Continuing To Live

By Philip Larkin

Continuing to live — that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries —
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise —
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

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I reach for the lifeline of poetry.  A book arrived that was recently ordered; the title: Breathing, Chaos and Poetry, by Franco “Bifo” Berardi.  Berardi is European, an Italian intellectual.  My instinct is that the Europeans are ahead of us, having experienced tyranny and its consequences, as well as the fault-lines of democratic institutions.  Berardi’s essay is an attempt at therapy, a suggestion that poetry can help us breathe again in the suffocation of our present situation.  I read these lines while finishing the three and a half page introduction.

The techno-financial automatism of today’s so called governance, imposes the rule of plunderers.

Only an alliance between the engineer and the poet, might reverse humanity’s slide toward self-annihilation.

Despair leads people to abandon any sentiment of humanist universalism and turn toward aggression and fascism; chaos invades social life.

The abstract grip of financial absolutism is suffocating social respiration.

Poetry is the only line of escape from suffocation. … Only poetry will help us through the apocalypse that is already raging as an effect of decades of financial absolutism.  Only poetry will soothe the suffering of the engineer’s mind and the poet’s mind, and will act to reverse the financial sphere’s grip upon language….

— excerpt Breathing, Chaos and Poetry, by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

These descriptions and the offer of hope could well have been written yesterday about our situation here in North America.  We face the ascent of an exponentially growing pandemic.  We have a defeated president who refuses to leave office, a person who symbolizes the rule of the financial sector over our entire economy, and the wholesale deregulation/rule of plunder.

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What about the Philip Larkin poem?  The poem is an example of poetry’s redeeming language, allowing us to breathe again.  Poetry tells the truth, in a way that prose, when prose is bent to the purposes of marketing, or bent to the purposes of propaganda (Fox News) can never do.  Our problem with language lies at the heart of our social dysfunction.  How can our use of language find rehabilitation?  There is only language to find anchor to the truth beneath the lies.

The Larkin poem speaks truthfully of the arc of a individual lifespan.  Living comes down to habit, and constant loss.  The possibilities of a “win” diminish with failing faculties; the mind notices that the list of priorities grows shorter.

What is one man’s/woman’s life against the backdrop of the cosmos?  What blind impress do all our behavings bear?

So, to give us a tune to hold onto, an anchor chain of rhythm, rhyme and harmony….