Tag: inspiration

Hands across the ocean.

This week I sent out a TinyLetter about distance and in some ways also about the courage to write across any perceived distance. The previous letter was about loss, and not necessarily that of physical form.

Borges writes that “in due time other men will rewrite the same books and nothing will really be lost” (excerpt sent by a friend, pictured below):

I came across Claire Messud’s Why I Write (via Literary Hub). She quotes Rushdie on how we as writers hold on to things and try to prevent or assuage their inevitable loss by telling stories.

Rushdie wrote: “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” I, for my heart, couldn’t afford to lose these things. I could, instead, tell stories: I could become a writer.

In my letter I voiced my gratitude for living in an era that offers vast multitudes of methods for communicating. We’ve had books and poems for thousands of years, but now barriers of distance are easier to cross than ever with language. Messud uses the metaphorical British film quote “hands across the ocean” to indicate this power of words:

Even a single successful sentence can be transformative; and a single poem or novel can alter someone’s life forever. That, my friends, is “hands across the ocean,” and it’s a meeting that happens if not only, then most fully, through language. With words, we can travel across nations and through time; we can inhabit lives far from our own.

What is our hope for the experience of literature, if not to share this: shards of memory and new worlds discovered? What, indeed, if not this, is the best truth of our experience of life?

I have my own collection of little literary and philosophical heads, my own stock of single successful sentences. Each of us is constructed, like a magpie’s nest, from these as much as from our childhood experiences and our temperament and our loves and losses. We are as much the sum of our lived literary experiences as of our literally lived experiences. This, of course, is what T.S. Eliot expressed in The Waste Land, and his is one of the essential sentences I carry with me everywhere. I’ve slipped it into several of my books. “These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins.” That’s all. It’s why I write, really. Fail again, fail better—to cite another from my collection. A single successful sentence, a so-called philosophical hue. Each an invocation; each a hand across the ocean; each a seizing of power away from fear and desire; each a small magic.

Perhaps, as writers, we hope that the more we share, the less we lose.

Perhaps, as Borges insists, there is no actual loss due to the repetitive nature of the very experiences we write about. We truly are rewriting the tales of every generation before us.

I write to carry my past with me, as much as I write to let it go.

J.L. Carrell wrote: “If I could, I would move mountains to reach you. You must know that. If you are reading this, the mountains have proved beyond my strength.”

And so I write to reach you across distances I have found that I am unable to cross. I still may never arrive, but perhaps arrival was never the point. I write to take you with me, though we have no more shared road ahead.

Hands across the ocean. Words between our hearts.

The Art of Losing

Almost exactly 3 years ago, I wrote my 500th blog post here on “rose in midair.” The blog I wrote on immediately before that was “becoming.rosekuo.org,” which I took offline. I’ve since written about 500 more posts here.

Three years ago, I was living in the green hills of Pennsylvania. Falling in love with men who wrote me heartfelt letters. Dancing a lot. Pretty much my life on repeat.

I practice reading back on my paper journals and blog entries — to remember, to forget, to indulge in knowing that nothing lasts, to know that pain is temporary, and that despite the odds, I am still here (!)

Memories are a funny thing. My most recent TinyLetter was about the art of losing that which we love.

An example of the universe converging: the day after I sent that TinyLetter, I read Josh Wagner’s Instructions for Life addressed to his 18-year-old self. Wagner writes:

You thought you loved this thing but really you loved the arrows that burned around you. And now your entire focus becomes how do I get rid of what took me so long to achieve? Because it no longer feels like the end-all-be-all of your entire life. Now it feels like guilt and confusion and naturally you have to wonder if you’re completely broken as a human because aren’t we supposed to want something and then have it and then we’re happy? But what you’ve forgotten is you don’t actually have it. We never have anything.

Here’s the painful truth you already know. Nothing lasts. Everything ends. The only eternal element in life is change. We call phrases like this cliché and roll our eyes when we hear them because we hate it. We hate that we’re going to die. In the morning we’re pushed out of the airplane and by sunset we’ll be a memory on the sidewalk.

So what to do on the way down?

If something has an expiration date you can let it spoil or you can turn it into fuel. What you have now in your arms, what you’ve struggled so hard to achieve, is ready fuel. You know you can’t keep it so you have two options: you can put it in a landfill or you can set it on fire.

…

Don’t be afraid to love. But first make sure you don’t think you know how.

Stop putting all that work into agonizing over the imminent loss of everything you love. Simply love. While it’s still right there in front of you. Time not spent burning is draining, every bit of it trickling away at one second per second. Do you want a landfill piled up over your bones or do you want a trail of fire through the sky?

And when you do fall in love—and you will, again and again and again—don’t stop falling just because you hit the ground.

Recently, the thought of loss has followed me quietly. Maybe it’s the feeling of getting older. Maybe it’s my heart flexing, preparing for the inevitable. Maybe it’s the habit of having lost so many times before, and the desire to protect my heart from it again. A discussion about love not being a zero-sum game haunts me, because it’s difficult to accept grey in a world where binary definitions make things easier:

In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s).

I don’t know what compels me to continue writing similar stories two decades later.

Italo Calvino writes, “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

I did once think this, and I would sometimes stay silent for fear of losing the thing I wanted to speak of. It’s a particular kind of vulnerability, to speak of something out loud, to address it. But now, I don’t know if I agree — because maybe by speaking of cities, my capacity to keep them grows stronger. While speaking of other cities, New York City patiently awaits my faithful return.

Like those scenes in the movie Inception in which buildings come apart in dreams, I imagine my losses to be just as prevalent and devastating. Everything good in this life comes more slowly than we have patience for — our urgency makes every small step seem a catastrophe, because we haven’t yet arrived at the destination we are reaching for.

I guess this is still the age-old thought: let the journey fill your arms, you know. Let optimism startle you, even convince you a for a little while. This has been the theme. Write on. Love on, through the windy nights. Love on, through the stormy ones. Love on, for this can be our sunlight — our trail of fire through a constant sky.

I am watching a couple slow dance precariously and laugh together while losing balance on the subway. The man sitting next to me is wearing a cowboy hat and reading Vonnegut. The sun was splitting the empty skies open with its orange before I went underground. The world will be defiant, you know, even in the face of so much confusion and despair. It remains throbbing with hope, or it (we) wouldn’t exist.