Six on History: Happy New Year
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"This certainly wasn’t the 2021 I imagined, long ago, when I thought the whole future would be in effect by 2020 — I grew up expecting flying cars and space travel any minute now. But instead of negotiating black hole etiquette with aliens, I spent the year in often overwhelming grief cycles. I cried so much more than I thought was possible in one year. Part of me wants to write you a column that is just a list of the people who we lost this year, lost to COVID-19, lost to cancer, or other fatal illnesses, or police-perpetrated killing, or overdose, or suicide, or mysterious circumstances. Some even made it to a death from old age, can you imagine?
And when we weren’t dying, we were going through the tumult of trying to decide if it is safe to go outside of our homes. Many of us were tired of practicing collective safety practices in defense of those who won’t or can’t. We were moving cities, or to the country, tired of the same walls and landscapes. We were breaking up, tired of the same arguments. We were learning how differently we all define “safety,” and what some of us are willing to risk our lives for. We were learning the depths to which paranoia and mistrust are rooted into our collective psyche. We lost friendships; not everyone could handle the distance or the differences in our survival strategies. We lost organizations; not everyone could pivot their existence into something relevant and accessible for Zoom; not every group could weather the emotional storm of so much loss.
There is grief on grief, on top of grief, filled with grief, shaped by grief, held by grieving people.
But I have some good news… I think.
I lost my certainty somewhere in this journey and I am flying by the seat of my feelings and experiences. But that is the good news — we are more clear about how little we know, and how uncertain everything is, and how constant change is, than we have ever collectively been before.
And we are learning so much about how grief moves in us individually and collectively. We know we must get good at grief, because change — both the kind we want and the kind we dread — requires a letting go.
When we really sit with the truth of change, and how much of it is beyond our control, and how much we try to control, we can begin to let go of the misguided idea that we are in control, or that control should even be our goal.
When we sit with the work of grief — the nonlinear emotional journey of facing undeniable loss, a journey which is somehow recognizable even though it looks different in every iteration, in every face — we have to recognize that one day we will be the one who is grieved. And in every one of our current and future relationships, for everyone we love, know, or ever will know, an element of grief will someday enter — one of us will die before the other, leaving the other to grieve.
For me, this all culminates into an overwhelming sense of how precious life is, how precious this life, on this planet, at this moment, is. And how, in order to be in a relationship with life, I, we, have to be willing to let go of the practices and beliefs aligned with premature death.
We have to let go of capitalism, and the accumulation drive and supremacy posturing that it produces in us.
We have to let go of our destructive tendencies toward each other and the planet. We extract from each other, destroy each other — we do the same to this precious and only Earth we know.
We have to let go of thinking there is one way to do everything. I was recently given the gift of these words from Ojibwe ancestor Walter Bresette: “Thinking there is one way to do everything is the most European way to approach life.” We have to let go of that colonizer-thinking, which is at odds with the complex biodiversity of all life. We have to let go of trying to make everyone think the same way and act the same way, and begin learning real strategies for sharing a planet where we will never be fully aligned.
And along the way, we have to learn, with grace, to let go of the parts of ourselves that were socialized by capitalism and oppressive systems of unjust power. As those harmful patterns and behaviors become markers of our past selves, we become more curious, more complex and more compatible with the future. Ultimately, I believe we have to let go of anything that isn’t love.
I wrote a little spell for this particular release, inspired by my late grandfather. I share it here with you for your use, or to inspire your own spells and articulations of letting go:
papa’s prayer
let it go
you will not be here forever
let it go
let it be dust blown from your palm
let it go
the mistake was made
let it go
don’t build that wall of disappointment
let it go
that was your best, this is theirs
let it go
you cannot force anything real
let it go
keep only the lessons
let it go
your hands are smaller than godhands
let it go
you cannot even fully comprehend it – what a gift
let it go
be generous, you have enough
let it go
keep moving towards your joy
let it go
you can still be happy
let it go
live like a river, a long spill home
let it go
this is the only moment, the dream
let it go
with your next exhale
let it go"
Anne
CMarie Fuhrman
I imagine today just like yesterday—
I will spend the morning writing and then,
when the tide recedes, I’ll trip along drift lines
searching. Yesterday I found an entire sand dollar
and four amber sea agates. The day before—
a red plastic heart stuck in driftwood. But
Anne, what I really want to find
is a buoy. A fine glass fishing buoy, like the one
you brought to our third-grade show-and-tell
in 1982. A perfect glass bauble, wrapped in brown
hemp. Mint green, cerulean, sparkling, and you,
Anne, gleaming, cradling the globe, in small,
flawless hands. You illumed, Anne, in front of the class,
teaching us what your Grandma taught you
about glassblowing and fishing nets and the tide
that carried that buoy all the way from Japan
to the Oregon Coast, so far from our landlocked
Colorado town, so far from anywhere
our imaginations had yet taken us. Even those of us
in the back row could see. Anne,
tall and gangly, shy and anxious, you traveled
to the sea and brought back a flawless
glass buoy. Even those who teased you hardest
felt the weight of envy. “Be careful,”
you begged us, hinting finally toward fragility, rarity.
Yet these years later I am still searching the wrack
lines, my hands begging back that unbroken
weight, as if by finding my own buoy I might know something
about… Anne,
please forgive me, I held on too loose—
what do ten-year-old hands know of mortality or the way
lives can be shattered on coasts? What
does this forty-nine-year-old heart understand
about the mechanics of staying afloat, of netting a life
and not letting go?
Copyright © 2021 by CMarie Fuhrman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 16, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I struggled for years to understand and make peace with Anne’s suicide. We grew up together, neighbors. I remember Anne on the school bus every morning, crouched in her seat, alone, staring out the window. Even that young I must have known shame in not reaching out. The third-grade day in the poem has never left me. Anne was vibrant and proud. The glass buoy was my way into the poem and back to Anne, to how tightly she clung to it and her eventual letting go.”
—CMarie Fuhrman
Teaching Learning Technology
290 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196
" ... When she returned her atoms to the universe, not yet forty, Elson bequeathed to this world 56 scientific papers and a slender, stunning book of poetry titled A Responsibility to Awe (public library) — verses spare and sublime, drawn from a consciousness pulling the balloon string of the infinite through the loop of its own finitude, life-affirming the way only the most intimate contact with death — which means with nature — can be.
Elson’s crowning achievement in verse is the poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” beautifully brought to life here as a trailer of sorts for the 2020 Universe in Verse — our annual charitable celebration of the science and splendor of nature through poetry — by astrophysicist, novelist, Pioneer Works Director of Sciences, and devoted enchantress of poetry Janna Levin, with music by cellist, composer, and music revolutionary Zoë Keating based on her original soundtrack for The Edge of All We Know — the forthcoming documentary about the Event Horizon Telescope, which in 2019 captured humanity’s historic first glimpse of a black hole. (Janna works on black holes; Elson was among the select scientists tasked with studying the first images returned by the Hubble Space Telescope, that pioneering emblem of our most ambitious tool-making and our longing for intimate contact with the nature of reality.)
Janna prefaces her reading with a Bohrsian reflection on the relationship between science and poetry, between the objective and the subjective, concluding with an exquisitely insightful and exquisitely phrased observation of how the tension between these seeming dipoles can dissolve upon closer inspection:
'We are all navigating an external world — but only through the prism of our own minds, our own subjective experience… The majesty of the universe is only ever conjured up in the mind.'
ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson
"Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings."
