The poem I tried to write the other day was a slight meditation on the word soon. It began with the dog, shaking his floppy ears and the jangle of his collar. Soon, he would want to be fed and walked and played with. Soon, I would have to get ready for work. Whether we want it to or not, life approaches. Something is always soon. I tried to recount my day from the day before (in my head, not in the poem) – what was in the rear view, did I do anything of consequence? I’ll acknowledge, that doing something of consequence might be a high bar (at least on a daily basis). Though when I ask myself such a question, it’s not usually in a judgmental way, it’s more out of curiosity – what did I do yesterday? What mattered?
Guests
My parents have been visiting this week. My sense of time and space is out of whack. I’m not used to having dinner with other people on a regular basis, or having the television on, or just having people be around. Normally, when I’m around other people, there’s a purpose to it (visiting or work or the bar), there’s some intentionality and it’s often short-lived. This is just us sharing the same space for a week. It’s made me more aware of those solitary routines that I’ve developed and am temporarily abandoning. It’s a little weird. Yet when they left, I felt a heaviness.
Living with other people is always an adjustment. As an example, they, my parents, load the dishwasher the wrong way. The way they do it is haphazard – the dishes slant and clang in all directions. When I load it, everything is orderly, there’s a pattern and neatness. Things fit. I’m not so compulsive as to reload the dishes the “correct” way, but I get a small shudder when I try to put in a large plate and have to try to find space among the chaos. And a funny addition to this thought… I loaded a few dishes, ran the dishwasher, and took the dog for a walk. When I came back in, my dad says, “you know, we did those dishes yesterday.” Nope, I did not know that. How would I know that (unless the dishwasher was locked or empty). These are the things I sometimes think about: what visual cues might we use to communicate with each other. What types of silent communications do we develop when we live together? We have a similar thing with the bathroom door. One of my parents has a tendency to shut it when it’s not in use. They also have a tendency to try to open it when it is in use – because if the door is always shut, one never knows if it’s occupied or not. I could propose an obvious solution to this mayhem, but being non-confrontational, I’d rather us all live in perpetual confusion for the week that we’re together.
Working For The Man
The other day, the manager of a local store came in to our office. They raised some money for us. I asked him a few questions about his business and how things were going. He said it’s been tough to hire and retain workers. He believes people are applying for jobs just to fulfill their unemployment requirements – that they have no intention of working and just want to milk the system a little longer. That may be true in some circumstances, but I wish people would question this “nobody wants to work” narrative a little harder. For one thing – I suspect that for the entire history of human kind, people have dreaded work. After all, the punishment for Adam and Eve was to be banished from paradise where they had everything they wanted… out into the world where they would have to provide for themselves (work for it). The punishment was work.
But another thing that bothers me about the “nobody wants to work” narrative is that it’s almost always applied to lower wage workers. We look at people who retire early as success stories, yet we don’t seem to question their motivations (pssst…. they also don’t want to work). We have a pretty messed up system that has always (at least since puritanical / colonial times) posited that success (money) shows god has favored you, and that everyone else is just lazy or indolent or perhaps evil…. something something idle hands and devil’s work. I often tell people that I had a small epiphany as I walked along the Mississippi River and looked at the opulent homes on the bluff. It’s a gorgeous view, and at our most core levels, I don’t believe that any one person is more deserving of having access to that beauty than any other person. No amount of work or success suddenly makes one more worthy of the world’s beauty and richness – yet the best views, the best vacations, the best meals are only available to those who can afford them and then we use words like “earned” as though some folks are “more deserving” than others. We talk about success and hard work as if one necessarily leads to the other. The reality is that sometimes it does, but for large swaths of people it does not. If life’s rewards were based on effort, I suspect a lot of single parents working multiple jobs would be living in houses on the bluff and eating caviar. They’d have nannies and tropical vacations and fast cars… but then I guess they wouldn’t have time for their two jobs and “lazy” lifestyle. So when I hear that “people don’t want to work,” I’m often tempted to ask (but polite society keeps me quiet), “can you blame them?” If I worked odd or long hours and never got ahead and was always stressed or tired or worried about money, I might want to opt out of this system as well.
That Nonsense That Sometimes Happens When We Sleep
The other night I had several dreams. I woke with some vague recollections. In one, I owned a low-to-the-ground sports car – something like a Dodge Charger. It was pretty new and periwinkle blue. I had parked it in a garage at a casino. When I came out to my car, it had been encircled by three or four other cars, and there were red streaks and slight dents on the side – apparently a red car that had also been parked nearby and scrapped my car as it left. Jerk. In another dream, I seemed to be in the middle of a falling out with my friend Tim. He was tired of listening to whatever it was I was rambling on about (probably capitalism). His life is busy in different ways than mine is, and while he agreed with my arguments and rants, I could sense his patience was wearing thin, and maybe his mind was changing in the other direction. He didn’t have the energy to care about whatever it was that I cared about – and so began the falling out – he didn’t really want to remain friends – I’m too much work. In yet another dream, but maybe tied into the falling out, I was at a party – maybe a birthday party for one of Tim’s kids, and I was sitting next to a big dude in a muscle shirt who I didn’t know. I made a blanket statement about a particular politician calling him a fucking asshole. This person took offense, stood up, gave me a shove, and wanted to fight – like actual fight over it. We didn’t. A week or two had passed and this guy and I had cordial, normal interactions (I think we were doing some type of construction project together). We worked, but didn’t talk to each other. After a while, he got pissed at me for “not dropping it” and for ignoring him. I think I said something along the lines of, “I can drop it and still not want to talk to you.” Pretty dumb dreams full of odd conflict.
Birthday Hangover
The post-birthday hours and days have been more of an emotional hangover than a beer-soaked hangover. Thinking about the years that have passed and the years yet to come can be complicated. Poetry sometimes helps, sometimes doesn’t. One of the poems I read used the phrase “citizen sadness” and I decided to riff on that in a few lines I was noodling with: Citizens of sad landscapes and dusty trees. Citizens in the republics of melancholy and joy. I should do something with that.
Last night at a different bar – at my Saturday night spot where I sit outside overlooking people in Adirondack chairs by a creek, I read a short essay from Marginalia (formerly Brain Pickings) on Eric Berne’s thoughts on intimacy. The essay begins:
We move among surfaces. If we are lucky enough, if we are courageous enough, every once in a while we dive into the depths with another. It is not easy, because even through our best self-awareness, we remain largely unfathomable to ourselves. To reach the nether fathoms with another is a transcendent terror — one we can only bear for a little while before some great gasp of panic beckons us back to the surface.
The willingness to stay is what we call intimacy, and it is the hardest-won, most precious mutual gift two people could exchange.
That’s a definition of intimacy I hadn’t considered: the willingness to stay. The “I hope to disappoint you better than anyone else has” type of commitment. This concept has been popping up a lot lately. The Atlantic just ran an article on this constant refrain of cutting toxic people from our lives writing: “And suddenly, everyone is toxic. Welcome to the cut-’em-loose era of human relationships.” An era, perhaps, with less intimacy. I came across a Frank O’Hara quote: “In time of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love” along with the poem “Even So” by Alice Walker:
Love, if it is love, never goes away.
It is embedded in us,
like seams of gold in the Earth,
waiting for light,
waiting to be struck.
And from Berne, I copied into the notes on my phone:
A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity.
Much of Berne’s theories posit that we have three people inside of us, a child, an adult, and a parent. He seems to believe that miscommunication happens when one of those three in one person is trying to communicate to a different one of those three in the other person. He also suggests that the child is the most free of those three and that our parent and adult selves are the ones who get in the way of intimacy (with notions of guilt and overthinking, shame and worry). Berne writes:
Once the Child is free of Adult caution and Parental criticism, he has a sense of elation and awareness. He begins to see and hear and feel the way he really wants to, the way he originally did before he was corrupted by his living parents. In this autonomous state, he no longer has to name things, as is usually required by his Adult, nor account for his behavior, as demanded by his Parent. He is free to respond directly and spontaneously to what he sees and hears and feels. Because the two parties trust one another, they freely open up their secret worlds of perception, experience, and behavior to each other, asking nothing in return except the delight of opening the gates without fear.
This type of intimacy applies to both the self and the other – it can be deep, deeply satisfying, and terrifying all at the same time. It, this opening up of secret worlds of perception, is at the core of trying to create or build… it is a daring attempt to share those views and thoughts that might not normally see the light of day.
Getting Things In Order
This morning, Sunday, after reading on the back deck, I put on some jazz and started to put the house back in order. I keep telling myself that I need to purge some of my stuff – stuff that has been in boxes (mostly books) for the past three years. Living this way has the strange effect of making me feel as though I’ve been in my own planetary wobble ever since my orbit got knocked off course a few years back – perhaps in search of other planets, other orbits. Instead of purging, I cleaned the fridge of a dozen old, mini bottles of now flat soda (they predate me coming here) and wiped down the bathroom. It was a sunny day. I went for a short run and walked to a coffee shop where I began rereading Stephen Dunn’s Loosestrife. He begins his book with a quote from William Gass, “Every philosophical catastrophe is a literary opportunity.” For me, Dunn’s poetry always delivers hints of wit and humor mixed with a type of dark and uncomfortable honesty…
Amongst the tidying up, I keep telling myself that I’d like to dedicate at least one weekend day to revising and submitting poems to journals. I do a lot of telling myself “I should” and considerably less doing. These things: the purging, the reading, the loafing about, the editing and submitting are all part of the “who and how I wish to be” conversation… which, to some degree, is a conversation about intimacy and sharing – a kind of giving to myself and others.