Where We Set Our Tables

So already, recently I've been thinking back to my June 2012 visit to the then tallest building in Shanghai, the Shanghai World Financial Center. 

Thanks to the thick, transparent glass panels that make up much of the floor of its hundredth-floor observation deck, visitors can look not only out across Shanghai in all directions, but also straight down to ground-level Shanghai spreading directly beneath their feet. The deck's many reflecting surfaces further intensify the surreal viewing experience, since visitors are always needing to figure out if they're seeing other people or other people's reflections.

Frankly, I didn't mind the wavy weirdness and uncertainty created by reflections of reflections. But those glass floor panels terrified me. I did all I could to avoid standing with "nothing" between me and the street 1,555 feet below me. 

So I was unnerved and fascinated by one couple's choice to claim one of those thick floor windows as their family's lunch spot. Comfortably seated on "nothing," they turned their attention from their cellphones and guidebooks and began setting out food, plates, and utensils. Meanwhile their pig-tailed daughter played, crawled, sat, and inspected the meal taking shape, utterly oblivious to the conspicuous drop to the street beneath her. The seeming precariousness of the place must have captivated the couple, though it had the exact opposite effect on me. Then again, I'm the kind of person who prefers floors that admit no view of the ground I know to be somewhere not far beneath them.

So why think of this Shanghai visit right now? First of all, when we're in the midst of global pandemic and precariousness, it's hard not to think of previous experiences that messed with our senses of safety and reality. There's no question that the coronavirus pulled the rug out from under all of us earlier this year. But now that the novelty of our absent rugs has worn off, many of us are beginning to wonder if maybe our floors are missing, too.

Second of all, a couple of months back, I heard Kay Ryan's poem "The Niagara River" (at minute 19:25) during the American Academy of Poets' #ShelterInPoems Virtual Reading. Immediately that family picnic on that Shanghai observation deck appeared before my mind's eye--and then stayed with me.

The narrator of Ryan's brief, pithy, provocative poem recounts the experience of a "we"--I think it's also family on sightseeing outing--eating lunch at a table set on the deck of a boat traveling down the Niagara River. As the group is eating and chatting atop what doesn't quite seem to qualify as a floor--"As though/ the river were/ a floor, we position/ our tables and chairs/ upon it, eat, and/ have conversation"--the shoreside views change "calmly as though/ dining room paintings/ were being replaced."

Now the Niagara River is not a river to mess with. "Mighty" is one word I feel comfortable using to describe it: with its width, speed, and magnificent falls, it does impress with its force and power. During my search for a photo* that conveyed its mightiness, I came across numerous stories of human triumph and tragedy, some the result of daring and others the result of fortunate and unfortunate ignorance. 

But the river--especially a river like the Niagara--isn't a floor; we can flow with it, let it carry, push, hurl, or drag us, but we can't plant ourselves on it and stand firmly "in place," much as we may choose words and images that cast it in familiar, relatable, taming terms.

Not that our efforts always succeed. In this case, what's certain--so certain that Ryan's narrator twice says "we do know"--is that beneath them is not some floor, but the Niagara River. What's not known--actually, "what is hard to remember"--which means what was once known--is "what that means." So reports the narrator, dispassionately stating the fact of that missing memory as naturally as the river passes the painting-like landscapes on its shores.  

I've had a few friends whose conversations with me seldom reflected what we were doing or experiencing at the moment. For example, we could have rounded a corner in a museum exhibition and encountered El Greco's "Laocoön"** at relatively close range, and they would have said something like, "How's your cousin liking her new house?"

So I do understand that there are lots of people who just keep talking and eating, even when they're in the midst of a potentially significant experience like cruising down a magnificent river. Ryan's narrator would be one of those, except that he/she/they does remember that there's something he/she/they doesn't remember. There's a sense of ancestors here somewhere, a sense of stories once told and of meaning assigned, even if they can't be recollected.

Interestingly, throughout the whole of the #ShelterInPoems Virtual Reading, there are a number of tables, most notably kitchen tables, where people are eating--and at which they're making some kind of meaning.

• There's the old couple having their usual dinner at their usual table who keep "Remembering, with twinklings and twinges" in Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Bean Eaters" (read by Marilyn Chin at minute 17:25).
• There's the kitchen table at which "children are given instructions on what it means to be human," where "We make men . . ., we make women," in Joy Harjo's "Perhaps the World Ends Here" (read by Richard Blanco at minute 35:55).
• There are the multiple kitchen tables at which the crucial "figuring-it-out" has happened that has made it possible for us to feel ourselves "walking forward" in "today's sharp sparkle" in Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day," written for Barack Obama's first inauguration (read by Amanda Gorman at minute 49:40).

The Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of the United States

Interestingly, all of these poems are about remembering, whether the memories belong solely to those sitting at the table or to a larger group of people--members of the same family, cultural group, organization or institution. The facts and meanings of those memories have come through storytelling in its many forms across time and place, as solid as the tables around which they're shared.

I know: it's not fair to compare a dining table cruising down a major river one afternoon to a kitchen table sitting solidly and dependably in the middle of a room that anchors a family and household through thick and thin. But travels far from home next to another major river were what inspired Langston Hughes to speak of rivers to himself--and to understand himself in connection to those who came before him. And Kay Ryan's narrator has plenty of mindfulness, even if "the meaning" is eluding him/her/them. Here's my quatrain summary of what her narrator is mindful of:

A floor unlike a floor.
A shore unlike a shore.
The river's name is sure--
But more recalled no more.

Perhaps mindfulness can put a floor beneath our feet, especially when the rug's been pulled out from under us, and we're struggling to maintain our balance. Or maybe even just the glimmer of memory can steady us. The bottom line is that some floors simply don't seem like floors--like the one of the observation deck in the Shanghai World Financial Center--which doesn't mean they aren't floors.

Megan Fernandes' poem "Shanghai" in this week's New Yorker brought back to me another Shanghai memory: an evening cruise down the "wild and holy" Huangpu River."***


Shanghai is a city of stunning artifice. A few of my photos captured the view as I saw it. But most of them resembled impressionistic paintings more than photos, given how my camera compensated for the way the increasing haze,  human-made and natural, diffused the evening light. 

There's something about those "distorted" photos that seem more right and real to me than the "accurate" ones: as Fernandes says of the city a few lines later, "That is the trick of this city. It looks like a weird hope,/ the human species struck by a wondrous asymmetry."*** 

Today, I am sitting far from Shanghai at my very solid kitchen table where I spend the bulk of my time during this pandemic. My table is standing on my equally solid hardwood floor. But I still often feel off-kilter: who doesn't these days? And the truth is that I'm on the third floor, and beneath me is not the ground, but two more floors upon each of which is probably set a table in the exact same place as mine. "Weird hope" may be the best we can do some days. Meanwhile the rivers flow on.

* Toda, W. (2019, July 9). A general view of the Niagara River and Horseshoe Falls in Niagara Falls, Canada. In City News. Retrieved from https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/07/09/man-swept-over-niagara-falls/ (Originally photographed 2017, July 15)

** Theotokópoulos, D. (n.d.). Laocoön [Painting found in National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.]. Retrieved July 4, 2020, from https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/el-greco-laocoon.html [El Greco is the more common name for Theotokópoulos. This photograph lops off some of the top of the painting.]
*** Fernandes, M. (2020, June 29). Shangai. The New Yorker. Retrieved July 5, 2020, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/shanghai