This Is Just To Say

"This Is Just To Say"

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

- William Carlos Williams

I love this poem. It’s one of my favorites. From the ironic title to the simple description [delicious / so sweet / and so cold] this short poem speaks volumes. It’s the literary equivalent of giving the middle finger. And a well-timed finger says so much.

Obviously this poem has much more to say than “I ate your plums.” It doesn’t even apologize; it simply asks for, nay demands in the imperative, forgiveness. There is no contrition here, merely the taunting of one party by another. If the speaker truly felt guilty the poem would lack force – it might really be saying all that it is asking to be taken for face value as saying. But the poem isn’t asking for absolution – not really – it’s a carefully crafted attempt to keep something else, something not spoken, in the heart and mind of our speaker’s epistolary interlocutor. Imagine coming home from work on Friday to find your refrigerator empty, your bed sheets ruffled, and a note from your best friend, “Just want to let you know that I drank all your beers and had sex with your wife. But don’t be mad at me (btw the beers were supper – cold and delicious - and your wife was a little tiger in the sac.). You would have to be pretty dense not to find in his words a deeper meaning than the simple revelation of actions.

And the sexual comparison isn’t all that far off. Plums do carry a certain sexual connotation – it’s hard to not see any fruit as sensual, or forbidden for that matter. The plum tree blossoms white flowers, the traditional color of purity and innocence, and here the fruit has been violated, taken against the will of the “other” party. Is the theft of one’s fruit, a fruit that’s been saved by one party, worse than it originally seems?

Maybe it isn’t. There is an implied communal ownership in the poem – the speaker didn’t eat “your plums”, but the lamely voiced plums “that were in / the icebox”. However the speaker’s guilt betrays his knowledge that whether or not the plums were communally held there was an understanding between the two parties that they were intended for the second party’s breakfast. The implication that the speaker is “guessing” that that’s what the plums were for seems feigned, compounding the irony of his note’s title. One could follow the fine line of marital expectations, obligations, and the inherently misogynistic nature of mid-20th century, patriarchal America. I'm sure such a reading has been proffered before, and I think a convincing case could be made for one. But i digress.

I don’t mean to keep harping on the power of the food in the negative sense a la my previous post, but the power structure is laid bare again – I have (or rather had) the plums, you do (or did) not. Score one for the poems speaker.

Blindness and Hunger

In Jose Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness (English translation 1997), an epidemic of sudden, well, blindness takes over the population of an undisclosed city-state. The blindness begins with one man, stopped at a traffic light, and quickly spreads amongst those he has contact with: his wife, the man who helps him back to his home (only to later steal his car), the doctor who treats him. The disease spreads in a Kevin Bacon-esque fashion among those these people now encounter. At first the infected are quarantined by the government until the effort proves futile – the entire population, save one woman, is stricken by the “white sickness.” Where people once saw an entire spectrum of color they now see nothing but a milky haze.

Basic necessities become increasingly difficult. The infected population is essentially interred in an old mental hospital where they are left to structure a new “society” as they see fit – or rather, as they feel fit. People’s inability to see makes going to the bathroom a major chore, and don’t even think about cleaning the bathroom, let alone cleaning one’s self. The living environs become more and more disgusting until the restrooms are covered in human waste. The waste begins to creep into the hallways and the living quarters. The inability to see excuses the “patients” from cleaning up after themselves; unfortunately they have to deal with the consequences of their mess.

The metaphor Saramago develops is apt. We’re not “responsible” for what we don’t see. Our priorities become increasingly about us and our immediate community (our loved ones, friends, strategically aligned, etc.). Acting for the benefit of the whole seems counter-intuitive and damn near impossible. Nowhere do these themes play out so powerfully in his book as where food is concerned.

Food is brought to the quarantined three times a day (sometimes – you get the sense that caring for this particular group of sick citizens is not the governments highest priority at the moment). The patients are sectioned off in the three wings of the former hospital and expected to distribute the food amongst themselves. It is an imperfect system, some take more than their fair share (there is never enough food to go around, everyone is to some degree or other “starving”), some are left to go without or with very little, and eventually alliances form. One day a faction of roughly twenty patients, all men, take over the food distribution and begin to make demands.

Their demands are unreasonable to say the least. Having taken over the food supply by force, they demand all of the other patients money and valuables – worthless considering the uselessness of a standard watch or ornamental jewelry in a society where no one can see, even more worthless in light of the fact that there is no economy to speak of within the former hospitals walls – there are no real goods save for the irregular deliveries of miniscule amounts of food. Money is useless. Gold is useless. Diamonds are useless. Eventually they begin to demand sex from the women. They get it. The women in their respective wards don’t want to starve. They don’t want their loved ones to starve. They are willing to do whatever they have to, even kill, in order to stave off crippling hunger. Food trumps decency. It trumps, or maybe defines, morality.

Eventually the patients are able to move beyond the walls of the “hospital”. Since everyone is now blind, there are no soldiers left to guard the infected. The infected cease to be the "other" because blindness is not only the dominant paradigm, it’s the only paradigm (true, there is a woman who can see throughout the novel, however her condition is an anomaly; she’s effectively isolated and both powerful in her situation and powerless to do anything about the larger overall societal confusion resulting from everyone else’s blindness. Even if she had the know-how to run the municipal water plant, she lacks the ability to run such a sophisticated system on her own. In other words, while her immediate community of 7 [?] benefit from her vision, the larger society does not). In scenes echoed by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, our heroes are left to wander the not-quite-post apocalyptic cityscape in search of leftover food stores. There is not a lot of food left by the time the reader gets to see what’s left of the once thriving metropolis. People are hungry. The scent of a recently eaten sausage on one’s hands is enough to inspire a blind mob riot.

In this situation the characters in Blindness are forced to revert to the hunter/gatherer of old. No decorum, no rules, only survival. Gangs of people wander the empty isles of a former grocery store, crawling on their hands and knees, scouring the ground for crumbs, thankful for the smallest scrap. Willing to kill for it. Remember the scene in Elie Weisel’s Night when a scrap of bread is thrown into a passing cattle care filled with Jewish prisoners heading off to the camps? The bread was thrown for the thrower’s amusement. He knew it would spark a fight to the potential death as people scraped and scrapped to prolong what at that point was a pretty miserable existence. Or maybe they just wanted to alleviate their suffering for a few hours, a few minutes, a few moments. We are reminded in this book as well of the primacy of food, the essential nature of it. Something so many of us take for granted everyday – three square meals, a couple of snacks, perhaps desert – has the power, through its absence, to turn us into savages, slaves, or both. In the final analysis, it’s not the lack of eyesight that threatens to destroy civilization in Blindness, but a lack of food.