Eileen Chong

Thinking about Immortality & Kindness

From 5 August 2020—

Taking Lisel Mueller's poem ‘Immortality’ as the starting point, poet Eileen Chong has written a letter entitled ‘A Letter to You’, reflecting upon the topics of immortality and kindness in the context of our present socio-cultural circumstances. She has then made a voice recording of her letter and spent a further two minutes in reflection, by way of her poem entitled ‘Mortal’.

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A Letter to You

Eileen Chong

If you prefer to read, please refer directly below.

A Letter to You

by
Eileen Chong

Dear Friend,

It’s cold and rainy outside. I’ve just made myself a cup of tea, and I’m sitting down to some poetry. Today, I am reading Lisel Mueller’s Alive Together. I’ve just read her poem, ‘Immortality’, which reflects on the Sleeping Beauty tale. In the poem, she describes an illustrated edition she read in her childhood. As I read the poem, I felt very sure that I, too, had read the same version of the story.

I looked for a copy online, and I was delighted to see the images of the book I’d read as a child. Yet I was also disappointed: my book might not have been Mueller’s book. In mine, there is no strawberry pie, no fly diving into red glaze. In Mueller’s poem, the speaker is fixated on the interrupted hunger of the fly, on its inadvertent, punctuated immortality, long moments before its unswerving arc towards death.

I’m now thinking of Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Flies’, in her collection Falling Awake, where she says ‘they lift their faces to the past’, and details how they visit and revisit dirt. Oswald also observes that ‘there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly’. I often think of Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -’, of the fly’s ‘uncertain - stumbling Buzz’, and of how the speaker eventually ‘could not see to see’. Flies are synonymous with filth, with disease, and with the finality of death.

My parents are church-goers; when we last spoke on the phone, they mentioned how their pastor had spoken of the Biblical plagues. I vaguely recall the stories from school, and images from old reruns of stop-motion films. I wonder: are we, as a human race, somehow being punished by a greater power? Or have we, in some way, brought this upon ourselves?

In 1958 to 1962, one of the first campaigns of the Great Leap Forward of Mao Zedong’s China was the Four Pests campaign, aimed at eradicating rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The government of the time declared that ‘birds are public animals of capitalism’, and sparrow elimination techniques included the banging of pots and pans, so the birds could not rest, and would fall dead to the ground in mid-flight from exhaustion. I cannot bear to think of the description of the shovelfuls of dead sparrows in the streets.

We know that sparrows also eat insects, among which are locusts. The widespread killing of sparrows in China at the time resulted in a great ecological imbalance, and consequently, in a plague of locusts. This became one of the contributing factors of the Great Chinese Famine, where it is estimated that up to 45 million people died of starvation. A quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union were later imported into China in a bid to restore the balance.

How much do we need reminding that everything is connected? That history was once the present, and that the future depends on what we do now? We are living beings who depend on one another, on the closely-fitted, moving parts of society, on elements of nature large and small—all of which cross the artificially constructed boundaries of countries, of language, of culture, of race.

In King Lear, Shakespeare tells us, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’ We are fragile creatures, and our lifespans, so short. We are, indeed, alive together for a brief moment as a human race. We are, fundamentally, more alike than we are different. We all suffer pain, hurt, and death, irrespective of our age, class, or colour. But we also share the same potential for joy, love, kindness, and compassion, wherever we might have come from, whatever our individual beliefs.

There are many avenues towards immortality, after a fashion—through our friends and families, through our words and deeds, in memories and legacies. What immortality will you choose today?

Your friend,

Eileen Chong

Mortal

by
Eileen Chong

If you prefer to read, pleases refer directly below.

Mortal

by
Eileen Chong

We begin in a room: a mother’s womb.
We are born to love, or abandonment,
sometimes to both. Gravity as sudden
as a dropped toy; levity, a book flung
across the room as the baby cries.

We begin to feel unwell: the objects
we collect have started to breathe
on their own. Someone has locked
the door and posted the key in a blank
envelope. We cross the street without looking.

You take with one hand, but you can give
with the other. The weight of compassion
heavy on your chest as a man shouts
at a woman carrying her child and a bag
of food. Where will she, or I, go next?

There is no village, no mythical home.
This is where we belong, in the here and now.
You flinch when the woman opens her mouth,
but she says Look at our faces, we are the same—
Two pairs of eyes meet. We are mortal, and alive.

Biography

Eileen Chong is a poet based in Sydney, Australia. She was born in Singapore of Chinese descent. Her poetry collections are Burning Rice (2012), Peony (2014), Painting Red Orchids (2016), and Rainforest (2018), all from Pitt Street Poetry, Sydney. Her next collection, A Thousand Crimson Blooms, is forthcoming from the University of Queensland Press in April 2021.

Chong writes about food, family, migration, love and loss. The Singaporean-Australian poet Boey Kim Cheng has said that ‘Chong’s work offers a poetry of feeling, rendered in luminous detail and language, alive to the sorrows and joys of daily living.’

Her books have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Anne Elder Award 2012 for a first book, the Australian Arts in Asia Award 2013, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2017, and the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2013 and 2017. Her poems are widely anthologised in Australian and international anthologies.