And things decay in the pit left for them
By that greater happening as it is imagined:
Shorn of duration.
Just to be aware of the discrepancy isn’t enough.
Knowledge does not make us happy.
It ought to be enough since
We sat to receive it
Passive and mutually shy
But this was the way we had chosen,
The way that leads to understanding.
Attacking for depth the transparency and apparently imperturbable smoothness of lines like this by Ashbery—most of “The New Spirit”—can feel futile. His fight with his rational mind worked out in prose is sweet to see. It ought to be enough…but. Knowledge does not make us happy.
The body is usually what’s missing; the head brain reigns, the heart brain flickers in and out at denouements, and the gut brain rumbles beneath conscious speaking, directing the ebb and flow of syntax perhaps but “shorn of duration” by the covering-over of the egoic hunt for self that haunts this long poem.
Every month I want to quit my program. It happens around day 22. The transparent futility leaks down into the spine from the jaw, which has been wound tight like a vise since the ‘spring’ of the cycle. Tension becomes a problem where it had been being functional, and even fun.
Suck me up out of my own shit! Sorry about that. There is quite a struggle for balance during these monthly transitions from “type of self that has the interest and motivation to work with a text as opaque and quasi-philosophical as Ashberyan prose poetry” to “feral wolf child whose chart, ruled by the dark houses (8th and 12th), hungers for black cacao and for the bloody syrup of her iron supplement.” This latter person wilts over a week from former into this decomposed form, and the travel out to the other realms (spiritualization, the binaristic formulation would say) becomes easy, i.e., unavoidable. I lose the ability to produce and circulate my own body heat. I lose any interest in leaving the house, since the aforementioned travel is happening in a psychic/cosmic interior, and requires only a safe, warm space for the body to rest while the other parts trip out.
It is not that I think that Ashbery did not own his body. I am always toggling between the dualistic body-mind literalism that dominated literary theory’s mainstream development and the integrative/holistic/feminist experiential living that knows the body and mind as two expressions of the same spirit (Hegel would go), call it consciousness. The lack of split that comes during the ‘winter’ of the cycle goes to show how there’s no meaningful discernment between what you’re thinking and what your body shows you you’ve made.
They shut me up in prose— / as when a little girl / they put me in the closet— / because they liked me ‘still.’
My cost of doing creative business, for example, has always fixated on the manifestation of monthly abortions. A person who has avoided grief for decades, and run ‘bodily’ from her fears, and built up fortresses of anxiety, there is no release valve for stored densities of suffering like the period. I do not know how men move through life without mandated expressions like this. I love mine on their timer. Something’s always gotta give.
image: the author in Bryce Canyon, photographed by her sister (UT, Feb 2021)
A FEW UPCOMING EVENTS
For Bay Area folks who want to feel as if the tops of their heads have been taken off: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-minds-spiritual-wisdom-from-the-psychedelic-underground-tickets-478734767577?aff=ebdssbdestsearch (cf. Emily Dickinson, note 17)
And a Zoom meeting (chat & meditation) this Sunday, 6pm PST (donation-based!): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-dharmanaut-circle-december-meeting-tickets-475349732847