i would prefer not to

Last year was the first in a decade that I did not go to see the Bluebell Wood in bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The garden, of course, was closed to visitors then; until I saw these photos by Scott Heins at Gothamist of a seemingly emptied-out Manhattan last May, I had forgotten how long the shutdown went on and on in the city last year.

We went yesterday to see them, and we lingered over the view. I remembered that Maxine Greene once said in a lecture that most people look at a work of art for only a few seconds, and since then I have made a practice of looking. Looking at flowers, trees, fields of grass, the sky—these stir up a restlessness in me, a need to respond. I wish I could be like one of the bees, humming and drinking in the mild sweetness of the bluebells.

Of all the flowers in the garden, the bluebells are my favorite, and they often bloom in time to be a birthday treat for me. Today is a bittersweet birthday; I am now the age my mother was when she died. I had been thinking that (to my surprise) it was no big deal, really, and then I had a mild panic attack before we left for the garden.

Middle age, at least, provides a rationale for my innate melancholia, though perhaps less insight than I would like into how I should live my days. Meanwhile, my questions about picking and choosing have led me to “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” who does have a preference, which is neither to pick nor to choose but rather simply not to. I would prefer not to: I feel this preference deeply, and in some cases lately I have acted on it, letting go of some obligations so that I might have more time to myself.

Bartleby in turn has led me back to How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, which I read slowly through the beginning months of the pandemic last year. Odell writes about refusing without retreating, about standing apart from the world as it is “from the point of view of the world as it could be” in such a way that one’s despair about the world as it is is transformed into “a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the ‘wrong way’: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.” She calls the position by which one may continue to live in this world according to another frame of reference a “third space”: a space that one gets to by refusing as Bartleby does, without saying “yes” or “no.”

I am perhaps incapable of participating in most things except in the “wrong way,” which has often left me lonely. And so I am haunted by the loneliness of Bartleby, whose refusal lands him in prison, where he dies. I prefer, then, to occupy the “third space” with others—such as the children, who have been complaining when I take them to the garden every week, but who also seem to enjoy being there with me, once we’re there.

I’ve written

For the Ploughshares blog, I wrote about the essays of Jenny Diski.

I contributed a poem to Zen Mountain Monastery’s Covid memorial, which includes beautiful artwork, photography, and poetry.

I’ve listened and read

Sarah Jaffe asks who cares?

Amitava Kumar writes about word counts, check marks, and his response to Annie Dillard’s famous observation that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo says that poetry is “a place beyond words” that we use words to get to.