eight lines of verse
yesterday, in my (sometimes) humble opinion, was a poor excuse for a holiday and did little to honor Janus, the Greek god of gates and doorways for whom the month is named:
this bust of a pagan God lives, inexplicably, in the Vatican
one head looking forward, one head looking back – the wisdom of Janus is the wisdom of warrior pose: "feel the pull of the past, stretch towards the future, stay centered in the present."
unfortunately, this wisdom, initially imparted upon me by a woman who impersonates a musical instrument for a living, was beside the point:
the point is that i spent much of the eight day of Christmas caught between mirrors, projecting expectations and misjudging reflections. the specifics are boring, even to me, but suffice to say that each activity seemed to draw me further into psychic quicksand. it didn't help that i had a wicked headache for much of the day, and i still don't know if it was a contributing factor or a symptom.
i suppose it doesn't matter.
what did matter is that my yin and i listened to This American Life, easily my favorite show on public radio and a surefire way to raise one's spirits – except yesterday:
Episode #234: "Say Anything"
this episode dealt with the myth that talking about things always makes them better, and focused on specific instances when (perhaps) it would have been better to say nothing. the one that grabbed my attention was an amateur interview between two friends, one of whom had recently tried to commit suicide. the two men were close in college, but had drifted apart in the intervening years. this struck a chord because it so closely resembled my own experience: the sadness of silently growing apart, the impotence of of fighting it, the feeling of being cast adrift in the ocean of time.
the friend being interviewed espoused one self-pitying, deceptively selfish remark after another. his entire worldview had been warped by his internal suffering, and the interviewer hoped, by recording these skewed ramblings, that his friend might someday come to see how he was living inside a world of funhouse mirrors.
i identified with both men, and my journal with the tape cassette:
the segment was beautiful, but it did little to help my state of mind.
i wondered if i had listened to: 1) the prologue to a suicide; or 2) a stranger that could have been me. the interview came to a conclusion, and a post-scriptum revealed that both hypotheses were true. i asked myself:
without the presents of the past,
how can we appreciate
the Presence of the present?
how can we appreciate
the Presence of the present?
in an attempt to address this question, i found myself writing the following eight lines of verse:
The trembling agitation of low
blood sugar on New Year's Day.
Angry with the one you love,
frustrated with myself; how much
of this is hunger? Answer: the great
melancholic river of the past grows
longer every day. A source I cannot
remember; a destination I cannot see.
thus began, and concluded, the eighth day of Christmas.
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