You are busy being born the whole first ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you are busy dying. . . . "Being born" here is an open and existential category: the gaining of experience, a living intensely in the present, after which comes the long period of life when a person is finished with the new. This "dying" doesn't have to be negative. It too is an open and existential category of being: the age when the bulk of your experience, the succession of days lived in the present, are mostly over. You turn reflective, interior, to examine and sort and tally. You reach a point where so much is behind you, but its scenes continue to exist somewhere, as memory and absence at once, as images you'll never see again.
None of it matters; it is gone. But it all matters; it lingers. The whole of youthful experience has slid away, the years and the people, the moments and feelings. In all that loss, a person continues to locate little tokes of joy from new and surprising places. Still learning, still becoming. Busy being born, and busy dying. You have a present, a now, even as you drag with you a snowballing bulk of what was. Sometimes you spike a new joy, you really do, and sometimes you hit an old one, and the more you've lived the more there are of the old ones.
--Rachel Kushner, "The Hard Crowd"
**
Much of Kushner's essay "The Hard Crowd" circles around memories of growing up in San Francisco in the 80s and early 90s. She and I did not have the same childhood: Kushner is four years younger than I am, brought up by unconventional beatnik communist parents, immersed early in the grit of the city, intensely social, whereas I was brought up by isolated parents who seemed older than they actually were, who inhabited the mores and fears of an earlier generation, who were deeply nostalgic for an idealized rural past. Nonetheless, our worlds overlap, and not only in terms of pop culture and the historical moment (Also, oddly, we have the same birthday.) Among other things, both of us are the daughters of educated parents and both found ourselves, for chunks of our lives, immersed in worlds where people have no conception of books or art as mentorship or security. In those situations one can become, in Kushner's words, "the soft one" . . . or perhaps be revealed as such, for surely that is what we always were.
The excerpt I shared from "The Hard Crowd" both surprised me and did not. Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been talking for months about the sensation of having reached a moment of reckoning in our work as poets. For the most part we have stopped envying the trappings of success. We no longer strive for attention in journals and contests. We've stopped castigating ourselves for not being famous. We've "turn[ed] reflective, interior"; we "examine and sort and tally." This wrestling has been a central element of our Poetry Lab conversations, a commonality among us, though I am younger than the other two by a decade. But as Kushner points out, dying is a "long period of life."
Still, I was surprised to see these thoughts framed so jauntily. That's not to discount the note of elegy in her words, but "little tokes of joy" felt so cheerful, and also accurate. This dying business is interesting, absorbing, comical, and at times almost subversive. It keeps me busy and entertained. It is like sorting through piles at a yard sale: junk mugs, junk baseball hats, junk record albums, junk chairs . . . and then, suddenly, a random postcard becomes a portal. O past. O whiff of rust and bones and pulsing life.
