Category: inspiration

National Poetry Month: sense records of our humanity

Tomorrow is the beginning of National Poetry Month. Though I already post quite often about poetry, I’m considering posting some more significant poems during the month of April.

Jennifer Benka, the director of the Academy of American Poets, discusses the benefits of reading poetry. 

The benefits of reading any literary work are immeasurable and life enriching. Reading is reflection—contemplative time. I think poetry, especially, requires that you step outside of the daily rush. Each poem is an art object that’s only activated when a person engages with it. And when you let words with their jagged edges, sharp music, and visual prompts assemble in the mind—when you exercise your imagination and allow language to elicit an intellectual and emotional response—you are more actively participating in your life. Audre Lorde said, “Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.” Poetry requires feeling, offers personal insight, and increases empathy. In speaking about the role of the art form, Mark Doty once said, “The project of poetry, in a way, is to raise language to such a level that it can convey the precise nature of subjective experience.” In this way, poems are sense records of our humanity, mapping ways in and ways out. 

on the nature of maps

Marfa Texas

The skies of Marfa, Texas

A space “without” seems strange: in today’s world, we are so accustomed to more rather than less. More buildings, more cars, more people, more things. Things everywhere.

The desert and open skies expand something in the heart; the apparent endlessness feels both intensely personal and coolly insouciant. Empty yet simultaneously so full of possibility. I referenced a friend’s tattoo once: a Chinese character that means “emptiness” but is idiomatic because it connotes “a space waiting to be filled,” which is arguably different from emptiness. There is a beauty in the waiting, in the pause in between. Sometimes when we see or feel emptiness we feel rushed or anxious to put something in it, rather than exploring the space. Stillness and space are necessary for us to find ourselves. Pico Iyer says, “I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to embrace the uncertainty of the future despite a past that is laden with preconceived notions of how things will go. I stumble a lot, take a lot of wrong turns in life. I try to preempt disappointment and protect myself by following the maps I’ve already made, but in staying in the harbor, I may pass up that one turn that will take me to the view I’ve been searching for; the one that will change everything that the past has programmed in me. I worry a lot about knowing the right path ahead of time, when really we are still the explorers of the path. Not everything is known, and that is ok. Epiphanies rarely repeat themselves. Rolf Faste’s “On the Nature of Maps” can be interpreted as double entendre, a metaphor of how to charter the new; he acknowledges the usefulness of the maps we already have, while also recognizing the space beyond that which is familiar.

  1. Maps are useful.
  2. Maps are useful in inverse proportion to their completeness.
  3. “The map is not the territory” – Korzybski
  4. Maps of known territories can be purchased.
  5. You can’t buy maps for unknown territories.
  6. Explorers go into unknown territories.
  7. In the absence of maps, explorers outfit themselves in other ways.
  8. The future is an unknown territory.

“And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”

— Pico Iyer

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Grief is a thing with feathers.

“To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.”

— Rebecca Solnit

shore

You know, we all want to appear like we have our shit together. Grief is a hard thing to write about without sounding negative. I’ve been doing a lot of magical thinking these days. Somehow I keep thinking you’ll hear me from across the ocean, which is the point of calling it magical. The tiny part of me that knows you won’t, that tiny part grows larger every day. Does this cause relief or despair? I can’t tell the difference.

***

I stared down at the camera you gave me that has not turned on since our last trip together. “Click, click,” the on button does nothing. I set it back down carefully. I looked in dismay at my beloved Kindle, stuck (ironically) on the last page of a book called The Course Of Love. It wouldn’t budge. The universe was telling me something. Every one of the electronic things that surrounded me in my life ceased to turn on, one by one, in your absence. I then put my phone down anxiously, wondering if it, too, will eventually crack under the pressure. Nervous from thinking about cracking under pressure, I will my heart to withstand.

“There is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”

I vehemently think, maybe besides the electronics you send everyone in your life, I just wanted you to show up at my door. Point at your chest. Show me it’s home. I want to be different from all the things and people you plug into, turn on, replace, upgrade, discard, abandon, lose. The ones that stay in your home in lieu of me.

It’s hard to want one of everything. It’s harder still to turn them down when offered, one by one.

Why do we think we should act so differently when the world is burning and we only have a few more days to live? Why would we hold each other close and relish the last few days, and yet when we have years we decide we can take our sweet time? Then of course we will look back and think, “it was too late. I should’ve done more, sooner.” We are the kings and queens of taking things for granted.

My anger feels unbearable. Am I angry at you, or at the loss of you? Am I angry because I’m scared of what would happen if I stopped being angry?

***

Since you’ve been gone, T. and I talk almost every day and we write in our secret blogs about grief. It helps to know someone is listening. Sadness can span any amount of time. There is no limit. It’s ok to not have a limit. Yet our culture of mastery and closure demands that there be clearly outlined phases, demands that there will be an end. Is it self-preservation or a form of denial to think there is always a finite and linear route, a light at the end of the tunnel?

We even have imaginary hierarchies of grief. I am certain we all tell ourselves things like: “surely, a death that has already occurred is certainly a greater heartbreak than ambiguous loss,” or “psh, the end of a relationship is no comparison to greater griefs that could occur.” Or, “it’s been X number of months, so I should feel fine now.” The lines get blurry.

As T. says, grief isn’t a competition. But we are only human. Even in our hearts we attempt to rank things, willing it to be so, searching for reasons to excuse ourselves from feeling fully. As if telling ourselves that “it’s not a big deal” and we should “be over it already” will magically make it true. In the movie Crazy, Stupid Love, there is that scene when the coworkers at his office find out about why he’s grieving. The coworker’s response is, “Oh thank god man, it’s ‘just’ a divorce! It could have been cancer!” And he mutters, “Yeah, thank god. It’s just my relationship.”

I held C. while she sobbed, “I thought we would grow old together. I wanted to grow old with him.” Inside, my heart was caving. Me, too.

I’ve never had the right words to tell my stories, but we can only take the words we have and rearrange them in various attempts. Sometimes, when I’m feeling the most brave, I imagine the only place the stories translate correctly is in my eyes. Sometimes I feel more brave and think that if I just allow you to look into them, you will finally understand. It’s magical thinking- the West Village brownstone we’d share together, the food adventures, the 2 minute planks and dairy-less pizza AND ice cream afterwards. And then I wake up from those dreams. And it doesn’t seem to work in real life. Others occupy your room, your bed. My eyes go dark. There is nothing to be read within them. But sometimes illiteracy is the obstacle, isn’t it?

Eugenides writes, “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in ‘sadness,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘regret.’ Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, ‘the happiness that attends disaster.’ Or: ‘the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.'”

Anyway. So as grief buddies, we ended up reading this post (Grief Magic) together (excerpts after the jump), and I felt like I had been dropped back in the middle of this vast ocean where you are on a shore I don’t know how to navigate to. These themes repeat in my writing, but I’ve seen in all my reading that we simply have to write about things until we are done writing about them. And that might take a lifetime.

But it’s okay, like Rapp says in her essay: we have everything ahead of us, and nothing at all. Perhaps there’s comfort in that, or at least some Germanic train-car hybrid emotion that can finally encompass our history together.

I get close to the shores I can find. I reach out to touch the water. Magically hoping that you’ll know. Magically hoping you’ll reach back.

hello, it's me

Never mind if he calls, the places you get
through inwardness take time, and to drift
down to the shore of the island, you know
by the sand moving, even the coarse sand here
It’s hard to say if you can even stand up, there
but there is blue sky, and blue water tipping up
the same distance from you as your face. Its face
goes further behind the eyes, without weight
or haze, and the horizon is just a change where
from going deeper you go wider, but go

— Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

 

***

Excerpts from “Grief Magic” by Emily Rapp, via The Rumpus:

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