"Life! Get it while it's hot!"

A friend had sent me the latest issue of Poetry, which has a short essay by Lynda Barry entitled “Poetry is a Dumb-Ass Spider” in which her musings on the work of a spider that has spun a web outside of her 14th floor hotel room lead to thoughts about the interrelation between the execution of political prisoners in China and the commercial display of bodies in Las Vegas. This drives her to drink, and as she pops open the $9.00 beer from the mini-bar “a fragment of an A.E. Housman poem memorized two years ago presents itself as vividly as if someone were shouting it at me.” She gives us the poem:

When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

And she notes that “[o]nly now it means the exact opposite of what I thought it meant. It’s not about forbearance and taking the long view in life at all. It’s saying, Life! Life! Get it while it’s hot!”

I’m thinking about this as a I prepare to go to a memorial service at the Society for Ethical Culture in Brooklyn for Joannie Chang who, in her life, was a labor lawyer who devoted a lot of time calling out corporations on their crappy employment policies; she also spent a lot of time training for epic bike rides in Hawaii and Alaska to raise money for AIDS service organizations, reupholstering and refinishing furniture, singing karaoke, and baking cupcakes.

For the last several years, Joannie and her partner Luna were working actively to start a family and she birthed twin girls just two months ago, managing to carry the girls until their 32nd week -- a medical miracle in the minds of the doctors who discovered that Joannie's constantly upset stomach was not just indigestion but stomach cancer. After Joannie brought the babies into the world, she started a very aggressive course of treatment but passed away last weekend.

As I’ve been reading all the stories people have been sharing about Joannie’s vitality, strength, tenacity, good humor, and vision, I’ve been thinking of all the ways in which people continue to inspire and move us even after they’ve moved on. In the memories that we carry, in the words that circulate in letters, poems, and books, in the spirits of their children, in the reverberations of their actions, in the stories that their lives generate. Thinking that one of the ways in which we do justice to the lives of those whom we love is to continue to do our own work in a manner that honors their spirits.

When I’ve needed to lift my own spirits in these last few months, I’ve been turning to Alex Pearson’s interpretation of Sarpedon’s articulation of the hero’s code to Glaukos at the end of Book 12 of the Iliad:

“Friend, if we could live forever, unaging, you and I would simply walk away from this fight. But now that the angels of death and destruction swarm around us on the field of battle, let’s go get our asses kicked, or kick some ass ourselves.”