Visiting the Monster

"I am from weak stock, yo,...told you that.
The bones of my father's grandfathers scored
with defeat, failure at every turn." (waking thought 3/2/17)

Sickness
Sickness and age
Sickness and age and winter

and monsters.

Reading Grendel by John Gardner again for the first time in more than 20 years. First book I read upon moving from Tennessee. The memories. Poor old monster, leaving his home outward toward new hills, lost and alone with a hundred soulsongs heard wrong inside his head.

The stuff that happens to Grendel is interesting, too.

I've been sick for the last week or so, and it's all slowed it down - thinking, moving, doing - and it let's the things you've outpaced catch up and needle you with nostalgia, harp songs pulling you back. The music started when, rummaging around, I found my first journal in MN, made myself. It was no less than Grendel himself who prompted me to start scribbling my own. The line-drawn pic above was still taped to the front, along with a cigarette butt. Ah, such virgin thoughts of loneliness.

What I love about Gardner's classic is that there is balance on many fronts: the magnitude of scope vs. size (Grendel comes in at well under 200 pp.). The heights of reason and the lows of brutality. Gardner himself, no doubt, valued balance, as reference to it can be found throughout the work. Too, I see Grendel himself as a fulcrum between the see-sawings of meaning and nihilism, of beauty and falsehood. The universe around him vies for Grendel's allegiance, but he is no easy follower.

So, also, do I find myself waffling between many things in this sick pause from life, many thoughts, many modes of being, many hopes, desires.

It's made me think about the nature and structure of the memoir I'm trying to write.

Perhaps no sprawling Prousitan omnium gatherum, but something small, memories to fit comfortably into your pocket, take to town, back home. Gardner knows better than to tell you everything, but through deft prose, (Thomas) Wolfe-like and flashing a spark in the direction, he leaves us to glean what we may. 

Yes, perhaps something like this, a focused beam on some center of my past, allowing the night around it to be wondered, highs and lows balanced with a knowing, childhood finally made right by the grown up, the work itself finished but waiting, as if one day if I might go back write the darkness, too.

First and Third

IT IS EITHER A PLATEAU OR THE BEGINNING of an end. February brought with it this year a strange introspection (yes, beyond my normal, solipsistic overthinking), one of a higher intensity or order of magnitude than in years prior. I literally feel like some astral projection of myself, having taken a step back from my life, turning my domestic routines into a boring third-person shooter. It creates both a numbness and a calm, a balance and a borderline Surreal disconnect from work, cleaning, driving, what have you. 

I was reminded of a never-finished short story I started years ago about a man going through this very thing.

"And yet at the same time his patience seemed to be deepening. Someone had pointed the nozzle of his hostility for the banalities around us straight down or in. Moments what, at one time would have resulted in a display of emotional fireworks, now were sent straight into the ground or, God forbid, directly back into the host...It could be likened to the effect of drunkenness. Left floating int he eddies of the room, the world seemed to speed by oblivious to his needs or wants. For him the stings of failure, adversity, and even disgust had lost their barb, provoking a slower reaction and one always keening toward mere disappointment." (from "The Third Person" ca. 2009)

And so life becomes art. 

It feels also like change, a pupa stage. Maybe I'll use it to do things I normally wouldn't. Take chances normally eschewed because of routine. Who knows? Maybe I will.

The Music

Of Distance and Depth

Feeling my 49 years lately. It really does go by quickly. Writing a memoir requires you to cast your eye back behind. Climbing toward some unseen summit, they say don't look down. It is fascinating, sometimes sad, sometimes shattering.

I still remember the strange color of sunlight on adolescent grasses, the shape of that girl's face as she turned to smile on me. The pain of rejection and the shame of defeat without a fight. But, too, the feeling of lying in a woman's arms for the first time and feeling wave after wave lapping at my shore, returned in full.

You might call it time numb.




 I suppose that's what we think age can do for us. The hard times and the good test your heart and strengthen your spirit, toughening your leather with heat. Arrows don't seem to pierce the way they used to, at least that's what I've learned to say to myself. Love, however, seem to penetrate more easily than every before, so I wouldn't say numb. I love more deeply than ever before. Pain now has armies to oppose it. Maybe it is just perspective. That sounds better.

Lately, I feel like I have been floating above my life, looking down upon the black and red colonies as they scramble to finish life before nightfall. Floating higher still, organisms become electrical impulses of circuitous life, like thoughts jetting from one node to the next, synaptic train junctions of coming and going, myriad combinations propose and plan and permutations of spontaneous hope go awry. When I see things from this distant vantage, the earth grows this amazing exoskeleton of lightning and will and power. And, like some god, it must now deal with the consequence of its creation.

Good morning, friend.

Vein

Working on the memoir again. Trying to tell my story right again. Keep digging. Find a vein. Mine it. Bleed it.

Realization today:

When I think of my parents, there is a deep sense of sadness, of unresolved shame or guilt. I imagine a movie, in which I am the star, leaving my parents in some German fairy tale scenario, only to have me, in the last moments of their lives, attempt a hail Mary comeback to rectify all the wrong I feel I did them by leaving.

Sustenance

Loving the sunshine today. Let it fill us with a lust for life, a hunger for sustenance, a will to not only move forward, but to thrive.

The Words

http://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/july-2015-michael-k-gause.html


The Music

Deadlift Blues

At some point you stop fearing, if only because the fear has gotten too great. Like some tribal rhythm which ceases, due to its length and constancy, ceases to distinguish itself from everything else. At some point you stand up and begin to walk. The blows, once avoided, are merely shrugged off as part of the movement.

I know people who are doing just that. From under crushing weights, they find the strength to deadlift dread and begin to move forward. They have the help of people who love them. Advocacy. Hell, maybe even something like victory. I know others who are doing the helping. In so doing, their strength and purity intensifies, and I am even prouder to have them in my life. They are the ones doing the hard work, yet the ripples of the situations in which they are involved issue out, and mix with other negativity muddying the waters of our daily lives. The current political situation. The almost constant news of violence that solves nothing. All of this becomes more crushing weight that we must carry. It is heavy and it is frightening.

At some point you stop fearing, if only because the fear has gotten too great.

Move forward, always forward. I'm doing it, and you are much stronger than I. Move forward because amidst all of this, there is love and support all around. I feel it, and I attempt to share it. Take the hits and advance. Echo all the negative that comes your way with humility and love. That's ours. That shit only gets snuffed if we let it. That's what I'm trying to do, and it feels right.

Go. Be awesome.

Getting Off the Bench

"Then will we dance? I cannot believe it is so far between knowing what must be done and doing it." ~ from River Notes by Barry Lopez

Reading on the train this morning, the line stopped me cold. It reached back years and rang a bell. The work itself, imposed and imposing, was the thing. Who am I to accomplish it? The eternal question, born of fearful messaging, reared on a healthy diet of ostracizing and bullying. The shying away from anything that might be witnessed. Winning was only considered in tiny realms supported by the few. Teachers, friends. I, the dust speck born to watch, reared to stand behind and monitor the rise and fall of things. Some find the strength to push through. I have had friends who disappeared. So strange to feel one's self created a sentinel only to observe, any visible accomplishment better left to the stronger ones, the ones who build the mountains.

But now I know that work and no work feel the same. Two sides of the coin in hand. Now it is the so-much-to-be-done that overwhelms, the knowledge that I can do it all. It is the focusing and moving forward amidst the confusion and white noise all around.

With this post comes a renewed attempt to post weekly.

Comments and suggestions from you, the ones who read, are appreciated.

Cheers