Try As I Might, I Cannot Be Enobarbus

There is something so simple and pure about a piano solo. I was listening to Jeff Bjorck’s rendition of “Be Still My Soul” earlier this evening, and listening to those notes resonate for half a moment in the air before the next key is struck touched something unnamable within my own soul. I first encountered “Be Still My Soul” in church; we sang it as a hymn. The lyrics are still imprinted in my head, and when I hear those swells from “Finlandia,” my soul seems to be caught helplessly in the rising wave of music, too.



It makes me think of the fragility of life. My friend Amphiarus was recently diagnosed with cancer. He’s twenty, the same age I am. We’re so young. We’re supposed to have our whole lives in front of us, aren’t we? The day after Amphiarus told me about his condition, one of my professor’s best friends passed away. The assignment for that day was related to her friend’s lifework. In that professor’s class, we have been investigating art and poetry, why we read poetry, and if art is really worth making. Is it worth it to spend a lifetime creating poetry, which is just artifice and illusion? What will be left after we die?

In the evening, after class, I was listening to Telemann’s “Soupirs Après la Princesse Dulcinée,” one of my favorite songs. It is so sweet, it is painful. My experiences over the previous days only heightened that feeling of bittersweet pain. I felt that the music, beautiful though it was, fell short of expressing what I was feeling. The sun was setting as I stared out the window and wondered why life was so damn beautiful, why it was that the greatest composers, the greatest poets and playwrights could not capture my feelings which reduced me to an immovable heap that could only wonder why death happened, why we live so long or even live at all, and how cruel and beautiful the very act of living is. I have not recognized that intensity of feeling and sense of unjust longing in any literature I have read, film I have seen, music I have heard. It could not encompass the range of my feeling. Perhaps that is all poetry is – one great big sham. A great big sham that makes us human and allows us to feel for another, to know another’s condition.

Yet when I watch “Pushing Daisies,” Ned’s pain and longing is my pain and longing. Perhaps I can understand everyone else’s story to some degree, yet when it really comes down to the very fiber of being, I cannot be Ned and Ned cannot be me. Neither can you. I cannot be Lessa Harry or Mara or Enobarbus or Oscar, however much I may want it.

I think my life, my friend’s life, Professor Greene’s life and her friend’s life, are beautiful because they will end one day. Keats had it right. In briefly talking with Amphiarus, he said that this change in his life has made him reconsider what is truly important. He has not elaborated since, other than trying to study abroad this summer in Paris, but I intend to find out what’s important to him so that, perhaps, I will discover more what is important to me. Antony and Cleopatra knew what was important: strolling the streets and people watching, letting the day go by, being a fool for love. Lying in the sun. Making friendships which will stand the test of time. Laughing at gilded butterflies and realizing how much your parents love you.

I know what poetry is – it is a specific lie which tells a greater truth. It makes us human because it blurs the line between thinking of ourselves and our own experiences into the experiences and thoughts of another.




In the vein of poetry, the following is a poem I wrote in response to an activity done in one of my classes. It’s on race and politics, and we did a free association with the terms “white” and “black.” Some words I got from this class, other words from other classes. It’s not very good, but it is my attempt to be poetic, too.

Sealed Seule

White black white,
Black white black.
Ash and dust and funerals
Don’t contemplate the tomb,
The darkness of the womb so
Close and tender, so rocky
And morose and warm.

Sinking beneath a thousand levels
Of grime and dirt and words
Into a place where black
And white
And all the colors in between
Are wiped away to nothing.

Carbuncle, onyx, obsidian
Thick and slick on the tongue
Like Moynihan.
A void which is not even a
Place which has no name
No sense no light no darkness
Just consciousness which isn’t
Even aware of itself.

Do not stopper up my eyes, for
They have no use in that darkness
Stringent, sealed seule.

What a life is that?
White and black and everything
In between come back again,
And all the pains and all the distinctions
Of a world that is not Zen, that is not round
Comes again the destruction of a unity.
I am not me, and neither is she.

Photo credits: "Untitled," Shevad Vadlen; "Inspired by 'Lovely Bones,'" Ambiaso; "One Could," Cole Rise.