Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

I started this decade on fellowship in Rome, and I was feeling hopeful about our future — even while Northern Italy slowly began to breakdown under the weight of a newly spreading Coronavirus. 

This was the dawning Chinese year of the Rat – the first animal in the Eastern Zodiac, representing new beginnings. Well, a whole lot most certainly began that year, and here we are now deep in the midst of it all. 

In a few days, we enter the Chinese Year of the Fire Horse – strength, independence, passion and transformation. I think we’re ready for that shift. 

It’s been a couple thousand Gregorian years since Roman Emperor Julius Caesar famously crossed the Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy, marking a point of no return in what felt, at that time, like a major world war. Before that step, Caesar was governor of a single Roman territory; his term was ending, and he’d been ordered to surrender his troops. Instead, he defied the senators and the laws of the people by marching his army into Rome proper, setting the stage for the Roman Civil War. By war’s end, Caesar had become dictator for life. 

“Crossing the Rubicon” has long been a widely used idiom. It refers to having stepped over a line, or passed a point of no return. We use it to say that one has taken the final step into dangerous waters from which there is no retreat; once that line has been crossed, nothing will ever be the same. A new beginning of a certain kind.

I think we’ve held on to this idiom, where we cross the point of no return, to remind us that pain is not in fact an end, but can instead be the beginning of a terrible cycle. This is where we break something that can take ages, perhaps even millennia, to repair. But repair we must. Our work, in fact, might be bigger than holding up a sign that says “Do not cross,” but to be prepared for the crossing–sometimes, history tells us, that crossing is inevitable. Something in our nature refuses to prevent it. The light however lies in the fact that we can recognize it; we can stand tall against its headwinds and take back the wheels of power. No matter how far off the road we’ve been driven, we can–we will, we must–steer the wheel back toward right. 

Today’s poem plumbs the depths of our darkest impulses. It illuminates that there is something titillating about playing in the dark, with choosing to feel pain, to find pleasure in it even, when the alternative can feel like…nothing at all. 

Rubicon
by Carl Phillips

Like that feeling inside the mouth as it makes of obscenity
a new endearment. Like a rumor-monger without sign among
the deaf, 
                       the speechless. Having been able, once, not only 
to pick out the one crow in a cast of ravens, but to parse darker,
even more difficult distinctions: weakness and martyrdom;
waves, and the receding fact of them as they again
                                                                                                                         come back;
bewilderment and, as if inescapable, that streak of cruelty to 
which by daybreak we confess ourselves resigned, by noon
accustomed, by night
                                                      devoted—feverish: now a tinderbox
in flames, now the flames themselves, that moment in intimacy 
when sorrow, fear, and anger cross in unison the same face,
what at first can seem almost 
                                                                          a form of pleasure, a mistake as
easy, presumably, as it’s forgivable. I suspect forgetting will be
a very different thing: more rough, less blue, more lit, and patternless.

“Rubicon” by Carl Phillips from SPEAK LOW © 2009 by Carl Phillips. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.