Claudia Rankine

## Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004)

Aime Cesaire epigraph: "And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear."

Death, television, grief, public grieving, who is worth grieving, what grieving means, the value of a life, versions of reality

"Am I dead?"

Twilight stage, knowing you're going to die in the house. Diagnosed dying, am I dead, vs. being dead. Constant knowledge of dead or alive, until dead, of course. How to translate pain to page, to a social space like a poem.

Television on all the time

"Joseph Brodsky saying, *What's the point of forgetting if it's followed by dying?"*

"This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today--too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think."

"YOUR LIFE IS WAITING"

"Weren't they mourning the protection they felt she should have had? A protection they'll never have? Weren't they simply grieving the random inevitability of their own deaths?"

"Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated and loved."

"If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is 'I' even me or am 'I' a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it? What does my subject mean to me?"

"Any kind of knowledge can be a prescription against despair."

"What alerts, alters."

"Who will she be when she is too tired to cry? Where does her kind of grief go?"

"Define loneliness?

Yes.

It's what we can't do for each other.

What do we mean to each other?

What does a life mean?

Why are we here if not for each other?"

"I'm amused but my sister is distracted because she has been asked to assess the value of her dead children's lives. She has to meet with an insurance adjuster."

"Still a day after the attack on the World Trade Center a reporter asked him to estimate the number of dead. his reply--More than we can bear--caused me to turn and look at him as if for the first time. It is true that we carry the idea of us along with us. And then there are three thousand dead and it is incomprehensible and ungraspable. Physically and emotionally we cannot bear it, should in fact never have this capacity. **So when the number is released it is a sieve that cannot hold the loss Giuliani recognized and answered for."**

"The language of description competes with the dead in the air."

"So terrorists embody that state of beyond; they are that freedom embodied. They bring life to that deathly state of lawlessness, breath to breathlessness. They carry those whose lives they touch over into that breathless realm. Antigone, the character not the play, by Theban definition was a domestic terrorist. Hegel uses her as an example. She identified with the dead, was willing to walk among them. In the course of the drama, even though she has many lines left to speak in the play, Creon eloquently describes her to her sister as already dead. So it is, was, already, with Osama."

"It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex. Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex."

The replacement mourner for her father.

Value of death, of grieving, of I v. other, I v. other, I v. other.

"Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different than a handshake. ...The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that--Here. I am here. **This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps everything to do with being alive."**

"Or one meaning of here is "In this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of," or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody--Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. **In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of."**

*Connections to Maggie Nelson, part. The Argonauts, I finished them at the same time, and I know there are connections (ie., connections between people, the form) but I know not what yet.*