Summer 2020. I woke up in my love’s bed. There had been a cascade of bad things that happened. A pandemic, for one. Many of our social relations unraveled and our worlds forced very small. People were dying, according to official records because of the novel virus but effectively because of the death by a thousand cuts of disposability under neoliberalism. Black bodies churned up under the quotidian violence of white supremacy and for a moment, we weren’t able to turn away. We couldn’t avert our eyes and many of us couldn’t gather in the numbers that the pervasive rage and inchoate pain demanded. Self-harm and death by suicide and incomprehensible tragedies rocked my networks and I remember waking up in that room suffused with sunlight and the full weight of all that hurt and suffering bearing down on me. I keened in his arms in a way that, if you’re a person who has built a lifetime out of invulnerability and resolute refusal of another’s help/care, binds you to the person who is caught bearing witness to your unmaking, whether they’re aware of it or not (and if you’re me in this scenario – you desperately hope they’re not aware, because is there anything more awful than being bound to someone?) (I often think we did language a semantic disservice when we let the awe in awful become negative) (here I’m using awful to signal the dread-tinged awe of letting yourself be seen when you’re breaking/broken).
In retrospect it was a weird choice, for a Grade 12 kid enrolled in what was then known as “Mod[ern] Western Civilization” to write an essay on the Romantics. It was fantastically uncool and anachronistic. It was totally arbitrary, as most of my scholastic choices were then, guided by an omnipresent ennui, a restlessness, and a desire to avoid taxing myself too much and an addiction to coasting (putting a pin in: is it much different now?). Somehow, for my final paper, I landed on the Romantic movement.
Something about the emo-ness of it all? Of William Blake, grappling with the paradigm shift between innocence and experience. Shelley and Wordsworth traipsing around the countryside, agog at the unfathomable beauty of the natural world. Early feminists, poetry, allegory, and a creeping dread over the ills of industrialization – so on-brand, amirite? And then, through the course of my “research,” I learned about the Romantic sublime. There have been numerous moments in my life when serendipitous stumbling on a conceptual framework/idea/symbol crystalizes an unnamable something that I’ve long thought/held/felt. It’s a lock and key moment – a suffusion of rightness that I’m forever chasing. As a solitary kid, left to my own devices, living in my own head and always feeling out of step with my peers, that feeling made me feel less alone, less of a freak.
The Romantic sublime, as I use it (using some description in a musty library book as a springboard), is the experience of being confronted with something so vast, grand, terrible, awful, infinite that it butts against the edges of your human capacity to comprehend. Whatever it is that sparks this, it resonates with something deeper, stripping away the mediating occlusion of our rational, thinking minds, as we hit the limits of our ability to take in the enormity of X. And yet, something even more extraordinary happens in that space, in the in-between, as we try to close that gap, to contain, to enclose it with our comprehension. There is a feedback loop created by our imaginations…our faculties reaching for the thing, that makes the experiential trying in and of itself a source of wondrous immensity. It is the piercing awareness of our limitations and simultaneous awareness of our potential. That we are even capable of trying. That we are big and small; terrible and exquisite; that it all exists in this universe of humanity in all its grace and depravity.
2020-2022 were some tough years for yours truly. I was laid low and lost for the bulk of them, unsettled in my own skin and fighting with all the overcorrecting fierceness I have in me (and I have a lot) against the surfeit of feelings (most of them “bad”) that were subsuming me. Middle age, man. You spend a lifetime building up defenses, coping mechanisms, resilience, avoidance tactics, and running running running away from the voice inside your head. You mean the grand narrative I’ve been gripping so tightly to, isn’t bedrock? You mean you can live 40-some-odd years and suddenly be unmade? Pretty rude, if you ask me.
I had a massage therapist once remark that when he applied pressure to one of my tight muscles to try to get it to release, my body fought back and doubled-down on the tension, resisting further. Arrogant thing that I am, I crowed about this observation, so proud of my impenetrability – that my very flesh wouldn’t cede or soften. I took this as irrefutable proof of my own fortitude and my ability to beast-mode myself out of any situation. I had so far to fall. Big Icarus Energy.
There were many many days for more months than I would have thought possible when I wasn’t able to do much more than drift through interminable greyness. What little I had I gave to work and what was left after that was expended on self-loathing for being so goddamn pathetically sad. It was deeply unsettling to have spent a lifetime aggressively joyful and joy-filled (though now in retrospect I can identify the frisson of frenetic, avoidant urgency that underlay the pursuit of that joy) and to have that joy suddenly inaccessible to me, and moreover, to have all the coping mechanisms I’d built avoiding the “bad” feelings lose their efficacy all at once.
I didn’t know how to be. I was hurting, I was bereft, and because I am fundamentally unkind to myself, I was compounding the “bad” feelings by applying all the fierceness I have in me (and I have a lot) layering on contempt and dismissiveness and self-punishment. Even people seeing me was too much for me. I remember after a visit to a friend’s house, when I was brimming with unhappiness, they told me that their partner said to them, “it’s sad when Rory’s sad” and just seeing those words in the text message made me cry and cry.
When I think about the many ways the people I hold close held me in that time, I am overcome, because what they did was so small-big that I can’t do anything but genuflect before the sublime of it. The time and attention people spared for me and the scope of the compassion and love I was shown seems impossible – and is probably a reflection of how mean I am to myself, still; in that I feel fundamentally humbled and unworthy of the care I was given and high-key embarrassed that I didn’t have any fight left in me to continue to resist.
If you had asked me before if I believed people are worthy of love just for existing, I would have said the right thing (lol – I know how to do that much), and in theory, I would have agreed that other people (the imagined, reified Other) are worthy of love just for existing, but I didn’t really buy it. And because I bought firmly into the culture of exceptionalism – I definitely didn’t think it applied to me. It was an “errybody BUT me” situation.
I feel like a corny MFer for even writing this…and yet. Every text message I received, checking in, day after day. Every phone call that followed, when my inevitable answer to the check-in text was, “I feel bad.” Every minute that these people spent on the phone with me, patiently sitting with me while I cycled through crying and then self-flagellating for being so banal. Every walk, every quiet sitting near, together-alone, every hug, every hair pet, every forehead kiss, every held gaze when I couldn’t bear to be looked at without welling up. Every meal provided, every gentle nudge to connect me back to my life, every soft insistence that I show up, stay, that I wasn’t a burden when I tried to deflect or apologize for being a miserable human being. I am very good at hiding and standing firm and I love that my people persevered and held space for me.
I worked my way though back to myself, eventually. This iteration of me emerged with an awareness that orienting oneself towards a bigger heart is always sound and that I didn’t have to fight people loving me so hard. I better understand the paradigm under which I relate to people and I’m a little better at showing my inner ball of goo, earlier. I’m a bit more patient and a lot more self-aware. I’m marginally less reactive and I’m quicker to apologize. I’m more open with my inner “love bug.” The kinship and generosity and grace I extend is fuller and more lived-in – more praxis, deepened by the first steps of practicing self-compassion (understanding that we are all in constant flux – these are less fixed poles and more me turning towards the direction of the light).
I’m also skittish now, a little more scared. Always aware of the creeping spectre of the bad feels that can bring me back down. I don’t know that I’ve found equanimity or acceptance (actually, I do know that I haven’t). I can’t quite loosen my grip, though I’m now aware of what I’m holding on to and what in turn, tethers me, so I can at least try to work against it.
The way that people show up for each other, is sublime. The way you can be split open by a community gathering in joy and mourning, is sublime. The automatic instinct to extend a hand when someone falls, is sublime. Infinity called forth by the smallest of gestures. The breadth of capacity available when it seems like there is nothing. The reach of the sublime, of our hope, our faith, our attempts to find the limits of ourselves, is nothing short of divine.
CATASTROPHE IS NEXT TO GODLINESS
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.
The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun.
I answered the phone, and a channel opened
between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness
stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet.
O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then:
you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment;
you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.
When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade.
And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin.
I get closer to open air; true north.
Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face,
does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort
if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press
your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me,
but just so—just so I can almost see your face—
In August 2020, I read the poem Catastrophe is Next to Godliness – A Poem for Sunday – by Franny Choi. I didn’t know then that I was going to be unmaking myself, but I read it and I remember the full resonance of the poem filling me up. Putting to words the terrible beauty that hardship births. How you wish for the communion that comes in the wake of life’s multiplicity of untethering moments without the accompanying moments themselves. How you can long for the space that rupture creates, without the pain of the tear.
I’ve wanted the boot on my neck. I’ve wanted to be marked as a manifestation of my baseness. I’ve wanted oblivion crystalized as shared pain. I wanted all of these things because I didn’t understand that what I was chasing was the attendant balm, the succor of awareness. In the chasm between the call and the response, are all that we have to offer, and the unnamable potential of that is transcendent.
chinottoismynemesis 