What is needful
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Indefinite
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Abstract
The names of three sections—Tributaries, Levees, and Deltas—are borrowed from riverine terminology. Tributaries are the sources of water near the headwaters of a river that come together to create and support the continued existence of the singularly named river (e.g., the Ohio River, Missouri, and Arkansas are all tributaries of the Mississippi. Their existence does not negate the identity of the Mississippi as a singularity but informs it.). Levees, manmade or natural, are barriers typically created from sediment and riverine detritus due to the natural flow of the river, preventing the river from going a particular direction—a levee is a place where something tries to go but is stopped; this does not change the river only its course. Finally, Deltas are the “end” of a river. Also called Mouths, Deltas are places where the river bed flattens out, and the freshwater spills out in multiple directions, typically into an ocean or sea. This way, Deltas are where the river “lets go” and gives itself back.
The narrator of these poems believes that humans are not so different from rivers. The typical state of man is a self-perception of moments, narrative fragments strung together by man’s overly developed cortex, wherein the self believes itself to be flitting from moment to moment in the eternal state of the present. However, if we could see the whole of existence from the outside, we would see that the individual does not exist at any singular point but as a flowing system eddying and bubbling through the Universe. Einstein wrote after his close friend Michael Besso’s death, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” If we could see past the illusion, literal enlightenment, we would know the truth of our individual existence. The self is only real in the way that a river is—the river exists, but the waters are constantly changing.
Humans have our physical tributaries existing in ancestral genomes and subjective formation through the stories they are told of who we are. So, likewise, the things we let go or are forced to part with build our levees, ushering each of us into new directions of existence, and, in the end, we are given back to the whole, spreading, emptying, flowing out into the unknowable consumption of the future. Yet, the course of the river/human, which is the story of comings and goings, remains carved upon the landscape. What may follow in these channels, what may chart new courses, or what may finish the work that began by another is yet to be seen, but, as Einstein said, what was, is never lost, only moved out of sight.
The goal throughout this collection is to celebrate existence, but a true celebration is necessarily accompanied by mourning. The cost of the narrator’s awareness of the self in the quantum sense is its own form of isolation. Yet, following Rilke’s advice to another young poet, the narrator sees the act of Love and the mercy and modesty of human needs as profoundly sufficient. There is, for the narrator, some level of charity from the divine which gives commensurately with our needs; partiality is, therefore, sufficient. The center does not hold, it’s true, but the narrator is content with its falling apart. The dissonance between the experiential self and the true cosmic self is mended in the assertion, “We remember things, not as they are, but as we need them to be.” Which is to say, we are left only with what is needful, and that is enough.
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