Sonnet
My thoughts through yours refracted into speech
transmute this room musically tonight,
the notes of contact flowing, rhythmic, bright
with an informal art beyond my single reach.
Outside, dark birds fly in a greening time :
wings of our sistered wishes beat these walls :
and words afflict our minds in near footfalls
approaching with latening hour’s chime.
And if an essential thing has flown between us,
rare intellectual bird of communication,
let us seize it quickly : let our preference
choose it instead of softer things to screen us
each from the other’s self : muteness or hesitation,
nor petrify live miracle by our indifference.
– Muriel Rukeyser (1935)
I first read this poem when I was sixteen. I remember sitting in the school library on a winter afternoon and coming across the poem and being gobsmacked.
I had always paid deep attention to lyrics in songs and spent tons of time in volumes and volumes of hard-cover black/white composition notebooks (you know the ones I mean?) copying down the lyrics from casette booklets or painfully transcribing them off the casettes themselves and then parsing them for deeper meanings.
And then… Muriel Rukeyser. Poetry. A new world opened up.
Anyway, I came back to this poem the other day and once again that last stanza stood out, still. Just as much, actually, as when I first read it more than thirty years ago.
Thirty-plus years later, and humans keep making the world more and more inhospitable to deeper connections between people, even though connections between people is literally the thing that makes life habitable in this world. Even Rukeyser calls it the “essential thing”.
Rukeyser wraps the poem up by noting how rare it is to connect with someone deeply in the first place- she calls it a “rare intellectual bird of communication.” I mean, wow. WOW. She got it so perfectly- that beautiful flowing shimmering electricity that happens between two people when they deeply connect and resonate with one another. If there is magic in the universe, it can found in that moment.
And then she adds: “Let us seize it quickly : let our preference choose it instead of softer things to screen us each from the other’s self…”- urging whomever she is addressing to grab it and hold on, because the world- even back then in 1935- seems DESIGNED to distract people from connecting. I guess it’s always been an easier route to pull away from someone when you are on that cusp on connection, simply because it’s such a vulnerable state to be in.
Finally she writes about pushing back against the urges for “muteness or hesitation”- against “petrify”ing a “live miracle” by “indifference” to it.
“Live miracle”… indeed.
———-
I was just going to post the poem here and leave it, but as I read this poem again, it struck me that it was written almost A HUNDRED years ago and she’s talking about something that is endemic to us right now.
You’d think a century ago it would be a lot easier to connect with other humans- there wasn’t social media or internet, not much telephone communication, travel was hard, letters took time to arrive, no television, and then the written word.
So you’d think human communication would have been kind of the only game in town. That would have BEEN the distraction, right? But even a hundred years ago, there she is mourning the way people are more apt to pull away than move closer, to choose distraction over one another.
I’m one of those people who never quite “got” social media. I got off Facebook after the 2016 election, Twitter clearly isn’t designed for long-winded people, I came late to Instagram and finally broke off it a few months ago. Today I logged in for a second to check my messages and I felt like that scene in Bowfinger when they make Eddie Murphy’s doppelgänger run across the LA Freeway.
The only social media I can do is this journal thing, which I started in 1997 in graduate school just on a lark, when there were no comments or social media- you just published your writing into the ether and the search engines would pick it up based on the things you write (NO tags, no meta- this was HTML) and if someone searched for those things, they’d find you and read you without you knowing, and if something resonated strongly enough they’d drop you an email.
I miss that. A lot. I realize it’s all gone now, the internet has totally evolved and the “attention economy” has become lucrative. Instead of actually talking to someone, you can fill your day with breezily “liking” hundreds of social media posts and – if you are really bowled over by something- leaving a a cartoon graphic to express your emotions. Not words- a cartoon of an eggplant or a flame or “100”. Imagine. I mean, cave people put more effort into their communications.
To me, it’s far lonelier *on *social media than if I avoid it. I feel less alone and isolated when I *am* alone and isolated than when I am on Instagram or whatever. Isn’t that weird? I feel more connected to the world sitting alone in my little surburban backyard garden or puttering around in my art studio than I do on social media.
I know I am pretty alone in my views of this because the vast majority of people around the world love social media and use it and find the one-on-one stuff too hard. So that’s on me. But there’s a part of me that feels like it’s maybe worth it to be the outlier on this one.
I still believe in deep connection but I’m starting to realize that it’ll be a “rare bird” if I still am able to find it.