Feeling Infinitely Beautiful

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.

–Marie Howe

I read this poem yesterday, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

I don’t know if a poem has ever explained so well the contradiction between “that yearning”–that part of you that wants and wants and wants–and reality. That yearning is always there: “We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want / whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.” I don’t think that part of you ever dies, because it’s what propels you forward. But that’s not “what the living do.” What the living do is leave crusty dishes and forget or refuse to call the plumber, drop a bag of groceries on the street and watch the bag break, spill coffee down their sleeves. What the living do is live imperfect lives, each day.

“This is what the living do.”

The speaker addresses this poem to Johnny, who did the opposite. He stopped parking the car and slamming the car door shut in the cold; he stopped living. The speaker says this is “What you finally gave up.” He gave up all of the small, meaningless tasks we have to do every day.

But he also gave up on the small moments of clarity we sometimes have. The speaker says: “But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, / say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep / for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: / I am living. I remember you.”

The speaker continues on despite her hurt and loss and longing, and she finds “a cherishing so deep” for the reality of her chapped life. Because, “This is it.” This is life. What the living must do is what the speaker finally does: she finds a way to appreciate her life. She doesn’t give up.

Robert Morris - Blind Time II and III, 1976-1985

Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago. 

THE SONG IS TALKING ABOUT ALCOHOL

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol. 

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do – and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.“ But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink – unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says "hey, what’s in this drink?" It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren't supposed to have sexual agency.

Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than "I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because unlike in Blurred Lines, the woman actually has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposedto, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…" She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: "at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.