I have always hated writing articles. Once, I nearly had a breakdown trying to write a book review that didn’t sound stale. I had strong feelings about the book…I just couldn’t write a sentence about it that didn’t feel empty.
In a way, I think I turned to poetry precisely because it expected nothing of me.
Now, of course, I know better. It is what I expect of me that is the problem. And that expectation is released only for a moment in poetry. When the last word is written, that problem of expectation comes crashing back, an anvil or a piano dropped precisely where I hoped it wouldn’t.
I’m still not sure how I feel about my relationship with writing articles and non-fiction pieces. But I do recognize the value of the exercise, and in my case, in its use as an method of accountability. Poems hold me accountable only to themselves. But my work will never grow satisfactorily if I cannot stretch myself in many directions, if I cannot create regular rhythms of learning and creating.
The last few weeks, in the final stages of a project that has demanded a large percentage of my attention for the past four or five years, I was reading religion scholar Karen Armstrong’s “The Spiral Staircase”. I stumbled upon this book in the beautiful little library at the hotel in Leh where I was staying during my exhibition, and with a propitious feeling that helped me ignore a prickle of guilt, I snuck the book into my bag the next day.
I have always had a strong relationship with Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”, the poem around which the book is structured. I wrote my senior thesis on it in my undergraduate degree. While doing my degree in comparative religion. On a more surface level, these connections between myself and the author drew me to her work. I wanted to jump up and do a happy dance when I read the paragraph
Theology is–or should be–a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense…You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you forever.
This feeling of someone else finding the perfect set of words to describe something that has long felt elusive.
On a much deeper level, I resonate with her struggle with failure, and with finding a place for herself in the world, both as a human being and with regard to her career. I, too, have an interest in religion and religious studies that most of the people around me find difficult to relate to at best, and frequently seem to just find distasteful. I, too, watch many of my friends settle slowly into the spaces that their lives seem meant to occupy, while mine seems to always be bouncing off of corners and settling in only to find something else has completely popped out of place.
Obviously, most of us deal with these same feelings at some point or another. They tend to fade into the background during the highs, and seem to be all there is in the lows.
And it’s an oft overstated, seemingly obvious idea, but I needed to experience these words:
The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray… if he [the hero] wants to succeed, he must enter the forest “at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.”
Maybe it’s not only about finding ways to do the things I like. Maybe it’s about practice. Maybe it’s making essays like little paper boats and floating them out into the universe, regardless of whether they make it somewhere or are taken by the sea.
Westering 