* 1 *
I’m sitting at my desk this early morning typing whatever comes as I watch sunrise in the window beside me; typing into this life that has taken years to craft, a life in which I can sit at my desk before work starts and type arrivals I needn’t immediately understand.
I realize that the old arrivals no longer frighten me—the ones that used to struggle to come into language in the midst of what I thought I wanted to say. I imagine them deep at the bottom of a dry storm drain. I don’t have to lean close to the grate and listen for any movement in the sewer where they’ve settled, since it hasn’t overflowed in years.
This image of the old arrivals—this is new, which pleases me.
But do I write only to be “pleased”?
Or is this image asking me to write farther into the storm drain than I have so far? Is the safety I describe something I am explaining only in order to let it spread out, and grow precariously thin?
The word “apocalypse” comes back to me from an essay I was reading last night about the Bible’s Book of Revelation. In it, apocalypse is an unexpected confrontation with the uncanny that transforms how a person sees everything. Can I fall from “the familiar” into the apocalypse at the edge of an idea I thought was comforting me? Does every idea have an edge, a border, that it is daring me to cross?
“The border makes up the homeland; it prohibits and gives passage in the same stroke.”
—Hélène Cixous
Does a poet crave the very apocalypse she may have been writing herself away from, for years—crave an apocalypse that might begin as an image, with all the fears that her beliefs protect her from compressed within it?
* 2 *
“If it resists me, I know it’s real”—Frank Bidart
I am thinking now that there’s a storm drain under every sentence, if I’m willing to look into its dankness, its dark. But “looking into it” is not an easy thing to understand how to do, or how to stop myself from doing, once I’ve begun.
Yet, don’t I crave those frightening moments when, in the midst of writing a poem, I fall into the dark, and have no way forward? In those moments, I sometimes go backwards and revise, then revise more… Do I want apocalypse to consume every meaning I’d begun with? Do I want it to release a meaning that changes everything that I thought the poem would help me to understand?
I’ve begun writing my poems in seven syllable segments (which don’t break between any word’s syllables at each segment’s end). It is a limiting form that forces me to revise, and revise again, because I can’t fit into the segments what I thought I’d wanted to say.
I’ve come to realize that by using a constraining form like this, I don’t just write about limitation, I live inside limitation in the work and then see how I handle it. I experience limitation as event, not aftermath.
Finally, if I have the courage to let it, the process writes for me something that I wouldn’t have otherwise found; it causes a contentiousness in my use of syntax that forces me to diverge from my more expected trajectories of thought, and so it exposes a content with more contextual resources than I’d had access to. But it is often content that frightens me. I will call this apocalypse.
* 3 *
Giorgio Agamben tells us that Spinoza defined survival as a need essential to all beings: that “the essence of any given being is the desire to preserve its being.” Yet Agamben adds that even if “every being desires this, it also [can] resist it, even if only for an instant.” As he speaks of freedom, he clarifies that the “being” which can enact choice can render preservation “inoperative” in order to “contemplate it.”
Agamben explains that it is this “inoperativity” and the need to contemplate the desire to remain “inoperative” before choosing how to proceed—that these make the drive for preservation a choice. As a choice, it achieves its “justice and truth.” He explains that this is what gives poetry its “decisive element—its grace.”
I ask myself, again, I will type here, again, the question, as if this repetition were itself a form of abstracting meaning from the words, beyond the meanings I have known:
Do I crave apocalypse? And yet, I must also ask, aren’t I, here in this essay, wanting to stand at its very edge, to pause, and feel the choice?
In an image, even in images I know, even in the image with which I began this essay, can more arrive if I ask the image to open its grate? Then, can I look inside to see if there is a hidden flood waiting to drown all that I’ve understood?
Can an image—especially one that I write into for so long that it becomes incomprehensible to me—become a sensory disruption that might manifest an apocalypse?
Does apocalypse, for me, mean to be unable to write in any direction except into the oblivion that may be destroying all the ways I know how to begin a new poem, and yet to begin regardless?
The core etymological derivation of apocalypse is “to reveal,” “to uncover.” I accept this, regardless of the cost, regardless of the ways that what is revealed may alter, may decimate, everything I thought I understood.
I remember an idea from George Oppen. I have memorized his words, but maybe I have never fully understood them, simple as they are. Maybe I still don’t, but I type his line here, and I listen: “When the [person] is frightened by a word, [they] may have started.”
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