Human existence and relationships are deeply complex and visceral. As much as we adapt to new technologies, evolving cultures, and , we're not able to forget for too long that we're just simply human, with all humanity's innate contradictions. Our minds are capable of great feats in the realms of science, art, philanthropy, yet even the greatest minds are still subject to emotions such as aloneness, remorse, or hatred.
The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks conveys what, perhaps, scientific journals cannot; We have the technology to terminate an unplanned pregancy, but the matter doesn't end there. The person emoting in this piece describes desire for the joys of motherhood, an understanding of the lost potential of the terminated lives, and regret about the course ultimately chosen. There's the unspoken request for forgiveness, understanding, from the reader as well as from "the children you got that you did not get." Expediency and technology never nullify these innate human, maternal responses.
With the number of distracting devices and toys available to amuse and/or torture us in modern society, with the ability to use the technology to connect to others via internet or mobile devices, it's ironic that so many still express feelings of loneliness. The writer of Alone, Maya Angelou, could very well have been another mother, the "empty nester'' whose years of nurturing her children led up to living alone. Or a famous blogger with a huge online community of correspondents who goes home at night to find that, as usual, there's no one there. Human beings need physical contact, personal intimacy, to feel connected in the most fundamental sense to another human being. There's no electronic device that can produce even a reasonable facsimile of human interaction. Yet, our interaction with one another can sometimes be antagonistic or painful as described in Destiny by Rosario Castellanos. Castellanos echoes the saying "kill or be killed." Like The Mother who asserts that "in my deliberateness I was not deliberate", Castellanos seems to acknowledge that there are times when the promotion of one is the demise of the other. There is a connection, even a sharing, between the parties, even in this morbid exchange.
It is precisely because of our humanity that someone without a similar experience to those described in these poems can still relate to the material. The lost promise in aborted lives resonates deeply with me as I really believe in the worth and potential in every single life. Most of us might not understand nuclear friction, project management, or be able to grasp a foreign language. But we can most certainly understand violence, longing, heartbreak, or hope.
Poetry
The Mother
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
From A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harper & Brothers. © 1945 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Used with permission. All rights reserved
Alone
by Maya Angelou
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Destiny
by Rosario Castellanos
Destiny
We kill what we love. What’s left
Was never alive.
No one else is close. What is forgotten,
What else is absent or less, hurts no one else.
We kill what we love. Enough of drawing a choked breath
Through someone else’s lung!
There is not air enough for both of us. And the earth will not hold
Both our bodies
And our ration of hope is small
And pain cannot be shared.
Man is an animal of solitudes,
A deer that bleeds as it flees
With an arrow in its side.
Ah, but hatred with its insomniac
Glass eyes; its attitude
Of menace and repose.
The deer goes to drink and a tiger
Is reflected in the water.
The deer drinks the water and the image. And becomes
-before he is devoured – (accomplice, fascinated)
his enemy.
We give life only to what we hate.
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2 comments:
I like your title. Reminds me of that 80's song "human" by Human League.
Your comments on human to human connectedness were very thoughtful and beautifully expressed. I agree that modern technology has resulted in many people feeling lonely and disenfranchised from other humans, and that face to face contact is rapidly becoming relegated to the less likely means of contact being replaced by devices like blackberries, i-phones, on-line dating, etc. The essence of being human is to love and be loved; all the rest is window dressing. But unfortunately the physical distance engendered by technology has reframed the meaning of human connectedness and communication.
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