CSG, Montreal, Canada

Dear Poetry Clinic,

Am I being selfish by wanting to be happy? I prioritize my dreams, goals, and happiness over anyone else’s. my child’s, my partner’s, my friend’s and family’s. My deep conviction is that the best thing I have to offer the world is a fully flourished, self-actualized and content version of myself. I also feel like this is the example I want to set for my child, to give them a sense of agency and responsibility – it’s not anyone’s job but their own to create a happy life. But how much selfish is too selfish? Should I be more inclined to sacrifice my own pursuits for the benefit of people I hold dear, at the risk of being less pleasant to be around?

CSG

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MNP:

Your query reminds me of the safety protocols that flight attendants repeat at the start of each flight, reminding us that in the case of an emergency, when oxygen masks descend, we should put on our own first before putting the mask on a child. In other words, in many instances to better help others, we need to look after and care for ourselves first. I sense, however, a latent anxiety about your commitment to “prioritiz(ing) (your) dreams, goals, and happiness over anyone else’s.” Western society does tend to emphasize the individual, often to the detriment of community and other collective instincts, and I’m reminded that the very act of carrying a child represents a profound act of what I call radical hospitality in which the mother breathes for the fetus. Ordinarily the mother’s body should reject the child’s, but all the systems that would engender such a rejection are turned off. Someone is breathing for and an other being breathed for. This process offers me a radical model that suggests that perhaps we—beings who are human—are hardwired to care for ourselves and for others, as well as to be cared for: it is not an either or matter. I am convinced that we are not and never have been alone, and am reminded of the line from the Whitman poem “Song of Myself, 51” (I am large, I contain multitudes.).” This reference to multitudes, also brings to mind the relatively recent scientific discoveries by scientists of microchimera—the presence of their children’s cells (and sometimes of other family member) within a mother’s body—“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Song of Myself, 51
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

-Walt Whitman

In addition to the Whitman poem mentioned above, I recommend:

Emily Dickinson’s “57” (Emily Dickinson—The Laurel Poetry Series) that begins “Of all the souls that stand create/I have elected one.” The poem compels us to think about the idea you have raised—how to be one among many and “create a happy life,” while contending with what Dickinson calls “this brief tragedy of flesh.”

57
Of all the souls that stand create
I have elected one.
When sense from spirit files away
And subterfuge is done;

When that which is and that which was
Apart, intrinsic, stand,
And this brief tragedy of flesh
Is sifted like sand;

When figures show their royal front
And mists are carved away,—
Behold the atom I preferred
To all the lists of clay!

-Emily Dickinson

The final poem is “pi day 46” (from Song & Dread, 2023) by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek that begins: “I miss my own self.” The poem ends with the couplet: “I miss writing a poem for its own self/for its own need to be in the world.” Like the poem written “for its own self,” we all have our “own need to be in the world”— an authentic need, which these poems balance and complicate by suggesting how being in the world is always a solitude containing puzzles of multitudes. And, I’m tempted to say multitudes of puzzles.

pi day 46
i miss my own self
i miss the weight of my head in my hand
& the weightlessness when i walk
beside my own self

i miss the pleasure of cool water
fresh of good cold beer
instant heat of the sun on skin
coffee-shop coffee
even the rude whirr of the espresso maker

i miss writing a poem for its own self
for its own need to be in the world

-Otoniya J. Okot Bitek