From my journal for November 17, 1995. By this time I am regularly questioning why I keep writing. I am typing up roughly a year later, and sometime next year I stop typing completely. I thought I might stop writing, but I didn’t.
I seem to have completely lost interest in my own writing at the moment, finding it hard to read, can’t see that there’s any value there that would make it worth typing up. Well plod on. Except that I have a suspicion, maybe even a hope, that this is another one of those thresholds of blankness, that I will arrive on the other side, some day, with a new awareness and new appreciation for my life — though I suppose it’s possible that some new clarity would change my relationship to my writing.
Well, why am I still writing? It gives me something to do, a discipline of noting what’s around me and jotting it down. I write the daily details because I know that, in the past, something I’ve never suspected — a physical symptom say — will reveal its importance. Often I’ve been glad to read about what the house looks like, or a series of mundane errands, because it gives such a sense of my real life in this house.
Went out to fill bird feeders, crunching over the snow. Chickadees coming singly to the one outside my window, and a larger nuthatch.
Something about the depression and the way it’s brought me to a new place, new questions about my life, and this sense of contacting child-pieces that have been lost behind frozen barricades. This seems like important work, an important place to explore. Would I even be here if I were on medication? This is the major question I have about taking it. On the other side is the way in which airplane phobia depression has wrecked the last few months, and I see that I couldn’t even get to this deep place of knowledge, “exploring the bottom,” until the planes had been stopped for long enough that I could begin to feel safe.
“Won’t you look down upon me Jesus
You gotta help me make a stand
You just gotta see me through another day —
My body’s achin’ and my time is at hand
I just can’t make it any other way — ”Woke this morning with that song in my mind. I remember how well it expressed for me that cold dark time when I was living in Portland and was so depressed.
From my journal for November 18
I’ve finished reading Doris Grumbach’s Fifty Days of Solitude, and I’m a little disappointed. It’s not a journal but a memoir. It’s very literary, black and silver, on the surface, or perhaps I should say that she’s on the surface of the depths. I think she’s reached that frozen layer that I’ve been writing about, and failed to pass through it to any kind of real joy, real communion, real pain. She acknowledges passion, but in a dry cold way. I have a sense of someone saying “I’m an adult. I know that life is cold and lonely and hard.” I know what it is, there’s no heart here, no soul. There is awareness, she doesn’t try to shut out all painful realities, acknowledges her lack of interest in the painful realities of the contemporary scene, her compassion is the kindness of a liberal intellectual, it’s not heart deep. I think of Etty Hillesum’s fire, of Rilke’s rivers of blood. I feel chilled by Grumbach’s writing, want something that breaks through that frozen layer to something real. (I don’t know how to define “real” except to say that it’s the fire that lives under the ice.)
And that brings me to the poets. I love the story of the person who said that the first thing to do after a political revolution is “kill the poets.” Because the poets remind us of deeper truths than those of politics, that it’s not so simple as good guys and bad guys, that what is more important than political power are the urgencies of the heart. “More important” is the wrong phrase because it suggests that political maneuverings and the urges of the heart could exist on a continuum, in the same dimension, when the truth is that they inhabit or constitute vastly different worlds. In the political, social, historical realm, the urges of the heart are invisible behind other urges — for power, for sex, for revenge, for possession, for security — and I don’t know to what bodily or psychic organ to attribute them. Perhaps they are the urges of the glands, though in the political realm they look/feel like urges of the heart, because the true urges of the heart are like the stars that can’t be seen from the brightly lit streets of the city. The true urges of the heart are for love, not sex or possession, but as appreciation and support of a being’s uniqueness, for creativity and generosity instead of power, for understanding and healing instead of revenge, for life open to the wild spontaneous winds of the great powers of the universe instead of the dull safety of “security.” This is the reminder that the poets bring to me, that being a failure in the social-political-economic world does not matter, that it’s only by attending to the urges of the heart that we can construct or grow — or create — a life worth living.
Actually, now I would say urges of the reptilian brain stem, instead of the glands. Otherwise I’m amazed at my writing from so long ago. 28 years ago. Cycle of Saturn.