I found I had nothing to say to this question and I looked for something where someone had something to say. We look for soothsayers and truth-tellers.
We need help most to say that we have experienced that which we lack. We feel most the lack of something to feel grateful for, for we cannot recognise fulfillment, even in those places where it is possible.
I found this through that aid to need that is the Poetry Foundation website. I found a soothsayer in a poet called William Meredith, who also looked for something where someone had something to say. Meredith found it in Pascal and Wendell Berry and quotes them.
Meredith can feel like any of us. I felt most like him in his self-description as an:
...... old
needer, looking for someone to need,
What we seek we find in the accident of some else’s birth (I say someone only because we like things that teach us to have individual identity) in ourselves to express our need and give thanks for its immediate fulfillment in the other who guides our senses and opens our mouths and speaks gratitude for life. Is it the God that fills the enpty spaces in Pascal’s universe? or is the self arising out of our own past and future to remind ourselves of our survival thus far.
Whatever, it is a ‘you’ who answers a ‘needer’s’ lack of them. The person is not the answer, but the facilitator of our need, metamophosisng into praise for the fulfillment we failed to notice when we might have noticed it if we had recognised it. And, maybe the very feeling of missing it is necessary for we only achieved it by the chance that we have thus far avoided accidents and happenings fatal to us, the things that ‘happen us away‘, that could reduce us back to the mud and silt we came from. The most wonderful thing is that in saving us thus far, it uses the same process by which it produces others, a ‘you’ with which to relate and see the world again with, and who opens our mouths to thank it or him or her or them.
There is enough in William Meredith without adding my voice, when it, he, she or they enters into my body to speak the thanks I will feel. Thanks for the present. Thanks for being in it.
______
Accidents of Birth BY WILLIAM MEREDITH
Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu’à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.
—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion
The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?
—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House
Spared by a car or airplane crash or cured of malignancy, people look around with new eyes at a newly praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these. For I’ve been brought back again from the fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie down for long naps. And I’ve also been pardoned miraculously for years by the lava of chance which runs down the world’s gullies, silting us back. Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet happened away. But it’s not this random life only, throwing its sensual astonishments upside down on the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs, not just me being here again, old needer, looking for someone to need, but you, up from the clay yourself, as luck would have it, and inching over the same little segment of earth- ball, in the same little eon, to meet in a room, alive in our skins, and the whole galaxy gaping there and the centuries whining like gnats— you, to teach me to see it, to see it with you, and to offer somebody uncomprehending, impudent thanks.
William Meredith, “Accidents of Birth” from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1997 by William Meredith. Reprinted with the permission of the author and TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, http://nupress.northwestern.edu. by the Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43104/accidents-of-birth
With love
Steven
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