Kay Ryan, "Home to Roost"

status

location: apartment whose key feature is "not enough light." quite a bit of it in the living room comes from the computer screen. a lamp is in the corner, but it makes the shadows of the places it doesn't reach that much deeper. kitchen light is on because if it isn't, i get scared.

music: linkin park. for some reason their sound really works with my car's audio system.

mood: full. had indian food.

We should talk about the Iced Coffee at an Interview Saga

As you are probably aware by now, the Internet is debating whether it is appropriate to bring iced coffee to an interview. The takes divide on a number of lines: gender (apparently "iced coffee" codes as feminine?) and age (older people think you need to wear a tie to sell a car, fwiw) feature prominently. A good summary of the situation is at NBC News.

@caitlinrecruiter

Coffee & interviews … finish it beforehand 😅

♬ Rain on the Spool - Jazz Rocks Triangle

I don't think we're being clear about the bigger issue. What exactly is the nature of work in the United States? Is work in the U.S. a serious enterprise, meant to advance ourselves individually, build better products and services, and create a country worth living in? Or does work tend to be centered around, I dunno, defrauding our neighbors, stealing as much as possible from the government, and setting up detention camps for children?

I don't doubt that @caitlinrecruiter is fundamentally correct. People who are hiring will look down at you for bringing an iced coffee to an interview. As she says, you don't want this to look like just another errand during your day. And when you think more about that, your brain should hurt. Isn't a job something we do during the day so we can have better lives and get paid? Why would the assumption be that we have to sign our lives completely to our workplace? If work is serious, it should have limits. If it is unserious–if there are no limits–then it is merely an excuse for oligarchs or those playing oligarchs to exert control over people they couldn't torment otherwise.

Work in America is for the most part nothing but an extension of class politics. This should be damning: it explains why so many can't ever have nice things, including a job that's fulfilling but not domineering.

To be clear, iced coffee is the last thing I'm worried about with someone interviewing. What I want to know is whether you will try your best and demonstrate concern for others. I don't think everyone has the same set of priorities, although there are notable exceptions.

Kay Ryan, "Home to Roost"

Appropriately, "Home to Roost" has chickens. Lots of them. Filling the sky, blotting out the sun, turning and turning in the widening gyre and casting darkness upon the world. Ryan presents a ridiculous vision with apocalyptic overtones. Since we're living in times where wannabe strongmen use joking tones to incite violence against vulnerable populations, it's worth thinking harder about the closeness of ridiculousness and horror. They are not distant cousins but very tightly related. To demonstrate: think how positively paralyzed you can be that some small, not terribly risky thing you did will catch up with you. How others may only see you as a deserving victim of irony.

So. Let's consider the chickens with care:

Home to Roost (from poets.org)
Kay Ryan

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the 
day. The sun is 
bright, but the 
chickens are in 
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens, 
dense with them.
They turn and 
then they turn 
again. These 
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have 
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

Ryan's repetition of "chickens" in the first three sentences almost seals this poem as parody. I recall Yeats' immortal "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned." The flood, you could say, is so because of flood-words ("loosed," "tide," "drowned"). And here, in "Home to Roost," the flood is only one word: chickens. They circle and blot out the day; they are in the way of the sun; the sky is dark and dense with them.

You're tempted to dismiss this as stupid. It's just playing with some old stories. Chicken Little as the sky that is falling, The Birds before they descend and kill us the way we've hunted nature. "Not everything is chickens," you intone solemnly, as if you uttered a truth about the constitution of subatomic particles. But the ridiculousness and repetition of chickens is the whole point. A small but indicative example: most traffic accidents happen somewhere familiar. Some of the worst tragedies right where you played hide and seek, climbed trees, and set up a new mailbox. Right where you are used to not thinking about anything, where differentiation was merely a multisyllabic word.

Our lives are lovely as they are ridiculous. They are patterns we don't want to break. Change is radical truth; if it isn't radical truth, it isn't change. This panics me. I'm playing philosopher. I want theories to toy with and fancy words that make everyone go "Aha! Now I understand things!" Can I adequately grapple with the reality of change? To what degree am I addicted to patterns, only envisioning what I saw before?

Everything is chickens. In building our lives, we had "chickens / ...let loose / one at a time / and small– / various breeds." And now "they have / come home / to roost–all / the same kind / at the same speed." I threw out everything that didn't fit the pattern, and now they're back. Bigger, faster, and meaner. An angered power born of intentional neglect.

I do wonder about this one set of lines in the center of the poem: "They turn and / then they turn / again." Why do the horrors we create have to move? Don't they just accumulate, growing with time, staring at us like an angry cat wronged? Don't they become obstacles because of density? I do believe that reflecting on the "turn" shifts the problem from the personal to the political, though the personal is very much blameworthy. The problem of "chickens" is contempt for living beings. You just get used to the idea that nothing else is different, nothing else really moves. So it is literally freedom which blots out the sun. We didn't think anything else deserved to move. Accordingly, our world will come to an end.