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Kieri Bourque
April 6, 2008
Essay #3
Jeff Pethybridge
To act or not to act despite what tradition states;
An understanding of the book “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs”
How many times have you come across something in the paper and felt a small twinge of pain for the suffering of the subject of the article? I know there have been many occasions that I thought that I should help but protocol and tradition said that I shouldn’t and so I didn’t. These are things that Juliana Spahr touches on in this book. She asks us to think about two specific topics, “the unanswerable question of political responsibility” and “the call to act despite the lack of answers.” The book in itself is her call to act despite the lack of answers and it is seen in many ways. However to understand what those ways are you have to break down what she is saying, get passed the similes and metaphors of her poetry and get to the root of her thoughts.
Juliana Spahr creates a voice in these poems that is seeking solutions to the world and almost thinking out loud in a sense. She ultimately comes across the idea that everything going on in the world gets in through a human’s five senses. We breathe in oxygen and fumes from a fire, and we exhale carbon dioxide and our thoughts. But it all gets under our skin even if we don’t truly acknowledge that it is there. She tries to use poetry to embody things that only theory can point to. Knowing that she is writing about the invasion of Iraq after September 11, 2001 helps to understand some of the flow and the reasons that she chooses to include what goes on throughout the world on a day to day basis. The poem is an expanded thought process strewn throughout the course of four months and everyday that she writes and pinpoints specifics she ties into her life because ha is part of the point that she is trying to make, we are all connected by the things that we breathe.
On a specific day December 1, 2002 Spahr begins to talk about skin and describes how skin is the largest organ and how “your skins is a boundary separating yous from the rest of yous.” When first diving into this day and seeking to find out what she is talking about it seems that Spahr is trying to say that we are separated because of skin. Then two lines later Spahr clarifies herself as if she in that constant flow of thought realizes that skin simply as a boundary was not a clear enough definition. In this clarification she says, “I speak of the separations that define this world and the separations that define us, Beloveds, even as we press our skin against one another in the night.” This is where we as readers realize that she is saying that as human beings we are separate entities connected by a common thread and Spahr as the writer is using this knowledge as a call to act despite the lack of specific concrete answers. Spahr wants those who read this book to take this knowledge and understand how everything that occurs in the world affects each and every one of us.
Spahr continues on December 1, 2002 to pinpoint specific occurrences that seem completely disconnected from the US but knowing the point stated before begin to become connected. One of the first things that she points out is fumes from a burning nightclub in Caracas . I had absolutely no idea as to where Caracas was so I looked it up and found that Caracas is the capitol of Venezuela. In the fire 47 people died because they could no escape fast enough since there were over 400 people inside. Another occurrence on that day that was pointed out was that 150 were seeking shelter at a Catholic Mission in the City of Man . This was due to fighting going on were these people lived and breathed. Both instances involve fumes from bombs and fires, things that we as humans breathe in and things that would get under our skin and connect us to the person reading the story half a world away. The point mentioned on December 1, 2002 that was the hardest for me to comprehend was that of:
“I speak of boundaries and connections, locals and globals, butterfly wings and hurricanes.”
The first thought across my mind was “what the heck do butterfly wings and hurricanes have in common?” Then when the question was posed in class, it was answered that this alluded to something called Chaos Theory , meaning that the smallest change in atmosphere, the flapping of butterfly’s wings could change the atmosphere so that months later a tornado would occur.
Those occurrences on that day set up for Spahr to start showing how politics plays into the day, and here is also where we see her opinion of the war and government leading this war. Specifically she points out how it seems to her that the world has begun to look like “a game of some sort, a game where troops are massed on a flat map of the world, and if one looks at the game board long enough one can see the patterns there even as one is powerless to prevent them.”