I Call, You Respond

A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

Call and Response: “Metempsychosis”

CALL:

El Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegria, who has written nine books of poetry and prose, has long been a voice for self-determination in her homeland, even though she lived in self-imposed exile in North Africa with her family for a time. Alegria’s long relationship with her husband, Darwin “Bud” Flakoll – spiritual, extremely intimate, devoted to art and dedicated to humanitarian and social justice activities – started as a three-month fiery courtship and a quick marriage and grew into a rich, collaborative life of testimonio. Shortly before Alegria and Flakoll were to go on a trip to southern Asia in 1995, Flakoll passed away. Alegria traveled to Singapore, Bangkok and Jakarta with her husband’s soul, as she has said, and wrote her poetry collection, Sorrow, about that trip – and her posthumous dialogue with her husband.

For this call-and-response, I chose the poem “Metempsychosis,” which captures Alegria’s dual emotions of grief/wanting to die with her husband and acceptance/wanting to continue living, in such spare, short poems that offer wide, open spaces as the point of departure for reader response:

Metempsychosis

If there is a return
my wait has been long
and if there is not
it has been barely
a sudden lightning flash.

—From Sorrow, by Claribel Alegria

 

RESPONSE #3: by Chuck Zak

Reading “Metempsychosis,” my initial reaction was to the idea of “return,” the metempsychosis of the title. But the more I thought about it, I was drawn to the idea of “my wait,” the subject’s anticipation that her husband may, in some form that grief might not be too particular about, be restored to her.

I’m very interested in cosmology (when it’s presented in layman’s terms, anyway) and I’ve recently been reading/watching a lot of Roger Penrose, physicist/philosopher at the University of Oxford. One concept he discusses is the “Three Worlds,” which involves three infinities: 1) the physical universe (which, through technically finite, has an ever-accelerating boundary which will forever remain beyond our reach – for all intents and purposes, infinite); 2) mathematics, and; 3) consciousness. Each depends on the other, is in some sense contained within the other, yet is independent or the other as well.

Where in these three infinities does our loss belong when we grieve for someone? They’re gone from the physical universe. They remain in our consciousness, albeit subject to the whims of memory, but – despite what we tell ourselves in consolation – no one is ever satisfied with having only their memory of a loved one. Mathematics, or the “ideal” sphere? That realm provides solace in the sense of something truly eternal and beyond any sort of degradation. But no one expects to find their loved one waiting for them in an equation.

So that “wait” discussed in the poem, whether it has “been long” or “barely a…flash,” actually contains the hope that there will be a reunion somewhere (“barely a flash” might seem the harbinger of a much, much longer wait, but if the wait is eternal, that flash is irrelevant, no marker of time will suffice to measure our desolation).

So ultimately, for me, this poem is about the enormous, unbelievable risk we take when we love someone. Even when this poet despairs, there is still a grain of hope, otherwise why measure time at all? Yet even this hope, however humble, is too great if we are to be truly honest with ourselves (at least those of us who possess only a fantastic hope of an afterlife, not an expectation).

Is it despairing? What else do we have? Gulfs of infinity on either side of our lives, only these things we love in between to derive meaning from. We’re foolish in this regard, to an extreme that’s staggering, yet what else can we do? A million other questions spring from this line of thinking – yet why bother? Fall in love. Either because you can’t help it or just to spite the indifferent infinities.

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Chuck Zak is a copywriter by trade, a musician by choice and spends nearly 100% of his time in and around Philadelphia.