Leaving a mark

recurring favs again: Jenny Odell and Rilke

I. A conversation I had the other day: My boyfriend B and I were sitting at a cafe and I had that sudden urge you sometimes get when you’re around someone who loves you unconditionally to complain about my mother. A severely boring symptom of my particular stage of life. But I just had the urge, so I opened my mouth and said something about all the kinds of awful things we would have to deal with when the unspeakable happens (she’d trained us all over time to grow quite superstitious around the concept of death and its speakability); the details are not important. And B just sat there and said, “Well, that’s fine.” I said, “What do you mean that’s fine? Do you even realise what it’s going to be like? How much we are going to have to do?”, and continued to punish him for being so patient and loving. Then B said, “Then you will do it. She’s been your mother your whole life.” And he took a sip of his coffee.

II. Rilke’s Ninth Elegy: My friend H once sent me a screenshot of an old note he kept in his phone, which was a copy paste of a poem that I’d sent him once, which I might have even written him by letter during the lockdown - I can’t remember. OK, enough. It’s Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, which was a poem that was on the first page I opened to when I decided I wanted to learn German, so I looked through German poetry at the bookshelf.

I hone in on this particular translation and stanza all the time:

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

Irrevocable.

Time’s arrow, once shot, moves decisively in an arc that cannot be stopped, reversed, or undone.

It is ironic that in some way we all struggle through life seeking some sort of immortality; usually one that is flattering, and yet without trying we will likely leave our mark.

Leaving one’s mark - in the purest, poetic sense - is so much more capacious than what modern ideas of ambition would have you - have me - believe.

I often think about the way that for women the best chance we have of leaving our mark is that of the personal kind, rather than the broad-sweeping marble-statue-erecting kind, where our name disappears in the wind but our labour is consumed like water into the soil of the Earth. We trust more thoroughly in our ability to give birth to greatness or confer it onto others than to ourselves - in many places mothers love their sons the most - and I wonder about the causality then of our ambitions: do us women give up on ambition because we know that selflessness is our best bet at immortality, or is there really something so selfless, or self-defeating, about our nature? Because to call women by nature less ambitious is so criminal; I see so many working so hard, only to be accused that, “she has no drive; she wants a balanced life.” As if a balanced life, today, is something you just fall into by forfeit rather than fight for against the demands of, well, everyone and everything, and not to mention, if you are a woman, their (everyone’s) feelings about it. That’s my feelings about that.

What B was saying to me in our conversation, on some level, was that “The least you could do is suffer for the woman who had suffered for you.”

III. The Myth of Self-reliance: Jenny Odell wrote one of those writerly reviews of Emerson’s essays, which is to say it is a review that is less of a decisive recommendation or critique but rather a description of a psychological encounter with the subject matter. How annoying; I love her writing so much.

Anyway, she describes the experience of feeling drunk on agentic power of reading the essays; fully allured by the promise of self-reliance, particularly in a time of feeling confused and out of touch with her own voice.

Her encounter culminates in a realisation that independence can only be asserted as it is enabled dependence on those who come before. The people talking shop and politics in the living room depend on the people washing dishes in the kitchen (domestically, often men and women; globally, often rich and poor). I think this is also why self-reliance feels like a particularly (though not exclusively) youngest-child delusion. I think also a little bit and so lovingly of my niece, who at barely four or five years old, was so thoroughly convinced that she knew how to do just about everything by herself (but would then cry desperately for help when she came into a roadblock of any kind - an experience she seemingly develops recurring amnesia for the next time a new challenge rumbles her way! Rightly so!) And as adults, the same as those of us who might see pursuit of lofty self-actualisation or transcendence as their own virtue rather than the compound returns on an inheritance of security.

In one sense - the social critique sense - this is privilege, that favourite word of the political moment; in another sense it is mercy. As in Gillian Rose: “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” When I think about my mother suffering for me, to raise me, I also deny her agency: the graciousness and mercy of also choosing to suffer for me.

Responsibility is never a choice; simply a recognition of fact, that of our connections from which there is no escape. They say even the monk who goes to the cave to meditate will hear the soar of airplanes above. It has never been about lone heroism; a lone hero is an oxymoron, because a hero is made also by a cause and a person in need.

My underlying belief carried an arrogant, lonely assumption: an assumption that the right way to live and die was to do so without leaving a trace; to clean up your affairs and tie up your responsibilities in a timely pre-mortem manner the way you might pack your own lunch and wipe the counter before leaving the house.

Not so. The inconvenience of another person, their oily thumb prints smudged all over the photo paper, their resistance to our erasure, is the same as their proof of having existed. All of it, as Rilke says, is irrevocable.