‘Does It Honor Life?’

Since 2016, I have kept a numbered notebook. It is a habit that reminds me of time passing, that I was there, at one point, within it. The notes accumulate; they eventually make a shape; they turn into books (my first poetry collection). They are my private “signs of life.”

After I finish a book, the notebook changes and the numbers restart. This latest notebook I have been keeping since 2021. I am on the 607th note. The 598th note includes this question I heard while waking up a few weeks ago: “Does it honor life?” At probably 5 A.M., I walked through the dark into the next room to write this down.

(The question was derived from this Hayao Miyazaki video that had been making the rounds. A Studio Ghibli team is pitching that an AI-generated zombie is superior to a human actor because it can walk on its head without feeling any pain. Miyazaki responds that it only makes him think of his disabled friend who lives with much physical pain in his life. He then adds, “I strongly feel as though this is an insult to life itself.”)

I have been asking a lot of questions lately: How do I live another day in this country? Should I be doing something to preserve my safety? Is it right, the way I treat my family, near or far? Am I doing all that I could, or should, for this world in which others are suffering more than me at this very instant? and, always and selfishly, What can I write today? Will it be any good?

Probably a lot of things that are happening right now are insults to life itself. It would not do me or you a lot of good for me to enumerate them here. I have instead tried to focus on just the other question, to just ask it, and then to try and answer it once or twice during the day.

I find that the answer I keep coming up with is writing. To write something beautiful. To write something to remember what was, is, and could be. This is the obvious answer, because I am a writer, and this, I have found, is part of the purpose of my life.

Yet what else is the purpose of my life? Being present at the weddings of my friends. Putting my feet into the ocean. Making a daily life with the person I love. Learning how to be less afraid of driving. Walking my dog. Watching my dog sleep (and snore). Being reminded of my friends and being minded by my friends. Complaining about the lack of snow in the Pacific Northwest, and then getting a lot of it in two weeks. Watching snowmen melt when I walk my dog. Thinking about every child and adult who got to make a snow man. I always imagine them laughing. I love the snow man. Remembering how, when I was a child, I wanted a serving of shaved ice as large as a snow man, and wondering why that wasn't already a thing, because obviously. And so on and so on.

I think about all the advice I gave on this newsletter in those two short-long years. I miss giving advice, but I also wonder if there was more advice to give, and perhaps I had answered all the questions that I could answer? Because, after all, whatever your question, my answer is a question that only you can answer. Does it honor life? Do you possess your life enough to know how to honor it? What would it take to do that?

I look over my notebook and I am surprised to find poems in it, but also prose. So much prose over these years I have not been publishing very much. Something that needs more than the shapes I'm used to being in. For a while it has felt as though there have only been weak wisps coming out of it all.

These wisps on the page begin to feel more like a mountain. Dashes across the page converging the greater the distance from them. And the unanswered questions of the moment, so great their number, wash away after leaving only what was said and what was done. And so a notebook becomes a book; a life becomes history.

So many questions are about how to live well in history, when the point of history is that it isn't life.

And then I think back on those years these wisps came out of: all the difficult firsts in my adult life; choosing to change and grow rather than stay and give up. Choosing to try another way. Willing to be wrong about it. Turning back when I least wanted to. That seems also a way to make life mine. Another way to honor it.

Those wisps turn into knocks and notes slipped under my door. Messages from strangers who were once myself; who love and esteem my company; who have my mind in mind. I can honor my life by remembering: nothing I do is incomplete, but a correspondence forever.

Six new poems in the Brooklyn Rail—a Tin House Craft Intensive on titles in March—"New Growth," Warren Wilson MFA lecture on uncertainty delivered July 2024.