To “set the darkness echoing.”
Dear friends,
Thanks for reading last week’s “raid on the inarticulate” where I talked about poetry and “the collective stories that bind us together.” Warning: Once again, I am in poetry mode. (Somebody send me a beret!)
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell says she writes verse as an exercise in “straining light through poetry.” Which has got me thinking about the process of straining things. Oh man, do we need good strainers! So, may I, quoting O’Donnell again, suggest the following:
“You need a great imagination to be a great human.”
Sometimes, I find that a great imagination can save me from my own reactions. This morning, I read a comment a friend made on Facebook:
When did it become a bad thing to say we must love—neighbor, enemy, immigrant, co-worker, etc.?
To which a friend of hers responded:
We have laws in the United States and those laws should be obeyed. But in your eyes it’s ok if they are illegal immigrants that destroy our country, murder and rape and you don’t want them deported? There’s something wrong with that picture.
It’s just too easy to deploy what I’d call our lesser imaginations of fear and rage when we read exchanges like that.
Fear believes the lie that anyone who is an immigrant is likely “illegal” and here to “destroy our country, murder and rape” us, therefore it is okay to round up anyone with any semblance of “otherness” (including refugees, who are extensively vetted and fully legal) and either keep them out or deport them just to be sure we’re all safe.
Another lesser imagination—rage—says to this unknown-to-me commenter, “You’re an unimaginative idiot!! I don’t see you; all I can see is your reprehensible opinion!”
But what if we employed our imaginations differently? What if we asked deeper questions? Replaced judgments and categorizations with curiosity and wonder? What if we imagined with the nuance human beings—all of us—deserve?
What if we understood that fear and anger, while not bad emotions in themselves, are not useful ways to imagine other human beings? That using our imagination thus will lead us into a darkness where no one feels safe and everyone is angry? This is the opposite of what welcome does.
One day last week, I spent an hour chatting in the beautiful spring weather with Frey Teklu, our manager at Refuge Clarkston. She said the barista trainees had been a bit irritable lately (most of them were fasting either for Ramadan or Lent), so she gathered them and said, “I’m hungry, too. And I understand how afraid we all feel these days. But we really do love each other. So, let’s just talk and work harder at understanding each other.”
Frey is one imaginative woman! She reminds me to be like Seamus Hainey in his poem Personal Helicon. Even as I peer into the murkiest of waters, my hope is that I will…
… see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Imagination at its best begins by looking within, by being honest about our own fear and anger, by treating our own failings with patience and kindness, and—eventually—by turning that patience and kindness outward to others. Can you imagine it? I’m trying!
Let’s set the darkness echoing,
Kitti
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch,
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
~ Seamus Hainey
