Reverse engineering hope

Writing my way out of oblivion (some thoughts and a poem)

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Mea culpa: You haven’t heard from me in months. Sorry.

Mostly, despondence has been the reason.

Ever since October 7th when I saw, among many other proudly live-streamed horrors, a naked young woman, her bones broken, contorted into the back of a pick-up truck, as Hamas terrorists cheered and spit on her withered body—and then I watched as some people celebrated this depravity, and falsely branded mass murder, torture, abduction, and rape as “resistance”—something inside me cracked in half, folded in on itself. Part of me is stuck there. On that day.

Since then, in the Jewish part of my DNA—which is half of me—some vestigial, epigenetic scar has been throbbing in my marrow. Screaming. I’ve needed reinforcements. So a stand-in wearing my face has taken over to perform the tiny feats of existence while the real me has retreated deep inside.

My stand-in, bless her, has been dutifully going through the motions of a human life: Attending work zooms, crossing things off to-do lists, meeting up with friends, walking to the store. Making the coffee. Opening the windows to let in the air. Frying garlic in a pan, listening to the hiss and pop of the allium smacking the oil. Putting first my toe, and then the trunk of the foot, into a sweater-knit slipper. Pouring hot water carefully over honey on a spoon, watching the crystals dissolve, stirring a waft of bergamot onto my tongue. Getting through it. Doing—not a lot, but the essentials—what needs to be done.

And she’s been at it for months now.

November saw the leaves fall and December somehow came with its low-slung winter sun. But in my nervous system it has remained October. Forever October.

And it doesn’t help that now it gets dark at four thirty pm. Plus I got COVID last week. Add seasonal affective insult to injury.

All this kvetching is to say: This “woe is me” hibernation state isn’t tenable. My stand-in is ready to be relieved. Sure, she’s great for staying on top of basic stuff, but she can’t write worth a damn. And she’s tired of covering for me. It’s time to resurface. How will I dig my way out of this hiding place?

My stand-in tells me that first we do it step by step. We make it small. Crumple the bigness of everything into a tiny, task-sized ball. Boil the tea, open the back door, let the wind brush the chap of my lip, run a comb through a curled mess of hair, straighten the corner of rug furled under my footstep. Smooth it out. There, that’s better. Do the things, the miniscule things, to survive the despair.

Then—we can build back to hope. My writing depends on it. I’m no good in this state.

I’ve often wished I was different. In the popular imagination, there is an archetype of the tortured artist who metabolizes their emotional angst into creativity: Their lament and writhing, their agony and sorrow, all fuel for the inspired prose their pain produces. Half-blind, doubled over, they are but a medium for the muse. The deeper the despair, the more transcendent the work. Or so it (supposedly) goes.

But that ain’t me, babe. I’m not that kind of writer, not at all. And I’m not drawn to doom-and-gloom work as a reader either. I do not romanticize sadness, bleak prognostication, or tortured missives. Depression is boring, unspectacular, and tedious to endure.

No, I do my best work from a place of hope. Not blind optimism. Of course not, not with so much suffering in the world. But a hope that is grounded in the messiness of reality—the darkness and the light—and rises tall from the muck, triumphant.

The more upbeat I feel, the more inspired I am. That’s why I named this newsletter Celebration after all, to create a space of uplift.

Unfortunately, the fertile, buoyant times are fleeting. And in the inevitable downswings, I have no inclination to create, which doesn’t bode well for consistency and output. (Hence, the mea culpa.)

But I’m sick of accepting this sitting down, surrendering to the ebbs and flows, at the mercy of my stand-in, relying on her willingness to take over on autopilot as I retreat to my wretched hiding place. (And she’s bound to quit or call OSHA soon, she’s been working without a break for months!)

So I’ve had an idea: If hope makes me write, maybe the inverse will be true. Maybe I can reverse engineer hope.

If I publish here once a week for the next four weeks—something, anything, even if it’s crap—maybe I can write my way back to hope. Even if I get there crawling, gasping. I think it’s worth a try.

On that note, I’d like to share a poem that I wrote in October about the true story of my outdoor flowers coming back from the dead after I watered their rotted-out husks for weeks.

Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash

Resurrection Poem

My patio plants

have bloomed back

to full splendor

buoyant after

the fallow weeks

life-enders

when they

sulked, ascidian

near-oblivion

limp and wilting

in their weary

tin caskets

in grave

surrender.

~~

Many mornings:

I swallowed

the impulse

to discard them

give them up,

give

up.

Many, many mornings.

~~

Something—what?—

made me persist

foolish, dogged

cursing, humming

upbeat, pissed

depending

on the day

spraying their brittle

brown corpses

heat-scorched

water-logged

heavy, dry

a cry beyond

hope.

~~

And now

here they are

in October

arching back

towards the sun

petals erupting

defiant, undone

from their green

sturdy spines

oblivious

to the mulched

cracked mess

of fallen leaves

they left

behind.

_____

I hadn’t intended to share this poem here but I changed my mind because it seems I was dictating instructions for resilience to myself (although I didn’t know it at the time), speaking from behind a wall of melancholy, marionetting my faithful stand-in, forcing her, my puppet, to type out the words. Knowing they would find me when I was ready. Maybe they will find you too. Maybe we will find them together.

Although the poem is far from perfect (I’ll probably rewrite it a hundred times), I think I was trying to say, you can always come back from the brink. Don’t give up. Water your writing practice. Little by little. Do it foolish, do it cursing. Even when it’s gray and pointless, when you’d rather be dead or in bed. Force one sentence. Squeeze out another. Do it angry, do it humming, do it tired, do it mourning, do it spacey, do it mad, do it aching, do it stupid, do it ugly, do it bad.

And then wait. And watch. Until one morning the seasons change and you rise, nourished, to meet the world again: Arched, miraculous, alive—blooming back towards the sun.