Take it easy

kinda random, but as someone who has serious existential slash depressive meltdowns more frequently than i’d like, i’ve been trying to find my way out of these thought mazes for years, and i’ve come to the conclusion that trying to combat it by going a few levels even more abstract in the philosophical meter - which is what i personally thought had to be the answer for a long time - is, in a lot of cases, counterproductive 

Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.

In the late summer of 2018, an orca whale named Tahlequah swam around the Pacific Ocean carrying the corpse of her dead calf under her fin. The calf had died a few hours after its birth. Tahlequah was first spotted attempting to push it toward the edge of the Pacific Ocean between the United States and Canada before deciding to just carry the calf with her, which she did for over two weeks. Observers and scientists called it a “tour of grief.” The length of mourning was—to that point—unprecedented. It was always a question of letting go. If the whale let her calf go, it would sink to the bottom of the ocean and become a memory.  Once, I had a conversation with a poet who also lost their mother. As we charted out our shared grief, the poet told me something they had learned from another poet. “Well, we have two mothers,” they began to tell me. “The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down.”  There is the putting down of the metaphorical corpse, and then there is the carrying of the physical, but the hesitation to part with both comes from a similar place. A mother who has lost a child carries with her not only the corpse of that child, but the potential for what that life could have been. I mourn both the actual body and the potential for the whole person it held. How much better my time in the world could have been spent with all of the once-living people I’ve loved, still here.  The drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of someone with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink. 

“There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you – may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.”

how do you deal with the problem of reading poetry in translation? or is it a problem to you? do you view the translated poem as a completely separate poem?

this was a shitpost, of course, but it was a sincere shitpost: the eroticism of bondage for me is, in part, the tension of asking to be bound, of desiring that constraint and working within its confines towards an outcome* that might appear to be at odds with the way the act looks. Then: Agha Shahid Ali on the ghazal: