None of This Is Valuable to Me: Notes on Going On

Abstract

This project began as an exploration of pastoral care and poetry. The poems, however, generally spoke to the theme of apocalypse—which in turn changed the conversation about care to look more closely at salvation, preservation, and utility. Over time, the work evolved to be as it now appears in these pages. It is above all an attempt to answer a question presented by the writer Ocean Vuong. Asked to reflect on his love of the Noah’s Ark narrative, Vuong says the story offers us a question we might live by: “When the apocalypse comes, what will you put into the vessel for the future?” Vuong’s question has at least four terms we might undertake to define: the apocalypse, the future, the vessel, and the thing(s) we put in it. This paper is focused on the last two, with less attention paid to which apocalypse and which future is in play. Each chapter takes as its starting point a particular vessel and the stuff we put in it for the future. The paper draws on a variety of sources in an attempt to understand logics of preservation and continuation. Its ultimate conclusion—if it has one—is that the things we give to the future must be useful in that future, and that any attempt to preserve oneself into the future (that is, to avoid one’s own mortality) is probably futile and misguided, at times even violent.