#24

1. I’d thought of a nice, dramatic way of turning the second person narrative into first person. I’d have done it somewhere towards the end of this paragraph, a quick switch enabled by brisk em-dashes. It was so cool in my head. So much so, unfortunately, that I ended up writing nothing all day yesterday. I’ve let it go now, and instead just begun. At some point in 2019, I wrote my first ever poem in a second person narrative. I got so hooked to the voice, however, that I couldn’t stop writing in it. It was the perfect way to write about myself without feeling like I shouldn’t, or like it was too personal. So much easier to pretend that I am talking to myself and that any reader is merely a coincidental bystander than to acknowledge the intentional and responsive presence of an audience. So tempting to resort to the passive voice, to avoid the “I” as often as I can, to stick to a crisp newspaper-headline-style of writing. Something about not taking up too much space, perhaps. Also a way of hiding, perhaps. These “grammar tricks” remind me of one of Heather Christle’s “Dear Seth” poems in her collection Heliopause (2015):

   

2. Another line from the collection routinely haunts me. She writes, in “Disintegration Loop 1.1,” “Myself the eager magnet / for another to address.” I was talking to a friend about some previously incomprehensible trouble I’ve had of late. I ended up revealing to him what has been going on almost inadvertently for at least the past decade of my life. I don’t know how this has come to be—I didn’t even know I was doing it until very recently—but it’s so relieving to find that I’m not alone, and that it is possible to heal from this: I have somehow managed to set up an automatic internal surveillance system for which I have been performing my little tasks, and to which I have been explaining my decisions and narrating my stories the entirety of my adolescent and adult life. It’s comprised mostly of people I am close to (and sometimes, momentarily, complete strangers). My friend has done this too, and he said, “Thinking of what they think of me makes me do things better and feel cooler.” Every task is done to perfection because the other is watching. (I made an excellent sandwich the other day.) He said it’s not even just about pleasing them; it’s about appealing to them. And so years have gone by entertaining an imagined audience pretty much at all waking hours unless I am working. A few weeks ago, I read Monica Heisey’s novel Really Good, Actually. It’s about the narrator, Maggie, dealing with an unexpected and painful divorce that shakes her up completely. It’s very witty! She married her college boyfriend, and says, “My entire life had been witnessed by Jon. I had to go back to high school to avoid him, and those memories were boring.” She realises that “[…] almost nothing had happened that I had not shared with someone else,” her ex-husband in particular. To share an experience with another is to invite them into your perception of it. This made thinking of past experiences painful for her, because they weren’t just hers—she’d shared them with people now lost. Later in the book, she has an epiphany and tells her father, “This sounds very basic, but you don’t have to say everything you think and feel to everyone around you all the time. Even if you want to. You can keep it to yourself. Sometimes, that feels better.” And I was like, whoa. It’s so basic, you’d think everyone knows this, but I needed it to be spelled out for me like this.

3. Friends have been unbelievably compassionate throughout this existential investigation. A year ago, I was working on my Master’s thesis alongside other very stressed people. When the deadline was three days away, and I hadn’t made much progress, I went to a friend’s room so we could scream together. We hadn’t interacted much before, but we knew we loved each other. (I want to write more about this knowing in another issue.) We were talking and she revealed that her grandfather was a palmist, and she’d picked a few things up from him, and was wondering if she could read my palm. I love this stuff, so I waited while she looked at my palm. She said a few things and they made sense. What I remember most vividly, however, is her awestruck expression as she said, “Dude, you have a very strong support system.” It’s true—I am awestruck every single day! I was reading Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022) some time ago, in which she writes (relatably),

   “On her old blog Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? Bhanu Kapil once spoke of her friendship with Melissa Buzzeo, saying that, “Melissa is a friend whose name is written on my heart. I would not be surprised if I die soon! My heart is quite scarred with the names of my friends!!!!! I chose, in this life, to love my friends as deeply and with as much loyalty as if we shared an ethnic bond.” This is the most beautiful thing I’ve heard anyone say about a friend, about friendship. I’ve sometimes thought that if I died suddenly it would be okay, because I’ve already had such deeply perfect company in this life, more than any one person deserves. I’m grateful for it, and I carry it with me always.”

4. A few weeks after I’d started college, having left one sheltered home for another, I walked up to a friend I’d newly made and faintly asked her why she hadn’t been talking to me of late. I couldn’t understand what I’d done wrong—I thought we’d gotten along. With a hint of apology, she said to me, “When I’m in a creative zone, I don’t really talk to many people.” She’d been busy writing. It wasn’t about anything I’d done; she was just taking some space. It’s taken me six years to understand this. It reminds me of a tweet I read that said something like “those who don’t worry about people-pleasing do still love you.” I understand now that at the root of all this lies the question of self-respect. Joan Didion writes, in her essay “On Self-Respect,” that it’s a “discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.” Without it, she writes, we are “curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their [other people’s] false notions of us.” “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight,” she writes, “to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.” Reading and writing help a lot. For me, like Cain, writing is one of the few times “when I am not alienated from myself.” She writes of Elena Ferrante’s Leda from The Lost Daughter (2006), who finally feels light in the absence of her daughters and feels as though she is “being returned to something vital, allowed to live and think at the proper speed, at a slower, looser pace, with fewer distractions, and this transforms her mentally and physically.” I haven’t been alone in such a long time. I was reading to a friend as he slowly fell asleep when I came across the following lines. They’re from the poem “Archetypes” from c. k. williams’ Repair (1999):

“I waited, hoping you’d wake, turn, embrace me, but you stayed in yourself,

and I felt again how separate we all are from one another, how even our passions,

which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions,

that for our more abiding, ancient terrors we each have to find our own valor.”

5. Please feel free to write back. I remain enthralled by this painting by Ariana Papademetropoulos:

   

   The Best Whistler in the World, Ariana Papademetropoulos (2021)