Victoria Adukwei Bulley's "There You Are"

Thoughts on recognition and endurance.

There You Are

There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove
pouring the herbs into the pot
hawthorn, rose;
buying the tulips
& looking at them, holding
your heart in your hands at the table
saying please, please to nobody else
here in the kitchen with you.
How hard, how heavy this all is.
How beautiful, these things you do,
in case they help, these things you do
which, although you haven’t said it yet,
say that you want to live.


from Quiet (Knopf, 2023)

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There you are, this poem today begins. Not there you were. Not there you will be.

There you are, this poem today begins.

I’ve been reading through much of Bulley’s work over the past few days, as I only just had the pleasure of being surprised by it. And I think I’m thinking of the presentness of that first line because of a moment in an essay Bulley wrote years ago:

I have a practised habit of asking about the past, a trait probably cultivated since I came into speech. I liked to ask why a lot. Why, perhaps more than what, where, when, and even how, is always a question about the past. Questions of what and where risk fooling us into thinking that our answers can be clean and numerical. What happened? This. Where? It was there. When? Then. How? Like so. Why, though, is where things get muddy. It is where the human voice enters – and for some, that of God – or failing this, for lack of answers, it is where the arms fall helpless at one’s sides. It is at why that the past frays and scatters, and I find myself writing to keep what I have of it close and whole. Things fall apart and, long before they do, they yellow at their edges – a gradual disappearance at play even when events are not wilfully forgotten but instead brought purposefully to light.

That why we ask of the past is real. It’s a haunting question, an anxious one. It’s curious and sometimes painful and even sometimes a question so full of despair. Why me, we sometimes ask. Why them, we sometimes ask. Why any of this at all?

And I think I am thinking of the presentness of this poem today because of the long, extended moment of suffering we are continually bearing witness to. In a recent post, the poet Hala Alyan named the importance of endurance in this moment — the endurance of witness, the endurance of maintaining one’s gaze, one’s empathy, one’s desire for truth and solidarity.

And endurance, strangely enough, involves this shape-shifting of time. Endurance extends the present moment into something longer. It refuses the occurrence of the past, this place from which the present emerges, this place of memory but perhaps not agency. Endurance maintains one’s ability to have agency, to enact change. Endurance, in many ways, is the long, long, long enactment of hope. It is hope turned into the extended moment. It is hope made possible.

And so, when this poem today begins with that seemingly-simple line — There you are — I think of all of this. I think of how beautiful it is to say that. To say are instead of were. To say are instead of will. To say are, to say there you are — it recognizes someone in the action of their being. It renders this poem as a forever-happening moment.

And maybe, too, I am thinking of that word: recognize. It is a word that is different than remember. To recognize is to see someone as they are, in this very moment. It is to witness someone become who you know them to be. It is to see someone. To call them by their name. Recognition must be part of witness, don’t you think? To recognize someone is to know them as human. It involves, too, a kind of follow-through. We recognize when we endure, because such recognition extends the present moment of our connection; it refuses the development of a past a little longer; it says we are here now, together.

When we don’t want to care about someone; when we see someone on the street that we might know, and yet don’t want to speak to, or when we refuse to pay attention to violence that seems to have nothing to do with us, or that we do not want to have anything to do with us, we say to ourselves — or maybe even to those we choose not to see — I don’t recognize you. This statement gives us permission to pretend ignorance, which is a refusal of an opportunity to witness.

This makes me think of a moment in Shusaku Endo’s Silence — translated by William Johnston — where Endo writes:

Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.

In other words: sin is the absence of recognition.

So, there you are, this poem today begins.

As in: I see you.

As in: I recognize you.

As in: life is a long act of witness.

And what about the subject of this poem? This lonely, heretofore-unrecognized person who is “boiling the water on the stove” and “pouring the herbs into the pot?” This person who is surrounded by “nobody else”?

Reading this poem for the first time, I was so moved by how Bulley translates the unnoticed work of this person into something tender:

How hard, how heavy this all is.
How beautiful, these things you do,
in case they help, these things you do
which, although you haven’t said it yet,
say that you want to live.

Absolutely beautiful.

I wonder, reading this poem, if the subject of the poem is the speaker herself. Or if it is someone else — real or imagined — that the speaker recognizes as they move through their daily work. Either way, I do not think the tenderness, beauty, and kind-hearted recognition of the poem changes — because, either way, such tender recognition is at the poem’s heart. To see — in someone else’s unnoticed labor — the hardness and heaviness of their work is to recognize such a person with a real empathy. And to see your own self, in the midst of so much work, and to call such work beautiful — well, there is something so adamantly and gorgeously tender about such self-seeing.

In another poem of Bulley’s, “Air,” she writes:

Don’t go.

We must stay alive
to our place in the family

of green & breathing things
that use even our sighs

to make sweetness from light.

I love that line break — “alive / to.” I love how jarring it is, how the words don’t seem quite right. But they are right. It is possible to be alive to something. This action involves recognition — like turning the possibility of a possibility on in your brain. Being open to what you might see, and then choosing to see it.

It’s no surprise, then, that the final word of today’s poem is live. It serves as a reminder that living is an active thing — that it is not simply one thing, not simply the work, the boiling, the pouring, the buying. That it is also the seeing. That it is also the act of recognizing yourself and others as part of all of this — this hard thing, this heavy thing, this beautiful thing.

And I think, too, of the purpose of such beautiful things — the tulips of this poem, for example — in a moment of extended suffering and violence. Beauty and softness might not serve as protections from violence, though those in positions of power might utilize such things in order to protect themselves, or deflect people’s attention away from how they use power. Yes, softness, too, can be weaponized. But when I think of the tulips in this poem, or when I think of the word please in this poem — I think of what language offers us, of what it can offer us — these gentle enactments of the everyday that are examples of what is hoped for both before and after violence. When poetry turns my gaze back towards softness, I remember that there is a world that is possible, even as the violence of today’s world makes it seem impossible. Poetry returns my gaze back toward that possible world. It is one part of life that fuels the long endurance needed for witness.

A better way of putting this is to simply think of these lines from Garous Abdolmalekian’s “Fog Song”:

I am so much a poet
that my antlers have blossomed
and my song
passes across the lake like fog:
                      Shooting each bullet is a rage
                                                released with a shotgun.

I have prepared the trunk of my body
for the possibility of your kindness. 

Poetry — like this poem above, like today’s poem — helps me prepare my own body for possibility. The possibility of hope. The possibility of recognition. The possibility of attention. The possibility of reimagination. The possibility of kindness. And these possibilities make that long act of endurance possible. Which is, in some ways, the long act of life. But it is the long act of life where we maintain a gaze, even when it is difficult. When we offer attention, even when it is hard. And when we recognize, in each moment, what deserves to be recognized.

As I sit here typing this, and thinking of recognition and endurance, it’s not long after I’ve finished a 100 mile bike ride in Central Park. Some of you who read this know that I have spent many years running ultra-endurance races. But, because of some injury complications, I’ve had to delay my return to running 50 mile races, or 100 mile races, or 24 hour races. Instead, I learned how to ride a bike, thanks to my friend Hal, and made it a small goal of mine recently to dwell on that bike for loop after loop of Central Park — for 100 miles in all.

I do such things because I love to, and because I love the physical sensation that depletion offers. I love, too, the attention I am forced to pay to my body, and to my surroundings. I love that an act of physical endurance extends the present into one long, ever-changing and yet seemingly unending moment. Just this morning, when I began my ride before 4 AM, I was the only living boy in Central Park. It was dark, and raccoons crept along the roads. I was a human engine moving a small machine 20 miles an hour into the narrow circle of light thrown in front of my bike. But then the sun rose, and people came with that light. I felt the city rustle itself awake. The raccoons returned to the shadows. All of this felt like one long moment for me, filled with doubt and manic energy and fatigue and pain and joy. I love such a thing because it reminds me of how life is not always a series of unrelated events, how it is also an interconnected and dependent thing, a present moment we live in together, responsive and joyful and tired and doubtful and so much else.

Though I am talking of sport, I hold what I value of endurance close as I think of the endurance of witness, the endurance of paying attention to what deserves it, to what is ongoing — caught in its own present moment of conflict. It is hard and heavy, yes, but the act of witness must go on. I believe there is beauty on the other side.

Finally, I am thinking, once again, of that phrase there you are. You say there you are when you find something lost that you love. You say there you are with softness, an almost-wonder, a quiet disbelief. You say there you are to the cat hiding behind the potted plant. You say there you are to an inanimate object, and, in such saying, you animate the object — you render it almost-living. You say there you are to yourself in the mirror, finally ready. You say there you are to someone you love, your nose almost touching theirs, your bodies close. You say there you are when you recognize someone being as fully themselves as you know them to be. You’re in the audience watching a beloved friend perform: there you are, you say to yourself. You say there you are to that one note on a piano you’ve been searching for. It rings through the room: there you are. All of this: so beautiful when it happens. And — there you are — a moment of love and recognition made real.

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Some Notes:

1. As I mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition 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.

2. Here are some things I’ve read recently in relation to the war on Gaza that have moved me:

   1. This essay — “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” — by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi.

   2. This essay — “On Language, Silence, and the Sit-in” — by Aracelis Girmay

3. 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.