There are days, weeks, and—if we are very, very lucky—sometimes years that we spend just going on about our business. We go to work and the grocery store. We grouse about the President and—Lord knows—about Congress. We bicker with our spouses and then laugh uproariously at the antics of our children or our pets. We feel a twinge of pain or guilt at the sight of a homeless vet begging on the highway off ramp and rifle through our purses for change. We sigh at the misfortune of the neighbor who lost a brother to suicide or the town that was flattened by a tornado. We wince at the small cruelties of children and Hollywood starlets and politicians. But mostly we go on, shrouded in the veil of “normalcy.”
But inevitably some time—and it is inevitable, really—the shroud is ripped, and the world is revealed in its rawness. Sometimes we are struck by its broken and jagged beauty. Sometimes we are on the pointed end of its cruelty. Sometimes it’s both. We look around and wonder how it is that everyone else is going on about their business—the working, the shopping, the bickering. We wonder how it is that they can be that blind. And our pain and our awareness are both excruciating and blessedly vivid.
But usually it fades, doesn’t it? Each day that goes by, we get more used to the new status of things. We become resigned to the scar that was once a bleeding wound. The dull ache creeps toward the background instead of obliterating everything in the foreground. And slowly, slowly, we put the shroud back on, even if what we now call normal is new.
The poets I admire most are the ones who refuse the shroud. The ones who bear witness. The ones who look directly into the face of private suffering yet transform it into a mirror on the human condition. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz is—or I guess was—unflinching in his witness of individual human suffering and yet his poems never stop there. They are civic and collective and create a fearless catalog of cruelty that now belongs to us all. As Helen Vendler said of Milosz: “the person is irrevocably a person in history, and the interchange between external event and the individual life is the matrix of poetry.”
I have spent these past days immersed in the suffering of adolescence—its confusions, its demons, its dangers. Once again, Milosz has been good company and good counsel:
“Normalization,” (Czeslaw Milosz translated by Clare Cavanaugh):
This happened long ago, before the onset
of universal genetic correctness.
Boys and girls would stand naked before mirrors
studying the defects of their structure.
Nose too long, ears like burdocks,
sunken chin just like a mongoloid.
Breasts too small, too large, lopsided shoulders,
penis too short, hips too broad or else too narrow.
And just an inch or two taller!
Such was the house they inhabited for life.
Hiding, feigning, concealing defects.
But somehow they still had to find a partner.
Following incomprehensible tastes—airy creatures
paired with potbellies, skin and bones enamored of salt pork.
They had a saying then: “Even monsters
have their mates.” So perhaps they learned to tolerate their partners’
flaws, trusting that theirs would be forgiven in turn.
Now every genetic error meets with such
disgust that crowds might spit on them and stone them.
As happened in the city of K., where the town council
voted to exile a girl
So thickset and squat
that no stylish dress could ever suit her,
But let’s not yearn for the days of prenormalization.
Just think of the torments, the anxieties, the sweat,
the wiles needed to entice, in spite of all.
Oh, that’s it isn’t it? We squint our eyes and transform ourselves into monsters, don’t we? Standing naked before the mirror, we see ourselves as damaged and imperfect and unlovable. The heartbeat of atrocity is self-hatred. The brilliance of this poem is that Milosz reminds us that private cruelties can mutate into mob-rule and exile and genocide, yet he does not diminish the piercing pain of youth soaked in self-loathing and doubt. He holds it all, and this week, he has held me—and by way of me, my daughter—through the “torments, the anxieties, the sweat.”
