Tung-Hui Hu's "How to Care?"

Thoughts on care.

How to Care?

That month, I wondered where they gathered
before hospitals, before the oncology ward,
intensive care, urgent care.

Back then it was all urgent, binding
hands and feet, immobilizing the body
before it could pass into cadaver. Now
it is easier, to look at photographs instead,

one of him in his work shirt, collar fraying,
stretched across his ribs. Another, his daughter,
who sets his shaven head upon a pillow as if
arranging flowers. Practice for the living,

walking through hallways, reading charts,
X-rays, seeing the hollows of a torso held
to the light, getting juice from the cafeteria,
swallowing it, passing it out of me,

it was like being on an ocean liner, the same
slowness to move, the same distance from land,
where men are hurting, men are living.

from Mine (Ausable Press, 2007)

---

I first read this poem earlier this week. I had spent a day teaching five almost-hour-long classes on a screen, staring into the void of my reflection in between the sessions. Which wasn’t really my reflection — more myself, in real time, becoming more of myself. When the school day finished and my last teacher’s meeting of the day wound down, my eyes felt like two pebbles jammed in the dammed creek of my skull, and I left my apartment, walked out into the cold, and made my way to The Strand, where I just wanted to stand for awhile between the stacks and forget the world for awhile. It was there that I pulled this book off the shelf, and read this poem, and read it again. Where men are hurting, men are living.

I love that this poem begins with wonderment. I love, in other words, that wonder can be a way to begin. It is enough to build a world, wonder is — therefore it must be more than enough to build a poem. Right? I think often of the question: what do we do with our wonder? And I think that wonder is so often discredited, made out to be the flimsy stuff of the personal, made out to be inauthentic even, unsuitable for architecture. But wonder is its own architecture; or rather, wonder is when one sees the holes within the architecture, or the architecture itself for what it is — I wonder about the tree growing in the cracks among the sidewalk, I wonder how that building stands, I wonder about that barge floating down the Hudson — how is it possible, and what a wonder it is that it moves so slow.

But I think this poem today also shows the value of wonder. Wonder offers a critique based in the imagination, which — though some might discount such a critique — is a place of such inherent value. It makes me think of a recent Twitter thread that unveiled some screenshots of recently patented aspects of the metaverse being developed by Facebook. One shot showed a desktop computer inside the metaverse — so that, if you logged onto the metaverse, you might avail yourself of some decades old technology. Strange, that the new world so resembles the old one.

Perhaps this shows at least one reason why imagination is important. Imagination is so rarely used by people in power that it must be viewed as a threat to power, and, as such, a potent form of critique. So often, I wander amidst the world and find myself saying: Really? This is what you dreamed up, with all your money and your power? This? This is one of my biggest qualms as a teacher working within the confines of standardized education, where students are assessed in highly specific ways through the use of very generic means. Why not a form of assessment that meets students where they are and allows each of them to interact with their own specific interests, challenging them (while also entertaining and engaging them) still? Maybe this would be inconvenient, sure. But it might be beautiful. It would surely be worthwhile.

Anyways, back to today’s poem. Though I don’t know if it is intended to serve as a critique of the bureaucratic standardization of our society’s approach to both living and dying, it feels like one. I think of Anne Boyer’s The Undying, and how she writes:

Enchantment is not the same as mystification. One is the ordinary magic of all that exists existing for its own sake, the other an insidious con. Mystification blurs the simple facts of the shared world to prevent us from changing it. Cancer's disenchantments give its mystifications room.

I love that phrase: the ordinary magic of all that exists existing for its own sake. Today’s poem’s opening stanza reminds us of the way that so much of our society’s approach to healthcare can be mystifying:

That month, I wondered where they gathered
before hospitals, before the oncology ward,
intensive care, urgent care.

In this stanza, Hu names three distinct settings within a hospital that serve as kinds of organizational structures. Their names give a sense of order and purpose. They allow us to compartmentalize this tragic side of life — our deaths — and calibrate our feelings accordingly. But, as Boyer’s quote alludes to, these settings also mystify us. As anyone who has had a loved one fall ill knows, a hospital provides both a sense of security and a sense of terror. In moments that I have experienced this, I know the person I love is cared for (and for that, I am extremely grateful), but I also feel at this strange remove. I have taken a nap in an oncology ward. It can be a metallic experience. The sterile lighting, the endless beeping, the orderly hustle and constant bureaucratic enforcement of systems — these things frighten even if they soothe.

When I underwent surgery last year, I felt both grateful for the orderly nature of care and absolutely terrified by the generic sterility. After I stripped down and stuffed my clothes into a plastic bag and put on my gown and sat down on my bed in this large room full of slightly private rooms, I greeted a revolving cast of people, each of whom was kind and gentle. One took my vitals. Another showed me how to use crutches. Each typed things into movable computers, tiny upright human-powered vehicles. I wanted someone to stay for a little while and talk to me, but I don’t think any of them could. I am sure they were each overworked, certainly tired, hustling from one person to the next, each doing their best to provide care within the larger system that mandated how they should perform their care. But I didn’t want the numbers and gauges, the cold metal of the razor against my skin. I longed for conversation, especially when the numbers were entered into the computer, and the computer was rolled away, and I was alone. I remember the anesthesiologist talking to me, and how grateful I felt for that. She asked me what I did, and I talked about being a teacher. I was so happy she had asked. I remember feeling happy, being asked something about myself. I remember looking forward to saying more. But then I don’t remember anything. I was being put to sleep.

Hu describes this feeling of being amidst the orderly nature of standardized care in later lines:

Practice for the living,

walking through hallways, reading charts,
X-rays, seeing the hollows of a torso held
to the light, getting juice from the cafeteria,
swallowing it, passing it out of me…

The four lines that follow the phrase Practice for the living seem to serve as an almost sardonic retort. Is this what living is, they seem to say. Is living this sense of distance from who we are? Does the act of paying nearly microscopic attention to ourselves free us to be more of ourselves entirely? Is life measured merely as a series of juice boxes received first in school cafeterias and then in hospitals? I don’t know. I really don’t.

So much of this standardized idea of order replicates itself in our daily lives. That line — Practice for the living — makes me think of Marie Howe’s seminal poem, “What the Living Do.” In it, grieving the death of her brother, Howe writes:

For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

Hu’s “practice for the living” follows the ordinary routines of a hospital. Howe’s living follows a similar sense of ordinariness, this time taking place within the wider — but still narrow — confines of daily life: hurrying along a street, spilling coffee, shopping for groceries and toiletries. Both poems remind us of something extraordinary: that within the ordinariness of our actions exists a wellspring of so much. In every moment of daily life — whether routinized or inconvenient, steeped in bureaucracy or deckled with adventure — each person is full of boundless extremes of sorrow or joy, grief or happiness. And we so often have to pocket our feelings just to move through the actions that are asked of us. It is a daily tragedy, experienced by everyone, that the world continues on regardless of how we feel about that fact.

The opposite also rings true. Sometimes, when there are no actions to be done, our feelings allow for a silence that cannot be found in any other moment. In Hu's poem, “Early Winter, After Sappho,” he writes:

For some, black ships

coming towards the city
are the quietest sounds on earth.
But I say it is with whomever one loves.

I love that. That love allows for a boundless quiet, a space of real listening. This is why the final line of the poem — where men are hurting, men are living — echoes outward. Such a line recognizes that living, in and of itself, is synonymous with hurt. That doesn’t mean that living is inherently a joyless thing, but it does mean that our capacity to feel pain is simply one truth of existence.

When I think of today’s poem, I think of how so much of the world puts us at such a great distance from some of the lone facts of our lives. They are tragic facts, yes — our suffering, our inevitable death. But to acknowledge them does not mean we limit our capacity for joy. And to give our lives over to endless standardization and bureaucracy — well, perhaps this might not be the best thing. Perhaps. I think that one of the only constants in our lives is death, which means that, maybe, to replicate that same level of constancy at the scale of the everyday — through the aforementioned means — is to essentially replicate death, or, at the very least, to take the life out of our lives while we are living them.

I’m struck by that simile at the poem’s end, the way Hu describes the order of care:

it was like being on an ocean liner, the same
slowness to move, the same distance from land

I feel this sometimes, within the confines and routines of life. The waking and working, the subscription payments and weekly lists of meals — this feeling of being suspended slightly above your life, creeping along toward something at a speed that feels imperceptible, a horizon that always remains a horizon. It reminds me of another poem by Marie Howe, “Hurry,” and its middle stanza, when the speaker — who keeps asking her daughter to hurry — pauses to reflect:

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?   
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?   
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,   
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.   

I am left wondering about today’s poem’s title — how to care. Such a question is perhaps one of the most important questions of our moment, when so much of the onus of care is placed on individuals to enact, simply because systems have failed them. The practice of living should be a practice of care, but so many take on that labor without recognition. Parents have to care for their children while balancing so much. People have to find ways to care for themselves because they are not guaranteed basic quality of care from the government. Corporations feed off of this uncertainty and unease by commodifying and marketing so many ideas of self-care without caring for the very employees who labor for them. How to care in a world that hardly ever models care? I don’t know.

Where men are hurting, men are living.

I believe, in this moment, that nearly all of life is experiencing a form of hurt. Probably this sounds too sentimental, too romantic. But I believe that every plant hurts at this moment, and every living being. I mean that literally, sincerely. I believe that so many actions or inactions, so many disenchantments or prayers, so many raised voices or silent ones — that so many of these things and more come from a place of hurt. Maybe I am wrong. But I don’t think I am. It’s like we are all collectively in that moment of being at a party when you look away, out the window, and wonder why you are there. And then you turn back toward the conversation, adjust your face and your posture, and try to make yourself ready for the conversation at hand. Even though you are not ready for it. Even though you don’t want to be there at all. That’s how I feel. Maybe you do, too. When your life is all you have, and where it hurts so much to live. How to care? I am trying.