I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism, the sadness lies in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel.
These lines from Don't Let Me Be Lonely introduce the themes of mental health, loneliness, and collective identities versus particular identities. These themes come in Rankine's discussion of a particular event: George W. Bush's election. The speaker meditates on the feeling of sadness as it connects to memory. The speaker notes that her sadness is related to American politics, though her emotions and what she calls "American optimism" are not directly related. The fact of institutionalized inequality—that a few lives are considered more important than "billions of lives"—is the "real source" of the speaker's sadness. The speaker also introduces one of the many interlocutors that make a presence throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely. This time, she is referencing Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope is a thing with feathers—" and refuting the poet's claim.
A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it ... It achieved nothing, all his worrying. Things worked out or they didn't work out and now here he was, an old man, an old man who each year of his life bit or shook doubt as if to injure if not to kill, an old man with a good-looking son who resembles his deceased mother. It is uncanny how she rests there, as plain as day, in the boy's face.
In this passage, the speaker discusses aging and death through a conversation between an aging father and his son. This passage also connects to the theme of the gray area between life and death, as the son looks like his mother who has passed away. In a way, the son's mother comes back to life in her resemblance to her son. She "rests" in his face.
While watching the movie, tears rolled down his cheeks. Apart from their use in expressing emotion, tears have two other functions: they lubricate the eyes so that the lids can move over them smoothly as you blink; they wash away foreign bodies. It is difficult to feel much tear-worthy emotion about anything in Fitzcarraldo as it is about having outlandish projects and achieving them in the name of art, but since the tears kept coming long after smooth blinking would have been restored and foreign bodies washed away, I decided that apparently my friend was expressing emotion and was not fine, not okay, no.
In this passage, the speaker uses two different registers together: that of personal narrative (observing her friend's grief) and scientific account (explaining the biological function of tears). This creates an uncertain tone—at once deeply emotional, and at the same time, slightly impersonal. The speaker is using her knowledge of the function of tears and her context to determine whether or not her friend is "okay."
We are having lunch because I am writing a book on hepatotoxicity, also known as liver failure. In the public imagination, liver failure is associated with alcoholism, but the truth is 55 percent of the time liver failure is drug-induced. Again and again there exists an "I" who was institutionalized because "I swallowed a bottle of Tylenol and went into a coma. Now, I can say that luckily the coma did not lead to liver failure and death, but back then I was disappointed when I woke up in a hospital room. The waking was slow because of the drugs in my system. I remember being cold. I remember shaking. They wrapped me in blankets. There was a flat needle taped against my skin, piercing my arm. The nurse, in an effort to demonstrate how far I had come, informed me the day I was to check out that the first thing I'd asked when I first awoke was, Alive? She said she answered, Yes, love, you are alive. When she told me this story she smiled and two cavernous dimples appeared on either cheek. Why are you smiling? Why are you smiling, my smiling nurse?"
In this passage, the speaker is meeting with her editor to discuss her new project, "a book on hepatotoxicity." The passage begins in an academic register as the speaker relates medical findings about liver failure to the reader. The speaker notes that the reality about liver failure is different from the "public imagination"—it is generally assumed that liver failure is caused by alcoholism, but most of the time it is actually caused by attempted suicide with Tylenol. The speaker plays with different voices in this passage, introducing the "I" as an other character and then melding her voice with that character's own. Thus, in this passage, the speaker is revealing to the reader that she has once attempted suicide and ended up in the hospital. Upon waking up, she questions why her nurse is smiling about the fact that she survived. The tone shifts from formal to deeply emotional and moving by the end of the quotation.
If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is "I" even me or am "I" a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it? What does my subject mean to me?
In this passage, the speaker's voice merges with the voice of the poet. She questions her responsibility towards the material in Don't Let Me Be Lonely and whether or not Claudia Rankine (the poet) and the speaker are always implicated with the usage of the pronoun "I." She questions whether "I" denotes an actual person or whether it is just a tool used to organize information. In a way, this passage also questions our role as readers. How are we understanding the "I" in this work? Do we take it for objective truth coming from a single point of view, or do we see the speaker as an entity who is always shifting? Rankine throws our understanding of the text into question. Ultimately, the speaker is asking us to see the complexity in the relationship between writer and her text, a speaker and their words.
Define loneliness?
Yes.
It's what we can't do for each other.
What do we mean to each other?
What does life mean?
Why are we here if not for each other?
This is one of the few lyric portions of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. In this lyric poem, the speaker uses the theme of loneliness to examine existence. The fact that the lines are mostly questions makes the lyric poem feel like a dialogue. It is uncertain how many voices are participating. The speaker relates loneliness to her relationships with other people, defining loneliness as where we fail in helping others. The speaker questions why we are alive if not to create connections with and support others.
I'm amused, but my sister is distracted because she has been asked to assess the value of her dead children's lives. She has to meet with the insurance adjuster. So far they have only spoken on the phone. He wants her to put together information on her children, think of it as a scrapbook, he'd said. Report cards, medical records, extracurricular activities. My sister isn't crying as she tells me this. Instead, she seems distracted and impatient. I am asking the questions she asked the adjuster and she is irritated with this reflection of herself. She wants to say to me the two words she wanted to say to him.
In this passage, the speaker is discussing the theme of how one's life is valued by society. For the speaker, insurance claims after someone's death are absurd in their reduction of a person's life to an amount of money. There are multiple voices at play in this quotation, but the only one that the reader has access to is the speaker's own voice as she relays this information. The mood is tense and sad; she thinks, it is implied, that her sister wants to say "fuck you" to her. However, it is also bittersweet—the speaker and her sister have a very close bond and the speaker does not take her sister's irritation at her to heart.
Three days after the attack on the World Trade Center it rains. It rains through the night with a determination that peters off by morning. That same afternoon I go downtown to the site. The rain, I thought, would clear the air of smoke. It is still smoking because the debris is still burning. A rank smell is in the air. The rescue workers are there moving pieces of wreckage by hand. In the overcast, dim light they shadow the dead, are themselves deadened.
The mood of this passage is dark and melancholy. The speaker uses the weather as a metaphor to describe the overwhelming atmosphere of New York City in the days after 9/11. The rain emphasizes this gloomy mood. The speaker's expectations about what the twin towers would look like are subverted. She recounts the feeling of hopelessness and grief of this particular moment in time. This passage also emphasizes the theme of the gray area between life and death. Because the rescue workers are in such a terrible moment, they are also close to death, "are themselves deadened."
It is not possible to communicate how useless, how much like a skin-sack of uselessness I felt. I am better than thou art now: I am a fool, the fool said, thou art nothing. Is she dead? Is he dead? Yes, they are dead. One observes, one recognizes without being recognized. One opens the paper. One turns on the television. Nothing changes. My distress grows into nothing. Thou art nothing.
The overall tone of the passage above is grim and hopeless. The part in italics is from Shakespeare's King Lear, though it is not specifically attributed to him. In this passage from King Lear, the fool character is telling King Lear, who has gone mad, that he is nothing because he has lost his social position. The passage then moves to the third person, which opens up the feeling that is being described and makes it universal. The speaker emphasizes the impersonalness of consuming media; a person can watch or read anything about other peoples' lives and not feel implicated. Ultimately, this leads to a feeling of numbness: "My distress grows into nothing."
Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to here. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.
These are the final lines of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Rankine is concluding her work with an emphasis on a sense of accountability and awareness of others. In contrast to the quotation that comes before this one, this quotation demands that what we hear, read about, and see be evaluated in terms of its real-life consequences for others. If something is being offered, one must recognize and receive it. The giver and the receiver are necessary for the acknowledgment of existence: "we must both be here ... indicating the presences of" (131, emphasis added).
