I think I figured out why I was falling into a deep well of wtf lately.
The county-year-list thing ended, which was fine; I was ready to not be so obsessive. I had a bunch of followup work to do in connection with the CBC compiling anyway, and the multi-year process of updating our local general plan to deal with sea level rise has been entering the phase where it goes from boringly slow to blindingly fast as the magician misdirects my attention and surprise! it’s a bunny! and I’m like, wait; we don’t NEED a bunny, we need a bear on a unicycle but the magician is like haha too late! better luck next time!
And there’s also, you know, my job. So I had plenty to do.
But in the meantime the usual (unusual) hijinks were going on in terms of US politics, and when I’m suddenly not getting up at 4 a.m. half the mornings to get in a couple of hours’ birdwatching in the far corners of the county I was paying more attention to my twitter feed, and it turns out my selection of politics-obsessed twitter follows, which worked fine when I was dipping in and out while attending to local avian matters, was WAY TOO MUCH AWFUL when consumed as a steady diet uninterrupted by birds.
So: Twitter follows trimmed down. And I’ve gotten on top of the CBC compiling and the SLR planning, so that’s cool. I’m going to prescribe myself just a little more birdwatching. And we’ll see how it goes.
So much loving Yulin Kuang’s “I Didn’t Write This” series of short films. It’s a gorgeously simple idea, that reel of cinematic art unfolding alongside and in conversation with a literary work, like a peek into someone else’s dreams. Or like your own dreams, when you fall asleep with a favorite book on your chest.
So: here are my poem suggestions. I’ve fallen in love with the work of Mary Oliver, whose work so often gives me the strange upside-down feeling of being recognized by someone I’ve never met. There’s a quiet, attentive beauty to her work that I think would blend well with Yulin’s warm, funny, careful director’s eye.
STARLINGS IN WINTER
Chunky and noisy, but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wire and instantly
they are acrobats in the freezing wind. And now, in the theater of air, they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising; they float like one stippled star that opens, becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again; and you watch and you try but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it with no articulated instruction, no pause, only the silent confirmation that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin over and over again, full of gorgeous life. Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.
THE MESSENGER
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.
Twitter (which for me is mostly US politics twitter, because I intentionally segregated my social media into (politics) | (uplift|landscapes|droll webseries|birds|pretty dresses) in November 2016, is making me super sad lately.
How about we vote in a law that puts a cap on how long a government shut down can happen… say 20 days… before the president has to agree to a budget solution or else the 21st day congress begins the process of impreachment because civilian jobs and salaries and livelihoods are not a bargaining tool for the president to abuse is order to get their way
If you aren’t serving the people then you aren’t doing the job of the presidency and you need to be replaced
And find a way And find your way back home Sea front and run down It’s far away
And don’t be shy, I know it’s alright I’m all over for now
When you get lost and found And when you get lost for a noun Like I lead you there I will lead you there When you get lost and found And when you get lost for a noun Like I lead you there I will lead you there
And don’t be shy, I know it’s alright Im all over for now
When you get lost and found And when you get lost for a noun Like I lead you there I will lead you there When you get lost and found And when you get lost for a noun Like I lead you there I will lead you there
“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
You, an atheist, have died. All the gods that have ever been line up to offer you their version of heaven if only you believe in _them_. Turns out souls are currency and yours is up for grabs.
There are many Gods. They speak, and I am tired. A mass of voices coiling around me, each telling their own tale. They speak over one another, they talk to me, they do not listen. And I am tired.
Currency. Is this what I am to them?
They will not stop speaking. They offer me things. They will take me to my loved ones. They will gift me joy and music. They will have me serve, in their armies, in their choirs. Some tell me stories of how they made me. From clay. From nothing at all. Some tell me they love me, small as I am, that I am their creation and so their child.
Above all, they repeat their stories. They talk incessantly of their power, their battles, of the ways and reasons they are feared. How long will they talk? Time does not happen here. It is so much effort to stay. Effort to maintain. Effort to exist.
So many Gods. Gods whose names I had already heard. Modern Gods whose human disciples still speak their names. Obscure Gods whose stories were written on tablets, on scrolls, thousands of years before, whose only proof and records were discovered underground, in caves, in ancient lands. Every God there ever was. They are all here with me. They have been talking for years. They repeat their stories. Their stories are important to them. They demand, plead for my attention.
I died knowing I was dying. I died as I lived, believing in no Creator, no great demiurge, and no final salvation from death. Knowing that gods were stories we told. I believed only in the universe. That it existed before me and would continue without me.
And it has.
The voices scream their stories. Why are they so desperate for me? Despite their insistence, I know what I knew before. My truth is unchanged. My truth is of the universe, of its physics and particles, of its probable beginnings, of its possible ends. Of the simple fact of existence.
These gods are not my creator. I was created by a long line of life, of unlikely Life happening and colliding and continuing. Eons. Three, four eons, billions of years all lined up behind me, all of my predecessors, their lives and their stories, they are my chapters and I am their sum. I am the story of Life, in all its improbably glory. And gods are as old as humans, but I am as old as Life, and Life is much older.
I think I’ve solved it. I think I know why they seek us. They want what Life wants. To exist. To continue. They need their legends told, at any expense, because:
We wrote them. I said before: gods are stories that we write and tell. We are their Creators. And this is why they scream for me, for my ears, for my attention. Stories exist only so long as they are told. Gods exist only so long as they have a listener. And I know they have nothing to offer me. There are no rooms, there are no gates, there are no hallways, no crowds for me to join. They only keep me here to listen. If I accept an offer, what then? Will they stop speaking, disappointed, and leave me? Will they keep delaying? Will the god of my choice sweep in, desperate, and keep me here as long as I can be convinced?
All of my being is tired. Life is not meant to persist this long after it is through. My presence and existence, temporary from the start, is loosening and loosening. All of my pieces beg to be released. I was not made to last.
I am through. I have given these voices enough.
So I do what life does when it is finished. I dissolve, and return to the world.
Have you ever considered being a writer first and a shitposter second?
And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing.
“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“
She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.
A few years later, when she was 25 or so:
“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“
During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry. And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”
A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.
the most depressing quote from her diaries:
“I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires – a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”
