I'm almost twenty seven years old and I have to force myself to clean my room. My car sits dead in the drive way. My scooter has a flat tire. My space heater broke the week it finally got down into the 40s at night. Records are missing sleeves. Emails go unanswered. I made my bed today for the first time in weeks (it does look amazing, highly recommend, filed under simple steps to make you feel better about yourself). I don't know why it's so difficult for me to undergo these easy, little things that are a part of being an adult. That part of my life, the physical part, being a mess doesn't really make me lose sleep at night. It's the avoidance of everything else that's the problem. I've been afraid to make decisions, since I've lost faith in myself over the summer, and I haven't been writing, because I'm afraid to get too close to what's been just below the surface for awhile now.
"I know where these tortured musings on the irremediable can lead. There's a dryness inside us we shouldn't get too close to. It's better not to know how much of our soul it occupies."*
I've been looking back on the past few years and realized I waited much too long to do some things and rushed in or completely fucked up most of the others. Anyone that's ever swung out over a river on a rope swing knows that too much hesitation is never a good thing. I've always let go in the last second, before smashing into the black water of the Santa Fe river, but that seems to be the only time I have any guts. This past year I failed to get into grad school and I was too chicken shit to apply to any others. I took it way too personally and now I'm staring down another academic year without credentials. I'm not saying you have to be in school to be somebody, absolutely the fucking contrary. I work in a bar where MFA students repeatedly don't tip me, and personally I think they look way too clean to be actual poets. Most of them, I'm sure, have never seen a rope swing in real life.
The other thing that deserves a lot of personal literary attention on my part is my total failure of having a healthy relationship. I don't mean that the relationship was a failure, but more to the point that I failed at it. I thought that by this point in my life I would have shut that door and been moving on to the next part of my life, but here I am, back at square one, and it's really no one's fault. I wanted to write an epic tale of woe, all about the miseries of summer and lost love and all of the stuff that's pretty easy to write about honestly, but I didn't. Looking back I'm glad I didn't. I've mostly just felt really confused, about everything. Drinking served its purpose of numbing out a lot of those feelings, and I've been on quite a roll of forgetting and evading, and might still be. I finally came to terms with the fact that it's hard to write when you're afraid of what you might unsettle in yourself. I've crossed that boundary at least. I'll still gladly check out mentally with my friends, because it's fun to be miserable together, even though we call it a party, even though it feels good, but I can wake up in the morning and sit down and deal with it finally.
"I felt the gradual return of my old loyalties to life, to the world that holds endless surprises, to the three or four beings whose voices reach me despite time and my incurable wanderlust."*
The weather changing has everything to do with everything. Summer's long misery is behind us! Everyone feels something new in the air, and it's both real and imagined. A lot of people, it seems, are ready to do something new. The next step. I feel comforted in the fact that by this time next year, I will be in a new place, doing something mostly different than what I'm doing now. Al Burian writes a lot about fall, and I've been flipping through a lot of Burn Collector lately. It's not a coincidence. Fall has a loneliness that summer doesn't, summer has a melancholy but fall is the time for remembering. The voices that reach me are the voices that I've always looked to my whole life, books I read before I had any friends, and books I bring with me when I travel, and books that will keep me company through our sunny, beautiful winter.
This book that I'm reading now (see below) has already effected me more than anything I've read this year. I did finish the Dark Tower series, and fell in love with the characters and story, but I consumed it, I devoured it so fast and just wanted to continue the story. In Mutis' book every sentence is a pleasure. The story is amusing and also at times strangely dark, and the main characters and the often doomed characters around him have insights into true melancholy. Reading it has reminded me of unidentifiable aches, weird pains, and the language of nostalgia. Travel, dreaming, and failure. The articulated, tangible feelings I've been searching for since summer ended.
*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis.
'I learned that you can get bruises without external contact. Struck by something trying to get out from within. Please use a pre exsisting orifice. You did tell me about that wide bruise. I remember thinking it must've looked like the ocean from an airplane. And I spent some time writing you up a mock prescription form for gin and tonics, but I threw it away.'
ReplyDeleteI think we're sort of in the same place:
ReplyDeletehttp://nonpretentious.com/2012/10/dear-mila-6/
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/people-simply-empty-out.html
Found this today, in John Gardner's _Becoming a Novelist_:
ReplyDeleteIn my own experience, nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. To most people, even those who don't read much, there is something special and vaguely magical about writing, and it is not easy for them to believe that someone they know--someone quite ordinary in many respects--can really do it. They tend to feel for the young writer a mixture of fond admiration and pity, a sense that the fellow is somehow maladjusted or misinformed. No human activity I know of takes more time than writing; it's highly unusual for anyone to become a successful writer if he cannot put in several hours every day at his typewriter.
One day you finally knew
ReplyDeletewhat you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
-Mary Oliver, _The Journey_