The Wit and Wisdom of Rupi Kaur

May 1 2019

to hate

is an easy lazy thing

but to love

takes strength

everyone has

but not all are

willing to practice

(Rupi Kaur)

if you were born with

the weakness to fall

you were born with

the strength to rise

(Rupi Kaur)

I am a pessimist by nature.

So a poem of affirmation

would feel inauthentic to me.

Anyway, there are plenty of these,

and they remind me of a greeting card

with its fist-pumping You go, grrrl

or earnest It only gets better,

along with a resplendent sunset

or encomium of

unconditional love.

I am judgmental, by nature.

So I always come with codicils

amendments

and quick preconceptions,

qualifying

with one narrowed eye,

instead of Zen-like acceptance

and open arms.

I feel unworthy, by nature.

So have never assumed I am wanted

welcomed

accepted incontestably.

Perhaps this is too self-conscious, for a man of my age.

But undeserving, as well, in a less personal sense.

Not original sin

because religion leaves me cold,

but the burden of ancestry;

the abiding flaws, and essential lethality

with which evolution has endowed

our presumptuous species.

Few understand

how nihilism comforts me.

Knowing

that I am not significant

that the universe is indifferent

and that there is no meaning or posterity

except for the illusions

we choose to construct.

So if writing is fun

then that is more than enough

to make it worthwhile.

We nihilists are humble.

With no personal gods watching over us

there is no self-importance

we are what we are.

The amused detachment

with which we go through life

is a kind of armour,

just as the bleak outlook of the pessimist

makes pretty much everything

turn out for the best.

So I eschew the aphorisms

of the popular poets,

the cute sayings

on the posters of cats

who hang-on despite.

Nevertheless, one writes.

And wants to be read.

Broadcasting my signal

like a deaf man, from his soundproof booth

who takes no calls,

talk-radio

that goes only one way.

Imagining electromagnetic waves

dispersing through space

and out to infinity;

weakening and weakening

until they eventually decay

to absolute zero,

there

on the expanding edge

of the cold black void.

As I sit down at the computer to transcribe this from my rough handwritten draft, it is telling that there are exactly five lines and one word crossed out. The rest was written as if taking dictation, in an almost trance-like stream-of-consciousness state. (I've made a few minor tweaks since, but nothing that couldn't have been left as it was.)

Philosophical poems are always difficult. They can sound pretentious. There is a tendency to say instead of to show, which offends the cardinal rule of good poetry. And it can be perilous, and ultimately unsatisfying, to try to distill the complex and precise ideas of a philosophical argument into the compressed and allusive style good poetry requires. So I'm reasonably happy with this one, because I don't think it's overly pretentious, or too didactic, or fails to honour what I wanted to say.

It would seem highly desirable to be an optimist. We are drawn to them. Life must be better as one. And doesn't optimism confers resilience and make it easier to overcome? On the other hand, it's hard to argue that optimists aren't setting themselves up for repeated disappointment, while pessimists are set, more often than not, to be pleasantly surprised. And there is an argument for pessimism as essential to human survival, and so selected for by evolution. This has been called “defensive pessimism”, and offers a good explanation for its persistence in human nature. Because pessimists tend to catastrophize – that is, visualize disastrous outcomes – they (that is, we) are far better prepared for whatever contingency arises. Better to imagine a lion stalking you, or a snake in the tall grass, than to tramp across the veldt in a sunny state of obliviousness. I'm doubtful that this particular optimist will be passing on his optimistic genes! Pessimists endure because it is healthy for every social group – whether family, tribe, or nation-state – to contain some pessimists, if only to warn and prepare.

And it's true, nihilism really can be a comfort. One doesn't take oneself so seriously if one is unimportant and nothing ultimately matters. This humility, this ability to laugh at oneself and one's plight, strikes me as both honest and powerful. As the poem says, the amused detachment that comes from a lack of self-importance can constitute both a defence against adversity and a kind of humility that is almost theological in its virtue.

Rupi Kaur is a wildly popular internet poet/celebrity whose work I despise. You will assume I am speaking out of envy, and all I can do is strenuously object to that accusation. Because I have no interest in celebrity (would probably run from it!). And because I'm confident the internet is a passing thing, destined to die when civilization collapses and its servers lose power, or when their over-worked and over-heated circuits burn-out, whichever inevitable end comes first. (As the poem says, there is no posterity. The presumption that anything “is forever”, an expression often applied to the internet, is laughably solipsistic. This reminds me of high school's apocryphal “permanent record”; which, from the distance of adulthood, is clearly neither permanent nor recorded!)

Her poetry is obvious, juvenile, pandering, and sentimental. I'm hardly a defender of the academy of poetry, since not only am I not a member, I'm not even an aspirant. I just think that her writing is lazy, boring, insipid, affected, superficial, and has no redeeming style. It feels good to mock her, and in so doing mock the dull followers and who are enthralled by her pious trifles. I won't apologize for that, although I will apologize for the weakness of character my pleasure reveals. I should, after all, aspire to be more generous and forgiving, less judgmental and severe. But, as the poem says, nature will out!