Lifestyle
Say what you like about Tumblr (EXCEPT ‘I like your shoelaces’) but over the years I’ve gotten some pretty good poetry recs - and not all of them Richard Siken. Ok, maybe 60% Richard Siken. But of the other 40%, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet popped up pretty often, and so I was excited to see a beautiful hardback copy of it in the library recently.
I touched that glorious fabric cover. I gasped at the bold design choice of blue text. I skipped the Rupi Kaur introduction because I am a snob and a gargoyle who has no joy in their heart to celebrate accessible poetry.1 I started reading.
It was gorgeous; the lyricism of the first few pages really got to me. Already I was taking out my notebook as it delved into the prophet answering the questions of those to whom he was saying goodbye, until I realised - was that the whole book?
Spoiler alert: it is. It’s the prophet giving advice on love, life, children, work, prayer, and anything else you might reasonably expect to find in the liminal space before they finally give you the online recipe. This isn’t a knock on it; the language really is beautiful, and I did take notes of certain passages which I loved, and possibly you would find great meaning in it if you picked it up yourself (it’s available on Gutenberg). But largely what I thought as I read it was this is just positivity instagram.
It’s absolutely not Gibran’s doing. I don’t think he could have predicted that a hundred years later there would be girlies (gn) making followings out of “if their absence brings you peace, you didn’t lose them” posts. He probably wasn’t doing daily affirmations or hashtagging prayers or going to Bali to find himself.
All the same, reading it made me feel the way I do when I read the entirety of a Mary Oliver collection at once - bothered, almost, by the uplifting-ness of it all, annoyed by the sentimentality, the loftiness and righteousness of The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.2 I don’t know, I wanted to tell him. I don’t think it’s possible for everyone that ‘when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born’. I don’t think that having a house ‘makes puppets of your larger desires’, or that wearing clothes is ‘a harness and a chain’. I don’t think that all evil, especially the evil we see today, is merely ‘good tortured by its own hunger and thirst’.
I’m sure I’m quoting out of context and some scholar3 is going to come and castigate me in the comments, plus I’m doing him a disservice by ignoring the more complex (and often meaningful) viewpoints he holds in other areas. But there remains a sense of casting off worldly pleasures for some kind of purer life, or even believing that that kind of purer, simpler, more wondrous life exists. It’s neither a new concept nor an old one (1979 and religion’s never gonna die!). For the more secular, I think again of Mary Oliver and how she sometimes brings to mind that Christopher Plummer quote about ‘being hit over the head with a Valentine's card’. I love Mary Oliver, for the record. And of course there are whole industries springing up nowadays around positivity inspo; get an ‘I am enough’ sticker in pastel for your Stanley cup!4
I guess my conflicted feelings are twofold; firstly, does that pure life exist, and secondly, should it be so celebrated? I can probably figure the second one more easily, which is - honestly? I like having a roof, and I like wearing clothes, and I don’t think all work can be moral, and I don’t think all lusts for comfort murder the passion of the soul. Also, millenialmom.net5, I don’t think I’m becoming the person I was always meant to be; I’m not sure if there is that kind of meant to be in the first place, and I don’t think each day is full of blessings, or that I am an abundant person. I don’t know if we have to be anything; maybe we just are.
But that response, I realise, is tied to the first - on some level I already don’t think that that life exists. Or perhaps more accurately I don’t think that it can exist in the world we now find ourselves in. (This is tied to being able to imagine a better world, something that I quite honestly struggle with, so take it from this perspective.)
Devin Kelly has a great post on Oliver that explores her relationship with curiosity and wonder, which suggests at the end that her work invites us to step out of the ‘certainty that is so often offered to us… one mission statement, one slogan, one truism offered’ and turn towards ‘that voice in the back of our head that says what if it didn’t have to be like this’. He says, ‘certainty provides a kind of security, and bearing honest witness to the world involves holding a lot of sorrow in your heart.’ But then I feel like that begs the question: what is it like, then? What is the uncertainty in this brand of positivity? Isn’t ‘there is wonder in the world’ itself a kind of truism? ‘Return to curiosity’ a mission statement? In a strange way, it seems to me reversed - that what we’re being offered is uncertainty. We are through the constant attack of global structures and every day’s awful news already holding sorrow in our heart, and the sentiment of beauty is the certainty offered to us that I now want to refuse.
Nowadays, I’m thinking of the poem I Suffer a Phobia Called Hope by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, or Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying by Noor Hindi, or it’s only day whatever of the quarantine & i’m already daydreaming of robbing rich people by José Olivarez. ‘there’s no way to make that pretty’, Olivarez writes, and could be talking about anything. Have we given up being able to see the beauty in the world? Can we still afford to talk about that? Is there really more to life, or is this all we have? When I get into this depressive jacuzzi it’s hard to read a positivity thing and think, oh, yeah, birds!
In fact there’s a poem about birds specifically:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / And in order to hear the birds / The warplanes must be silent
- Marwan Makhoul
These ends are hard to reconcile, as evinced by the fact that I’m typing this out on at least the fourth pass of this post. I think I’ve landed on three things that, if not provide an answer with any definition above 240p, at least help me to frame my thinking. I don’t know if it’s a useful frame, but what is a Substack for if not to blab about something entirely pointless?
Firstly: density and context. It might work for someone who’s genuinely in a good place, but as someone who just answered a questionnaire with ‘strongly agree - I feel sad every day’, being bombarded on all fronts with smile :) sucks absolute shit. Like Jamie Carragher once said of Gary Neville, it’s ‘all right in small doses’, after which it becomes too sunshine-out-of-ass to hold on to the complexities and nuances of the original sentiments, even if they’re there. Even worse is when it’s co-opted into a ‘just stay positive! :)’ attitude towards a work and life that’s actively trying to kill you. Kelly’s correct in his observation that we’re set up against certainty, and endless positivity (regardless of source) can devolve, or be turned, into an almost cultish desire to pretend that everything Will be ok when it might not, so stop complaining about overwork and look on the bright side of life. The bombardment of content, and often bad content6, is a different thing, but it feels extremely prevalent and suffocating in this particular corner of the internet. I suspect that’s what’s colouring my perception of Gibran, making it difficult for me to see past that my gloop glasses and actually engage with his spirituality on a level that’s fair to him.
Secondly: sincerity (and crafting that sincerity). I freely admit, as a snob and a gargoyle who has no joy in their heart, that I find positivity inspo vapid and self-aggrandising and cringe, with a kind of unreal loftiness meant to be seen rather than internalised. I feel like my beloved millennial mothers, and instagram accounts like this or this, or - god forbid - the Midnight Library, have a sort of cynical self-awareness of the fact that they’re selling something. Gibran and Oliver and poetry in general feels more sincere, written with intention. The weight of it is different. I guess a distinction I’m thinking of in my head is that inspo sells the belief in happiness while poets believe in the happiness they’re selling. Of course, this doesn’t avoid a slightly preachy tone that can come with anything along these lines. Here I think the fact that poets are really just great writers helps massively; it makes the sentiment beautiful even if I don’t wholly agree with it. Wild Geese remains one of my favourite poems despite the way it has been flogged.
Thirdly: complexity. Selling a sentiment is a straightforward thing - you tell someone. Belief7 is a more interesting beast; it allows you to disagree with it the way that the dogmatism of a positive affirmation doesn’t; it leaves you room for cynicism, despair, and failure, through which you can see if hope becomes important to you, rather than insisting that hope is there to begin with. There’s a complexity you can’t capture with a canva graphic. Or to quote from the best: you do not have to be good. You do not have to mainline happy thoughts for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body decide for itself. And eat hot chip and lie.
Entertainment
Why do they keep naming films things so mundane they’re nearly impossible to look up? Ian Wright mentioned being in a film called The Kitchen so I duly went to google it, with predictable results. Tacking on the year sometimes helps so I searched The Kitchen 2024 and got… more predictable results. They’re also completely un-memeable! I Wish You’d Go Back To What You Did Last Summer When You Had Fun Film Titles.
History
An aside to the aside - where does ‘history’ go in newspapers? Culture? News? Anyways, I’ve been reading about Parícutin, a volcano that more or less just popped out of a farmer’s cornfield in Mexico in 1943. This video is amazing - you can see the destruction wrought by the ash on nearby towns, as well as a frankly baller shot of I assume the scientist William Foshag lighting his cigarette on one of the volcanic rocks.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s poetry that’s being made accessible here. GARGOYLE! GARGOYLE!
I loved Piranesi, and I think this quote is deployed with a little more cynicism than positivists (I’m sure I’m slaughtering some kind of philosophical concept here) would, which is why I like it there and not on its own.
Of the multitudes of scholars of 1920s poetry that are reading this post, I’m sure.
I’m so sorry if this is a legitimate website that I’m just making fun of. Think of it as a convenient stand-in for every gentle sunset white text 50% opacity background image you’ve seen.
Including what you’re reading :] no, no, I’m sorry, I’m trying to get better at the self-derogatory thing.
Like, real belief, insofar as that exists, I guess is what I’m trying to say? I’d say that evangelical Christians giving out books whose plots were ‘I was a horrible atheist and sinner but then I found god <3’ (this happened to me) were selling something.