’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
— excerpt from "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll, 1871
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? — William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939
"Jabberwocky" was a favorite poem of mine growing up. My mother read it to me as a child, and I committed it to memory right away. I loved that something so nonsensical could still have meaning, that one could infer from rhythm and diction and tone what the writer was intending to convey. Quite a lot feels nonsensical to me at the moment. That is true on a global level: where we are as a country, as a people, as a fractured nation in the wake of this absurd and damaging election. It is true on level that's closer to home too: what we are navigating as a family, my own daily life at the moment let alone what our 5-year-old has to endure, the drastically different course our path has taken from what we expected it to look like this fall. These rogue cells we call cancer, our medical reality that to me is still confounding and nonsensical despite the protocols and diagnostic codes that try to tame it into something verging on the straightforward. This constant sense that while we are holding it together, things are still falling apart. The widening vortex that sometimes threatens to swallow me whole if I don't keep moving forward without too much reflection. I am not going to comment directly on the election here. This is not the forum to do so. No matter what your politics, all I will say is this: I realized on election night as I processed the unexpected along with everyone else that more than any other emotion, I felt almost numb. Regardless of the results that night - and of course the results matter - I had long before entered some stage of shock and grief over the fact that things had gotten so out of hand, at how polarized we had become as so-called "united" states, at how outlandish the discourse had gotten. The Yeats poem above is one of my other favorite poems from the past, long before The Sopranos made it more popular. While unfailingly bleak, it feels quite apt at the moment. This is a time when the worst seem full of passionate intensity. It is uncharted territory as a constant now - both personally for us with James in navigating these rough waters, and with our country, still in either its adolescence as a democracy or in its mid-life crisis (I haven't decided my own POV on that yet). All I know how to do in the face of these unknowns is to tap into muscles I never knew existed, to move in ways I never anticipated, to "gyre" and to "gimble" even when I don't know what those action words actually mean. To stop my own slouching, straighten my back and stand tall, move nimbly ahead and make the best of what even the nonsense brings. Our country's misplaced bird of prey cannot hear the falconer at the moment. Our own ceremony of innocence was drowned on August 17th when the cancer cells had already been loosed upon his body. It is unprecedented, downright terrifying even to be this unmoored, and yet we forge ahead even when the way forward is unclear. So gyre and gimble we will. With a supermoon to guide us.
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