Mary Oliver, “Every Morning,” and Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys, Old Girls”: “You don’t know anything unless you do”

My younger sister began a project this year for our older sister’s 70th birthday: our healer sister, who’s also a dancer, collage artist, explorer, and creator of memorable parties. Every morning since April, my younger sister has sent our older sister (and me, since I asked to be included in the project) videos of every kind of singing and dancing, travelogues, Broadway parodies, animals at play. She sends these very early, before she starts her family caretaking or goes out into the world, where she’s a professional nature-lover, working for the  parks, serving when necessary as essential county personnel in fires and virus crises, trying to solve climate issues. Here’s the video she sent today, evidence of the essential nature of art and dance: a baby dancing to Beyoncé.

Probably, at this point, I should be posting only baby and cat videos as a present for all of us who scan the news and our mail, who have been wearing out our hearts and perhaps still looking for any sign of what’s to come, and whether the worst is over. In 2016, like so many people, I fell into a night and day news addiction, studying and sharing every scrap of political (and now medical) information, speculation, the percentages, odds, figures, and theories.  

Nonetheless, in the middle of everything, it’s still art and literature I keep turning to as my primary way of understanding the world. Elissa Strauss, our artistic director at LABA East Bay, sent all the current LABA fellows this Sarah Fine essay on art in times of crisis as we’re thinking about the intersection of tragedy, humor, and art-making for our beit midrash, our study session. It makes me think about the way we do and don’t admit our need for art and about which kinds of art we turn to when we’re in need. Sometimes we turn to art that wraps us in hope (sometimes I want this: pleasure, escape, silliness). Sometimes we turn to art that makes us feel we’re being told a real truth, that trusts us enough to show the way into what may sometimes be a very dark cavern. 

Mary Oliver, “Every Morning” 

That 70th birthday party was my first big Zoom milestone event this spring, in April, full of people who’d almost never used Zoom, as well as those of us who lived on it already. My sister had asked that we each bring a poem. So fascinating, to see what we’d each chosen. And so much Mary Oliver: my older sister’s favorite poet. At a certain point, when someone would say, “I also have a Mary Oliver poem,” we would all start to laugh. What did we read? Oh, you know the answers! The wild geese called our names; we had to think of what we would do with our one wild and precious life; we woke early; we wanted, when death came, to be able to say that all our lives, we were brides married to amazement (my older sister had read this a few years ago at our father’s memorial service). I love every one of these poems, which is like saying that I love walking on the beach, or delighting in gardens, or sitting by the fire. Yes, of course. 

Mary Oliver, what a task she carried out, to be the poet of comfort, the one you can turn to for weddings, for funerals, for a reminder of gratitude. Ron and I recently made a video where we read “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End,” for a friend in the hospital who had asked for friends to send videos, to get her through the recovery for a hard procedure at the end of a hard year, with far too much hospital time, and at the moment when she’d thought she’d come to the end of the process and could start putting it behind her. 

All the roads we’re on right now seem to be long ones. The best possible result (“I am knocking wood all the time” says one of a pair of friends who are spending what seems to me a terrifying amount of time on the road) still comes with hard times and a lot of clean up. The worst possible result (we can imagine so many, and then life brings what we had not imagined, or not fully imagined)… The more you know about Oliver’s life, the more you know she was not someone who happily wandered the woods, carefree, taking for granted a happy childhood (her childhood was a nightmare), a simple life (her life was not simple). But until I read this poem, I had never pictured her indoors, doing the analog version of doom-scrolling:

Every Morning

I read the papers,
I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
The way the red mortars, in photographs,
arc down into the neighborhoods
like stars, the way death
combs everything into a gray rubble before
the camera moves on. What
dark part of my soul
shivers: you don’t want to know more
about this. And then: you don’t know anything
unless you do…

(you can read the rest here https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=36384)

The poem ends:

all this I read in the papers,
in the sunlight,
I read with my cold, sharp eyes.

Her cold, sharp eyes. Mary Oliver. Sharp yes, but cold? That’s not the Mary Oliver we bring to our milestones. She published this in Poetry in March 1986. What kind of comfort is it to imagine even Mary Oliver caught by the news? She’s still herself. She describes the red mortars arcing down into the neighborhoods like stars with as much metaphorical precision and sensory vividness as she might the nature she celebrates in other poems. She captures the desire to flee knowledge and then the rigorous call to understand what’s happening with the same complexity she uses to offer benedictions to the suffering.  

Even though it’s not a poem anyone would share for a birthday or a wake, she’s keeping us company: all of us reading the news together with our cold, sharp eyes. And company’s all the more essential in hard times, however we find it (on Zoom, through art). 

Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys, Old Girls” 

This Marvelous Paragraph project has been going on for a while, like the pandemic itself, and I keep getting out All Aunt Hagar’s Children and then putting it away because I know I won’t be able to do justice to it, and specifically, to this story: “Old Boys, Old Girls.”  

Well, the hell with it. Here it is, art in hard times, about whole lives of endurance, a story of such deep honesty that it comes to grace, without ever relaxing its relentless attention.  

“Old Boys, Old Girls” announces its territory in the opening paragraph: 

They caught him after he had killed the second man. The law would never connect him to the first murder. So the victim – a stocky fellow Caesar Matthews shot in the Northeast alley only two blocks from the home of the guy’s parents, a man who died over a woman who was actually in love with a third man – was destined to lie in his grave without anyone officially paying for what had happened to him. It was almost as if, at least on the books the law kept, Caesar had got away with a free killing. 

This story covers a long deep time in Caesar’s life, in and out of prison, with its intricate social structures, ghosts (both the living and the dead), and the specific effects on those who find themselves part of this pipeline. There’s no voyeuristic melodrama in watching Caesar’s life. Jones refrains from editorializing or overdramatizing, and yet he keeps giving us new turns and surprises, as with the changes in Cathedral, Caesar’s friend and ally, after a series of low-key but ruinous ghostly visits: 

But the man Cathedral had killed had become a far more constant visitor. The dead man, a young bachelor who had been Cathedral’s next-door neighbor, never spoke. He just opened Cathedral’s cell door inward and went about doing things as if the cell were a family home—straightening wall pictures that only Cathedral could see, turning down the gas on the stove, testing the shower water to make sure that it was not too hot, tucking children into bed. Cathedral watched silently. 

Caesar went to Cathedral’s cell one day in mid-December, six months before they freed him. He found his friend sitting on the bottom bunk, his hands clamped over his knees. He was still outside the cell when Cathedral said, “Caes, you tell me why God would be so stupid to create mosquitoes. I mean, what good are the damn things? What’s their function?” Caesar laughed, thinking it was a joke, and he had started to offer something when Cathedral looked over at him with a devastatingly serious gaze and said, “What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.” Cathedral was not smiling. He returned to staring at the wall across from him. “What’s with creatin bats? I mean, yes, they eat insects, but why create those insects to begin with? You see what I mean? Creatin a problem and then havin to create somethin to take care of the problem. And then comin up with somethin for that second problem. Man oh man!” Caesar slowly began moving away from Cathedral’s cell. He had seen this many times before. It could not be cured even by great love. It sometimes pulled down a loved one. “And roaches. Every human bein in the world would have the sense not to create roaches. What’s their function, Caes? I tell you, we need a new God, and I’m ready to cast my vote right now. Roaches and rats and chinches. God was out of his fuckin mind that week. Six wasted days, cept for the human part and some of the animals. And then partyin on the seventh day like he done us a big favor. The nerve of that motherfucker. And all your pigeons and squirrels. Don’t forget them. I mean really.” 

That ghost is a quintessentially Jonesian figure. The young bachelor, tucking children into bed. Cathedral watching the future he’s obliterated. 

And then, when Cathedral cracks, there’s that rant. It’s not about the nature of evil, it’s about mosquitos. Caesar thinks it’s funny, at first. It is funny, until it’s not, and then it is again. A very hard humor. Whatever Cathedral’s theology, or ours, unless we’re ferociously literal-minded, there’s something to what he says. Here’s news we won’t find in the papers, or online. As in “the Metropolis of Death,” Otto Dov Kulka’s description of Auschwitz (included in Fine’s essay), this story takes place “150 to 200 metres from the selection platform and 300 to 400 metres from the crematoria.” It has, as Oliver writes, “…death as history, death as a habit.” But it also has a window into art and caring, beyond what we ordinarily imagine as even being possible. I’ve read it over and over, and I am always wanting to share it. Here, I say to you, read this. It has something you might not know you needed until Edward P. Jones brought it into the world and handed it over to us, a gift that requires our fullest attention.