Author Note: Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of the poem “POET WRESTLING WITH THE POSSIBILITY SHE’S LIVING IN A SIMULATION {INSIDE A SIMULATION}” which appeared in The Ex-Puritan Issue 43, Fall 2018. As part of our Author Notes series, she answers some of our questions about the context behind the piece.
Does your poem have an interesting origin story/compositional history you’d like to share?
This poem is kind of a continuation and/or response to another poem I wrote called “Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation,” which was published by Guernica in the summer of 2018. It started when I began to experience numbness and tingling on my left side six years ago, and I went through a plethora of medical tests. There was one moment in particular where I was having my blood drawn for the umpteenth time: as my veins are very small and difficult to find, the nurse who was drawing my blood urged me to drink more water first, hoping that it would make them more visible, thinking I was dehydrated. So I was sitting there alone in the examination room, thinking how just a month ago, this exact same nurse had tried to draw my blood and couldn’t find my veins after poking around in both arms (which is still excruciatingly painful no matter how many times it happens), and then said to me almost the exact same words about drinking more water first, hoping that it would make them more visible, thinking I was dehydrated ... So, naturally, not only did I have a minor freak-out about the familiarity of it all and hid from her in the bathroom, but I also tweeted that I was hiding from her in the bathroom, wondering if she’d find me virtually—as if to prove I was wrapped up in some strange experiment in which only my left side was going numb, as if my “wiring” was “faulty.” (She did find me, although she claimed she did not see the tweet until I mentioned said tweet. I wonder to this day … ) Anyway. I then began to question if humanity is indeed living inside a simulation—one in which we inevitably die because our bodies are purposely wired to self-destruct. There is strong evidence anyway that advanced civilizations like ours tend to annihilate themselves—only what kind of simulation are we living in? And how can we even begin to uncover such a secret, otherworldly machination? Wouldn’t that kind of power be over our heads to begin with? As for this poem, “Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation {Inside a Simulation},” I take a much more skeptical approach by focusing on one of the fundamental forces—gravity—which is actually a very weak force compared to, say, electromagnetism. Why is gravity such a weak force and yet dictates so much of what we understand about the universe? Does gravity hunt (for) matter? This poem is also a prologue to another series I began on the idea of efes, which is Modern Hebrew for “zero,” but can also mean “to nullify” in mystical Jewish texts. In this series I treat efes as a much stronger fundamental force than, say, gravity, but one in which nullification presents properties and possibilities of transformation rather than destruction. Oh, and there’s a bunny in this series as well. A vampire bunny. This undead bunny is an agent of efes, and one of his first appearances is here, in which the speaker is trying to figure out what indeed is happening if she’s living in a simulation inside a simulation. And simply by asking that, the histories and “artifacts” of reality start to break down. She is being torn apart like a hunted rabbit, but not destroyed; rather, she is transported somewhere else, though she doesn’t know where. All she can deduce is that for such a weak force, “[g]ravity is a grave. That will win. Its. Hunting.” The vampire bunny appears later in her adventures in trying to understand what is reality and what is not; why there are so many unsolvable problems of physics, and why there just might be a limit to human understanding in the end, for a reason we will never know.
Are there any recent albums you’ve been digging, and why?
Hands down, Leonard Cohen’s very last album You Want It Darker. I’ve been listening to it for a couple of years regularly now since he passed away. The title song is so haunting that I hear it even when I’m not playing it. Also: the soundtrack to Under the Skin by Mica Levi. The film is beautiful, but what it makes so beautiful is the eerie, almost-always-slightly-off strings that highlight the alien protagonist’s journey on Earth. I write to both albums.
In your practice, what would you say is the balance between silliness and seriousness?
In my twenties, I was painfully serious. I’m glad I outgrew that. A life without humour is not a life I care to live, simulation or not.
RosebudBen-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and was a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow; her most recent collection of poems, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, was selected as Agape Editions’ EDITORS’ CHOICE, and will be published in 2019. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner,Poetry Northwest, and Arts & Letters, among others; recently, her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and for The Speakeasy Project.
