That Being Said

As Cathy says, the triviality of eating Fritos, of munching, is offset by reading the editorial page of the paper about a world on edge, about more serious concerns, the high ledge of global events. And yet the poet still dreams, perched on that ledge, outlined against the sky.

On the other hand, he’s eating his lunch on a ledge, and maybe these are the last rites, his suicide note. Maybe he’s overwhelmed by life, while also enchanted by it.

“That Being Said” asks the reader to take another look at what the poem seems to say. Like many of the details of the poem, the title is a trivial, earthbound afterthought, which nevertheless infers the vastness of the universe, the balance point between life and death.

It also calls up Charles Ebbets’ 1932 photo, New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam, where workers eat their lunch on a skyscraper girder, high above the city on the 69th floor of the RCA building. It’s a clash between the sense of security which comes from eating lunch with the sense of insecurity from vertigo, culled at the same time from the growth of a nation, when Rockefeller Center was being built in the heart of the Depression.

So the poem also evokes the resilience of our country, its resurrection during the worst of times, as it now works its way through the 2020 pandemic: the long view, where everything in ordinary life is seen from a great distance at the edge of the universe. As Cathy says, “Fritos, and eternity.”

The New York Times stopped calling its editorial opinion page the “Op-Ed” page last month. It’s now called “Guest Essays.”