A Sacrifice to the American Religion of Shopping

Poet Andrei Codrescu offered this commentary on NPR's All Things Considered last night about the death of a Wal-Mart employee who was stampeded by a crowd of shoppers, anxious to get into the store for super savings on Black Friday.

I'm a pretty analytical girl ... which makes me so glad for people like Codrescu, who have poetic minds. Codrescu calls the death a sacrifice to the American religion of shopping.

"And so we went shopping! We so went shopping, in rumbling herdlike elephant masses, we killed a guy who didn't get out of the way fast enough. It's a tragic incident, but by no means meaningless. Shopping is a religion, and some religions demand sacrifices.

The Wal-Mart employee died for us on Black Friday, but have we stopped to think what his sacrifice means? Not at all: We're stampeding right on through to the other side of Christmas. We aren't just shopping: We are saving America."

I'm sure a lot of the more thoughtful of us already have done this, but maybe we should all stop for a minute and think about what his death means.

Billy Collins on Death

The First Night
by Billy Collins
The worst thing about death must be the first night. —Juan Ramón Jiménez Before I opened you, Jiménez, it never occurred to me that day and night would continue to circle each other in the ring of death, but now you have me wondering if there will also be a sun and a moon and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set then repair, each soul alone, to some ghastly equivalent of a bed. Or will the first night be the only night, a darkness for which we have no other name? How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death, How impossible to write it down. This is where language will stop, the horse we have ridden all our lives rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff. The word that was in the beginning and the word that was made flesh— those and all the other words will cease. Even now, reading you on this trellised porch, how can I describe a sun that will shine after death? But it is enough to frighten me into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon, to sunlight bright on water or fragmented in a grove of trees, and to look more closely here at these small leaves, these sentinel thorns, whose employment it is to guard the rose.
Those of you who follow poetry will know that former poet laureate Billy Collins is somewhat of a controversial figure. (Those of you who don't follow poetry may not know who he is.) Collins' work is more transparent than that of most laudable poets. Critics say it lacks depth and the structural legs to stand the test of time. Supporters of his work say he makes it look easy because of his great skill, and he should not be faulted for having poems that are a pleasure to read. However you feel about his work, I'm drawn to the depiction of death he creates here—inspired by a quote from Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Edna St. Vincent Millay on Death of Young Classmate

Right now, I'm reading a fantastic biograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's not exactly new ... I've known about it for awhile and just finally got around to reading it. The book is Savage Beauty by Nancy Millford. It's a masterpiece—I wish more authors would take this much time to craft, hone, and research. Her language is gorgeous ... and the amount of detail she pulls together into a cohesive tale is astounding. You really must have to be of a certain ilk to write good biographies. The attention to detail, the charm necessary to work with surviving family members, the follow-through, the talent for writing. Well, Milford has it all.

I'm a sucker for a good first sentence. Here's Milford's: "I played a hunch in the winter of 1972." Killer.

Anyway, on to the point :) Millay wrote some beautiful poems in 1917/1918 after one of her Vassar classmates died in that year's flu pandemic. You can see that she is struggling with the injustice of someone so young and full of life being struck down so suddenly. The poems are raw, vulnerable, and full of Millay's honest, real emotion. Here is one called "Chorus":

Give away her gowns
Give away her shoes;
She has no more use
For her fragrant gowns;
Take them all down,
Blue, green, blue,
Lilac, pink, blue,
From their padded hangers;
She will dance no more
In her narrow shoes
From the closet floor

And another titled "Elegy Before Death":

There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;

Still will the tamaracks be raining
After the rain has ceased, and still
Will there be robins in the stubble,
Grey sheep upon the warm green hill.

...

Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own,—
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from common stone!

According to Milford, publishers were afraid to move on these poems, even though Millay was already quite well known and respected for Renasance, because the poems were loaded with the theme of death. But as Milford points out, Millay refused to alter her work in a significant way, knowing that great writers for centuries before her had made their mark tackling the subject of death. Milford writes that the publishers didn't care that Millay "was echoing her beloved Latin poets." ... "Death scared them off, as it had neither the Elizabethans nor the Romans."