Philip Levine's "Today and Two Thousand Years from Now"

Thoughts on uselessness.

Today and Two Thousand Years from Now

The job is over. We stand under the trees
          waiting to be told what to do,
                    but the joy is over.

The darkness pours between the branches above,
          but the moon’s not yet
                    on its walk

through the night sky trailed by stars.
          Suddenly a match flares, I see
                    there are only us two,

you and I, alone together in the great room
          of the night world, two laborers
                    with nothing to do,

so I lean to the little flame and light my Lucky
          and thank you, comrade, and again
                    we are in the dark.

Let me now predict the future. Two thousand years
          from now we two will be older,
                    wiser, having escaped

the fleeting incarnations of workingmen.
          We will have risen from the earth
                    of southern Michigan

through the tangled roots of Chinese elms
          or ancient rosebushes to take
                    the tainted air

into our leaves and send it back, purified,
          down the same trail we took
                    to escape the dark.

Two thousand years passed in a flash to shed
          no more light than a wooden match
                    gave under the trees

when you and I were lost kids, more scared than
          now, but warm, useless, with names
                    and different faces.


first published in The Yale Review (April 2000)

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I won’t put a little self-promotional note at the top of these newsletters often (I don’t want to say never), but yeah, while I have you, and before I talk at length about the great Philip Levine, I’d just like to say that my novel, Pilgrims, has a cover, a release date, and a preorder link. It’ll be out November 18th. You can preorder it here. And the cover is below. For all of this, I am wildly grateful. This novel, which tells a story of monks and brothers and dogs and bread-makers and long roads, feels like a big chunk of myself. And I’d be honored if you read it.

Alright. I want to talk about this poem. But first. There is another poem — famous, canonical, mythic — by Philip Levine where people are standing in the poem’s first line. In that poem, “What Work Is,” Levine writes:

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,

Few poems have meant more to me in my life than that one. In that poem, one brother reflects on his own brother as he stands waiting — waiting for work. In that poem, one brother works “eight hours a night so he can sing” opera. In that poem, one brother wishes he told his brother he loved him, something “so simple, so obvious,” and yet something he can’t remember ever doing. In that poem, there is so much waiting — in rain, among people — in order to see, to even just see, if there might be work that day. In that poem, the people waiting are waiting for someone else to tell them if they might be deemed needed, or useful, while the work they love to do — their art, their music, their so-much-else — waits for them somewhere else.

About that poem, Levine said:

And we stood there, and stood there, and stood there, and it didn’t open ‘til 10 . . . I thought about it, though — and I thought, this isn’t an accident. They want people who are willing to stand in the rain for two hours to get a job. You’re passing the serf test.

In this poem today, written many years later, it is as if those two brothers have climbed out of “What Work Is,” and are standing together at the end of all that work:

The job is over. We stand under the trees
          waiting to be told what to do,
                    but the joy is over.

They are not, sadly, at the end of all of that waiting. No. The two of them have been conditioned to wait — to believe in their usefulness in the eyes of someone else. To have their time guided by someone else’s determination. It is because of this, I think, that “the joy is over.”

Their only way out is more time, and more waiting. Their only way out is to wait longer than anyone else. To become old. Ancient. Two thousand years old. Old enough to become trees. Freedom comes, in this poem today, when the two of them:

will have risen from the earth
                    of southern Michigan

through the tangled roots of Chinese elms
          or ancient rosebushes to take
                    the tainted air

into our leaves and send it back, purified

There’s beauty here. And tenderness. There’s a sense that our freedom lies in the resurrection of what we have ruined. That we only become whole again when we become closer to what has been lost.

In an essay on the awfulness of capitalism, Anne Boyer writes:

There is no opposite of the air: only the defilers of it. Only villains attempt to invert the lightest, purest thing—air—so that it becomes the most poisonous and the heaviest. The air is a commons. The commons never has had an opposite.

I love this. I love how it talks to today’s poem. I love how Levine sings the same song of solidarity — this idea that becoming older and wiser means returning as trees, purifying the defiled air. Boyer is right. The air is a commons. And we have ruined it. Levine knows that, which is why part of our regrowth — our freedom — involves sending back the air we have tainted into something purer, something better. This: a kind of apology. This: a different imagination of a future.

There is so much I love about this poem today, and about Levine’s work as a whole — about its music, its images, its moral clarity, its love of people. But what I especially want to talk about today has to do with the final stanza:

when you and I were lost kids, more scared than
          now, but warm, useless, with names
                    and different faces.

I was struck, deeply, by the word useless here. I was struck by this idea of being “more scared than / now, but warm, useless.” Here, to be useless — because of that conjunction but — must mean something good. It must mean the opposite of scared. It must mean something closer to warm. This idea — of uselessness being something cherished, some long-ago moment in one’s life when one wasn’t scared — feels new. It feels so at odds with how we think about the word useless. And so I think I want to talk about uselessness. About that word. And what it means. And how we give it meaning. I think I want to talk about the joy of being useless, and how so much of the world turns us away from that joy.

Indeed, for most of my life — perhaps until the moment I first read this poem by Levine — I have associated uselessness with negativity. For most of my life, I have called things useless that I thought had no purpose. As a kid, I refused to do work that I thought was useless. Work that I thought meant nothing. Now, as a teacher, I assign work that I hope will never be called useless. Until I read this poem, I thought that — maybe — there would be no greater embarrassment than if someone I taught or someone I offered something to said that what I made for them was useless.

I haven’t ever wanted to be useless. But maybe now I do.

You see, in this moment in Levine’s poem, there’s something wildly freeing about uselessness. The two boys — lost, but warm — do not need to be seen as useful by anyone else. They exist, in this moment, outside of the constraints of society, where to be seen as useful — though seemingly something positive — means that they are caught up in the demands of someone else’s gaze, in the near-constant mathematical calculus of determining whether anything you do is of use to someone or something else. This constant calculation — which leads to near-constant self-doubt, self-correction, self-adjustment — is the opposite of freedom. And yet, it is the work that so many people do alongside their daily work. Every day, we work so that we can be seen as useful by someone else, and we also perform the million daily calculations to determine whether the work we do is of any use at all. Every day, we judge ourselves and are, ourselves, judged. All in the name of usefulness.

And, too, as this goes on, day in and day out, we witness, day in and day out, supreme and unconscionable acts of violence that, by the very fact of their nature, make the claim that some people are not of use to society. When people debate, in full view of the general public, some moral justification for the ongoing siege of Gaza that continues to starve so many, what they are really doing is trying to justify whether or not the existence of someone is useful or useless by their own limited imagination. They are applying the framework of purpose and use to the lives of people. This is one — of many reasons — why the language of capitalism is an awful influence on our conception of what is possible. We internalize it in ways we cannot see. And then, by the fact of such internalization, the world becomes one atrocity after another.

In that same essay by Anne Boyer that I quoted above, she writes:

It is likely that if capitalism continues on unchallenged, many more species will die before our own does, but one of the ways in which we know that capitalism is composed not of one human class but of distinct classes is that when humans die, too, of the ecocide committed by capital, they die for the most part according to class, with ecological catastrophe’s victims almost always drawn from the members of the global poor and working class.

In other words: capitalism makes clear that it loves the language of usefulness and uselessness. In fact, it operates with that language as its compass. We feel it in our bones. We grow anxious and full of doubt at the very possibility that we — me and you — might be seen as useless in our lives and in our work. And, as we grow anxious and full of doubt, people die. They die not because they think about their uselessness, but because someone else — with power beyond the bounds of comprehensibility — has deemed them useless, a mere inconsequential statistic, a side effect of their rampant ascent upon the high hill of progress, which is really a hellish and strange descent into a world where we watch and experience violence on the daily and are asked, by talking heads and pundits, to think about something other than the fact that people are dying when they shouldn’t be dying.

And so, after reading this poem? What I think? Is that? I’d rather be useless than useful. I’d rather embrace the concept of uselessness than try to buy into a system where what is seen as useful is inherently seen as better, which means that it is inherently seen as worthwhile, which means that it is inherently seen as worth living. To embrace a sense of uselessness is to have a different answer to the question why are you here? Which is another way of asking why are you alive?

In an essay from his book Hold Everything Dear, John Berger writes:

In the stance I keep referring to, there is something special, a quality that no postmodern or political vocabulary today can find a word for. The quality of a way of sharing that disarms the leading question: why was one born into this life?

This way of sharing disarms and answers the question not with a promise, or a consolation, or an oath of vengeance…Its answer is brief, brief but perpetual. One was born into this life to share the time that repeatedly exists between moments…

Here, Berger is making the case that one’s answer to the question of worthwhileness or usefulness should have nothing to do with trying to justify one’s existence, one’s purpose, one’s very fact of being. Instead, it should have everything to do with our acknowledgement of one another. With what we do together, rather than what we make for someone else, or what our existence makes for someone else. We are born, in Berger’s words, to share.

I want to hold onto that more than anything else. I think again about that image at the end of Levine’s poem, where two boys are lost, and yet they are not scared. They are warm. They are useless. I think, in that image, they are having fun. They are playing made-up games with sticks. They are hiding behind trees. They are climbing them. They are trying, and maybe failing, to make fire. And maybe, too, they are laughing. Laughing at their own uselessness, which is one of the beautiful things about uselessness. When we don’t center such a thing, we can laugh at it. We can make fun of ourselves. Which is a beautiful phrase, if we weren’t so serious about it. And so yes, maybe they are making fun of themselves. Maybe they are sprinting down a dirt road. Maybe they are tripping over stones. Maybe they are grass-stained, torn-jeaned, wild and full of breath. They don’t know what’s coming. The long lines. The hours of work. The tragedies to experience, and the tragedies to witness. And you, watching them. You have a choice. You could educate them about what is to come, and break them of their play. Or you could join them, and share in it. You could be useful, or you could be useless. I’ve chosen one before. I’m thinking about choosing the other.

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Some notes:

1. Annie Dorsen put together a spreadsheet of presses, organizations, and other institutions of the arts who have been affected by the loss of NEA funding. Here’s a helpful guide for how to support small and independent presses who have lost their funding, put together by Deep Vellum Books.

2. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

3. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.

4. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

5. If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here.

6. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.