The other morning, instead of scrolling Twitter and Facebook and reading the news – or more accurately, doing less of those things – I spent my time revising poems and researching the submission guidelines of a few journals. I still didn’t hit submit, but this was a step. I have continued to add to my Twitter feed some people who write and publish poetry on a regular basis (I think I can do this). My screenshot collection of new-to-me poems is growing. That day was also John Ashbery’s birthday. I hadn’t read much of his poetry, but I was happy to discover the ones that were being shared online. And… as if the cosmos was somehow telling me to continue down this path, my writer friend (I really only have one) reached out to apologize for not having gotten around to looking at the poems I had sent. He promised to do so this week. I thanked him and asked if I could resend some of the poems – they happened to be the ones I had revised in the morning.
A day later, I was back to mindlessly scrolling social media. It’s a sexy, seductive beast…. not really, it’s just an easy way to fill time – of which I often bitch about having so little. I read some poems and saw some pictures of a group of writers at a writers’ retreat. My first thought on seeing the picture was, yeah, I should probably apply to one of those – it might be good to surround myself with writers. But then my thinking jumped to, but if I were in a relationship (which no doubt will happen any day now), I’d rather spend my limited vacation time with that person than off with a bunch of poets. This was an odd mental jump to make…. For one, why do I always anticipate some other person? I’ve lived alone for years and yet still think as though I’m part of some unit. Perhaps that’s my default setting. But also, why even go there? Sure, I could come up with a justification built around the scarcity of vacation time in our modern existence. I could think back to times of infatuation or love in which I wanted to do everything together. I could also think back to my own personal past in which I seldom took more than one week-long vacation per year… am I dedicated enough to the craft to devote my precious vacation time to it? But I knew this was about something else. As I rooted around that heavy, wooden chest of self-honesty and reflection, any future hesitation I might have about going to such a retreat has more to do with jealousy and the discomfort I would feel if the roles were reversed. I should probably say potential jealousy and discomfort because, you know, this is another one of those pointless thought experiments not based in any current reality.
I asked myself why might such a scenario make me uncomfortable? Without any hesitation, I knew where my insecurities were and knew I’d be afraid this fictional future person would meet someone more interesting and inspiring than I am and run off with them – or at least find a way to “enjoy the richness” of their company while away on a retreat. I would be sad at not being, or no longer being, that person’s sun, moon, and stars…. A retreat seems like the perfect opportunity for an affair of both mind and body – one that leads to years of correspondence and clandestine meetings in upscale hotels in foreign cities. Admittedly, this is also a projection. Right now, as a single person, I wouldn’t be opposed to that type of an encounter. If I were to attend a retreat, it would be to work on my writing and to meet interesting people and learn and be inspired – that’s the point of these things. The setting seems rife with the type of temptation that could only lay a shaky foundation for anything more serious or longer lasting. “We met at a retreat and were swept away by each other’s magic… so…. clearly neither of us can ever do that again, alone.”
So where does this come from? It probably doesn’t help that one of my first poetry teachers was an attractive, older man with wavy hair who several of my female classmates stared at dreamily (batting eyelashes and all)… or that he had an affair with one of his graduate students. Or that two of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen Dunn, also had affairs – or at least I think they did. I know Vonnegut did, I think Dunn did, but am not sure. For a lot of reasons, I’m pretty opposed to infidelity. Despite that not being a terribly controversial stance to take, affairs happen all the time. For better or worse, they are part of the human experience and emotional soup of life. For me, this insecurity also has this weird, internal conflict with my views on art and artists. What attracts me to artists is the very thing that scares me about them. In my experience, they are a little better at being in the moment, experiencing the fullness of beauty, and are more inclined to follow their passion, muse, and desires. Free spirits sometimes shackled by this deep commitment to understanding the human condition, they necessarily work to break down illusions of time, reality, the heart, and the mind – which can also make them more prone to what we might describe as flightiness or impulse or depression. They get lost for moments or hours or days and the fear is that the wandering off will always be more attractive than the staying put. In a silly way, I sometimes think because I have these traditional, over-romanticized ideas and ideals about “love” or what it means to be an artist, I then think I can’t possibly be a good writer or artist and a good partner (more projection, more “or” statements that could just as easily be “and” statements). I sometimes think that in order to create, I (and others) have to be willing to go places we might not normally go or dig into those all-too-human admissions and experiences that good society insists we keep tucked away.
Jealousy, infidelity, insecurity are raw spots of complicated emotions. They are born out of common everyday insecurities, but also desire, passion, and being human. Thirst after someone and you begin to assume everyone else does too – why wouldn’t they? I can remember hanging out with a friend and his wife one night. They started to argue about jealousy. She had been hanging out with a male friend and wondered why this didn’t make her husband jealous. She took it as a sign that he wasn’t interested in her, that maybe she wasn’t attractive to him. She wanted to know why he didn’t worry about losing her. He insisted that he had such complete trust in her that he wouldn’t get jealous. Of course, they both had valid perspectives. I suspect, like her, most of us want to be prized in some way… and most of us have held and lost something near and dear. Deep down, we know that anything that’s prized is also at risk of being lost. While his trust was admirable and is deemed as healthy and what we should strive for in mature relationships, it also seemed to come from that secure place of not having lost anything precious. I mediated the dispute as best as I could pointing out the validity of each side and how each might concede a little to the other. I’m much better at doing this for other people than I am in my own life.
As I think about these contradictions that I assume many of us face, I’m reminded of a few things. Once during a couples therapy session, the counselor pointed out that the things we admired most in each other were also the things that drove us most crazy. I love free spirits, I’m terrified they’ll fly away. I can want growth for my partner and also fear it. In this sense, I’m reminded of the character Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” He is a simple brute of a man who likes to pet soft things. Not knowing his own strength, he kills his pet mouse with affection. I’m also reminded of a quote by Anton Chekhov:
Every happy man should have someone with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him – illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others.
Every time I seek this quote out, I have this image in my head of a mysterious, faceless man (perhaps in a surrealistic painting with a bowler hat) with a tiny hammer waiting to tap, just hard enough to surprise, the forehead of the happy man who stands in an empty room with shiny floors and lots of doors that keep the outside world at bay. What I often forget, perhaps intentionally, is that there’s more to the quote: “But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind – and everything is all right.”
As to why go there in the first place? In some ways, this is part of my personal practice – to get comfortable with the uncomfortable, to combat my tendency to anticipate the worst by walking headstrong into the storm. I think I want to believe in some type of temporary permanence – something bigger than myself that lasts as long as I do (or maybe longer). I want to believe in a process of renewal that doesn’t necessarily involve the death of other things. That has not been my life experience. In my world, change has always involved hard departures (parents, lovers, friends and self) – and so I think that’s what I’ve come to expect. I go there to remind myself of life’s odd irony that the tighter we hold on to things, or the more aggressively we pursue things, the less likely we are to keep them or achieve them. I also go there to remind myself of the other possible outcomes…. Undoubtedly, there are countless times that artists go away to be inspired and don’t have affairs and come back refreshed and happy and more committed to their craft and with fresh eyes for the beauty of their everyday. It’s just that those aren’t the stories that get told. They’re often the small triumphs we take for granted.