Marlborough Enterprise, MA
July 11 2004
Casey: Take the time to say you care
By Helen Marie Casey / Local Columnist
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Perhaps we are all like the character in the novel who laments, “I am
obsessed by the fear that there will not be time enough.” We sit by
our barbeque or under a tree and, try as we may to relax totally into
the moment at hand, we are more often than not owned by the clock or
the calendar. We are indentured.
We are antsy when we are without projects or work and we fidget
when we have no idea of what the day will hold. What we really want
to do is be in control of our time and of the future itself. What we
want is impossible. We are like the little boy who attempted to empty
the ocean bucket by bucket: our ambition outstrips our capacity. We
cannot number the days we have nor can we know what will empty itself
into our life. And this gives rise to our fundamental terrors:
disaster can as easily knock us down as not. Our imagination runs
riot with the possibilities.
We do our best to safeguard everyone dear to us but the
reminders of how little control we have are everywhere. Nightly
newscasters tell us about the toddlers who fall out of windows or off
third-story porches. News stories of the serial killer who buried his
victims in his yard stretch across the ocean right into our front
room. Wartime atrocities have become our daily fare.
Little wonder that we take fright at the smallest provocation
and see danger where there is, in fact, nothing visible. Little
wonder that we are learning to be wary. Little wonder that we are
withdrawing into ourselves when what this tired old world wants is a
little more embracing and a little less handwringing.
There are always individuals who find ways to transcend the
horrors that life presents and even to rescue meaning from its hiding
places. Fortunately for the rest of us, these individuals are often
artists and they fill the empty spaces that surround us with
language, paintings, sculptures, dance, and music.
Poet and teacher Gregory Djanikian writes of the Armenian
genocide, about which one might think nothing good could be made.
Yet, the poet uses memory, storytelling, and simple, familiar images
to remind us that so long as there is memory and language, the
destroyers do not hold the ultimate victory.
The poet-conjurer begins one of his mesmerizing poems this way:
“I can tell you it was a village/fertile and full of grain,/that the
moon grew full above it/before it darkened./I can tell you that the
figs/were abundant, their tiny seeds/were like small gems, hard/and
round in the mouth.”
As the poet continues to describe the village, the women, and
the men — all disappeared — he makes them reappear. He makes the
village idyllic and his love for his people palpable. He makes it
possible for his readers to recall that while there is much humans
cannot control, there is also much that we can control. We can refuse
to be mastered by fear or threats. We can refuse to give up on the
fundamental values and principles that define us. We can refuse to
allow anyone to write the horrors out of history lest forgetting them
— or being ignorant of them — we come to repeat them.
A little past the midpoint of his poem, Gregory Djanikian speaks
of the men of his village: “I can tell you that the men/deep in the
fields of wheat/would lie down soon/and disappear into its many
roots.”
These summer days we may be restless about any number of things
but about a few things we should have singular clarity. We need each
other is the first thing and the second is that we ought to say so
now and again. If we don’t say so, it’s always possible there won’t
be time enough.