WRITE YOURSELF BACK INTO THAT ELEGIAC RADIANCE
florida, i do not understand what happened inside you. florida scattered with psychic eruptions. tamable. lulled by conversation. you would not even suspect that minutes before, something was stirring inside me. i was trying to understand what had happened. it’s dangerous to be so inside your life like that but you must, otherwise you don’t even feel like you are really alive. you have to genuflect to the swash of emotion, let it fill the room. this flood? you need this flood. do not be afraid of drowning. you need the muteness of being underwater…the moment of going under when the world recedes. you can’t hear a thing—figures go liquid, everything on the other side of the threshold is framed by the movement of the water. horizons undulate as you shed all your resistance and sink into the awareness that nothing can hold you back. i keep thinking of the water. blue water limned by white beams. at the bottom there are sparkling stones and i know that i must retrieve them and bring them back to the surface. but then as i am swimming toward the ocean floor the ominous net descends, scoops me up and drops me on land. panting panting. where is the edge? something wide. find the field. i haven’t even come close to grabbing the stones. i just want to hold them long enough to form something lasting in my mind, something i can continue to carry after i toss them back into the water. when i was in high school there was this one morning when i refused to go to school because i had this really intense dream. it was such a private feeling, and i felt i could not be around other people because it would force me to release the dream. i knew that once it was gone, it was gone.
what to do in the absence of water. everything always so gone. sometimes i put headphones on and BLAST the music while sitting in front of a box fan. it’s kind of like going under water, the way it drowns everything out. everything seems to be moving very fast and i am on the edge of something, i don’t know what, there’s just this overwhelming sense of total motion. my hair could be the leaves shaking violently in the wind. i would very much like to be a cluster of leaves getting blown off a tree.
what i need is strategies for dismantling this internal resistance, the utterly consuming void of self-hate and doubt. frantz fanon is healing. i think about the politics of depression, all this internalized bullshit. i feel horrible beneath the realization that i no longer “radiate” and haven’t for maybe the past year and a half. before it came so easy. it wasn’t a dimwitted-happiness-corporate-‘feel-good’ kind of thing. it was something more elegiac, yet energetic and reaching. it was the world exploded open, a very strong sense of everything. though i was very lonely i felt that i could be with people in this totally different way—unguarded and profoundly present. there were infinite manic letters to friends, late-night songwriting sessions with my air organ perched on the edge of my bed, long bike rides into the night. now when i am around people i have no motivation to be open at all. i want to retreat. i feel all this shame. i want to apologize for my silence, for no longer being interesting. now i have to fight to remember that the whole point of writing was to create a practice aimed at undoing that feeling of unworthiness, the sense that nothing i say matters. writing as a collective process…bodies igniting other bodies, making the language-house more FREE. not just free to assemble words in whichever ways i please, but creating a space to house more people…finding a way to give ourselves the permission to write in all directions.
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