21.02.21: The Things We Leave Behind

Above all else, I'm afraid of being forgotten by the world, and by the people I love. This week, I discuss this fear, and how it inspired my newest collection.

In his book Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, Irvin D. Yalom writes:

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

I’ve been thinking about these words a lot over the last couple of years, but particularly since the start of the pandemic. I have grown haunted by this idea of the second death; the last time a breathing person says your name, or allows you to grace their memory.

Of course, this is something each of us have to face, but most people are carried forward by the next generation; remembered through the lives and deeds of their children, and their children’s children.

This is not a gift I will be graced with.

But I know there are other ways to leave our mark on the world, to live a life with meaning. For many this is through acts of bravery, charity, athletic prowess or great kindness. For others, this purpose is found through their work, and I think this is particularly true of artists.

There is something about a global pandemic that forces you to reflect on your own mortality, and I have become increasingly driven by this idea of leaving something behind me through my writing; producing a body of work that might, one day, outlive me.

When I first started writing, it was to find a way to say goodbye to the woman who showed me what love really meant. Although I still write about her, the focus of my work has shifted, to finding meaning in the life I have built in her absence; the life that so often tries to crumble beneath me.

I think this, more than anything, is the subject of my new book. The title is inspired by this idea that we can leave parts of ourselves behind us, whether that’s in the people we have loved, the things we have done, or the art we have found a way to create. We all have our own kind of legacy, it’s just a question of who we choose to leave it with, and how long it manages to last.

In parallel to this, the book is also about the things we carry - the pasts that make us who we are here, now. I wrote a lot about my own personal trauma in this book, and for the first time I didn’t write about love. I guess, this one is a book about the other monsters.

Of course, I have also included poems about the pandemic itself, and the impact of a national lockdown on a tired mind. I included these poems partly to help cement the collection in a particular time and place, but also because experiencing something so profoundly frightening had a real impact on who I am, and how I think about the life I’ve been living.

In the end, I think the world we have come to know is one of the things I now carry; a weight we must all bear, in one way or another.

*

I’m genuinely excited and, more so than usual, nervous about sharing this chapbook with all of you. Despite the nature of my previous books, there’s no question that this is the most personal thing I have ever released.

The book is released on March 16th, but until then, here’s a poem from The Things We Leave Behind, and I think it’s a fitting choice for this particular discussion:

Hammer and the Ink

i cannot write you everything.

i have enough ink
to create a world
where you could be happy,
but not enough
to put you in it.

i guess i’m saying
i can write
the hunger
but not
the bread.

look outside
and the sun
is still rising,
but will fall again
before long.

what will i have built before then?

———

I want to thank all of you that have already pre-ordered the book. Your support never ceases to both amaze and humble me, and remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. I genuinely feel like you may be the ones that remember me the longest, and there are no words I can use to thank you enough, for that.

Yours,

Blake