Hallowed Eve

“I think probably every 21-year old has 10 poems to write. What makes a poet is not just talent. It’s hunger. And it’s hunger so profound and unkillable that it keeps you going for 50 and 60 years.”

Louise Gluck in her 2012 interview before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature


“If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.”

“Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835-1849

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Dear Alex,

If the bulk of this year has strained and spiked our imagination as none before, then these last two months shall beg us again to ask with you in your recent posts:

Are we fundamentally alienated from each other - or are we meant to be together?

The last time your voice shaped this question for our Bible Study group, silence boomed like a paradox in our comfort zone. Were we not gathered that Saturday night on Zoom as one body yet diverse and distant as we were then - and still now? Can I trust that you and I understand “alienated” vs. “together” in parallel context as selfish and splintered as we know of love, a many-splendored thing? Do we not store secret triumphs and traumas that have rendered our tiny universes, even if possible for transparent disclosure, more self-absorbed than life-transcending?

These close-ended questions corner us to make stark decisions about our open-ended choices. On screen or stage, we look conjoined but in practice, we repel one another. In our babel for pandemic clarity, one of my favorite media, the New York Times, cracks the calm of dawn with war-cry headlines as Americans joust with the divisiveness and enslavement that inherently drive democracy towards Tuesday’s Election Day: “The Battlegrounds Within Battlegrounds”. So are we fighting for or against another?

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a French sociologist and diplomat whose travel to the United States in 1831 unwound his observations in the two-volume “Democracy in America”, cautions us about the tyranny of the majority and civil society: “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

Insert our first names to the first of Tocqueville’s words above - and we may be reminded of our unequal circumstances and liberties in our returning to your initial question of man for himself or togetherness. As children of free will, we are free to choose our singular response with each blink to look forward in spite of our wayward nature. Though we are chained by limits and ignorance, perceptible and perceived, we seem to trust somehow that we can choose in this moment of grace to love and nurture rather than wound ourselves and another. Our daily choosing and wrestling over our indivisible identity - either as heirs of creation or chemical scum in entropy - can change in micro shifts our macro lives, internally and communally, towards alienation or solidarity.

This past Saturday evening, after a day of studying and cleaning at home, I went to a local eatery in downtown for dinner. I saw a few floating, white sheets with tiny eyes and feet peeping through the darkness more eerily somber than past Halloween nights. Fewer in number were diners seated along coiffed lines to comply with social distancing, their halo of conversations seeping though closed doors within arm’s length from empty table legs in open terrace. Vintage light bulbs loop around the necks of branches glowing with honey-gold leaves. It was a dim, bittersweet night, one that tinkers with our hope and desperation for a vaccine to resolve our alienating measures, yet the night stays still and immeasurably hollow as ripe for our pondering with Rowan Williams:

“I am inclined to add that you might also expect the baptized Christian to be somewhere near, somewhere in touch with, the chaos in his or her own life - because we all of us live not just with a chaos outside of ourselves with quite a lot of inhumanity and muddle within us.”

This hallowed eve - and the year altogether - is nearly over. Whether you ramble in this mushroom of hemisphere or levitate to another stratosphere, we shift ever between day and dark, life and doom. Do you then choose to live to your end with your faulty, pitiful self - or reclaim the pre-destined glory designed for you, me and us together?

Yours, Kate