It’s a weird time. Even with the seasons reversed, I’ve discovered that ghosts still appear when the sun is up. Particularly in the evening when the city is still because many people are out of town and many others are sitting peacefully on their porches and the sky glows slowly towards dusk. Daylight ghosts.
Where I grew up (Yorkshire, mostly) this was midwinter and was usually bleak and hard-edged, full of ice and darkness after the Christmas lights had blinked out. The moors can be an unforgiving place at any time of year, particularly so at this one. But the between time of grey skies and snow, before the New Year started to crank up again, could also be magical or at least a child given to daydreaming liked to imagine so. Time was slow and expectant then.
Of course I acknowledge those are the rhythms of Northern latitudes and in some sense I’ve just brought them with me here as excess baggage. There is undoubtedly magic in the slow time of high summer too, in swimming in cool rivers on hot days. But whatever time is given to us we’re reeling out a rope from childhood to the present day, and our childhoods can tug hard on that rope at unexpected times.
Magic aside, there’s a commonality in our need for reflection at this time of year, summer or winter. I’ll start by saying I don’t begrudge anyone their achievement lists. Celebration is a worthwhile endeavour. I just rarely find the year in hindsight to be coherent enough to make good narratives lately. This year some things worked out, other things didn’t. There was a road trip of the kind whose memories are still playing across my mind in patches of turquoise, like light moving across the surface of water. And there was what feels like the requisite amount of loss and grief for the time of life, in which wake we still bob up and down.
No more remarkable than many other lives and much less remarkable than some. So I won’t remark further. I have, however, spent some time digging back through other people’s poems that I had posted elsewhere online in order to find something useful to share here. I found two such, brilliant in different ways. I’ll post one today and another in a few days time.
Before I share those, I also came across something by accident which gave me cause to reflect. The online world seems to be undergoing another great upheaval currently. Hopefully for the better; I guess we shall see. What I came across was a pictorial Twitter thread by illustrator Sas Milledge (if you are willing to stray there briefly it’s worth a look, here).
After digesting what Milledge said for a while, it felt right. She makes a good point about the business of online art on platforms like Twitter. I get what she is trying to say here - for those who want to create quietly but still reach an audience, the nature of attention-driven algorithms can be jarring. What is intended to be “Please take some time to look at my work” can end up becoming “Look at me!”
She also taps into an insight that has increasingly bothered me over time - how social media that monetises attention, the way Twitter does, can hijack the way people interact and the way they feel as a result. It is clearly possible to have uplifting interactions there, strike up genuine friendships and make communities of common interest. And there are clearly other big reasons for people to be fractious over the last couple of years. I find it difficult, though, to ignore a sense of unease that, given how much time people spend there, the mean-spiritedness that can infect social media has also spilled over into day to day life. Perhaps I’m wrong, I hope so. But I can’t help feeling that people have become more prone to assuming the worst of each other.
Which brings me to this:
Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
First published in “Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection”, from Green Writers Press. Included in Bonfire Opera, by Danusha Laméris (University of Pittsburgh Press 2020)
It’s actually from 2019 and, in introducing it then, the New York Times called it “utterly necessary for our time”. Whilst they couldn’t have predicted what was about to happen next, it seems it has become more necessary with each of the subsequent years. In an antidote to the fracturing of our social fabric, Danusha Laméris details a list of minor exchanges that can take place in any ordinary day between ordinary people, yet which feel extra-ordinary when set out in this way. As she says, almost holy.
The poem became popular in a similar way to “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith. It’s a particular type of cultural snobbery that says that popular art is necessarily poorer art. I don’t agree with that idea. You can see, say, Van Gogh’s work a million times and still catch your breath at the exceptional rendition of colour. It might be the case where something has been created solely for the purposes of widespread popularity. More often, a well crafted piece strikes such a chord of shared humanity that most everyone nods in recognition.
In sharing it I’m not making a twee nod to generic kindness. I understand that it has become a popular word lately and like all words has uses and abuses. Sometimes it gets used to brush away dialogue that needs to happen but makes for discomfort. Writing that dwells in darkness, in grief or anger, can be as much a necessary act of kindness as anything else. Yet, from time to time, we need a nudge to remind us that we can do both things. And there’s enough spite in the world that I have no mind to contribute to it whether writing light or dark.
The narrative of heroism has embedded itself in our culture. Incessant personal improvement sells too. But the most content people I have ever met have led (outwardly) unambitious lives. So I think you can also tick off your achievement list and make your resolutions with the rituals of the ordinary. If you prepared a meal carefully for someone else with what little time you had and what ingredients you found to hand. If you chatted to a friend with no particular purpose, nothing to gain. If the sound of hollering and feet splashing in the sunlit water sets memories drifting down the river for your kids.
Happy New Year! And the best of wishes for the year ahead.