I seldom get through reading a few poems, or an essay without wanting to hop on my computer and write something. Similarly, I seldom write something without wanting to take it all back or revise it or clarify. I’m thankful that the collection of essays I’m reading seems to support this behavior, this back and forth, this self doubt in the face of an ego that made me think I had something to say in the first place.
This morning (basically now), I had one of those urges to grab my computer and jot some stuff down. By the time I ever get to the actual subject, some of the urgency will have disappeared. Perhaps a lesson to get to it with greater expedience.
I just finished an essay on basketball and poetry. Stephen Dunn was a good basketball player – made his college team. He came up against a teammate who was much better and afterwards he barely got to play again. Later in life he was in an adult league and had an amazing game one night… he had a teammate who fed him the ball throughout. Both players, the one who humbled him and the one who fed him, were named Richie, so it’s a tale of two Richies. Dunn is a really good writer. He can weave these stories together with humor and wistfulness. He can connect two ideas that we might not otherwise connect – like basketball and poetry. I suppose all good writers can do this… he just happens to be the one I read / am reading. I would like to work on that technique more – much of what I write here is surface level, a reporting of events. Towards the end of the essay, Dunn writes:
Poems are often demanding because they are trying to be equal to the complexities of the world and how to be alive in it.
I’ve learned something about sudden rightness from basketball as well as from poetry. But poetry alone has slowed me down, taught me patience and the rewards of contemplation. There are reasons why people don’t exchange high-fives in libraries. Poetry teaches you to say “yes” quietly – and at its best it doesn’t let you escape from experience, from the hard business of living. To be a poetry fan you have to be prepared to wince, to have some of your shibboleths subverted.
“Works of art,” Camus reminded us, “are not born in flashes of the imagination, but in daily fidelity.”
One of the points I was trying to make in my post “Mess” was this notion of being and feeling different – this thing that I will carry forward in some manner – a different way of moving through the world. I don’t know if my writing is any good. I don’t know if it will last or get abandoned. I don’t think much of it is worth keeping or rises above the daily ramblings of some dude in his forties who really hasn’t even gone through very much… I write this just as I got news that friend’s mother passed away last night. My trials and tribulations are pretty frivolous and trivial – but they are the experiences I have and what has shaped my thoughts. Poetry, whether I become a published poet or not, has taught me to slow down. It has taught me to think a little harder about what matters. It has taught me to examine life through multiple lenses. A blog post about googling someone is not high art… but it elicits other feelings – the discovery of what we share and don’t share with each other, the notion of our private selves, the shame of not being stronger or able to let go, the shame in googling someone… writing about these things is a form of fidelity to daily existence. I have no idea how or if these ideas will turn up later. As Dunn suggests, you don’t necessarily include things because they happened…. you include them because you’ve made space for them.
All of this writing is often about making space, about slowing down, about finding a little depth of human experience in the absolute mundane. The benefit of a post like “Mess” is less in what I wrote or discovered, and more about the process and motivations… how I felt both in the moment, and afterwards – feeling a little foolish for almost marrying someone who had, I suspect, a lot hidden. The benefit of writing is in revealing that it’s amazing what we can and can’t know about a person and the risks we’re willing to take to get to know them on a deeper level, and also how, sometimes, people don’t want to be known on that level. The lines I omitted from the Ben Folds song:
There are rooms in this house that I don’t open anymore
Dusty books and pictures on the floor
But she will never see
She’ll never see that part of me
Those lines pose a challenge for me (and I suppose for a lot of us). We want to put our past behind us, box it up and maybe not revisit it, let alone share it – sometimes because it’s painful or embarrassing or full of shame. But I really struggle with those last two lines. I want her, whoever she may be, to see all of me, or as much as is possible. To accept most if not all of who I am, who I’ve been, and who I hope to be… I suppose I expect to be able to see my partner in the same way. On our deepest levels, we want to be seen, we want to be accepted for the messy people that we are. That necessarily involves revealing yourself.
My ex-fiancee, B, was often concerned about her legacy and being accepted for who she is/was. She put a lot of hope in her legacy being realized through a child or her writing. I’m not sure she has accepted her past or realized that she’s been creating her own legacy all along in the people she has held dear or left behind… that in order to leave a legacy, you have to be willing to be seen. I’ve mentioned before a conversation that stuck out in which she said she was afraid I would forget her. Ever since she left, I’ve been the keeper of memory, and the few times she has reached out it has been in attempts to erase any trace of us. The more I think about that conversation, I can see how it might have been a projection of her own behaviors – her own intentional burying of the past. She expected and feared I would do it because she’s done it before.
There are things from her past that my ex-wife and I never talked about – or never talked deeply about. Things that made me uncomfortable, and I’m sure were beyond difficult for her. They would have been tough conversations – we probably would have been better off if we had had those conversations anyway. But these are the things that can’t be forced. They require safety, security, and trust… but also a willingness. This is the beautiful complexity worth exploring (especially in writing) – the desire to be seen and the inclination to be hidden or anonymous. Wanting to be discovered over and over again. Watch any child play hide and seek and you realize that the moment of ecstatic joy, the one that elicits the wriggles and screams and giggles, is not in the hiding, but in the moment of discovery. Leave the child hiding too long, and they start to peek out, make noise, reveal themselves, almost daring the seeker to find them. Go further back to infants…. peek-a-boo is all about revelation and seeing. A demonstration that eye contact is about seeing deeply and the anticipation of that connection….. I’m not here, I’m not here, I’m not here…. peek-a-boo, here I am.
B and I were getting there, slowly. I’m sad that we never fully arrived. She probably shared more with me than she did most people. But… I also think she is one to box things up and put them away where only she can revisit them. I suspect, like most of us, she has a lot of hidden and contradictory desires. She wants to start over and have it take root but also have the option of starting again. She wants to be discovered and accepted while also holding on to what is sacred to only her. It’s why Emotionally Focused Therapy can be so effective – it allows for the dusting off and the deep sharing that ultimately leads to healing and discovery. I always seem to come back to that Adrienne Rich quote – the one about love being terrifying and about the truths we continuously reveal to each other. I find myself writing about things to be able to reveal my truth to myself first…. to move a little closer to merging the public self with the private self; to get comfortable with not hiding.