Memento

A Poem

Remember that your work is done
In light of the great unfinishing.
Lap after lap, the race is run,
Flagging strides, cramped muscles diminishing,
And still you tread on, life never replenishing.

But it is in the memory
That we are fitted to our shared end
The work undone in plenary,
The book unwritten, the song never penned,
The flight canceled, call unanswered, wrongs gone uncondemned.

Remember that so little lasts.
Every day a little more is lost.
Each moment collects its new pasts.
Every morning, a new river is crossed;
Every evening, a new draft of the story glossed.

Do you go gentle in the dark,
Or do you walk with fear and trembling?
Tension prods the soul to embark—
Every action, every loss resembling
An overwrought mind, fighting the great dissembling*.

Remember that the dancing stops,
That that which once was will soon be not.
In the long run, every beat drops.
Remember, your death is coming in hot.
Remember, the forgetting is part of the plot.

* v. 1. To hide under a false appearance; 2. To put on the appearance of : simulate.

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A note: I generally try not to “explain” poems, but sometimes they bear a little context.

Last week, I was able to get away for a retreat on simplicity in a world of excess at the marvel that is Laity Lodge. Malcolm Foley and Jamie Smith led us through a discussion on the ways our economic life is not neutral, that Mammon (cf. Matt. 6:24) demands sacrifice and must be resisted. One of the themes that they brought out was the need for a healthy memento mori as a path of resistance—if you forget your mortality, it becomes easier to give in to the logic of scarcity and accumulation and empire. Only in embracing death as part of life (albeit temporary!), is the fear of death that drives our greed defanged.

On Saturday night as part of a concert, Joshua Stamper gathered some of the attendees into a spoken-word chorus for a piece called “heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves” (taken from the final section of Eliot’s “Little Gidding”). As voices rose into a cacaphony of noise through reading overlapping headlines about economic anxieties, sales pitches, and stock reports, two voices begin to break in—one reading John 14 on the peace of Christ, and one reading from Eliot, focusing our attention on the lines “Quick now, here, now, always— / A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything) /And all shall be well and /All manner of thing shall be well /When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire /And the fire and the rose are one.”

It was a truly luminous, in-the-moment work of art to behold. It was especially moving, as I had been reading through the Four Quartets all week as a meditative exercise.

On the way home—a long and winding way including canceled flights and a 2:00 a.m. check-in to a seedy airport-adjacent hotel in Dallas—I started thinking on these themes, fitting them into this formal ABABB build that characterizes the “wounded surgeon” theme of Section IV. of “East Coker”, and imagining this as the words of a wise comforter carefully cutting out the pretense, performance, exhaustion, and privations of late capitalism from one carrying these as a burden.

I have needed this. I suspect you might, too.