levelheaded: Who Rest

 

Suzanne Highland’s “Who Rest” is hard to pin down. It opens cinematically with a man smoking a cigarette on a rooftop. By line two, the strong images are complicated by their placement within metaphors (“his cigarette is a languid afternoon and his lunchbox is a tin can”). A line later, we learn that the man on the roof’s “face is a bright white seed” followed by an explanation of the comparison (his face has been “tilled up, exposed / because of work the state began / and left unfinished”).

 

What “work the state began” is unclear. Maybe the phrase refers to an uncompleted construction project. Maybe it’s a commentary on our education system, on the criminal justice system, on social services. Maybe” the state” refers to a geographic location. Maybe it’s a reference to a mental or emotional state of being. Who knows? What we do know is that the effect of being or feeling “unfinished” causes one to appear “small / and getting smaller and smaller / and smaller.”

 

As the camera pans away from the rooftop, the loner’s face morphs into our own indistinguishable features. We become him. From a distance, violence, which may be brutal up close, is “bathed in white light.” Objects, which may be desirable, are “objectionable.”

 

The ever-changing world can be a “paranoiac symphony.” So quickly the white turns to a “darkness” in which we “move around.” And we are capable of becoming the very darkness that surrounds us (“a dark blot in darkness”). As if to combat this losing of self, the speaker “ask[s] for attention,” but when a voice calls back, “no one uses [the speaker’s] name,” which again highlights the indistinguishable nature of people and things.

 

Clearly there’s a lot to worry about as a human being trying to exist in the world. Hence the beauty of the “empty reed,” unfilled with all the conflicts running through our minds. People seeking personal growth are “planting their hands in the ground.” Those who want progress are “turning themselves into wheels.” We go to extraordinary lengths to try to improve ourselves. In those efforts, we can’t help but feel a tinge of envy for the cat who sleeps, “mostly unconcerned.”

 

 

– The Editors