Never to Return
On the radical power of hope and imagination.
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Happy Monday Folks,
Mary Oliver once wrote a poem entitled “We Should Be Well Prepared”, which goes like this:
The way the plovers cry goodbye.
The way the dead fox keeps on looking down the hill with open eye.
The way the leaves fall, and then there’s the long wait.
The way someone says we must never meet again.
The way mold spots the cake,
The way sourness overtakes the cream.
The way the river water rushes by, never to return.
The way the days go by, never to return.
The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.
For a year now I have read these last three lines at least once a week, kept them in the top of my notes app where my eye can’t miss. It feels allegorical somehow, a metaphor for something about this year that feels it rests on the tip of my tongue and yet cannot be spoken aloud. It can’t be put into words, which is, in the end, the only real skill I have ever had: to translate the feelings that others seem unable to, to give voice to something nameless, faceless. Unspeakable.
Writing— and any art— is, in my opinion, a process of translating the unspeakable. In times of crisis we turn to art because it helps us to make sense of the world, to know that we are not alone in how we feel. When I think about this poem, I think that perhaps art is the thing that allows us to be well prepared. Each line here indicates a future possibility, mostly tinted with loss, and it is the imagination of these things that help us to cope with the eventual reality. Likewise, we can imagine the opposite, and in that hope, find a radical opportunity to believe in something better.
Let it be said here that hope is not easy. Hope is, in fact, one of the most difficult forces to us to harness. Like empathy— which I have written extensively about for this newsletter— hope is a practice, a choice. If you, like me, deal with depression and anxiety, hope in a different, better future is one of the most impossible things I can wrap my brain around. I do not function that way; if I am not feeling stuck, I am probably thinking of all the terrible things that might happen, the horrible futures that could befall us. The world sinking to rising floodwater, all the mountaintops ablaze with rolling fields of fire, everything consumed to desert, to dirt. And myself with it. It is terrible. Sometimes I am so afraid of what my brain can envision that I do not possibly know how I can go on.
Art has allowed these possibilities, filling my head with them, but it has also allowed me to imagine the opposite. That choice is one I must make every day if I am to go on. It is a learned practice, and one that this year has forced me to get even better at.
A few years ago, I traveled around the world to talk to survivors of human rights crises about the power of telling their story, and what it meant to talk to and learn of others who shared similar stories. A common theme ran throughout every conversation I had, which is that storytelling became a life force, a way to know that no one, not a single one of us, is alone. And beyond that, storytelling became a way to reclaim experience, to understand that each of our individual experiences are all contributing to the greater story of our lives. Most of the time, we want to believe that telling our stories is a way to provide hope for other people, to say, if I went through this, you can too. But when I first started sharing my stories— all the painful, complicated, endless ones that had no clear resolution or meaning— what I found instead was some kind of hope for myself. In myself. A way to steel and prepare myself against the rest of my life, and find ways to say, yes, I will not return there, I will not go back, I will go on. I will go on.
On the worst days, I think of my favorite line of Richard Siken’s poetry, the last line of his poem “Snow and Dirty Rain”. All of us are going forward, he writes. None of us are going back. For better or for worse, we move forward, even when the future is vast and unclear. Even when we do not know what it holds. We move forward. It is impossible to go back. But it is not impossible to reclaim what is lost, not if we can imagine it. And I really do believe that.
Judith Butler writes that to desire something is akin to having it, that it is the feeling of desire that matters more than the physical reality. Imagination breeds sensation, breeds feeling. If you can conjure up the feeling of having something, then you already have it. That imaginative power is really what desire hinges on; consciousness begins in the mind, after all.
I know this to be true because I believe in art, and the power of imagination, and I have experienced sensations of fullness stemmed from just a single thought so deep that I could feel it in every nerve cell of my body, in everything I have and am. I have hope, and with that, I am prepared to move on. A long time ago now I stood on a dock next to someone I thought I loved and stared up at all the stars. Soon, I knew, I would leave behind the life I had been living and return to the one I was supposed to, one I was not sure I wanted anymore. I stared at their face, their eyes, green in the moonlight, looking up at all the stars. This is the last time I’ll see stars like this for a while, I told them. Yes, they said, but aren’t they beautiful. Besides, you’ll be back soon. Yes, I agreed, and threw my head back. Felt the cold ripple of wind on the water and the flesh of my arms rise. We have everything now, I thought to myself. Everything. I could see it, the future stretching out wide. My body recognized what had already been lost and what would one day be gained again. The night looked beautiful, so beautiful. I looked up. High overhead, a white flash trailed through the sky, a star bursting to its own death, and for a moment it looked the same as the distant lights in my neighbor’s apartment, the single bulb in my nightstand flicking on and off. I still hold on to that image even now. It is everything.
Your prompt this week is to choose one word for how you see your future. Describe it. What sensation does that word give you? If you had to illustrate it, what would it look like? Close your eyes and really imagine it. Do you feel the word anywhere in your body? If so, where? And what is it that you hope for?
Enjoy your week, friends. See you Friday.
I literally cannot stop listening to the new Bo Burnham album with all the songs from his Netflix special, Inside, thus All Eyes On Me is your song of the week. Yes, Bo Burnham is technically a comedian, and yes, this album is a brilliant piece of art that seriously exemplifies how to turn circumstances out of your control into something beautiful and meaningful. Also, the vocals here just stop me in my tracks.
Haven't been able to stop listening to "Inside" either—this special messed me up on first watch, but every time I listen to it, it gets better. And better. And better. I loved when you wrote about finding hope in yourself/for yourself, "A way to steel and prepare myself against the rest of my life." That resonated with me heavily right now, at a time of transition and change. I don't know exactly what word fits for how I see my future, but it feels like the moments before a sunrise. Like I've been walking through the heavy, quiet dark since before the sun set, and now the plum sky is beginning to give way to a slowly softening blue. The sun is coming closer to making good on its promise.
The word is timeless. I am working to move my writing, my work, my loves, my times from linear, capitalist progression and toward a more spiral motion around ideas and sensitivities, toward greater clarity and vision in moral experience and moral value. I feel the word in my heart. The sensation is bursting anr immediate.