Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Had you met me in my early 20s, you would have thought me superficial. Looking back now, my life then seems quite narrow. I rarely read newspapers. I kept my head empty of foreign affairs and doggedly sought the nearest club or house party, and not just on weekends. I fashioned myself as an artist who at best, occasionally wrote poems, and even though I sought open mics in bars to perform, ashamedly, I was in it for the social vibes, that is, chiefly to meet interesting women.

Back then, poetry, like my other pursuits — sports, fashion, and music — lacked depth. My current friends and colleagues, similar in age, were already making headway into their careers as nonprofit professionals aiding newly arrived refugees, as foreign service officers stationed in South Asia, or as academics researching uses of robotics in healthcare. Seemingly, everyone but me strived early on to make a difference, or to make their mark.

Yet, fortunately, life is no race when it comes to personal growth. My nomadic sensibilities also fueled my curiosity in people, their passions, and then, eventually, in the world of ideas and letters. I became a voracious reader and traveler. I clocked several cross-country trips; I camped underneath the stars on the Rio Grande, danced to Zydeco music in Louisiana, and ate regional foods such as Memphis barbecue spaghetti. I dove into works by Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Morrison and pondered everything from the limits of a rational mind, to the depth of a woman’s inner life, to the psychological damage of whiteness as an aesthetic pillar in society. I sought adventures that led me in mind and spirit to believe, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, life is the grandest of experiments.

Where before I was single-minded in my pursuit of pleasure and beauty, I shifted and sought to root my inquisitiveness and powers of observation in the service of a vision of poetry that was expansive and wide-ranging. In short, I opened myself up to the world — and it changed me.

Today’s poem celebrates that maturing sensibility of being present and open, especially when your pleasures go beyond the pursuits of desire and the body.

Pleasure
by Victoria Redel

All my life, my friend tells me, I was dragged around by lust.
She slices a piece of pecorino & lays it carefully over a section of green apple.

Honestly, she says, it yanked me down more alleys & into more palaces
than I can remember. Tethered, she laughs.

What a relief to be free of it, she says. Not that I longed to be free, not then.
Then I lived for it, but when it was gone, it was gone.

Suddenly, there is a good deal more to consider each day, she says.
Just washing plums & pears. You’ll see.

The tilt of them drying on the cloth. Don’t get me started on the cardinals.

“Pleasure” by Victoria Redel from PARADISE, RECEIVED © 2022 Victoria Redel. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.