There are moments when my thinking is either too fast or too multifaceted for me to catch up with it or wrestle it to the ground. In this type of sense-making process, it feels like a masked and comical burglar ran off with my brain in a satchel and I’m giving chase. In those moments, I sense a strange mix of euphoria and confusion. In those moments, I feel a level of frustration along the lines of a child who doesn’t know how to communicate their needs, their hungers, or their joyous raptures. These are the moments when words seem to fail. Perhaps more accurately, these are the moments when I know there are words, but they seem so very far away… or like they’re buried in rock and sand and I don’t have the proper tools or patience to excavate them. This is when I don’t know if I’m playing cops and robbers with my mind or if I’m an archeologist trying to unearth artifacts of my thinking and the metaphors get mixed.
Nearly finished my first cup of coffee for the morning, I was bouncing between two books of poetry: Like a Beggar by Ellen Bass and You Better Be Lightening by Andrea Gibson. I’ve dog-eared pages and poems in both books. I’ve been savoring the Gibson book ever since I bought it at a bookshop in New Mexico. The book by Bass I bought at a bookshop in Haight-Ashbury. They are very different poets, and I like them for different reasons. That’s where the words stopped this morning. That’s when the burglar and the archeologist started dancing. I found myself wanting to compare the poets – or at the very least wanting to articulate what it is that I like in their work. I couldn’t. I was back in middle school trying to answer the teacher’s probing questions to those oversimplified statements that we as students often gave “I liked it.” Why did you like it? What’s good about it? In these moments, I feel entirely unqualified to speak, much less write. And while the frustration of not being able to answer why I liked something is real, it’s a good feeling of frustration. It’s born out of joy. More importantly, it seems like a good opportunity to slow the brain (and the moment) down… a good opportunity to practice – or at least teach those two miscreants of the mind a simple two-step.
What I was feeling as I read the two poets was two different sensations. One was big and quick and encompassed the entire world, the other was slower and more finely tuned in on the details of an individual, yet universal, experience. And though I’m going to drop the metaphor here (maybe), the burglar and archeologist might also be apt descriptions of the two poets and their styles.
Gibson’s poems burn. There’s a pace to them that feels quick and full of passion for listing out the everyday wonders around us. It’s as if the world is exploding and Gibson has become an expert at catching the beautiful and mutilated shards. Many of Gibson’s poems defy being excerpted. I’ll read some lines and want to quote them, but then realize that the punch, the turn, the place to which I’m being delivered deserves to be quoted as well.
This morning I read the poem “Aliens Explain Why They Are Visiting Earth.” It begins, “Because your leaders / move their fingers / over the buttons of bombs // as if they are piano keys.” As well and inviting as those lines are, they’re enhanced by what follows, “As if they could make a symphony / of playing chords around // your children’s necks.” Later the poem continues, “Because we want to watch / skateboarders in Berlin / carve the streets // into statues of themselves. / Because we know / kids in New Orleans // glue bottle caps to the soles / of their shoes and tap dance / in Jackson Square.” And further on in the poem we encounter, “We are visiting from so far away / we thought it was the furthest / one could go until we saw the distance // between two lovers / who had been sharing the same bed / for four decades.” The poem concludes, “To be human, it seems, // is to know your true self / only as well as you know / a galaxy you’ve never been to. // We came here to help you / get there.”
There are a lot of other good and powerful lines in Gibson’s poem – in many of Gibson’s poems. This poem has several turns: from the ominous beginning to a joy-filled middle, to a heart-felt complicated end. When I was done reading it, I felt like I had been given a tour of the world. I felt as though I had peeked through dozens of windows giving witness to the happiness and frailty of human experience: dangerous leaders in control of our collective future, skateboarders slicing their way through Berlin, kids tap dancing in New Orleans, and the immeasurable distances between two lovers sharing a bed. Gibson’s poem makes me believe/feel/think that we are wondrous galaxies that exist far beyond our own comprehension.
After reading that poem, I switched over to Bass whose poetry, by comparison, feels more measured, more surgically precise, and in some ways, more matter-of-fact or nonchalant. Bass has written about killing chickens on a farm with such dispassionate detail that it was both difficult to read and mesmerizing at the same time: “I gathered each one, tucked her bright feet, / drew her head through the kill cone’s sharp collar, / her keratin beak and the rumpled red vascular comb / that once kept her cool as she pecked in her mansion of grass.” Bass’ lines are longer and slower than Gibson’s. They’re a different type of invitation into the poet’s field of vision and our own humanity.
This morning I read her poem, “Ode to Invisibility” which is about that strange point in our lives when we’re no longer seen as carnal beings yet we have plenty of carnality left in us. The narrator speaks about her younger days when, “walking from the subway, / even in my work boots and woolen babushka, / all those slouched men plastered to the brick walls / around the South End of Boston– / I could feel them quicken, their mouths / opening like baby birds. I was too beautiful / and never beautiful enough.” She picks up the lusty pace in remembering her earlier self with lines like “Musk dotted on my hot pulses, / and that pink angora bikini that itched like desire” culminating in “Hello, my pretty. Your ankles were elegant, / your breasts such splendor / men were blinded by their solar flare.” These lines are immediately followed (without a stanza break) by the turn in the poem to the present moment – her current life of invisibility. “These days, I’m more like my dog, / who doesn’t peruse himself in the mirror, / doesn’t notice the gray at his temples, …” She continues, “I can trot along the shallow surf of Delray Beach / in my mother-in-law’s oversize swimsuit, / metallic bronze and stretched-out so it bulges like ginger root.” Bass ends her poem, “…I’m invisible / as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand. / It’s a grand time of life: not so close to the end / that I can’t walk for miles along the pulpy shore, / and not so far away that I can’t bear / the splendid ugliness of this disguise.” the poem is full of contradictions like the play between “grain of clear sand” and “grand time” or the phrase “splendid ugliness.” We feel and see the “oversize swimsuit,” the “metallic bronze,” the “pulpy shore.” Once again, but in a very different way from Gibson’s poem, I felt treated to the tension between beauty and frailty, between the enormous cosmos of a lifespan and the detailed insignificance of a grain of sand.
When I read poetry, it can be easy for me to get on a roll. It can be easy to plow through a few poems getting little pops of joy and wonder at small phrases and images. At times, it can feel like I’m speeding down the highway taking in some sights, but only in so much as my attention allows because it is still partially focused on the road in front of me. In my more attentive moments, I try to pause after each poem. But even then, I seldom pause long enough to give them deep consideration. I seldom stop to ask myself, what specifically did I like about that – which lines spoke to me and why? When I do ask those questions, I throw my mental hands up in the air with a petulant, “I don’t know, I just do.” If I want to get better at writing, at observing, at loving the world, it seems important to be able to spend some time answering these questions. It seems important to be able to think critically and passionately about how this life unfolds – if for no other reason than to be able to appreciate and understand how other lives unfold.
This morning, after asking myself those questions, I began to realize just how uncomfortable I felt at not having quick and easy answers. I began to realize that what first felt like an “I can’t explain it” moment was really an “I’m impatient and not practiced enough at explaining it” moment. This morning as I read, I began to realize (again) that I’m poorly trained in this type of slowing down, poorly trained in this type of thinking. I again recognized that my discomfort and frustration is because my brain doesn’t want (or doesn’t know how) to sit with the poem or painting or moment for very long. It doesn’t want to search for the words or process the experience on a deeper level. This, of course, is true for many of life’s small pleasures. We enjoy the moment (as we should) and move on from it (as we must). Close examination takes time. Sometimes, close examination feels like it’s ruining the mood or spoiling the moment. This is another one of those strange vacillations we feel as human beings – where being in the moment can mean examining every nook and cranny AND also feeling the feels (letting the moment wash over us) without examination or interpretation.
I want to practice more of this slowing down. It feels both necessary and good. Many years ago (probably ten or more), I chose the title of this website, TurtleSloth, with the express intention of teaching myself to slow down. At the time, I only sensed that life’s pace was quickening and our attention spans were dwindling (or at least mine was). It took a divorce and meeting new people to make me want to practice paying attention. It took a truncated engagement to turn that practice inward. At the time of starting all of this (blog/journal), I had no idea of how the themes of attention and slowing down would weave through my thoughts and experiences with love, Buddhism/spirituality, poetry, hiking, friendship, life, and work. Like kindness, love, patience, and compassion, slowing down is another area in life where I routinely have to work in order to turn the platitude into practice.
The best case I can make for doing so, for slowing down and processing life on a deeper level is that, like love, there’s a type of honesty and joy in choosing the hard way. There’s a level of growth in going against what comes easy and natural because doing what comes easy and natural isn’t an exercise of choice but is instead, as David Foster Wallace puts it in his wonderful commencement speech, our default setting. I don’t mean to suggest that we can’t or shouldn’t enjoy what comes easy and natural. I don’t mean to suggest that one version of experience is better than the the other. What I do mean to suggest (and this is a reminder to myself more than anything else) is that deliberately choosing to slow down provides a different experience and a different type of joy. It feels softer. More importantly, it feels like it better prepares me to appreciate and understand what crosses my field of vision: life’s varied abundances and deficits, life’s contradictions, life’s skateboarders in Berlin and pulpy shores.
As an addendum (because I was prepared to end there), this dual process and practice of slowing down and close examination is also about learning to walk through the world with less cynicism and more curiosity. If life is meant to be shared, and I think it is, we should be able to articulate to others why things are important to us. In doing so, we might learn a form of compassion and understanding for people and things beyond our own self-interest. I suspect that the same tools we use to understand and explain why things bring us joy can help us understand and explain why we hold on to our insecurities and fears. That level of honesty not only opens us up to others, but helps us be receptive of and hold space for them.
This morning I read two poems. This morning I chased down a burglar and observed an archeologist at work. I then spent over two hours exploring the uncomfortable frustration I felt over not being able to explain why I liked those poems or why any of this (the burglar, the archeologist, the kids tap dancing in New Orleans, the itchiness of desire, the beauty of solar flare breasts, the comfort of settling into our own disappearances) even matters. Exploring those worlds and that dichotomy, the fact that MY understanding (of poetry, art, joy, love, self, the world, and others) doesn’t matter AND at the same time is of the utmost importance, felt like it was time well spent in the pursuit and practice of living. It felt like I was stealing time, like I was unearthing time, like I was learning a small but important lesson in how to live. And what else should we do with our lives but live them?