of fun out of it? No, not in the way that it demeans the message of this side, but rather in the way that it plays with all of its possibilities? Doesn’t it do that?

And isn’t making fun kind of a playing with possibility? As in, when you see a really little kid laughing, as I saw last night — like, a really infectious laugh — at a restaurant while her parents waited for their order, and when you see this little kid laughing because they are jumping up and down on the booth, trying to see all the sounds they can get the booth to make, the little tangents-of-a-fart sounds and wheezy cough sounds and all sorts of others, isn’t this a kind of playing with all the various possibilities in the world? Isn’t this a kind of making fun? And so: maybe a poem, too, can make fun of the world, don’t you think? Maybe a poem can see the world and wonder aloud about all of its possibilities, don’t you think? And maybe, too, the result of that making fun isn’t always that we laugh. I think sometimes we can cry, too. I think that’s okay, too. I think I’d like to cry more about possibility. I cry about impossibility far too often.

So yes: when I read today’s poem, I think of how it makes fun out of an observation. How it turns the observed world around and around, playing with it, making fun out of the play of it, and wondering such play toward the many meanings this world offers. Sometimes the world feels all stale; sometimes it feels all a little too mechanical. Sometimes we need to make fun in order to remember that it is possible, in this world, to laugh, or to cry, or to argue, or to feel at all. I think this is why, most Sunday nights, you’ll find me baking bread. To hold something in my hand, to shape it, to not know exactly how or why any of it happens, but to know that it will happen, and to feel it happening, to sense it, to sense it deeply — it’s a ceremony you could call poetry if you didn’t already call it life.

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Some notes:

1. Perhaps you have heard about the students at Columbia University who a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. If you are in NYC and want to support, you can follow this page (and this one, of the NYC chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement) to see what resources might be needed by these students, and to see ways to stand in solidarity with them.

2. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.

3. The independent press distributor Small Press Distribution (SPD) just shut down without any warning. This article provides good context. If you have the means, consider supporting any of the presses affected. Here is a list.

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