All-Purpose Elegy
By Paul Guest
For the sun, which will burn out or run down
or dramatically implode in a future
epoch about as awful as this one. For
the one-antlered deer that expired en-route
to an upstate sanctuary because
why not. For the sequoia tunnel tree
which was uprooted in a storm
the other day. For my boyhood fantasy
of driving through it. For California.
For this sadness. This joy. This
bucket on the floor. For the industry
which will most harm you
upon its inevitable demise.
For the pet rabbits who died
in grotesque cages
in our backyard. For the school
that burned down. For the lake
in my dreams which is always frozen.
For the pained myth
of your birth. For this new year.
Which isn’t new at all.
Which will be the same
as last year and the one before it.
And so on. For the air
inside my mouth shaped like nothing.
For the bell ringing
through the early rain.
For each unheeded warning. For sweet
love, which seems ever more
impossible. For Norway,
which has shut down all its FM broadcasts.
For silence, which nobody
truly values. For the song
I couldn’t recognize in the elevator,
though all I could do was ache.
For the night, which becomes more immense
and depressing and utter
and the voices in it which argue and argue.
For this conflict with the stars.
For ashes. For the wind.
For this emergency we call life.
This weird in-between time of year always seems to inspire reflection, remembering the year that was, tallying the joys and sorrows, listing the bests and worst of things. We try to sum up what we’ve lived through for a year, which seems like such a long time and no time at all. The world is fucked up, and I’m having a hard being hopeful this time. So I’ve been thinking about elegy, that poetic form of lament that makes a love language of grief. Rich politicians have normalized the Orwellian idea that corporations are people. Climate change is fucking terrifying. There have been an unfathomable number of lives lost to Covid. We’re all existentially exhausted. I need to grieve a little, OK?
Elegy originated with the Greeks who had none of our cultural stoicism—they knew how to lament and they did so loudly and dramatically. All their wailing and ululating was a catharsis—those strong emotions were given a name and a place. There’s something so freeing in that—just screaming out your grief until your lungs are raw.
As a poetic form, they were usually perfrmed at funeral processions. They’ve evolved, of course, as all art does, but at the heart of an elegy is grief—for a single person and for the whole world that exists now without them.
I recently read a piece that found parallels in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Greek elegy, with the author arguing “Its mimesis comes down to a microcosm of America contained within Bed-Stuy,” and its catharsis is in the destruction of Sal’s Pizzeria. Radio Raheem is the individual who’s mourned with the catharsis, but Radio Raheem himself is so much more than a character. From his introduction, he’s a metaphor for the struggle of hope.
The police murder Radio Raheem and all he stood for. It feels right to pause and say the names of the Black Americans who died at the hands of law enforcement in 2021.
Alvin Motley Jr.
Ryan Leroux
Winston Smith
Latoya Denise James
Andrew Brown Jr.
Ma’Khia Bryant
Matthew “Zadok” Williams
Duante Wright
James Lionel Johnson
Dominique Williams
Donovan Lynch
Marvin Scott III
Jenoah Donald
Patrick Warren
Xzavier Hill
Robert Howard
Vincent Belmonte
Another elegy I encountered recently was Michael Azzerad’s piece in The New Yorker, “My Time with Kurt Cobain” which was a beautiful and humanizing portrait.
Dealing with the death of someone you know is always difficult and strange, but that difficulty and strangeness is vastly compounded when the person was a public figure. When a parent dies, for instance, you can dole out the information at a rate you’re comfortable with. You can tell friends and co-workers one at a time—or not at all. They offer their condolences, share a memory of the person if they knew them, say a few supportive words, and that’s it. But, when it’s a public figure, everyone knows right away. If people know that you knew the famous person, a lot of them will reach out to you, even if they wouldn’t have done the same had a relative died. Often, they have a parasocial relationship with the celebrity, an emotional attachment to someone who did not know them. They tell you, unbidden, what that person meant to them. They don’t seem to understand that you did actually know and love this person, and they knew and loved you, and that you’re on a different level of grieving.
I think about that parasocial grief we feel for the losses of public figures like Cobain, and it’s not insubstantial. Our lives bump up against each other all the time. For better or worse, we impact the lives we touch. When you make art and release it into the world, you lose control over it—what it means—as viewers and listeners form their own meaning from the art. But the artist is still human and hurt and loved by someone like the rest of us.
When 815,000 lives have been lost to Covid-19, I can’t help but think of all the people their lives touched. How many lives are we each connected to? 100? 500? The number has nine digits.
Yes, I shared a different cover of this same song in September (and yes, I also mourned a musician then), but it’s a good song, and I’m not sorry. If anything, these covers and Bowie’s original are in conversation with each other about lament and trying to exist in this beautiful, terrible world.
The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.
Here are little snippet from the opening to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, published here as an essay you should read in full, even if you’ve already read the book. It’s a stunning meditation on what we inherit—pain and love—from our mothers.
Monarchs that survived the migration passed this message down to their children. The memory of family members lost from the initial winter was woven into their genes.
I’ve been gathering things around me that bring me comfort: too many plants, too many books, filling food. This recipe was easy, delicious, and warming. The toppings are important.
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
15-ounce can pumpkin puree or a scant 2 cups of pumpkin puree
A few fresh sage leaves and a few sprigs fresh thyme, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
A good pinch of ground nutmeg
1 1/2–2 cups chicken stock
Salt and pepper to taste
Serve with 1 pound al dente linguini pasta, or any cooked pasta you like
Topped with:
Well-browned ground Italian sausage
Goat cheese crumbles
Toasted pine nuts
Parsley
Red pepper flake
To make the sauce, in a medium saucepan heat olive oil over medium-low heat. Add the garlic and cook gently until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the pumpkin puree and chopped herbs.
Increase heat to medium and add all of the spices. Stir in 1 1/2 cups chicken stock and allow to simmer for 10 minutes until thickened to your desired sauce consistency. Add more stock as you see fit. Taste and season with salt and pepper (and even more spices) to your taste.
Toss boiled pasta in the warm sauce. To serve, top with sausage or sausage alternative, goat cheese crumbled (or parmesan), toasted pine nuts (or any kind of crunch) and chopped parsley.
In being surrounded by so much loss for nearly two years now, I returned to Sam Anderson’s utterly devastating piece, “The Last Two Northern White Rhinos on Earth,” in which he tries to fathom the extinction of one species to understand the million projected by the UN to disappear in a mass extinction in the coming years. Ultimatley, it sheds light on what it means to be human.
One million species. A number so large exceeds the mind — it becomes, as Albert Camus puts it in “The Plague,” “a puff of smoke in the imagination.”
And yet we cannot allow ourselves to forget the reality concealed by that puff of smoke. One million is not just a number — it contains countless living creatures: individual frogs, bats, turtles, tigers, bees, eels, puffins, owls. Each one as real as you or me, each with its own life story and family ties and collection of habits. Together, these animals make up a vast, incredible archive: a collection of evolutionary stories so rich and complex that our highly evolved brains can hardly begin to hold them. Modern humans, for no good reason, have lit that archive on fire.
It’s a long read, but workth your time. It’s stunning writing, worthy of being reread and studied for its craft.
None of my preparation really prepared me for being in their presence. To stand near them is to feel things. It is to feel, first of all, size — the blunt creaturely meaning of it. White rhinos are the second-largest land mammals, second only to elephants. They can grow to be 6,000 pounds, with a curved front horn up to five feet long. To stand near something so huge tugs on the gravity of your cells. You feel present and embodied, being dwarfed by these warm-blooded munchers.
Although it’s about endlings and rhinos and a history of pointless poaching, the essay becomes so much bigger than the sum of its parts. It affirms a perspective, a better way of way of seeing, that feels humbling. It’s about what it means to be alive, the value of love.
Then, point out that nothing exists in isolation. A rhino is not just a rhino: It is a load-bearing strand in an elaborate ecological web. Just by going about its day, a rhinoceros helps keep its whole environment healthy. Its grazing mows and plows the fields. Its daily walks clear paths through the bush, leaving hard, flat roads for other animals to follow. A rhino’s dung feeds colonies of insects, and birds come to feed on the insects, and other predators come to catch the birds. A rhino is not just a part of the world — it is a world. Everywhere it goes, it moves in swirling clouds of ox-peckers and egrets and guinea fowl. Humans like to pretend that we can stand apart from such elaborate interconnections, from the vast web of nonhuman life. But we, too, are a part of that web. And sooner or later our strand will be cut.
At some point, we have to talk about love. About rhinos as givers and receivers of love. We don’t live in a culture that encourages this. Love is not quantifiable; it doesn’t generate doomed statistics. It is ignored in policy debates. And yet, in the end, love is the source of all our meaningful values.
It’s this perspective on rhinos that feels like it can keep us human amidst such constant, mind-numbing loss and grief, that “puff of smoke in the imagination.”
We are built to love, and we can summon that love to do nearly impossible things — and yet that love has an outer range of maybe 30 yards. It’s like a wonderful lamp. It fills the inside of our houses. It washes over our families and our pets. It extends, as we walk, to the town around us.
But it cannot leap, with any of the necessary intensity, across city limits or state lines or oceans. It cannot leap, except abstractly, with great effort, to distant people in need, or to strange, threatened animals. We love, really love, what is near us. What we have touched. What loves us back.
Those limitations are a problem when it comes to a crisis like mass extinction.
This is a time of resolution and reflection, and this is a reminder for me to love more, love more pointlessly and broadly and urgently and with the full knowledge of how much it will hurt in the end. And when your love becomes grief, sing it, scream it, call it out shamelessly. Perform an elegy for what you love.
Finally, I’d like to hear from you. What and how are you grieving?
Did you like this issue? Would you please share it with someone else—family, friend, co-worker—who might as well?