I lost my love for quotes sometime in the last ten years. They now appear the property of Boomers on Facebook—every profundity presented in McNugget size on a Canva background. They are often misattributed, misspelled, and meme-able. The old joy of underlining a paperback with a blunt lead pencil has vanished. Just Google it. Someone’s already shared it. In fact, why read the book at all? Just get the highlights.
Seasons of self-loathing are nothing new, but this sharpness of self-disgust is less common. Over four days I decide my appearance is repulsive. I am fat and unlovable. My mid-thirties paunch rests as a tired flesh balloon on my waist, covered in sprawling dark hair. My back is covered in fine strands, too, making me more animal than human. I am hairy everywhere except for my head.
I’ve never thought myself pretty, but my reflection is unbearable to me now. I am also smart enough to know this self-revolt is banal and barely worth commenting upon. Everyone has it, don’t they? So dry up, Burton, and get on with it.
I ruminate for hours on food, protein count, and figuring out ways to get to the gym that is slowly draining our bank account. I Lift Heavy Things surrounded by other men, each more muscular than the last - they have something I don’t. They have won at some version of masculinity I’ve lusted after as a child.
When I was six, I watched a bit of professional wrestling on TV. I stripped to my underwear and wrestled the toys on my bed. I was agog at their bronze muscles. I was assured one day, mine would arrive.
Excuse me, where are they?
“Perhaps a great maternity lies over everything, as a shared longing…And in the man too there is maternity, as it seems to me, physical and spiritual; his engendering is also a kind of giving birth, and it is an act of birth when he creates out of his inmost resources. And perhaps the sexes are more closely related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in man and woman, freed of all sense of error and disappointment, seeking one another out not as opposites but as brothers and sisters and neighbours, and they will join together as human beings, to share the heavy weight of sexuality that is laid upon them with simplicity, gravity and patience.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
In the span of a single car trip, the entire thing unravels. I am travelling from my home to Toowoomba, down the Warrego, whose paths I regard as the contours of my own palm. I am thinking about my play, which I need to re-draft. I am caressing the dramaturgical advice given to me like a smooth stone. Over and over, it spins in my hand. And then I become convinced I have ruined it before I begin. The play is too tidy now, too formulated, and any spontaneous spark is gone. I can’t bear to write it or think about it anymore. I can’t bear to have those eyes looking at something that I originally wrote in the hours before dawn, sitting at my kitchen bench. What have I done?
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open, no satisfaction, whatever, at any time. There’s only a queer, divine dissatisfaction. A blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
-Martha Graham (emphasis my own)
Oh, Christ, and here we are, in the inherited darkness. The great abuser sits across from me, and we all sit together and eat thin slices of wet, roast meat. His wife coughs. When she gets up, I hold her hand to help her. Her skin is like paper. Her fingers are soft. The poor thing. How she would hate to be pitied. How did her mother carry her, and how did she then carry her only daughter, my mother? She looks at her great-grandchildren, my children, with endless awe.
These girls. They’re amazing.
Now their marriage ends in separate beds. In the expensive nursing home that they have been moved to. Her husband flirts with the nursing staff, who are paid handsomely to withstand his bullshit.
It's odd to watch someone die. Slowly and silently. We don’t talk about it. But it is the event horizon that we are all aware of.
We are all walking each other home, said Ram Das.
I grip my grandmother’s hand and walk her to her room.
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a buddha with wings,
it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings-
five feet apart- and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow -
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows-
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us-
as soft as feathers-
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow-
that is nothing but light-scalding, aortal light-
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
-Mary Oliver
On Sunday night I turn to my wife and say, ‘let’s not do television for a few evenings. It makes me feel numbed and dead. It makes my low libido lower.’
We sit for a little bit and I almost reach for the remote. Then I sort washing, and she reads Mary Oliver poems aloud. And then we swap and I read a few letters from Rilke. And the lonely frozen melancholy thaws a little in the company of human suffering and hope.
Pair this with other personal, melancholy musings, like this one from January or this contemplation on happiness. Or there was that time the dog died.