Tabs Open #47: Joined By The Salt That Turned Them Faceless

For no reason other than that I’m desperate to write about anything other than politics—given that I’m currently spending all the rest of my free time doing politics—this feels like a good week for some poetry.

First, a quick preamble: I saw a viral tweet the other day that expressed a profound sadness that no one my age seems to have hobbies anymore. That the gig economy, and perhaps capitalism as a whole, have rendered us unable to engage in fun skill-building absent monetization. It seems like another sad truth in a world full of them, and I’m sure it is true to a degree—the demands on working people’s time and energy have certainly not decreased of late. But it didn’t really ring true for me. A lot of my friends have hobbies, things they’ve worked at for weeks or months or years; this is true even for the ones without the kind of comfortable money that typically allows for this sort of thing. In fact this newsletter (which I have not tried to monetize, intentionally, because I very much want it to remain a hobby instead of becoming a second job) has occasionally been a space for celebrating the cool stuff my friends are doing with their ever-diminishing free time.

I decided to use my modest platform to ask some of them to share those things with me, even and especially if it was something they’d ordinarily be too shy to put out in the world. The returns were frankly amazing. You’ll be astonished to hear that there are countless talented musicians, artists, poets, illustrators, and writers even in my small corner of the great unwashed working class.

Austin Kleon’s excellent blog had an entry with this picture a few weeks ago:

That’s the kind of spirit I was hoping to channel. And my friends didn’t disappoint. One of my friends, a nurse in her working life, shared this:

scrolling thunder @sentimentalBoar

@crowcialist Here's a poem of mine I don't hate 🤷‍♀️K

It’s always a treat to discover things like this about the people you know and like. Sarah’s decision to share this with me opened the floodgates for me and I started diving deep into some other poems as a result. The first that came to mind was one I had to dig a little bit to find, as it appears un-credited at the end of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, the last book I read in 2019.

It’s called “Black Marigolds,” and it comes from the 1st century AD. This is a translation of the original Sanskrit written by the poet Chauras.

I have no idea whether the American poet Jack Gilbert, writing almost two millennia later, ever read that. I do know that his poem “I Imagine The Gods” makes me feel the same way when I read it, evokes the same ancient and sensual air of mystery and longing. On my bedroom wall I have a big sheet of butcher paper where I tack things up and doodle with a Sharpie. This bit is excerpted there, where I can contemplate it daily:

Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

Speaking of the gods, this bit of award show poetry from soccer legend Eric Cantona was brought to my attention earlier today. What a mind. The crowd shots in this video are absolutely priceless.

B/R Football @brfootball

Eric Cantona's speech at tonight's #UCL draw was...something 😳M

(Cantona, besides being regarded as one of the best players in English Premier League history, is notorious for an incident in which he jumped into the stands to kick a fan after being ejected from a match. It later transpired that the fan was an avowed white nationalist with a history of violent assault on minorities. Cantona said his only regret about it was that he didn’t continue beating him.)

Alright, one last poem before I let you go. After I went to Iowa to canvass for Bernie Sanders in advance of the caucuses there I developed a sense of romantic attachment to the place. So I sought out all the poems I could find that had to do with Iowa in any way. The best of these, I think, is Debora Greger’s “The Right Whale in Iowa.” The closing lines really stuck with me:

flung back to shore, here rest two coins

      face to face, joined

by the salt that turned them faceless

      as they turned to each other.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll catch you next week.

-Chuck