Today (years ago now, ~2016) I finished reading When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It is a very cool book and I recommend it. He was an English major turned neuroscientist turned cancer patient. The book is a memoir about the author and his obsession with mortality while he raced against time to finish this book before he died. The perspective is very enlightening. Before I finished the book I wrote down many of the poetry references he made. These will be the poems for the first week. They will be about death. What better way to bring poetry to life?
"Caelica 83" by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville
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You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.
New names unknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.
It is like Too Short said, "Get it while the gettin' is good." The break in the format and call to the reader is a slap in the face for anyone who didn't get the author's purpose in the first 4 lines. We are all stepping towards our nameless, breathless, soulless, and lifeless eternity; so we should live our lives while we can. At first it sounds scary or maybe like a stupid Drake YOLO endorsement. But I hope I remember to make time while I am. This is life's big dilemma: what will we do with our time. As a currently unemployed teacher I think about this a lot more now. Maybe thanks to the book, but also to all the time I have and all the things I am not doing. When I was too busy I yearned for time, and now I waste it. I just wrote, "make time, while you be" on a sticky note and posted it to the wall to remind me of my very finite existence.
ReplyDeleteJimbo
Make time...for what do you?
DeleteI have been focusing daily on the following:
-Relationship- more excuses to experience nature
-Poetry
-Movement practice- GMB Fitness/Yoga
-Nutrition- spending more time on prepping whole foods, new vegan recipes
-Not paying attention to the little things (forget doing laundry 2x/week- do when you run out of clothes, clean apartment same time every week not obsessing throughout the week on dumb stuff, cleaning out items to minimalize what the brain thinks about- material possessions reflecting my values- only keep "travel/camping", "books/education", "fitness", "bracelet/beading", "puzzles". Everything else goes :)
Perform the best things in life first- poetry/reading/fitness in the morning, prep food, work, and then relationship time after- being present in this time and not having all of the other little things nagging because they are already in the books! Also allows presence during this time in the morning
Man, full circle here.
DeleteYet again, I am an unemployed teacher. The sticky is still on my wall. I have productive plans starting tomorrow. Now I just need to get to bed. And hopefully I can take my own advice a lot more!
It is almost as if the writer of this poem expects an element of how you live your life to transfer in death...in a sort of afterlife...almost as if how you live now is how you will live later. But also written in somewhat of a tone of experience....as if he was writing from death back to life, to the Reader. Not quite a tone of warning like a lot of poems promise or promote, but more of that of a lesson without bias. The way we live our life is how we will live our death!
ReplyDeleteBrowsing a little more...the books title is in direct reference to this idea..the crossing over from life to death, from "breath to air"
ReplyDeleteAlso- this poem was part of a series of poems written sequentially between three friend poets. When Greville titled poems Caelica he was directly addressing a certain line of ideas...as Caelica means "the sky". To: philosophy lol. Cool.
From an incredible book review I found online: https://dollopofsunshine.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/when-breath-becomes-air-a-book-review/
In response, Jimbo, to your thoughts on time spent...
On time: “Time for me now is double-edged: Every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse, but closer to the next recurrence — and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time, it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races. Even if I had the energy, though, I prefer a more tortoise-like approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist.”
Let's add those other poems from the series.
DeleteHere is a link to some of the other Caelica sonnets:
Deletehttp://www.luminarium.org/renlit/
See Caelica on pg 97-98 for a better description of the sonnet sequence:
https://books.google.com/books?id=DTEVCTAp-LEC&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=caelica+sonnets&source=bl&ots=RAAX_l4C8m&sig=eSIG9Kql5ZL8VJRMgJt3xjYZIdk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi7h4Gy-8fOAhUS6WMKHaF_A38Q6AEIJjAF#v=onepage&q=caelica%20sonnets&f=false
I think this was the first poem we posted on the blog. Says my comment was 15 August!
ReplyDeleteAnd here I am again... unemployed teacher, haha.
Until next time
This poem always, always, makes me have a deep think on the concept of Time. Time is such a human thing to have...if we truly take a look at the natural world around us there is no such concept and yet we are bound and shackled by its restraints. This time around, I want to see if itʻs possible to live a bit more timeless...
DeleteI read a physics book about time not existing in the laws of nature. I'll rec it for you on goodreads.
Delete