Writing About Trivialities

This is an image of molecules of a nasal spray, tiny little things that do a world of good. I picked it because my life feels overwhelmed with illness at the moment, with people in my family who have serious or not-so-serious illnesses, so that’s what comes to mind to write about. I wrote a poem in which I describe in detail my husband’s not-life-threatening problems and my own also not-serious ones. I’m a bit uneasy about the poem. It may be the subject. Or not.I notice how glitches in the body’s functioning compel us as much as world catastrophes, and then I think, this is what I used to see in old people when I wasn’t one, that turning inward and fussing over their own bodies. We get letters regularly from my 94-year-old father in which he enumerates over and over his battles with nasal congestion, constipation, neck pain, and so on. The detail is amazing—two or three single-spaced pages several times a week. Here’s a small sample: “I do get up two or three times, maybe, to urinate, and then my nose stops up so I use decongestant nose spray (similar to Afrin, but cheaper.) I also use a saline spray feeling that this might reduce the inflammation caused by the “oxymetazoline HCL .05%.”The point isn’t to make fun, but to wonder about how obsession works for or against us as writers. Young poets write passionate poems about love, and, if the poems are good ones, we find this sort of obsession rich, full of life. Poets are obsessed with race, gender, war. We find all those subjects significant. But some of the poems written about those things are trivial.So here is my question: What is the difference between the trivial and the significant? The trivial can be falsely significant. You know what I mean. You feel that the writer’s stuck in trivialities. The poem takes us nowhere, but wants us to feel that the details themselves are significant. Or, conversely, something can happen in a poem to pull the details toward profoundity. By profundity, I mean the poem matters to me, to you. Not just to the writer.You know Henry Reed’s poem, “Naming of Parts,” in which he describes the method of cleaning a gun in great detail, stanza after stanza? The end of the poem pulls us out of that constriction into actual, real spring, silent almond-blossoms, a silent judgment. We would never say this poem is trivial.A lot of memoir is about the trivial. We build detail of the trivial, the tiny details, to make a world. Our days are made of trivia—pouring the coffee, standing at the window, and so on. Back to my question—how does the trivial become meaningful? And then I think, isn’t the most trivial movement the most meaningful? I just got through saying that our lives are MADE of trivia. It’s all in how we make trivial moments somehow point to the wonder of being alive. For all of us.I’m sure that is not accomplished by attaching a moral to the poem/memoir. It is not accomplished by assuming our life is so darned special that what happens to us is of universal importance.  Wait. Maybe it is. Here I’m back to saying the one pitifully small thing I know about how a poem “works”: it must come from a capacious soul, it must come from a writer who not only has the language to work with but who KNOWS that we’re all in this together, that what happens to me is what happens to you.I welcome your thoughts about this. Here’s the poem that prompted my meanderings. I’ll probably be embarrassed later that I showed it to you. It may not be worth squat. It may be really trivial.Inventory Your blood pressure’s finally pretty good,you’re almost off the dreaded pillsthat made you sleep all day, and slowlyonto better ones, but still you havemysterious flushing in your face, the feelof being packed and feverish, althoughno fever, the ears stopped up and popping,although popping doesn’t help. Thenthere’s your back, lower disks collapsingon each other. And there’s my eyes,watering because they’re dry, becausethey’re too much focused on a back-litscreen. The drops don’t help that much.I take the flax seed oil. Our teethare pretty good, mine more than yours.Better say this all right here instead of toour friends, but the details do fascinatewhen we get down into them, the subtleshifts from certain drugs, the MRI the CT scanthe stress test the drawn blood into severalvials, the skin scratches and their faintreddening the ascending and descendingnotes played in the ear to hear exactlywhere they disappear. Right now my eyesare dripping water down my cheeks,the price I pay for taking on our lives this way.Kafka said the artist’s task is to leadthe isolated individual into the infinite life.I’ll say yes to that but I’m with Blakein that you can see the infinite in a grainof sand, or in a CT scan. I could havebrought up God instead, or Hegel or angels,so you can thank me now for thesecomplaints and tests that unite instead ofdivide the way creationism fundamentalismand other –isms do. I said “–isms,” not“rhythms.” You do have some hearing lossin the upper and lower range: one wayin which our bodies rub away sharp edgesjostling day by day, but not enoughto explain the stopping up or popping,the sense your head’s exploding, whichaccording to the tests it isn’t. Some things,it seems, occur we don’t know why.What can we do but plead “Fix this, orgive it a name, at least, some syllablesto roll on the tongue, something to standfor the single tiny glitch that wants to hide,whereas otherwise we’d be just fine?”