happy lamp day

illustration by Laura Scroggs 

Welp, here we are in the week of Thanksgiving, the one day America devotes to gratitude. This week crosses us over from autumn to holiday season, America's celebration of family and cheer and nuclear-sized greed. I'm gonna go all Quaker on you for a moment. Friends learn as children in “First Day School" that every day is a sabbath; we name the days of the week by number (first day, second day, and so on) as a way of observing that each day is as holy as the next. How would this reframe the idea of a holiday for gratitude? What if every blank calendar day were considered sacred? Matthew Zapruder’s wonderful poem "Lamp Day" (link below) presses the re-set button on gratitude practices. We could arbitrarily pick a memento, or person, or place, and reconstruct its history. It's not, Zapruder tells us, a sentimental or mawkish activity, but rather a scientific study: "On Lamp Day we try / not dreamily but systematically / to remember it all." Zapruder is proposing an earnest celebration of the objects of our affection, rather than a celebration of our own gratefulness. This practice is an invitation to take something, anything, and trace its contours with our consciousness, revering its place in our lives. We "do it by thinking about the hidden reasons [we] love something small." Zapruder leaves the question of its importance unanswered but makes clear that thinking about why we love things is not about their exchange value.
Surrounding an object with our attention is an internal process, not for show: we alone "make a sunlit / and rainy map no one / will ever be able to hold." Like the hotel window, we begin to reflect the history all around us, each object in its wholeness, "calmly reflecting / everything bad and good." I connect this mode of perception with the Tibetan concept of shiné, as I've understood it from Pema Chodron's teaching: the quality of mind that sees everything from a place of calm but at the same time with crisp, accurate clarity. As if under bright lamplight. "I am plugged in. I am calm. / Lamp Day has a name." As if to bring home the poem's focus not on itself, but on the stories of objects, this seeming finale of the poem drifts off into an awareness of the speaker's coffee cup, inscribed with the story of its origin: the word Omaha.
Gratitude lamplight is sharper and more edged in Robinson's "Portable Paradise." The references to island beauty suggest, half-ironically, a reprieve from sustained and daily stresses. As a Trinidadian living in England, Robinson knows life under pressure and also knows all about the orientalist fantasy of an island utopia. So this poem sticks a knife in it. Staring at whatever is precious in your memory bank is a way to stay hopeful, a way to sleep at night. The speaker has been taught to conceal his happy place, its white sands and fresh fish, like a weapon against the dominant culture lest it be stolen. Here, if you sing the song of peace, you'd better hum it under your breath. To combat the "sustained and daily" stress, this poem recommends finding a safe, private space to pour out any remnant of calm, like shards of shrapnel, and comb through it under the mind's lamplight. As we await an autocracy coming into power and announcing, just for example, its plan to deport a massive number of people - quadruple the population of Chicago, according to today's NYT report - here's the message: keep your Omaha safe in your pocket. 

PRACTICE
"Plugging in" to this mode of clear, accurate perception requires that we include, rather than dismiss, our emotional response to the phenomena around us. Zapruder's window reflects everything, bad and good. We are challenged to take in the objects around us with attention to their history, their function, their story, their feel. In somatics we call it "orienting." Perhaps you could glance around your room, taking stock of the objects that catch your gaze. This does not have to be a sentimental acknowledgment of stuff you like; as the edge in Robinson's poem implies. It's a witnessing of your world with fearless precision, inclusive of feelings of threat, or rage, or sorrow. Choose an object and linger with it. If possible, hold it in your hands, feeling its shape as you would a worry stone. Turm in the palm of your mind its round, full-bodied history. What is its resonance for you, its lesson for you, its role in defining you?

"Lamp Day"