As some of you may know, my partner Mariella is a poet. She writes and reads a lot of poetry and is very connected to the poetry world; by proximity, I am a part of that world, reading poetry or just being around people who do. But the truth is, I am very skeptical when it comes to trying new things. Catchy things always make me doubt their quality. For example, she recently borrowed A Suit or a Suitcase by Maggie Smith from the library and told me how profound the poems are. Yet I doubted it. I couldn’t take it seriously simply because the title was so catchy, but good.
Then I went to Guyana for my research trip, and the night we came back, I finally decided to pick up the book. The next day, we went to Costco to buy some food. On the ride home, I was still talking about it. I couldn’t stop processing it.
As I was getting into the poem titled For Years I Lived, I was transported into parts of my mind and my thinking that recognize what we are. Yet a lot of it was misconstrued in the way we think of what and who we are in the world. Maggie Smith took me down this road of giving me clarity right there in the car.
She used a metaphor that our existence, our life, is water. Scientifically, we are 70% water, but I had never thought philosophically or existentially that we are water. The way she broke it down completely shifted how I see things. We aren’t a lump of clay or some chunk of wood to be carved.
It made so much sense for me personally as I’m thinking about identity and being. It even connects to this concept I wrote about for one of my classes when we were studying new materialism, where I termed it heliotropic black mattering. This poem fits right into that framing. I didn’t name it as water back then; I named it as us bending and reshaping to our surroundings. Sometimes we shrink or dry up, but we also get blessed with downpours and overflows. We shape ourselves to traverse the world. Maggie Smith said we’re flowing, and it just started to make so much sense.
So I just went into this deep discussion with myself about us being water. An oak tree loses parts of itself once it’s formed and reformed. But if we’re water, we might dry up, or we might flow in abundance, yet we never lose ourselves in a way where we stop being who we are. We’re always going to be water. If we dry up, I don’t know what happens then, and if we overflow, I don’t know what happens then.
The waters are gentle. Water is sweet, and it’s salty. It gives life and takes lives; it can be a sustainer or a destructive force. When we think of ourselves as water, I feel so much more powerful, and I want to thank Maggie Smith for that. I also want to thank Mariella for bearing with me and sharing this work of art that taps into ways of thinking I’m sometimes slow to engage with, even if I’m always happy I finally do.
I’m happy that we are water. We can flow. We can hold so many things at the same time. Sure, we get polluted or contained sometimes. But water finds a way to burst through. Instead of being permanently molded by everything around us, we shape those things. We take their forms, and we can also shape them in ways that we like. And that makes me happy.
Leave a Reply