Jenny George's "Reprieve"

Thoughts on cruelty and light.

Reprieve

Before the insects start to grind their million bodies,
before impulse scatters the deer into the trees,
before desire:
there’s a rest.
The dawn and the day observe each other.

The herd begins to move over the field, one shared dream
of grass and wind.
The small stones of their hooves in the stony field.

I’ve exhausted my cruelty.
I’ve arrived at myself again.
The sun builds a slow house inside my house,
touching the stilled curtains, the bottoms of cups
left out on the table.

from The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon, 2018)

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I’ve had the following two lines from this poem stuck in my head for the past few weeks:

I’ve exhausted my cruelty.
I’ve arrived at myself again.

I really have. There have been these sporadic days in New York when the wind chill has hovered at or just below 0 degrees. And often on those days I’ve found myself waking in the morning to walk ten minutes to Central Park, The Hold Steady playing in my ears, before setting off for a jog. At the end of those runs — my fingers so cold they almost feel burnt inside my gloves, a sheath of skin sloughed off my face — I feel, like Jenny George writes, that I have “arrived at myself again.”

Those days of blistering cold are almost always accompanied by a kind of light that is so pure and crystallized it feels like salvation, if salvation could feel like anything. There is a type of winter light, a cold light seeming warm, a light that, when beamed through a windowpane, feels like it clears whatever it touches, maybe even forgives it. It is a light that makes you forget death, a light that makes you wonder if death is even possible. It is a light like water, as beautiful as it is full of life. It is a light that almost always — when it exists — exists in the morning. It is a light so much like the one Jenny George describes, a light that “builds a slow house inside my house.”

This is why I love the title of today’s poem: “Reprieve.” Such a word has a legal etymology, essentially meaning a stay of execution, a foregoing of death. When considered within the context of this poem, the title seems to hint at how close we are — at all times — to death, that every day lived is a day lived against death’s very possibility, which means that every waking moment serves as its own reprieve. The opening lines set such a tone:

Before the insects start to grind their million bodies,
before impulse scatters the deer into the trees,
before desire:
there’s a rest.

Before, before, before. It’s a beautiful conceit for a poem, to frame the present tense as a place of before-ness. We each know, with certainty, that we will die, and this poem gives the present tense a language for that certainty. In other words, if death is one of the few certainties we have in life, then every present moment is a kind of before. Even in the present moment that I am writing this, I am living in a moment that is before such a final certainty. George describes this as a time when the “dawn and the day observe each other.” An extended stillness. An inaction. It gives the present tense a sense of the past, as if we are each living — even in this moment, and now, and now — in the past tense of our finality.

But, in another sense, today’s poem reminds us of what we are before we become ourselves. It’s there in this image:

The herd begins to move over the field, one shared dream
of grass and wind.

Before we become ourselves — before, in other words, the day begins, and we are each further along in our journey to death and have further gathered all of the things that we collect on the way to death: our anxieties, our mistakes, our missteps, and our fears — we are a “shared dream.” We are something possible. A thing together before we become apart. Before we are cruel, we are, at least for a short time, paused in some moment of light together. It reminds me of a moment from Middlemarch, which I have been reading (for the first time! a blessing!) over the past week or so. At one point, Eliot describes both Lydgate and Rosamund as:

moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous, fitfully illuminated life.

This is such an apt way to describe what happens after our shared dream, when the light no longer builds a house inside our homes, and we have to go out into the world — with all of our own cruelty and all of the cruelty of others — and make do within the frustrations of a dimming day. And it’s true. Sometimes the act of living through a day feels like an act of accumulative hardening. Every hour adds another layer of anxiety, or anger, until it is evening and you are sitting in the thick skin of your acquired brutality, wondering how to get back to being yourself.

Maybe this is why, as I have grown older, I have come to appreciate mornings. Even on weekdays, when I have to be at my high school by 8 o’clock, I wake close to 5, and read for awhile before I go for a walk or jog. I don’t do this because I value my appearance or my body, two things which I am trying simply to come to terms with and value on different terms. I do this because there is a kind of stillness — both of the world and of my mind — that I find in the morning that I cannot find anywhere else. It is there at night, the stillness is, but it is a stillness so laden with anxiety that it feels like a constant humming, a brutal tremor inside my brain. The morning is as close to perfect as the world gets.

These nearly fleeting experiences of almost-perfection feel like times when, as Galway Kinnell writes in his poem “Parkinson’s Disease,” it will only feel like a “small dislocation” to pass from this life into the next. Such a moment might only come when we view all things as a reprieve from cruelty. Galway says it best:

At this moment, he glints and shines,
as if it will be only a small dislocation
for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

From this paradise into the next. I’ve read this poem and those lines often, especially when I feel anxious about death — which I often do. I like the idea of death being as small and gentle as moving from one room to the next, the opening of a door. But I have a hard time thinking of this life as paradise. That complex paradox reminds me of three lines from Nicole Sealey’s “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’”:

It isn’t ordinary. The way the world unravels,

from a distance, can look like pain

eager as penned-in horses.

Maybe this is why I can’t get those lines — I’ve exhausted my cruelty. / I’ve arrived at myself again. — out of my head. Because cruelty and pain feel so often like things that are deemed as ordinary, when maybe they are not. Because these lines feel like such a strange and apt critique of how it feels to be alive in this moment, when so much of our cruelty seems inexhaustible, and when we are still trying to find ourselves. I feel my own personal cruelty grow as the day goes on. I feel my impatience, my petulance, my frustration, and my judgement. I feel my ability to harbor compassion diminished the more time I spend online, and I feel my incredulity grow the more I understand the daily news. I feel my fuse growing shorter. Just the other day, sautéing and frying on a hot stove, I snapped at the person I was cooking for, and spent the next half hour sulking as I washed the dishes. It is a sad fact, these days, that our individual and collective cruelty seems to grow — both in the world and in ourselves — as each hour passes.

I think often about the way that teaching in high school for the past four years — after three years of teaching at the college level — has pushed me to consider the way in which cruelty is so often accepted as commonplace. So many actions of the adult world — engaging in online public shaming, assuming worst intentions, enacting willful misreadings — would, if they occurred within the daily life of a high school, be considered terrible practices, even traumatic. And so many of the words we use so frequently and take for granted — words like discipline and urgency and the like — are words that enact a kind of cruelty to the body, or the mind, or time itself. And so many of the ideas of success that we often project toward others — ideas that go along with words like relentless and powerful and limitless — are ideas that potentially excuse the acts of cruelty required to achieve such success.

As a teacher, you do witness acts of pain and anger on a near-daily basis, but the response is almost always the same: a patient attempt at restoration, understanding, working towards the reforging of trust and a recommitment to values. It’s hard, long work, and it’s very hopeful. And it doesn’t always end perfectly. It hardly ever does. But nearly everyday I wonder: why spend all this time and labor trying to build a language of restoration and generosity when the world does not seem to speak in that language?

In Middlemarch, Eliot describes Dorothea at one point:

Her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness.

There are echoes of such a sentence — and maybe a latent idea, that tenderness plus action is a kind of justice — inherent in Aracelis Girmay’s oft-quoted line:

& so to tenderness I add my action.

The lines from today’s poem that I cannot stop thinking about — they remind me of the possibility that we are not inherently cruel. That, when we arrive back at ourselves, rinsed of our cruelty, we have the capacity for extraordinary tenderness, extraordinary compassion. I think this is true. I think the world we walk into after that morning-moment of being free from cruelty is a world that systematically exploits our labor, heightens our anxiety, frustrates our ability to understand, and marginalizes us from one another and from the idea of a shared dream.

In Capitalism Realism, the late critic Mark Fisher writes about frustration and anger. In one passage, he says:

[Anger] is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality.

I think today’s poem reminds me that the seeming impossibility of communality exists because of our cruelty and because of the cruelty of a world that exploits this tendency in us and manufactures it to an exponential degree. But cruelty, maybe, like anything, can be exhausted. It can be used up, found to have no purpose. We can wake in the morning, maybe, and remember the stillness of a shared dream. We can remember ourselves. We can live in that “rest,” where the “dawn and the day observe each other,” and we observe that act of gentle observation.

I am thinking again of light. During a brief stint of teaching remotely, I would take photos of the morning light shining through the bedroom’s window and throwing a shadow on the wall. Here is one.

I am building slow a house inside my house that is made entirely of light. When I am gone from it, and feeling lost, I try to remember what it looks like, and how it feels. I try to remember the long stem of the plant, and how often it needs water. Sometimes moving through this world is like moving through a room that has no windows, a room entirely in shadow. You might as well close your eyes. Sometimes it feels like it makes no difference. You find yourself always stubbing a toe, crying out in frustration. But maybe you are making a house inside yourself that is made of light, too. Maybe it is, like a long morning, filled entirely with the best parts of you — your patience, your generosity, the way you sometimes spend an hour watching dawn wake itself up over the river, and wake the world with it, too. Look, I guess I am saying: I have hated myself and hated others and hated the world so often and for so many reasons, and none of that has done for me what light does when it finds me in the morning, when it reminds me that there is a world I could be better in, and it is this one.